Today is the 363rd day of 2021. There are two days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

2001: A series of firework explosions spark a massive fire in downtown Lima, Peru, killing 291 people. The blaze, fuelled by dozens of sidewalk stands selling illegal fireworks, quickly spreads throughout the crowded commercial district.

Other Events

1170: Archbishop Thomas Becket is slain at the altar in Cathedral of Canterbury, England.

1721: French occupy Mauritius and rename it Ile de France.

1845: Texas is admitted as the 28th state.

1890: US troops massacre 200 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

1901: Commonwealth of Australia is inaugurated after being constituted by an Act of the Imperial Parliament the previous year.

1916: James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is first published in book form in New York after being serialised in London.

1921: United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan sign Washington treaty to limit naval armaments.

1940: German bombers inflict greatest damage on London since Great Fire of 1666.

1957: Singers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme are married in Las Vegas (the marriage lasts until Gorme’s death in 2013).

1965: Independence is announced for Bechuanaland, which becomes Botswana.

1967: Hyundai Motor Company is founded in Seoul, South Korea.

1972: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, crashes into the Florida Everglades near Miami International Airport, killing 101 of the 176 people aboard.

1975: A bomb explodes in the main terminal of New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing 11 people (It has never been determined who was responsible).

1986: Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dies in Sussex, England, at age 92.

1990: Johan Kraag is sworn in as president of Suriname after bloodless military coup on December 24 ousts former president.

1996: Guatemalan Government and guerrilla leaders sign an accord ending 36 years of civil conflict, bringing Central America’s last and longest civil war to an official close.

1998: In Yemen, troops surround and fire on a band of Islamic extremists holding 16 tourists hostage, ending a kidnapping that leaves six of the hostages dead.

2004: Paramedics spray Indian beaches with bleach and vaccinate tsunami survivors, as Indonesian authorities bulldoze mass graves for thousands of corpses lining the streets and lawns of Banda Aceh.

2006: Turkish Cypriots begin dismantling a bridge that blocked plans to relink war-divided Nicosia’s commercial centre and was seen as the strongest symbol of the island’s partition. The bridge is gone 11 days later, but no breakthrough in reunification talks is evident.

2008: An estimated 47 million people visited New York City in 2008, beating the previous year by one million visitors, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announces.

2009: North Korea acknowledges it has detained an American for illegally entering the reclusive country, news welcomed by relatives of a missionary who feared they would never hear from him again after he sneaked across the border.

2010: Police in Denmark and Sweden say they thwarted a terrorist attack possibly hours before it was to begin, arresting five men they say planned to shoot as many people as possible in a Copenhagen building housing the newsroom of a paper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

2012: Shocked Indians mourn the death of a woman who had been gang-raped and beaten on a bus in New Delhi nearly two weeks earlier; six suspects are charged with murder. (Four are later sentenced to death; one dies in prison; the sixth, a juvenile at the time of the attack, was sentenced to a maximum of three years in a reform home.) Russia’s foreign minister says that Syrian President Bashar Assad has no intention of stepping down and it would be impossible to try to persuade him otherwise. Maine’s same-sex marriage law goes into effect.

2013: Saudi Arabia pledges $3 billion to Lebanon to help strengthen the country’s armed forces and purchase weapons from France as the troops struggle to contain a rising tide of violence linked to neighbouring Syria’s civil war.

2016: The United States strikes back at Russia for hacking the US presidential campaign with a sweeping set of punishments targeting Russia’s spy agencies and diplomats; Moscow calls the Barack Obama Administration in the US “losers” and threatens retaliation. Tennis star Serena Williams announces her engagement to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian — on Reddit. (The couple marries on November 16, 2017.)

Today’s Birthdays

Jeanne d’Etoiles, Marquise de Pompadour, mistress of France’s King Louis XV (1721-1764); Pablo Casals, Spanish cellist (1876-1973); Viveca Lindfors, Swedish-born actress (1920-1995); Mary Tyler Moore, US actress (1937-2017); Gelsey Kirkland, US ballet dancer (1952- ); Ted Danson, US actor (1947- ); Jude Law, British actor (1972- )

— AP