Today is the 202nd day of 2023. There are 163 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1873: Jesse James and his gang pull off the first train robbery in the US, taking US$3,000 from the Rock Island Express in Adair, Iowa.

OTHER EVENTS

1542: Pope Paul III establishes the Roman Inquisition to fight Protestantism.

1683: Lord William Russell is beheaded in England for plotting to kill the king.

1718: Austria and Venice gain substantial lands in the Balkans from Turkey by the Peace of Passarowitz.

1773: Pope Clement XIV dissolves Roman Catholic Jesuit order after pressure from anti-clerical countries, but the order is re-established in 1814.

1798: France’s Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Egyptians at Battle of the Pyramids and becomes master of Egypt.

1820: Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted announces his discovery that an electrical current creates a magnetic field.

1831: Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg is crowned the first king of newly independent Belgium, prompting the Dutch to invade.

1861: The Confederate army defeats Union troops at the Battle of Bull Run in the US state of Virginia at the start of the American Civil War.

1920: Sinn Fein and unions riot in Belfast, Ireland. King Faisal recognises French mandate in Syria.

1925: In Dayton, Tennessee, John T Scopes is convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. The conviction is later overturned.

1944: American forces land on Guam during World War II.

1954: An armistice is signed in Geneva, dividing Vietnam into a communist north and a US-supported south as France surrenders North Vietnam to the communists.

1959: US District Court judge in New York City rules that D H Lawrence’s famous book Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not pornographic.

1960: Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon — now Sri Lanka — becomes the world’s first woman prime minister.

1962: Indian and Chinese troops clash in two disputed areas of Kashmir.

1969: US Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin Jr blast off from Moon and head back to Earth after man’s first lunar landing.

1973: France explodes nuclear device over South Pacific island despite worldwide protests.

1974: United States announces that Greece and Turkey have agreed to a ceasefire in war on island of Cyprus.

1975: Soviet Soyuz spacecraft lands safely in Soviet Central Asia after its rendezvous in space with US Apollo craft.

1989: Top Communist Party leaders in Soviet Union call for sterner restrictions on the press.

1991: South African Government admits it secretly gave $600,000 in recent years to African National Congress rival Inkatha Party.

1994: Former dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returns to Moscow 20 years after he was expelled.

1998: Concerned that violence in Kosovo could spill over, the UN Security Council decides to add about 300 troops to the 750-strong UN peacekeeping force in Macedonia.

2000: Bolivian drug trafficker Roberto Suarez Gomez, the self-proclaimed “King of Cocaine”, dies at age 68. He is believed to be the model for the acclaimed US movie Scarface.

2001: Flash floods triggered by torrential rain and hailstorms leave at least 30 people dead and 100 injured in north-west Iran.

2002: WorldCom Inc, the second-largest US telecommunications company, files for the largest US bankruptcy ever, a month after disclosing it had inflated cash flow by $3.8 billion.

2003: The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that so far more than 1,000 Iraqi children had been killed or injured by abandoned weapons and unexploded ordnance.

2004: Saudi security forces discover the head of American hostage Paul M Johnson Jr in a freezer during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda hideout, just days before the expiration of a month-long amnesty offered to militants.

2005: Rioters enraged by subsidy cuts clash with security forces for a second day across Yemen, burning cars and buildings and leaving 16 people dead in the country’s worst civil strife in more than a decade.

2006: Israel moves tanks and troops to its border, calling up reserves and warning civilians to flee Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon as it prepares for a likely ground invasion.

2007: India elects Pratibha Patil as the country’s first female president. The 72-year-old candidate of the governing Congress party received 65.82 per cent of the votes, defeating incumbent Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.

2010: China’s largest reported oil spill empties beaches along the Yellow Sea as its size doubles, while clean-up efforts include straw mats and frazzled workers with little more than rubber gloves.

2011: Eurozone leaders agree to a sweeping deal that will grant Greece a massive new bailout — but likely make it the first Euro country to default — and radically reshape the currency union’s rescue fund, allowing it to act pre-emptively when crises build up.

2012: Syrian rebels make a run on Aleppo in some of the fiercest fighting seen in the country’s largest city, which has been a bastion of support for President Bashar Assad over the course of the 17-month uprising.

2013: Syrian government troops fire mortar rounds that hit a main market in the northern town of Ariha, killing at least 20 civilians, Opposition groups say.

2014: Bowing to international pressure, pro-Moscow separatists release a train packed with bodies and hand over the black boxes from a downed Malaysia Airlines plane, four days after it was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Ernest Hemingway, US author and Nobel laureate (1899-1961); Marshall McLuhan, Canadian media theorist (1911-1980); Isaac Stern, Russian-born violinist (1920-2001); Don Knotts, US actor (1924-2006); Norman Jewison, Canadian director (1926- ); Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), British pop singer (1948- ); Robin Williams, US actor (1951-2014); Josh Hartnett, US actor (1978- )

— AP