Today is the 321st day of 2021. There are 44 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

1993: The US House of Representatives approves the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico.

OTHER EVENTS

1534: British Parliament passes the Act of Supremacy, which declares King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.

1558: Elizabeth I becomes Queen of England after the death of Mary I.

1604: Sir Walter Raleigh is tried for treason and is imprisoned in England.

1734: Publisher of the New York Weekly Journal , John Peter Zenger, is arrested for libel. He is later acquitted, a decision regarded as a landmark for freedom of expression.

1800: US Congress holds its first session in Washington in the partially completed Capitol building.

1831: Venezuela, Ecuador and New Granada dissolve the Union of Colombia; New Granada becomes an independent state.

1869: Suez Canal opens in Egypt, linking Mediterranean and Red Seas.

1937: Lord Halifax visits Adolf Hitler, attempting a peaceful settlement of the majority German Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. This marks the start of Britain’s policy of appeasement.

1943: The Soviet Union’s Red Army starts the first withdrawal of the Summer offensive in Kiev, where several sections were abandoned in the face of Nazi counter-attacks.

1954: General Gamal Abdel Nasser becomes head of State in Egypt.

1964: Britain says it will ban arms exports to South Africa.

1969: The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the United States and Russia begin in Helsinki, Finland.

1971: Vemij Thanon Kittikachorn seizes power in Thailand, abolishes Parliament, dismisses Cabinet and suspends nation’s constitution.

1972: Former Argentine dictator Juan D Peron returns to his homeland after 17 years of exile.

1973: US President Richard Nixon tells an Associated Press managing editors meeting in Florida that, “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

1977: Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat formally accepts invitation to visit Israel, ignoring uproar among Arab nations and in his own Government.

1988: Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party scores solid victory in parliamentary elections.

1992: Italian police arrest 75 people in the largest Mafia crackdown since 1984.

1993: South African leaders endorse a new constitution to end apartheid.

1999: The United Nations urges Rwanda to cooperate with an international tribunal after the release of genocide suspect Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, a top Hutu official, on procedural grounds.

2005: Rebels burning tires and sporadic explosions block thousands of Sri Lankans from voting in a tight election for a new president to shape peace efforts in the country bloodied by civil war and devastated by the 2004 tsunami.

2008: Courts in military-ruled Myanmar sentence at least seven democracy activists to prison, continuing a crackdown that saw about 70 people jailed the previous week.

2009: US President Barack Obama, with China’s leader at his side, lifts his sights for a broad accord at next month’s climate conference that he says will lead to immediate action and “rally the world” toward a solution on global warming.

2010: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah steps down as head of the country’s National Guard and transfers the influential position to his son, an apparent sign that the elderly monarch is beginning to lessen some of his duties.

2011: Israel has identified eastern Africa as an important strategic interest and is stepping up ties with nations in the region in a joint effort to control the spread of Islamic extremists.

2012: A speeding train crashes into a bus carrying Egyptian children to their kindergarten in central Egypt, killing at least 49 and prompting a wave of anger against the Government in Cairo. Israel destroys the headquarters of Hamas’s prime minister and blasts a sprawling network of smuggling tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip, broadening a blistering four-day-old offensive against the Islamic militant group. A speeding train crashes into a bus carrying Egyptian children to their kindergarten, killing 48 children and three adults.

2013: Residents of the Libyan capital launch a general strike and hold protests demanding the city’s myriad of powerful militias be disbanded after violence in which nearly 50 people were killed.

2016: US President-elect Donald Trump, at Trump Tower in New York, holds his first meeting with a world leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and receives advice from former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

TODAY BIRTHDAYS

Rock Hudson, US actor (1925-1985); Martin Scorsese, US film director (1942- ); Cyril Ramaphosa, African National Congress secretary-general and head of the Constitutional Assembly (1952- ); Danny DeVito, US actor (1944- ); Lorne Michaels, US writer/producer (1944- ); Rachel McAdams, Canadian actress (1978- ); Winthrop Graham, Jamaican athlete (1965- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer