Today is the 186th day of 2023. There are 179 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2011: A jury in Orlando, Florida, finds Casey Anthony, 25, not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child abuse in the 2008 disappearance and death of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee.

OTHER EVENTS

1587: Sir Francis Drake leads an expedition into the port of Cadiz, Spain, and ravages the Spanish coast; he destroys so many vessels the Spaniards have to delay their invasion of England for a year.

1811: Venezuela becomes the first South American country to declare its independence from Spain.

1830: The French invade Algeria and take Algiers, seizing private and religious buildings and a vast portion of the country’s arable land; the colonisation of Algeria was seen as a way of providing employment for veterans of the Napoleonic wars.

1865: Methodist Minister William Booth founds the Christian Revival Association, later to become the Salvation Army, in London. The Secret Service Division of the US Treasury Department is founded in Washington, DC, with the mission of suppressing counterfeit currency.

1932: Right-wing politician Antonio de Oliveira Salazar becomes Portugal’s prime minister; he soon creates an authoritarian political order that lasts until 1974.

1935: US President Franklin D Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act.

1946: The bikini, created by Louis Reard, is first modelled by Micheline Bernardini during a poolside fashion show in Paris.

1959: President Sukarno dissolves Indonesia’s Constituent Assembly.

1962: Independence takes effect in Algeria; the same day civilians of European descent, mostly French, come under attack by extremists in the port city of Oran.

1969: Tom Mboya, likely successor to Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, is assassinated in Nairobi.

1973: General Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, comes to power in Rwanda in a bloodless coup and remains president until his death in a plane crash in 1994.

1975: The Cape Verde Islands become independent after 500 years of Portuguese rule. Arthur Ashe becomes the first black man to win a Wimbledon singles title as he defeats Jimmy Connors.

1977: The Pakistan army seizes power in a bloodless coup that unseats Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

1984: The Supreme Court weakens the 70-year-old “exclusionary rule”, deciding that evidence seized in good faith with defective court warrants can be used against defendants in criminal trials.

1991: A worldwide financial scandal erupts as regulators in eight countries shut down the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

1994: Thousands of jubilant Palestinians greet Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat when he returns to the West Bank for the first time in 27 years and swears in the self-rule Government.

1995: Flouting a UN ban on military flights over Bosnia, a suspected Serb warplane fires rockets at a strategic power plant in government-held territory.

1999: Caribbean leaders gather for a summit in Trinidad to discuss issues the development of a regional supreme court.

2000: The UN Security Council imposes an 18-month diamond ban on Sierra Leone’s rebels in a bid to strangle their ability to finance a civil war.

2001: Former Argentine President Carlos Menem is indicted by a federal judge for heading up an “illicit organisation” that sold rifles and artillery to Croatia in 1991 and Ecuador in 1995, in violation of UN embargoes.

2002: South Africa’s Constitutional Court orders President Thabo Mbeki to provide the antiretroviral drug Nevirapine to pregnant women in State hospitals who are infected with HIV.

2004: Jamaica’s third prime minster, Hugh Lawson Shearer, dies. The prosecutor for a UN-sponsored war crimes court opens the first trials for rebel military commanders accused in a vicious 10-year campaign for control of diamond-rich Sierra Leone.

2006: North Atlantic Treaty Organization calls for a firm international response to North Korea’s missile tests, which the military alliance condemns as a threat to security in Asia and the wider world.

2008: Seven-hour shoot-out between Russian soldiers and suspected militants in the republic of Ingushetia leaves two dead on each side.

2009: Honduras’s exiled president flies toward home in a Venezuelan jet in a high-stakes attempt to return to power, even as the interim Government orders the military to turn away the plane.

2010: US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rebukes Russia for failing to live up to the ceasefire agreement it signed nearly two years before to end the fighting in the small former Soviet State of Georgia, where she says Moscow is building permanent military bases.

2013: Enraged Islamists push back against the toppling of President Mohammed Morsi as tens of thousands of his supporters take to the streets, vowing to win his reinstatement and clashing with their opponents in violence that kills some three dozen people.

2017: The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals rules that two laws passed by Congress did not end the right to a bond hearing for unaccompanied immigrant children who are detained by federal authorities.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Sir Stamford Raffles, British founder of Singapore (1781-1826); Phineas Taylor Barnum, US circus pioneer (1810-1891); Cecil Rhodes, English statesman and Central Africa pioneer (1853-1902); Jean Cocteau, French author-film-maker (1889-1963); Owen Gray, Jamaican music pioneer (1939- ); Edie Falco, actress (1963-).

– AP/Jamaica Observer