Today is the 97th day of 2025. There are 268 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1967: Her Majesty The Queen knights Jamaican Prime Minister Donald Sangster.

OTHER EVENTS

1739: Dick Turpin is executed in England for horse stealing.

1853: Queen Victoria delivers her eighth child under chloroform; her approval and recommendation of it popularises use of the anaesthetic.

1868: American religious leader Brigham Young weds his 53rd wife, American actress and future polygamy critic Anna Webb, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

1922: United States Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall secretly leases federal oil reserves to the Mammoth Oil Company in return for cash gifts, in the Teapot Dome Scandal.

1937: A mob of central Pennsylvania farmers ejects several hundred sit-down strikers from the Hershey chocolate plant at Hershey, Philadelphia; the United States Senate passes, 75-3, a resolution condemning sit-down strikes as illegal and declaring the industrial spy system, denial of collective bargaining, and other unfair labour practices as contrary to sound public policy.

1947: American industrialist Henry Ford, who revolutionised factory production with his assembly-line methods and was the founder of the Ford Motor Company, dies at age 83. About half of an estimated 615,000 workers employed by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company go out on strike in all except nine of 48 states.

1948: The World Health Organization, established to research and prevent disease and improve public health worldwide, becomes the United Nation’s ninth specialised agency upon ratification of its constitution by Ukraine, Byelorussia and Mexico.

1951: Indochinese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh orders his forces to revert from orthodox military tactics to guerrilla warfare.

1958: The Japanese foreign ministry announces the unconditional release of 10 remaining World War II leaders convicted as class A war criminals.

1959: Oklahoma voters decisively repeal prohibition, leaving Mississippi the only dry state.

1963: American professional golfer Jack Nicklaus, a dominating figure in world golf from the 1960s to the 80s and the winner of 73 PGA tour events in his career, wins the Masters Tournament at age 23.

1968: Riots continue in over 100 US cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

1969: The Internet’s symbolic birth date is marked by the publication of RFC 1 host software.

1986: Forest fires in South Korea, fanned by strong winds, claim the lives of at least 20 persons and injure 17 others. A contingent of Druze Muslim militiamen kill a reported 17 Sunni Muslims in the mountain village of Bsaba, south-east of Beirut, while some 50 houses are also burned — during the most violent inter-Muslim conflict ever reported from that region of Lebanon.

1994: Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu, is assassinated by Hutu soldiers a day after the deaths of Juvénal Habyarimana, president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, president of Burundi, as Rwanda enters a period of anarchy and mass killings. The Vatican commemorates The Holocaust for the first time with an orchestral concert in the Sala Nervi. American soul singer Percy Sledge pleads guilty to tax evasion; he receives a sentence of six months in a halfway house, five years of probation, and is ordered to pay US$96,000 in back taxes and penalties.

1997: President Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran formally opens the US$1.1-billion Tabriz petrochemical complex.

2000: South African cricket Captain Hansie Cronje is charged by Delhi police with fixing One-Day International matches against India.

2001: After the lira falls sharply and prices soar, thousands of laid-off workers and citizens call for the resignation of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and his Government. A helicopter carrying among its 16 passengers and crew seven Americans searching for those still listed as missing in action from the 1955-75 Vietnam War, crashes into a mountain in central Vietnam; all aboard are killed.

2006: Three suicide bombers detonate their weapons during Friday prayers at a major Shi’’ite mosque in Baghdad; at least 71 people are killed.

2007: A Russian rocket carrying US billionaire Charles Simonyi and two cosmonauts blasts off on a 13-day trip to the international space station, at a cost to Simonyi of US$20 million.

2008: In Haiti, thousands of people protesting the high price of food shut down the capital Port-au-Prince, days after food riots in Les Cayes led to five deaths.

2010: After a day of fighting in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, between anti-government protesters and police in which at least 85 people are killed, Opposition politicians succeed in forcing President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to flee the city; former Foreign Minister Roza Otunbayeva is said to be in charge.

2012: American television journalist Mike Wallace, who was noted for his aggressive, bruising style during interviews on the long-running TV news magazine programme 60 Minutes, dies at age 93.

2016: The longest-ever captured python is found on Penang Island in Malaysia; it measures 26 feet/8 metres.

2017: A truck is driven into a department store in Stockholm, Sweden, killing four, in a terror attack.

2019: Rwanda marks 25 years and the beginning of 100 days of mourning since the genocide that killed 800,000 people.

2020: Australia’s highest court overturns the child sexual abuse conviction of Catholic Cardinal George Pell.

2022: Ketanji Brown Jackson becomes the first black woman to be confirmed by the United States Senate to the Supreme Court, in a 53-47 vote.

2023: US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk suspends the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of key abortion pill mifepristone, leading to the US Government’s request for a legal appeal to stop the nationwide ban. Lasse Wellander, Swedish session and touring guitarist with Abba, dies of cancer at 70.

2024: Joe Kinnear, Irish soccer defender with Tottenham and manager of Wimbledon, Luton Town, Newcastle United, dies from vascular dementia at 77.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Will Keith Kellogg, industrialist and founder of Kellogg Company (1860 -1951); Billie Holiday, US jazz singer (1915-1957); Francis Ford Coppola, American director of The Godfather (1939- ); Jackie Chan, Hong Kong movie star (1954- ); Russell Crowe, Australian actor (1964- ); MacKenzie Scott, American novelist, philanthropist, and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (1970- ).

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MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, celebrates a birthday today. As of December 2024 Scott has a net worth of US$42.1 billion. (AP)