Today is the 272nd day of 2023. There are 93 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1982: Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with deadly cyanide claim the first of seven victims in the Chicago area. (To date, the case remains unsolved.)

OTHER EVENTS

1567: Second War of Religion begins in France between Huguenots and King Charles IX.

1650: France’s Parliament imposes peace on Bordeaux, which virtually ends second Fronde revolt.

1789: The US War Department establishes a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.

1829: London’s reorganised police force, which becomes known as Scotland Yard, goes on duty.

1875: Rebellion in Cuba leads to deterioration of US-Spanish relations.

1910: The National Urban League has its beginnings in New York as The Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes.

1911: Italy declares war on Turkey, eventually conquering Libya.

1923: Britain begins ruling Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.

1938: British, French, German and Italian leaders conclude the Munich Agreement, which is aimed at appeasing Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

1943: US General Dwight D Eisenhower and Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio sign an armistice during World War II aboard the British ship Nelson off Malta.

1963: The second session of Second Vatican Council opens in Rome.

1965: Soviet Union admits it is supplying arms to North Vietnam.

1972: China and Japan normalise relations.

1977: The Billy Joel album The Stranger was released by Columbia Records.

1978: Pope John Paul I is found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.

1987: Henry Ford II, long-time chairman of Ford Motor Co, dies in Detroit at age 70.

1988: The space shuttle Discovery blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, marking America’s return to manned space flight following the Challenger disaster.

1990: The United States meets with Vietnam in the first high-level meeting between the two nations since the Vietnam War.

1992: Brazilian lawmakers impeach President Fernando Collor de Mello.

1996: Bosnia’s first post-war elections are watched by international groups that certify victories by nationalist parties and the new president, Alija Izetbegovic.

2002: The United Nations World Food Program says it is cutting off grain rations to three million North Koreans because of a shortfall in food aid from donor nations.

2004: The Vatican, in its first speech ever to the UN General Assembly’s annual autumn session for world leaders, calls for a total ban on human cloning and criticises the war in Iraq and unilateral responses to terrorism.

2006: A Brazilian jetliner clips a smaller jet in mid-air and crashes into the Amazon jungle, killing all 155 on board in the nation’s worst air disaster.

2009: Iran’s nuclear chief says the country’s new uranium enrichment site was built for maximum protection from aerial attack; carved into a mountain and near a military compound of the powerful Revolutionary Guard.

2011: Angry supporters of President Bashar Assad’s regime hurl tomatoes and eggs at the US ambassador to Syria as he enters the office of a leading opposition figure and then try to break into the building, trapping him inside for three hours.

2013: The death toll from a building that collapsed in Mumbai rises to 60 as the rescue operation is called off.

2014: Afghanistan swears in Ashraf Ghani as its second elected president embarking on a new era with a national unity government poised to confront the Taliban.

2016: A New Jersey Transit commuter train slams into the Hoboken station, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Jacopo Tintoretto, Italian artist (1518-1594); Anita Ekberg, Swedish actress (1931-2015); Lech Walesa, Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner (1943- ); Jerry Lee Lewis, singer (1935-2022); Bryant Gumbel, TV personality, (1948- ); Sebastian Coe, Olympic gold medal runner, (1956- )

– AP