Today is the 299th day of 2023. There are 66 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

2014: Ukrainians overwhelmingly vote in several pro-Western parties in a landmark parliamentary election, another nudge in the former Soviet nation’s drift away from Russia.

1911: Sir Donald Sangster, the second prime minster of Jamaica, is born this day.

OTHER EVENTS

1863: The Red Cross begins when an international conference commences in Geneva aimed at improving medical conditions on battlefields.

1881: The most famous shoot-out in the Wild West unfolds at the OK Corral and involves lawmen (including Wyatt Earp) and cowboys; Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton killed.

1952: Hattie McDaniel, the first African American actress to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in Gone With The Wind, dies this day of breast cancer at age 57; McDaniel was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975.

1960: Gordon House becomes the offical meeting place of the Jamaican Government, replacing Headquarters House.

1970: Following an absence of more than three years, American boxer Muhammad Ali returns to the ring, defeating Jerry Quarry; Ali had been barred from fighting after he refused to be inducted into the US Army during the Vietnam War.

1975: Anwar Sadat becomes the first Egyptian president to pay an official visit to the United States.

1977: The last natural case of smallpox is discovered in Merca district, Somalia; reagrded as the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, this is considered the most spectacular vaccination success.

1979: South Korean President Park Chung Hee is assassinated by his lifelong friend Kim Jae Kyu, head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who was sentenced to death for his actions.

1984: The Terminator, directed by James Cameron and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, is released in the US.

1987: US President Ronald Reagan announces an embargo on all US imports from Iran because of its “unprovoked attacks” on American military forces and merchant ships.

1990: President Alberto Fujimori announces a plan to employ free market incentives as a way to turn Peruvian farmers away from their economic dependence on growing coca, the plant used to make cocaine.

1999: Britain’s House of Lords votes to end the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in Britain’s upper chamber of Parliament.

2000: Supporters of Ivory Coast’s president-elect and his political rival engage in bloody clashes in Abidjan over a demand for new presidential elections.

2001: US President George W Bush signs a sweeping anti-terrorism Bill into law, giving police and intelligence agencies vast new powers.

2002: Russian troops pump a gas intended to render people unconscious into the Moscow theatre in which Chechen guerrillas are holding the audience and performers hostage; the troops then storm the theatre, freeing most of the 750 people, but at least 127 are killed by the disabling gas.

2019: A raid by US Special Forces kills ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria. Robert Evans, American film producer (The Godfather, inter alia) dies this day at age 89.

2020: Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga says the country will becomes carbon-neutral by 2050.

2021: A UN report says current climate pledges have put the world on course for a “catastrophic” average 2.7-degree Celsius temperature rise this century, ahead of the Glasgow climate summit.

2022: Thousands of protesters in Saqez, Iran, defy security forces to mark the 40-day Arba’een (period of mourning) for Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who died in police custody for not wearing a hijab properly.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Domenico Scarlatti, Italian composer (1685-1757); Georges Jacques Danton, French revolutionary leader (1759-1794); William Charles Wentworth, Australian explorer (1790-1872); Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, deposed shah of Iran (1919-1980); Bob Hoskins, British actor (1942-2014); Hillary Rodham Clinton, former US secretary of state and former US first lady (1947- ); Keith Urban, Australian country singer (1967- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer