Today is the 237th day of 2022. 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 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: Hundreds of French colonists arrive in Louisiana, with some settling in present-day New Orleans.

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.

1916: President Woodrow Wilson signs an Act establishing the US National Park Service 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 its number of resident Germans.

1944: A Free French division, racing from Normandy, liberates Paris from the Germans. During World War II Paris is liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation. Romania declares war on former ally Germany.

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

1958: President Dwight D Eisenhower signs a measure providing pensions for former US presidents and their widows.

1960: Opening ceremonies are held for the Summer Olympics in Rome.

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

1965: A massive avalanche roars down from a glacier in the Swiss Alps, burying 108 people at a hydroelectric construction project.

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

1975: The Bruce Springsteen album Born to Run is released by Columbia Records.

1981: 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.

1989: Voyager 2 makes its closest approach to Neptune, its final planetary target.

1993: United Nations trucks piled high with food and medicine enter the embattled Bosnian city of Mostar. Terrified Muslims prevent 53 Spanish peacekeepers from leaving the city for six days.

1996: Israel moves trailers into Jewish West Bank settlements, the first step by 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. He is sentenced to 6 1/2 years’ imprisonment. (Krenz was released in 2003 after serving less than four years.)

1999: The Russian military says it has largely driven Islamic militants out of Dagestan, a southern Russian region invaded by Chechnya three weeks earlier.

2003: Bombs planted in taxis, in two separate locations in Bombay, explode, killing 50 people and wounding more than 150.

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.

2009: After weeks of denials, two Pakistani Taliban commanders acknowledge that the group’s top leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is dead — claiming he died 18 days after a US missile strike and disputing reports that the al-Qaeda-linked movement he left behind was falling apart. Senator Edward M Kennedy dies at age 77 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, after a battle with a brain tumour.

2012: A North Atlantic Treaty Organization 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. Neil Armstrong, 82, who commanded the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing and was the first man to set foot on the moon in July 1969, dies in Cincinnati, Ohio. A huge explosion rocks Venezuela’s biggest oil refinery and unleashes a ferocious fire, killing at least 42 people. Alpha and long-shot Golden Ticket finish in a historic dead heat in the US$1- million Travers Stakes at Saratoga Race Course.

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’s consent, saying any such attack would be considered an aggression.

2016: Hillary Clinton says that Donald Trump has unleashed the “radical fringe” within the Republican Party, claiming the billionaire businessman’s campaign as one that will “make America hate again”. Trump rejects Clinton’s allegations, defending his hard-line approach to immigration while trying to make the case to minority voters that Democrats had abandoned them. The bodies of two nuns, Sisters Margaret Held and Paula Merrill, both 68, are found in their home in Durant, Mississippi; a suspect is charged with capital murder.

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 (1930-2020); 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