Today is the 227th day of 2023. There are 138 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1865: Sir Joseph Lister, a British surgeon, discovers the antiseptic process and reduces post-operative patient mortality to less than 15 per cent in one year.

OTHER EVENTS

1057: Macbeth is killed in battle by Malcolm, son of late king Duncan, near Aberdeen, Scotland. In 1047 Macbeth killed Duncan to grab the Scottish throne and the fight for the crown continues for generations.

1498: Grenada is sighted by Christopher Columbus; he sails past the island without landing and gives it the name Concepcion.

1635: The first recorded North American hurricane hits the Plymouth colony.

1847: With hope, pride — and some subterfuge — Charlotte Brontë sends her hefty manuscript of Jane Eyre to publishers in London on this day, then crosses her fingers.

1914: After some 10 years of work the Panama Canal opens to ships.

1935: American entertainer Will Rogers and aviation pioneer Wiley Post are killed in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska.

1936: A woman spectator leans over and kisses Adolf Hitler at the Berlin Olympic Games on this day; Hitler pretends to be amused but his guards are made to suffer later on. Americans make a clean sweep of the 3m diving medals, won by Marjorie Gestring, Katherine Rawls and Dorothy Poynton-Hill at the Berlin Olympics.

1939: The Wizard of Oz, an American musical fantasy film directed by Victor Fleming and King Vidor, premieres at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Hollywood.

1945: Korea is liberated from 35 years of colonial rule with Japan’s defeat in World War II; the peninsula is divided into the communist North and capitalist South.

1947: After three decades the Indian independence movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi, achieves its goal on this day in 1947 as a free and independent India is established, ending nearly 200 years of British rule.

1948: Syngman Rhee announces the establishment of the Republic of Korea (South Korea).

1950: A magnitude-8.4 earthquake kills 200 people and destroys 30,000 square miles (76,800 square kilometres) of land in Assam, north-east India.

1955: India’s Independence Day is marked with an invasion of Portuguese Goa where 5,000 Indians, advocates of passive resistance, walk into the fire of Portuguese police; thirteen Indians are killed and 100 injured.

1958: American rock singer-songwriter Buddy Holly weds receptionist Maria Santiago.

1960: The Republic of the Congo gains independence from France.

1965: Four days of rioting begins in Los Angeles in what becomes known as the Watts Riots and which leaves more than 30 dead and hundreds injured.

1969: The Woodstock Festival opens in Bethel, New York, on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm.

1971: Bahrain gains independence from Britain.

1974: The wife of South Korea’s President Park Chung-Hee is killed in Seoul by an assassin’s bullet evidently intended for her husband.

1975: Bangladesh’s founding father, Sheik Mujibur Rahman is assassinated alongside most of his family, in a successful military coup.

1982: South Korea frees 1,251 convicted criminals and 35 jailed political dissidents in a general amnesty, celebrating its liberation from Japanese colonial rule in August 1945.

1990: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein offers to withdraw from Iranian territory and release prisoners of war, in a bid to win favour with Tehran against the United States.

1991: The UN Security Council authorises Iraq to export US$1.6 billion worth of oil to finance desperately needed food, medicine and emergency supplies.

1994: Carlos the Jackal, a freelance terrorist, is arrested in Sudan and flown to Paris for trial; he is eventually sentenced to life in prison by a Paris court for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and an alleged informer.

1996: In a sign that Bosnia’s wartime isolation is over Sarajevo’s battered airport welcomes its first commercial flights in more than four years.

1998: A car bomb explodes in Omagh, Northern Ireland, killing 29 people and leaving more than 200 injured; the Real Irish Republican Army (Real IRA), an IRA splinter group, claims responsibility for the bombing which is the deadliest attack in Northern Ireland since the eruption of violence there in the late 1960s.

2000: A group of 100 separated family members from North Korea arrive in South Korea for temporary reunions with relatives they haven’t seen for a half-century; a group of 100 South Koreans also visits the North.

2001: The death toll in the ambush of a refugee train by Angolan rebels rises to 252 after rescue workers identify 100 more bodies.

2006: The British Defence Ministry says more than 300 British soldiers who were executed by the military for cowardice during World War I will be pardoned.

2007: India celebrates the 60th anniversary of its independence from British rule a day after Pakistan celebrates its own.

2008: Leftist Fernando Lugo becomes Paraguay’s president, ending six decades of one-party rule.

2010: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says he has never seen anything like the flood disaster in Pakistan, after surveying the devastation; he urges foreign donors to speed up assistance to the 20 million people affected.

2012: Syrian fighter jets scream through the sky over the rebel-held town of Azaz, dropping bombs that level the better part of a poor neighbourhood and wounding scores of people, many of them women and children; activists say more than 20 people are killed.

2011: A relentless barrage of bombings kill 63 people in the most sweeping and coordinated attack Iraq has seen in over a year, striking 17 cities from the northern Sunni areas to the southern Shiite heartland.

2013: Scientists at the Smithsonian announce the discovery of the olinguito, “the first carnivore species to be discovered in the American continents in 35 years”; the small arboreal animals live in the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador.

2021: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani flees the country following the departure of the last US troops, as Taliban forces enter the capital Kabul and regain control.

2022: Scotland becomes the first country in the world to make period products free for all. Solange Knowles becomes the first black woman to compose for the New York City Ballet.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Napoleon Bonaparte, French emperor (1769-1821); Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist-poet (1771-1832); (Thomas Edward) Lawrence of Arabia, British soldier and author (1888-1935); Julia Child, American TV chef and author (1912-2004); Neville Leopold Bonitto, Jamaican former first-class cricketer (1924-2013); Oscar Peterson, Canadian jazz pianist (1925-2007); England’s Princess Anne (1950- ); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Mexican film director (1963- ); Melinda Gates, American businesswoman and philanthropist (1964- ); Ben Affleck, American actor, writer and director (1972- ).

— AP/ Jamaica Observer