Today is the 15th day of 2021. There are 350 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2009: US Airways Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger ditches his airliner in the Hudson River near New York after a flock of birds disables both the plane’s engines. All 155 people aboard survive.

OTHER EVENTS

1535: King Henry VIII assumes title of supreme head of the Church of England.

1559: England’s Queen Elizabeth I is crowned in Westminster Abbey.

1892: The rules of basketball are published for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the game originates.

1919: Pianist and conductor Ignace Jan Paderewski becomes the first premier of newly created Republic of Poland.

1922: Irish Free State is established under Michael Collins.

1967: The first Super Bowl is played in the United States as the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League defeat the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League 35-10.

1973: US President Richard Nixon announces the suspension of all US offensive action in North Vietnam, citing progress in peace negotiations.

1976: Sara Jane Moore is sentenced to life in prison for her attempt on the life of US President Gerald Ford in San Francisco.

1989: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Warsaw Pact and 12 other European countries adopt a human rights and security agreement in Vienna, Austria.

1993: A historic disarmament ceremony ends in Paris with the last of 125 countries signing a treaty banning chemical weapons.

1996: Greek Premier Andreas Papandreou resigns after nearly two months in the hospital for treatment of pneumonia.

1998: President Suharto of Indonesia reaches an agreement with the International Monetary Fund on an austerity programme to stop the country’s economic meltdown.

1999: Some 45 ethnic Albanians, including children and old men, are killed and mutilated near the Kosovo village of Racak, Yugoslavia, apparently by Serb forces.

2002: Both Pakistan and India refuse to pull their troops back from their tense border, where up to one million troops are massed in their biggest mobilisation in 30 years.

2004: Pentagon auditors request an investigation of possible criminal wrongdoing after US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, picks a high-priced Kuwaiti supplier for gasoline in Iraq just one day after considering bids from only three companies.

2006: Socialist paediatrician Michelle Bachelet, a former political prisoner, wins Chile’s presidential election to become the Andean nation’s first woman leader and extend the rule of the country’s centre-left coalition.

2007: Nepal’s Parliament is dissolved and replaced by an interim legislature including former communist rebels, a major step to co-opt the ex-guerrillas into mainstream politics after they agreed to end their decade-long insurgency.

2008: Republican Mitt Romney scores his first major presidential primary victory in his native Michigan. During a visit to Saudi Arabia, President George W Bush warns that surging oil prices threatens the US economy and urges Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nations to boost their output.

2010: A top French lawmaker submits a draft law that would ban Islamic dress— veils, robes, head scarves — anywhere in public, a measure that would set a European precedent and trap thousands of women between their religious convictions and the law of the land.

2013: New York state enacts the nation’s toughest gun restrictions and the first since the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre, including an expanded assault weapon ban and background checks for buying ammunition. Twin blasts rip through a university campus in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, killing more than 80 people, most of them students, in the Government-controlled part of the city.

2014: A graphic video showing the death of a 16-year-old Chinese girl is released after firefighters ran over her in the wake of the Asiana Airlines plane crash in San Francisco.

2017: In his final interview as president, Barack Obama tells CBS’s 60 Minutes that the increase of Israeli settlements had “gotten so substantial” that it was inhibiting the possibility of an “effective, contiguous Palestinian State”.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Jean Baptiste Moliere, French dramatist (1622-1673); Franz Grillparzer, Austrian author (1791-1872); Pierre Joseph Proudhon, French political philosopher (1809-1865); Nazim Hikmet, Turkish poet (1902-1963); Martin Luther King Jr, American civil rights leader (1929-1968); Mario Van Peebles, US actor/director (1957- ); Chad Lowe, US actor (1968- ); Tony Rebel (Patrick George Anthony Barrett), Jamaican reggae artiste (1962- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer