Today is the 239th day of 2024. There are 127 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

2020: An earthquake with a magnitude of 4.8 shakes Jamaica.

OTHER EVENTS

1071: Turkish Seljuks beat the Byzantine forces at the Battle of Manzikert (now Malazgirt, Turkey), gaining entry into Anatolia and opening the road to Europe.

1346: English archers defeat French knights at Battle of Crecy in northern France.

1541: Suleiman I, Sultan of Turkey, annexes Hungary.

1847: Liberia is proclaimed an independent republic.

1883: The volcano Krakatoa erupts on the island Krakatau, near Indonesia, creating tsunami waves that killed more than 36,000 people.

1896: Insurrection begins in the Philippines against the Spanish.

1915: German army captures Brest-Litovsk in Russia during World War I.

1920: The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing American women the right to vote, is declared in effect.

1934: Adolf Hitler demands that France turn over the Saar region to Germany.

1936: Treaty ends British occupation of Egypt, except Suez Canal zone, and Britain and Egypt form alliance for 20 years.

1937: Japan blockades Chinese shipping.

1942: German army reaches Stalingrad in Soviet Union during World War II.

1945: Japanese envoys board US battleship
Missouri to receive surrender instructions at the end of World War II.

1947: The UN Security Council passes a resolution for both the Dutch and Indonesians to adhere to a ceasefire order.

1957: The Soviet Union announces it has successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile.

1970: North Vietnam sends its chief negotiator back to Vietnam peace talks in Paris after 8 1/2-month boycott of negotiations.

1978: Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice is elected the 264th pope of the Roman Catholic Church, following the death of Paul VI. The new pontiff takes the name John Paul I.

1990: Number of US soldiers, airmen and sailors in the Gulf reaches 60,000.

1993: Egyptian-born Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and 14 others are charged in an attack on New York’s World Trade Center earlier in the year.

1997: Former South African President F W de Klerk resigns as the head of the National Party, which created the practice of apartheid, and leaves politics.

2003: Rwandan President Paul Kagame is the overwhelming winner of presidential elections. The election was the first since the 1994 genocide.

2005: A fire races through a crowded, run-down Paris apartment building housing African immigrants killing 17 people, mainly children trapped while they slept, and triggers angry calls for decent housing for the needy in the French capital.

2009: Edward “Ted” Kennedy dies at 77. The brother of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy, he was the US Senate’s dominant liberal and most skilful deal-maker.

2011: A car loaded with explosives crashes into the main United Nations building in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja and explodes, killing at least 18 people in one of the deadliest assaults on the international body in a decade. A radical Muslim sect claims responsibility for the blast.

2014: Israel and Gaza’s ruling Hamas agree to an open-ended ceasefire after seven weeks of fighting — an uneasy deal that halts the deadliest war the sides have fought in years.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Sir Robert Walpole, first prime minister of Britain (1676-1745); Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, French scientist (1743-1794); Guillame Apollinaire, French poet (1880-1918); Peggy Guggenheim, US art collector (1898-1979); Albert Sabin, Polish microbiologist, developed oral polio vaccine (1906-1993); Julio Cortazar, Argentine writer (1914-1984); Branford Marsalis, US jazz musician (1960- ); Macaulay Culkin, US actor (1980- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer