This is the 265th day of 2023. There are 100 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2021: World Health Organization warns urgent action is needed on air pollution, which is on par with smoking and a poor diet in causing seven million premature deaths a year.

OTHER EVENTS

1609: The king of Spain orders the deportation of the baptised former Muslims known as Moriscos.

1692: The last eight people are hanged for witchcraft in the US, with 19 hanged overall and six other deaths occuring during the Salem Witch Trials.

1711: Rio de Janeiro is captured by the French.

1862: US President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in the Confederate states free as of January 1, 1863.

1914: In one hour a German submarine sinks three British cruisers off the Dutch coast.

1920: A Chicago grand jury convenes to investigate charges that eight White Sox players conspired to fix the 1919 World Series.

1927: Slavery is abolished in Sierra Leone in Africa.

1949: The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.

1955: Hurricane Janet, the most violent of the Caribbean season at the time, causes almost 600 deaths around the islands. On BBC Radio Grace Archer is killed in a barn fire on Brookfield Farm but BBC denies this was done to spoil the launch of rival network ITV.

1965: A ceasefire is declared in the war between India and Pakistan, but both sides subsequently violate it.

1974: The official death toll from the hurricane that swept Honduras is put at 5,000.

1975: Sara Jane Moore fails in an attempt to shoot US President Gerald Ford outside a San Francisco hotel.

1980: Iraqi tanks enter Iran, marking the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War as a full-scale conflict.

1986: Two hijackers seize a Soviet airliner at Ural Mountains airport and kill two passengers before security agents recapture the plane and shoot the hijackers.

1988: The Government of Canada apologises for the World War II internment of Japanese-Canadians and promises compensation.

1989: F W De Klerk takes over as president of South Africa.

1990: Jordan’s King Hussein appeals to the United States in a televised message to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia so as to avert “death, destruction and misery”.

1993: Abkhazian rebels in Georgia shoot down a second passenger plane in two days, killing 80.

1994: A NATO aircraft strike is directed at Serbian targets near Sarajevo after UN troops patrolling the city came under machine gun and rocket fire. The Friends TV sitcom debuts on NBC.

1995: America’s Time Warner Inc and Turner Broadcasting System Inc (TBS) announce a merger with Time Warner, purchasing TBS in a deal valued at US$7.5 billion, creating the world’s largest media company.

1997: US President Bill Clinton, speaking at the United Nations, announces he will submit to the Senate a treaty banning all nuclear explosions.

2001: Pope John Paul II visits Kazakhstan and Armenia, and cautions against allowing September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States to create divisions between Muslims and Christians.

2004: The US military drops an espionage charge against a Muslim interpreter accused of spying at the camp for terror detainees at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — the third Guantanamo spy case of the year to fall apart.

2006: Pope Benedict XVI invites Muslim envoys to meet with him at his summer residence for what the Holy See says is urgently needed dialogue following a crisis ignited by his remarks on Islam and violence.

2007: Monks leading swelling demonstrations against Myanmar’s military regime march past barricades to the home of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, increasing pressure on the junta.

2008: The first excavation of Stonehenge in more than 40 years uncovers evidence that the stone circle drew ailing pilgrims from around Europe for what they believed to be its healing properties, archaeologists say.

2009: Al-Qaeda releases a new, 106-minute-long video predicting President Barack Obama’s downfall at the hands of the Muslim world, to mark the eighth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US.

2010: Declassified US documents show former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, a prominent member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, told the FBI that the dictator “delighted” in the 1998 terrorist bombings of two US embassies in East Africa.

2011: American diplomats lead a walkout at the UN General Assembly as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fiercely attacks the United States and major west European nations as “arrogant powers” ruled by greed and eager for military adventurism.

2012: The leaders of the rebel Free Syrian Army say they moved their command centre from Turkey to Syria with the aim of uniting rebels and speeding up the fall of President Bashar Assad’s regime.

2013: A pair of suicide bombers blow themselves up amid hundreds of worshippers at a historic church in north-western Pakistan, killing 78 people in the deadliest-ever attack against the country’s Christian minority.

2014: Fierce fighting between the Islamic State militant group and Kurdish forces just over the border in Syria brings the battle closer to Turkey, triggering a surge of tens of thousands of refugees and raising pressure on the Government to step up efforts to take on the Sunni extremists.

2015: Palangkaraya in Indonesian Borneo records the highest air pollutant index (API) value ever recorded of 1,986 due to haze caused by forest fires deliberately lit to clear land for palm oil plantations. Volkswagen admits that 11 million cars have been wrongly programmed to appear to emit lesser emissions than they do.

2016: Police officer Betty Shelby is charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting unarmed black man Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

2020: President Xi Jinping of China pledges at the UN that the country will adopt stronger climate targets, including becoming carbon-neutral by 2060.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Michael Faraday, British physicist (1791-1862); Caroline Astor, US aristocrat of New York high society (1830-1908); Louis Botha, South African soldier statesman (1862-1919); Wilhelm Keitel, German WWII general (1882-1946); Melvin Van Peebles, American actor, writer, film-maker and composer (1932-2021); Andrea Bocelli, Italian opera singer (1958- )

– AP