TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2003: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, is convicted of fraud and theft by a regional court in Pretoria, South Africa, and sentenced to five years in prison.

OTHER EVENTS

1184 BC: The Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse

1521: Spanish rebels are defeated at Villalar, Spain, and leaders of the anti-Hapsburg movement are executed.

1617: Concino Concini, Marquis d’Angre, is assassinated by order of France’s King Louis XIII

1704: The first regularly issued American newspaper starts publication.

1792: Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composes France’s national anthem, La Marseillaise.

1898: Spain declares war on the United States after receiving a US ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.

1915: The Ottoman Turkish Empire begins the brutal mass deportation of Armenians during World War I.

1916: Some 1,600 Irish nationalists launch the Easter uprising by seizing several key sites in Dublin; the rising is put down by British forces several days later.

1967: Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is killed when the parachute straps of his spacecraft get entangled and the vehicle plunges to earth.

1970: China launches its first satellite.

1975: Terrorists from the German Red Army faction occupy the West German Embassy in Stockholm, taking 12 people hostage and killing two of them.

1975: Thousands of Vietnamese refugees are flown to the US island of Guam as communists move rapidly in their takeover of South Vietnam.

1980: The United States launches an abortive attempt to free American hostages in Iran but it results in the deaths of eight US servicemen.

1989: Rebels shell the eastern Afghanistan city of Jalalabad, killing at least 54 people.

1991: The South African Government announces it will uphold an agreement with the African National Congress to free all political prisoners by April 30.

1993: Commandos break into the cockpit of a commandeered Indian Airlines plane in Amritsar, India, and shoot dead the lone hijacker, freeing all 141 people aboard.

1997: Islamist militants armed with sabres and axes strike two villages in Algeria, butchering 47 people in a pre-election terror wave that leaves an estimated 420 dead in a few weeks.

1998: In front of a cheering crowd, 22 Rwandans convicted of genocide are executed by firing squad in Kigali.

2000: Iranian hardliners close down 14 pro-democracy publications in a strike against a major pillar of the reform movement.

2001: A jury is chosen in the murder trial of a former Ku Klux Klansman charged 38 years after the church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Alabama.

2004: American businesswoman Estée Lauder, who cofounded the hugely profitable fragrance and beauty company that bore her name, dies in Manhattan.

2006: Three bombings hit an Egyptian beach resort popular with foreigners, killing at least 21 people and wounding more than 60 a day after Osama bin Laden issued a taped warning against Westerners.

2007: Mexico City lawmakers vote to legalise abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

2009: Mexico shuts down schools, museums, libraries and State-run theatres across its overcrowded capital in hopes of containing a swine flu outbreak that authorities say killed at least 20 people.

2010: Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas calls on President Barack Obama to impose a Mideast peace deal, reflecting growing frustration with what Palestinians see as Washington’s failure to wrangle concessions out of Israel’s hard-line Government.

2011: A civil rights group says at least 500 people died in religious rioting that followed Nigeria’s presidential election.

2013: In Bangladesh a shoddily constructed eight-storey commercial building housing garment factories collapses, killing more than 1,100 people.

2014: Russia announces new military exercises involving ground and air forces near its border with Ukraine, swiftly responding to a Ukrainian operation to drive pro-Russia insurgents out of occupied buildings in the country’s tumultuous east.

2017: Two inmates receive lethal injections on the same gurney about three hours apart as Arkansas completes the nation’s first double execution since 2000, just days after the State ended a nearly 12-year hiatus on administering capital punishment..

2021: At least 82 COVID-19 patients die in a fire at Ibn Khatib hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, with 100 more injured. Joe Biden becomes the first US president to officially recognise the killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during WWII as genocide.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Edmund Cartwright, English inventor of first power loom (1743-1823); William Brooke Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), American, British, German and Irish fascist politician and Nazi propagandist (1906-1946); Shirley MacLaine, US actress-dancer-author (1934- ); Sir Kenneth Hall, Jamaican former governor general (1941- ); Barbra Streisand, US actress-entertainer (1942- ); Cedric the Entertainer, US comedian (1964- ); Sachin Tendulkar, Indian cricketer (1973- )

– AP/Jamaica Observer