Today is the 222nd day of 2010. There are 143 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

1997: Photos of British Princess Diana embracing film producer Dodi Fayed are published in the London Sunday Mirror, raising speculation about her future.

Other Notable Events

1792: French monarchy is overthrown when mobs in Paris attack palace of King Louis XVI.

1842: Lord Ashley’s Mine Act prohibits women and children under 10 from working underground in Britain.

1866: Bolivia cedes territory between Andes and Pacific Ocean to Chile.

1885: Leo Daft opens America’s first commercially operated electric streetcar, in Baltimore.

1897: A young researcher at German chemical firm Bayer, Felix Hoffman, first synthesises acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin’s active ingredient.

1913: Bulgaria gives up its claim to Macedonia in a peace treaty signed in Bucharest, ending Second Balkan War. Tensions remain in the region, exploding a year later in World War I.

1945: Japan offers to surrender in World War II if Emperor Hirohito is permitted to keep his throne.

1975: Nationalist China resumes air flights to Japan. Taiwan had severed plane service in April 1974, in retaliation for an aviation agreement Japan had signed with China.

1990: Arab heads of state condemn Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and send pan-Arab defense force to Saudi Arabia; Iraqi President Saddam Hussein calls on Muslims to launch “holy war” against foreign troops and “corrupt” Arab rulers.

1994: Feminist Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, under a death threat from Islamic extremists, flees to Sweden.

1995: Two of Saddam Hussein’s daughters, their husbands and a group of army officers flee to Jordan. King Hussein grants them political asylum.

1998: More than 2,000 people die in flooding in China.

1999 – Rebel-allied soldiers free some 200 remaining captives in Sierra Leone, who were kidnapped during a scheduled handover of civilians abducted during Sierra Leone’s eight-year civil war.

2000: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez holds talks with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, defying the US by being the first head of state to go to Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War.

2002: Turkey’s economy minister, Kemal Dervis, resigns from the government of ailing Premier Bulent Ecevit ahead of early November elections.

2005: Police in Brazil examine fingerprints and other evidence left behind by thieves who stole $67.8 million from the Central Bank in one of the world’s biggest heists.

2008: Russia and Georgia clash on land and at sea despite a Georgian cease-fire offer and claim of withdrawal from the separatist province of South Ossetia.

Today’s Birthdays

Count Camillo Cavour, Italian statesman (1810-1861); Jay Cooke, US financier (1821-1905); Charles Keene, British artist and illustrator (1823-1819); Alexander Glazounov, Russian composer (1865-1936); Herbert Hoover, US president (1874-1964); Leo Fender, US guitar manufacturer (1909-1991); Rosanna Arquette, US actress (1959-); Antonio Banderas, Spanish actor (1960-).