Today is the 276th day of 2023. There are 89 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1942: President Franklin D Roosevelt establishes the Office of Economic Stabilization and authorises controls on farm prices, rents, wages and salaries.

OTHER EVENTS

1899: Settlement of the British Guiana-Venezuela boundary dispute takes place.

1922: Rebecca L Felton, a Democrat from Georgia, becomes the first woman in the US Senate.

1945: The May-Johnson Bill, keeping the atomic bomb a secret and establishing security regulations, is introduced in the US Congress.

1964: The FBI arrests four Philadelphia, Mississippi, law enforcement officers and a former deputy sheriff on charges of depriving Negroes of their civil rights.

1968: International observers report finding no evidence of genocide being committed by the Nigerian Government against Biafrans.

1981: Irish nationalists at Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, end seven months of hunger strikes that claimed 10 lives.

1990: After four decades of Cold War division, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agrees to a unified Germany within NATO, leading to Germany’s reunification.

1992: Sinead O’Connor rips up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live.

1996: US President Bill Clinton and the foreign ministers of Great Britain, China, France and Russia sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty forbidding all testing of nuclear weapons.

2008: The United States enacts a historic, US$700-billion, government bailout legislation for the battered financial industry.

2013: Chinese President Xi Jinping announces plans for a “21st century maritime silk road”, linking China to Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean (Belt and Road Initiative/One Belt One Road), while in Indonesia.

2018: Cervical cancer could be eliminated in Australia within decades because of a government vaccination programme, according to report in The Lancet Public Health.

2021: The Pandora Papers investigation reveals the secret wealth of 30 current and former world leaders, including Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Charles Camille St Saens, French composer (1835-1921); Chubby Checker, US singer (1941- ); Hopeton Lewis, Jamaican rocksteady pioneer (1947-2014); Al(fred Charles) Sharpton, Jr, minister and civil rights activist (1954- ); Neve Campbell, Canadian actress (1973- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer