Today is the 106th day of 2021. There are 259 days in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1925: Kingston College in Jamaica is declared open.

OTHER EVENTS

1856: Declaration of Paris abolishes privateering, defines nature of contraband and blockade, and recognises principle of “free ships, free goods”.

1900: The first books of US postage stamps are issued.

1906: Pacific cable between United States and China is completed.

1917: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returns to Russia after years of exile.

1942: India’s Congress party rejects terms of self-government offered by Britain.

1945: US troops enter Nuremberg, Germany, in World War II; in his first speech to Congress, President Harry S Truman pledges to carry out the war and peace policies of his predecessor, President Franklin D Roosevelt.

1988: Israeli commando unit, commanded by Ehud Barak — later to become prime minister — kills Palestine Liberation Organization military commander Abu Jihad in Tunis.

2002: Premier Wim Kok and the members of his ruling three-party coalition resign en masse in response to a published report that faulted the Dutch Government and the UN in a 1995 massacre by Serbs of more than 7,500 Muslims in Srebrenica, Bosnia.

2003: The European Union holds a ceremony in Athens, Greece, where 10 nations scheduled to join the group in May 2004 sign an accession treaty. The 10 prospective members are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

2008: The US military frees AP photographer Bilal Hussein after more than two years in custody in Baghdad.

2009: President Barack Obama pledges in Mexico to help a deeply troubled neighbour in its battle against drugs and violence, including action to slow the dangerous flow of weapons from the United States.

2010: Thick drifts of volcanic ash blanket parts of rural Iceland as a vast, invisible plume of grit drifts over Europe, emptying the skies of planes and sending hundreds of thousands in search of hotel rooms, train tickets or rental cars.

2011: President Raul Castro draws a line in the Caribbean sand across which Cuba’s economic reforms must never go, telling delegates to a key Communist Party summit that he has rejected dozens of suggested reforms that would have allowed the concentration of property in private hands.

2014: Scores of female students kidnapped by Islamic militants from a north-eastern Nigerian school are freed.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Jacques Thibaut, French novelist (1844-1924); Charles Chaplin, English-born actor-director (1889-1977); Henry Mancini, US composer-conductor (1924-1994); Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (1940- ); Martin Lawrence, US actor/comedian (1965- )

— AP