Today is the 243rd day of 2021. There are 122 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1971: Cuba terminates the airlift that had brought 246,000 Cuban refugees from Havana to Florida since December 1965.

OTHER EVENTS

1290: Jews are exiled from England by proclamation of King Edward I.

1704: Forces of Russia’s Czar Peter the Great take Narva in Russia.

1876: Turkey’s Sultan Murad V is deposed on plea of insanity and is succeeded by Abdul Hamid II.

1886: An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.3 devastates Charleston, South Carolina, killing at least 60 people, according to the US Geological Survey.

1888: Mary Ann Nicholls is found murdered in London’s East End. She is the first victim of Jack the Ripper.

1900: British forces under Frederick Roberts occupy Johannesburg, South Africa.

1918: Bolshevik troops attack British Embassy in Petrograd, Russia.

1922: Czech-Serb-Croat Alliance is signed at Marienbad.

1923: Italy starts a brief occupation of the Greek island of Corfu after the murder of a boundary delegation.

1935: US President Franklin D Roosevelt signs an Act prohibiting the export of US arms to belligerents.

1939: The first issue of Marvel Comics, featuring the Human Torch, is published by Timely Publications in New York.

1942: German General Rommel renews offensive against British at Alam Halfa in North Africa in World War II, but is driven back to original lines.

1947: The US Investigating Committee recommends that Great Britain give up control of Palestine.

1954: Hurricane Carol hits the north-eastern Atlantic states; Connecticut, Rhode Island and part of Massachusetts bear the brunt of the storm which results in some 70 deaths.

1957: Malaysia gains Independence as Federation of Malaya.

1962: Trinidad and Tobago becomes an independent nation within British Commonwealth.

1965: The US House of Representatives joins the Senate in voting to establish the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

1969: Boxer Rocky Marciano dies in a light airplane crash in Iowa, a day before his 46th birthday.

1972: American swimmer Mark Spitz wins his fourth and fifth gold medals in the 100-metre butterfly and 800-metre freestyle relay respectively at the Munich Summer Olympics; Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut wins gold medals in floor exercise and the balance beam.

1977: Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith’s party wins the election and gains all 50 white seats in Parliament. The vote gives Smith a mandate to negotiate with black leaders on greater political representation for the country’s six million blacks.

1980: Polish labour leaders sign agreements with Communist Government establishing for the first time in a Soviet-bloc nation the rights to strike and to establish free trade unions. The agreement signed in Gdansk (guh-DANSK’) ends a 17-day-old strike.

1982: El Salvador Defences Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia Merino discloses that the armed forces have suffered 3,657 casualties in a year; bringing the number of people killed by rightists during the three-year civil war to more than 35,000.

1986: Some 82 people are killed when an Aeromexico jetliner and a small private plane collide over Cerritos, California. The Soviet passenger ship Admiral Nakhimov collides with a merchant vessel in the Black Sea, causing both to sink; up to 448 people reportedly died. Moscow’s secret police hold US news correspondent Nicholas Daniloff on spying allegations. His wife calls it a frame-up.

1987: The Michael Jackson album Bad is released by Epic Records. Government and Opposition officials in South Korea agree on revising constitution to clear way for direct presidential elections and other reforms.

1990: After Armenian Republic’s Parliament declares a state of emergency, 250 militant nationalists give up their weapons.

1991: Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan become the ninth and tenth Soviet republics to declare independence.

1992: White separatist Randy Weaver surrenders to authorities in Naples, Idaho, ending an 11-day siege by federal agents that had claimed the lives of Weaver’s wife, son, and a deputy US marshal. (Weaver was acquitted of murder and all other charges in connection with the confrontation; he was convicted of failing to appear for trial on firearms charges and was sentenced to 18 months in prison but given credit for 14 months he’d already served.)

1994: Irish Republican Army declares an open-ended ceasefire in its 24-year campaign against British rule of Northern Ireland. Russia officially ends its military presence in the former East Germany and the Baltics after half a century.

1995: A bomb-laden car explodes in a crowded square outside Algeria’s national police headquarters, killing 10 and injuring 15.

1996: Iraq captures Irbil in northern Iraq, a key city inside the Kurdish “safe haven” protected by US-led forces. It is Saddam Hussein’s largest military action since the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

1997: Prince Charles brings Princess Diana home for the last time, escorting the body of his former wife to a Britain that is shocked, grief-stricken and angered by her death in a Paris traffic accident earlier that day. Typhoon Rex veers away from Japan’s main island of Honshu, but the record rainfall it spawned forces thousands to flee their homes. Flooding and landslides caused by the rains kill 14 people and injure 45.

1998: North Korea launches a new, more powerful long-range ballistic missile that crosses over Japan’s main island and crashes into the Pacific Ocean. The test draws strong protests from Japan and the United States.

2002: A Russian Mi-24 assault helicopter is shot down by a missile in Chechnya. Both of the gunship’s pilots are killed. Chechen rebels claim responsibility.

2004: Militants in Iraq kill 12 Nepalese contract workers in a gruesome video discovered on an Islamic website, showing one of them beheaded and the 11 others shot in a methodical series of execution-style slayings.

2005: Panicked by rumours of a suicide bomber, thousands of Shiite pilgrims break into a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad during a religious procession, crushing one another or plunging into the Tigris river. Nearly 1,000 die, mostly women and children.

2006: Police in Norway recover the Edvard Munch masterpieces The Scream and Madonna, two years after masked gunmen grabbed the national art treasures in front of stunned visitors at an Oslo museum.

2007: The 25th anniversary of “Elk Cloner”, regarded as the first virus to hit personal computers worldwide.

2008: Practitioners of the ancient Greek religion gather among the ruined temples at the Acropolis, praying to Athena to stop the removal of sculptures and pieces of the temples to museums. Participants claim it is the first such gathering since the religion was abolished late in the fourth century. With Hurricane Gustav approaching New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin (NAY’-gin) pleads with the last of its residents to get out, imposes a dusk-to-dawn curfew on those who were staying, and warns looters they will be sent directly to prison.

2013: Short of support at home and allies abroad, US President Barack Obama steps back from a missile strike against Syria and instead asks Congress to support a strike against President Bashar Assad’s regime for suspected use of chemical weapons. British television interviewer David Frost, 74, dies aboard a cruise ship bound for the Mediterranean.

2017: Rescuers begin a block-by-block search of tens of thousands of Houston homes, looking for anyone who might have been left behind in the flood water from Hurricane Harvey. The Donald Trump Administration orders Russia to close its consulate in San Francisco and offices in Washington and New York, intensifying tensions between Washington and Moscow; Russia was given 48 hours to comply. Iraq’s prime minister says the northern town of Tal Afar had been “fully liberated” from the Islamic State group after a nearly two-week operation. The scope of the fake accounts scandal at Wells Fargo expands, with the bank now saying 3.5 million accounts may have been opened without customers’ permission.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Theophile Gautier, French author (1811-1872); Maria Montessori, Italian doctor and educator (1870-1952); William Saroyan, US writer (1908-1981); Buddy Hackett, US actor/comedian (1924-2003); Richard Gere, US actor (1949- )

— AP