This Day in HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1997: Jamaica’s fourth prime minister, Michael Manley, dies.

OTHER EVENTS

1834: The city of York in Upper Canada is incorporated as Toronto. 1857: In its Dred Scott decision the US Supreme Court holds that Scott, a slave, could not sue for his freedom in a federal court.

1869: Dmitri Mendeleev presents the first periodic table of the elements to Russian Chemical Society.

1899: The name Aspirin is trademarked by German company Bayer for its drug made from acetylsalicylic acid; it is patented by Felix Hoffmann.

1921: Police in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, issue an edict requiring women to wear skirts at least four inches below the knee.

1922: The United States prohibits export of arms to China.

1930: Indigenous Canadians show Clarence Birdseye how they preserve the fish they catch; intrigued, he sees the possibilities and the frozen food industry is born.

1957: Two former British colonies, Gold Coast and Togoland, form the independent West African nation of Ghana.

1964: Boxing legend Cassius Clay joins the Nation of Islam and changes his name to Muhammad Ali, calling his former title a slave name.

1965: Frank Loesser’s musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying closes at 46th Street Theatre, New York City — after 1415 performances, seven Tony Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize.

1967: The daughter of Josef Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva, appears at the US Embassy in New Delhi and declares her intention to defect to the West.

1988: Thousands of Tibetans demanding independence set fires throughout their capital city of Lhasa.

1994: Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid rejects a peace agreement reached by 12 other faction leaders in Cairo.

1995: Reggae pioneer and singer Delroy Wilson dies.

1998: The US Army honours three Americans who risked their lives and turned their weapons on fellow soldiers to stop the slaughter of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968.

1999: Ta Mok, the last leader of Khmer Rouge, is captured by the Cambodian army and flown to the capital for trial.

2006: Several cats test positive for the deadly strain of bird flu in Austria; Poland reports its first outbreak of the disease as the World Health Organization calls bird flu a greater global challenge than any previous infectious disease.

2007: France and the

United Arab Emirates sign an agreement to open a branch of the Louvre museum in Abu

Dhabi.

2008: A Palestinian kills eight students at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem before he is slain; Hamas militants in the Gaza

Strip praise the operation in a statement, and thousands of Palestinians take to the streets of Gaza to celebrate.

2010: Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls the official version of the September 11, 2011 attacks a “big lie” used by the US as an excuse for battling terror.

2013: The number of Unregistered refugees tops one million, half of them children

— a milestone in Syria’s accelerating humanitarian crisis.

2015: US State Department charges two Vietnamese and a Canadian citizen with cyber fraud for stealing one billion e-mail addresses for spam.

2016: Former First Lady Nancy Reagan dies in Los Angeles at age 94.

2017: US President Donald Trump signs a scaled-back version of his controversial ban on selected foreign travellers, although it still bars new visas for people from six Muslim-majority countries and temporarily shuts down America’s refugee programme.

2018: The highest overdose death rate ever recorded in the US is 142,000 overdoses in the 2016-17 period, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Forbes magazine names Amazon founder Jeff Bezos the world’s richest person for the first time, at US$112 billion; Bill Gates is listed as second-richest.

The world’s oldest message in a bottle is found in western Australia, thrown from the German ship Paula 132 years prior on June 12, 1886.

2019: Lebron James scores his 32,293rd point in the second quarter of the Lakers’ 115-99 loss to Denver in LA, passing Michael Jordan into fourth place on the NBA’S all-time pointscoring list.

2020: American rapper Lil Uzi Vert’s second album, Eternal Atake, tops the Billboard charts upon its release.

2021: The US Senate passes a Us$1.9-trillion COVID-19 relief Bill called the American Rescue Plan.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Michelangelo, Italian renaissance artist (1475-1564); Cyrano de Bergerac, French author-duellist (1620-1655); Ed Mcmahon, US host-announcer

(1923-2009); Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian novelist

(1927-2014); Shaquille O’neal, US basketball player (1972- )