Today is the 234th day of 2023. There are131 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1950: Jamaican George Rhoden sets a world record in the 400 metres with a time of 45.80 in Eskilstuna, Sweden.

OTHER EVENTS

1485: Henry Tudor’s forces defeat and kill English King Richard III during the last battle in the Wars of the Roses; Richard is the last English monarch to die in battle.

1567: The Spanish Duke of Alba establishes a “Council of Blood” and begins a reign of terror as military governor in the Netherlands.

1642: The English Civil War begins between Royalists and Parliament when King Charles I brands Parliament and its soldiers as traitors.

1654: Jacob Barsimson, said to be the first Jewish immigrant to America, lands at New Amsterdam.

1788: The British establish a settlement in Sierra Leone, Africa, as an asylum for freed slaves.

1910: Korea is annexed by Japan, and Japanese colonial rule in Korea begins.

1911: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting is stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, France; it is recovered in Italy in 1913.

1932: BBC begins experimental regular TV broadcasts.

1941: German authorities in Paris warn they will shoot French hostages if attacks on Germans in the city continue.

1945: The Iranian army kills seven rebellious officers and men who were planning to lead an attack on the Russian-garrisoned city of Meshed.

1957: US Secretary of State Dulles gives permission to 24 news organisations to send correspondents to communist China.

1958: US President Dwight Eisenhower offers to halt US nuclear tests for one year (beginning October 31, 1958) on condition that the Soviet Union refrains from further testing and agrees to open negotiations for an international nuclear test control system.

1960: Negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, for a treaty to ban tests of nuclear weapons are adjourned for five weeks after the US warns that talks cannot continue indefinitely.

1963: Five exiled relatives of King Saud, including his half-brother Prince Talal, petition the Saudi Arabia Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, for permission to return to Saudi Arabia, after being exiled in 1962 following their establishment of the Saudi Liberation Front in Cairo, in opposition to the king.

1966: The US Department of Labor reports 1966 as the most inflationary year since 1957.

1970: North Korea rejects the proposal for reunification made on August 15 by South Korean President Park Chung Hee.

1972: Rhodesia is asked to withdraw from the 20th Summer Olympic Games because of its racial policies. The deaths of 16 alleged guerrillas during an attempted prison break in southern Argentina triggers demonstrations in several Argentine cities.

1981: A Taiwanese domestic jetliner explodes in mid-air and bursts into flames, killing all 110 people on-board.

1989: Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers strikes out Rickey Henderson to become the first MLB pitcher to register 5,000 strikeouts. The 1940 occupation and annexation of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia by the Soviet Union is officially declared invalid by a commission of the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet (Parliament); massive demonstrations the next day for independent statehood are held on the 50th anniversary of the non-aggression pact signed by Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler which included secret protocols that paved the way for Soviet annexation of the Baltic states and eastern Poland, as the Baltic states were formally incorporated into the USSR in August 1940.

1991: A Yugoslav federal official acknowledges that a truce ordered in Croatia on August 7 has collapsed and 70 people have died in fighting since.

1993: Former Prime Minister Kasdi Merbah of Algeria, an advocate of dialogue with violent Islamic extremists, is assassinated in an ambush that also kills his son, brother and two others.

1996: Monsoon rains and a snowstorm sweep across the Himalayas during a Hindu pilgrimage to a mountain temple, killing more than 200; tens of thousands are stranded. US President Bill Clinton signs a welfare reform Bill that, he contends, would “make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life”; most families that had been on welfare for a total of five years would be denied benefits, heads of households who failed to find jobs within two years would have their benefits reduced, most welfare benefits would be denied to legal immigrants who were not citizens.

1998: Angolan troops enter the war in Congo on the side of President Laurent Kabila, apparently saving the capital Kinshasa.

2000: Three UN aid workers are severely injured in an attack by pro-Indonesian militias in West Timor; the next day the United Nations high commissioner for refugees suspends operations in that location.

2002: About 45 kilogrammes (100 pounds) of weapons-grade uranium is transferred from Yugoslavia to Russia for conversion to commercial power generation use and is considered a potential target for terrorist groups or rogue states seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

2003: The Nigerian Red Cross reports that 100 people have been killed and 1,000 others injured in five days of ethnic clashes in the southern port city of Warri.

2004: The Transitional Federal Assembly, Somalia’s new provisional legislature, is sworn in at Nairobi, Kenya, where peace negotiations among the warring factions in Somalia had been taking place.

2005: Saboteurs trigger multiple blackouts that halt Iraq’s entire oil export capacity, a move that costs Baghdad US$4.5 million per hour and removes 1.5 million barrels a day from the world market.

2006: A Russian passenger jet crashes in Ukraine during a thunderstorm, just minutes after sending a distress signal, killing all 170 people on-board, including dozens of children.

2007: Fourteen US soldiers are killed when a Black Hawk helicopter crashes during a night-time mission in northern Iraq.

2008: After two days of fighting in which at least 70 people died, Islamist militants take control of the port city of Kismaayo in Somali.

2009: Britain rejects any suggestion it struck a deal with Libya to free the Lockerbie bomber — questions that arose when the leader of the North African nation, Moammar Gadhafi, publicly thanked British officials as he embraced the man convicted of killing 270 people in the 1988 airline bombing.

2010: All 33 Chilean miners trapped deep underground for 17 days are found alive.

2011: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is nowhere to be found as his 42-year rule teeters on the brink of collapse following months of NATO air strikes that left his Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli largely demolished, and which saw most of his security forces fleeing or surrendering when rebel forces took control of most of the city.

2012: Adherents of a religious sect in western Mexico physically block schoolteachers from entering their walled community, setting up one of the most high-profile confrontations between religious and civil authorities in Mexico since the 1940s.

2014: Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto inaugurates a 5,000-member gendarmerie, a new division of the federal police that is intended to help reduce persistent violent crime.

2021: Josephine Baker becomes the first black woman to be interred in the Panthéon in Paris, according to the French Government.

2022: One of world’s longest school closures ends in the Philippines as schools reopen for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, after only online learning.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Claude Debussy, French composer (1862-1918); Leni Riefenshtal, German film-maker (1902-2003); Deng Xiaoping, Chinese leader (1904-1997); Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer (1908-2004); Arthur Sackler, US physician (1913-1987); Dua Lipa, British-Albanian pop singer (1995- )

– AP / Jamaica Observer