Today is the 257th day of 2023. There are 108 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2005: A UN summit marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations opens with calls for the world to restore confidence in the United Nations after scandals that have seen its reputation tarnished.

OTHER EVENTS

1613: Turkey invades Hungary.

1752: Britain adopts Gregorian calendar.

1770: Freedom of the press is allowed in Denmark.

1812: Napoleon Bonaparte enters Moscow and Russians set fires throughout the city.

1814: Francis Scott Key writes America’s national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner.

1829: Treaty of Adrianople ends Russo-Turkish war.

1854: Allied forces land unopposed on the Russian Crimea.

1864: Japan agrees to truce following attack by British, French and Dutch fleets in Shimonoseki Straits in reprisal for Japan’s closing of ports and expelling of foreigners.

1901: US President William McKinley dies in Buffalo, New York, of gunshot wounds inflicted by an assassin. Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt succeeds him.

1911: Peter Stolypin, Russian premier, is fatally shot by a revolutionary.

1918: Austria-Hungary makes peace offer to Allies in World War I.

1923: Miguel Primo de Rivera assumes dictatorship in Spain.

1927: Modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan dies in Nice, France, when her scarf becomes entangled in a wheel of the car in which she was riding.

1948: A ground-breaking ceremony takes place in New York at the site of the United Nations’ world headquarters.

1959: The Soviet space probe Luna 2 becomes the first man-made object to reach the moon.

1960: Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is founded.

1972: US Senate approves US-Soviet agreement to freeze a major part of their offensive nuclear arsenals for five years.

1975: Pope Paul VI declares Mother Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton the first US-born saint.

1982: Lebanese Christians massacre hundreds of Palestinians after their leader, President-elect Bashir Gemayel, is killed by a bomb; Princess Grace of Monaco, formerly actress Grace Kelly, dies at age 52 of injuries from a car crash the day before.

1991: United Nations weapons inspectors report Iraq would have been capable of building two or three atomic weapons a year by the mid-1990s, had its nuclear production facilities not been destroyed during the Persian Gulf war.

1993: Israel and Jordan sign an “agenda for peace” in Washington. One day after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their interim accord for Palestinian self-rule.

1996: Bosnia holds its first post-war election.

2000: Cheng Kejie, a former deputy chairman of China’s parliament, is executed for corruption. He was convicted of taking nearly US$5 million in bribes.

2004: Senior Israeli Cabinet ministers approve cash advances of up to US$100,000 to Jewish settlers who willingly leave their homes in the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements.

2005: A UN summit marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations opens with calls for the world to restore confidence in the United Nations after scandals that have seen its reputation tarnished.

2006: Germany ordains its first rabbis since World War II — an event hailed as a milestone in the rebirth of Jewish life in the nation.

2007: Vladimir Putin rewrites the rules for Russia’s closely watched presidential succession and names his new prime minister, Viktor Zubkov. Defence Secretary Robert Gates raises the possibility of cutting US troop levels in Iraq to 100,000 by the end of 2008, well beyond the cuts President George W Bush approved. In Iraq, some 1,500 mourners call for revenge as they buried the leader of the Sunni revolt against al-Qaeda, Adbul-Sattar Abu Risha, who had been assassinated in a bombing claimed by an al-Qaeda front.

2009: In a case that altered airport security worldwide, three British Muslims are imprisoned for at least 30 years each for a plot to kill thousands by blowing up trans-Atlantic airliners with liquid explosives hidden in soda bottles.

2012: Fury over an anti-Islam film spreads across the Muslim world, with deadly clashes near Western embassies in Tunisia and Sudan, an American fast-food restaurant set ablaze in Lebanon and international peacekeepers attacked in Sinai. A French gossip magazine’s publication of topless photos of Prince William’s wife, Kate, prompts an immediate (and still pending) lawsuit from the royal couple and statements of outrage from palace officials.

2013: A diplomatic breakthrough on securing and destroying Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile averts the threat of US military action.

2014: Diplomats from around the world press for a coherent global strategy to combat Islamic State group extremists after they behead yet another Western hostage.

2016: Hillary Clinton’s campaign releases a letter from her doctor saying the Democratic presidential nominee is “recovering well” from pneumonia and remained “fit to serve as President of the United States”. President Barack Obama said the US is lifting economic sanctions and restoring trade benefits to former pariah state Myanmar as he met with former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s de facto leader. Tyre King, a 13-year-old boy, is fatally shot by Columbus, Ohio, police after authorities said he pulled a BB gun from his pants.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Maria Luigi Cherubini, Italian composer (1760-1842); Alexander von Humboldt, German astronomer-explorer (1769-1859); Ivan Pavlov, Russian physiologist (1849-1936); Alice Stone Blackwell, US women’s suffragist (1857-1950); Margaret Sanger, US birth control pioneer (1879-1966); Zoe Caldwell, Australian actress (1933-2020); Sam Neill, Irish actor (1947- ); Amy Winehouse, singer/songwriter (1983-2011); Dmitry Medvedev, Russian prime minister (1965- ); Tyler Perry, actor-writer-director-producer (1969- ); Nas, rapper (1973- ); Mikey Smith, Jamaican dub poet (1954-1983)

— AP/Jamaica Observer