Today is the 327th day of 2023. There are 38 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

1852: Just past midnight a sharp jolt likely caused by heavy rains results in Lake Merced, California, dropping 30 feet (9m).

1971: UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Anthony Barber announces accelerated public works spending aimed at curbing the highest unemployment rate in 32 years.

OTHER EVENTS

1584: The English Parliament expels Jesuits.

1644: Areopagitica, a pamphlet by John Milton decrying censorship, is published.

1869: One of the last clippers ever built and the only one still surviving, clipper Cutty Sark is launched in Dumbarton, Scotland.

1890: King William III of the Netherlands dies without a male heir; a special law is passed to allow his daughter, Princess Wilhelmina, to inherit.

1892: Pierre de Coubertin launches a plan for the modern Olympic Games at the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques annual general meeting.

1897: The portable pencil sharpener is patented by American inventor John Lee Love.

1909: The Wright brothers form a million-dollar corporation to manufacture aeroplanes.

1913: Jim Larkin and James Connolly establish the Irish Citizens Army in order to protect strikers.

1921: US President Warren G Harding signs the Willis Campell Act (anti-beer Bill) forbidding doctors from prescribing beer or liquor for medicinal purposes.

1946: At least 6,000 Vietnamese civilians are killed in a French naval bombardment of the port city of Haiphong.

1988: Officials in Serbia’s autonomous province of Kosovo outlaw all public assemblies and forbid organised groups of demonstrators to enter Pristina, the provincial capital.

1989: At least 300,000 people jam Prague’s Wenceslas Square to demand democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia.

1990: British children’s books author Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach, 1961 and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 1964) dies in Oxford, England.

1998: The European Union lifts a worldwide export ban on British beef, imposed after experts announced a possible link between mad cow disease and a fatal disease in humans.

1999: Kuwait’s Parliament rejects a decree giving women the right to vote and run for office.

2004: Walmart Stores in China issues a statement saying it will respect a request from employees to form a union, in accordance with the law in China; Walmart had always opposed unionisation throughout its stores.

2006: In London a rare radioactive substance is used to kill ex-KGB spy-turned-Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who called Russian President Vladimir Putin “barbaric and ruthless” and blamed him personally for the poisoning.

2010: The Vatican says condoms are the lesser of two evils when used to curb the spread of AIDS, even if their use prevents a pregnancy — a seismic shift on one of the most profound and extremely contentious Roman Catholic teachings.

2011: Yemen’s leader Ali Abdullah Saleh agrees to step down after months of demonstrations against his 33-year rule, pleasing the US and its Gulf allies.

2014: Republicans condemn US President Obama’s use of executive powers to force through immigration reform.

2015: President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia bans “khatna”, the Islamic ritual practice of genital mutilation of young girls.

2018: The US federal climate report finds that climate change will reduce the economy by 10 per cent by 2100, with US$141 billion in costs from heat-related deaths and US$118 billion from sea level rise. Italian designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana apologise for a culturally insensitive video and media posts insulting Chinese culture; they cancel their Shanghai fashion show.

2019: The Sumatran rhino is officially declared extinct in Malaysia after the last-known specimen, 25-year-old Iman, dies of cancer in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.

2021: A manuscript of the early workings of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, “one of the most important scientific documents of the 20th century”, sells at auction for US$13 million. NASA launches its DART Mission by deliberately crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid so as to test technology aimed at preventing any future impact on earth by hazardous asteroids.

2022: Russia steps up its air strike campaign on Ukraine with widespread power blackouts across the country and 80 per cent of Moldova, Kyiv, being left without power or water.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Billy the Kid (William Henry McCarty, Jr), American frontier outlaw (1859-1881); Henry Moseley British physicist (1887-1915); Paul Celan, Romanian poet (1920-1970); Vo Van Kiet, former Vietnamese prime minister (1922-2008); Krzysztof Penderecki, Polish composer (1933-2020); Marcia Griffiths, Jamaican legendary “Queen of Reggae” (1949- ); Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela (1962- ); Oded Fehr, Israeli actor (1970- )

– AP/Jamaica Observer