Today is the 65th day of 2023. There are 300 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2006: Several cats test positive for the deadly strain of bird flu in Austria; Poland reports its first outbreak of the disease as the World Health Organization calls bird flu a greater global challenge than any previous infectious disease.

OTHER EVENTS

1834: The city of York in Upper Canada is incorporated as Toronto.

1836: After a 13-day siege 1,500-3,000 Mexican soldiers overwhelm the Texan defenders as 182-257 Texans die, including William Travis, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett.

1857: US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B Taney announces the Dred Scott decision that Scott, a slave, cannot sue for his freedom in a federal court, thus ruling Africans cannot be US citizens and making slavery legal in all US territories.

1869: Dmitri Mendeleev presents the first periodic table of the elements to the Russian Chemical Society.

1899: The name Aspirin is trademarked by German company Bayer for its drug made from acetylsalicylic acid, and is patented by Felix Hoffmann.

1921: Police in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, issue an edict requiring women to wear skirts at least four inches below the knee.

1922: The United States prohibits export of arms to China.

1924: The Egyptian Government opens the mummy case of King Tutankhamen, ruler of Egypt in 14th century bce.

1930: Indigenous Canadians show Clarence Birdseye how they preserve the fish they catch; intrigued, he sees the possibilities and the frozen food industry is born.

1957: The two former British colonies of the Gold Coast and Togoland form independent West African nation Ghana, led by Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. Israeli troops hand over the Gaza Strip to a UN force.

1964: Boxing legend Cassius Clay joins the Nation of Islam and changes his name to “Muhammad Ali”, calling his former title a slave name.

1965: The US Defense Department announces that 3,500 Marines are being sent to South Vietnam — the first US ground combat troops committed to fighting against Communist guerrillas.

1967: The daughter of Josef Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva, appears at the US Embassy in New Delhi and declares her intention to defect to the West.

1981: Journalist Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America”, signs off as the long-time anchor of the CBS Evening News.

1988: Thousands of Tibetans demanding independence set fires throughout their capital city of Lhasa. Outraged students shut down liberal arts college for the deaf, Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, forcing selection of a deaf president, I King Jordan, instead of Elisabeth Zinser, a hearing woman.

1993: The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) rebels capture Angola’s second-largest city, Huambo, after a two-month battle with government troops.

1994: Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid rejects a peace agreement reached by 12 other faction leaders in Cairo.

1995: Jamaican reggae pioneer and singer Delroy Wilson dies.

1997: Jamaica’s fourth prime minister, Michael Manley, dies. Separatist Tamil Tiger rebels break a two-month lull in Sri Lanka’s civil war by raiding an army base and an airfield in coordinated, pre-dawn attacks that leave 213 people dead.

1998: The US House of Representatives votes to let Puerto Rico decide in a referendum if it wants to remain a territory, or become an independent nation, or a US state. The US Army honours three Americans who risked their lives and turned their weapons on fellow soldiers to stop the slaughter of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968.

1999: Ta Mok, the last leader of the murderous Khmer Rouge, is captured by the Cambodian army and flown to the capital for trial.

2007: France and the United Arab Emirates sign an agreement to open a branch of the Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, despite criticism that the French Government is peddling the country’s artistic treasures.

2008: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announces he is breaking relations with Colombia because of his opposition to the Colombian raid on a guerrilla base in Ecuador. A Palestinian kills eight students at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem before he is slain; Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip praise the operation in a statement and thousands of Palestinians take to the streets of Gaza to celebrate.

2010: Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the official version of the September 11, 2011 attacks a “big lie” used by the US as an excuse for battling terror.

2012: The United States, Europe, and other world powers announce bargaining will begin again with Iran over its fiercely disputed nuclear efforts, amid rising talk of war.

2013: The number of UN-registered Syrian refugees tops one million, half of them children.

2016: Former First Lady Nancy Reagan dies in Los Angeles at age 94.

2017: US President Donald Trump, without fanfare, signs a scaled-back version of his controversial ban on selected foreign travellers; it still bars new visas for six Muslim-majority countries and temporarily shuts down America’s refugee programme. The world’s most famous sled dog race, the Iditarod, starts with 71 mushers setting off from Alaska on a nearly 1,000-mile trek across the wilderness.

2018: The world’s oldest message in a bottle is found in western Australia, thrown from the German ship Paula 132 years prior on June 12 1886.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Michelangelo, Italian renaissance artist (1475-1564); Cyrano de Bergerac, French author and duellist (1620-1655); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet (1806-1861); Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler, German automobile engineer and inventor (1834-1900); Shaquille O’Neal, US basketball player (1972- ); Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian novelist (1927-2014);

— AP/ Jamaica Observer