Today is the 93rd day of 2020. There are 273 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1982: Several thousand troops from Argentina seize the disputed Falkland Islands, located in the south Atlantic, from Britain. (Britain seized the islands back the following June.)

OTHER EVENTS

1513: In searching for the Fountain of Youth, Spaniard Ponce de Leon discovers Florida, but does not realise it is part of mainland North America.

1792: US Congress passes the Coinage Act, which authorises establishment of the US Mint and allows the government to make its own money.

1932: Aviator Charles A Lindbergh and John F Condon goes to a cemetery in The Bronx, New York, where Condon turns over $50,000 to a man in exchange for Lindbergh’s kidnapped son. (The child, who was not returned, was found dead the following month.)

1968: Film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the groundbreaking science-fiction epic produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, has its world premiere in Washington, DC.

1992: Mob boss John Gotti is convicted in New York of murder and racketeering; he is later sentenced to life, and dies in prison.

1998: Maurice Papon, a Vichy official and later Cabinet minister in post-war France, is sentenced to 10 years in prison for deporting Jews during World War II.

1999: Serbian troops go house to house in the Kosovo town of Djakovia, making threats and killing men and sending thousands of ethnic Albanians fleeing.

2002: Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf meets with Afghanistan’s interim leader Hamid Karzai, in the first visit by a Pakistani leader in more than 30 years. The two indicate they plan to mend relations and work together to promote stability in Afghanistan.

2003: US President George W Bush’s Administration announces sanctions against a nuclear research laboratory in Pakistan for having helped North Korea to develop nuclear weapons.

2005: Pope John Paul II, who helped topple communism in Europe and left a deeply conservative stamp on the church that he led for 26 years, dies at age 84 in his Vatican apartment, ending a long public struggle against debilitating illness.

2008: President George W Bush suffers a diplomatic setback when North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies rebuff his pleas to put former Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia on the path toward membership. Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who helped broker peace in Northern Ireland but couldn’t survive a scandal over his collection of cash from businessmen, announces he would resign.

2009: Anxiously assembled at the most perilous moment for the global economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the world’s financial powers pledge more than US$1 trillion for emergency loans to combat spreading chaos.

2010: Rescue workers attempting to reach 153 miners trapped in a flooded coal pit in China’s Shanxi province report “signs of life” including tapping, banging and shouting as relatives allege cover-up of incident.

2011: Unknown attackers wielding machetes and guns kill more than 1,000 people in the neighbourhood of a western Ivory Coast town controlled by forces trying to install the internationally recognised president.

2012: Gulf states develop a plan to funnel millions of dollars a month to Syrian rebels who could use the amount as a blank check to build up their arsenals.

2013: UN General Assembly approves first United Nations treaty regulating multi-billion-dollar international arms trade. North Korea says it will restart its long-shuttered plutonium reactor and increase production of nuclear weapons material in what outsiders saw as its latest attempt to extract US concessions by raising fears of war.

2014: Europe’s surging far-right — riding French electoral win by the National Front — sets sights on European Parliament.

2017: US President Donald Trump takes Senator Rand Paul to his Virginia golf course to talk health policy with the outspoken critic of the failed plan to repeal and replace so-called Obamacare.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Charlemagne, Emperor of the West (742-814); Hans Christian Andersen, Danish writer (1805-1875); William Holman Hunt, English artist (1827-1910); Emile Zola, French author (1840-1902); Max Ernst (1891-1976); Buddy Ebsen, US actor (1908-2003); Sir Alec Guinness, British actor (1914-2000); Emmylou Harris, US country singer (1947- ) Garnett Silk (born Garnet Damion Smith) Jamaican reggae music (1966-1994)

— AP/Jamaica Observer