Today is the 33rd day of 2017. There are 332 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1999: Hugo Chavez takes office as Venezuela’s president, seven years after he tried to overthrow the Government in a military coup.

OTHER EVENTS

1653: New Amsterdam — now New York City — with a population of 800, gains a city charter from the Dutch.

1943: German troops surrender to Russians in Stalingrad after losing 200,000 men.

1971: Idi Amin assumes power in Uganda following a coup that ousted President Milton Obote.

1979: After 14 years in exile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns from Paris and becomes the de facto leader of Iran.

1990: South African President F W de Klerk lifts ban on African National Congress and promises to release political prisoner Nelson Mandela.

1991: An earthquake jolts Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing at least 109 people and injuring more than 350.

1992: Serbian officials and a Serb leader agree to support a UN peace plan for Croatia.

1995: The leaders of Israel, Jordan, the PLO and Egypt sit down together for the first time in Cairo in an attempt to revive Israel’s troubled accord with Palestinians.

2000: The two Libyan defendants charged in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, plead innocent at a pretrial hearing in a Scottish court. The blast killed 270 people.

2006: Foreign aid workers and journalists start leaving the Gaza Strip after masked Palestinian gunmen, incensed by cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in European newspapers, surround an EU office and threaten to attack Europeans.

2009: Moammar Gadhafi of Libya is elected as leader of the African Union.

2011: A massive cyclone strikes north-eastern Australia — the most powerful storm to hit the area in nearly a century.

2012: NASA, which relies solely on Russia to take US crews to the space station, says it still has confidence in the quality of Russia’s manned rockets, despite an embarrassing series of glitches and failures in Moscow’s space programme.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

James Joyce, Irish author (1882-1941); Valery Giscard d’Estaing, former French president (1926- ); Graham Nash, British pop singer (1942- ); Farrah Fawcett, US actress/model (1947-2009); Christie Brinkley, US model (1954- ); Shakira, Latin singer (1977- )

— AP