Today is the 270th day of 2023. There are 95 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2001: In Zug, Switzerland, an unhinged man armed with a standard, Swiss Army-issue assault rifle bursts into a cantonal Parliament meeting and opens fire, killing 14 legislators; it is the worst mass murder in Switzerland’s history.

OTHER EVENTS

70: The walls of the upper city of Jerusalem are battered down by the Roman army.

1290: An earthquake in the Gulf of Chihli (Bohai Sea), near China, reportedly kills 100,000 people.

1540: Pope Paul approves Ignatius of Loyola’s proposal to create the Society of Jesus, or Jesuit Order.

1590: Pope Urban VII dies 13 days after being chosen as the pope, making his reign the shortest papacy in history.

1810: During the Battle of Bussaco, Arthur Wellesley’s Anglo-Portuguese Army defeats a larger French force led by Marshal André Masséna, with the French suffering 4,500 dead and wounded.

1821: Mexican revolutionary forces, led by Agustín de Iturbide, occupy Mexico City as the Spanish withdraw, bringing an end to the Mexican War of Independence.

1822: French scholar Jean-François Champollion announces he has deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone.

1825: George Stephenson’s Locomotion No 1 becomes the first steam locomotive to carry passengers on a public rail line, the Stockton and Darlington Railway in England.

1905: Physics journal Annalen der Physik publishes Albert Einstein’s paper Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?, introducing the equation E=mc².

1908: Henry Ford’s first Ford Model T automobile leaves the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Michigan.

1923: Martial law is declared in Germany. New York Yankee Lou Gehrig hits the first of his 493 home runs.

1939: Warsaw, Poland, surrenders to the Germans after 19 days of resistance in World War II.

1951: The West German Bundestag pledges restitution to Jews for crimes perpetrated by the Nazis; no exact amount is decided, but West Germany is to repay about US$600 million in goods.

1955: Egyptian Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser announces that Czechoslovakia has signed a barter agreement to exchange arms in return for Egyptian cotton.

1959: A typhoon batters the Japanese island of Honshu, killing almost 5,000 people.

1968: France bars Britain’s entry into the European Common Market.

1990: Britain and Iran restore diplomatic relations after ties were broken off in March 1989 following the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuance of a death sentence against writer Salman Rushdie.

1993: The UN Security Council bans sales of arms and fuel to the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) because the rebel movement failed to stop fighting the Government and renegotiate a 1991 peace settlement to end the country’s civil war.

1994: American soldiers take over the Haitian Parliament as they continue to spread out over the country.

1995: The three rivals for control of Bosnia-Herzegovina — Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and the Moslem-dominated Bosnian Government — reach an agreement to establish a collective presidency and Parliament in Bosnia.

1996: Islamist Taliban rebels seize control of Kabul and quickly hang former President Najibullah.

1998: Gerhard Schroeder and his Social Democrats win German elections after 16 years of conservative rule under Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

1999: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak wins his fourth six-year term, taking nearly 94 per cent of the vote in a referendum on his presidency.

2000: The legislature of Iran votes to lift the prohibition on unmarried women attending school outside Iran; approval by the Guardian Council is also needed for the ban to be rescinded. A Greek ferry strikes rocks and sinks, killing 75 people; the ship’s captain and crew are detained by police when some survivors say they were watching a soccer match on television as the ship went aground.

2004: The top prosecutor for Sierra Leone’s war crimes court accuses former Liberian President Charles Taylor of recruiting fighters in the country he once led and working to destabilise other West African nations.

2005: Afghanistan’s Interior Minister Ahmad Ali Jalali resigns after expressing frustration over the involvement of senior officials in the country’s booming drug trade.

2006: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signs into law a sweeping global warming initiative that imposes the first cap on greenhouse gas emissions in the US.

2007: Soldiers fire into fleeing crowds on the bloodiest day in the month-long protest against Myanmar’s junta; tens of thousands demonstrate for the 10th-straight day in Yangon; and security forces also raid several monasteries overnight.

2008: Chinese astronaut Zhai Zhigang completes China’s first spacewalk.

2009: Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard says successfully test-firing short-range missiles in drills is meant to show Tehran is prepared to crush any military threat from another country.

2010: Pakistan disputes NATO’s claim that its forces have the right to hot pursuit across the Afghan border after coalition helicopters launch air strikes that kill more than 50 militants who had escaped into Pakistan following an attack on an Afghan security post.

2011: A convicted killer who escaped from a US prison in 1970 is captured in Portugal after more than 40 years as a fugitive.

2013: Seven people are killed in mosque bombings in Baghdad, Iraq.

2015: A ‘supermoon’ coincides with a lunar eclipse, creating a “blood moon” over much of the earth.

2022: Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinz Abe receives a State funeral at Nippon Budokan Arena, Tokyo, after he was assassinated in July.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Cosimo de Medici, Italian founder of the Medici dynasty (1389-1464); King Louis XIII of France (1601-1643); Samuel Adams, US revolutionary leader (1722-1803); Louis Botha, first prime minister of South Africa (1862-1919); Robbie Shakespeare, acclaimed Jamaican bassist (Sly and Robbie) (1953-2021); Gwyneth Paltrow, actress (1972- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer