Today is the 74th day of 2021. There are 291 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1937: The world’s first blood bank is established at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital by Dr Bernard Fantus. It is a breakthrough for surgical procedures and emergency treatments.

OTHER EVENTS

1848: Hungarian intellectuals stage bloodless revolution in Budapest against Austro-Hungarian empire. It is put down by Russian troops the next year.

1874: France assumes protectorate over central Indochina region of Annam, which breaks off vassalage to China.

1894: France and Germany agree on boundaries between French Congo and Cameroons.

1903: British conquest of northern Nigeria is complete.

1917: Czar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates after humiliating defeat by the Germans. The Russian State and military begin to dissolve.

1919: The American Legion is founded in Paris.

1938: Nazi Germany seizes Czechoslovakia with little resistance, after having annexed the Sudetenland, with its fortifications, the previous year.

1985: The first Internet domain name, symbolics.com, is registered by the Symbolics Computer Corp of Massachusetts.

1988: Israeli authorities impose travel ban on Palestinians in occupied territories.

1989: Soviet Union’s President Mikhail S Gorbachev calls for rapid measures to ease chronic Soviet food shortages.

1991: Serbian President Borisav Jovic resigns after the collective presidency fails to declare a nationwide state of emergency.

1992: A second earthquake in a short time strikes eastern Turkey, killing an estimated 800 people.

1993: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin offers, after a meeting with US President Bill Clinton, to surrender part of the Golan Heights to Syria.

1998: CBS’s 60 Minutes airs an interview with former White House employee Kathleen Willey, who said President Bill Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances toward her in the Oval Office in 1993, a charge denied by the president.

2000: In a forensic first, a grand jury in New York indicts an unidentified man for three rapes based on his DNA genetic profile.

2001: Armed Chechens hijack a Russian plane carrying 174 people after it takes off from Turkey and force it to land in Medina, Saudi Arabia.

2003: Rebels led by ousted army chief General Francois Bozize capture the Central African Republic’s capital, Bangui, and the international airport while President Ange-Felix Patasse was out of the country. Bozize declared himself president.

2004: Saudi security forces kill two militants, including one considered al-Qaeda’s chief of operations on the Arabian Peninsula, in a shoot-out in the capital Riyadh.

2006: A Spanish boat recovers the bodies of 24 people believed to be African migrants floating in waters off the coast of Mauritania, hundreds of miles south of the Canary Islands.

2007: The Islamic militant Hamas and its Fatah rivals forge a unity Palestinian Government to end more than a year of political wrangling, isolation and bloodshed. Israel quickly rejects the new leadership, saying it fails to recognise the Jewish State.

2008: China orders tourists out of Tibet’s capital while troops on foot and in armoured vehicles patrol the streets and enforce a strict curfew a day after riots that a Tibetan exile group says left at least 30 protesters dead.

2009: Thousands of anti-Government protesters led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif head to Islamabad for a planned sit-in at Parliament, ramping up a power struggle that risks hobbling a vital Western ally in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

2013: The chief of Syria’s main, Western-backed rebel group marks the second anniversary of the start of the uprising against President Bashar.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Charles de Montalembert, French author (1810-1870); Jules Chevalier, French priest/founder of Sacred Heart Missionaries (1824-1907); Henri Saint Cyr, Swedish equestrian/Olympic gold medallist (1902-1979); Harry James, US band leader (1916-1983); Judd Hirsch, US actor (1935- ); Christopher Gonzalez, Jamaican sculptor/painter (1943-2008); Sly Stone, US singer/musician (1943- ); will.i.am, US rapper/musician (1975- ); Eva Longoria Parker, US actress (1975- ); Nadine Sutherland, Jamaican singer (1968-)

— AP