Today is the 40th day of 2023. There are 325 days left in the year.

TODAYS’ HIGHLIGHT

1962: Jamaica becomes an independent nation within the British Commonwealth.

OTHER EVENTS

1667: Peace of Andrusovo ends the Thirteen Years’ War between Russia and Poland, giving Russia the eastern Ukraine, including Kiev.

1796: Qianlong, the fourth emperor of the Qing dynasty, abdicates and is succeeded by Jiaqing.

1801: The Peace of Luneville between Austria and France marks the virtual destruction of the Holy Roman Empire.

1825: The US House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams president after no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.

1849: Rome is proclaimed a republic under Giuseppe Mazzini.

1870: The US Weather Bureau is established.

1891: Menelek, emperor of Ethiopia, denounces Italian claims to a protectorate.

1964: The Beatles make their first live American television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

1972: The British Government declares a state of emergency after a month-long coal miners’ strike.

1989: The People’s National Party wins Jamaica’s 11th parliamentary election with 45 seats to the Jamaica Labour Party’s 15.

1990: Kenyan Foreign Minister Robert Ouko is found slain at his family farm before he was to have presented a report on corruption; two of President Daniel Arap Moi’s closest confidants are later named as suspects but never convicted.

1991: About 90 per cent of those casting ballots in Lithuania’s referendum on independence vote in favour of secession from the Soviet Union.

1995: Russian President Boris Yeltsin says that Russian troops have pacified Chechnya; in reality, fighting continues and the Russians are later forced to withdraw from the separatist region.

1996: A bomb explodes in a London business district, killing two, injuring 37, and causing an estimated US$125 million in damages; the Irish Republican Army claims responsibility.

1998: The United States announces it will send 2,500 to 3,000 marines to Kuwait, bolstering forces in the latest stand-off with Iraq over weapons inspections.

2000: A Massachusetts, USA, court rules that a woman can’t have frozen embryos she made with her former husband at a fertility clinic; the custody battle was a first in the state — and one of a few in the United States.

2001: US Navy submarine collides with a Japanese fishing vessel about 16 kilometres (10 miles) south of Honolulu, Hawaii, sinking the ship and leaving nine of its passengers missing at sea.

2002: Hundreds of singing Ethiopians line Addis Ababa’s streets to welcome the return of a replica of the Ark of the Covenant looted from Ethiopia by British soldiers, along with gold and silver artefacts, more than 130 years before.

2003: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami announces Iran has mined uranium for use in its power plants; he says Iran will retain control of the entire cycle of use of the uranium it mined — from processing the uranium ore to reprocessing the spent reactor fuel.

2005: A car bomb blamed on Basque separatists explodes in Madrid, injuring dozens of people a week after Spain’s Parliament overwhelmingly rejected a plan to give the region broad autonomy bordering on independence.

2006: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called US President George W Bush a “madman” and accuses the US and Britain of planning to invade Iran, Venezuela’s closest ally in the Middle East.

2007: The UN atomic monitor suspends nearly half the technical aid it provides to Iran — a symbolically significant punishment for nuclear defiance that only North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had faced in the past.

2008: Turkey’s Parliament votes to amend the constitution to lift a decades-old ban on Islamic headscarves at Turkey’s universities, despite fierce opposition from the secular establishment.

2009: A woman who ignited a fierce right-to-die debate that convulsed Italy and involved the Vatican dies just as lawmakers in Parliament rush to pass a Bill designed to keep her alive.

2011: British police disclose they will contact thousands of people whose cellphones may have been targeted by the News of The World tabloid, an indication of the scale of the scandal at the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

2012: The United States and its allies believe the window to stop Iran from building a bomb is quickly closing, pushing conflict with the Islamic republic to the top of the Barak Obama Administration’s national security worries in the midst of an election year.

2013: Yemen’s interior minister says his country is disappointed to find that a large and diverse cache of weapons seized on a ship in the previous month had been exported from Iran, a finding Washington said underscores Tehran’s continuing evasion of UN resolutions.

2014: Hundreds of civilians are evacuated from the besieged Syrian city of Homs, braving gunmen spraying bullets and lobbing mortar shells to flee as part of a rare three-day truce to relieve a chocking blockade.

2020: Deaths from the novel coronavirus overtake those of Sars (813 deaths worldwide in 2003), with more than 34,800 known infections. Suspected militants attack and kill at least 30 people, many while sleeping in their cars in Auno, north-eastern Nigeria, kidnapping women and children.

2021: The US Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump begins in Washington DC.

2022: Nearly four million bottles of beer are destroyed in a large crackdown on alcohol in the northern Nigerian state of Kano, where alcohol is prohibited under Sharia law.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Leander Starr Jameson, South African statesman (1853-1917); Beatrice Tanner (Mrs Patrick Campbell), English actress (1865-1940); Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, Australian aviation pioneer (1897-1935); Carmen Miranda, Portuguese-born singer-actress (1909- ); Alice Walker, US author (1944-); Ziyi Zhang, Chinese actress (1979-)

– AP/Jamaica Observer