Today is the 158th day of 2023. There are 207 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1692: A massive earthquake devastates Port Royal in Jamaica.

OTHER EVENTS

1099: The First Crusade reaches its target, Jerusalem, and starts to besiege the city.

1494: The Treaty of Tordesillas — an agreement between Spain and Portugal aimed at settling conflicts over lands newly discovered or explored by Christopher Columbus and other late 15th century voyagers — is signed.

1665: The Great Plague of London commences and Samuel Pepys writes in his diary of houses marked with a red cross in London’s Drury Lane, indicative of someone within being infected with the plague and confined for 40 days or until death.

1780: An anti-Catholic riot takes place in London during which hundreds die.

1832: Asian cholera reaches Quebec, brought by Irish immigrants, and kills about 6,000 people in lower Canada.

1862: Britain and the USA sign a treaty to suppress the slave trade. General B Butler orders William Mumford hanged after he removed and destroyed a US flag on display over the New Orleans Mint.

1929: Vatican City becomes a sovereign State.

1965: The Supreme Court of the United States decides on Griswold v. Connecticut, effectively legalising the use of contraception by married couples.

1970: Voters in Switzerland reject a proposal to force almost one-third of a million aliens to leave that country.

1972: Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s musical Grease opens at Broadhurst Theater, New York City, and runs for 3,388 performances.

1975: Sony introduces the Betamax videocassette recorder for sale to the public.

1977: A Bill that virtually would have allowed abortion on demand is unexpectedly killed in the Italian Senate by a two-vote margin.

1982: Elvis Presley’s Graceland home in Memphis, Tennessee, where he died in 1977, is opened for public tours and becomes one of the top tourist attractions in the United States.

1990: The US House of Representatives votes to bar the sale of computers and telecommunications gear to Soviet Union until Moscow begins negotiating Lithuania’s independence.

1994: Following two months of genocide the US agrees to a UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda after receiving assurances that UN troops would not be called on to fight.

1995: Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui becomes the island’s first president to set foot in the US.

1998: Lebanon holds its first municipal elections in 35 years. Muslim and Christian voters in Beirut endorse religious harmony.

1999: More than 96 per cent of Indonesians vote in democratic elections for the first time since 1955.

2000: A suspected Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam suicide bomber kills a Cabinet minister and 20 others during a fund-raiser for the families of slain soldiers, at Sri Lanka’s first-ever War Heroes Day.

2008: Hillary Rodham Clinton urges her supporters to rally behind ex-rival Barack Obama, who goes on to win the US presidency.

2012: Two US officials testify at a court martial hearing that the State Department took extraordinary steps to limit harm to foreign relations and individuals after an army private allegedly sent 250,000 classified diplomatic cables to the secret-sharing website WikiLeaks.

2013: A total of 18 people are killed and 14 injured after a bus plunges off a mountain road in Himachel Pradesh, India.

2017: The earliest-ever evidence of Homo Sapiens from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco — at 300,000 years old — is unearthed by archaeologists and published in the journal Nature. Police warn bald men against attacks in Mozambique after five men are murdered for the gold believed to be in their heads. Suicide bombers attack the Iranian Parliament in Tehran and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini, killing 12 in the first Islamic State attacks in Iran.

2018: Baltimore ex-police sergeant Wayne Earl Jenkins, head of a rogue police unit, is sentenced to 25 years for robbery and racketeering.

2019: The United Nations says more than four million Venezuelans have left their country since 2015 due to its economic crisis.

2020: The COVID-19 global death toll passes 400,000, with confirmed cases at 6,973,195 according to Johns Hopkins figures.

2022: A new study reveals Shark Bay sea grass, off western Australia, may be world’s largest plant, covering 77 square miles of sea floor due to it cloning itself for 4,500 years.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Alexander Pushkin, Russian writer (1799-1837); Paul Gauguin, French painter (1848-1903); Henry Lawson, Australian poet (1867-1922); Robert Karl Nunes, Jamaican who was the West Indies’ first Test captain (1894-1958); Imre Nagy, Hungarian premier (1896-1958); Tom Jones, Welsh-born pop singer (1940- ); Gwendolyn Brooks, African American and first black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize (1917-2000); Orhan Pamuk, Turkish writer (1952- ); Prince, African American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist (1958-2016); Edward “Bear” Grylls, British adventurer, author and TV presenter for Man vs Wild (1974- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer