Today is the 152nd day of 2021. There are 213 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2002: Queen Elizabeth II opens Buckingham Palace to 12,000 guests for a four-day national party in celebration of her 50 years on the throne.

OTHER EVENTS

1479: The University of Copenhagen, Denmark, is founded.

1524: The yearlong anti-aristocratic Peasants’ War breaks out in southern Germany.

1562: Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I signs a truce with the Sultan of Turkey, Suleyman I, agreeing to pay tribute for Austria’s share of Hungary.

1671: Turks declare war on Poland, leading to the Polish surrender of the Ukraine.

1813: The US Navy gains its motto as the mortally wounded commander of the frigate Chesapeake, Captain James Lawrence, said, “Don’t give up the ship” during a losing battle with a British frigate.

1857: Britain’s Royal Navy destroys Chinese fleet in China Sea in the Second Opium War.

1869: New Spanish Constitution is promulgated, continuing the monarchy but allowing universal male suffrage and freedom of religion.

1936: After a war of conquest, Ethiopia is annexed by Benito Mussolini’s Italy.

1943: A civilian flight from Lisbon to London is shot down by the Germans during World War II, killing all aboard, including actor Leslie Howard.

1945: Sukarno, leader of the Indonesian independence movement, gives a speech defining the Pantjasila, or Five Principles of Indonesian nationhood, for the first time.

1958: Charles de Gaulle becomes premier of France.

1967: The Beatles release their landmark album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

1968: Author-lecturer Helen Keller, who earned a college degree despite being blind and deaf most of her life, dies in Westport, Connecticut.

1973: The Greek military regime abolishes the monarchy.

1976: Syrian forces invade Lebanon and capture Christian and Muslim positions, advancing on Beirut in attempt to halt 14-month civil war.

1980: CNN, the Cable News Network, makes its debut in the United States.

1987: Lebanon’s Prime Minister Rashid Karami is killed when a time bomb planted in an attache case explodes in his lap aboard a helicopter.

1990: US President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev sign a pact to cut nuclear missiles and chemical weapons stockpiles.

1992: Ecologists, diplomats, and native people from around the world gather in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the 12-day Earth Summit.

1994: South Africa rejoins the British Commonwealth, 33 years after leaving over apartheid.

1996: Russia announces that the ruble, whose value had been strictly controlled by the Kremlin since the 1920s, will trade freely.

1997: Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, is fatally burned in a fire set off by her 12-year-old grandson in her Yonkers, New York, apartment.

1998: Fleeing fierce fighting and persecution by Serbs in Kosovo, 2,000 ethnic Albanian refugees reach Albania.

1999: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) jets attacking Kosovo fire into neighbouring Albania, hitting government bunkers, injuring a refugee, and narrowly missing a group of foreign journalists.

2000: A United Nations tribunal for Rwanda’s 1994 genocide sentences a Belgian-born radio journalist to 12 years in prison for broadcasts that encouraged the slaughter.

2001: Nepal’s crown prince, Dipendra, shoots and kills his parents, King Birendra and Queen Aiswarya, and six other royal family members before shooting himself.

2003: Engineers close most of the sluice gates of the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River in the central province of Hubei, thereby beginning the process of filling a reservoir behind the dam.

2004: Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, a Sunni Muslim critic of the occupation, is named as Iraq’s new president. Al-Yawer is the choice of the US-picked Iraqi Governing Council, which dissolved itself immediately so that the new Government can start work even before it takes power from the American-led coalition at the end of the month.

2005: Gunmen kill a French diplomat as he drives through Haiti’s capital, amid growing insecurity in the hemisphere’s poorest country.

2006: The US Army Corps of Engineers takes responsibility for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, saying the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data.

2007: Lebanese tanks and armoured vehicles battle their way into the outer neighbourhoods of a Palestinian refugee camp in some of the heaviest fighting since violence broke out between the military and al-Qaeda-inspired militants nearly two weeks ago.

2008: Australia pulls its combat soldiers from Iraq, fulfilling an election promise that helped sweep Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to power in November.

2009: An Air France jet carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris runs into a towering wall of thunderstorms and disappears over the Atlantic Ocean.

2010: Al-Qaeda announces that its No 3 official, Mustafa al-Yazid, has been killed along with members of his family — perhaps one of the most severe blows to the terror movement since the US campaign against al-Qaeda began. A US official said al-Yazid is believed to have died in a US missile strike.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857); John Masefield, English poet (1878-1967); Brigham Young, US Mormon leader (1801-1877); Marilyn Monroe, US actress (1926-1962); Colleen McCullough, Australian author (1937-2015); Morgan Freeman, US actor (1937- ); Jason Donovan, US actor (1968- ); Alanis Morissette, Canadian singer (1974- ); Heidi Klum, model and TV host (1973- ); Jonathan Pryce, Welsh actor (1947- )

— AP