Today is the 306th day of 2010. There are 59 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

1930: Haile Selassie is crowned emperor of Ethiopia.

Other Events

1947: Howard Hughes pilots his huge wooden airplane, known as the Spruce Goose, on its only flight, which lasts about a minute over Long Beach Harbour in California.

1951: Bolivia receives a US$1 million US Export-Import Bank loan to expand production of tungsten to be sold to the US.

1956: Hungarian government renounces Warsaw Treaty and appeals to the United Nations against Soviet invasion.

1962: US President John F Kennedy announces an end to the Cuban missile crisis, saying the Soviet Union is dismantling bases in Cuba.

1963: South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem is assassinated by his own troops during a coup.

1964: King Saud of Saudi Arabia is deposed, and Faisal is proclaimed king.

1978: Two Soviet cosmonauts who established a new endurance record by staying in space 139 days and 15 hours land safely in Kazakhstan.

1983: US President Ronald Reagan signs a bill establishing a federal holiday on the third Monday of January in honour of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

1992: Basketball star Magic Johnson retires for a second time from the Los Angeles Lakers, just five weeks after the guard, who has HIV, announced he would return to the NBA.

1999: Prominent Zulu prince Cyril Zulu, the mayor-designate of Durban, South Africa is assassinated by an unknown gunmen.

2000: One American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts move into Alpha, an international space station, for a four-month stay.

2002: US President George W Bush calls Saddam Hussein a “dangerous man” with links to terrorist networks, as UN Security Council members await a revised US resolution to disarm Iraq.

2003: The US Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire installs as its bishop Reverend V Gene Robinson, consecrating the first openly homosexual Anglican bishop and drawing censure from numerous provinces within the worldwide Anglican Communion.

2006: Iran test-fires dozens of missiles, including the Shahab-3 that can reach Israel, in military maneuvers that it says are aimed at putting a stop to the role of world powers in the Persian Gulf region.

2007: Morocco recalls its ambassador from Spain after King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia announce plans to visit two Spanish enclaves in North Africa. Morocco’s claim to them is a consistent sore spot in bilateral relations.

2008: Hundreds of people march through Belarus’ capital to remember the victims of Stalinist purges and call for an end to repression in a country that still has many of the trappings of the former Soviet Union.

Today’s Birthdays

Marie Antoinette, wife of France’s King Louis XVI (1755-1793); Luchino Visconti, Italian film director (1906-1976); Odysseus Elytis, pseud. of Odysseus Alepoudelis, Greek poet and Nobel laureate (1911-1996); Burt Lancaster, US actor (1913-1994); David Schwimmer, US actor (1966-); KD Lang, Canadian singer (1961-).