Today is the seventh day of 2022. There are 358 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1999: The US Senate opens the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, the first such trial in 130 years.

OTHER EVENTS

1537: Alessandro de Medici is assassinated and Cosimo de Medici succeeds him in Florence.

1610: The astronomer Galileo Galilei sees four of Jupiter’s moons.

1782: The first commercial American bank, the Bank of North America, opens.

1789: The first US presidential election is held. Americans vote for electors who, a month later, choose George Washington to be the first president.

1807: Britain declares blockade of coasts of France and Napoleon Bonaparte’s allies.

1913: A cracking process to obtain gasoline from crude oil is patented in the United States.

1927: Commercial transatlantic telephone service is inaugurated between New York and London.

1942: Japan begins successful siege of Bataan Peninsula during World War II, routing American and Philippine troops.

1953: US President Harry Truman announces that the United States has developed the hydrogen bomb.

1959: The United States recognises Fidel Castro’s Cuban Government.

1961: African heads of State issue African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights at Casablanca.

1967: Fighting is reported between Chinese Red Guards and workers in Nanking.

1968: Government of Lebanon resigns after Israeli commando raid at Beirut airport; the Surveyor 7 space probe makes a soft landing on the moon, marking the end of the US series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface.

1972: India resists US pressure and grants full diplomatic recognition to China.

1973: Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos suspends scheduled plebiscite on new constitution, saying his country is slipping back into subversion and corruption.

1979: Vietnamese forces capture the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge Government.

1987: Lebanon’s former President Camille Chamoun suffers minor wounds when remote-controlled car bomb explodes near his bulletproof car.

1990: Thousands of Romanians demonstrate nationwide to protest the number of ex-Communists in the interim Government.

1991: Coup attempt in Haiti by former leader of paramilitary organisation Tontons Macoute, Roger Lafontant, fails.

1992: Yugoslav military shoots down European Union helicopter, killing five truce observers.

1993: US forces in Mogadishu, Somalia, unleash a barrage of tank, helicopter and rocket fire on two bases where snipers were firing.

1994: About 750,000 gallons (2.8 million litres) of heating oil blacken beaches on Puerto Rico when a barge runs aground.

1996: A bomb rips through a city bus in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, killing at least eight people and injuring 35.

1997: In Algiers, Algeria, a car bomb explodes in a bustling shopping district, killing at least 13 people and wounding 100 others.

1998: The Canadian Government formally apologises to the country’s indigenous people for 150 years of oppression and establishes a “healing” fund.

2000: An exhausted 14-year-old Tibetan Buddhist leader reaches India after trekking across the snowy Himalayas after defecting from Chinese-ruled Tibet.

2001: A general practitioner in Manchester, England, may have killed more than 200 patients over almost 24 years, a clinical study of Dr Harold Shipman’s medical practice shows. He is sentenced to life in prison for the deaths of 15 patients.

2003: A Congo military court sentences 26 defendants to death for the January 2001 assassination of President Laurent Kabila, who was shot by a bodyguard in the presidential palace.

2006: The Brazilian commander of UN peacekeepers in Haiti is found dead after shooting himself in the head — a blow to the 9,000-strong force and efforts to restore democracy in Haiti.

2008: Australia battles fires and flooding after days of summer heat and storms. The flooding is some of the worst the country has seen in decades.

2009: Russia shuts off all its gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine.

2011: President Barack Obama forcefully declares his support for US civilian trials of Guantanamo detainees, pledging to overturn language in a sweeping Defence Bill that would effectively block such trials from happening anytime soon.

2013: President Barack Obama chooses former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to lead the US Defense Department and counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

2014: The first batch of the most dangerous chemical weapons is loaded onto a Danish ship and taken out of Syria, a key step in ridding the regime of its banned arsenal.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Pope Gregory XIII (Ugo Buoncompagno) (1502-1585); James Harrington, English political author (1611-1677); Robert Anderson, Scottish author (1750-1830); Zora Neale Hurston, American writer (1903-1960); Jean-Pierre Rampal, French flautist (1922-2000); David Caruso, US actor (1956- ); Nicolas Cage, US actor (1964- ); Katie Couric, talk show host (1957-)

— AP