Today is the 167th day of 2014. There are 198 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1963: First woman space traveller, Valentina Tereshkova, is launched into orbit from base in Soviet Union.

OTHER EVENTS

1671: Rebel Cossack leader Stenka Razin is executed by quartering in Moscow’s Red Square.

1779: Spain declares war on Britain, and begins a four-year siege of Gibraltar.

1917: First All-Russian Congress of the Soviets is convened.

1920: Council of League of Nations holds first public meeting at St James Palace in London.

1940: France’s Maginot Line is abandoned to Germans in World War II.

1958: Imre Nagy, premier of Hungary during the 1956 rebellion, is executed in Budapest.

1960: US President Dwight D Eisenhower cancels visit to Japan after anti-American riots there.

1971: US Senate votes against plan calling for total American troop withdrawal from Vietnam by end of year.

1976: Bloody rioting erupts in Soweto, South Africa, when black students protest being taught in Afrikaans. Six hundred die in months of racial upheaval. The day is now National Youth Day in South Africa.

1991: Tens of thousands of Filipinos flee the eruption of Mount Pinatubo along ash-clogged roads, while the US begins evacuating all 20,000 dependents of Clark Air Force Base. Seven hundred people die in

the eruption.

1992: The US and Russia agree to slash their arsenals of

long-range nuclear weapons by two-thirds reducing the chance of a “nuclear nightmare”.

1993: UN forces in Somalia launch new aerial attacks against buildings belonging to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

1995: The world’s seven richest industrial countries endorse the creation of an international bailout fund to rescue countries on the verge of bankruptcy.

1997: The Irish Republican Army kills two police officers in Northern Ireland. The British Government calls off all further contact with Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm.

1998: Afghanistan’s Taliban religious army orders the closing of more than 100 private schools that had been educating girls.

1999: Amnesty International singles out the United States for human rights abuses citing use of the death penalty, particularly against people who committed crimes before they were 18.

2000: In a setback for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Lebanon rejects the United Nations’ verification of Israel’s withdrawal, saying Israel still controls some Lebanese territory.

2001: US President George W Bush and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin meet for the first time in Slovenia. They agree to cooperate and have regular consultations.

2002: Pope John Paul II canonises Franciscan Capuchin friar Padre Pio, granting the Italian monk the name St Pio of Pietrelcina.

2003: A drought that began in 2001 puts some 12.6 million Ethiopians at risk of starving to death, United Nations food agencies say, adding that this could lead to the worst famine since a 1984-85 crisis in which a million people died of starvation.

2004: Russia’s richest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his top business partner make a joint appearance at the start of a high-profile trial that will delve into Russia’s murky recent past and set the tone for its future.

2005: Masked gunmen seize dozens of children at an international school in north-western Cambodia, killing a three-year-old Canadian boy and threatening to shoot others before police rescue the hostages.

2006: The leader of Nepal’s Maoist rebels announces a landmark agreement to make his followers part of the Himalayan kingdom’s government for the

first time.

2007: North Korea invites UN nuclear inspectors in the first concrete sign of a breakthrough in the stalemate over the communist nation’s disarmament held up by a financial dispute.

2008: Hundreds of Taliban fighters take over several villages in southern Afghanistan just outside the region’s largest city, and NATO and Afghan forces redeploy to meet the threat.

2010: Defying UN sanctions over its nuclear programme, Iran promises to expand its atomic research as its president vows to punish the West and force it to “sit at the negotiating table like a polite child” before agreeing to further talks.

2011: Osama bin Laden’s long-time second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, takes control of al-Qaeda, the group declared, marking the ascendancy of a man driven by hatred of the United States who helped plan the Sept 11, 2001 attacks.

2012: UN observes suspend patrols in Syria due to a recent spike in violence, the strongest sign yet that an international peace plan is unravelling despite months of diplomatic effort to prevent the country from plunging into civil war.

2013: From Bangkok to Miami, cities and coastal areas across the globe are building or planning defence to protect millions of people and key infrastructure from more powerful storm surges and other effects of global warming.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Geronimo, Apache Indian leader (1829-1909); Stan Laurel, US actor (1890-1965); Bobby Clark, US vaudevillian/comedian

(1886-1960); Jean Peugeot, French car manufacturer (1896-1966); Barbara McClintock, US geneticist and Nobel laureate (1902-1992); Joyce Carol Oates, US author (1938- ); Eddie Levert, US singer (1942- ); Joan Van Ark, US actress (1943- )