This is the 250th day of 2022. There are 115 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT:

2001: Venus Williams and Serena Williams reach the finals of the US Open, defeating Jennifer Capriati and Martina Hingis, respectively, becoming the first sisters to play for a Grand Slam championship in more than 100 years.

OTHER EVENTS:

1892: James J Corbett knocks out John L Sullivan to win the world heavyweight crown in New Orleans in a fight conducted under the Marquess of Queensberry rules.

1901: The Peace of Beijing ends the Boxer Rebellion in China.

1907: The British liner RMS Lusitania sets out from Liverpool, England, on its maiden voyage, arriving six days later in New York.

1927: American television pioneer Philo T Farnsworth, 21, succeeds in transmitting the image of a line through purely electronic means with a device called an “image dissector” at his San Francisco laboratory.

1940: Nazi Germany begins its eight-month blitz of Britain during World War II with the first air attack on London.

1963: The National Professional Football Hall of Fame is dedicated in Canton, Ohio.

1972: The International Olympic Committee bans Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett of the US from further competition for talking to each other on the victory stand in Munich during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, after winning the gold and silver medals in the 400-metre run.

1977: The Panama Canal treaties, calling for the US to eventually turn over control of the waterway to Panama, are signed in Washington by President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos. Convicted Watergate conspirator G Gordon Liddy is released from prison after more than four years.

1979: The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) makes its cable TV debut.

1986: Desmond Tutu is installed as the first black clergyman to lead the Anglican Church in southern Africa.

1987: The syndicated TV talk show Geraldo, hosted by Geraldo Rivera, begins an 11-season run.

1996: Rapper Tupac Shakur is shot and mortally wounded on the Las Vegas Strip; he died six days later.

2002: President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, meeting at Camp David, say the world has to act against Saddam Hussein, arguing that the Iraqi leader defied the United Nations and reneged on promises to destroy weapons of mass destruction.

2005: Police and soldiers go house to house in New Orleans to try to coax the last stubborn holdouts into leaving the city shattered by Hurricane Katrina. President George W Bush leads the nation in a final tribute to William H Rehnquist, remembering the late chief justice as the Supreme Court’s steady leader and a man of lifetime integrity.

2007: Osama bin Laden appears in a video for the first time in three years, telling Americans they should convert to Islam if they want the war in Iraq to end.

2008: Troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are placed in government conservatorship. Hurricane Ike roars across low-lying islands in the Atlantic as a category four storm. Serena Williams outlasts Jelena Jankovic 6-4, 7-5 to win her third US Open championship and ninth Grand Slam title. Hall of fame basketball coach Don Haskins dies in El Paso, Texas, at age 78. Mystery author Gregory Mcdonald (cq) dies in Pulaski, Tennessee, at age 71. Astroland, New York City’s world famous amusement park at Coney Island, closes after 46 years. Britney Spears wins three MTV Video Music Awards, including video of the year for Piece of Me.

2010: A Chinese fishing trawler and two Japanese patrol boats collide near disputed islands in the East China Sea, further straining relations between Beijing and Tokyo. Lucius Walker, who had led an annual pilgrimage of aid volunteers to Cuba in defiance of the nearly half-century US trade embargo, dies in New York at the age of 80.

2013: Tony Abbott’s conservative, Liberal-led party wins a crushing victory in Australia against the centre-left Labour Party which had ruled for six years. Tokyo is awarded the 2020 Summer Olympics, defeating Istanbul in the final round of secret voting by the International Olympic Committee.

2015: Hillary Clinton, interviewed by The Associated Press during a campaign swing through Iowa, says she does not need to apologise for using a private e-mail account and server while at the State Department because “what I did was allowed”. Courting unions on Labour Day, President Barack Obama denounces Republicans for a “constant attack on working Americans”, telling a rally in Boston that he would be using his executive power to force federal contractors to give paid sick leave to their employees. Former child star Dickie Moore, 89, dies in Connecticut.

2017: More than a half-million people are ordered to leave South Florida as Hurricane Irma approaches; Georgia’s governor directs nearly 540,000 coastal residents to move inland. One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico strikes off the country’s southern coast, toppling hundreds of buildings and killing at least 90 people. (A deadlier quake would strike central Mexico nearly two weeks later.) Equifax, one of the three major US credit bureaus, announces that hackers gained access to credit information on 143 million Americans between mid-May and July. A federal appeals court rejects the Trump Administration’s limited view of who is allowed into the country under the president’s travel ban, saying grandparents, cousins and other close relatives of people in the United States should not be kept out. Donald Trump Jr tells a Senate panel that he did not collude with Russia to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

2019: President Donald Trump says he had cancelled a secret weekend meeting at Camp David with Taliban and Afghan leaders — just days before the anniversary of the September 11 attacks — after a bombing the week before in Kabul that killed 12 people, including an American soldier. India’s lunar lander crashes on the surface of the moon, where it was supposed to deploy a rover to search for signs of water; a successful landing would have made India just the fourth country to land a vessel on the lunar surface. Nineteen-year-old Bianca Andreescu wins her first Grand Slam title, beating Serena Williams 6-3, 7-5 in the final of the US Open.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:

Giacomo Ancionio, Italian theologist (1492-1566); England’s Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603); August Kekule von Stradonitz, German chemist (1829-1896); Elia Kazan, US film director (1909-2003); Todor Zhivkov, Communist ruler of Bulgaria (1911-1998); Sonny Rollins, jazz musician (1930- ); Belgium’s King Baudouin (1930-1993); Sonny Rollins, US jazz musician (1930- );

Buddy Holly, born Charles Hardin Holley, rock-and-roll legend (1936-1959); Gloria Gaynor, singer (1943- ); Alfa Anderson, singer (1946- ); Susan Blakely, actress (1948- ); Dennis Thompson, rock musician (1948- ); Julie Kavner, actress (1950- ); Chrissie Hynde, US rock singer (1951- ); Benmont Tench, rock musician (1953- ); Corbin Bernsen, actor (1954- ); Michael Emerson, actor (1954- ); Michael Feinstein, pianist (1956- ); Diane Warren, singer-songwriter (1956- ); Margot Chapman, singer (1957- ); J Smith-Cameron, actor (1957- ); Leroi Moore, saxophonist (1961-2008); W Earl Brown, actor (1963- ); Toby Jones, actor (1966- ); Leslie Jones, actress-comedian (1967- ); Angie Everhart, model-actor (1969- ); Diane Farr, actress (1969- ); Monique Gabriela Curnen, actress (1970- ); Tom Everett Scott, actor (1970- ); Chad Sexton, rock musician (1970- ); Shannon Elizabeth, actress (1973- ); Oliver Hudson, actor (1976- ); Devon Sawa, actor (1978- ); JD Pardo, actor (1980- ); Benjamin Hollingsworth, actor (1984- ); Alyssa Diaz, actress (1985- ); Evan Rachel Wood, actor (1987- ); Ian Chen, actor (2006- )

– AP