ON THIS DAY- On this day in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis began after US President John F. Kennedy announced that US spy planes discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba. Kennedy said America would not stop short of military action to end what he described as a “clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.” Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature on this day in 1964, saying he always refused official distinctions and did not want to be “institutionalized.” Sartre penned a letter on why he refused the honor. In 1989, the Taif Agreement, created to provide “the basis for the ending of the civil war and the return to political normalcy in Lebanon” was signed. A year later, the Royal Geographical Society unveiled evidence showing that the region around the Aral Sea in Central Asia suffered the world’s worst ecological disaster after what was once the world’s fourth largest freshwater pool shrunk by two-thirds. Two years ago, Hisham Ramez resigned as governor of the central bank and Tarek Amer was appointed as his replacement.