Today is the 204th day of 2019. There are 161 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1958: Queen Elizabeth II names four women to peerages — the first women to sit in Britain’s House of Lords.

OTHER EVENTS

1588: English Army assembles at Tilbury to repel invasion by Spanish Armada.

1595: Spanish land at Cornwall, England, and burn Mousehold and Penzance before returning to their ships.

1785: Prussia’s Frederick the Great forms Die Fuerstenbund (League of German Princes).

1829: The first typewriter is patented by William Burt of Mount Vernon, Michigan.

1882: Koreans attack Japanese legation in Seoul, the Korean capital, provoking intervention by Japanese and Chinese troops.

1904: The ice cream cone is invented by Charles E Menches during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis.

1913: “Second Revolution” breaks out in south China to force from power military commander Yuan Shih-kai. He wins the armed struggle, ending hope for democracy in China after the abdication of the emperor.

1914: Austria and Hungary issue ultimatum to Serbia after assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The dispute leads to World War I.

1920: King Faisal’s Arab army is defeated at Maysaloun, and Syria falls under French control.

1921: The first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party is held in Shanghai. Thirteen delegates represent 50 members.

1945: Marshal Henri Philippe Petain is put on trial, charged with betraying France during World War II.

1952: Egyptian military officers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrow King Farouk I.

1974: Greece’s military rulers announce they will turn nation back to civilian rule.

1983: A regional struggle for independence by Tamils in Sri Lanka’s north and east escalates into a civil war when they kill 13 Sri Lankan soldiers. The nation’s Sinhalese majority responds by killing hundreds of Tamil civilians in the south.

1993: British Prime Minister John Major survives a vote of confidence and a reluctant House of Commons approves a treaty of European union on his terms.

1996: Aided by US spy photographs, war crimes investigators in Bosnia recover more than a dozen bodies thought to belong to Muslims executed after the fall of the city of Srebrenica.

1997: Swiss banks publish lists of World War II era depositors in newspaper advertisements throughout the world.

2002: Israeli fighter jet drops a one-ton bomb on a crowded residential neighbourhood in Gaza City, killing Salah Shehada, a Palestinian militant, and 14 civilians. The strike draws widespread condemnation for the high civilian death toll.

2005: A Brazilian man killed by British police in a dramatic subway shooting had nothing to do with a series of bombing attacks on London’s transit system, police announce, calling the death a “tragedy” and expressing their regret.

2008: Ukraine blames Soviet leaders for a famine that killed millions of people in 1932-33 and publishes documents it says “unequivocally” proved its case — part of its campaign to get the tragedy recognised as genocide.

2010: Researchers in Mexico say a scientific reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought.

2013: Prince William and his wife Kate present their newborn son to the world for the first time, as yet without a name. The infant is third in line to rule Britain after his grandfather, Prince Charles, and William.

2014: Bomb blasts appearing to target former Nigerian military leader Muhammadu Buhari and a prominent moderate Muslim cleric kills dozens of people in the northern city of Kaduna but leave both leaders unharmed.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Francesco Sforza, Italian mercenary and duke of Milan (1401-1466); Lord Allanbrooke, English soldier (1883-1963); Raymond Chandler, US author (1888-1959); Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (1891-1975); Elio Vittorini, Italian novelist, translator, and literary critic (1908-1966); Don Imus, US radio personality (1940- ); Woody Harrelson, US actor (1961- ); Daniel Radcliffe, British actor (1989- ); Philip Seymour Hoffman, US actor (1967-2014 ); Alison Krauss, US country singer (1971- )

— AP