Today is the 344th day of 2021. There are 21 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1948: UN General Assembly in Paris unanimously adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Six members of the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia and South Africa abstain.

OTHER EVENTS

1906: US President Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first American to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for helping mediate an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

1936: King Edward VIII of Britain abdicates with the intention of marrying American divorcee Wallis Simpson. His brother, the Duke of York, becomes King George VI.

1950: UN Mideast peace mediator Ralph J Bunche is presented the Nobel Peace Prize, the first black American to receive the award.

1963: Zanzibar becomes independent within the Commonwealth.

1964: Dr Martin Luther King Jr receives the Nobel Peace Prize.

1973: Austria closes its transit centre for Jews leaving the Soviet Union.

1988: Chinese troops shoot into crowds of Tibetans demonstrating in Lhasa for human rights.

1993: African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela says he and President F W de Klerk are bound by the Nobel Peace Prize they accepted to spend the rest of their lives building a democratic, non-racial South Africa.

1996: South African President Nelson Mandela signs a constitution guaranteeing equal rights to all races.

2009: President Barack Obama accepts the Nobel Peace Prize, offering a striking defence of war at the same time as he makes an impassioned case for building a “just and lasting peace”.

2010: Veteran journalist and university lecturer John Maxwell passes on.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Ada King Lovelace, English mathematician and world’s first computer programmer (1815-1852); Cesar Franck, Belgian composer (1822-1890); Emily Dickinson, US poet (1830-1886); Mary Norton, English children’s author (1903-1992); Michael Manley, former Jamaican prime minister (1924-1997)

— AP/Jamiaica Observer