Today is the 299th day of 2018. There are 66 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1917: Brazil declares war against Germany in World War I.

OTHER EVENTS

1795: The first jackasses arrive in America through Boston Harbour as a gift from the King of Spain to US President George Washington, so they could be mated with mares and produce America’s first native mules.

1896: Italy concedes Ethiopia’s independence by Treaty of Addis Ababa after a crushing defeat at Adwa earlier in the year.

1942: US aircraft carrier Hornet is sunk after being hit by Japanese aircraft in the Solomon Islands battle.

1947: US film actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall fly to Washington to protest alleged violations of personal freedom by the House Un-American Activities Committee in hearings on Communist infiltration in Hollywood.

1955: Republic of South Vietnam is proclaimed under Ngo Dinh Diem.

1962: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev offers to withdraw missiles from Cuba if United States removes bases in Turkey, but is rebuffed.

1975: Anwar Sadat becomes the first Egyptian president to pay an official visit to the United States.

1979: South Korea’s President Park Chung-Hee is slain by his lifelong friend Kim Jae Kyu, the head of the Korean intelligence agency.

1987: US President Ronald Reagan announces an embargo on all US imports from Iran because of its “unprovoked attacks” on American military forces and merchant ships.

1990: President Alberto Fujimori announces a plan to employ free market incentives as a way to stop Peruvian farmers from their economic dependence on growing coca, the plant used to make cocaine.

1992: An elaborate pageant for Queen Elizabeth II in celebration of the 40th anniversary of her accession to the British throne is held in London.

1994: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Prime Minister Abdel Salam Majali of Jordan sign a peace treaty ending 46 years of hostility.

1997: Angola promises to withdraw its troops from Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, where they helped rebels oust elected President Pascal Lissouba.

1998: Days after signing a peace accord with the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu beats a no-confidence vote in Parliament.

1999: Britain’s House of Lords votes to end the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in Britain’s upper chamber of Parliament.

2000: Supporters of Ivory Coast’s president-elect and his political rival fight bloody clashes in Abidjan over a demand for new presidential elections.

2001: US President George W Bush signs a sweeping anti-terrorism Bill into law, giving police and intelligence agencies vast new powers.

2002: Elite Russian counterterrorism forces storm a theatre in Moscow, bringing an end to a hostage crisis that had begun with the theatre’s seizure by more than 50 Chechen guerrillas. At least 119 of the 750 hostages die.

2009: One of Fidel Castro’s sisters says in a memoir that she collaborated with the CIA against her brother, starting shortly after the United States’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

2010: A volcanic eruption and a tsunami kill scores of people hundreds of miles (kilometres) apart in Indonesia — spasms from the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, which spawns disasters from deep within the Earth.

2012: Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi is convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to four years in prison in a verdict that could see him barred from public office for four years.

2013: Days of torrential rain cause floods in sout-east India, killing dozens of people and forcing the evacuation of more than 70,000 others from hundreds of low-lying villages.

2014: Ukrainians overwhelmingly vote in several pro-Western parties in a landmark parliamentary election, another nudge in the former Soviet nation’s drift away from Russia.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Domenico Scarlatti, Italian composer (1685-1757); Georges Jacques Danton, French revolutionary leader (1759-1794); William Charles Wentworth, Australian explorer (1790-1872); Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, deposed Shah of Iran (1919-1980); Bob Hoskins, British actor (1942-2014); Hillary Rodham Clinton, former US secretary of state and former US first lady (1947- ); Jaclyn Smith, US actress (1945- ); Natalie Merchant, US singer (1963- ); Keith Urban, Australian country singer (1967- )

— AP