Today is the 118th day of 2013. There are 247 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1992: A new, smaller Yugoslavia is established by Serbia and Montenegro after four other republics, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia secede.

OTHER EVENTS

1770: British navigator Capt James Cook, aboard Endeavor, lands in Australia, naming the natural harbour Botany Bay — now in the suburbs of Sydney.

1876: Britain’s Queen Victoria is declared Empress of India.

1945: Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, are executed by partisans in World War II.

1952: War with Japan officially ends as a treaty signed by the US and 47 other countries takes effect.

1967: Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refuses to be inducted into the US Army.

1969: Charles de Gaulle resigns as President of France.

2001: Two thousand people attend an anti-government rally in Singapore demanding more civil liberties and protesting the ruling party. Singapore has one of Asia’s highest standards of living but also some of the world’s strictest laws.

2003: Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the world’s largest producer of AIDS drugs, announces it will reduce the price of its popular AIDS medication Combivir to 90 cents a day, from US$1.70, in 63 developing countries.

2004: Macedonia’s liberal prime minister Branko Crvenkovski wins presidential election with 62 per cent of the votes cast. But his conservative opponent Sasko Kedev, who garners 37 per cent, claims voter fraud and demands the ballot be annulled. Crvenkovski and Kedev are seeking to replace former President Boris Trajkovski, who died in a February airplane crash in Bosnia.

2005: Iraq’s National Assembly approves the country’s first democratically elected government, a Shiite-dominated body that excludes the Sunni minority from meaningful positions and threatens efforts to dampen the deadly insurgency.

2006: The International Atomic Energy Agency says in a report that Iran has defied a UN Security Council call to freeze uranium enrichment and is stonewalling efforts to determine if it is developing nuclear arms.

2008: Austrian Josef Fritzl, 73, confesses to imprisoning his daughter for 24 years in a windowless cell with a soundproofed door and fathering seven children. He also tells investigators that he tossed the body of one of the children in an incinerator when the infant died after birth.

2010: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown blunders during campaign season when an open microphone captures him slamming a voter he had just been trying to win over.

2011: The moderate Palestinian president plays down concerns that his emerging alliance with the militant Hamas will undermine peace negotiations with Israel, insisting that he will retain control over foreign policy and remain committed to resolving the conflict.

2012: Syria derides UN chief Ban Ki-moon as biased and call his comments “outrageous” after he blames the regime for widespread cease-fire violations — the latest sign of trouble for an international peace plan many expect to fail.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Yi Sun-shin, Korean admiral and national hero (1545-1598); James Monroe, US president (1758-1831); Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Portuguese dictator (1889-1970); Kurt Goedel, Austrian-born US mathematician (1906-1978); Saddam Hussein, Iraqi dictator (1937-2006); Harper Lee, US author (1926-); Ann-Margret, Swedish-born US actress (1941-); Penelope Cruz, Spanish actress (1974-); Jessica Alba, US actress (1981-).

-AP