TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1999: Overwhelmed by rising waters on the Niger River, officials open the floodgates of two major dams, submerging 400 villages and leaving more than 300,000 homeless. Some 500 are believed drowned.

OTHER EVENTS

1536: William Tyndale, who translated the first English Bible, is executed for heresy in Vilvoorde, the Netherlands.

1927: In the US, the era of talking pictures arrives with the opening of The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. It features both silent and sound-synchronised scenes.

1979: Pope John Paul II becomes the first pontiff to visit the White House, where he is received by US President Jimmy Carter.

1981: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is shot to death by extremists while reviewing a military parade.

1992: The UN Security Council unanimously votes to create a war-crimes commission for Bosnia-Herzegovina.

1996: Yao Wenyaun, the last surviving member of the “Gang of Four”, which promoted class struggle under Chairman Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution, is freed from prison. In jail for 20 years, he was convicted in 1981 for plotting to seize power after Mao’s death in 1976.

2000: An official inquiry into the infection of more than 200 Irish haemophiliacs with HIV and hepatitis C confirms that the government’s Blood Transfusion Service Board knowingly put them at risk in the early 1980s by selling infected blood products to hospitals.

2002: The Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite television network broadcast an audiotape made by Osama bin Laden where the speaker on the tape warned the US of future attacks.

2004: The European Union recommends setting mostly Muslim Turkey on a course for full membership in the union. The commissioners set stiff conditions to prevent far poorer Turkey from backtracking on the sweeping democratic and human rights reforms being demanded.

2006: The fledgling UN Human Rights Council ends its second session after failing to approve any decisions addressing the world’s worst abuses.

2007: Ruling-party lawmakers claim victory for Pakistan’s President Gen Pervez Musharraf as voting ends in the presidential election.

2008: Wall Street joins in a worldwide cascade of despair over the financial crisis, driving the Dow Jones industrials to their biggest loss ever during a trading day. They close below 10,000 for the first time since 2004.

2009: A top suspect wanted for orchestrating the killings of thousands of people in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide — including children, hospital patients, priests and even an elderly and revered African queen — is captured.

2010: A method for building complex molecules has paid off by helping to fight cancer, protect crops and make electronic devices; and now it has earned its developers, two Japanese scientists and an American researcher, a Nobel Prize.

2011: The Nobel Prize in literature is awarded to a Swedish psychologist, Tomas Transtromer, who used his spare time to craft sparsely written poems about the mysteries of everyday life; commuting to work, watching the sun rise, or waiting for nightfall.

2012: Israel scrambles fight jets to intercept a drone that crossed deep into Israeli airspace from the Mediterranean sea, shooting the aircraft down over the country’s southern desert.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Louis Philippe, king of France (1773-1850); Jenny Lind, Swedish soprano (1820-1887); Charles Edouard Jeanneret, Swiss architect known as “Le Corbusier” (1887-1965); Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian anthropologist and leader of Kon-Tiki expedition (1914-2002); Hafez Assad, former Syrian president (1930-2000); Britt Ekland, Swedish actress (1942-); Elizabeth Shue, American actress (1963-).

—AP