2 Esfand 1385

Events

• 1848 (178 years ago) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.
• 1913 (113 years ago) Ioannina is incorporated into the Greek state after the Balkan Wars.
• 1945 (81 years ago) World War II: During the Battle of Iwo Jima, Japanese kamikaze planes sink the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea and damage the USS Saratoga.
• 1952 (74 years ago) The Bengali language movement protests occur at the University of Dhaka in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
• 1971 (55 years ago) The Convention on Psychotropic Substances is signed at Vienna.
• 1974 (52 years ago) The last Israeli soldiers leave the west bank of the Suez Canal pursuant to a truce with Egypt.
• 2013 (13 years ago) At least 17 people are killed and 119 injured following several bombings in the Indian city of Hyderabad.
• 2022 (4 years ago) In the prelude to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine Russian President Vladimir Putin declares the Luhansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic as independent from Ukraine, and moves troops into the region. The action is condemned by the United Nations.

Births

• 1728 (298 years ago) Peter III of Russia,
• 1903 (123 years ago) Anaïs Nin, French-American essayist and memoirist (died 1977)
• 1907 (119 years ago) W. H. Auden, English-American poet, playwright, and composer (died 1973)
• 1924 (102 years ago) Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwean educator and politician, 2nd President of Zimbabwe (died 2019)
• 1937 (89 years ago) Harald V of Norway, King of Norway (died 2026)
• 1946 (80 years ago) Alan Rickman, English actor and director (died 2016)
• 1980 (46 years ago) Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, 5th King of Bhutan
• 1989 (37 years ago) Corbin Bleu, American actor, model, dancer, film producer and singer-songwriter

Deaths

• 1513 (513 years ago) Pope Julius II,
• 1677 (349 years ago) Baruch Spinoza, Dutch philosopher and scholar (born 1632)
• 1730 (296 years ago) Pope Benedict XIII,
• 1926 (100 years ago) Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Dutch physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1853)
• 1965 (61 years ago) Malcolm X, American minister and activist (born 1925)
• 1984 (42 years ago) Mikhail Sholokhov, Russian novelist and short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1905)
• 1999 (27 years ago) Gertrude B. Elion, American biochemist and pharmacologist, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1918)
• 2018 (8 years ago) Billy Graham, American evangelist (born 1918)

All 298 events, births and deaths of February 21