TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1869: The suction vacuum cleaner is patented by Ives McGaffey of Chicago.

OTHER EVENTS

632: The prophet Muhammad dies in Medina. He leaves no arrangement for his succession, creating a rift in Islam lasting to this day.

1762: Russo-Prussian alliance against Austria is concluded.

1883: France, by Convention of Marsa with Bey of Tunis, gains effective control of Tunisia.

1915: Allied forces take Neuville in France from Germans in World War I.

1925: Britain and France accept in principle Germany’s proposals for security pact to guarantee Franco-German and Belgo-German boundaries.

1942: Japanese submarines shell Sydney, Australia, in World War II.

1965: US troops in Vietnam are authorised to engage in offensive operations.

1976: Large force of Syrian troops moves into Lebanon, where civil war rages.

1978: A jury in Clark County, Nevada, rules the so-called “Mormon will”, purportedly written by the late billionaire Howard Hughes, was a forgery.

1982: President Ronald Reagan becomes the first American chief executive to address a joint session of the British Parliament.

1988: Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze tells United Nations that Moscow would observe a moratorium on nuclear testing if United States also agrees.

1990: Vaclav Havel is elected president in Czechoslovakia’s first free elections in 44 years.

1992: Delegates at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, approve new UN body to monitor compliance with environmental treaties.

1993: Rene Bousquet, former head of police in Vichy France, is killed in his Paris apartment by a gunman on the eve of his war crimes trial.

1994: Two months after the start of the carnage in Rwanda, the UN Security Council approves the dispatch of 5,500 peacekeepers with a timid mandate to protect humanitarian aid but not to stop the slaughter.

1996: China sets off an underground nuclear test blast.

1998: Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha dies suddenly of a heart attack, opening the way for democracy in the country.

2001: Japan is shocked when a man stabs and kills eight children and wounds 15 teachers and students at a school in Ikeda.

2004: France and Germany, the sharpest critics of the Iraq war, back a revised UN resolution laying out the powers of Iraq’s new government, an important step toward gaining the approval of the UN Security Council.

2005: Ethiopian police open fire on stone-throwing protesters in the centre of the capital, killing 22 people and wounding hundreds as unrest mounts over the ruling party’s claim of victory in recent elections.

2006: The US Food and Drug Administration approves Gardasil, a vaccine against HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer. Sheikha Haya Al Khalifa (SHAY’-kah HY’-ah al hah-LEE’-fah), a lawyer from Bahrain, is elected UN General Assembly president, the first woman from the Middle East to take the post.

2010: US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says proposed new UN sanctions against Iran’s suspect nuclear programme will be the toughest ever adopted.

2011: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, increasingly cornered under a stunning upturn in NATO air strikes, lashes back with renewed shelling of the western city of Misrata, killing 10 rebel fighters.

2013: President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping end a two-day summit in the California desert with few policy breakthroughs but the prospect of stronger personal ties.

2014: Egypt’s former military leader is sworn into office as president nearly a year after he ousted the nation’s first freely elected leader.

2015: Acknowledging setbacks, President Barack Obama says at the close of a G-7 summit in Germany that the United States still lacked a “complete strategy” for training Iraqi forces to fight the Islamic State. Siding with the White House in a foreign policy power struggle with Congress, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Americans born in the disputed city of Jerusalem could not list Israel as their birthplace on passports.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Giovanni Cassini, Italian astronomer (1625-1712); Robert Schumann, German composer (1810-1856); Frank Lloyd Wright, US architect (1869-1959); Suharto, second Indonesian president (1921-2008); Joan Rivers, US comedian/talk show host (1933-2014); James Darren, US actor (1936- ); Nancy Sinatra, pop singer (1940- ); Sonia Braga, Brazilian actress (1950- ); Kanye West, rapper (1977- ); Julianna Margulies, US actress (1967- )

— AP