Today is the 318th day of 2023. There are 47 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1994: Tropical Storm Gordon kills at least 829 people in Haiti.

OTHER EVENTS

1533: Spanish conquistadors take the city of Cuzco, the capital of the Inca empire.

1647: England’s King Charles I is recaptured and imprisoned by rebels.

1775: American troops under Benedict Arnold invade Quebec Province in Canada.

1851: American author Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is published.

1889: Inspired by Jules Verne, New York World reporter Nellie Bly sets out to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She succeeds, making the trip in 72 days.

1890: Anglo-Portuguese agreement on Zambezi and Congo grants Britain control of lower Zambezi and colonising rights up to the Congo.

1935: US President Franklin D Roosevelt proclaims Philippine Islands a commonwealth and pledges independence by 1946.

1940: German bombers destroy most of the English city of Coventry in World War II.

1947: United Nations recognises Korea’s claim to independence.

1957: Britain declares Bahrain an independent Arab state under British protection.

1969: Apollo 12 blasts off for the moon.

1970: Cyclone and giant waves devastate southern coast of East Pakistan — now Bangladesh— and islands in Bay of Bengal, with death toll estimated at 300,000.

1973: Britain’s Princess Anne marries Captain Mark Phillips in Westminster Abbey. The couple divorces in 1992.

1986: The US Securities and Exchange Commission impose a record $100-million penalty against Wall Street trader Ivan Boesky for using insider information.

1988: Palestine Liberation Organization’s Parliament-in-exile endorses new political strategy that implicitly recognises the state of Israel and renounces terrorism.

1989: Black nationalist movement South West Africa People’s Oorganization wins a solid majority in Namibia’s first national election.

1992: A Unionist gunman kills two people and wounds 13 in a Belfast bookmaker’s shop in Northern Ireland.

1993: Supporters of continued US commonwealth status for Puerto Rico prevail in a statehood referendum.

1996: American troops arrive in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, in advance of a multinational operation to feed and help send home more than one million refugees in Zaire, now called Congo.

1998: Iraq sends a letter to the UN Security Council stating that weapons inspections can continue. An hour before the launch of an airstrike, US President Bill Clinton calls it off.

1999: The United Nations imposes sanctions on Afghanistan and demands the arrest of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. The sanctions require UN member states to freeze Taliban assets and to ban flights in and out of the country.

2000: Israeli troops impose a siege on Palestinian communities, paralysing life in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in retaliation for deadly shooting ambushes that signal an escalation in seven weeks of fighting.

2003: Negotiators for the 1989 Montreal Protocol, adopted to help eliminate chemicals that destroyed the atmospheric ozone layer, refuse most of the exemptions for methyl bromide use sought by the US.

2004: The US military’s ground and air assault of Fallujah goes quicker than expected, with the entire Iraqi city occupied after six days of fighting. Thirty-one Americans are killed in the siege.

2006: The International Atomic Energy Agency reports new traces of plutonium and enriched uranium — potential material for atomic warheads — have been found in a nuclear waste facility in Iran.

2007: Charged with crimes against humanity, former Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary and his wife are formally put in detention by Cambodia’s UN-backed genocide tribunal.

2008: A lunar probe from India lands successfully on the moon.

2009: Iran’s embattled Opposition leaders accuse the Government of becoming more brutal than the shah’s regime in Web statements, and authorities announce a new Internet crackdown aimed at choking off the reform movement’s last real means of keeping its campaign alive.

2010: Democracy heroine Aung San Suu Kyi takes her first steps back into Myanmar’s political minefield, vowing to press ahead in her decades-long fight for democracy, while also calling for compromise with other political parties and the ruling junta.

2011: Jordan’s king says that Syrian President Bashar Assad should step down for the good of his country, the first Arab leader to publicly make such a call.

2012: Israel carries out a blistering offensive of more than 20 airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, assassinating Hamas’s military commander and targeting the armed group’s training facility and rocket launchers in Israel’s most intense attack on the territory in nearly four years.

2013: Egypt gives the red carpet welcome to senior Russians officials aiming to extend Moscow’s influence through military and economic cooperation with a key US ally in the Middle East after Washington froze millions of dollars in military aid.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Claude Monet, French painter (1840-1926); Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian statesman (1889-1964); Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author (1907-2002); Joseph McCarthy, US senator (1909-1957); Jordan’s King Hussein (1935-1999); Britain’s King Charles III (1948- ); Buckwheat Zydeco, US singer/accordionist (1947-2016 ); Reverend Run, US rapper (1964- ); Olga Kurylenko, actress (1979- ); Condoleezza Rice, former US Secretary of State (1954- ); Brian Dietzen, actor (1977- ); Shyheim, rapper (1979- ); Tobin Esperance (Papa Roach), rock musician (1979- ); Vanessa Bayer, actress-comedian (1981- ); Russell Tovey, actor (1981- ); Cory Michael Smith, actor (1986- ); Graham Patrick Martin, actor (1991- ); Janieve Russell, Jamaica athlete (multiple Commonwealth Games gold medallist) (1993- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer