Today is the 252nd day of 2021. There are 113 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1991: Saudi Arabia releases 400 Iraqi citizens held in the kingdom in exchange for a Saudi prisoner of war and a Saudi woman held in Iraq.

OTHER EVENTS

1585: Pope Sixtus V excommunicates Henry of Navarre of France.

1776: Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia changes the name “United Colonies” to “United States”.

1817 Alexander Twilight, probably first African American to graduate from a US college, receives BA degree at Middlebury College

1835: “September Laws” in France severely censor press and suppress radical movement.

1839: English scientist and astronomer John Herschel takes first glass plate photograph.

1850: California is admitted as the 31st state of the Union.

1861: Nurse Sally Tompkins is officially commissioned as an officer (and its only woman officer) by the Confederate US Army.

1894: Sun Yat-sen heads his first attempt at revolution in China. The revolt does not succeed until 1911.

1908: Russia takes part of Poland.

1913: Russian pilot Pyotr Nesterov becomes the first pilot to fly a loop, doing so in his Nieuport IV monoplane; he is arrested for ten days for endangering government property.

1914: First fully mechanised unit in the British Army is created — the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade (WWI).

1915: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History forms in Chicago by Carter G Woodson and others — now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

1926: National Broadcasting Company created by Radio Corporation of America.

1948: Korean People’s Democratic Republic is formed in North Korea, claiming authority over entire country.

1954:Earthquake strikes Orleansville, Algeria: 1,400 killed.

1957: US President Dwight D Eisenhower signs into law the first Civil Rights Bill to pass the US Congress since the Civil War.

1971: Prisoners seize control of the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, New York, beginning a siege that claims 43 lives.

1974: US President Gerald Ford is heavily criticised in Congress over his pardoning of former President Richard Nixon.

1976: Marxist revolutionary Mao Zedong dies. He had emerged as the undisputed Chinese Communist Party leader following the Long March (1934–35) and dominated China in the period after the communist takeover in 1949.

1979: British film The Bitch , starring Joan Collins, a sequel to The Stud, both based on novels by her sister Jackie Collins, premieres in UK.

1985: Race riot begins in Birmingham, England.

1987: Gary Hart admits on Nightline to cheating on his wife.

1990: American tennis player Pete Sampras defeats Andre Agassi at the US Open to capture his first of 14 Grand Slam singles titles. George H W Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev meet in Helsinki & urge Iraq to leave Kuwait.

1992: In a bid to defuse tensions with UN forces, the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s radical communist movement that ruled the country from 1975 to 1979, invites the peacekeeping chief to its secluded base.

1994: The United States agrees to accept at least 20,000 Cuban immigrants a year in return for Cuba’s promise to halt people from boarding rafts and trying to sail to America.

1995: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) warplanes return to the skies over Bosnia to attack repaired Serb air defences, and acknowledge that the attacks probably killed some civilians.

1996: Typhoon Sally hits coastal areas of Guangdong, China’s most developed province, killing more than 130 people and injuring thousands.

1998: Independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr submits a report to the US Congress on possible impeachable offences by US President Bill Clinton.

1999: 16th MTV Video Music Awards features Lauryn Hill and Will Smith as winners.

2000: Venus Williams wins her first US title — US Open Women’s; beats fellow American Lindsay Davenport 6-4, 7-5. Gunmen wound three people in a beauty salon in Kashmir, 24 hours after warning women to wear veils in public or be shot. The group said to be behind the warning denies it had issued any such threat.

2001: Band of Brothers , based on book by Stephen E Ambrose, created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, premieres — then most expensive miniseries ever made at that time. Ahmad Shah Massoud, Afghan political and military leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan at 48.

2003: The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Boston, Massachusetts, and lawyers representing 552 alleged victims of sexual abuse by priests announce a legal settlement worth up to US$85 million.

2005: President Hosni Mubarak is officially declared the victor of Egypt’s first contested presidential elections — but the vote is marred by a lower than expected turnout of 23 per cent.

2006: Tens of thousands of red-clad protesters throng Taiwan’s capital, demanding that President Chen Shui-bian resign over a series of alleged corruption scandals involving his family and inner circle.

2007: Liberia ships its first consignment of diamonds since the lifting of UN sanctions imposed in 2001 that blocked the export of so-called blood diamonds used to fuel years of war.

2008: Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of assassinated former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, takes office as Pakistan’s president.

2009: The first photographs of the self-proclaimed September 11 mastermind at Guantanamo Bay have cropped up on the Internet, and experts say the images of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are being used by terrorist groups to inspire attacks against the United States.

2010: Iran says it will free Sarah Shourd, one of three American hikers jailed for more than 13 months, as an act of clemency to mark the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

2013: US President Barack Obama calls a Russian-backed plan for Syria to turn over all of its chemical weapons for destruction a “potentially positive development” that could head off threatened US air strikes.

2015: Elizabeth II becomes the longest-reigning monarch in British history, surpassing Victoria’s record reign of 63 years and 216 days.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Otis Redding, US soul singer/songwriter (1941-1967); Hugh Grant, British actor (1960- ); Adam Sandler, US actor (1966- ); Michelle Williams, US actress (1980- ); Arnold Bertram, Jamaican historian and former government minister (1944- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer