Today is the 59th day of 2023. There are 306 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1525: Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, is tortured and executed by Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes.

OTHER EVENTS

1594: Britain’s Royal Physician Roger Loper is arrested for alleged conspiracy to poison Queen Elizabeth.

1806: French forces capture Barcelona, Spain.

1825: Britain and Russia sign a treaty covering respective rights in the Pacific Ocean area.

1849: The ship California arrives at San Francisco, carrying the first of the gold seekers.

1854: Some 50 slavery opponents meet in Ripon, Wisconsin, to call for the creation of a new political group which becomes the Republican Party.

1877: A peace treaty is signed between Turkey and Serbia.

1911: Australia’s Premier Andrew Fisher announces plans to nationalise monopolies.

1933: A Nazi decree suppresses civil liberties in Germany.

1942: Japanese forces land in Java, Indonesia, in World War II.

1947: The Taiwanese rebel against Nationalist forces moving in from mainland China; thousands are killed in a month of fighting.

1951: A Senate committee headed by Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, issues a preliminary report saying at least two major crime syndicates are operating in the United States.

1962: The United States announces that new atomic tests will be conducted in the atmosphere near to Johnson Island in the Pacific.

1974: The United States and Egypt re-establish diplomatic relations after a seven-year breach.

1975: More than 40 people are killed in the London Underground when a subway train smashes into the end of a tunnel.

1986: Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme is assassinated on a street in Stockholm while walking home from a movie theatre.

1987: Philippines President Corazon Aquino announces “full and complete amnesty” for communist rebels who lay down their arms.

1990: The Soviet legislature passes a landmark law allowing citizens to acquire land and bequeath it to their children.

1991: Allied and Iraqi forces suspend fighting and Iraq pledges to accept all UN resolutions on Kuwait.

1992: The UN Security Council approves a 22,000-strong peacekeeping force for Cambodia.

1993: Four US federal agents and six members of a Christian sect are killed when authorities raid the sect’s headquarters in Waco, Texas; a 51-day stand-off ensues, ending with the deaths of about 80 sect members in a fire.

1996: Daiwa Bank Ltd of Japan agrees to plead guilty to a criminal cover-up of US$1.1 billion in bond-trading losses and to pay US$340 million in fines, settling one of history’s biggest banking frauds.

1997: An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.3 shakes western Pakistan, killing at least 35 people.

2000: Right wing leader Joerg Haider, criticised for his anti-foreigner statements and past praise of some Nazi-era policies, resigns as head of the Freedom Party in an apparent bid to end Austria’s international ostracism following his party’s rise to a place in the governing coalition.

2003: A US district court finds reputed Ku Klux Klan member Ernest Avants guilty of aiding and abetting the 1966 murder of Ben Chester White, a 67-year-old black farm worker in Jackson, Mississippi.

2004: An Israeli helicopter fires two missiles at a car in the Gaza Strip and kills three people, including an Islamic Jihad militant, Ayman Dahdouh.

2006: Officials announce finding the deadly strain of bird flu in a cat in Germany, the first time the virus is identified in an animal other than a bird in central Europe.

2007: Two Picasso paintings, Maya and the Doll and Portrait of Jacqueline, worth a total of nearly US$66 million, are stolen from the house of the artist’s granddaughter in Paris.

2008: Kenya’s rival politicians sign a power-sharing agreement and shake hands after weeks of bitter negotiations on how to end the country’s post-election crisis which set off violence that killed more than 1,000 people and eviscerated the East African country’s economy.

2009: With his nation’s economy in shambles, President Robert Mugabe throws himself a lavish birthday party and calls on Zimbabwe’s last white farmers to leave.

2010: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, charges that the US and its allies are behind the UN nuclear watchdog agency’s claim that Iran may be making nuclear bombs, despite its repeated denials.

2011: The United States and European allies intensify efforts to isolate Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, redoubling demands for him to step down, questioning his mental state, and warning that those who stay loyal to him risk losing their wealth and being prosecuted for human rights abuses.

2012: Helicopters ferry food, phones and flashlights to more than 1,000 passengers and crew stuck aboard a disabled cruise ship that was being towed to the Seychelles Islands through waters prowled by pirates.

2013: Pope Benedict XVI becomes the first pope in 600 years to resign, ending an eight-year pontificate shaped by struggles to move the Roman Catholic Church’s past sex abuse scandals and to reawaken Christianity in an indifferent world.

2017: Heralding a “new chapter of American greatness”, US President Donald Trump issues a broad call for overhauling the nation’s health-care system and significantly boosting military spending, in an hour-long speech to a joint session of Congress. Dozens of tornadoes begin touching down in the upper Midwest and northern Arkansas, killing at least three people. Amazon’s cloud-computing service, Amazon Web Services, experiences a five-hour outage in its eastern US region, causing unprecedented and widespread problems for thousands of websites and apps.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Michael Montaigne, French essayist (1533-1592); Mary Morris Knibb, Jamaican founder of Morris Knibb Preparatory School, teacher, social worker, politician and philanthropist (1886-1964); Linus Pauling, American scientist (1901-1994); Bugsy Siegel, American gangster (1906-1947); Svetlana Alliluyeva, Russian writer and only daughter of Joseph Stalin (1926- ); Mario Andretti, Italian race car driver (1940- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer