Today is the 264th day of 2023. There are 101 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1982: National Football League (NFL) players begin a 57-day strike.

OTHER EVENTS

46 BC: Julius Caesar celebrates the first of four triumphal processions in Rome — over Gaul, Egypt, Pontus and Africa — with leader of the Gauls, Vercingetorix led in chains.

1348: Jews in Zurich, Switzerland, are accused of poisoning wells.

1513: At 17 months James V is crowned king of Scotland in the Chapel Royal at Stirling Castle

1677: Jan and Nicolaas van der Heyden patent the fire hose.

1780: Traitor US General Benedict Arnold gives British Major John André plans to West Point.

1784: The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser becomes the first successful daily newspaper in the United States.

1823: The angel, or resurrected being, Moroni appears to Joseph Smith Jr — of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and instructs him to restore God’s church on earth.

1827: The angel Moroni gives Joseph Smith Jr a record of gold plates, one-third of which Smith translates into The Book of Mormon.

1872: James H Conyers becomes the first African American admitted to the US Naval Academy (USNA) at Annapolis.

1885: The Dutch demonstrate for a general voting right.

1893: Frank Duryea drives the first American-made, gas-propelled vehicle.

1898: Empress Dowager Cixi seizes power and ends the Hundred Days’ Reform in China, imprisoning the Guangxu Emperor.

1913: The first aerobatic manoeuvre, a sustained inverted flight, is performed in France.

1922: US President Warren G Harding signs a joint resolution of approval to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

1925: St Andrew High School for Girls is established in Jamaica.

1930: Johann Ostermeyer patents the flashbulb.

1934: A typhoon strikes Honshu Island Japan, killing 4,000.

1939: Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich discusses, in Berlin, a final solution regarding the Jews.

1942: Hostages totalling 116 are executed by the Nazis in Paris.

1949: Chinese Communist leaders proclaim the People’s Republic of China.

1972: Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos imposes martial law in the Philippines, beginning a period of harsh authoritarian rule.

1981: Belize gains its independence from the United Kingdom.

2013: Al-Shabaab militants launch a terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi; three days later Ghanian poet and novelist Kofi Awoonor is among the 65 dead.

2016: Three genetic studies published in the journal Nature conclude all non-Africans descended from one migration out of Africa 50-80,000 years previously; a genomic study, also published in Nature, finds the Australian Aboriginals to be the oldest-known civilisation on earth.

2017: Research regarding discovery of the first brainless animal that sleeps, the Cassiopea jellyfish, is published in Current Biology by Caltech scientists.

2018: A fossil of Dickinsonia, from White Sea, Russia, is proven to be the oldest-known animal fossil at 558 million years.

2019: The skies turn red over Jambi province, Indonesia, as the worst illegal forest fires since 2015 burn more than 800,000 acres, creating respiratory problems for a million people.

2021: At the United Nations Joe Biden pledges to double financial aid to developing countries, and President Xi Jinping says China will stop coal-fired projects abroad. McDonald’s announces plans to “drastically” reduce plastic in its Happy Meals by 2025. (The meals make McDonald’s one of the largest toy distributors in the world.)

2022: Western sources (The New York Times) put the figure between the number of Russian soldiers who died fighting in Ukraine at 25,000-over 80,000; Vladimir Putin announces partial mobilisation of the Russian population, drafting between 300,000 and 1.2 million men to fight in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which prompts demonstrations around the country.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana (1909-1972); Stephen King, American novelist (1947- ); Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan (1954-2022); Leonard Cohen, Canadian musician and author 1934;

– AP/Jamaica Observer