This is the 303rd day of 2023. There are 62 days left in the year

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

2004: Ukrainians vote in a presidential election watched by the West for signs of whether the former Soviet republic is committed to democracy and if the country between Russia and NATO’s eastern flank will tilt toward the Kremlin.

2018: World Wide Fund (WWF) conservation group says “exploding human consumption” has caused a 60 per cent decline in all wildlife between 1970 and 2014.

OTHER EVENTS

1817: Simon Bolivar organises an independent Government in Venezuela.

1888: In London, Jack the Ripper murders his last victim.

1951: A Bill increasing retirement and survivors benefits under the Railroad Retirement Act is signed by President Harry S Truman.

1959: Dominican Vice-President Joaquin Balaguer confirms $50,000,000 in expenditure for arms from abroad.

1961: The Soviet Union tests a hydrogen bomb with a force estimated at 58 megatons, an action condemned throughout the world.

1973: Libya becomes the seventh Arab country to suspend oil deliveries to the Netherlands.

1978: US President Jimmy Carter signs a law allowing the deportation of all naturalised US citizens who had engaged in Nazi atrocities.

1989: Riot police in Moscow repeatedly charge and club demonstrators following a candlelight vigil outside KGB headquarters in memory of Joseph Stalin’s victims.

1992: Heavy fighting breaks out in Luanda, the capital of Angola, between the Government and the Union for the Total Independence of Angola or UNITA; in three days of conflict at least 1,000 lives are claimed, until both sides establish a truce on November 1.

1997: Sri Lanka’s air force begins recruiting women to train as pilots for cockpits left vacant by the deaths of airmen in the country’s 14-year civil war.

1998: Typhoon Babs cuts a destructive swath through the Philippines; some 320,000 people are left homeless.

1999: The last Indonesian troop ship sails out of East Timor, ending a bloody 24-year military engagement in the now-independent nation; some 200,000 East Timorese and 5,000 Indonesian troops had perished since the Indonesian invasion of the former Portuguese colony on December 7, 1975.

2002: The Irish Republican Army breaks off negotiations with an independent disarmament commission over talks on scrapping weapons — a key goal of Northern Ireland’s four-year-old peace accord.

2007: Six French charity workers are charged with kidnapping after a failed attempt to leave Chad with 103 children an aid group said are orphans from Sudan’s Darfur region, Chadian authorities say.

2008: A US federal jury convicts Charles McArthur Emmanuel (son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor) in the first case brought under a 1994 US law allowing prosecution for torture and atrocities committed overseas.

2009: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is confronted repeatedly by Pakistanis as she ends a tense three-day tour of the country, chastised by one woman who said a US programme using aerial drones to target terrorists amounts to “executions without trial”.

2010: Yemeni police arrest a woman on suspicion of mailing a pair of bombs powerful enough to take down airplanes, officials said, as details emerge about a terrorist plot aimed at the US that exploits security gaps in the worldwide shipping system.

2014: After the killing of a Palestinian man suspected of having shot a Jewish activist in Jerusalem, Israel, for the first time since 1967, shuts down all access to the holy site Temple Mount (Noble Sanctuary); the site is reopened the following day to all but men under the age of 50.

2017: A US federal judge blocks President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military.

2018: German ex-nurse Niels Högel admits in court to killing over 100 patients, making him one of the world’s worst serial killers.

2019: Kashmir officially loses their autonomous status, their flag and their constitution, as India brings it under federal control.

2022: An Indonesian medical tragedy is acknowledged as 157 children have perished from kidney injuries due to contaminated medicines, according to authorities.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Irish author-politician (1741-1816); Feodor Dostoyevsky, Russian novelist (1821-1881); Ezra Pound, US poet (1885-1972); Homi Bhabha Indian physicist; Louis Malle, French film director (1932-1995); Diego Maradona, Argentine soccer star (1960-2020); Courtney Walsh, West Indies cricket legend from Jamaica (1962- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer