Today is the 255th day of 2025. There are 110 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1988: Hurricane Gilbert slams into Jamaica with torrential rain and winds of 233 kph (145 mph), killing 45 people and causing damage estimated at $1 billion.

OTHER EVENTS

1609: English explorer Henry Hudson sails into the New York river that now bears his name.

1801: Alexander I of Russia announces annexation of Georgia.

1848: Switzerland adopts new constitution as a federal union with strong central government.

1938: In a speech in Nuremberg, Adolf Hitler demands self-determination for the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia.

1943: German paratroopers take Benito Mussolini from the hotel where he is being held by the Italian Government.

1953: Nikita Khrushchev becomes first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

1958: The US Supreme Court, in Cooper v Aaron, unanimously rules that Arkansas officials who were resisting public school desegregation orders could not disregard the high court’s rulings.

1959: Soviet Union launches Luna 2, the first spacecraft to reach the moon.

1964: Dissident army officers try unsuccessfully to overthrow Government of South Vietnam.

1970: Palestinian guerrillas blow up three hijacked airliners in Jordan.

1974: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is deposed by a military junta.

1977: South African black student leader Steven Biko dies while in police custody, triggering an international outcry.

1980: Turkish military seizes power and keeps it until 1983.

1987: Communist rebels battle troops in fierce fighting near Manila.

1990: President Alberto Fujimori’s Government turns down a US offer of $35.9 million for anti-drug counterinsurgency operations in Peru.

1991: Scores of Iraqi soldiers along the Iraq-Saudi Arabian border are buried alive by US tanks that pushed tons of sand and earth into their trenches during the Persian Gulf war.

1992: Abimael Guzman, the shadowy founder of bloody Maoist guerrilla movement the Shining Path, is captured in a safe house in Lima, Peru.

1993: Rebel Serbs in Croatia launch rocket attacks against targets near the capital.

1994: In Poland, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) soldiers and former Eastern Bloc nations hold first joint manoeuvres.

1995: The Belarusian military shoots down a helium balloon during an international race, killing its two American pilots.

1996: Taliban rebels consolidate their hold on the strategic eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

1999: Indonesia says it will accept a peacekeeping force in East Timor, which was ravaged by Indonesian-controlled militias after residents voted for independence.

2000: A suspected car bomb rips through an underground garage in the Jakarta Stock Exchange building, killing 15 people and injuring dozens more.

2001: After the collapse of the Twin Towers, US President George W Bush addresses a national audience to declare America is under attack and the United States will use all its resources to defeat terrorism.

2003: The UN Security Council votes to lift sanctions against Libya that had been in place for 11 years as a response to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

2004: Hurricane Ivan heads toward western Cuba and the south-eastern United States after battering the Cayman Islands with ferocious 150-mph (240-kph) winds, killing at least 60 across the Caribbean.

2005: Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe quietly adopts constitutional changes that make it easier for the State to seize private property and prevent opponents from travelling abroad to criticise his 25-year rule. Hong Kong Disneyland opens in Penny’s Bay, Lantau Island, Hong Kong.

2006: Syrian guards foil an attempt by suspected al-Qaeda-linked militants to blow up the US Embassy in Damascus, exchanging fire outside the compound’s walls.

2007: Authorities confirm a new foot-and-mouth outbreak on the outskirts of London, just days after the Government lifted livestock restrictions following the appearance of the devastating disease last month. Shinzō Abe announces his intention to resign as prime minister of Japan.

2009: About 50 civilians, security forces and militants die in a wave of violence around Afghanistan, including a bomb that leaves 14 Afghan travellers dead in one of the country’s most dangerous regions.

2011: A leaking gasoline pipeline explodes, sending flames racing through a slum in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi slum and kills at least 75 people.

2012: A mob armed with guns and grenades launches a fiery attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing the US ambassador and three other Americans.

2017: Crews work to repair the lone highway connecting the Florida Keys, where 25 per cent of the homes were feared to have been destroyed by Hurricane Irma; more than nine million Floridians, or nearly half the state’s population, were still without power in the late-summer heat. Gay rights pioneer Edith Windsor, whose landmark Supreme Court case struck down parts of a federal anti-gay-marriage law, dies in New York at the age of 88.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

France’s King Francis I (1494-1547); Herbert Henry Asquith, British prime minister (1852-1928); Maurice Chevalier, French actor-entertainer (1888- 1971); Alfred Knopf, US publisher (1892-1984); Jesse Owens, US athlete (1913-1980); Ian Holm, English actor (1931-2020); Linda Gray, US actress (1940- )

— AP