Today is the 143rd day of 2023. There are 222 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1832: Enslaved Jamaican Samuel “Sam” Sharpe is executed for his role in the Christmas Rebellion; he is proclaimed a national hero of the country 143 years later in 1975.

OTHER EVENTS

1430: Joan of Arc is captured near Compiegne, France, by Burgundians who sell her to the English.

1915: Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary, entering World War I.

1920: The Communist Party of Indonesia is formed, the first such leftist organisation to be set up in Asia outside the former Russian empire.

1934: US robber couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are shot to death in a police ambush as they drive a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, USA.

1939: Britain’s Parliament approves a plan for an independent Palestine by 1949 but the plan is later denounced by Jews as well as Arabs, who oppose a Jewish State in Palestine.

1945: Nazi official Heinrich Himmler commits suicide while imprisoned in Luneburg, Germany.

1960: Israel announces its capture of former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.

1969: The death toll from Malaysia rioting exceeds 500, with 90 per cent of casualties being ethnic Chinese.

1971: An earthquake destroys the town of Bingol in eastern Turkey, killing 1,000 people.

1992: The United States and four former Soviet republics sign an agreement to implement the START missile-reduction treaty.

1993: More than 1.5 million Cambodians ignore Khmer Rouge threats and vote in the country’s first free elections in more than two decades.

1995: Israel suspends plans to confiscate Arab land in east Jerusalem, acknowledging that it no longer can act at will to strengthen the Jewish hold on the city.

2001: Yugoslavia, bowing to US pressure to cooperate with the UN war crimes court or face cuts in economic aid, unveils a new law that allows authorities to extradite former President Slobodan Milosevic for trial.

2002: A heatwave strikes India and kills 1,030 people, mainly in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, as temperatures reach a record 124 degrees Fahrenheit (51 degrees Celsius).

2004: A bomb planted by suspected rebels explodes in a crowded discotheque in north-west Colombia, killing six people and wounding 82 — the bloodiest in a series of attacks marking the 40th anniversary of Colombia’s main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

2005: Afghan anti-drug forces arrest suspected drug traffickers and seize a huge cache of opium, in a show of resolve after President Hamid Karzai comes under fire for his record in fighting the world’s largest narcotics industry.

2006: Osama bin Laden purportedly says in an audio tape that Zacarias Moussaoui — the only person convicted in the US for the September 11, 2001, attacks — had nothing to do with the operation.

2007: Frieda Birnbaum, a 60-year-old woman, gives birth to a pair of boys in New Jersey, USA; hospital officials believe her to be the oldest woman to give birth to twins in the United States.

2008: The Government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accuses almost 400 Opposition candidates of crimes and declares them ineligible to run for office in November while they are under investigation. Televangelist John Hagee parts ways with John McCain, who rejected Hagee’s endorsement a day earlier after an audio recording from the late 1990s surfaced in which the preacher suggested that God had sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the Promised Land.

2009: Italian authorities take into custody a top boss from the Gambino Mafia clan who was deported from the United States after spending more than two decades in jail for drug trafficking.

2010: Thugs allegedly aligned to Christoper “Dudus” Coke torch three police stations and attack members of the security forces in Kingston, Jamaica; the incident is regarded as the springboard for the incursion in Tivoli Gardens a day later in which at least 73 people perished. A US-born cleric who encouraged Muslims to kill American soldiers calls for the killing of US civilians, providing the most overt link yet between the radical preacher and the militant group.

2011: A dense ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano blows toward Scotland, causing airlines to cancel flights, and raising fears of a repeat of the previous year’s huge travel disruptions in Europe that stranded millions of passengers.

2013: The Boy Scouts of America throw open its ranks to gay Scouts, but not to gay Scout leaders.

2017: Roger Moore, the suavely insouciant star of seven James Bond films, dies in Switzerland at age 89.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Carl von Linne (Linnaeus), Swedish botanist (1707-1778); Franz Anton Mesmer, Austrian physician (1753-1815); Joan Collins, English-born actress (1933- ); Drew Carey, US comedian (1958- ); Jewel, US singer (1974- ); Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov, Russian chess grandmaster (1951- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer