Today is the 196th day of 2021. There are 169 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2011: Rupert Murdoch accepts the resignations of The Wall Street Journal’s publisher and the chief of his British operations, as the once-defiant media mogul struggles to control an escalating phone-hacking scandal, offering apologies to the public and the family of a murdered schoolgirl.

OTHER EVENTS

1099: Three years after the First Crusade set out, the Christian army storms Jerusalem and puts its Muslim inhabitants to the sword.

1685: James Scott, duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of King Charles II and claimant to the throne, is beheaded in England for his part in the rebellion to overthrow King James II.

1789: France’s King Louis XVI is awakened and told that his authority has collapsed with the fall of the Bastille.

1801: France and papacy sign agreement saying French clergymen are to be appointed by the Government and merely confirmed by the pope.

1893: The Matabele, Bantu-speaking people of south-western Zimbabwe, stage uprising against rule of British South Africa Company. They are defeated and administered by the company in separate districts.

1909: Mohammed Ali, shah of Persia, is deposed in favour of 12-year-old Sultan Ahmad Shah.

1945: Italy declares war on Japan, its former Axis partner in World War II.

1948: UN Security Council orders truce in Palestine.

1958: United States dispatches troops to Lebanon at request of President Chamoun; South Africa resumes full membership in United Nations.

1965: US Mariner IV spacecraft sends to Earth first close-up photographs of planet Mars.

1974: Officers in Cyprus favouring unification with Greece oust Archbishop Makarios from presidency. The coup leads to a Turkish military intervention.

1975: United States’s Apollo and Soviet Union’s Soyuz spacecraft blast into orbit for rendezvous in space.

1987: Taiwan ends 38 years of martial law to pave the way for multiparty elections.

1990: Tens of thousands of people march to Kremlin walls to protest Communist Party control of Soviet Government, army and KGB.

1997: Fashion designer Gianni Versace is shot to death outside his Miami Beach mansion by Andrew Cunanan, who kills himself a few days later.

1998: Nigeria’s military Government orders the immediate release of at least 400 people imprisoned under the late military ruler, General Sani Abacha.

1999: China declares that it has invented its own neutron bomb, making an unprecedented disclosure about its nuclear arsenal to counter and reject US accusations of atomic spying.

2001: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina leaves her post after five years in office, longer than any other Bangladeshi leader.

2005: Investigators probing the United Nations oil-for-food programme say they have found evidence of “gross mismanagement” and possible corruption by the United Nations agency that oversaw compensation for victims of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

2008: Protesters storm past barricades near the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, during a rally marking the 55th birthday of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

2009: Israeli soldiers who fought in the previous winter’s Gaza War say the military used Palestinians as human shields, improperly fired incendiary white phosphorous shells over civilian areas, and used overwhelming firepower that caused needless deaths and destruction.

2012: Syria’s 16-month bloodbath crosses an important symbolic threshold as the International Red Cross formally declares the conflict a civil war, a status with implications for war crimes prosecutions.

2013: Human rights lawyers ask Nigeria’s Federal High Court to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan’s leader Omar al-Bashir, who is accused of genocide and war crimes, but he receives a warm welcome when he arrives in Nigeria for an African Union health summit.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmes van Rijn), Dutch artist (1606-1669); Marie Tempest, English actress (1864-1942); Walter Benjamin, German literary critic (1892-1940); Iris Murdoch, British writer (1919-1999); Jacques Derrida, French philosopher (1930-2004); Linda Ronstadt, US singer (1946- ); Forest Whitaker, US actor/director (1961- ); Gregory “Cool Ruler” Isaacs, regaae singer and songwriter (1951-2010)

— AP/Jamaica Observer