Today is the 66th day of 2020. There are 300 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2006: Several cats test positive for the deadly strain of bird flu in Austria and Poland reports its first outbreak of the disease as the World Health Organization calls bird flu a greater global challenge than any previous infectious disease.

OTHER EVENTS

1834: The city of York in Upper Canada is incorporated as Toronto.

1836: Alamo mission in San Antonio, Texas, falls to Mexican army after 13-day siege in which Davy Crockett and 186 other defenders die.

1853: Verdi’s opera La Traviata premieres in Venice, Italy.

1857: In its Dred Scott decision, the US Supreme Court holds that Scott, a slave, could not sue for his freedom in a federal court.

1922: United States prohibits export of arms to China.

1936: The British Supermarine Spitfire MKI takes to the air.

1944: US heavy bombers stage the first full-scale American raid on Berlin during World War II.

1945: German city of Cologne falls to US First Army in World War II.

1946: France recognises Vietnam as free state within Indochina Federation.

1953: G M Malenkov succeeds the late Joseph Stalin as premier of the Soviet Union.

1957: Two former British colonies of Gold Coast and Togoland form independent West African nation of Ghana; Israeli troops hand over Gaza Strip to UN force.

1962: United States pledges to defend Thailand against direct Communist aggression without waiting for action by South-east Asia Treaty Organization.

1965: US Defense Department announces that 3,500 Marines are being sent to South Vietnam — the first US ground combat troops committed to fighting against Communist guerrillas.

1967: The daughter of Josef Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva, appears at the US Embassy in New Delhi and declares her intention to defect to the West. Singer-actor Nelson Eddy, 65, dies in Palm Beach, Florida.

1970: A bomb being built inside a Greenwich Village townhouse by the radical weathermen accidentally goes off, destroying the house and killing three group members. Alexander Dubcek, former Czech Communist Party boss, is suspended from the party.

1988: Thousands of Tibetans demanding independence set fires throughout their capital city of Lhasa. The board of trustees at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, a liberal arts college for the deaf, selects Elisabeth Zinser, a hearing woman, to be school president; outraged students shut down the campus, forcing selection of a deaf president, I King Jordan, instead.

1990: Afghan Defence Minister Shahnawaz Tanai leads unsuccessful coup attempt against Government of Najibullah.

1991: Iraqi troops appear to have crushed a rebellion in Basra and are reported to be moving on other southern cities in revolt.

1993: The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) rebels capture Angola’s second largest city, Huambo, after a two-month battle with government troops.

1994: Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid rejects a peace agreement reached by 12 other faction leaders in Cairo.

1995: The US dollar plummets to 92.70 yen, its lowest level against the yen anywhere in the world since modern exchange rates were established in the late 1940s.

1997: Separatist Tamil Tiger rebels break a two-month lull in Sri Lanka’s civil war by raiding an army base and an airfield in coordinated, pre-dawn attacks that leave 213 people dead.

1998: US House of Representatives votes to let Puerto Rico decide in a referendum if it wants to remain a territory or become an independent nation or a US state. The US Army honours three Americans who risked their lives and turned their weapons on fellow soldiers to stop the slaughter of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968.

1999: Ta Mok, the last leader of the murderous Khmer Rouge, is captured by the Cambodian army and flown to the capital for trial.

2003: An Algerian passenger jet crashes in the Sahara Desert shortly after take-off, killing 116 people.

2007: France and the United Arab Emirates sign an agreement to open a branch of the Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, despite criticism that the French Government is peddling the country’s artistic treasures.

2008: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announces that he is breaking relations with Colombia because of his opposition to the Colombian raid on a guerrilla base in Ecuador. A Palestinian kills eight students at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem before he was slain; Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip praise the operation in a statement, and thousands of Palestinians took to the streets of Gaza to celebrate. Twin bombings in a shopping district in Baghdad kill at least 68 people and wounds 130 others.

2010: Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the official version of the September 11, 2011 attacks a “big lie” used by the US as an excuse for battling terror.

2011: The two Opposition parties that triumphed in Ireland’s election, conservative Fine Gael and left-wing Labour, agree to form the country’s next coalition Government after compromising on repair of the debt-battered economy.

2012: The United States, Europe, and other world powers announce that bargaining will begin again with Iran over its fiercely disputed nuclear efforts amid rising talk of war.

2013: Syria’s accelerating humanitarian crisis hits a grim milestone: the number of UN-registered refugees tops one million, half of them children. US Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky, a critic of the Barack Obama Administration’s drone policy, launches an old-style filibuster to block Senate confirmation of John Brennan’s nomination to be Central Intelligence Agency director; Paul lasted nearly 13 hours before yielding the floor. Syria’s accelerating humanitarian crisis hits a grim milestone as the number of UN-registered refugees topped one million, half of them children.

2016: Former first lady Nancy Reagan dies in Los Angeles at age 94.

2017: Without fanfare, US President Donald Trump signs a scaled-back version of his controversial ban on selected foreign travellers, one that still barred new visas for people from six Muslim-majority countries and temporarily shut down America’s refugee programme. Robert Osborne, the genial face of Turner Classic Movies and a walking encyclopedia of classic Hollywood, dies in New York at age 84. The world’s most famous sled dog race, the Iditarod, starts with 71 mushers setting off from the heart of Alaska and embarking on a nearly 1,000-mile trek across the wilderness.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Michelangelo, Italian renaissance artist (1475-1564); Cyrano de Bergerac, French author-duellist (1620-1655); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet (1806-1861); Ed McMahon, US host/announcer (1923-2009); Shaquille O’Neal, US basketball player (1972- ); Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian novelist (1927-2014)

— AP