Today is the 328th day of 2023. There are 37 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

1947: Price ceilings are reimposed by the Canadian Government on canned fruits and vegetables .

2008: The UK announces a plan to cut taxes and increase spending, in spite of a large budget deficit, in an attempt to stimulate the troubled economy.

2012: The number two leader in Islamic military group Hamas says the group will not stop arming itself because only a strong arsenal, not negotiations, can extract concessions from Israel.

2018: Taiwanese voters vote against referendums to legalise same-sex marriage.

OTHER EVENTS

1975: An earthquake hits eastern Turkey, taking at least 574 lives which could rise to more than 3,000, according to the Government.

1982: Prime minister of Jamaica Edward Seaga officially launches National Development Bank of Jamaica Limited.

1987: The United States and the Soviet Union agree to scrap short- and medium-range missiles in the first superpower treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.

1989: Sachin Tendulkar scores a Test Cricket fifty at age 16 years and 214 days, a record.

1990: South Africa’s pan-Africanist Congress announces it will join with the African National Congress in opposing the white-led Government.

1992: The UN General Assembly passes a non-binding resolution calling for an end to the United States’s 30-year embargo against Cuba; the vote is 59 in favour, three against (USA, Israel, Romania), and 79 abstentions, with the latter group including Russia and the European Communities.

1993: Two 11-year-old British boys are convicted in the murder of a Liverpool toddler.

1995: Irish voters decide to legalise divorce, passing a referendum by a narrow margin.

1997: Taliban rulers of Afghanistan agree to uproot the poppy crop, the source of half the world’s heroin supply.

1998: America Online confirms it will buy Netscape Communications in a deal worth US$10 billion.

2001: The Grand National Assembly of Turkey ratifies changes to the country’s legal code that makes women equal to men before the law and no longer subject to their husbands.

2005: In a potential blow to Caribbean markets the European Union agrees on a major overhaul of its sugar subsidy programme, cutting prices by 36 per cent.

2006: The Government of Azerbaijan suspends the licence of the country’s only private TV and radio station.

2010: Anger and fear about Europe’s seemingly unstoppable debt crisis courses through the continent as striking workers shut down much of Portugal; Ireland proposes its deepest budget cuts in history; and seething Italian and British students clash with police over education cuts.

2015: Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke is charged with first-degree murder of 17-year-old African American Laquan McDonald in 2014.

2016: An international research team publishes its discovery of 1,500 new viruses found in invertebrates.

2017: Iin the Dagens Nyheter Swedish newspaper 18 women accuse Jean-Claude Arnault, who has ties to the Nobel Prize Committee, of sexual assault and harassment.

2019: Data leaked from the Chinese high-security Muslim Uighur security camps, housing one million people, show systematic brainwashing in the western Xinjiang region.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Arthur Chaskalson, first chief justice of South African Constitutional Court (1931-2012); Ted Bundy, American serial killer (1946-1989)

– AP/JamaicaObserver