Today is the fifth day of 2024. There are 361 days left in the year.

TODAY IN HISTORY

1993: The tanker Braer runs aground on the Shetland Islands and spills 26 million gallons (98.42 million litres) of oil in the next few days.

OTHER EVENTS

1809: Britain and Turkey conclude Treaty of Dardanelles.

1869: Joint Argentine, Brazilian and Uruguayan forces take Asuncion, Paraguay, during Triple Alliance war.

1895: Discovery of X-rays is announced by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen; French Captain Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of treason, is publicly stripped of his rank. He is ultimately vindicated.

1919: Communist Spartacist revolt begins in Berlin; Nationalist Socialist Party formed in Germany.

1925: Nellie T Ross succeeds her late husband as governor of Wyoming, becoming the first female governor in US history.

1949: In his State of the Union address, US President Harry Truman labels his Administration the “Fair Deal”.

1964: Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Benedictos of Jerusalem meet in Holy Land on Mount of Olives — the first meeting in five centuries between a Roman Catholic pope and Eastern Orthodox Church patriarch. It is also the first papal pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

1987: Cheering students in China burn hundreds of copies of newspaper Peking Daily to protest the government publication’s harsh criticism of student demonstrations.

1991: Cuba and the Soviet Union sign agreement ending trade at easy terms and artificially low prices.

1992: Rebels pound Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s stronghold with rockets and machine guns, and he offers to hold a referendum on their demand that he resign.

1995: With oil tanks ablaze on the horizon, troops move in to quell a peasant uprising in southern Colombia that reportedly leaves one child dead and costs millions of dollars in oil revenue.

1996: Yehiya Ayyash, the suspected mastermind of a string of suicide attacks that killed dozens of Israelis, dies when a booby-trapped mobile phone blows up in his hands in the Gaza Strip.

1997: French trains are diverted to pick up stranded skiers, and German rail stations are converted into homeless shelters as the death toll from Europe’s longest cold spell in a decade passes 230.

1998: Arab interior ministers give preliminary approval to an accord to combat terrorism in the Middle East.

2000: US Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner rules that six-year-old Elian Gonzalez “belongs with his father” and must be returned to Cuba. Gonzalez was rescued after his mother died when their US-bound boat capsized off Florida and was living with Miami relatives.

2000: Two US medical firms and a Dutch organisation offer to pay up to US$2.36 million to Dutch haemophiliacs infected with the AIDS virus during blood transfusions in the 1980s.

2007: In a wave of Palestinian fighting, assailants outside a Gaza mosque gun down a Muslim preacher known for his anti-Hamas views, and thousands march through Gaza carrying the bodies of seven slain Fatah men.

2008: Indonesia’s former dictator Suharto, 86, is put on a dialysis machine in critical condition a day after being admitted to Pertamina Hospital. He dies January 27 of multiple organ failure after more than three weeks on life support

2009: Russia’s cut-off of natural gas to Ukraine forces several European countries to dip into reserves, with Moscow tightening the tap even further.

2011: Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a fierce opponent of the United States and head of Iraq’s most feared militia, comes home after nearly four years in self-imposed exile in Iran, welcomed by hundreds of cheering supporters in a return that solidifies the rise of his movement.

2013: President Barack Obama hails a last-minute deal with Congress that pulled the country back from the “fiscal cliff”, but warned in his Saturday radio and Internet address that he would not compromise over his insistence that lawmakers lift the federal debt ceiling.

2016: President-elect Donald Trump, in a series of tweets, urges Republicans and Democrats to “get together” to design a replacement for President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Konrad Adenauer, German statesman (1876-1967); Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistani prime minister (1928-1979); Friedrich Duerrenmatt, Swiss playwright and novelist (1921-1990); Robert Duvall, US actor (1931- ); Umberto Eco, Italian writer (1932-2016); Charlie Rose, US talk show host/journalist (1942- ); Diane Keaton, US actress (1946- )

— AP