Today is the 230th day of 2021. There are 135 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1964: South Africa is banned from participating in the Olympic Games in Tokyo for refusing to renounce its apartheid policies.

OTHER EVENTS

1649: Turkey’s Sultan Ibrahim is deposed, assassinated and succeeded by Mohammed IV.

1812: Russian forces are defeated at Smolensk, which is occupied by the French under Napoleon.

1870: Western Australia is granted representative government.

1896: France annexes Madagascar.

1914: US President Woodrow Wilson proclaims American neutrality in World War I; Germany declares war on Russia.

1920: The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution is ratified, giving women the right to vote.

1968: More than 100 women and children are killed when a landslide sweeps two sightseeing buses into rain-swollen river on Honshu Island in Japan.

1986: Sudanese rebel group claims responsibility for shooting down Sudan Airways passenger plane in which all 60 people aboard were killed.

1989: In Colombia, leading presidential hopeful Luis Carlos Galan is assassinated outside Bogota, the Medellin drug cartel is suspected.

1994: A powerful earthquake rips through north-west Algeria, collapsing thousands of dwellings and killing at least 150 people.

1995: Flash floods in the Marrakesh region of Morocco kill at least 73 people.

1996: In Pakistan, gunmen fire on a group of Shiite worshippers in central Punjab province, killing 18 people and injuring 100.

1997: Typhoon Winnie begins a sweep through Asia, killing 28 in Taiwan, then hits China, causing at least US$2.6 billion in damage and killing as many as 56 people.

1998: Congolese rebels send President Laurent Kabila’s troops fleeing as they advance to within 200 kilometres (125 miles) of the capital, now deprived of electricity.

2000: Indigenous people belonging to a tribe believed to have been decimated 80 years before are located in the jungles of the Amazon state of Acre in Brazil.

2001: Wildfires burn 5,000 acres (2,000 hectares) in a drought-stricken Washington state. More than 93,000 acres were destroyed across the state’s arid east side in the past week.

2003: Fourteen European tourists kidnapped in late February and March by Algerian Islamic militants are freed in northern Mali.

2004: Prisoners clash with knives, sticks and rocks at a San Salvador jail, leaving at least 23 dead and two dozen injured.

2007: Two men hijack a Turkish passenger plane bound for Istanbul, holding several people hostage for more than four hours before surrendering, officials said.

2008: General Pervez Musharraf resigns as the president of Pakistan.

2009: A terminally ill Libyan man convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing moves closer to being allowed to die outside of his Scottish prison cell when a court agrees he can drop an appeal against his conviction.

2010: The US Central Intelligence Agency opens a counter-proliferation centre to combat the spread of dangerous weapons and technology, a move that comes as Iran is on the verge of fuelling up a new nuclear power plant.

2012: The death toll of a suspected al-Qaeda attack on a Yemeni intelligence headquarters rises to 20, in the worst such attack in a year.

2013: UN experts arrive in Damascus to begin their investigation into the purported use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.

2014: Iraqi and Kurdish forces recapture Iraq’s largest dam from Islamic militants following dozens of US air strikes in the extremists’ first major defeat since they swept across the country this summer.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Antonio Salieri, Italian composer (1750-1825); Meriweather Lewis, American explorer (1774-1809); Lord John Russell, English statesman (1792-1878); Shelley Winters, US actress (1920-2006); Roberto Clemente, Puerto Rican baseball player (1934-1972); Roman Polanski, Polish film director (1935- ); Robert Redford, US actor (1936- )

— AP