Today is the 81st day of 2023. There are 284 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1991: High school instructor Pamela Smart, accused of recruiting her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, Gregory, is convicted in Exeter, New Hampshire, of murder-conspiracy and being an accomplice to murder; she is sentenced to life in prison without parole.

OTHER EVENTS

1349: The Townspeople of Fulda, Germany, massacre Jews, blaming them for the Black Death.

1622: Opechancanough, brother of Chief Powhatan and his successor as the leader of the Powhatan Indian Empire, leads an attack on the Jamestown Colony, killing at least 347 colonists and initiating the Powhatan War.

1638: Co-founder of Rhode Island, Anne Hutchinson is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony after her liberal religious beliefs run afoul of officials.

1794: The US Congress passes a law prohibiting American ships from supplying slaves to other countries.

1832: German author and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dies in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar.

1882: The US Congress outlaws polygamy.

1895: In Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumiere show their first movie, generally regarded as the first public display of a movie projected onto a screen.

1896: Charilaos Vasilakos of Greece wins the first modern marathon in 3:18 at the Panhellenic Games.

1917: The United States becomes the first nation to recognise the new provisional Government in Russia.

1945: The Arab League is organised in Cairo by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan (now Jordan), Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

1965: The US confirms its troops used chemical warfare against the Vietcong.

1972: In Eisenstadt v. Baird the US Supreme Court rules unmarried people have same right to contraception as married people.

1978: Karl Wallenda, the 73-year-old patriarch of The Flying Wallendas high-wire act, falls to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two buildings of a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

1988: Both Houses of the US Congress override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act.

1989: Delegates from 105 countries, meeting in Switzerland, adopt a draft UN treaty to control the international transport of dangerous wastes.

1991: Police fire on pro-democracy protesters in Bamako, Mali, and kill 30 during violence that leads to the overthrow of dictator General Moussa Traore.

1992: A USAir Fokker F28 jetliner crashes on take-off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport and 27 people are killed.

1993: Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Cambodia attack an ethnic Vietnamese fishing village, killing 35.

1994: A Russian Airbus A-310 crashes in Siberia en route to Hong Kong after the pilot’s teenage son takes the controls; all 75 people aboard die.

1996: A UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issues the first indictments for crimes against Serbs, charging three Bosnian Muslims and a Bosnian Croat with murder, torture and rape.

1999: US envoy Richard Holbrooke meets with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in a last-ditch attempt to gain concessions on Kosovo, while Yugoslav police and army troops burn villages in the rebel province.

2001: The United States orders the ouster of more than 50 Russian diplomats suspected of undercover intelligence activities.

2002: Britain’s High Court grants a quadriplegic woman the right to have her life support switched off — the first time in Britain a person whose medical treatment offers normal life expectancy wins the right to die.

2004: An Israeli missile strike kills Palestinian Islamist leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, co-founder in 1987 of the militant Palestinian organisation Hamas.

2005: The only man to challenge Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak for the presidency, Ayman Nour is charged with forging signatures to win approval for his party.

2006: Governments, not private companies, should take the lead in improving public access to safe drinking water, representatives of 148 countries conclude at the end of a forum in Mexico City on improving global water supply.

2008: Taiwan’s Opposition candidate Ma Ying-jeou crushes his rival in presidential elections, promising a China policy that will defuse decades of tension with the island’s missile-wielding neighbour.

2009: A group of Saudi clerics urges the kingdom’s new information minister to ban women from appearing on TV or in newspapers and magazines, making clear the country’s hard-line religious establishment is sceptical of a new push toward modernisation.

2010: President Nicolas Sarkozy dismisses his labour minister and reshuffles several other Cabinet posts after leftists wallop his conservatives in France’s regional elections — a defeat that exposes his inability to convince the public on his economic reforms.

2012: Drunk soldiers loot Mali’s presidential palace hours after they declare a coup suspending the constitution and dissolving the institutions of one of the few established democracies in a troubled corner of West Africa.

2013: US President Barack Obama says during a visit to Jordan that he worries about Syria becoming a haven for extremists when — not if — President Bashar Assad is ousted from power.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Anthony van Dyck, Dutch artist (1599-1641); Robert Andress Millikan, US scientist (1868-1953); Marcel Marceau, French mime (1923-2007); Yayoi Kusama, Japanese artist (1929- ); Ken Boothe, Jamaican legendary rocksteady and reggae singer (1948- ); William Shatner, Canadian actor (1931- ); Andrew Lloyd Webber, British composer (1948- ); Reese Witherspoon, US actress (1976- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer