Highlights In History On This Date:

December 23

Today is Tuesday, December 23, the 358th day of 2008. There are 8 days left in the year.

*1588 - Henry, Duke of Guise and leader of militant Catholics who wanted a Spanish princess on the French throne, is assassinated on King Henry III's orders at Blois, France.

*1601 - Irish rebels Tyronne and O'Donnell are routed near Kinsdale by British forces.

*1698 - George Lewis succeeds as Elector of Hanover on death of Ernest Augustus.

*1728 - Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI and Frederick William of Prussia sign Treaty of Berlin.

*1783 - George Washington resigns as commander in chief of the US. Army and retires to his home at Mount Vernon, Virginia.

*1832 - The French take Antwerp, forcing Holland to recognize Belgium's independence.

*1861 - Sultan of Turkey agrees to unification of Moldavia and Wallachia as Romania.

*1876 - The first constitution in a Muslim country is passed in Turkey, but power remains largely in the hands of the sultan.

*1920 - French and British approve convention fixing boundaries of Syria and Palestine.

*1941 - US forces on Wake Island in the Pacific surrender to Japanese in World War II.

*1947 - The transistor is invented at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. This made equipment miniaturization possible and ushered in a tidal wave of electronic miracles including the personal computer.

*1948 - Japanese Premier Hideki Tojo and six other Japanese World War II leaders are executed in Tokyo.

*1950 - A treaty in which Vietnam becomes a sovereign nation within the French Union is signed in Saigon.

*1968 - Eighty-two crew members of the US intelligence ship Pueblo are released by North Korea, 11 months after they were captured.

*1972 - Earthquake strikes Managua, Nicaragua, killing 10 000.

*1977 - Eight French nationals kidnapped in May by guerrillas fighting for the independence of the former Spanish Sahara, are handed over to UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim in Algiers.

*1986 - The experimental US airplane, Voyager, lands in California's Mojave Desert after becoming the first aircraft to circumnavigate the globe nonstop without refueling.

*1989 - United States sends 2 000 reinforcement troops to Panama to combat unexpectedly stiff resistance from Panamanian troops loyal to ousted General Manuel Antonio Noriega.

*1990 - Slovenes vote overwhelmingly in favor of secession from Yugoslavia.

*1993 - The Rhine sweeps to its greatest height in 67 years, flooding Cologne's old town and menacing the new Parliament building in Bonn. The death toll in European flooding reaches six.

*1994 - Bosnia's Serbs and the Muslim-led government agree to a cease-fire in their war.

*1995 - A fire in Dabwali, India, kills 540 people, including 170 children, during a year-end party being held near a children's school.

*1996 - Tajikistan's President Emomali Rakhmonov and the top opposition leader Sayed Abdullo Nuri sign a cease-fire agreement aimed at ending the four-year civil war.

*1997 - Gunmen charge into a village of rebel sympathizers in Chiapas, Mexico, and kill 45 people, including 15 children.

*1998 - South Korean police use water cannon and tear gas to evict a group of monks from the Chogye temple, after the monks threw firebombs and rocks at them. The clash ends a 40-day standoff between rival monks at the spiritual home to eight million Buddhists.

*2000 - US and British warplanes in Baghdad strike targets in southern Iraq. Iraqi officials say the attack killed one person and injured two others. The US Central Command headquarters reports that the warplanes, patrolling the no-fly zone in southern Iraq, attacked a radar system and anti-aircraft sites with precision-guided weapons.

*2001 - San Luis Governor Adolfo Rodriguez Saa takes over as interim president of Argentina, immediately halting payments on the nation's $132bn debt. He resigns a week later saying "an attitude of pettiness and haggling" within his Justicialist party has left him unable to govern.

*2003 - An explosion at a natural gas field near Chongqing in Sichuan province of China kills at least 198 people. The explosion reportedly occurred when a pocket of natural gas and hydrogen sulfide was accidentally drilled open.

*2005 - South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk resigns from his university after he was found to have faked stem-cell breakthroughs that kindled worldwide optimism of revolutionary cures for disease.

*2006 - UN Security Council votes unanimously to impose the first set of sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment amid suspicions Tehran wants to build nuclear weapons.

*2007 - The world's last Hindu monarchy is to be swept aside under an agreement signed between Nepal's former communist rebels and its major political parties that sets the stage for the country to become a republic.