Today is the 80th day of 2023. There are 285 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1980: US President Jimmy Carter announces the United States is boycotting the Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

OTHER EVENTS

1801: French forces are defeated at Alexandria, Egypt, by the British under Ralph Abercromby, who is mortally wounded.

1884: France legalises trade unions.

1905: Britain and Persia sign an agreement to counter Russian designs in the Near East.

1919: The Soviet Republic is proclaimed.

1945: After bombing the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, British RAF planes mistakenly bomb the French School, killing 86 children and 10 nuns.

1953: Sudan achieves self-government.

1960: A Pan African demonstration against pass laws in South Africa leads to the shooting and killing of 60 blacks in Sharpeville.

1963: The Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay, which had held some of the most dangerous civilian prisoners including Al Capone and the “Birdman of Alcatraz” Robert Stroud, is emptied of its last inmates at the order of Attorney General Robert F Kennedy.

1965: More than 3,000 civil rights demonstrators, led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, begin a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

1975: The military Government in Ethiopia abolishes the royal position of emperor.

1977: India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi resigns after losing her seat in parliamentary elections.

1984: NFL owners pass the infamous anti-celebrating rule.

1985: Police in Langa, South Africa, open fire on black protesters marching to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville shootings, killing at least 21 demonstrators.

1988: Jordan’s King Hussein calls on the Muslim world to support Palestinian unrest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

1990: After 106 years of German and South African rule, Namibia becomes independent.

1993: El Salvador’s Congress approves amnesty for people accused of civil war atrocities.

1996: Russian forces launch air and artillery attacks on villages in western Chechnya.

1997: US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin hold a summit in Helsinki, Finland, and agree to slash their nuclear arsenals.

2002: Pope John Paul II releases his first statement addressing the large number of recent cases of sexual abuse of minors by members of the Roman Catholic clergy; he denounces the priests saying they betrayed their vows and succumbed to evil.

2003: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), set up in 1995 to investigate human rights abuses during the apartheid system of white-minority rule, urges the Government to pay US$270 million (euro 201.25 million) to some 20,000 victims who testified about atrocities suffered under apartheid.

2005: Secretary General Kofi Annan unveils a plan to overhaul the United Nations and immediately begins the task of selling his vision to all 191 UN member states, urging them to make the proposals a reality when they meet again in six months.

2006: Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sends the first public tweet which reads, “Just setting up my twttr.”

2007: Somali insurgents drag the corpses of four Somali soldiers and two of their Ethiopian allies through the streets of Mogadishu and set the bodies on fire, drawing crowds who throw stones and kick the bodies as violence rages throughout the capital.

2009: Hungary’s prime minister stuns the country by announcing his resignation because he had become an “obstacle” to reforms needed to pull the country out of its worst financial crisis since the end of communism 20 years before.

2011: Officials race to restore electricity to Japan’s leaking nuclear plant but with its mangled machinery and partly melted reactor cores, bringing the complex under control is a monstrous job. Syrians chanting “No more fear!” hold a defiant march after a deadly government crackdown fails to quash three days of mass protests in the southern city of Deraa — an extraordinary outpouring in a country that is known for brutally suppressing dissent.

2012: Britain’s finance minister cuts the rate of income tax for the country’s wealthiest citizens but imposes a raft of measures to prevent tax avoidance and imposes a hefty new charge on expensive property sales, in an attempt to spread the burden of austerity across the UK’s taxpayers.

2013: The European Space Agency reveals new data that indicates the universe is 13.82 billion years old.

2017: US and British officials announce they are barring laptops and tablets from the cabins of some international flights because of long-standing concerns about terrorists targeting jetliners.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Johann Sebastian Bach, German composer (1685-1750); Benito Juarez, Mexican president (1806-1872); Henry Ossian Flipper, soldier, former slave, and first African American to graduate from the US Military Academy (1856-1940); Reverend Hugh Braham Sherlock, Jamaican founder of Boys’ Town, author of Jamaica’s National Pledge and the lyrics of Jamaica’s National Anthem (1905-1998); King Ghazi of Iraq (1912-1939); Timothy Dalton, Welsh actor (1944- ); Rosie O’Donnell, US comedian-former talk show host (1962- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer