Today is the 46th day of 2023. There are 319 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1964: Cassius Clay — who changed his name to Muhammad Ali — becomes the world’s heavyweight boxing champion.

OTHER EVENTS

1994: North Korea agrees to open part of its nuclear programme to international inspection.

1995: A fire roars through a three-storey nightclub in Taichung, Taiwan, killing at least 67 people and injuring 11 in Taiwan’s deadliest fire on record.

1996: Police deactivate a bomb in central London hours after the Irish Republican Army refused to rule out further attacks.

1999: Abdullah Ocalan, a Kurdish rebel leader, is captured by Turkish commandos in Kenya where he had sought refuge at the Greek Embassy; he is brought to Turkey to stand trial.

2000: Stung by Britain’s decision to suspend Northern Ireland’s power-sharing Government, the Irish Republican Army deepens the province’s political crisis by breaking off negotiations on disarmament.

2003: The Vatican opens sealed archives concerning its relations with Germany between 1922 and 1939, when Eugenio Pacelli — later Pope Pius XII — was the Vatican’s secretary of state; the archives are unsealed to address criticism that Pope Pius XII had not tried hard enough to stop Nazi Germany from killing millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

2004: US administrator for Iraq, L Paul Bremer opens the nation’s first human rights ministry, saying it will investigate atrocities committed during Saddam Hussein’s rule, draft a human rights declaration, and promote private groups that defend civil liberties in the country.

2005: Three years after a promised overhaul of China’s workplace safety system the Government says a gas explosion killed 203 miners and left 12 more missing — the worst reported mining disaster in the country since Communist rule began in 1949.

2007: An armed man hijacks a Mauritanian plane to Spain’s Canary Islands but is overpowered by passengers and crew and arrested shortly after landing. None of the 71 passengers are seriously injured.

2008: Czech President Vaclav Klaus, 66, wins a second five-year term when lawmakers choose him over a University of Michigan economics professor. More than five months after his single-engine airplane went missing in Nevada, American adventurer Steve Fossett is legally declared dead; his body was recovered later in the year.

2009: President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela wins a referendum to eliminate term limits, paving the way for him to run again in 2012.

2010: A rush-hour commuter train speeds through a red signal and slams into an oncoming train as it leaves a suburban Brussels station, killing at least 18 people and disrupting rail traffic in northern Europe.

2011: Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi is ordered to stand trial on charges he paid a 17-year-old Moroccan girl for sex and then used his influence to cover it up — an offence that, if proven, could see him barred permanently from public office.

2012: A fire started by an inmate tears through an overcrowded prison in Honduras, burning and suffocating screaming men in their locked cells as rescuers desperately searched for keys; 300 people are killed in this, the world’s deadliest prison fire in eight decades.

2013: With a blinding flash and a booming shock wave a meteor blazes across Russia’s western Siberian sky and explodes, injuring more than 1,000 people as it blasts out windows.

2017: US President Donald Trump’s nominee for labour secretary, Andrew Puzder abruptly withdraws his nomination after Senate Republicans balk at supporting him, in part over taxes he had belatedly paid on a former housekeeper not authorised to work in the United States.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer (1564-1642); Babur, founder of Mughal dynasty in India (1483-1530); Louis XV, king of France (1710-1774); A N Whitehead, English philosopher (1861-1947); Ernest Shackleton, Anglo-Irish explorer (1874-1922); Jane Seymour, English actress (1951- ); Matt Groening, US creator of The Simpsons (1954- ); Jaromir Jagr, Czech hockey player (1972- )

– AP