ON THIS DAY

Today is Saturday, August 25. Highlights in history on this date:

- Spain invades Portugal and keeps it for more than 80 years.

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

- Krakatoa volcano erupts in Dutch East Indies, creating a tidal wave that kills 36,000.

- US National Park Service is established within the Department of the Interior to protect America’s wilderness.

- British and Soviet troops invade Iran following the Shah’s refusal to reduce the number of resident Germans.

- The UN General Assembly votes to adopt an Arab resolution to facilitate the withdrawal of US and British troops from Lebanon and Jordan.

- Author Truman Capote is found dead in a Los Angeles mansion, aged 59.

- Iran and Iraq open direct talks in Geneva on ending the nearly eight-year-old Gulf war.

- 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 during the Cold War.

- The Zimbabwe government names another 509 white-owned farms it plans to confiscate for redistribution to landless blacks, bringing to 1542 the number it has targeted under a hastened land seizure programme.

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

- Bombings tear through crowded public areas in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, killing at least 42 people.

- A renowned political cartoonist whose drawings express Syrians’ hopes for change is grabbed after he leaves his studio and beaten by masked gunmen who break his hands and dump him on a road outside Damascus.

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