Today is the 199th day of 2023. There are 66 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2013: Alexei Navalny, a charismatic and creative Russian Opposition leader who exposed high-level corruption and mocked the Kremlin, is sentenced to five years in prison on charges of embezzlement in a verdict that sets off street protests and draws condemnation from the West.

OTHER EVENTS

1290: King Edward I orders the expulsion of Jews from England; this edict remains in place for 350 years.

1536: The pope’s authority is declared void in England.

1716: A decree orders all Jews expelled from Brussels, Germany.

1753: Lemuel Haynes, the first black man in the United States to be ordained as a minister, escapes from a slave holder in Framingham, Massachusetts.

1830: The Uruguayan Constitution is sworn in.

1841: Pedro II, at 15 years old, is formally crowned emperor of Brazil after a 10-year regency.

1853: With the completion of the Grand Trunk Line, trains begin running over the first North American railroad between Portland, Maine and Montreal.

1872: Britain introduces voting by secret ballot, via the Ballot Act, for elections in Britain; previously votes were made openly.

1878: Frank Hadow makes his lone Wimbledon appearance and wins, beating defending champion Spencer Gore 7-5, 6-1, 9-7.

1923: The British Matrimonial Causes Act gives women equality in divorce suits.

1962: None of the presidential candidates receives the one-third vote necessary for election in Peru; the decision moves to Congress but military forces seize and overthrow the Government.

1966: South Africa declares it will maintain control of South-West Africa after the World Court dismisses a lawsuit brought by black-ruled African states.

1969: A car driven by US Senator Edward M Kennedy plunges off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, and passenger Mary Jo Kopechne drowns.

1972: The Egyptian Government orders the Soviet Union to withdraw military advisers stationed in Egypt.

1976: For her performance on the uneven parallel bars at the Olympic Games in Montreal, Nadia Comneci of Romania becomes the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10 in an Olympic gymnastic event.

1990: Iraq accuses Kuwait of stealing its oil for the past decade.

1993: Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resigns and dissolves Parliament, leading to general elections.

1994: Terrorists bomb a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 95.

1996: Tamil rebels begin an attack on a 1,200-strong army camp in northern Sri Lanka; only 30 army soldiers survive the attack, making it the worst Government loss in the civil war.

1997: Police close half of the Caribbean island of Montserrat to keep residents away from areas most threatened by an erupting volcano.

1998: South African President Nelson Mandela celebrates his 80th birthday by marrying Graca Machel, widow of Samora Machel, the first president of Mozambique.

1999: India says it has ousted the intruders on its Kashmir frontier with Pakistan, ending the worst fighting between the countries since a 1971 war.

2001: Workers bring much of Argentina’s business activity to a halt with a nationwide strike prompted by Government spending cuts.

2002: A J P Abdul Kalam, a scientist known as the father of India’s nuclear missile programme, is elected as the nation’s 12th president.

2003: Kobe Bryant, a player for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA), is charged with felony sexual assault; the charge stemmed from a July 1 report by a 19-year-old woman that Bryant had raped her.

2004: An American accused of deserting the US Army and defecting to North Korea is hospitalised immediately after he arrives in Japan, putting himself within the reach of US authorities for the first time in 39 years.

2005: Lawmakers in Beirut approve motions to pardon Samir Geagea — a notorious anti-Syrian warlord serving a life term for killing a prime minister — and free nearly three dozen Muslim militants, some with alleged links to al-Qaeda.

2006: Nearly 300 striking doctors in Zimbabwe ignore Government demands for them to return to hospital wards, deepening a crisis in the African nation’s health system which saw qualified staff fleeing the country in droves for jobs that paid up to six times more abroad.

2007: An underground steam pipe explosion tears through a Manhattan street near Grand Central Terminal, swallowing a tow truck and killing one person amid a towering geyser of steam and flying rubble.

2009: A top US envoy calls for patience in getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear programmes, a day after Washington warned of aggressive sanctions unless the North returned to stalled disarmament talks.

2010: Pakistan and Afghanistan seal a landmark trade deal as US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pushes the two neighbours to step up civilian cooperation and work together against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

2011: Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioner resigns, a day after his boss also quit, and fresh investigations of possible police wrongdoing are launched in the phone hacking scandal that has spread from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire to the British prime minister’s office.

2012: Rebels penetrate the heart of Syria’s power elite, detonating a bomb inside a high-level crisis meeting in Damascus that kills three leaders of the regime, including President Bashar Assad’s brother-in-law and the defence minister.

2015: The Sun newspaper in Britain controversially publishes an old picture and video of Queen Elizabeth giving a Nazi salute in 1933. PayPal is spun off from eBay as a separate publicly traded company on the NASDAQ.

2018: Google is fined a record US$5.1 billion by the EU for abusing its power in the mobile phone market. Lava from the Kilauea volcano eruption destroys 700 homes to date and adds 700 acres to Big Island, confirms the Hawaii National Guard. Seventeen men are charged with the gang rape of a 12-year-old girl in Chennai, India, Turkey ends its two-year state of emergency.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

William Makepeace Thackeray, English novelist (1811-1863); Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian politician and Nazi collaborator (1887-1945); Hume Cronyn, Canadian actor (1911-2003); Nelson Mandela, South African president (1918-2013); John Glenn, US astronaut (1921-2016 ); Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet (1932-2017); Ainsworth “Roy” Rushton Shirley, Jamaican “high priest” singer of reggae (1944-2008); Vin Diesel, US actor (1967- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer