Today is the 27th day of 2016. There are 339 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2013: Flames race through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil, killing more than 230 people in the world’s deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.

OTHER EVENTS

1340: Edward III of England declares himself king of France, a claim that leads to the Hundred Years’ War. The kings of England call themselves kings of France until 1801.

1695: Mustafa II becomes Sultan of Turkey on death of Ahmed II.

1822: Greek Independence is formally proclaimed.

1865: Treaty between Spain and Peru virtually recognises Peru’s Independence.

1880: Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.

1888: The National Geographic Society is incorporated in the United States.

1914: Haiti’s President Michel Oreste abdicates during revolt, and US Marines land to preserve order.

1943: US bombers stage first all-out US air raid on Germany in World War II, a daylight attack on Wilhelmshaven; Germany begins civil conscription of women.

1944: The German and Finnish siege of Leningrad, now St Petersburg, is lifted. At least 650,000 people died during the 872-day siege.

1945: Soviet troops liberate the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.

1951: An era of US atomic testing in the Nevada desert begins as an Air Force plane drops a one-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats.

1964: France establishes diplomatic relations with China.

1967: Three US Apollo astronauts die in flash fire aboard space capsule.

1973: Accords are signed in Paris, providing for the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, leading to the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.

1977: The Vatican reaffirms the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on female priests.

1981: Indonesia’s Tampo Mas II passenger ship catches fire and sinks in Java Sea, killing 580 people.

1993: Police in New Delhi lob tear gas shells to disperse rioting mobs of Hindus and Muslims who attack a mosque and a temple and burn down dozens of shops.

1994: Terrorists strike three times in Northern Ireland, killing the first two victims of the new year and wounding two others.

1998: Bowing to the wish of Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church in Germany stops issuing certificates allowing abortion.

1999: Eamon Collins, a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) intelligence officer and author of an expose of life inside the IRA, is found dead near the Northern Ireland town of Newry.

2001: Police fire tear gas and warning shots as thousands of rock-throwing students in Jakarta storm the gates of Indonesia’s Parliament in the largest protest yet against the country’s president.

2003: UN weapons inspectors report that although the Iraqi Government had given inspectors access to suspected weapons sites, it had not provided sufficient information about its weapons programmes and stockpiles. This report is seen as bolstering the US case for military action to disarm Iraq.

2010: An Ethiopian Airlines jet crashes just minutes after take-off from Beirut in a fierce storm and international ships search along Lebanon’s coast for the bodies of the 90 people on-board and the black boxes that may provide the cause of the disaster.

2011: Chilean judicial officials vow to investigate the death of President Salvador Allende for the first time, 37 years after the socialist leader was found shot during a withering attack on the presidential palace.

2014: Army chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who led the coup ousting Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, moves close to declaring his candidacy to replace him, securing the backing of the military for a presidential run.

2015: President Cristina Fernandez calls on Congress to dissolve Argentina’s intelligence services in the wake of the mysterious death of a prosecutor, strongly denying his accusations that she had tried to shield former Iranian officials suspected in the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer (1756-1791); Edouard Lalo, French composer (1823-1892); Lewis Carroll, English mathematician and writer (1832-1898); Jerome Kern, US composer (1885-1945); Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler (1931-2001); James Cromwell, US actor (1940- ); Mikhail Baryshnikov, Russian ballet dancer (1948- )

— AP