Today is the 215th day of 2023. There are 150 days left in the year.

TODAYS HIGHLIGHT

2005: French authorities find 351 foetuses and stillborn babies stored in bags and jars at a Paris hospital.

OTHER EVENTS

1460: King James II of Scotland is killed by the blast of a cannon saluting the arrival of his wife, Queen Mary, at Roxburgh Castle, England.

1492: Christopher Columbus sets sail from Palos, Spain, looking for a route to India across the Atlantic, encountering the New World instead.

1589: Henry of Navarre, first of the Bourbon line, succeeds the assassinated Henry III as king of France.

1914: Germany declares war on France at the start of World War I.

1916: Irish-born British diplomat Roger Casement, a strong advocate of independence for Ireland, is hanged for treason.

1936: Jesse Owens of the United States wins the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics as he takes the 100-metre sprint.

1949: The National Basketball Association is formed as a merger of the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League.

1958: The nuclear-powered submarine USS Nautilus becomes the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater.

1969: Israeli Government leaders announce they will retain the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and a major part of the eastern and southern Sinai Peninsula — the areas captured from the Arabs in the June 1967 war.

1972: The US Senate ratifies the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. (The US unilaterally withdraws from the treaty in 2002.)

1987: The Iran-Contra congressional hearings end with none of the 29 witnesses tying President Ronald Reagan directly to the diversion of arms-sales profits to Nicaraguan rebels.

1988: Hard-line leader Sein Lwin clamps indefinite martial law on the capital of Myanmar.

1990: The United States and the Soviet Union jointly condemn Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait while Iraqi troops begin massing along Kuwaiti border with Saudi Arabia.

1991: Russian branch formally breaks off from the Soviet Union’s Communist Party to form a new party led by reform-minded communists.

1997: Political moderate Mohammad Khatami takes over as president of Iran.

1999: The US Justice Department rules that the Government must pay the heirs of Abraham Zapruder US$16 million for his film of President John F Kennedy’s assassination.

2000: The European Union opens an antitrust case against Microsoft.

2001: The International Monetary Fund announces it will loan US$1.2 billion to Argentina and extend US$15-billion line of credit to Brazil.

2002: Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian calls for legislation that would allow a referendum to be conducted on whether to declare independence from China.

2007: A 94-year-old great-great-grandmother, Phyllis Turner, who left school at the age of 12, becomes the world’s oldest recipient of a master’s degree from University of Adelaide in Australia. Toyota says its April-June 2007 profit has jumped 32.3 per cent to a then-record high for a quarter, lifted by strong overseas sales and a weaker yen. Iraqis welcome home their soccer team which had won the Asian Cup.

2009: Huge crowds reminiscent of the 1986 “people power” demonstration take to Manila’s streets to honour the passing of former President Corazon Aquino, who captured the hearts of Filipinos by ousting a brutal dictator and keeping democracy alive in the Philippines.

2012: The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly denounces Syria’s crackdown on dissent in a symbolic effort meant to push the deadlocked Security Council and the world at large into action on stopping the country’s civil war. Michael Phelps rallied to win the 100-metre butterfly for his third gold of the London Games and No 17 of his career. Missy Franklin set a world record in the 200 backstroke for the 17-year-old’s third gold in London. Falling at speeds of up to 220 mph, 138 skydivers shattered the vertical skydiving world record as they flew heads-down in a massive snowflake formation in northern Illinois. (This record was in turn eclipsed in 2015 by 164 skydivers plunging over central Illinois.)

2016: President Barack Obama cut short the sentences of 214 federal inmates, including 67 life sentences, in what the White House called the largest batch of commutations on a single day in more than a century. An Emirates Boeing 777 crash-landed in Dubai and caught fire; all 300 people on board survived, but one firefighter was killed.

2021: Elaine Thompson-Herah becomes the first woman to win the 100 metre and 200 metre sprint double at two consecutive Olympic Games.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Koshaku Yamagata Aritomo, first prime minister of Japan (1838-1922); Dolores del Rio, US-Mexican film star (1905-1983); Phyllis Dorothy (PD) James, British mystery writer (1920-2014); Tony Bennett, US singer (1926-2023); Martin Sheen, US actor (1940- ); Martha Stewart, US lifestyle guru (1941- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer