Today is the 326th day of 2023. There are 39 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2012: The top leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood denounces peace efforts with Israel and urges a holy war to liberate Palestinian territories — one day after the country’s president, who hails from the movement, mediated a ceasefire between Israelis and Palestinians to end eight days of fierce fighting.

OTHER EVENTS

1906: The “SOS” distress signal is adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin.

1938: A collective fine of 1,000 million Rm is imposed on the German Jewry as punishment for the assassination of Herr vom Rath.

1955: RCA Records make its best investment, paying US$35,000 to Sun Records for Elvis Presley’s contract

1963: US President John F Kennedy is assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald while riding in an open-topped motorcade in Dallas, Texas.

1972: US President Richard Nixon lifts a 22-year-old ban on American travel to China.

1986:With a second-round knockout of Trevor Berbick, 20-year-old Mike Tyson becomes the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history.

1989: Lebanese President Rene Mouawad is assassinated.

1990: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigns after 11 1/2 years in office.

1991: Ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide meets with a group of legislators to negotiate an end to Haiti’s constitutional crisis — the first meeting between the two sides since Aristide’s overthrow in a military-led coup.

1994: Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi is placed under investigation in a bribery probe.

1995: Pixar’s Toy Story, the first entirely computer-animated feature-length film, is released and becomes a critical and commercial hit.

2001: The Turkish Parliament approves revisions to the country’s 75-year-old civil code to recognise men and women as equal before the law.

2002: Officials cancel the Miss World pageant in Nigeria and move it instead to London, after news that the African nation will host the event sparks deadly riots.

2004: Opposition supporters gather to protest alleged fraud in Ukraine’s presidential run-off, which European monitors say was marred by official interference and suspiciously high turnout figures.

2005: Conservative Angela Merkel takes power as Germany’s first female chancellor.

2006: Nepal celebrates the end of a bloody 10-year communist insurgency by declaring a public holiday; the international community hails the deal under which communist rebels will join an interim government.

2007: A transport strike that crippled France for nine days — in open defiance of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reform agenda — collapses as rail workers around the country vote “Yes” to return to work.

2008: China denounces a US congressional panel that issued a report accusing it of stepping up computer espionage attacks on the American government, its defence contractors, and businesses.

2009: Iran begins a large-scale air defence war games aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from attack, as an air force commander boasts the country could deter any military strike by Israel.

2010: Thousands of people stampede during a festival in the Cambodian capital, leaving more than 330 dead and hundreds injured in what the prime minister calls the country’s biggest tragedy since the 1970s reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge.

2011: South Korea’s ruling party forces a long-stalled free trade deal with the United States through Parliament, enraging Opposition lawmakers who blast their political rivals with tear gas.

2014: A 6.7-magnitude earthquake near Nagano, Japan, causes at least 34 buildings near a ski resort town to collapse.

2017: Californian man Craig Coley is pardoned by Governor Jerry Brown for a double murder, after serving 39 years; it is the longest prison term to be overturned in the state. Ratko Mladic, the “Butcher of Bosnia”, is convicted of genocide and other atrocities during the Bosnian war and jailed for life in The Hague. Uber admits hackers stole personal information affecting 57 million people worldwide and were paid US$100,00 to keep quiet. Vanellope Wilkins, born with her heart outside her body, is the first UK baby to survive birth and operations to reinsert her heart.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Charles de Gaulle, French general-statesman (1890-1970); Benjamin Britten, English composer (1913-1976); Jamie Lee Curtis, US actress (1958- ); Boris Becker, German tennis professional and Wimbledon champion (1967- ); Aston “Family Man” Barrett, Jamaican legendary bassist (1946- )

– AP/Jamaica Observer