Today is the 67th day of 2023. There are 298 days left in the year

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

2008: US President George W Bush vetoes a Bill that would have banned the Central Intelligence Agency from using simulated drowning and other coercive interrogation methods to gain information from suspected terrorists.

OTHER EVENTS

1765: Britain’s House of Lords passes the Stamp Act to tax American colonies.

1817: The New York Stock Exchange is founded.

1898: The United States refuses to support Britain in its conflict with Russia over a loan to China.

1904: Germany revises the 1872 anti-Jesuit law to permit the return of some members of the Roman Catholic order.

1917: Riots and strikes break out in St Petersburg, marking the start of the Russian Revolution.

1950: Marshal Voroshilov announces the existence of the Soviet atomic bomb.

1957: Ghana is admitted to the United Nations.

1965: The United States lands 3,500 Marines in South Vietnam.

1969: The Soviet Union puts its Far East army on alert as a warning to China after its frontier clash on Ussuri River.

1970: Cyprus President Archbishop Makarios escapes assassination when terrorist snipers shoot down his helicopter.

1986: Guerrilla violence in Colombia takes seven lives a day before national elections.

1987: Sri Lankan troops launch large new offensive, killing 11 separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in the northern Jaffna Peninsula.

1990: The West German Parliament adopts a resolution calling on the united Germany to honour Poland’s western border.

1996: China fires three ballistic missiles into waters off Taiwan’s main ports, two weeks before the island’s first presidential elections.

1997: Hundreds of people flee southern Albania, fearing clashes between the Government and armed insurgents.

1998: James McDougal, one of the most important cooperating witnesses in Kenneth Starr’s investigation into President Bill Clinton’s Whitewater real estate dealings, dies in prison.

1999: American baseball player Joe DiMaggio, one of the best all-around players in the history of the game, dies. The US Energy Department fires a Taiwanese-born scientist suspected of handing over nuclear missile technology to China in the 1980s.

2003: An Argentine court releases an indictment ordering the arrest of four former Iranian government officials for their alleged role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed.

2004: A female wing of Nepal’s Maoist rebel movement, the All Nepal Women’s Association (Revolutionary), calls a general strike to protest violence against women, bringing this Himalayan kingdom to a standstill.

2005: The UN war crimes court indicts Kosovo’s prime minister for alleged atrocities while commanding ethnic Albanian insurgents against Serb forces in the struggle for control of the province.

2006: Tens of thousands of Sudanese march through Khartoum protesting plans to deploy UN peacekeepers in conflict-torn Darfur and demanding the expulsion of the top UN and US envoys in the country.

2009: Roman Catholic and Protestant congregations pray together for peace after Irish Republican Army dissidents kill two Britsh soldiers — the first deadly attack on Northern Ireland security forces in 12 years.

2010: Hundreds of earthquake survivors huddle in aid tents and around bonfires in eastern Turkey, seeking relief from the winter cold after a strong temblor knocks down stone and mud-brick houses in five villages, killing 51 people.

2011: The European Union adopts a plan to double its efforts to boost energy efficiency in order to cut greenhouse gases, partly by producing better household appliances, renovating public buildings and private homes, and driving improved cars.

2013: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is lauded at his State funeral as a modern-day reincarnation of Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar and a disciple of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

2014: During a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappears, prompting a massive search effort that was finally called off in early 2017.

2017: Many American women stay home from work, join rallies, or wear red to demonstrate how vital they are to the US economy as International Women’s Day is observed with a multitude of events around the world — including the ‘Day Without a Woman’ in the US. Fire sweeps through a crowded youth shelter near Guatemala City, killing 40 girls.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Richard Howe, English admiral (1726-1799); Oliver Wendell Holmes, US jurist (1809-1894); Otto Hahn, German chemist (1879-1968); Juana de Ibarbourou, Uruguayan poet (1895-1979); Gladys Bustamante (wife of Sir Alexander Bustamante), women and workers’ rights Jamaican activist (1912-2009); Vasundhara Raje, Indian politician (1953- )

– AP/Jamaica Observer