Today is the 190th day of 2024. There are 176 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2010: Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth’s oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life, but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.

OTHER EVENTS

1793: The first republican constitution in France is adopted, providing for universal male suffrage and the right to free public education; the constitution is soon suspended when the Reign of Terror starts.

1812: Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces cross Niemen River and enter Russian territory.

1839: Ibrahim, son of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, routs Turkish forces at Nizip; the Ottoman Empire is saved by European intervention.

1885: Samuel David Ferguson becomes the first African American member of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops.

1894: France’s President Sadi Carnot is assassinated by an Italian anarchist at Lyon.

1916 Mary Pickford becomes the first female film star to get a million-dollar contract

1917: Russia’s Black Sea fleet mutinies at Sevastopol in the Crimea.

1920: Greeks launch an offensive in Asia Minor against Turkish nationalists.

1922: Germany’s Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, a Jew, is slain by right-wingers.

1932: A bloodless coup ends absolute monarchy in Thailand, initiating the so-called Constitutional Era.

1944: A pro-Nazi Danish police group sets part of the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen on fire in revenge for Danish sabotage actions.

1947: Aeroplane pilot Kenneth Arnold sees a squadron of unidentified flying objects near Mount Rainier, in Washington state, and coins the phrase “flying saucers”.

1978: Yemen’s President Ahmed Hussein Ghashami is killed by a bomb planted in an envoy’s briefcase.

1984: An estimated one million people march in Paris to protest a plan by the Socialist Government of President Francois Mitterand to tighten State control over private schools.

1989: China’s Communist Party replaces Zhao Ziyang as party chief, accusing him of serious errors by supporting democratic demands.

1997: Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s Government scraps the plan for a constitutional convention to decide whether Australia should become a republic separate from Britain.

1992: Israel’s Labour party celebrates its election upset of hard-line Likud as Yitzhak Rabin promises to let Palestinians govern themselves.

1995: Riot police shoot and beat stone-throwing Palestinians demonstrating for the release of 5,000 prisoners in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

1999: Some 30 gunmen, demanding jobs, seize control of a Haitian orphanage they graduated from, holding it for about 12 hours before surrendering.

2001: Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic lashes out at a decree ordering his extradition to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes, calling it “legal savagery”.

2004: Christie’s Auction House in New York City conducts a sale of 80 of Eric Clapton and friends’ guitars to benefit Crossroads Centre at Antigua, a drug and alcohol residential rehabilitation facility he co-founded in 1997, raising over US$5 million.

2005: Jamaican-born Jeanine McIntosh becomes the first black female aviator in the history of the US Coast Guard.

2007: An Iraqi court sentences Saddam Hussein’s cousin, known as Chemical Ali, and two other former regime officials to death by hanging for slaughtering up to 180,000 Kurds in the 1980s.

2010: Five American Muslim men who were arrested in Pakistan are found guilty in a court in Sargodha, Pakistan of having conspired to carry out terrorist attacks; they are sentenced to 10 years in prison.

2012: Islamist Mohammed Morsi is declared the winner in Egypt’s first free presidential election in history.

2013: Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s flamboyant former premier, is sentenced to seven years in prison and banned from politics for life for paying an underage prostitute for sex during infamous “bunga bunga” parties.

2014: Former News of the World editor Andy Coulson is convicted of conspiracy to hack phones in the British scandal that led to the newspaper’s shutdown, split Rupert Murdoch’s powerful media empire, and brought an apology from Prime Minister David Cameron who employed Coulson as a spokesman.

2016: British Prime Minister David Cameron resigns after the UK votes to leave the Eueopean Union.

2017: The United Nations states the Yemen cholera epidemic has reached 200,000 cases, with 1,300 deaths; it is considered the worst cholera outbreak anywhere in the world.

2018: Women drive for the first time in Saudi Arabia after a ban is lifted.

2019: An El Salvador immigrant father and his 23-month-old daughter drown trying to cross the Rio Grande into the US; their photo causes widespread condemnation. Greek Cypriot army officer Nicos Metaxas is given seven life sentences for the murder of five women and two children in Nicosia. A mysterious sickness affects 718 children, with 152 deaths around the Indian city of Muzaffarpur; previously thought to be linked to the lychee fruit, the illness has subsequently remained unknown.

2020: World Monetary fund predicts a deeper global recession with contraction of 4.9 per cent (down from 3 per cent), noting 2/3 of all countries used 11 trillion to support their economies.

2022: In Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US Supreme Court overturns Roe versus Wade (1973), ending the constitutional right to an abortion.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Nuno Alvares Pereira, Portuguese leader (1360-1431); St John of the Cross, Spanish mystic (1542-1591); Ambrose Bierce, US writer (1842-1914); Lord Horatio Kitchener, British soldier (1850-1916); Victor Frances Hess, Austrian physicist (1883-1964); Jack Dempsey, US world heavyweight boxing champion (1895-1983); Rupert Hoilette, Jamaican former sprinter who competed in 1964 Summer Olympics (1946-2023); Lionel Messi, Argentine-born football player (1987- )

— AP/ Jamaica Observer