Today is the 237th day of 2014. There are 128 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1965: Massive avalanche roars down from glacier in Swiss Alps, burying 108 people at hydroelectric construction project.

OTHER EVENTS

1580: Spain invades Portugal and in a matter of weeks, conquers it and keeps it for more than 80 years.

1718: French immigrants to United States found city of New Orleans in Louisiana.

1825: Uruguay declares independence from Brazil.

1875: Matthew Webb, British professional swimmer, becomes the first person to swim across the English Channel, travelling from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in 22 hours.

1921: The United States signs a peace treaty with Germany.

1944: A Free French division, racing from Normandy, liberates Paris from the Germans.

1958: The UN General Assembly unanimously votes to adopt an Arab resolution to facilitate the withdrawal of US and British troops from Lebanon and Jordan.

1967: Hanoi announces plans for the evacuation of all non-essential civilians in the Vietnamese city in view of the increased US air attacks.

1973: UN Security Council condemns Israel for “premeditated air attack” on Lebanese villages.

1981: The US spacecraft Voyager 2 comes within 105,000 kilometres (63,000 miles) of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back pictures and data on the ringed planet.

1984: The Soviet Union conducts successful tests of long-range ground-launched cruise missiles in response to United States deployment of these weapons.

1990: UN Security Council authorises military action to enforce trade embargo imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait.

1996: Israel moves trailers into Jewish West Bank settlements, the first step of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toward expanding settlements.

1997: Egon Krenz, the East German communist leader who threw open the Berlin Wall eight years earlier, is convicted of manslaughter for the shooting deaths of citizens who tried to flee to the West during the Cold War.

1998: Seven Cuban-Americans are indicted by a federal court panel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on charges of conspiracy to murder Cuban President Fidel Castro.

2000: The Zimbabwe Government names another 509 white-owned farms it plans to confiscate for redistribution to landless blacks, bringing to 1,542 the number it has targeted under a hastened land seizure programme.

2006: Uganda agrees to a conditional truce with the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army to end a 19-year insurgency in the north of the country that has left thousands dead.

2008: Israel frees nearly 200 jailed Palestinians in a goodwill gesture hours before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice begins her peace mission to the region.

2009: After weeks of denials, two Pakistani Taliban commanders acknowledge that the group’s top leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is dead — claiming he died 18 days after a US missile strike and disputing reports that the al-Qaeda linked movement he left behind was falling apart.

2011: A renowned political cartoonist whose drawings express Syrians’ frustrated hopes for change is grabbed after he left his studio and beaten by masked gunmen who broke his hands and dumped him on a road outside Damascus.

2013: Israel pushes forward with plans to construct 1,500 apartments in east Jerusalem in a move that could undermine recently renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Ivan IV (“The Terrible”), first czar of Russia (1530-1584); Erich Honecker, East German leader (1912-1994); Leonard Bernstein, US composer-conductor (1918-1990); Sean Connery, British actor (1930- ); Fredrick Forsyth, British novelist (1938- ); Elvis Costello, British singer (1954- ); Claudia Schiffer, model (1970- ); Tim Burton, US film director (1958- ); Danny Smythe, drummer with US rock group The Box Tops (1948- )