Today is the 144th day of 2023. There are 221 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1978: American management consultant Marilyn Loden first coins the term “glass ceiling” to describe invisible career barriers for women.

OTHER EVENTS

1689: The Toleration Act is passed by the British Parliament, granting freedom of worship to Nonconformists and allowing them their own places of worship and their own teachers and preachers.

1738: John Wesley is converted, launching the Methodist movement; the occasion is celebrated annually by Methodists as Aldersgate Day.

1830: The first passenger railroad in the United States begins service between Baltimore and Elliott’s Mills, Maryland.

1972: The United States and Soviet Union agree to put US and Soviet spacemen in orbit together by 1975.

1975: US President Gerald Ford approves two Bills providing more than US$400 million for the resettlement of refugees from South Vietnam and Cambodia.

1981: Ecuador’s President Jaime Roldos Aguilera is killed in a plane crash in the Andes Mountains near Peru border.

1984: Israel and the United States reject a United Nations proposal for an international peace conference on the Middle East.

1988: Parliament in the United Kingdom passes Section 28 as law, prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality; it is repealed in 2001/2004.

1990: US President George Bush unconditionally renews China’s most-favoured-nation trade status with the United States for one year.

1991: An armoured personnel carrier rolls over and kills an anti-army demonstrator in Slovenia.

1992: US President George Bush orders the coast guard to intercept Haitian refugees at sea and return them to Haiti.

1994: A stampede kills 270 pilgrims at a shrine in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Four men convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City are each sentenced to 240 years in prison.

1998: The first multi-party vote in a region ruled by China’s Communists is held in Hong Kong; pro-democracy parties win most of the legislature seats that were up for vote.

1999: Sonia Gandhi agrees to take back the presidency of India’s main Opposition Congress Party, ending a leadership crisis.

2000: The Santiago Court of Appeals strips General Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution, allowing for the ailing former dictator’s prosecution on human rights violations. Israel ends its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, withdrawing the last of its troops from its self-declared security zone.

2007: The US Government stops all imports of Chinese toothpaste to test for diethylene glycol, a deadly chemical reportedly found in tubes sold elsewhere in the world.

2009: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will continue to build homes in existing West Bank settlements, defying US calls to halt settlement growth.

2010: The doctor whose research linking autism and the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella — which influenced millions of parents to refuse the shot for their children — is banned from practising medicine in his native Britain. Following a stand-off with gunmen, security forces enter the Tivoli Gardens, Jamaica, community to apprend strongman Christopher “Dudus” Coke, requested for extradition by the United States Government on drug-trafficking and gunrunning charges.

2011: Egypt’s prosecutor general orders former President Hosni put on trial on charges of corruption and conspiring in the deadly shootings of protesters during the uprising that ousted him; Mubarak’s power previously was nearly unquestioned for three decades.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, Dutch, German, Polish, Prussian inventor and physicist best known for inventing mercury-in-glass thermometer, and the Fahrenheit scale (1686-1736); Jean-Paul Marat, French revolutionary (1743-1793); England’s Queen Victoria (1819-1901); Jan Smuts, South African prime minister and general (1870-1950); U Ne Win, military dictator of Burma (1911-2002); Prince Buster (Cecil Campbell), Jamaican legendary ska singer (1938-2016); Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet and Nobel laureate (1940-1996); Bob Dylan, US singer (1941- ); Patti LaBelle, US singer (1944- ); Eric Cantona, French football player (1966- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer