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

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1965: Rev Martin Luther King Jr leads 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks.

OTHER EVENTS

1634: British colonists under Lord Baltimore reach Maryland in North America.

1815: Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia form new alliance against Napoleon Bonaparte after he escapes from confinement on Elba.

1911: A fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co factory in New York City kills 146 immigrant workers; the tragedy galvanises America’s labour movement.

1913: The home of vaudeville, the Palace Theater, opens in New York City

1941: Yugoslavia joins Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Alliance in World War II.

1968: Ethnic Chinese opposition politicians and university teachers form the Malaysian opposition party Gerakan Ra’ayat Malaysia.

1969: Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan turns power over to the military after 11 years of leadership.

1989: Heads of Egypt, Jordan and Palestine Liberation Organisation meet to coordinate Middle East peace strategy.

1971: Pakistani troops are deployed in East Pakistan — now Bangladesh — to quell rebels demanding an independent State.

1975: Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal is assassinated in Riyadh by nephew with history of mental illness. Faisal’s brother, Crown Prince Khaled, succeeds to throne.

1982: The Canada Act is signed, ratifying the Canadian constitution and making the country wholly independent of Great Britain.

1990: Arson fire in illegal nightclub kills 87 in the Bronx, New York; most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants.

1991: United States says Saddam Hussein has almost succeeded in putting down a rebellion by Shiites in southern Iraq with the help of aircraft flown in violation of the Gulf War ceasefire accord.

1992: Returning from a 10-month stay in space, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev is given smelling salts when he learns that the Soviet Union has disintegrated while he was away.

1993: Gunmen storm the military compound of President Gnassingbe Eyadema in Lome, Togo, and kill his top military aide, then flee from government troops.

1994: American troops withdraw from Somalia after a 16-month humanitarian mission marred by fighting with Somali warlords.

1996: The European Union moves to ban British beef, five days after the British government alerts the public to the danger of eating meat from cows with mad cow disease.

1997: Australian Senate votes to overturn the world’s only law allowing terminally ill patients to commit suicide with a doctor’s help.

1998: US President Bill Clinton, on a visit to Rwanda, acknowledges that the US and the world failed to protect Rwandans from the 1994 campaign of genocide that killed half a million people, mostly Tutsis.

2002: An earthquake and several aftershocks in northern Afghanistan kill as many as 2,000 people and injures more than 4,000, according to officials in Kabul, the capital.

2004: The US military intensifies its suicide prevention efforts as a result of an investigation into the self-inflicted deaths of 23 US soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait the previous year. As part of the new policy, the army requires all soldiers to take suicide prevention classes within three months of arriving in Iraq or Kuwait.

2005: The US agrees to sell about two dozen sophisticated F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, a diplomatically sensitive move that rewards Pakistan for its help in fighting terrorism, but angers India.

2006: Military authorities report Turkish troops killed 14 Kurdish guerrillas in a clash in Kurdish-dominated south-east Turkey. Autonomy-seeking guerrillas have been involved in escalating attacks.

2007: Iran partially suspends cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency while hard line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the most recent set of UN sanctions will not halt the country’s uranium enrichment “even for a second”.

2008: The Pentagon announces that the US mistakenly shipped to Taiwan four electrical fuses designed for use on intercontinental ballistic missiles, but has since recovered them.

2010: Countries that use the euro say they have agreed on a financial backstop for Greece that would combine loans from other eurozone governments and the International Monetary Fund, a move aimed at stopping the government debt crisis that has undermined the shared currency.

2011: A possible breach at Japan’s troubled nuclear plant escalates the crisis anew, two full weeks after an earthquake and tsunami first compromise the facility. The development suggests radioactive contamination may be worse than first thought, with tainted groundwater the most likely consequence.

2012: The US pays US$50,000 in compensation for each villager killed and US$11,000 for each person wounded in a shooting rampage allegedly carried out by a rogue American soldier in southern Afghanistan.

2013: The president of the Central African Republic flees the country for Cameroon after rebels overrun the capital of the impoverished nation long wracked by rebellions.

2014: US President Barack Obama declares that a security summit took “concrete steps” to prevent nuclear material from falling into the hands of terrorists even though Russia and China failed to sign an agreement to beef up inspections.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Joachim Murat, French soldier and King of Naples (1767-1815); Anne Bronte, English novelist (1820-1849); Arturo Toscanini, Italian-born conductor (1867-1957); Bela Bartok, Hungarian composer (1881-1945); David Lean, British film director (1908-1991); Gloria Steinem, US feminist-editor (1934- ); Elton John, British entertainer-songwriter (1947- ); Sarah Jessica Parker, US actress (1965- ); Aretha Franklin, R and B singer (1942-2018)

— AP