Today is the 5th day of 2023. There are 360 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2009: Russia’s cut-off of natural gas to Ukraine forces several European countries to dip into reserves, with Moscow tightening the tap even further.

OTHER EVENTS

1649: Francesco Cavalli’s opera Giasone premieres in Venice (the most popular opera of the 17th century)

1809: Britain and Turkey conclude the Treaty of Dardanelles.

1869: Joint Argentine, Brazilian and Uruguayan forces take Asuncion, Paraguay, during the Triple Alliance war.

1895: The discovery of X-rays is announced by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen. French Captain Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of treason, is publicly stripped of his rank but he is ultimately vindicated.

1914: Following the great success of the Model T, American automobile maker Henry Ford raises his workers’ pay from US$2.40 to US$5.00 a day and reduces the hours of the workday.

1919: Anton Drexler establishes the German Workers’ Party, the forerunner of the Nazi Party, in Munich, Germany.

1925: Nellie Tayloe Ross assumes office in Wyoming, becoming the first female governor in the United States.

1929: King Alexander I suppresses the Yugoslav Constitution and establishes a dictatorship.

1953: Samuel Beckett’s two-act tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, considered a classic of the Theatre of the Absurd, premieres in Paris.

1964: Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Benedictos of Jerusalem meet in the Holy Land on the Mount of Olives — the first meeting in five centuries between a Roman Catholic pope and Eastern Orthodox Church patriarch; it is also the first papal pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

1972: US President Richard Nixon orders the development of the space shuttle.

1987: Cheering students in China burn hundreds of copies of the Peking Daily newspaper to protest the Government publication’s harsh criticism of student demonstrations.

1991: Cuba and the Soviet Union sign an agreement ending trade at easy terms and artificially low prices.

1992: Rebels pound Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s stronghold with rockets and machine guns and he offers to hold a referendum on their demand that he resign.

1993: Brian Lara scores his maiden Test century with 277 for the West Indies v Australia in a drawn third Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The tanker Braer runs aground on the Shetland Islands and spills 26 million gallons (98.42 million litres) of oil in the next few days.

1994: Easing fears of a nuclear arms race in north-east Asia, the Clinton Administration says North Korea has agreed to allow renewed international inspection of seven nuclear sites.

1995: With oil tanks ablaze on the horizon, troops move in to quell a peasant uprising in southern Colombia that reportedly leaves one child dead and costs millions of dollars in oil revenue.

1997: French trains are diverted to pick up stranded skiers and German rail stations are converted into homeless shelters as the death toll from Europe’s longest cold spell in a decade passes 230.

1998: Daniel arap Moi is sworn in as president of Kenya for his fifth-consecutive term. Arab interior ministers give preliminary approval to an accord to combat terrorism in the Middle East.

2000: Two US medical firms and a Dutch organisation offer to pay up to US$2.36 million to Dutch haemophiliacs infected with the AIDS virus during blood transfusions in the 1980s. US Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner rules that six-year-old Elian Gonzalez “belongs with his father” and must be returned to Cuba; Gonzalez was rescued after his mother died when their US-bound boat capsized off Florida and was living with Miami relatives.

2003: Two Palestinians carry out a coordinated suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, the Israeli capital, killing themselves, 22 others and injuring more than 100. The attack marks the first suicide bombing in Israel since November 2002.

2005: The US military command that oversees the detention mission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, opens an internal investigation into allegations of prisoner abuse stemming from FBI documents released shortly before. Dwarf planet Eris is discovered in images taken two years earlier at Palomar Observatory in California.

2006: A suicide bomb explodes in a crowded market in an Afghan town just a few hundred yards (metres) from where the US ambassador was meeting with local leaders; ten Afghans are killed and 50 wounded in the deadliest of a recent series of attacks.

2007: In a wave of Palestinian fighting, assailants outside a Gaza mosque gun down a Muslim preacher known for his anti-Hamas views, and thousands march through Gaza carrying the bodies of seven slain Fatah men.

2008: Indonesia’s former dictator Suharto, 86, is put on a dialysis machine in critical condition a day after being admitted to Pertamina Hospital; he dies on January 27 of multiple organ failure after more than three weeks on life support.

2011: Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a fierce opponent of the United States and head of Iraq’s most feared militia, comes home after nearly four years in self-imposed exile in Iran, welcomed by hundreds of cheering supporters in a return that solidifies the rise of his movement.

2012: An apparently coordinated wave of bombings targeting Shiite Muslims kills at least 78 people in Iraq, the second large-scale assault by militants since US forces pulled out the previous month.

2013: President Barack Obama hails a last-minute deal with Congress that pulls the country back from the “fiscal cliff” but warns in his Saturday radio and Internet address that he will not compromise over his insistence that lawmakers lift the federal debt ceiling.

2014: Eusébio, perhaps the greatest Portuguese football (soccer) player of all time, dies in Lisbon.

2016: President-elect Donald Trump, in a series of tweets, urges Republicans and Democrats to “get together” to design a replacement for President Barack Obama’s health-care law. Four black people in Chicago are charged with hate crimes in connection with a video broadcast live on Facebook that shows a mentally disabled white man being tortured. Friends and family members gather at the next-door homes of Debbie Reynolds and daughter Carrie Fisher in the Hollywood Hills for an intimate memorial to mourn the late actresses.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Konstantin Stanislavsky, Russian actor, director, and producer (1863-1938); Konrad Adenauer, German statesman (1876-1967); Friedrich Duerrenmatt, Swiss playwright and novelist (1921-1990); Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistani prime minister (1928-1979); Alphonso “Dizzy” Reece, Jamaican jazz trumpeter (1931- ); Alvin Ailey Jr, American dancer and choreographer (1931-1989); Umberto Eco, Italian author and literary critic (1932-2016 ); Hayao Miyazaki, Japanese director (1941- ); Diane Keaton, US actress (1946- );

— AP/ Jamaica Observer