Today is the 45th day of 2014. There are 321 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2012: Oscar Pistorious, the double-amputee Olympic sprinter dubbed the Blade Runner, is charged in the slaying of his girlfriend at his upscale home in South Africa.

OTHER EVENTS

1540: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V enters Ghent, in Belgium, and executes leaders of revolt.

1663: Canada becomes royal province of France.

1893: United States annexes Hawaii by treaty.

1899: US Congress approves, and US President William McKinley signs, legislation authorising states to use voting machines for federal elections.

1920: The League of Women Voters is founded in Chicago.

1929: Seven hoodlums, rivals of the Al Capone gang in Chicago, Illinois, are murdered in what becomes known as the “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre”.

1946: The first all-electronic computer is introduced at the University of Pennsylvania.

1958: Union of Kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan into Arab Federation with King Faisal as head of state.

1972: US trade restrictions against China are relaxed, putting China on same basis as

Soviet Union.

1979: Four armed men kidnap US ambassador to Afghanistan Adolf Dubs. The ambassador is later killed in a shoot-out with police.

1988: Three officers of Yasser Arafat’s mainline group in the Palestine Liberation Organisation are killed in Cyprus when their booby-trapped car explodes.

1989: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issues edict sentencing British author Salman Rushdie to death for allegedly insulting Islam, sending him into hiding for years.

1991: Several Latin American countries halt food imports from Peru, seeking to contain a cholera epidemic that killed 3,000 people.

1994: An anti-terrorism court in Algeria sentences 27 Islamic fundamentalists to prison in one of the country’s biggest anti-terrorism trials.

1996: Zapatista National Liberation Army rebels accept a Mexican government offer of limited political and judicial autonomy for some of Mexico’s more than seven million indigenous people.

1998: Milan Simic and Miroslav Tadic become the first Bosnian Serb suspects to turn themselves in voluntarily to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

2001: A criminal investigation is conducted into outgoing US President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive commodities traders Marc Rich and Pincus Green, who had fled to Switzerland in 1983 to escape prosecution for tax evasion and violation of a trade embargo.

2002: Researchers at the US Texas A&M University in College Station successfully clone a cat, making it the sixth species to be cloned.

2006: The oldest son of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is sentenced to nine months in prison for illegal fund-raising during his father’s 1999 primary campaign.

2009: The Group of Seven finance ministers pledge to avoid resorting to protectionism as they try to stimulate their own economies in the face of the world’s worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

2010: US officials seek to shore up support for a tougher stand against Iran’s nuclear programme by saying Tehran has left the world little choice and expressing renewed confidence that hold-out China would come around to harsher UN penalties.TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Domingo F Sarmiento, Argentine president (1868- 1874) (1811-1888); Israel Zangwill, English author (1846-1926); Jack Benny, US comedian (1894-1975); Gregory Hines, US actor/dancer (1946-2003); Florence Henderson, US actress (1934-); Meg Tilly, US actress (1960-); Rob Thomas, US singer (1972-)

— AP