Today is the 281st day of 2021. There are 84 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1871: The Great Chicago Fire starts, supposedly when a cow kicks over a lantern in a barn. Most of the city is razed.

OTHER EVENTS

1858: The “Arrow Incident”, in which a ship flying the British flag is boarded by Chinese, provokes the second Anglo-Chinese War.

1892: Sergei Rachmaninoff first publicly performs his piano Prelude in C-sharp Minor in Moscow.

1912: Montenegro declares war on Turkey. It is joined 10 days later by its neighbours in the First Balkan War.

1934: Bruno Hauptmann is indicted for the murder of famed American aviator Charles A Lindbergh’s kidnapped infant son.

1939: Germany incorporates western Poland into Third Reich in World War II.

1945: US President Harry Truman announces the secret of the atomic bomb would be shared only with Britain and Canada.

1954: Communist Vietnamese forces occupy Hanoi.

1962: Uganda becomes an independent nation within the British Commonwealth.

1970: US President Richard Nixon proposes a ceasefire in Indochina. The Communist representatives respond by denouncing the proposal.

1975: Heavy fighting in Beirut and northern Lebanon kills at least 25 people and shatters the latest truce between warring Christians and Muslims.

1984: China announces plan to make primary school education compulsory by 1990 and eradicate adult illiteracy by 1995.

1985: The hijackers of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro kill American passenger Leon Klinghoffer, dumping his body and wheelchair overboard.

1990: Israeli police open fire on stone-throwing Palestinian protesters on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, killing at least 19 Arabs and wounding more than 100 others.

1991: A new truce in Yugoslavia takes effect but any optimism about an end to the fighting in the breakaway republic of Croatia is tempered by the fact that it was the fourth negotiated cease-fire in three weeks.

1992: A Scottish study finds that the French-made abortion pill RU-486 could also be used as a “morning-after” contraceptive by women who had had unprotected intercourse.

1993: South African President F W de Klerk orders an army raid on an alleged terrorist group and five black youths are killed, as controversy erupts because the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize jointly to de Klerk and Nelson Mandela.

1994: US President Bill Clinton sends 4,000 US troops and American warships to the Gulf to counter Iraqi deployment near Kuwaiti border.

1995: Guatemalan Defence Minister General Mario Enriquez Morales resigns amid controversy over an attack by soldiers that left 11 Indian peasants dead and 17 injured in Alta Verapaz province.

1996: Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat makes his first public visit to Israel and pledges to keep his police from firing again on Israeli soldiers.

1997: Scientists report the Pathfinder probe’s exploration of Mars has yielded evidence that the planet was once hospitable to life.

2001: An SAS airliner taking off for Denmark from Milan, Italy, hits a private jet and explodes, killing all 114 people on both planes and four people on the ground.

2002: Pakistan conducts tests of a medium-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. India responds with its own missile test.

2003: The ethnic Hutu rebel group Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) signs a peace agreement with the Burundian Government designed to end fighting in the country’s decade-long civil war.

2005: A powerful 7.6-magnitude earthquake in South Asia reduces villages to rubble and triggers landslides. More than 80,000 people are killed and over three million people are left homeless.

2006: Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters in Hungary call for the ouster of the Socialist prime minister because of his admission on a leaked tape that he had lied to the country about the economy.

2007: UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown says Britain will cut its troops in Iraq to 2,500, starting in the spring.

2008: Maldivian islanders vote in the first democratic presidential election in their nation’s history.

2010: The Nobel committee awards its Peace Prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday, lending encouragement to China’s dissident community and sending a rebuke to the authoritarian government, which sharply condemns the award.

2011: President Ali Abdullah Saleh makes vague comments that he is willing to leave power in his first major speech since returning to Yemen, but he gives no concrete plan for the future of the country.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

Allison Cockburn, Scottish poet (1713-1794); Juan Peron, Argentine president (1895-1974); Paul Hogan, Australian comedian-actor (1939- ); Chevy Chase, US actor/comedian (1943- ); Sigourney Weaver, US actress (1949- )

— AP