Today is the 109th day of 2023. There are 256 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2009: Jamaican Stephen Fray attempts to hijack CanJet 918 at Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay.

OTHER EVENTS

1892: The prototype of the first commercially successful American automobile is completed in Springfield, Massachusetts, by Charles E Duryea and his brother Frank.

1882: British naturalist Charles Darwin dies at age 73.

1897: The first Boston Marathon is won by John J McDermott in 2:55:10.

1927: American actress Mae West is sentenced to 10 days in jail, convicted of obscenity and “corrupting the morals of youth” with her portrayal of a prostitute in the Broadway play Sex, which she also wrote; the publicity made her nationally known.

1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an act of resistance by Polish Jews under Nazi occupation, begins and is quelled four weeks later, on May 16.

1948: American Broadcasting Company (ABC) TV network debuts.

1971: Charles Manson is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Sharon Tate.

1982: Astronauts Sally Ride and Guion Bluford Jr become the first woman and African American, respectively, selected for the NASA programme.

1993: After a 51-day stan-doff with US federal agents some 80 members of the millennialist Branch Davidian religious group perish in a fire at their compound near Waco, Texas.

1994: A Los Angeles jury awards US$3.8 million to motorist Rodney King who was beaten by a group of policemen.

1995: Timothy McVeigh sets off a truck bomb at Alfred P Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 and injuring 500.

1999: The German Parliament gathers for first time in renovated Reichstag, symbolising the Government’s return to Berlin.

2001: Telecommunicatons company Digicel is launched in Jamaica.

2003: About 100 striking Nigerian oil workers seize four offshore rigs and hold hostage 97 expatriate workers as well as more than 150 Nigerian nationals who refused to join the strike.

2011: Fidel Castro resigns his position of first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba after 45 years of holding the title.

2012: India’s successful test of a powerful new missile that can carry nuclear weapons to Beijing causes barely a ripple — even in China — just days after North Korea was globally vilified for a failed rocket launch.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

José Echegaray, Spanish dramatist, mathematician, statesman and Nobel laureate (1832-1916); Getulio Vargas, president and dictator of Brazil (1883-1954 ); Jayne Mansfield, US actress (1932-1967); Dudley Moore, British-born actor (1935-2002); Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, second supreme leader of Iran (1939- ); Ashley Judd, US actress (1968- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer