• Today is Friday, Feb. 21, the 52nd day of 2014. There are 313 days left in the year.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On Feb. 21, 1965, black Muslim leader and civil rights activist Malcolm X, 39, was shot to death inside the Audubon Ballroom in New York by assassins identified as members of the Nation of Islam.
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• On this date:
• In 1513, Pope Julius II, who had commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, died nearly four months after the project was completed.
• In 1613, Mikhail Romanov, 16, was unanimously chosen by Russia's national assembly to be czar, beginning a dynasty that would last three centuries.
• In 1862, Nathaniel Gordon became the first and only American slave-trader to be executed under the U.S. Piracy Law of 1820 as he was hanged in New York.
• In 1885, the Washington Monument was dedicated.
• In 1916, the World War I Battle of Verdun began in France as German forces attacked; the French were able to prevail after 10 months of fighting.
• In 1925, The New Yorker magazine made its debut.
• In 1945, during the World War II Battle of Iwo Jima, the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea was sunk by kamikazes with the loss of 318 men.
• In 1947, Edwin H. Land publicly demonstrated his Polaroid Land camera, which could produce a black-and-white photograph in 60 seconds.
• In 1964, the first shipment of U.S. wheat purchased by the Soviet Union arrived in the port of Odessa.
• In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon began his historic visit to China as he and his wife, Pat, arrived in Beijing.
• In 1989, the future president of Czechoslovakia, playwright Vaclav Havel (VATS'-lahv HAH'-vel), was convicted for his role in a banned rally and sentenced to nine months in jail (he was released in May 1989).
• In 1994, Aldrich Ames, a former head of Soviet counterintelligence for the CIA, and his wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, were arrested on charges of spying for

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