Today is the 67th day of 2019. There are 298 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

2011: The European Union adopts a plan to double its efforts to boost energy efficiency in order to cut greenhouse gases, partly by producing better household appliances, renovating public buildings and private homes, and driving improved cars.

OTHER EVENTS

1618: German astronomer Johannes Kepler devises his third law of planetary motion.

1702: England’s Queen Anne ascends the throne upon the death of King William III.

1765: Britain’s House of Lords passes Stamp Act to tax American colonies.

1865: A canal is begun in the Netherlands to connect Amsterdam with the North Sea.

1898: United States refuses to support Britain in its conflict with Russia over a loan to China.

1904: Germany revises 1872 anti-Jesuit law to permit return of some members of the Roman Catholic order.

1917: Riots and strikes break out in St Petersburg, marking the start of Russian Revolution.

1957: Ghana is admitted to the United Nations.

1965: United States lands 3,500 Marines in South Vietnam.

1969: Soviet Union puts its Far East army on alert as warning to China after frontier clash on Ussuri River.

1970: Cyprus President Archbishop Makarios escapes assassination when terrorist snipers shoot down his helicopter.

1986: Guerrilla violence in Colombia takes seven lives a day before national elections.

1987: Sri Lankan troops launch large new offensive, killing 11 separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in northern Jaffna peninsula.

1989: Chinese troops converge on Tibetan capital of Lhasa to enforce martial law following three days of anti-Chinese rioting.

1990: West German Parliament adopts resolution calling on united Germany to honour Poland’s western border.

1996: China fires three ballistic missiles into waters off Taiwan’s main ports, two weeks before the island’s first presidential elections.

1997: Hundreds of people flee southern Albania, fearing clashes between the Government and armed insurgents.

1998: James McDougal, one of the most important cooperating witnesses in Kenneth Starr’s investigation into President Bill Clinton’s Whitewater real estate dealings, dies in prison.

1999: The US Energy Department fires a Taiwanese-born scientist suspected of handing over nuclear missile technology to China in the 1980s.

2003: An Argentine court releases an indictment ordering the arrest of four former Iranian government officials for their alleged role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed.

2004: A female wing of Nepal’s Maoist rebel movement, the All Nepal Women’s Association (Revolutionary), calls a general strike to protest violence against women, bringing this Himalayan kingdom to a standstill.

2005: The UN war crimes court indicts Kosovo’s prime minister for alleged atrocities while commanding ethnic Albanian insurgents against Serb forces in the struggle for control of the province.

2006: Tens of thousands of Sudanese march through Khartoum protesting plans to deploy UN peacekeepers in conflict-torn Darfur and demanding the expulsion of the top UN and US envoys in the country.

2008: US President George W Bush vetoes a Bill that would have banned the Central Intelligence Agency from using simulated drowning and other coercive interrogation methods to gain information from suspected terrorists. Barack Obama captures the Wyoming Democratic caucuses.

2013: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is lauded at his State funeral as a modern-day reincarnation of Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar and a disciple of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board, vanishes during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, setting off a massive search. (To date, the fate of the jetliner and its occupants have yet to be determined.)

2017: Many American women stay home from work, join rallies or wear red to demonstrate how vital they were to the US economy, as International Women’s Day was observed with a multitude of events around the world, including the Day Without a Woman in the US. Fire sweeps through a crowded youth shelter near Guatemala City, killing 40 girls.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Richard Howe, English admiral (1726-1799); Oliver Wendell Holmes, US jurist (1809-1894); Juana de Ibarbourou, Uruguayan poet (1895-1979); Cyd Charisse, US actress-dancer (1923-2008); Lynn Redgrave, British actress (1943-2010); Aidan Quinn, US actor (1959- ); Camryn Manheim, US actress (1961- )

— AP