Today is Sunday, Aug. 21, the 234th day of 2016. There are 132 days left in the year.

August 21, 2016 at 12:00a.m.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1831: Nat Turner launches a violent slave rebellion in Virginia resulting in the deaths of at least 55 whites. (Turner is later executed.)

1858: The first of seven debates between Illinois senatorial contenders Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas takes place.

1911: Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris. (The painting is recovered two years later in Italy.)

1940: Exiled Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky dies in a Mexican hospital from wounds inflicted by an assassin the day before.

1944: The United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China open talks at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington that helps pave the way for establishment of the United Nations. (The talks conclude on Oct. 7.)

1945: President Harry S. Truman ends the Lend-Lease program that had shipped some $50 billion in aid supplies to America’s allies during World War II.

1959: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order making Hawaii the 50th state.

1963: Martial law is declared in South Vietnam as police and army troops begin a violent crackdown on Buddhist anti-government protesters.

1972: The Republican National Convention opens in Miami Beach.

1983: Philippine opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr., ending a self-imposed exile in the United States, is shot dead moments after stepping off a plane at Manila International Airport.

The musical play “La Cage Aux Folles” opens on Broadway.

1986: More than 1,700 people die when toxic gas erupts from a volcanic lake in the West African nation of Cameroon.

1991: The hard-line coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev collapses in the face of a popular uprising led by Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin.

1993: In a serious setback for NASA, engineers lose contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft as it is about to reach the red planet on a $980 million mission.

2006: A defiant Saddam Hussein refuses to enter a plea on genocide charges and dismisses the court as illegitimate at the start of his second trial, this one concerning the wide scale killings of tens of thousands of Kurds in 1987-88.

British prosecutors announce that 11 people have been charged in an alleged plot to blow up trans-Atlantic jetliners bound for the U.S. (Nine British Muslims are later convicted in connection with the plot.)

A train crash on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, kills at least 58 people.

A bomb blast tears through a Moscow market, killing at least 14 people.

2011: Euphoric Libyan rebels race into Tripoli and take control of the center with little resistance as Moammar Gadhafi’s defenses collapse and his four-decade regime appears to be crumbling.

In a statement from Martha’s Vineyard, where he is vacationing with his family, President Barack Obama calls on Gadhafi to acknowledge reality and step down.

2015: A trio of Americans, U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Spencer Stone, National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos and college student Anthony Sadler, and a British businessman, Chris Norman, tackle and disarm a Moroccan gunman on a high-speed train between Amsterdam and Paris.

First Lt. Shaye Haver of Copperas Cove, Texas, and Capt. Kristen Griest of Orange, Conn., become the first female soldiers to complete the Army’s rigorous Ranger School at Fort Benning, Ga.

Mike Fiers pitches the second no-hitter in the major leagues in nine days, leading the Houston Astros to a 3-0 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: Columbiana County, under a court order to keep its jail population low, can no longer send excess prisoners to Allen County, which is now full.

Local police and the FBI are searching for leads in the ambush killing of mobster Joseph Naples Jr. outside what family members say was to be his retirement home on 25 acres on Lynn Road in Beaver Township.

Lynn Steiner of Davis International, a Youngs-town contractor, hopes that a coup that overthrew Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev hasn’t crushed a $3 million deal to build a huge slaughterhouse in Leningrad.

1976: The Environmental Protection Agency proposes a $500 million plan to attack air pollution in the state’s urban areas. Ohio is the only state not yet in compliance with the 1970 Clean Air Act.

Youngstown City Council sidetracks action on $1.7 million in improvements at the Youngstown Municipal Airport because the projects would cost the city $210,000 in matching funds.

Eight people die – some of them beating on the doors of their flaming cars – after a runaway truck slammed into a line of stopped traffic at the bottom of a steep hill in Valley View, a Cleveland suburb.

1966: Welfare Director James O’Brien announces the opening of the Mahoning County Welfare Department’s new $459,901 work experience and training program for 300 local welfare clients. It is an experimental program to break the cycle of poverty.

Some 8,000 or more hourly workers at the General Motors plant at Lordstown and the Packard Electric Division in Warren are getting $1.8 million in raises, ranging from 9 cents to 18 cents an hour.

Nearly 200 area public officials will be asked to provide moral support for a new citizen effort to enhance beautification in the greater Youngstown area.

1941: A record increase in income in Youngstown due to defense production means a boom in home buying and home building. Mahoning County Auditor George Jones predicts an addition of $2.5 million to $5 million to the county’s tax duplicate.

Marvin Goldberger of Youngstown is awarded a founder’s scholarship at Carnegie Institute of Technology. He will be a sophomore in the school of chemical engineering.

All schoolchildren will be admitted free on opening day of the 95th Canfield Fair on Aug. 30.

David John Murphy, 13 months old, becomes Mahoning County’s 58th traffic fatality of the year after he was struck by a garbage truck while being pushed in his carriage by his grandmother, The traffic toll is 27 more this year than the same time in 1940.