Today is the 194th day of 2021. There are 171 days left in the year. 

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1995: A jury in Panama declares former President Manuel Antonio Noriega innocent of the murders of nine army officers who participated in a 1989 coup attempt against him. 

OTHER EVENTS

1558: Flemish army under Duke of Egmont, in service of Spain’s King Philip II and aided by English fleet, defeats French at Gavelines.

1648: French take Tortosa in Italy.

1787: The Northwest Ordinance is enacted by US Congress outlining how the territory north of the Ohio River will be governed and evolve into states.

1793: A radical leader of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat, is murdered in his bath by patriot Charlotte Corday at the height of his power and influence. A journalist, Marat’s writings helped bring about the Reign of Terror soon after his death.

1822: Greeks defeat Turks at Thermopylae in Greece.

1854: Abbas I, viceroy of Egypt under the Ottomans who opposed Western-inspired reforms, is strangled by two of his servants and succeeded by Mohammed Said.

1863: Rioting against US Civil War military conscription breaks out in New York City and about 1,000 people are killed in three days of disorder.

1878: Russo-Turkish War ends, resulting in gradual expansion of Russian power in Ottoman territory.

1911: Britain and Japan renew their alliance for four years.

1971: Firing squads in Morocco execute 10 army officers accused of trying to overthrow King Hassan.

1986: Two Muslims are burned alive by Hindus at main government hospital in India’s Gujarat state on fifth day of Hindu-Muslim riots.

1987: Two Iranian gunboats attack French container ship in the Gulf off Saudi Arabia, and Iraq says its warplanes make retaliatory raids.

1990: Mayors of Moscow and Leningrad show solidarity with populist Boris Yeltsin by resigning from the Soviet Union’s Communist Party on last day of Party Congress.

1992: President George Bush announces that the United States will no longer produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium for weapons.

1993: Croat militiamen in Mostar embark on a new wave of ethnic cleansing, detaining hundreds of Muslim men and evicting women, children and the elderly from their homes.

1997: US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, recently told about her Jewish heritage, finds names of family members who were killed by Germans during Holocaust on wall of Prague synagogue.

1998: Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto resigns after his party is humiliated in parliamentary elections.

1999: In Peru, President Alberto Fujimori personally supervises the military operation to capture Oscar Ramirez Durand, the last leader still at large of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, one of Latin America’s most violent rebel movements. He is caught the next day.

2000: Ending a hostage stand-off that paralysed Fiji, coup leader George Speight frees the ousted prime minister and 17 others. His hand-picked nominee is named the country’s new president.

2001: Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf arrives in India for a landmark summit aimed at smoothing stormy relations between these two nuclear rivals.

2002: An attack by suspected Muslim militants kills 29 people in a slum in the Indian-controlled part of the Kashmir region long disputed by India and Pakistan.

2004: The Red Cross says it suspects that the United States is holding terror suspects secretly in locations across the world despite granting the organisation access to thousands of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere.

2005: Egypt steps up pressure for the return of five of its most precious antiquities from museums abroad, including the Rosetta Stone in London and the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin — bringing in UNESCO to mediate.

2006: South Korean businessman Tongsun Park, accused of being an Iraqi agent and trying to influence the United Nations’ oil-for-food programme, is found guilty of conspiracy.

2007: Argentina’s Supreme Court throws out a 1989 presidential pardon that absolved a former army general of alleged human rights abuses during Argentina’s dictatorship.

2008: An assault by militants on a US base close to the Pakistan border kills nine American soldiers and wounds 15 in the deadliest attack on US forces in Afghanistan in three years.

2009: US Government budget deficit hits milestone, tops US$1 trillion, intensifying fears about higher interest rates and inflation.

2010: Swiss authorities declare Oscar-winning film director Roman Polanski a free man — no longer confined to house arrest in his Alpine villa and free to return to France, rejecting a US request for his extradition because of a 32-year-old sex conviction.

2011: Rupert Murdoch’s dream of controlling a British broadcasting behemoth evaporates after he withdraws his bid for BSkyB — the latest, biggest casualty of what Prime Minister David Cameron called the hacking “firestorm” sweeping through British politics, media and police.

2012: Islamic insurgents based in north-east Nigeria claim responsibility for weekend raids on Christian villages in Plateau state that left at least 58 people dead.

2013: Typhoon Soulik kills at least nine people and affects more than 160 million in East China and Taiwan.

2014: Joint efforts by US Secretary of State John Kerry and three other Western foreign ministers fail to advance faltering nuclear talks with Iran with a target date for a deal only a week away. 

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

John Dee, English alchemist and mathematician (1527–1608); Gustav Freytag, German novelist (1816-1895); Souphanouvong, Laotian communist leader (1909–1995); Wole Soyinka, Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate (1934– ); Harrison Ford, US actor (1942–); Erno Rubik, Hungarian inventor of Rubik’s Cube (1944–); Cheech Marin, actor/comedian (1946– )

— AP