Today is the 17th day of 2024. There are 349 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1947: Una Morris, the Jamaican Olympian who competed in 1964, 1968 and 1972, is born this day.

OTHER EVENTS

1773: Captain James Cook becomes the first to cross the Antarctic Circle.

1871: Determined to improve public transportation in San Francisco, wire manufacturer Andrew Hallidie patents the cable car.

1873: A group of Modoc warriors defeats the United States Army in the First Battle of the Stronghold, a part of the Modoc War.

1893: Hawaii’s monarchy is overthrown as a group of businessmen and sugar planters force Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate.

1916: Rodman Wanamaker, at Taplow Club, Martinique Hotel, New York City, organises a lunch to discuss forming a golfers’ association (later the PGA).

1917: The United States purchases three of the Virgin Islands — St Thomas, St John, and St Croix — from Denmark for US$25 million.

1920: The first day of the prohibition of alcohol comes into effect in the US as a result of the 18th Amendment to the constitution.

1929: In newspaper comic strip Thimble Theatre cartoon character Popeye debuts.

1945: Soviet troops and Polish forces liberate Warsaw, more than five years after it fell to Nazi Germany. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews, disappears in Hungary while in Soviet custody.

1977: Roman Catholic schools in South Africa begin admitting black and coloured (mixed-race) students into formerly all-white schools, thereby breaching the Government’s policy of racial segregation. Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, 36, is shot by a firing squad at Utah State Prison, ending a de facto nationwide moratorium on capital punishment in the US that had lasted for nearly a decade.

1992: Israel begins enforcing a sweeping curfew on Palestinians, from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.

1993: The United States unleashes a shower of Tomahawk cruise missiles against a nuclear fabricating plant 13 kilometres (8 miles) from Baghdad, delivering the point that Iraq must comply with UN resolutions.

1995: A large-scale earthquake strikes the Osaka-Kobe (Hanshin) metropolitan area, killing an estimated 6,400 people and causing major damage.

1996: Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual leader of Egypt’s main Muslim radical faction, is sentenced to life in prison by a US court for plotting to blow up the United Nations and other New York-area landmarks.

1997: In Dublin, with little fanfare, a court grants the first divorce in Ireland’s history.

1999: Fighting erupts near a village in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, where 45 ethnic Albanians were massacred a few days earlier, forcing mourners to halt funeral services for the slain and flee.

2000: In a demonstration in Charleston, South Carolina, on Martin Luther King Jr Day, some 46,000 marchers in the South Carolina capital demand an end to the flying of the Civil War-era Confederate flag over the state capitol, and call for tourists and others to boycott the state until the flag, considered by many African Americans a symbol of slavery, comes down.

2001: The School of the Americas, run by the US Army and famous for having trained Manuel Noriega and Anastasio Somoza, reopens with the new name: Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation; it had closed in December 2000.

2002: Two neo-Nazi youth are convicted for the stabbing death of a 15-year-old, in the first racially motivated fatal crime on record in Norway.

2003: Rescue workers digging into thick mud find the bodies of three children in south-eastern Brazil, bringing the death toll from mudslides to 36.

2004: About 10,000 Muslim women march through Paris to protest against France’s plan to ban head coverings from public schools.

2006: The US Supreme Court upholds an Oregon law that allows physician-assisted suicide for people who are terminally ill.

2008: American-born chess player Bobby Fischer, who at 14 became the youngest grandmaster in history when he received the title in 1958, dies at age 64 in Reykjavík, Iceland.

2011: Tunisia’s prime minister announces a national unity government, allowing opposition into the country’s leadership for the first time — a bid to quell civil unrest following the ouster of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

2013: A total 106 people are massacred by Syrian army forces in Homs.

2017: The Nigerian military mistakenly bombs a refugee camp, killing more than 70 in Rann, Borno State.

2019: China executes Cai Dongjia, the country’s “godfather of crystal meth” from Boshe, Guangdong. Indian spiritual leader Ram Rahim Singh and two aides are sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a journalist who exposed sexual abuse at the sect.

2021: Russian Opposition leader Alexey Navalny is arrested immediately on his return to Russia, after recovering from nerve-agent poisoning.

2023: Italy’s most wanted mobster, Matteo Messina Denaro, is arrested at a private clinic in Palermo after being on the run for 30 years.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Leonhard Fuchs, German physician (1501-1566); Benjamin Franklin, US statesman and scientist (1706-1790); Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist (1860-1904); Alphonse Capone, US gangster (1899-1947); Betty White, US actress, (1922-2022); James Earl Jones, US actor (1931- ); Muhammad Ali, US boxer (1947-2016); Jim Carrey, Canadian actor (1962- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer