Today is the 179th day of 2023. There are 186 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1914: Austria’s Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated at Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Serb revolutionary, igniting World War I.

OTHER EVENTS

1389: The Serb army is defeated by the Turks at Kosovo Polje and the remainder of Serbia is conquered by Turks, who rule for almost 500 years.

1846: The saxophone is patented by Antoine-Joseph “Adolfe” Sax.

1881: The Immigration Act of New Zealand restricts Japanese immigration.

1892: Sir Clifford Campbell, the first Jamaican national to be appointed governor general of Jamaica, is born at Petersfield, Westmoreland, to the late James Campbell and Blanche, nee Ruddock.

1895: Raids are launched from Bulgaria into Macedonia following the founding of an external Macedonian revolutionary organisation at Sofia.

1919: Germany and the Allies sign the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending World War I and providing for the creation of the League of Nations.

1948: Yugoslavia is expelled from Communist group Cominform for hostility towards the Soviet Union.

1956: Labour riots are put down in Poznan, Poland, with many casualties.

1973: The Black Sports Hall of Fame forms; Paul Robeson, Elgin Baylor, Jesse Owens, Jim Brown, Wilma Rudolph, Joe Louis and Althea Gibson are elected.

1976: The Seychelles, an Indian Ocean island group, becomes independent after 102 years under British rule.

1986: West European leaders, meeting in the Netherlands, delay indefinitely imposing economic sanctions against South Africa.

1988: The US military attache to Greece is killed by a powerful car bomb that blows his armour-plated car off the road.

1989: One million Serbs gather in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, to mark the 600th anniversary of their defeat by the Turks and to cheer their nationalist leader, Slobodan Milosevic.

1990: At the 17th Daytime Award presentation for the Emmys, Susan Lucci loses for the 11th time.

1993: Thousands of illegal Albanian immigrants in Greece are rounded up and sent home in bus convoys as police crack down following Albania’s expulsion of a Greek Orthodox priest.

1994: Three masked gunmen seize a bus and take about 40 passengers hostage near the southern Russian city of Mineralnye Vody.

1997: Cuban and Argentine forensic experts uncover the remains of legendary guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara and five of his companions near the Bolivian town of Vallegrande.

1998: Slavko Dokmanovic, Serb former mayor of Vukovar, Croatia, hangs himself in his cell while the International War Crimes Tribunal considers the verdict regarding his role in a massacre of 200 people.

1999: Computer hackers deface the US Army’s main website after having hacked into the White House, FBI and US Senate websites.

2000: Seven months after floating adrift in the Florida straits, six-year-old Elian Gonzalez returns to his native Cuba, bringing to a close a fierce custody battle.

2001: Yugoslavia hands over former President Slobodan Milosevic to the UN War Crimes Tribunal.

2003: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, starring Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, premieres at Disneyland.

2004: The United States hands over sovereignty to the Iraqis two days ahead of schedule and seven months before elections are set to take place.

2007: Israeli President Moshe Katsav agrees to resign in a plea bargain that drops rape allegations and the threat of jail time in return for pleading guilty to lesser charges.

2008: Zimbabweans deface ballots and boycott the discredited re-election of President Robert Mugabe after an onslaught of State-sponsored violence pushes his main Opposition from the race.

2009: Soldiers oust the democratically elected president of Honduras and Congress names a successor, but Manuel Zalaya, the leftist ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, denounces what he calls an illegal coup and vows to stay in power.

2010: Ten people are arrested in the US for allegedly serving as secret agents of the Russian Government with the goal of penetrating US Government policymaking circles.

2012: Archaeologists say pottery fragments found in a south China cave are confirmed to be 20,000 years old — making them the oldest pottery in the world.

2015: The Greek Government says banks will be closed for a week and ATM withdrawals restricted, after the European Central Bank refused to supply emergency funds.

2016: Suicide bombings and gun attacks at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport kill 42 and wound more than 200.

2017: China’s president, Xi Jinping begins a three-day trip to Hong Kong to mark 20 years since the territory was handed back to China.

2018: Amsterdam elects its first-ever woman mayor, Femke Halsema, since it first mayor in 1343. An employee is charged with attempted poisoning of a colleague’s sandwich in Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock, Germany, leading authorities to investigate 21 other suspicious deaths.

2019: A 3,400-year-old Bronze Age palace from the Mittani Empire is uncovered on the Tigris River bank due to a lack of rainfall dropping the water level in the Mosul Dam reservoir.

2020: Joe Bugel, American football coach, dies of bone cancer at 80.

2021: The US Supreme Court declines to hear the school’s appeal in the transgender bathroom case made by Gavin Grimm in Virginia, upholding an earlier decision that it was discriminatory.

2021: Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalises marijuana use by adults.

2022: Ghislaine Maxwell is sentenced to 20 years in US federal prison for grooming and aiding Jeffery Epstein to abuse underage girls.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

England’s King Henry VIII (1491-1547); Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish painter (1577-1640); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French philosopher-author (1712-1778); Luigi Pirandello, Italian dramatist and Nobel laureate (1867-1936); Sir Clifford Campbell, first Jamaican national to be appointed governor general of Jamaica (1892-1991) ; Richard Rodgers, US composer (1902-1979); Roy Gilchrist, Jamaican-born West Indian cricketer (1934-2001 ); Kathy Bates, US actress (1948- ); Elaine Thompson-Herah, two-time double Olympic Games Jamaican medallist (1992- )

– AP and Jamaica Observer