Today is the 242nd day of 2021. There are 123 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1983: Guion S Bluford Jr becomes the first black American astronaut to travel in space, blasting off aboard the Challenger.

OTHER EVENTS

30 BC: Cleopatra of Egypt commits suicide by letting an asp bite her.

1862: Confederate forces won victories against the Union at the Second Battle of Bull Run in Manassas, Virginia, and the Battle of Richmond in Kentucky.

1928: Independence of India League is formed in India.

1941: During World War II, German forces approaching Leningrad cut off the remaining rail line out of the city.

1944: Russian forces enter Bucharest, Romania, in World War II.

1945: Britain re-establishes its governance of Hong Kong, ending three years and seven months of Japanese occupation. US General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Japan to set up Allied occupation headquarters.

1963: The “Hot Line” communications link between Washington and Moscow went into operation.

1967: Thurgood Marshall becomes the first black American appointed to the US Supreme Court.

1979: Hurricane David devastates island nation of Dominica as it rampages through the Caribbean and US eastern seaboard, claiming 1,000 lives.

1984: The space shuttle Discovery was launched on its inaugural flight.

1986: Soviet authorities arrested Nicholas Daniloff, a correspondent for US News and World Report, as a spy a week after American officials arrested Gennadiy Zakharov, a Soviet employee of the United Nations, on espionage charges in New York. (Both men were later released.)

1991: Azerbaijan declared its independence, joining the stampede of republics seeking to secede from the Soviet Union.

1997: Britain’s Princess Diana, her boyfriend Emad Mohammed al-Fayed, the Harrod’s heir, and driver Henri Paul die in a car crash in Paris after being chased by photographers.

2001: More than 430 refugees rescued from a sinking ferry, most of them Afghans, languish on a Norwegian cargo ship as Australia refuses them entry.

2005: A day after Hurricane Katrina hit, floods were covering 80 per cent of New Orleans, looting continued to spread, and rescuers in helicopters and boats picked up hundreds of stranded people.

2006: Israel rejects demands from visiting UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that it immediately lift its sea and air blockade of Lebanon and withdraw its forces once 5,000 international troops are deployed.

2007: In a serious breach of nuclear security, a B-52 bomber armed with six nuclear warheads flew cross-country unnoticed; the Air Force later punished 70 people.

2008: Gustav howls into Cuba’s Isla de Juventud as a monstrous Category four hurricane, while both Cubans and Americans scramble to flee the path of the storm, which has already killed 81 people.

2009: Japan’s Opposition sweeps to a historic victory in elections, crushing the ruling conservative party that has run the country for most of the post-war era and assuming the daunting task of pulling the economy out of its worst slump since World War II.

2010: An enormous drill begins preliminary work on carving a half-mile (nearly a kilometre) chimney through solid rock to free the 33 men trapped in a Chilean mine, their ordeal now having equalled the longest known survival in an underground disaster.

2011: Libyan rebels say they are closing in on Moammar Gadhafi and issue an ultimatum to regime loyalists in the fugitive dictator’s hometown of Sirte, his main remaining bastion: surrender this weekend or face an attack.

2013: Indonesia’s highest court upheld a death sentence for Lindsay Sandiford, a British woman convicted of smuggling US$2.5 million worth of cocaine into the resort island of Bali. Seamus Heaney, 74, who won the Nobel Prize for literature and gained a global reputation as Ireland’s greatest poet since William Butler Yates, died in Dublin.

2017: The former Hurricane Harvey completed a U-turn in the Gulf of Mexico and rolled ashore for the second time in six days, hitting south-western Louisiana as a tropical storm with heavy rains and winds of 45 miles an hour. Flood water began to recede in Houston, where thousands of homes were flooded. A federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked most of a new state law that would have let police officers ask people during routine stops whether they were in the country legally; the law also threatened sheriffs with jail time for not cooperating with federal immigration authorities. (The crackdown on “sanctuary cities” took effect the following March after a federal appeals court upheld the law.)

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

John Gunther, US journalist/author (1901-1970); Fred MacMurray, US actor (1908-1991); Cameron Diaz, US actress (1972- ); Lisa Ling, US TV personality (1973- ); Ben Jones, actor (1941- ); Andy Roddick, tennis player (1982- )

— AP