Today is the 243rd day of 2023. There are 122 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1971: Cuba terminates the airlift that had brought 246,000 Cuban refugees from Havana to Florida since December 1965.

OTHER EVENTS

1290: Jews are exiled from England by proclamation of King Edward I.

1876: Turkey’s Sultan Murad V is deposed on plea of insanity and is succeeded by Abdul Hamid II.

1886: In one of America’s worst disasters, 110 people are killed when an earthquake rocks Charleston, South Carolina.

1888: Mary Ann Nicholls is found murdered in London’s East End. She is the first victim of Jack the Ripper.

1939: The first issue of Marvel Comics, featuring the Human Torch, was published by Timely Publications in New York.

1954: Hurricane Carol hits the north-eastern Atlantic states; Connecticut, Rhode Island and part of Massachusetts bear the brunt of the storm, which resulted in some 70 deaths.

1957: Malaysia gains independence as Federation of Malaya.

1962: Trinidad and Tobago becomes an independent nation within British Commonwealth.

1965: The US House of Representatives join the Senate in voting to establish the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

1969: Boxer Rocky Marciano dies in a light airplane crash in Iowa, a day before his 46th birthday.

1972: American swimmer Mark Spitz wins his fourth and fifth gold medals in the 100-metre butterfly and 800-metre freestyle relay at the Munich Summer Olympics; Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut wins gold medals in floor exercise and the balance beam.

1977: Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith’s party wins the election and gains all 50 white seats in Parliament. The vote gives Smith a mandate to negotiate with black leaders on greater political representation for the country’s six million blacks.

1980: Polish labour leaders sign agreements with Communist Government establishing for first time in a Soviet-bloc nation the rights to strike and to establish free trade unions.

1986: Eighty-two people are killed when an Aeromexico jetliner and a small private plane collide over Cerritos, California. The Soviet passenger ship Admiral Nakhimov collides with a merchant vessel in the Black Sea, causing both to sink; up to 448 people reportedly died.

1991: Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan become the ninth and tenth Soviet republics to declare independence.

1994: Irish Republican Army declares an open-ended ceasefire in its 24-year campaign against British rule of Northern Ireland.

1997: Prince Charles takes Princess Diana home for the last time, escorting the body of his former wife to a Britain that was shocked, grief-stricken and angered by her death in a Paris traffic accident earlier that day.

1998: North Korea launches a new, more powerful long-range ballistic missile that crosses over Japan’s main island and crashes into the Pacific Ocean. The test draws strong protests from Japan and the United States.

2005: Panicked by rumours of a suicide bomber, thousands of Shiite pilgrims break into a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad during a religious procession, crushing one another or plunging into the Tigris river. Nearly 1,000 die, mostly women and children.

2006: Police in Norway recover the Edvard Munch masterpieces The Scream and Madonna, two years after masked gunmen grabbed the national art treasures in front of stunned visitors at an Oslo museum.

2007: The 25th asnniversary of “Elk Cloner”, regarded as the first virus to hit personal computers worldwide.

2008: Practitioners of the ancient Greek religion gather among the ruined temples at the Acropolis, praying to Athena to stop the removal of sculptures and pieces of the temples to museums. Participants claim it is the first such gathering since the religion was abolished late in the 4th century.

2013: Short of support at home and allies abroad, President Barack Obama steps back from a missile strike against Syria and instead asks Congress to support a strike against President Bashar Assad’s regime for suspected use of chemical weapons. British television interviewer David Frost, 74, dies aboard a cruise ship bound for the Mediterranean.

2017: Rescuers begin a block-by-block search of tens of thousands of Houston homes, looking for anyone who might have been left behind in the floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey. The Trump Administration orders Russia to close its consulate in San Francisco and offices in Washington and New York, intensifying tensions between Washington and Moscow; Russia is given 48 hours to comply. Iraq’s prime minister said the northern town of Tal Afar has been “fully liberated” from the Islamic State group after a nearly two-week operation. The scope of the fake accounts scandal at Wells Fargo expanded, with the bank now saying 3.5 million accounts may have been opened without customers’ permission.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Theophile Gautier, French author (1811-1872); Maria Montessori, Italian doctor and educator (1870-1952); William Saroyan, US writer (1908-1981); Buddy Hackett, US actor/comedian (1924-2003); Richard Gere, US actor (1949- ); Dorothy Scott, Jamaican Olympian (1957- ); Christopher Tucker, American stand-up comedian and actor (1971- )

– AP