Today is the 184th day of 2023. There are 181 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2006: Virgin Atlantic Airways makes its inaugural flight to Jamaica.

OTHER EVENTS

AD 321: Roman emperor Constantine, a Christian, proclaims Sunday a day of rest and religious observance.

1583: Russia’s Czar Ivan the Terrible kills his son Ivan in a fit of rage.

1856: The US House of Representatives votes to admit Kansas to statehood under the anti-slavery resolution known as the Topeka Constitution, despite the opposition of the Senate and President Franklin Pierce.

1928: Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator John Logie Baird demonstrates the first colour television transmission in London.

1954: Food rationing, imposed during World War II, ends in Britain.

1962: French President Charles de Gaulle signs an agreement recognising Algeria as an independent State, after 132 years of French rule.

1969: Just weeks after being fired from rock band The Rolling Stones, British musician Brian Jones is found dead in his swimming pool.

1981: Asian youth in the predominantly Indian neighbourhood of Southall in West London fight with a band of skinheads (white youth with close-cropped hair) during which Molotov cocktails are thrown and fires lit before police are able to quell what is termed a race riot.

1988: United States Navy cruiser USS Vincennes shoots down an Iran Air jetliner over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard.

1993: Ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide signs an accord in New York with the Haitian military that will return him to office.

1996: The UK House of Commons announces that the Stone of Scone (aka the Stone of Destiny), used in the coronation of Scottish (and subsequently English and British) monarchs, will be returned to Scotland after 700 years at Westminster Abbey.

2000: Opposition candidate Vicente Fox is declared the winner in Mexico’s presidential elections, in a stunning victory that ends the ruling PRI party’s 71-year lock on the presidency.

2001: Fifteen female Falun Gong followers allegedly hang themselves at a labour camp in north-eastern China after being tortured by the camp staff; the Chinese Government had outlawed the spiritual movement in 1999.

2005: Saudi anti-terror forces kill al-Qaeda’s top leader in the kingdom during a dawn gun battle but, despite the Moroccan terrorist Younis Mohammed Ibrahim al-Hayari’s death and a two-year crackdown on militants, the number of extremists grows.

2007: A 10-year-old Nepalese girl is stripped of her title as a living goddess because she travelled overseas to promote a documentary about the centuries-old tradition; Sajani Shakya’s position is reinstated because of popular support but she retires in March 2008 at the age of 11.

2008: The Pentagon announces the tour extension of 2,200 marines in Afghanistan, after insisting for months the unit would come home on time. Venus and Serena Williams win in straight sets to set up their third all-sister Wimbledon final and seventh Grand Slam championship matchup.

2009: After bitter wrangling, Africa’s leaders agree to denounce the International Criminal Court and refuse to extradite Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, who had been indicted for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

2011: Novak Djoković of Serbia beats Spaniard Rafael Nadal 6-4, 6-1, 1-6, 6-3 for his first Wimbledon title.

2012: Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond resigns following a financial market scandal that sewed the seeds for a new investigation into Britain’s banking sector.

2013: Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, is overthrown by the military after just one year — the same type of Arab Spring uprising that had brought the Islamist leader to power.

2014: Germany passes its first nationwide minimum wage law — at 8.5 euros.

2015: Australian rules football coach Phil Walsh, of the Adelaide Crows, is stabbed to death by his son Cy at his Somerton Park home.

2016: A devastating truck bombing on a bustling commercial street in downtown Baghdad kills nearly 300 people. A 19-year-old Virginia tourist loses his left foot in a blast when he stepped on a plastic bag of explosive chemicals in New York’s Central Park.

2017: A bus crashes in a traffic jam and results in a fire that kills 18 near Muenchberg, Germany.

2018: Cardi B becomes the first female rapper to get two number one US Billboard hits with her song I Like It, a collaboration with Bad Bunny and J Balvin.

2019: More than a million people are ordered to evacuate the Japanese island of Kyushu amid warnings of mudslides following 1,000mm (39 inches) of rainfall. The United States produces the most waste per head globally and recycles the least at 35 per cent, according to new research by Verisk Maplecroft; Germany recycles the most at 68 per cent.

2022: Sri Lanka says it has less than one day’s worth of fuel as its economic crisis deepens, closing schools and stopping public transport.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Samuel de Champlain, French explorer who founded New France and Quebec City and made the first accurate map of the Canadian coast (1567-1635); John Clare, English poet (1793-1864); Franz Kafka, Austrian author (1883-1924); Jean-Claude “Papa Doc” Duvalier, former president of Haiti (1951-2014); Tom Cruise, US actor (1962- ); Julian Assange, Australian WikiLeaks founder (1971- )

— AP/ Jamaica Observer