Today is the 64th day of 2021. There are 301 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1946: Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers his famous “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in United States.

OTHER EVENTS

1496: England’s King Henry VII commissions John and Sebastian Cabot to discover new lands.

1684: Holy League of Linz is formed by Holy Roman Empire, Poland and Venice against the Turks.

1770: Crowds and British troops clash in Boston, an incident that becomes known as the Boston Massacre and hastens American Revolutionary War.

1798: French forces occupy Bern, Switzerland.

1867: An abortive Fenian uprising against English rule takes place in Ireland.

1868: US Senate is organised into a court of impeachment to decide charges against President Andrew Johnson.

1933: The Nazi Party wins 44 per cent of the vote in German parliamentary elections, enabling it to join with Nationalists to gain a slender majority in the Reichstag.

1939: The Republican Government of Spain flees to France after their forces are cornered by the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.

1953: Soviet dictator Josef Stalin dies after three decades in power.

1960: President Sukarno suspends Indonesia’s Parliament.

1962: European extremists in Oran, Algeria, raid prison and kill several Muslim political prisoners.

1970: Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty goes into effect after 43 nations confirm ratification.

1974: Ethiopia’s leader Haile Selassie, confronted by continued unrest, agrees to constitutional convention to create new system of elected democratic government.

1990: South Africa sends troops to Ciskei homeland to suppress mob attacks on factories and shops after military coup there ousted authoritarian president.

1991: Iraq hands over what it says are the last 35 prisoners from the Gulf War.

1995: Pierre-Claver Rwangabo, the governor of Rwanda’s southern province Butare, is assassinated in an ambush. The prime minister blames soldiers of the defeated Hutu-led Government living in Zaire.

1996: US President Bill Clinton sends sophisticated bomb-detection equipment and technical experts to Israel to help battle a deadly wave of terrorism.

1997: Representatives of North Korea and South Korea meet for the first time in 25 years, for peace talks in New York.

2000: Thirty-five years after police beat and bloodied voting rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, modern-day civil rights activists trace the same path with Bill Clinton — a white Southerner who credited that march for his rise to the presidency.

2001: A stampede breaks out during the annual hajj pilgrimage in Medina, Saudi Arabia, killing 35 Muslims.

2002: Boris Berezovsky, once one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, accuses the Russian Federal Security Services of perpetrating a series of bombings in Moscow in 1999 that was blamed on Chechen terrorists.

2005: A team of US and Ethiopian scientists discovers the fossilised remains of what they believe is humankind’s first walking ancestor, a hominid that lived in the wooded grasslands of the Horn of Africa nearly four million years ago.

2008: Police shoot and kill a man armed with explosives who took 10 Australians hostage on a tourist bus in northern China.

2010: Russian and Ukrainian presidents lavish praise on each other for moving past the “degraded” relations that followed Ukraine’s pro-Western Orange Revolution of 2004, but fall short of reaching any specific deals.

2011: Three weeks after President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, Egyptians turn their anger toward his internal security apparatus, storming the agency’s main headquarters and other offices and seizing documents to keep them from being destroyed to hide evidence of human rights abuses.

2012: Assailants waving the battle flag of al-Qaeda gun down 25 policemen in a brazen and well-orchestrated challenge to government control over the strategic town of Haditha fraught with Iraq war symbolism.

2013: Hugo Chavez, the populist leader of oil-rich Venezuela who was Latin America’s most vocal and controversial leader as well as Washington’s chief antagonist in the region, dies.

2014: Russia and the West try to build diplomatic solution to Ukraine as Crimea tensions flare.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Gerardus Mercator, Flemish geographer-mathematician (1512-1594); Giovani Tiepolo, Italian painter (1696-1770); Soong Mayling, better known as Madame Chiang, wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan (1898-2003); Sir Rex Harrison, British actor (1908-1990); Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian film director (1922-1975); Penn Jillette, US comedian (1955- ); Niki Taylor, US model (1975- ); Eva Mendes, US actress (1975- )

— AP