Today is the 27th day of 2023. There are 338 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1998: Bowing to the wish of the pope, the Catholic church in Germany stops issuing certificates allowing abortion.

OTHER EVENTS

1340: Edward III of England declares himself king of France, a claim that leads to the Hundred Years’ War. The kings of England call themselves kings of France until 1801.

1880: Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.

1888: The National Geographic Society is incorporated in the United States.

1977: The Vatican reaffirms the Roman Catholic church’s ban on female priests.

1981: Indonesia’s Tampo Mas II passenger ship catches fire and sinks in the Java Sea, killing 580 people.

1999: Eamon Collins, a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) intelligence officer and author of an exposé of life inside the IRA, is found dead near the Northern Ireland town of Newry.

2000: Human rights officials announce they have unearthed the remains of 50 people at a clandestine cemetery in Zacualpa, a village 40 miles (64 kilometres) north-west of Guatemala City; the victims, including two children, were apparent casualties of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

2002: Munitions at an army base in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, explode and send fireballs and shrapnel into the air, forcing hundreds of area residents to flee; as many as 600 people drown in a canal that blocked their way to safety.

2003: UN weapons inspectors report that although the Iraqi Government had given inspectors access to suspected weapons sites, it had not provided sufficient information about its weapons programmes and stockpiles; this report is seen as bolstering the US case for military action to disarm Iraq.

2006: Bolivian President Evo Morales cuts his salary in half and orders that no Cabinet minister collect a higher wage than his own, with the savings being used to hire more public school teachers.

2007: Suspected Muslim separatists ambush police patrols and torch a school in southern Thailand a day after killing a police sergeant and setting fire to a government school.

2008: Guyana deploys security forces in villages and forests surrounding Lusignan where, the day before, rampaging gunmen killed 11 people including five children.

2009: A cruise ship carrying 300 passengers, which lodged in the St Lawrence River’s thick ice near Montreal for more than 30 hours, is freed using an ice-breaking vessel.

2010: An Ethiopian Airlines jet crashes minutes after take-off from Beirut in a fierce storm; international ships search along Lebanon’s coast for bodies of the 90 people on-board and black boxes that may provide the cause of the disaster.

2011: Chilean judicial officials vow to investigate the death of President Salvador Allende for the first time, 37 years after the socialist leader was found shot during a withering attack on the presidential palace.

2013: Flames race through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil, killing more than 230 people in the world’s deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.

2014: Army chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who led the coup ousting Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, moves close to declaring his candidacy to replace him, securing the backing of the military for a presidential run.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer (1756-1791); Edouard Lalo, French composer (1823-1892); Lewis Carroll, English mathematician and writer (1832-1898); Jerome Kern, US composer (1885-1945); Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler (1931-2001); James Cromwell, US actor (1940- ); Mikhail Baryshnikov, Russian ballet dancer (1948- )

— AP