Today is the 129th day of 2018. There are 236 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

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

OTHER EVENTS

1509: Christopher Columbus sails from Cadiz on his fourth and last voyage to the New World, one that ends with his ships beached on Jamaica.

1788: Britain passes parliamentary motion abolishing slave trade.

1914: Mother’s Day is proclaimed in the United States.

1926: US Navy Commander Richard E Byrd and Floyd Bennett become first men to make airplane flight over North Pole.

1933: In Berlin, 25,000 books are thrown into a bonfire in the first of Nazi book burnings.

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

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

1955: West Germany is admitted into NATO.

1967: India’s Vice-President Zakir Hussain is named president, becoming the first Muslim to hold that office.

1974: The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee opens hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

1980: Liberian freighter rams the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida, killing 35 motorists and causing a section of the bridge to collapse.

1991: Between 100,000 and 400,000 protesters march in Seoul demanding the resignation of South Korean President Roh Tae-woo.

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.

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

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.

2002: Maryland Governor Parris Glendening orders a moratorium on executions pending completion of a study to determine whether racial bias affected death penalty decisions.

2003: The United States, Britain and Spain offer a draft UN Security Council resolution that would 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 killed 24 other people.

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.

2013: Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, who has 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 after most foreign troops withdraw in 2014.

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- ); Glenda Jackson, English actress and politician (1936- ); Candice Bergen, US actress (1946- ); Billy Joel, US pop singer (1949- )