Today is the 44th day of 2023. There are 321 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2006: Denmark’s prime minister says the country’s image in the Muslim world has been tainted by false images and rumours in the Prophet Mohammed drawing controversy and insists the country is tolerant and open to all faiths.

OTHER EVENTS

1542: England’s Queen Catherine Howard is executed for treason on the orders of her husband Henry VIII.

1633: Italian astronomer Galileo arrives in Rome and is detained by the Roman Catholic Inquisition.

1635: The Boston Latin School, the United States’s oldest secondary school, is founded.

1689: The English Parliament adopts a Bill of Rights.

1795: The first US state university opens at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

1820: Duc de Berry, heir to the French throne, is assassinated by an anti-royalist.

1914: The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is founded in New York City.

1920: The League of Nations recognises Switzerland’s neutrality.

1945: Allied forces capture Budapest, Hungary, in World War II. US warplanes firebomb Dresden, Germany, wiping out the city and killing more than 35,000 civilians.

1960: France explodes its first atomic bomb.

1961: UN Security Council urges use of force to prevent civil war in the Congo.

1976: Nigerian junta leader General Murtala Ramat Muhammad is assassinated in a coup attempt.

1990: Britain, France, Soviet Union, United States, and two Germanys announce two-stage plan for talks leading to German reunification.

1992: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat claims tape in which he purportedly made slanderous comments about Jews was doctored.

1995: Peru announces it has captured the last Ecuadorean stronghold in Peruvian territory and declares a unilateral ceasefire in the Andean border war.

1996: Israeli troops seal off the West Bank and Gaza to prevent terrorist attacks. The restrictions last for years.

1997: Rebels, under Laurent Kabila, take Zairian town of Faradje while advancing on the country’s third-largest city, Kisangani.

1999: Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire suspected of being behind the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, is reported to have disappeared from his base in Afghanistan.

2000: Serbia announces it will demand compensation at an international court from those responsible for a cyanide spill that contaminated a major river, destroying most aquatic life.

2001: A strong earthquake rattles El Salvador, sending tremors through the Central American country still recovering from a January quake that killed hundreds.

2004: Chechnya’s exiled former President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, wanted by Russia for terrorism and ties to al-Qaeda, is assassinated when a bomb blows apart his car as he leaves a mosque in Doha, Qatar. Yandarbiyev’s 13-year-old son is critically wounded.

2005: Troops in helicopters bring badly needed relief supplies to villages obliterated by floods in south-western Pakistan, as the nationwide death toll from the disaster climbs past 350.

2008: One of the world’s most wanted and elusive terrorists, Imad Mughniyeh, is killed by a car bomb in Syria nearly 15 years after dropping almost entirely from sight. Iran and the militant group Hezbollah blame Israel, which denies a role.

2009: A female suicide bomber targets Shiite pilgrims in Musayyib, killing at least 40.

2010: Bombs and booby traps slow the advance of thousands of US Marines and Afghan soldiers moving through the Taliban-controlled town of Marjah — NATO’s most ambitious effort yet to break the militants’ grip over their southern heartland.

2011: President Hugo Chavez says that he has no intention of ceasing his efforts to make Venezuela a socialist country, and he expresses confidence that his allies would take the reins of his “Bolivarian Revolution” if he died or decided to step down.

2013: A weary Pope Benedict XVI begins a long farewell to his flock, celebrating his final public mass as pontiff.

2014: The largest solar power plant in the world — thousands of mirrors sprawling across roughly five square miles (13 sq kilometres) of the Mojave Desert — opens in the western US state of Nevada.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Carole Joan Crawford, 1963 Miss World and first winning delegate from both Jamaica and the Caribbean (1943- ); Jerry Springer, US talk show host (1944- ); Robbie Williams, British singer (1974- );

– AP/Jamaica Observer