HISTORY AT A GLANCE

TODAY is Monday, July 31, the 212th day of 2017. There are 153 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date: 1950 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 85 relating to Korean War is adopted.

1954 – First ascent of K2, by an Italian expedition led by Ardito Desio.

1964 – Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first closeup photographs of the moon, with images 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes.

1970 – Black Tot Day: The last day of the officially sanctioned rum ration in the Royal Navy.

1971 – Apollo program: Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover.

1972 – The Troubles: In Operation Motorman, the British Army re-takes the urban no-go areas of Northern Ireland. It is the biggest British military operation since the Suez Crisis of 1956, and the biggest in Ireland since the Irish War of Independence. Later that day, nine civilians are killed by car bombs in the village of Claudy.

1973 – A Delta Air Lines jetliner, flight DL 723 crashes while landing in fog at Logan International Airport, Boston, Massachusetts killing 89.

1988 – Thirty-two people are killed and 1,674 injured when a bridge at the Sultan Abdul Halim ferry terminal collapses in Butterworth, Penang, Malaysia.

1991 – The United States and Soviet Union both sign the START I Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first to reduce (with verification) both countries’ stockpiles.

1992 – Georgia joins the United Nations.

1992 – Thai Airways International Flight 311 crashes into a mountain north of Kathmandu, Nepal killing all 113 people on board.

1999 – Discovery Program: Lunar Prospector: NASA intentionally crashes the spacecraft into the Moon, thus ending its mission to detect frozen water on the moon’s surface.

2006 – Fidel Castro hands over power to brother Raúl Castro.

2007 – Operation Banner, the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and the longest-running British Army operation ever, comes to an end.

2012 – Michael Phelps breaks the record set in 1964 by Larisa Latynina for the most medals won at the Olympics.

2014 – Gas explosions in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung kill at least 20 people and injure more than 270.