Today is the 237th day of 2021. There are 128 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2000: The Zimbabwe Government names another 509 white-owned farms it plans to confiscate for redistribution to landless blacks, bringing to 1,542 the number it has targeted under a hastened land seizure programme.

OTHER EVENTS

1580: Spain invades Portugal and in a matter of weeks, conquers it and keeps it for more than 80 years.

1718: French immigrants to United States found city of New Orleans in Louisiana.

1825: Uruguay declares independence from Brazil.

1860: British and French troops take Tianjin in war with China.

1875: Matthew Webb, British professional swimmer, becomes the first person to swim across the English Channel, travelling from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in 22 hours.

1883: France obtains protectorate over Annam and Tonkin in Indochina.

1916: US National Park Service is established within the Department of the Interior to protect America’s wilderness from development.

1921: The United States signs a peace treaty with Germany.

1941: British and Soviet troops invade Iran, following shah’s refusal to reduce number of resident Germans.

1944: A Free French division, racing from Normandy, liberates Paris from the Germans.

1950: US President Harry Truman orders the Army to seize control of the nation’s railroads to avert a strike.

1961: President Janio Quadros of Brazil, citing unidentified “terrible forces”, resigns unexpectedly after seven months in office.

1965: Massive avalanche roars down from glacier in Swiss Alps, burying 108 people at hydroelectric construction project.

1967: Hanoi announces plans for the evacuation of all non-essential civilians in the Vietnamese city in view of the increased US air attacks.

1973: UN Security Council condemns Israel for “premeditated air attack” on Lebanese villages.

1981: The US spacecraft Voyager 2 comes within 105,000 kilometres (63,000 miles) of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back pictures and data on the ringed planet.

1984: The Soviet Union conducts successful tests of long-range ground-launched cruise missiles in response to United States deployment of these weapons.

1990: UN Security Council authorises military action to enforce trade embargo imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait.

1996: Israel moves trailers into Jewish West Bank settlements, the first step of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu toward expanding settlements.

1997: Egon Krenz, the East German communist leader who threw open the Berlin Wall eight years earlier, is convicted of manslaughter for the shooting deaths of citizens who tried to flee to the West during the Cold War.

2006: Uganda agrees to a conditional truce with the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army to end a 19-year insurgency in the north of the country that has left thousands dead.

2008: Israel frees nearly 200 jailed Palestinians in a goodwill gesture hours before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice begins her peace mission to the region.

2011: A renowned political cartoonist whose drawings express Syrians’ frustrated hopes for change is grabbed after he left his studio and beaten by masked gunmen who broke his hands and dumped him on a road outside Damascus.

2012: A North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air strike in eastern Afghanistan kills a dozen militants including a senior leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, dealing a blow to armed extremists operating on both sides of the countries’ porous borders.

2013: Israel pushes forward with plans to construct 1,500 apartments in east Jerusalem in a move that could undermine recently renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

2014: Syria says it is ready to help confront the rising threat from the Islamic State group but warns the United States against carrying out air strikes without Damascus’ consent, saying any such attack would be considered an aggression.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Ivan IV “The Terrible”, first czar of Russia (1530-1584); Erich Honecker, East German leader (1912-1994); Leonard Bernstein, US composer-conductor (1918-1990); Sean Connery, British actor (1930- ); Frederick Forsyth, British novelist (1938- ); Elvis Costello, British singer (1954- ); Claudia Schiffer, German model (1970- ); Tim Burton, US film director (1958- ); Danny Smythe, drummer with US rock group The Box Tops (1948-2016)

— AP