Today is the 45th day of 2023. There are 320 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

270 ce: St Valentine, a priest and physician, is martyred in Rome; exchanging love greetings on Valentine’s Day stems from legend that Valentine had signed a letter to his jailer’s daughter, with whom he had fallen in love, “From your Valentine”.

OTHER EVENTS

1076: Pope Gregory VII excommunicates Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV for the first time.

1540: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V enters Ghent, in Belgium, and executes leaders of the revolt.

1663: Canada becomes a royal province of France.

1779: Captain James Cook is killed by Hawaiians in a dispute over the theft of a cutter.

1831: Vicente Guerrero, revolutionary general and president of Mexico, dies this day at the age of 48 after being executed by the firing squad of the conservative government that ousted him.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone.

1893: The United States annexes Hawaii by treaty.

1899: The US Congress approves, and US President William McKinley signs, legislation authorising states to use voting machines for federal elections.

1919: Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein divorces Mileva Maric after 16 years of marriage.

1920: With the establishment of women’s suffrage in the United States, Carrie Chapman Catt forms the League of Women Voters in Chicago.

1922: GraceKennedy and Company Limited — one of the Caribbean’s largest conglomerates — is launched in Jamaica.

1924: Thomas J Watson renames the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) as International Business Machines (IBM).

1929: Members of Al Capone’s gang of bootleggers massacre a rival gang run by George Moran in Chicago, during the Prohibition era, in what becomes known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

1931: The original Dracula film, starring Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire, is released.

1946: The first general purpose, high-speed, electronic digital computer, the ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer) is demonstrated to the public by its creators, J Presper Eckert Jr and John W Mauchly, at the University of Pennsylvania.

1956: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev denounces Joseph Stalin’s policies at a Soviet Communist Party conference.

1962: US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy conducts a televised tour of the White House’s Executive Mansion for CBS Television.

1971: Richard Nixon installs a secret taping system in the White House.

1972: US trade restrictions against China are relaxed, putting China on the same basis as the Soviet Union.

1979: Four armed men kidnap US Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolf Dubs; the ambassador is later killed in a shoot-out with police.

1984: Britain’s Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean dominate ice dancing at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics and record 9-of-9 perfect scores for artistic impression in their free dance routine.

1988: Three officers of Yasser Arafat’s mainline group in the Palestine Liberation Organisation are killed in Cyprus when their booby-trapped car explodes.

1989: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issues an edict sentencing British author Salman Rushdie to death for allegedly insulting Islam, sending him into hiding for years. Robin Givens is granted a divorce from Mike Tyson in the Dominican Republic.

1990: An Indian Airlines passenger jet crashes on landing, killing 91 people.

1991: Several Latin American countries halt food imports from Peru, seeking to contain a cholera epidemic responsible for the deaths of 3,000 people. Psychological thriller The Silence of the Lambs is released in American theatres; widely regarded as a classic it later won five Academy Awards: best picture, best actor (Anthony Hopkins), best actress (Jodie Foster), and best director (Jonathan Demme).

1992: Nearly half of the former Soviet Republics vow to form separate armies.

1994: An anti-terrorism court in Algeria sentences 27 Islamic fundamentalists to prison in one of the country’s biggest anti-terrorism trials.

1996: Zapatista National Liberation Army rebels accept a Mexican Government offer of limited political and judicial autonomy for some of Mexico’s more than seven million indigenous people.

1998: Milan Simic and Miroslav Tadic become the first Bosnian Serb suspects to turn themselves in voluntarily to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

2001: A criminal investigation is conducted into outgoing US President Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of fugitive commodities traders Marc Rich and Pincus Green, who had fled to Switzerland in 1983 to escape prosecution for tax evasion and violation of a trade embargo.

2002: Researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station, USA, successfully clone a cat, making it the sixth species to be cloned.

2003: Dolly the Sheep of Scotland, the world’s first cloned mammal from an adult cell, dies at the age of six.

2005: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim register YouTube, a website for sharing videos which would become hugely popular, with more than one billion unique users visiting the site every month. A powerful bomb assassinates former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 13 other people, devastation that harks back to Lebanon’s violent past and raises fears of new bloodshed in the bitter dispute over Syria, the country’s chief power broker.

2006: The oldest son of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is sentenced to nine months in prison for illegal fund-raising during his father’s 1999 primary campaign.

2009: The Group of Seven finance ministers pledge to avoid resorting to protectionism as they try to stimulate their own economies in the face of the world’s worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

2010: US officials seek to shore up support for a tougher stand against Iran’s nuclear programme by saying Tehran has left the world little choice, and expressing renewed confidence that holdout China will come around to harsher UN penalties. Alexandre Bilodeau wins the gold medal in the freestyle skiing men’s moguls event, becoming the first Canadian to win a gold medal during a Canadian-hosted Olympics.

2012: Oscar Pistorious, the double-amputee Olympic sprinter dubbed the Blade Runner, is charged in the slaying of his girlfriend at his upscale home in South Africa.

2018: Amid scandals and corruption allegations, South African President Jacob Zuma resigns and is later replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Thomas Malthus, English economist and demographer (population growth will always tend to outrun food supply and should be checked by stern reproduction limits theorist) (1766-1834 ); Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, US official and diplomat, and best-selling author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1818-1895); Christopher Latham Sholes, US inventor of the QWERTY keyboard (1819-1890); Domingo F Sarmiento, Argentine president 1868-1874 (1811-1888); Israel Zangwill, English author (1846-1926); Gregory Hines, US actor-dancer (1946-2003); Sushma Swaraj, Indian politician (1952-2019)

— AP/Jamaica Observer