Today is the 320th day of 2024. There are 46 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

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.

OTHER EVENTS

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

1889: Brazil’s King Pedro II abdicates, and Brazil is proclaimed a republic.

1939: US President Franklin Roosevelt lays the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC.

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

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

1976: Syrian army takes control of Beirut, ending an 18-month civil war in Lebanon.

1977: Israel sends formal invitation to Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat to visit Jerusalem and address the Israeli Parliament.

1982: Funerals are held in Moscow’s Red Square for the late Soviet President Leonid I Brezhnev.

1986: A government tribunal in Nicaragua convicts American Eugene Hasenfus on charges of delivering arms to Contra rebels, and sentences him to 30 years in prison. He is pardoned a month later.

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.

1995: European Union ambassadors approve a total arms embargo to punish Nigeria’s military regime for the execution of nine political activists.

1996: Voters in Sao Paulo, Brazil, elect Celso Pitta as their first black mayor.

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.

1998: US President Bill Clinton announces that Iraq has “backed down” and has promised to cooperate unconditionally with UN weapons inspectors.

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.

2008: Somali pirates hijack a Saudi-owned supertanker loaded with 2 million barrels of crude oil in the Indian Ocean. It is the largest ship pirates have seized.

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

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

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- )

— AP