Today is the 209th day of 2023. There are 156 days left in the year.

TODAY HIGHLIGHT

2022: Flooding in Garrett County, eastern Kentucky, puts four million in Kentucky and surrounding states under flood alert and kills at least 37 people.

OTHER EVENTS

1540: Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex and King Henry VIII’s chief minister, is executed in England for treason on the same day Henry marries his fifth wife, Catherine Howard.

1742: The Peace of Berlin between Austria and Prussia ends the first Silesian War. (Silesia is now south-western Poland.)

1794: French revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre and 22 of his supporters are executed by guillotine before a cheering crowd in Paris.

1821: Peru’s independence from Spain is formally declared.

1866: The Danish Constitution is revised to favour the king and Upper House.

1868: The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution — which granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the Civil War — entered into force.

1904: Russia’s Minister of Interior Viacheslav Plehve is assassinated by a socialist.

1914: World War I begins when Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

1937: The Japanese seize Beijing in China and subsequently occupy it until 1945.

1942: USSR leader Joseph Stalin issues Order No 227 in response to alarming German advances into Russia; under the order all those who retreat or otherwise leave their positions without orders to do so will be immediately killed.

1945: A US Army bomber crashes into Empire State Building in New York City, killing 14 people.

1959: The People’s National Party in Jamaica wins the country’s fourth general election. Hawaiians vote to send the first Chinese-American, Hiram L Fong, to the US Senate and the first Japanese-American, Daniel K Inouye, to the House of Representatives, in preparation for statehood,.

1976: An earthquake kills more than 240,000 people and almost completely destroys the city of T’ang-shan in north-eastern China.

1986: A car stuffed with explosives rips through a densely populated residential Christian area of east Beirut, killing at least 32 and wounding 140.

1989: India agrees to pull its peacekeeping troops out of Sri Lanka two years after pushing through a ceasefire between separatist Tamil Tiger rebels and the Sri Lankan Government.

1991:Spanish cyclist Miguel Indurain won his first of five consecutive Tour de France titles.

1992: The UN Security Council authorises an urgent airlift of food and medicine for Somalia and demands the cooperation of warring factions.

1996: A 69-day prison hunger strike that killed 12 inmates in Turkey ends after concessions are made by the Government on prison conditions.

1997: Fierce fighting in Afghanistan sends villagers fleeing, but the Taliban Islamic army holds fast to its positions outside the capital of Kabul.

1999: After weeks of mass pro-democracy demonstrations Iranian President Mohammed Khatami makes his first public appearance, pledging to continue a reformist agenda; hardliners oppose his programme for greater political and social rights and attempt to retake control.

2000: Peruvians furious with the presidential inauguration of Alberto Fujimori protest in the streets of Lima, setting government buildings ablaze and throwing rocks; at least five die and dozens are injured.

2001: Peru’s former spy chief, Vladimir Montesinos, tells the ex-wife of former President Alberto Fujimori that the autocratic leader ordered her to be killed.

2005: The Irish Republican Army announces it is renouncing violence as a political weapon and pledges to resume disarmament — a potential breakthrough after years of deadlock.

2007: The Liberian Government lifts a self-imposed moratorium on the mining, sale and export of diamonds that had been in place for six years since the stones came under UN sanctions when ex-President Charles Taylor’s Government was accused of using revenues to fuel war in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

2008: Suicide bombers strike a Shiite Muslim pilgrimage in Baghdad and a Kurdish protest rally in northern Iraq, killing at least 57 people and wounding nearly 300.

2009: Iraqi forces raid a camp housing members of an Iranian opposition group north of Baghdad in a move that runs contrary to US wishes and prompts clashes.

2010: Lawmakers in the region of Catalonia thrust a sword deep into Spain’s centuries-old tradition of bullfighting, banning the blood-soaked pageant that had fascinated artists and writers from Goya to Hemingway.

2012: Ye Shiwen of China sets the world record in the women’s 400m individual medley (4:28.43) to take the gold medal at the London Olympics.

2013: A total of 39 people are killed after a bus veers off a bridge in Avellino Province, Italy.

2014: Israel criticises John Kerry’s proposed ceasefire, stating that no ceasefire deal will be accepted without the destruction of tunnels leading from Gaza to Israel and the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip

2016: The earliest evidence of cancer is found in 1.7 million-year-old toe fossil from Swartkrans Cave, South Africa; the discovery is published in the South African Journal of Science.

2017: The Pakistan Supreme Court rules corruption accusations against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif are enough to remove him from office.