Highlights in history on this date:

1560 - Charles IX succeeds as King of France on death of Francis II.

1776 - The first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, is organized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

1782 - The first American-born U.S. president, Martin Van Buren, is born in Kinderhook, New York.

1792 - Trial of France's King Louis XVI begins; revolutionary coup takes place in Geneva; George Washington is re-elected U.S. president and John Adams as vice president.

1797 - Napoleon Bonaparte arrives in Paris to command forces for an invasion of England.

1812 - Napoleon Bonaparte leaves his troops retreating from Russia and sets out for Paris.

1848 - U.S. President James Polk triggers the Gold Rush of '49 by confirming gold was discovered in California.

1934 - Clashes break out between Italian and Ethiopian troops on Somaliland border; Soviet Union executes 66 people charged with plotting against the Stalin government; Parliament grants Turkish women voting and election rights as part of modern Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's westernization reforms.

1936 - Soviet Union adopts new constitution under a Supreme Council.

1955 - The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merges to form the AFL-CIO under its first president, George Meany.

1956 - British and French forces begin withdrawal from Egypt in the Suez War; Union of British Togoland and Ghana is approved.

1971 - Soviet Union, at U.N. Security Council, vetoes resolution calling for cease-fire in hostilities between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

1977 - Egypt breaks diplomatic relations with five Arab nations that were hostile to President Anwar Sadat's peace overtures to Israel.

1989 - Israeli soldiers kill five heavily armed Arab guerrillas, who the military says crossed the border from Egypt to launch a terrorist attack commemorating anniversary of Palestinian uprising.

1990 - U.S. troops arrest former Panamanian police official after he escapes from prison by helicopter and takes over national police headquarters.

1991 - AP correspondent Terry Anderson, former American hostage in Lebanon, is reunited with sister Peggy Say, who worked tirelessly for his release.

1993 - A letter bomb blast injures Vienna's mayor in his home. It is the fifth explosive sent in three days to journalists, priests and others linked to Austria's immigrant community.

1994 - Russia seals the border of the breakaway republic of Chechnya and both the Chechen government and opposition leaders express fears of imminent Russian intervention.

1995 - Tel Aviv district court indicts Yigal Amir, the confessed assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, along with two of his suspected accomplices.

1996 - U.S. President Bill Clinton names U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright as the country's first female secretary of state.

1997 - Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is inaugurated as the first popularly elected mayor of Mexico City. Cardenas, who many Mexicans believe was fraudulently deprived of a 1988 presidential election victory, pledges to fight crime and corruption.

1998 - Nigeria's transition to democracy overcomes its first major hurdle with a high turnout and few disturbances marking local government elections.

2000 - Lawyers for the first of two Libyans accused in the 1988 Pan Am airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, launch their defense in the Netherlands.

2003 - Ivory Coast rebels back away from immediate disarmament hours after President Laurent Gbagbo announces a start date for the long-awaited plan aimed at securing peace in the West African nation.

2004 - Egypt frees an Israeli Arab businessman convicted of spying in exchange for Israel's release of six Egyptian students, a deal that signals a warming of relations between the two countries.

2005 - The first witness to take the stand in the trial of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein recalls mass arrests, tortures and killings.

2006 - Fiji military commander Commodore Frank Bainimarama says he had seized control of the country and dismissed the elected prime minister after a standoff between the two leaders rooted in tension between the South Pacific nation's indigenous people and its ethnic Indian minority.

2007 - A man opens fire with a rifle at a busy Omaha department store, killing eight people before taking his own life. Five more people are wounded, two critically.

2008 - The Netherlands' highest court rules that a peep show owner is eligible to pay sales tax at a lower rate because his establishments are a form of theater. The government has argued that they are simply strip shows _ and thus taxed at a higher rate.

Today's Birthdays:

George Armstrong Custer, U.S. general (1839-1876); Fritz Lang, German film director (1890-1976); Walt Disney, U.S. cartoonist-film producer (1901-1966); Werner Heisenberg, German physicist (1901-1976); Anastasio "Tachito" Somoza Debayle, Nicaraguan dictator (1925-1980); Rama IX, Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej (1927--); Little Richard, U.S. singer/pianist (1932--); Joan Didion, U.S. author (1934--).

Thought For Today:

I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation _ Mike Todd, American movie producer (1907-1958).