This is the 30th day of 2024. There are 336 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTs

1992: Inventor Ray Kurzweil publishes his first book The Age of Intelligent Machines on artificial intelligence, predicting the popularity of the Internet.

2019: Russian Senator Rauf Arashukov is arrested within parliament on two murder charges.

2012: Paramilitary police in northern Senegal open fire on men and women protesting President Abdoulaye Wade’s plan to run for a third term, killing two.

OTHER EVENTS

1349: The Jews of Freilsburg Germany are massacred.

1487: Bell chimes are invented.

1647: After nine months of negotiations, Scottish Presbyterians sell the captured Charles I to the English Parliament for around £100,000.

1649: Charles I, king of Great Britain and Ireland and whose authoritarian rule and quarrels with Parliament provoked the English Civil War, is executed in London by beheading.

1661: Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, is ritually executed after having been dead for two years.

1667: The Truce of Andrusovo ends the Thirteen Years’ War between Russia and Poland.

1790: A lifeboat is first tested at sea, by Mr Greathead the inventor.

1797: The US Congress refuses to accept the first petition from an African American.

1815: The burned US Library of Congress is re-established with Thomas Jefferson’s 6,500 volumes.

1835: Demented painter Richard Lawrence tries to assassinate US President Andrew Jackson.

1924: The first-ever Winter Olympics takes place in Chamonix, France.

1933: President Paul von Hindenburg names Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany.

1945: The greatest maritime disaster in history occurrs as German ocean liner Wilhelm Gustloff
is sunk by a Soviet submarine, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 people.

1948: Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated by Hindu extremist Nathuram Godse, in the garden of the New Delhi home he was visiting

1962: The UN General Assembly adopts an Asian-African resolution, calling on Portugal to halt repressive measures against Angola.

1965: The world’s largest-ever State funeral at the time is held for Winston Churchill at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

1969: The Beatles perform their last live gig, a 42-minute concert on the roof of the Apple Corps headquarters in London, England.

1972: Thirteen Roman Catholic civil rights marchers are shot to death by British soldiers in Northern Ireland on what becomes known as Bloody Sunday.

1979: White Rhodesians approve a new constitution to eventually give blacks control of the nation now known as Zimbabwe.

1990: The Communist Party loses the majority in the Czech Parliament which it dominated for four decades.

1994: The United States grants a limited visa to Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the Northern Irish political party that supports the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

2000: In Berlin, Germany, hundreds of neo-Nazis demonstrate at the site of a planned memorial to Holocaust victims, and march through the Brandenburg Gate where Nazi troops once held processions.

2002: The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland agrees to pay US$10 million to children sexually abused by clergy over the past few decades.

2004: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announces that UN staffers can receive benefits for their gay or lesbian partners if their country recognises same-sex marriages or domestic partnerships.

2010: China suspends military exchanges with the United States, threatens unprecedented sanctions against American defence companies, and warns that cooperation will suffer, after Washington announces US$6.4 billion in planned arms sales to Taiwan.

2014: An appeals court in Florence upholds the guilty verdict against US student Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend for the 2007 murder of her British roommate.

2016: Angelique Kerber of Germany wins her first major title by beating Serena Williams 6-4, 3-6, 6-4 in Australian Open women’s tennis.

2017: Scientists in central China reveal the oldest known human ancestor — a 540-million-year-old Saccorhytus in a fossil.

2019: A 24-hour church mass lasting 97 days — to prevent the deportation of Armenian asylum seekers — ends after Dutch authorities reconsider at Protestant Bethel Church in The Hague.

2020: The World Health Organization declares COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern, at a meeting in Geneva.

2023: A suicide bomb blast kills at least 100 and injures 157 people at a mosque for police officers in Peshawar, Pakistan.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Franklin D Roosevelt, US president (1882-1945); Richard Livingston “Dickie” Fuller, former West Indies cricketer (1913-1987); Phil Collins, English pop singer (1951- )

– AP/Jamaica Observer