Friday is the 127th day of 2021. There are 238 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1429: Seventeen-year-old Joan of Arc leads French forces to lift the English siege of Orleans, turning the Hundred-Year War to France’s favour. The English retreat the next day, but Joan of Arc refuses to pursue them on a Sunday.

OTHER EVENTS

1727: Jews are expelled from Ukraine by decree of Catherine I of Russia.

1821: Sierra Leone, Gambia and Gold Coast are taken over by the British Government to form British West Africa.

1926: French Army and Air Force bombard sections of Damascus during an Arab revolt.

1954: Vietnamese forces overrun Dien Bien Phu, held by the French. A resulting ceasefire divides the country into North and South.

1975: US President Gerald Ford declares an end to the “Vietnam era”. In Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, the Viet Cong celebrate its takeover.

1984: A $180-million out-of-court settlement is announced in the Agent Orange class action suit brought by Vietnam veterans who claimed they suffered injury from exposure to the defoliant.

1991: Storms disrupt the aid effort and cause more casualties in Bangladesh following a cyclone that killed 125,000.

1994: Legislators in Johannesburg take oaths of office and blacks and whites sit down together for the first time to govern South Africa.

1995: Jacques Chirac, conservative mayor of Paris, wins France’s presidency.

1996: The first international war crimes proceeding since Nuremberg opens at The Hague in The Netherlands.

1998: Germany’s Daimler-Benz agrees to buy Chrysler Corp in a US$38-billion deal; Londoners vote overwhelmingly to elect their own mayor for the first time in history.

1999: Pope John Paul II arrives in Romania, becoming the first pope to visit an Orthodox country since Christianity split into Orthodox and Catholic denominations in 1054.

2003: Teams of US customs agents working with US soldiers in Iraq recover about 700 artifacts and 39,400 ancient manuscripts that had disappeared from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad during US-led war.

2008: Dmitry Medvedev is inaugurated as Russia’s president, pledging to an audience in a vast Kremlin hall that he will bolster civil rights and push the economic development transforming the country.

2013: The Dow Jones industrial average closes above 15,000 for the first time, another milestone in the market’s epic assent of 2013.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Robert Browning, English poet (1812-1899); Johannes Brahms, German composer (1833-1897); Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russian composer (1840-1893); Rabindranath Tagore, Indian poet, Nobel laureate (1861-1941); Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslav president (1892-1980); Eva Peron, Argentine popular leader (1919-1952); Justin Hinds, ska vocalist known for Carry Go Bring Come (1942-2005)

— AP/Jamaica Observer