Today is the 292nd day of 2018. There are 73 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1992: African National Congress President Nelson Mandela acknowledges that prisoners in congress military camps had been tortured during the 1980s and early 1990s. The camps, located in other African countries, had been training sites during the congress’s guerrilla war against the South African Government.

OTHER EVENTS

1765: The Stamp Act Congress, meeting in New York, draws up a declaration of rights and liberties.

1781: British troops under Lord Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, ending the American Revolution war.

1812: French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte begin their retreat from Moscow.

1813: Napoleon’s forces are defeated by a combined Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and Swedish army at Leipzig, Germany, marking the end of the French Empire east of the Rhine.

1943: The foreign ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain open a conference in Moscow to discuss broad principles of cooperation.

1944: The US Navy announces black women would be allowed into Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES).

1950: United Nations forces enter Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

1951: US President Harry Truman formally ends the state of war with Germany.

1954: An Anglo-Egyptian treaty providing for withdrawal of British armed forces from the Suez Canal Zone during the next 20 months is signed in Cairo with Egypt taking complete control of the Suez in seven years.

1960: The US imposes an embargo on exports to Cuba covering all commodities except medical supplies and certain food products.

1969: US Vice-President Spiro Agnew refers to anti-Vietnam War protesters “an effete corps of impudent snobs”.

1972: US and South Vietnamese officials meet in peace negotiations where the US and North Vietnam will move toward a ceasefire agreement in Indochina and a political accord that would replace the current Government in Saigon.

1977: The supersonic Concorde aeroplane makes its first landing in New York after 19 months of delays caused by residents concerned about the aircraft’s noise.

1983: The commander of Grenada’s armed force announces that Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, who was under house arrest, has been killed by soldiers after he tried to seize army headquarters.

1984: A young Polish pro-Solidarity priest, the Rev Jerzy Popieluszko, is abducted and murdered by Communist secret police.

1987: The stock market crashes as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 508 points, or 22.6 per cent in value — its biggest-ever percentage drop in decades.

1990: The Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopts a long-awaited plan to reform the nation’s economy.

1991: A clandestine assembly of ethnic Albanian legislators proclaim Kosovo to be an independent republic. The republic of Serbia annexed Kosovo in 1990.

1994: A bomb on a crowded city bus kills 20 people in Tel Aviv, Israel.

1995: A powerful bomb explodes at Sri Lanka’s main oil storage tank in a Colombo suburb, causing mass evacuations as fires rage out of control.

1996: Chechen separatists install their military commander, Aslan Maskhadov, as prime minister of a makeshift coalition Government.

2000: A suspected Tamil Tiger suicide bomber blows himself up in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The explosion occurs minutes before President Chandrika Kumaratunga swears in a new Cabinet to cement her shaky coalition and end a week-long political crisis.

2001: US special forces begin operations on the ground in Afghanistan, opening a significant new phase of the assault against the Taliban and terrorists.

2004: Myanmar’s secretive military regime forces out its prime minister, the long-powerful General Khin Nyunt, and places him under house arrest on corruption charges.

2005: Chile’s Supreme Court strips former dictator General Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution for corruption charges related to his multimillion-dollar bank accounts overseas.

2006: Suicide bombings in the south and east of Afghanistan kill a British soldier, two children and a policeman, as President Hamid Karzai calls on NATO forces to use caution during military operations a day after 20 civilians are killed.

2007: A global manhunt that began three years ago when police found hundreds of photos on the Internet of a man having sex with a dozen young Asian boys ends with the arrest in Thailand of Canadian schoolteacher Christopher Paul Neil.

2008: One of only two portraits of painter Francis Bacon by his friend and fellow British artist Lucian Freud is sold at auction for more than 5.4 million pounds ($9.4 million).

2009: UN-backed fraud investigators throw out nearly a third of President Hamid Karzai’s votes from the August election, undercutting his claim of victory and stepping up the pressure for him to accept a run-off.

2010: The technology giant says the Dead Sea Scrolls, among the world’s most important, mysterious and tightly restricted archaeological treasures, are about to get Googled.

2011: Hundreds of youths smash and loot stores in central Athens and clash with riot police during a massive anti-Government rally against painful new austerity measures that won initial parliamentary approval.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Auguste Lumiere, Frenchman credited with making the first movie (1862-1948); John Le Carre, British writer (1931- ); Jennifer Holliday, US singer (1960- ); Evander Holyfield, US heavyweight boxing champion (1962- ); John Lithgow, US actor (1945- ) Peter Tosh (1944-1987)

— AP & Jamaica Observer