Today is the 262nd day of 2022. There are 103 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1961: Jamaica holds a referendum on its continued membership in the West Indies Federation. The majority vote to with draw.

OTHER EVENTS

1356: The English under Edward, the Black Prince, defeat the French at Poitiers and take King John II prisoner.

1656: An English fleet under Robert Blake captures Spanish treasure ships off Cadiz, Spain.

1777: The Americans defeat a British force at the First Battle of Saratoga, a turning point in the American War of Independence.

1783: The Montgolfier brothers send aloft a balloon with a rooster, a duck, and a sheep aboard, rapidly advancing French aeronautics.

1796: In his farewell address printed in a Philadelphia newspaper, George Washington, the first US president, implores his country to maintain neutrality and avoid entangling alliances with Europe.

1870: The French surrender Versailles to Germans in Franco-Prussian War.

1881: James A Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, dies of wounds inflicted by an assassin.

1893 New Zealand becomes the first country to grant all women the right to vote.

1941: The Germans take Kiev in the Soviet Union.

1944: The Soviet Union and Finland sign a peace treaty in Moscow, ending a three-year war.

1955: President Juan Perón of Argentina is overthrown and flees to Paraguay after an army-navy revolt led by democratically inspires officers.

1959: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, on a visit to Los Angeles, reportedly becomes furious when informed that he can’t visit Disneyland for security reasons.

1960: Chubby Checker’s The Twist hits number one the Billboard Hot 100.

1962: China attacks Indian forces, seizing part of Kashmir after a three-week war.

1970: The Mary Tyler Moore Show premieres on CBS.

1972: An Israeli diplomat is killed and another injured when a letter bomb explodes at the Israeli embassy in London.

1978: Egypt’s Cabinet unanimously approves President Anwar Sadat’s Camp David agreement to sign a peace treaty with Israel within three months.

1983: Caribbean islands St Kitts and Nevis become independent of Britain.

1984: China and Great Britain announce their agreement to transfer Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997.

1985 A magnitude-8.1 earthquake in Mexico City kills an estimated 10,000 and leaves 250,000 homeless.

1986: US Federal health officials announce AZT will be available to AIDS patients.

1989: A French airliner blows up over Niger, killing 171 people; Libya is later blamed for the explosion.

1991: In the Ötztal Alps on the Italian-Austrian border, German tourists discover a mummified human body (later known as the Iceman) that was subsequently determined to date from 3300 bce.

1992: Dr Nigel Cox is convicted of attempted murder in Great Britain because he administered a fatal injection to an elderly patient who asked him to help her die.

1994: US troops peacefully enter Haiti to enforce the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

1995: An Iranian flight attendant hijacks a Kish Air Boeing 707 to Israel during a flight from Tehran; the plane is returned to Tehran with 174 passengers and crew.

1997: A crowded passenger train collides with a freight train in west London, killing six people and injuring more than 170 others.

1999: Foreign peacekeeping troops begin pouring into East Timor, experiencing no resistance from Indonesian troops or anti-independence militias.

2001: Islamic clerics urge terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan voluntarily, but set no deadline for him.; the United States threatens to attack the Taliban if they don’t turn in bin Laden.

2002: Israeli forces demolish 20 buildings and other structures in Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah after Palestinian suicide attacks kill seven Israelis.

2003: Venezuela suspends oil shipments to the Dominican Republic because of a plot being hatched there to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Venezuela had sold about 110,000 barrels of oil a day to the Dominican Republic, making up 70 per cent of that country’s oil supply.

2004: Hu Jintao becomes the undisputed leader of China as the country completes its first orderly transfer of power in the communist era with the departure of former President Jiang Zemin.

2005: A parliamentary commission announces that Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and six other politicians should face a special court over allegations of abuse in dealing with a partly State-owned oil company.

2006: Thailand’s army commander stages a coup ousting Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra while he is in New York, circling his offices with tanks, declaring martial law, and revoking the constitution.

2007: Anti-Syrian lawmaker Antoine Ghanem, who had returned to Lebanon two days earlier from refuge abroad, is killed along with six other people by a bomb that rocks a Christian neighbourhood of Beirut.

2008: China’s food safety crisis widens after the industrial chemical melamine is found in milk produced by three of the country’s leading dairy companies.

2009: Russia says it will scrap a plan to deploy missiles near Poland since Washington dumped a planned missile shield in Eastern Europe.

2010: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that “the future belongs to Iran”, and challenges the United States to accept that his country has a major role in the world on the first day of his visit to the United States to attend the annual General Assembly of the United Nations.

2011: The Palestinians brush aside heated Israeli objections and a promised US veto, vowing to submit a letter formally requesting full UN membership when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the General Assembly. Panamanian baseball pitcher Mariano Rivera registers his record-setting 602nd career save; when he retired in 2013 Rivera had an unprecedented 652 saves and was considered the sport’s greatest relief pitcher.

2012: Scholars question the much-publicised discovery by a Harvard University scholar that a 4th century fragment of papyrus provided the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married.

2013: Pope Francis warns that the Catholic Church’s structure might “fall like a house of cards” if it does not balance its divisive rules about abortion, gays and contraception with the greater need to make it a merciful, more welcoming place for all.

2015: English author Jackie Collins, whose glamorous public persona echoed the lavish lifestyles of the characters in her provocative romance thrillers, dies at age 77.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

France’s King Henry III (1551-1589); Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre, French astronomer (1749-1822); George Cadbury, British chocolate manufacturer (1839-1922); William Golding, British writer and Nobel laureate (1911-1993); Jeremy Irons, English actor (1948- ); Twiggy Lawson, British actress/former model (1949- ); Sunita Williams, American astronaut (1965- ); Trisha Yearwood, US country singer (1964- ); Jimmy Fallon, US actor/comedian (1974-)

— AP/ Jamaica Observer