Boxing Day, December 26, is the 360tht day of 2018.There are five days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2004: A massive tsunami triggered by earthquakes tears across the Indian Ocean, devastating coastal communities in 12 countries, killing at least 216,000 people, and leaving more than a million people homeless.

OTHER EVENTS

1492: Explorer Christopher Columbus founds a European settlement on the island of Hispaniola.

1865: American inventor James H Nason receives patent for the coffee percolator.

1901: The Uganda Railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria is completed.

1962: Eight East Germans escape to West Berlin by crashing a bus through barriers at border checkpoint.

1971: Sixteen Vietnam War veterans seize the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour to dramatise their anti-war stand.

1977: Argentina’s Government announces a holiday amnesty, freeing 432 political prisoners of the 3,607 being held under a state of siege imposed in March 1976.

1991: Algeria holds its first multi-party parliamentary elections since independence from France in 1962.

1992: Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic concedes defeat in Serbian presidential elections and congratulates the incumbent, hard-liner Slobodan Milosevic.

1996: Six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey is found strangled in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado.

2003: An earthquake rocks the Iranian city of Bam, 980 kilometers (610 miles) southeast of the capital Teheran, killing 50,000 people and destroying 90 per cent of the city’s residential area.

2006: Gerald R Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon’s scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America’s history, dies at 93.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor of first computer (1791-1871); George Romney, English artist (1734-1802); Henry Miller, US writer (1891-1980), Mao Tse-tung, Chinese leader (1893-1976); Leopold Mannes, US co-developer of Kodachrome film (1899-1964).

— AP