This Day in HISTORY

Today is the 132nd day of 2021. There are 233 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2002: Former US President Jimmy Carter travels to Cuba for talks with President Fidel Castro and the nation’s leading dissidents. He is the first former or sitting US president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.

OTHER EVENTS

1536: Sir Francis Weston,

Mark Smeaton and other alleged paramours of England’s Queen Anne Boleyn go on trial for treason.

1870: An act creating the Canadian province of Manitoba is given royal assent, to take effect in July.

1937: Britain’s King George VI is crowned at Westminster Abbey.

1938: Japanese warships capture Chinese island of Amoy.

1943: Battle of North Africa ends in World War II with German surrender of Cap Bon in Tunisia.

1978: The US Commerce Department announces hurricanes will no longer be named exclusively after women.

1980: The first non-stop crossing of North America in a hot air balloon is made.

1985: Amy Eilberg becomes the first female rabbi in the conservative Jewish movement.

1996: A rusty freighter teeming with thousands of sick and hungry Liberian refugees is finally allowed to limp into a Ghanaian port after a harrowing week at sea.

1997: The leaders of India and Pakistan meet for the first time in four years in Male, The Maldives, and agree on measures to ease the tension between their long-feuding countries.

2008: A 7.9-magnitude earthquake hits Sichuan province in central China, killing more than 28,000 people and burying more than 10,600 people.

2010: Britain ushers in its first coalition Government since World War II as a pair of rivals-turnedpartners pledge to set aside their deep policy differences and tackle the country’s disastrous budget deficit.

2012: At least 100,000 Spaniards angered by grim economic prospects and the political handling of the international financial crisis turn out for street demonstrations in the country’s cities.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Florence Nightingale, English nursing pioneer (1820-1910);

Gabriel Faure, French composer

(1845-1924); Katharine Hepburn, US actress (1907-2003); Gabriel Byrne, US actor (1950- ); Seymour “Foggy” Mullings, former deputy prime minister of Jamaica (1931-2013)