Today is the 172nd day of 2023. There are 193 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2011: The Food and Drug Administration announces cigarette packs in the US will have to carry macabre images including rotting teeth and gums, diseased lungs, and a sewn-up corpse of a smoker as part of a graphic campaign aimed at discouraging Americans from lighting up.

OTHER EVENTS

1788: The United States Constitution goes into effect as New Hampshire becomes the ninth state to ratify it.

1887: Britain annexes Zululand, blocking Transvaal’s attempts to gain access to Africa’s coast.

1964: Civil rights workers Michael H Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E Chaney are slain in Philadelphia, Mississippi; their bodies are found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.

1965: Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr is presented with the Key to the City of Kingston at a civic reception at the National Stadium.

1971: The International Court of Justice in The Hague rules that South Africa’s administration of the territory of Southwest Africa is illegal.

1973: The US Supreme Court, in Miller v California, rules that states may ban materials found to be obscene according to local standards.

1982: A jury in Washington, DC, finds John Hinckley Jr not guilty, by reason of insanity, in the shootings of President Ronald Reagan and three other men.

1985: Scientists announce that skeletal remains exhumed in Brazil are those of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

1989: A sharply divided Supreme Court rules that burning the American flag as a form of political protest is protected by the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.

1990: A massive earthquake strikes northern Iran, killing as many as 100,000.

1994: US President Bill Clinton’s Administration offers North Korea high-level talks if it will confirm a willingness to halt its nuclear programme.

1997: The United States, France and Russia agree to toughen sanctions against Iraq until UN inspectors confirm Baghdad is cooperating in the elimination of its weapons of mass destruction.

2000: Chile’s Senate approves a plan aimed at investigating what happened to 1,000 people who disappeared during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

2001: A US federal grand jury indicts 13 Saudis and one Lebanese in the 1996 bombing that killed 19 Americans servicemen in Saudi Arabia.

2003: Iran suggests the country will keep up controversial plans to enrich uranium but says it will increase its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

2004: Assailants armed with grenades and rocket launchers seize the Interior Ministry headquarters in Ingushetia, a Russian region bordering warring Chechnya, killing the acting minister.

2005: Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, is convicted of manslaughter in the slayings of three civil rights workers exactly 41 years before, which helped spur the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; he is sentenced to 60 years in prison.

2006: The US Marine Corps announces that seven marines and a sailor have been charged with murder for pulling an unarmed Iraqi civilian from his home and shooting him to death, without provocation, the previous April. (The group’s leader, Sergeant Lawrence G Hutchins III, is sentenced to 15 years in prison after being convicted of unpremeditated murder; five cut deals with prosecutors in which they plead guilty to lesser charges.)

2007: International efforts to shut down North Korea’s nuclear programme take a surprise turn when the US sends a top American official to Pyongyang for direct talks.

2010: A Pakistan-born US citizen pleads guilty to trying to bomb New York’s Times Square and says he is “part of the answer to the US terrorising the Muslim nations and the Muslim people”.

2017: In a landmark case an Israeli woman wins a sexism case against El Al airline after being asked to change her seat so as not to be next to a man. Romanian Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu is ousted after losing a no-confidence vote 241-7.

2018: The EU imposes tariffs on US goods worth US$3.2 billion in response to US tariffs. 2021: New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard is the first openly transgender athlete to be selected for the Olympics.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Sonia Eloise Pottinger, Jamaica’s first female record producer (1931-2010); Francoise Quoirez (Francoise Sagan), French author (1933-2004); Don Black, UK songwriter (1938- ); Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross, US actress and actor, respectively, and parents of Alex Keaton in US sitcom Family Ties) (both 1947- ); Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan (1953-2007); Robyn Douglass, Japanese- born actress (1953- ); Britain’s Prince William (1982- ); Michael Malarkey, Lebanese actor (1983- )

– AP and Jamaica Observer