Today is the 18th day of 2022. There are 347 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2007: A woman who disappeared in the jungles of north-eastern Cambodia is found 19 years later. The woman — identified as Rochom P’ngieng, 27 — does not speak any intelligible language, but is recognised by a village policeman who claims to be her father.

OTHER EVENTS

1535: The city of Lima, capital of present-day Peru, is founded by Spanish conquistadors on the central Pacific coast of South America.

1778: English navigator Captain James Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands, which he dubs the Sandwich Islands.

1788: The first English settlers arrive in Australia’s Botany Bay to establish a penal colony.

1871: The German Empire, forged as a result of diplomacy rather than an outpouring of popular nationalist feeling, is founded this day in 1871 in the aftermath of three successful wars by the North German state of Prussia.

1896: An X-ray machine is demonstrated in the US for the first time in New York. On the same day, British troops occupy Kumasi, West Africa.

1908: Frederick Delius’s Brigg Fair premieres in London.

1911: The first aircraft landing on a ship’s flight deck is performed by American pilot Eugene Ely on the battleship Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay.

1912: English explorer Robert F Scott and his expedition reach the South Pole, only to discover Norwegian Roald Amundsen had got there first.

1915: Japan issues “Twenty-One Demands” to the Republic of China in a bid to increase its power in eastern Asia. With the European powers preoccupied with World War I, Japan secretly presents China with Twenty-one Demands for privileges.

1918: The first democratically elected national legislature in Russia opens in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks soon shut it down, marking the start of Communist dictatorship.

1919: The World War I Peace Congress opens in Versailles, France.

1923: Actor/director/screenwriter Wallace Reid dies, aged 31, from a morphine overdose.

1936: Author Rudyard Kipling dies, aged 70.

1943: The Soviets announce they have broken the long Nazi siege of Leningrad. To save on the costs of labour and equipment, the United States bans the sale of pre-sliced bread during World War II.

1965: The Rolling Stones record The Last Time and Play With Fire at RCA studios in Hollywood.

1967: Albert DeSalvo, who claimed to be the “Boston Strangler”, is convicted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of armed robbery, assault and sex offences.

1972: Former leader of Rhodesia, Garfield Todd and his daughter, Judith, supporters of black majority rule, are seized after violence erupts over Anglo-Rhodesian plans for independence. On the same day, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Brian Faulkner bans all parades and marches until the end of the year.

1974: The band Bad Company forms from members of Free, King Crimson and Mott The Hoople.

1976: France expels at least 40 Soviet officials on grounds they worked as spies.

1977: Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of Legionnaires’ disease. Australia’s worst rail crash, at Granville, Sydney, kills 83 when train hits concrete bridge.

1980: The owners of New York club Studio 54, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, are sentenced to three and a half years in prison for tax evasion and fined US$20,000.

1983: The International Olympic Committee officially reinstates the gold medals of American athlete Jim Thorpe, who had won the decathlon and the pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm but was later deprived of his medals over allegations that he was not an amateur athlete.

1986: Martin Luther King, Jr Day is first celebrated as a national holiday.

1989: Thousands of Czechoslovaks converge on Prague’s central Wenceslas Square chanting “freedom”, “truth”, and “human rights” on fourth-consecutive day of public dissent.

1990: Peggy McMartin Buckey is cleared of 52 child molestation charges. Singer Mel Appleby, of the duo Mel and Kim, dies of pneumonia aged 23 following treatment for metastatic paraganglioma.

1991: Jordan’s Parliament denounces allied attacks on Iraq and urges Arab and Islamic nations to strike back at US and coalition partners. The US acknowledges the CIA and the US Army paid Panama dictator Manuel Noriega US$320,000 over a number of years.

1992: More than 100,000 people attend Kenya’s first legal anti-government rally in 22 years.

1993: Elton John resigns his directorship of Watford Football Club.

1995: A US jury awards more than 9,000 victims of torture under the regime of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos with US$766 million from the Marcos estate.

1996: Lisa Marie Presley files for divorce from Michael Jackson.

1997: Norway’s Boerge Ousland emerges on the Pacific edge of Antarctica to become the first person to cross the continent alone and unaided.

2000: A meteorite impacts Earth at Tagish Lake in Canada. Helmut Kohl resigns as honorary chairman of the Christian Democratic Union, brought down by a campaign financing scandal that marks the stunning denouement of one of Europe’s most respected statesmen and the man who reunited Germany.

2002: The Sierra Leone Government declares the country’s 11-year-old civil war, which killed about 50,000 people, over.

2005: The world’s largest commercial jet, the Airbus A380, is unveiled in France.

2006: President Laurent Gbagbo calls on his supporters to end days of violent street protests that have roiled Ivory Coast’s Government-held south, telling protesters to go home and asking fearful workers to return to their jobs.

2007: Hurricane Kyrill strikes Western Europe, killing 44 and sinking a container ship off the coast of Devon.

2008: Actor/director George Clooney becomes a UN messenger for peace. Maasai fighters in Kenya battle rival tribesmen loyal to President Mwai Kibaki on the third, final and bloodiest day of protests over Kenya’s disputed election.

2009: Israeli troops begin to withdraw from Gaza after their Government and Hamas militants declare an end to a three-week war. Artist and TV presenter Tony Hart dies, aged 83.

2010: Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle, mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright, dies of cancer aged 63.

2011: The UN tribunal investigating the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister warns against speculating about the sealed indictment as a quiet show of force by Hezbollah rattles nerves amid fears the militant group will react violently if accused. American diplomat and administrator R Sargent Shriver, who served as the first director (1961–66) of the U.S. Peace Corps, dies at age 95.

2012: Italians tally 11 dead, 21 missing from cruise ship disaster in which the US$450-million Costa Concordia, carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew, slammed into a reef and flopped on its side off the tiny Italian island of Giglio after the captain made an unauthorised detour on his route.

2013: Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is indicted on corruption charges stemming from post-Hurricane Katrina business contracts and bribes.

2015: Session drummer Dallas Taylor (Crosby Stills & Nash) dies of complications from viral pneumonia and kidney disease, aged 66

2017: Former England Ladies cricket Captain Rachel Heyhoe Flint dies, aged 77.

2016: The Eagles guitarist Glenn Frey dies aged 67 from complications arising from rheumatoid arthritis, colitis and pneumonia.

TODAY’S BITRTHDAYS

Francois Michel Detellier, French statesman (1641-1691); Cary Grant, English-American actor (1904-1986); Chun Doo-hwan, former South Korean president (1931- ); Paul Keating, former Australian prime minister (1944- ); Kevin Costner, US actor/director (1955- ); Jesse L Martin, US actor (1969- )

— AP