Today is the 235th day of 2023. There are 130 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2003: John J Geoghan, a defrocked priest convicted of the molestation of more than 100 children over a period of decades and who was emblematic of the sex scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Church — in particular the Archdiocese of Boston — is beaten and strangled to death by a fellow prisoner at a correctional centre in Massachusetts.

OTHER EVENTS

1973: Four people are taken hostage by a robber in a Stockholm bank in Sweden. During the six-day drama the captor and captives develop a friendship later described as “the Stockholm syndrome”.

1986: Leaders of nine southern African nations, meeting in Angola, express support for international economic sanctions against South Africa.

1990: The Soviet Republic of Armenia declares independence and Estonia begins formal negotiations with the Kremlin on separation from the Soviet Union.

1996: Osama bin Laden issues a message titled: A declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places’.

1997: Iran’s new moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, appoints a female vice-president, the first woman to serve in a top Government post since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

2000: The first season of reality TV game show Survivor ends — credited with launching the reality TV fad of the early 21st century — ends.

2001: A Japanese court rules that the central government must pay a total of US$375,000 to 15 Koreans who survived an explosion aboard a Japanese ship shortly after World War II.

2002: Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe unexpectedly dissolves his Cabinet and ousts moderates, a move officials say is related to his programme to seize land from white farmers and redistribute it to landless blacks.

2004: Controversial new rules governing who is eligible for overtime pay go into effect in the US. Israel announces plans to expand its West Bank settlements in the Jerusalem area.

2005: Hurricane Katrina forms over The Bahamas, later becoming a Category 5 hurricane. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan tours the hunger-stricken desert nation of Niger as a French aid group accuses the world body of responding to the crisis too late and with too little.

2009: Wildfires north of Athens continue to spread, encompassing 14 towns and an estimated 30,000 acres of olive groves, farm fields, and forest.

2010: Nepal’s legislature fails in its fifth attempt to choose a prime minister.

2011: After rebel forces capture his compound in Tripoli, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s four-decade rule of Libya ends; he is discovered two months later in the Libyan city of Surt, and killed.

2013 UN inspectors are stopped by the Syrian Government from investigating a reported site of a chemical massacre.

2015: A 12-year-old boy trips and rips 17th-century painting Flowers by Paolo Porpora, worth $1.5 million, at an exhibition in Taiwan.

2017: Nearly 60 million people in the Indus Valley, Pakistan, are at risk from arsenic, according to research published in Science Advances.

2020: US black man Jacob Blake is shot and injured by police in front of his children in Kenosha, Wisconsin, prompting violent protests.

2021: The US Food and Drug Administration grants full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 and over — the first vaccine to move past emergency-use status in the US.

2022: Nicki Minaj’s single Super Freaky Girl debuts at number one — the first female rapper to do so since Lauren Hill in 1998 with Doo Wop (That Thing).

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Arnold Toynbee, British historian (1852-1883); Gene Kelly, US actor-dancer (1912-1996); Barbara Eden, US actress (1934-); Bunny “Striker” Lee (Edward O’Sullivan), Jamaican legendary record producer (19941-2020); Kobe Bryant, LA Lakers professional basketball player (1978-2020).

– AP/ Jamaica Observer