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Today is the 319th day of 2021. There are 46 days left in the year.TODAY'S HIGHLIGHT2012: Oil giant BP agrees to plead guilty to a raft of criminal charges and pay a record US$4.5 billion in a settlement with the US Government over the deadly 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.OTHER EVENTS1492: Christopher Columbus notes in his journal the use of tobacco among Indians - the first recorded reference to tobacco by a European.1577: Sir Francis Drake of England leaves on a voyage around the world.1889: Brazil's King Pedro II abdicates, and Brazil is proclaimed a republic.1904: American inventor King Camp Gillette is granted a US patent for the first razor with disposable blades.1920: League of Nations Assembly holds first meeting in Geneva.1928: Fascist Grand Council becomes part of Italian constitution.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.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.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: Funeral services are held in Moscow's Red Square for the late Soviet President Leonid I Brezhnev.1985: Britain and Ireland sign an accord giving Dublin an official consultative role in governing Northern Ireland.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 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), proclaims the establishment of an independent Palestinian state at the close of a four-day conference in Algiers.1991: The UN Environment Program reports worldwide production and use of chemicals believed to cause erosion of the ozone layer has declined 40 per cent over the last five years.1992: Shining Path rebels detonate two bombs in Lima, Peru, wounding 10 people.1993: Gunmen in Lebanon kill a senior aide of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.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.1999: Chinese and US negotiators sign a breakthrough agreement in Beijing that removes trade barriers and clears the biggest hurdle to China's entry into the World Trade Organization.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. Microsoft released Xbox, a video game console system.2002: Colombian army troops rescue Bishop Jorge Enrique Jimenez, one of Latin American's leading Roman Catholic bishops, and another priest after a gunbattle with their rebel captors in the Andean mountains.2003: Car bombings within minutes of each other at two Jewish synagogues in Istanbul, Turkey, kill at least 25 people and wound more than 300.2004: Sending home a final jumbo jet full of anxious foreigners, France ends its leading role in one of Africa's largest evacuations, a five-day exodus of 5,000 Westerners and others amid fighting between Ivory Coast and its former colonial ruler.2005: UN peacekeepers and gang members trade gunfire in the Cite Soleil slum of the Haitian capital, leaving at least two people dead.2006: Pakistan's Parliament approves amendments to an Islamic-based law on rape, dropping the death penalty and flogging for people convicted of having consensual sex outside marriage.2007: Cyclone Sidr roars across the southwestern coast of Bangladesh with 150 mph (240 kph) winds killing at least 3,100 people in the deadliest such storm in more than a decade.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.2009: Hundreds of French and Afghan troops push into a hostile valley in eastern Afghanistan where militants launch quick attacks, then disappear into hillside villages. The mission: secure the area for a planned bypass road around the Afghan capital to move supplies from neighbouring Pakistan.2010: Rolls-Royce to temporarily replace any oil-leaking engines like the one that caught fire and blew apart on a Qantas superjumbo jet earlier this month, forcing the A380 to make an emergency landing in Singapore with 459 people aboard.2011: Prime Minister-designate Mario Monti of Italy says he is ready to present his new Government to the president after winning wide backing - and important pledges of sacrifices - from political, business and union leaders during two days of intense consultations.2016: President Barack Obama, opening his final overseas trip while in office, acknowledges in Athens, Greece, that he was surprised by Donald Trump's victory, and said it stemmed from deep-seated anxieties among working-class Americans that the Government needed to do better to address.TODAY'S BIRTHDAYSWilliam 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