This is the 278th day of 2022. There are 87 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1947: In the first televised White House address, US President Harry S Truman asks Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe.

OTHER EVENTS

1969: The British TV comedy programme Monty Python’s Flying Circus makes its debut on BBC 1.

1970: Egypt’s only political party names Anwar Sadat to succeed late President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

1974: The Irish Republican Army bombs two pubs in Guildford, Surrey in England, resulting in five deaths and dozens of injuries. (Four men who became known as the Guildford Four were convicted of the bombings but were ultimately vindicated.)

1978: US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance travels to South Africa to promote the transition to black rule in Namibia.

1981: Former Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg is posthumously granted honorary US citizenship for his humanitarian actions during World War II.

1983: Lech Walesa, leader of Poland’s Solidarity labour movement, is named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

1984: The space shuttle Challenger blasts off from the Kennedy Space Center on an eight-day mission; the crew included Kathryn D Sullivan, who becomes the first American woman to walk in space, and Marc Garneau, the first Canadian astronaut.

1986: American Eugene Hasenfus is captured by Sandinista soldiers after the weapons plane he is riding is shot down over southern Nicaragua.

1987: South Africa’s President P W Botha says his Government plans to permit some multiracial neighbourhoods.

1988: Chileans, in a plebiscite, turn down a proposal to extend General Augusto Pinochet’s rule until 1997. Democrat Lloyd Bentsen lambasts Republican Dan Quayle during their vice-presidential debate, telling Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

1989: The Dalai Lama wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

1990: A jury in Cincinnati acquits an art gallery and its director of obscenity charges stemming from an exhibit of sexually graphic photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe.

1991: Fighting erupts between Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq, in the second outbreak of violence between the two sides since the withdrawal of US and allied forces in July.

1993: China breaks moratorium on nuclear testing.

1994: Forty-eight bodies are found in two locations in Switzerland after a cult’s mass suicide-murder.

1996: Bosnia’s three-member presidency gets off to a rocky start as the Serb member refuses to attend the inauguration.

1997: Sixteen schoolchildren and their bus driver are killed in Algeria when their bus is sprayed by gunfire at a false roadblock.

1998: A committee of the US Congress votes to recommend an impeachment inquiry of President Bill Clinton’s actions in the case involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

1999: Two packed commuter trains collide near London’s Paddington Station, killing 31 people.

2000: The Israeli army says it has agreed to a ceasefire with Palestinian security authorities, the fourth since violence erupted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip a week earlier.

2001: A 63-year-old Florida man dies of the inhaled form of anthrax, the first of a series of anthrax cases in Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Washington.

2005: Powerful warlords, a former Taliban commander, and women’s rights activists are among the front-runners after ballot counting ends in Afghanistan’s landmark parliamentary elections.

2006: European Union ministers endorse a plan to make joint patrols that pick up migrants on the high seas permanent, moving to end internal divisions over dealing with a surge of illegal immigration from Africa.

2007: Syria vows not to forcibly expel any of the 1.5 million Iraqis who have fled there, despite new rules aimed at stemming the flow of people across the border.

2008: Track star Marion Jones pleads guilty in White Plains, New York, to lying to federal investigators when she denied using performance-enhancing drugs, and announces her retirement after the hearing. President George W Bush defends his Administration’s methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects, saying both were successful and lawful. Topps Meat Co says it is closing its business, six days after it was forced to issue a massive beef recall. Germany becomes the latest country to move to allay fears about the financial meltdown, enhancing a rescue plan for Hypo Real Estate AG and guaranteeing private bank accounts as European governments scramble on their own to save failing banks.

2010: Former French trader Jerome Kerviel is convicted on all counts in history’s biggest rogue trading scandal, is sentenced to at least three years in prison and ordered to pay his former employer damages of euro 4.9 billion (US$6.7 billion) — a sum so staggering it drews gasps in the courtroom.

2011: Apple founder Steve Jobs, 56, dies in Palo Alto, California. The New York Police Department’s intelligence squad secretly assigns an undercover officer to monitor a prominent Muslim leader even as he decried terrorism, cooperated with the police, and dined with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

2013: A month before the presidential election, the Labor Department reports that unemployment fell in September 2012 to its lowest level, 7.8 per cent, since President Barack Obama took office; some Republicans question whether the numbers have been manipulated.

2014: Mexican security forces investigating the role of municipal police in deadly clashes with protesters find buried human remains in mass graves on the edge of Iguala in the country’s south.

2017: Portugal’s former Prime Minister Antonio Guterres wins the Security Council’s unanimous backing to become the next UN secretary general, succeeding Ban Ki-moon. Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Scottish-born Fraser Stoddart, and Dutch scientist Bernard “Ben” Feringa win the Nobel Prize in chemistry for making devices the size of molecules.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Chester Alan Arthur, 21st president of the United States (1829-1886 ); Robert Goddard, US inventor of modern rocket (1882-1945); Glynis Johns, South African-born actress (1923- ); Diane Cilento, Australian actress (1933-2011); Vaclav Havel, Czech politician, playwright and former dissident (1936-2011); Bob Geldof, British singer (1954- ); Kate Winslet, British actress (1975- )

– AP