Today is the 61st day of 2016. There are 304 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

2008: Prince Harry returns to Britain after news of his secret deployment as a forward air commander with the military in Afghanistan was leaked to the press.

Other Events

1896: Ethiopian forces defeat Italians at Adwa, northern Ethiopia, ending Italy’s quest to create a substantial African colony.

1919: Korean Independence is declared in Seoul and two million people rally, leading to brutal Japanese repression.

1961: US President John F Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps.

1966: Soviet Union lands one-ton spacecraft on planet Venus after three-and-a-half month flight.

1988: South African Government introduces Bill to outlaw foreign funding of political activity.

1991: Colombia’s third-largest rebel group, the Popular Liberation Army, formally lays down its arms.

1992: Muslims and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina vote for independence from Yugoslavia, enraging Serb nationalists.

1997: About 5,000 neo-Nazis march through Munich to protest an exhibit on the army’s involvement in World War II atrocities.

1998: Serbian police sweep through ethnic Albanian villages in the troubled Kosovo province while the Albanians’ leader appeals to the West to stop the violence. Twenty-four Albanians are killed by Serbian security forces in a few days.

1999: Rwandan Hutu rebels, claiming they oppose American and British support of the Tutsi Government in Rwanda, abduct eight foreign tourists from camps in the Ugandan rainforest and hack them to death.

2003: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described planner and organiser of the September 11 attacks, is captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

2004: Exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in a phone interview, said he was abducted from Haiti by US troops who accompanied him on a flight to the Central African Republic.

2007: Japan’s nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denies Tokyo’s military forced women into sexual slavery during World War II, backtracking from a past government apology.

2009: Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resigns after the country’s attorney general informs him that he plans to indict him on suspicion of illicitly taking cash-stuffed envelopes from a Jewish-American businessman.

2011: Yemen’s embattled president accuses the US, his closest ally, of instigating the mounting protests against him, but it fails to slow the momentum for his ouster as hundreds of thousands rally in cities across the country against him.

2012: French President Nicolas Sarkozy takes refuge from a crowd of several hundred angry protesters in a café while campaigning in the country’s south-west Basque country.

Today’s Birthdays

Frederic Chopin, Polish romantic pianist and composer (1810-1849); Theophile Delcasse, French statesman (1852-1923); Giles Lytton Strachey, English author (1880-1932); Yitzhak Rabin, former Israeli prime minister (1922-1995); Harry Belafonte, US singer/actor (1927-); Dirk Benedict, US actor/director (1945-); Ron Howard, US director/actor (1954-); Roger Daltrey, British singer/songwriter (1944-); Javier Bardem, Spanish actor (1969-).

— AP