Today is the 319th day of 2017. There are 46 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2012: Oil giant BP agrees to plead guilty to a raft of criminal charges and pay a record US$4.5 billion in a settlement with the US Government over the deadly 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

OTHER EVENTS

1492: Christopher Columbus notes in his journal the use of tobacco among Indians — the first recorded reference to tobacco by a European.

1940: The first 75,000 American men are called to Armed Forces duty under peacetime conscription.

1963: Cuban President Fidel Castro warns the United Nations that his country will shoot down any US military plane entering its airspace on a reconnaissance mission, saying that the United States already verified the withdrawal of Soviet strategic missiles from Cuba by high-seas inspection.

1969: A Vietnam War protest gathers 250,000 people in Washington, DC.

1988: The Palestine National Council, the legislative body of the PLO, proclaims the establishment of an independent Palestinian state at the close of a four-day conference in Algiers.

1991: The UN Environment Program reports worldwide production and use of chemicals believed to cause erosion of the ozone layer, has declined 40 per cent over the last five years.

1997: Russian President Boris Yeltsin fires two cabinet ministers after it is revealed that Anatoly Chubais, Russia’s leading economic reformer, took money for a book from a financial institution.

1999: Chinese and US negotiators sign a breakthrough agreement in Beijing that removes trade barriers and clears the biggest hurdle to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

2001: A judge rules that Britain has no laws governing human cloning, despite parliament’s attempt to make it the first nation to permit and regulate research using cloned embryos.

2004: Sending home a final jumbo jet full of anxious foreigners, France ends its leading role in one of Africa’s largest evacuations, a five-day exodus of 5,000 Westerners and others amid fighting between Ivory Coast and its former colonial ruler.

2007: Cyclone Sidr roars across the south-western coast of Bangladesh with 150 mph (240 kph) winds, killing at least 3,100 people in the deadliest such storm in more than a decade.

2010: Rolls-Royce to temporarily replace any oil-leaking engines like the one that caught fire and blew apart on a Qantas superjumbo jet earlier this month, forcing the A380 to make an emergency landing in Singapore with 459 people aboard.

2016: President Barack Obama, opening his final overseas trip while in office, acknowledges in Athens, Greece, that he was surprised by Donald Trump’s victory, and said it stemmed from deep-seated anxieties among working class Americans that the Government needed to do better to address.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

William Pitt, British prime minister (1708-1779); William Herschel, German-born astronomer and discoverer of Uranus (1738-1822); Erwin Rommel, German general (1891-1944); Petula Clark, English popular singer (1932- ); Sam Waterston, US actor (1940- ); Rachel True, US actress (1966- ).