Today is the 130th day of 2024. There are 236 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1994: South Africa’s newly elected Parliament chooses Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first black president.

OTHER EVENTS

1944: Soviet forces liberate Sevastopol in the Crimea during World War II.

1946: Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III abdicates and Umberto II proclaims himself king.

1955: West Germany is admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

1960: The US Food and Drug Administration approves use of a birth control pill.

1992: Police and inmates of Lima’s top-security prison exchange gunfire as the Government tries to retake a cell block held by Maoist rebels.

1993: Fierce Croat-Muslim fighting breaks out in Mostar, Bosnia.

1994: Hundreds flee fighting between rival armies in Aden, Yemen.

1995: The US Coast Guard turns over 13 Cuban boat people to Cuban authorities, the first application of a new US policy designed to curb the stream of refugees from Cuba.

2000: In a landmark human rights trial, 13 Indonesian soldiers admit they were following orders when they dragged 26 student activists into a field in Aceh province and killed them.

2001: While in Iran, Cuban leader Fidel Castro receives a hero’s welcome and calls the United States an “imperialist king” that would fall just as the shah fell in 1979.

2003: The United States, Britain and Spain offer a draft UN Security Council resolution that will lift sanctions against Iraq and establish US-led control of Iraq’s post-war reconstruction for at least one year.

2004: A bomb rips through a stadium in the Chechen capital of Grozny during a Victory Day ceremony, killing provincial President Akhmad Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed president leading efforts to control separatist violence in the war-wracked region. Separatist rebels are blamed for the attack which also kills 24 other people.

2006: Union leaders in Puerto Rico call off islandwide protests as a special commission looks for answers to a fiscal crisis that has partially closed the Government and eroded the credit rating of the US territory.

2007: India test-fires a medium-range, nuclear-capable missile meant for military use. The surface-to-surface Prithvi or Earth missile, with a range of 95 miles (150 kilometres), is fired from the test range in Chandipur in the eastern state of Orissa.

2008: Myanmar’s junta seizes two planeloads of UN aid shipments meant for hungry survivors of the prior week’s devastating cyclone, prompting the world body to suspend further help. US military planes loaded with aid are denied access by the country’s isolationist regime.

2009: Jacob Zuma takes power in the culmination of an extraordinary political comeback, pledging to Nelson Mandela and the nation to renew the spirit of commitment and hope of South Africa’s first black presidency.

2010: Experts say North Korea’s submarine fleet is technologically backward, prone to sinking or running aground, and all but useless outside its own coastal waters.

2011: Two major credit agencies signal their concern about Greece’s massive debt, lending new credence to the view that European authorities must do more to help the country a year after it barely avoided bankruptcy with a bailout.

2012: A decade after hijackers, mostly from Saudi Arabia, attacked the United States with passenger jets, the Saudis emerge as the principal ally of the US against al-Qaeda’s spin-off group in Yemen, and at least twice disrupted plots to explode sophisticated bombs aboard airlines.

2013: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, who irked Washington with his frequent criticism of American military operations in his country, says that his Government is now ready to let the US have nine bases across Afghanistan.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Giovanni Paisiello, Italian composer (1740-1816); James Pollard Espy, pioneering US meteorologist (1785-1860); John Brown, US anti-slavery activist (1800-1859); Sir James V Barrie, English dramatist (1860-1937); Albert Finney, English actor (1936-2019); Glenda Jackson, English actress and politician (1936-2023); Maurice Linton Churchill Foster, former Jamaica and West Indies cricketer (1943- ); Candice Bergen, US actress (1946- ); Billy Joel, US pop singer (1949- ); James L Brooks, US director (1940- ); John Corbett, US actor (1961- ).

— AP/Jamaica Observer