Today is the 30th day of 2023. There are 335 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1948: Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in New Delhi, India.

OTHER EVENTS

1349: The Jews of Freilsburg Germany are massacred.

1487: Bell chimes are invented.

1647: After nine months of negotiations, Scottish Presbyterians sell the captured Charles I to English Parliament for around £100,000.

1649: Charles I, king of Great Britain and Ireland — whose authoritarian rule and quarrels with Parliament provoked the English Civil War — is executed in London by beheading.

1661: Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England is ritually executed after having been dead for two years.

1667: The Truce of Andrusovo ends the Thirteen Years’ War between Russia and Poland.

1790: A lifeboat is first tested at sea, by Mr Greathead the inventor.

1797: The US Congress refuses to accept the first petition from an African American.

1815: The burned US Library of Congress is re-established with Thomas Jefferson’s 6,500 volumes.

1835: Demented painter Richard Lawrence tries to assassinate US President Andrew Jackson.

1889: Crown Prince Rudolf and his lover Baroness Mary Vetsera, 18, are found dead in from a possible suicide pact at the Mayerling hunting lodge outside Vienna.

1902: Britain signs a treaty with Japan providing for the independence of China and Korea.

1911: The Canadian Naval Service becomes the Royal Canadian Navy.

1924: The first-ever Winter Olympics take splace in Chamonix, France.

1931: The American silent romantic-comedy film City Lights has its world premiere; it is considered by many to be Charlie Chaplin’s crowning achievement in cinema.

1933: President Paul von Hindenburg names Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Fictional character The Lone Ranger was introduced on radio station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan.

1943: The Soviets destroy a German army south-west of Stalingrad in World War II.

1945: The greatest maritime disaster in history occurrs as German ocean liner Wilhelm Gustloff is sunk by a Soviet submarine, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 people.

1957: The United Nations calls on South Africa to reconsider its apartheid policy.

1961: I Fall to Pieces single is released by Patsy Cline and wins Billboard Song of the Year.

1962: The UN General Assembly adopts an Asian-African resolution calling on Portugal to halt repressive measures against Angola.

1964: The US launches Ranger 6, an unmanned spacecraft carrying television cameras, to crash-land on the moon.

1968: The Tet Offensive begins as Communist forces launch surprise attacks against South Vietnamese provincial capitals.

1969: The Beatles perform their last live gig, a 42-minute concert on the roof of the Apple Corps headquarters in London, England.

1970: Two students are killed and more than 200 wounded as demonstrators storm the presidential palace in the Philippine capital of Manila.

1972: Thirteen Roman Catholic civil rights marchers are shot to death by British soldiers in Northern Ireland on what becomes known as Bloody Sunday.

1979: White Rhodesians approve a new constitution to eventually give blacks control of the nation now known as Zimbabwe. The civilian Government of Iran announces it has decided to allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was living in exile in France, to return.

1986: President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines pledges to relinquish power peacefully if he loses to Corazon Aquino in the February 7 election.

1990: The Communist Party loses the majority in the Czech Parliament which it dominated for four decades.

1991: Iraqi forces attack Allied positions in Saudi Arabia near the Kuwaiti border, holding the abandoned coastal city of Khafji for a time; eleven US marines are killed, seven by friendly fire.

1994: The United States grants a limited visa to Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the Northern Irish political party that supports the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

1995: A car bomb explodes in Algiers, killing at least 20 people and injuring about 60 in the worst bombing during a three-year insurgency by Islamic militants. Flodding in the Netherlands forces the evacuation of more than 100,000 people from low-lying areas.

1999: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) authorises its secretary general to launch military action against Yugoslavia if it does not negotiate an agreement for autonomy in Kosovo.

2000: In Berlin, Germany, hundreds of neo-Nazis demonstrate at the site of a planned memorial to Holocaust victims, and march through the Brandenburg Gate where Nazi troops once held processions.

2002: The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland agrees to pay US$10 million to children sexually abused by clergy over the past few decades.

2003: Richard Reid, who in October 2002 pleaded guilty to attempting to bomb a trans-Atlantic flight, is sentenced by a court in Boston to life in prison.

2004: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announces that UN staffers can receive benefits for their gay or lesbian partners if their country recognises same-sex marriages or domestic partnerships.

2007: The United Nations’ first women-only peacekeeping contingent — made up of about 100 Indian policewomen — arrives in Liberia to join the UN’s 15,000-strong peacekeeping force in the West African country.

2008: The Australian Government says it will issue its first formal apology to its indigenous people on February 13, a milestone that could ease tensions with a minority whose mixed-blood children were once taken away on the premise that their race was doomed.

2010: China suspends military exchanges with the United States, threatens unprecedented sanctions against American defence companies, and warns that cooperation will suffer after Washington announces US$6.4 billion in planned arms sales to Taiwan.

2011: Hundreds of South Africans fill a historic church in the township of Soweto to pray for former President Nelson Mandela after his release from a hospital where he was treated for an acute respiratory tract infection.

2012: Paramilitary police in northern Senegal open fire on men and women protesting President Abdoulaye Wade’s plan to run for a third term, killing two.

2013: Israel conducts a rare air strike on a military target inside Syria near the border with Lebanon amid fears President Bashar Assad’s regime could provide powerful weapons to the Islamic militant group Hezbollah.

2014: An appeals court in Florence upholds the guilty verdict against US student Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, raising the spectre of a long legal battle over her extradition if the conviction is upheld.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Livia Drusilla, Roman empress (58 BC- 29); Franklin D Roosevelt, US president (1882-1945); Boris III (Boris Klemens Robert Maria Pius Ludwig Stanislaus Xaver), tsar of Bulgaria (1894-1943); Emilio G. Segrè, Italian physicist and Nobel laureate (1905-1989); Gene Hackman, US actor (1930- ); Phil Collins, English pop singer (1951- ); Abdullah II, king of Jordan (1962- ); Christian Bale, Welsh actor (1974- ); Jody Watley, US singer (1959- )

— AP