Today is the 268th day of 2023. There are 97 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2017: Britain’s Prince Harry and girlfriend Meghan Markle make their first public appearance as a couple, attending a wheelchair tennis event at the Invictus Games for wounded veterans in Toronto.

OTHER EVENTS

1493: Christopher Columbus sets sail from Cadiz, Spain, with a flotilla of 17 ships on his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere.

1789: The first United States Congress adopts 12 amendments to the constitution; sending them to the states for ratification. Ten of the amendments become the Bill of Rights.

1894: British annex Pondoland, connecting Cape Colony and Natal, in Africa.

1957: Under escort from the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

1959: Premier S W R D Bandaranaike of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, is assassinated by a Buddhist monk who opposed his economic policies.

1963: The military of the Dominican Republic overthrows the Government of President Juan D Bosch seven months after the country’s first democratic elections.

1966: Two typhoons hit Japan, leaving more than 300 people dead and missing.

1970: Jordan’s King Hussein and Palestinian guerrilla leaders agree on ceasefire to end week-long “Black September” civil war in Jordan that left between 1,000 and 5,000 dead. In the 8:30 pm time slot, immediately following The Brady Bunch, ABC premiered a programme that would give Screen Gems its second TV-to-pop-chart smash: The Partridge Family.

1972: Japan’s Premier Kakuei Tanaka arrives in Beijing, becoming first Japanese premier to set foot in China since World War II.

1973: Three-man crew of US space laboratory, Skylab 2, makes safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean after record 59 days in orbit around earth.

1976: Prime Minister Ian Smith accepts a proposal for eventual black rule in Rhodesia in a broadcast to the nation.

1992: The first contingent of a 600-member Japanese UN peacekeeping unit arrives in Cambodia, among the first Japanese soldiers to serve overseas since World War II.

1996: At least 40 Palestinians and 11 Israelis are killed in a fight, triggered by Israel creating a new opening to an archaeological tunnel at a sensitive religious site in Jerusalem.

1997: US President Bill Clinton pulls open the door of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as he welcomes nine blacks who had faced hate-filled mobs 40 years earlier.

1999: Students pay tribute to six protesters who died during two days of fighting with police in Jakarta, Indonesia. They were protesting a security law giving the military emergency powers.

2000: Stunned by an apparent electoral defeat, Slobodan Milosevic’s allies urge the Opposition to allow a run-off election in Serbia.

2003: Experts from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency say they found traces of highly enriched uranium in Iran at Kalaye Electric Co on the outskirts of Teheran.

2008: Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama sits down with President George W Bush at the White House to discuss a multi-billion-dollar Wall Street bailout plan, but the session, which also included top congressional leaders, devolved into what the McCain campaign described afterward as a “contentious shouting match”. Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin defends her remark that the close proximity of Russia to her home state of Alaska gave her foreign policy experience, explaining in a CBS interview that, “We have trade missions back and forth.” Anti-apartheid activist Kgalema Motlanthe becomes the third president of South Africa since the end of white rule. After a 43-year wait, Paul McCartney performs his first concert in Israel, saying he was on a mission of peace for Israel and the Palestinians.

2010: Israeli settlers have hauled construction equipment into a Jewish settlement deep inside the West Bank, preparing to break ground on a new housing project even as the US races to prevent peace talks from collapsing with the end of an Israeli moratorium on settlement building.

2011: President Mahmoud Abbas receives a hero’s welcome from thousands of cheering, flag-waving Palestinians, having made a bid for United Nations recognition that appears destined to fail but has allowed him to finally step out of the shadow of his predecessor Yasser Arafat.

2013: Nearly a dozen of Syria’s powerful rebel factions, including one linked to al-Qaeda, formally break with the main Opposition group in exile and call for Islamic law in the country, dealing a severe blow to the Western-backed coalition. Skipper Jimmy Spithill and Oracle Team USA won the America’s Cup with one of the greatest comebacks in sports history, speeding past Dean Barker and Emirates Team New Zealand in the winner-take-all Race 19 on San Francisco Bay.

2017: Former Congressman Anthony Weiner is sentenced to 21 months behind bars for illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl. North Korea’s top diplomat says his country had the right to shoot down US warplanes, after President Donald Trump’s weekend tweet suggesting that the North’s Kim Jong Un “won’t be around much longer”.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

William Faulkner, US writer and Nobel laureate (1897-1962); Dmitri Shostakovich, Soviet composer (1906-1975); Robert Bresson, French film director (1901-1999); Glenn Gould, Canadian pianist (1932-1982); Christopher Reeve, US actor (1952-2004); Barbara Walters, US news anchor (1931-2022); Michael Douglas, US actor (1944- ); Will Smith, actor/rapper (1968- ); Catherine Zeta-Jones, Welsh actress (1969- ); Sir Florizel Glasspole, Jamaica’s third and longest serving governor general (1909-2000)

— AP