Today is the 327th day of 2022. There are 38 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1993: Two 11-year-old British boys are convicted in the murder of a Liverpool toddler.

OTHER EVENTS

1859: British naturalist Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, explaining his theory of evolution.

1874: Barbed wire is patented by American Joseph F Glidden.

1950: Forces of the UN launch an offensive on Korea’s western front in an effort to knock out the main Chinese Communist forces south of Manchuria.

1956: The UN General Assembly presses Britain, France and Israel for withdrawal of their troops from Egypt; the United States joins the Soviet and Arab-Asian blocs in voting in favour of the withdrawals.

1961: The UN Security Council calls on UN members to make Africa a nuclear weapons-free zone.

1963: Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of US President John F Kennedy, is shot to death by Jack Ruby in Dallas, Texas.

1970: Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, desiring to lead Japan back to the way of the samurai, leads a sword attack on an army general’s office in Tokyo and then kills himself in traditional hara-kiri fashion.

1971: Hijacker Dan Cooper parachutes from a Northwest Airlines 727 flight over Washington state with US$200,000 in ransom. His fate remains unknown.

1974: US President Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid I Brezhnev meet in Vladivostok and reach a tentative agreement to limit the number of offensive, strategic nuclear weapons.

1975: An earthquake hits eastern Turkey, taking at least 574 lives, and the Government says the total could reach more than 3,000.

1987: The United States and the Soviet Union agree to scrap short- and medium-range missiles in the first superpower treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.

1989: Elias Hrawi is elected president of Lebanon following the assassination of Rene Mouawad.

1990: South Africa’s pan-Africanist Congress announces it will join with the African National Congress in opposing the white-led Government.

1991: The US space shuttle Atlantis carries out a military mission where a missile-detection satellite is deployed and astronauts practise sighting strategic installations on the ground.

1992: A Chinese airliner crashes into a mountain 25 kilometres (15 miles) from its destination in the southern city of Guilin, killing all 144 on-board. The crash is the fifth in China in four months.

1995: Irish voters decide to legalise divorce, passing a referendum by a narrow margin.

1996: A court annuls election results for the Belgrade, Yugoslavia, city council where an Opposition coalition appeared to have won a majority. More than 30,000 people demonstrate against the ruling.

1997: The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan agree to uproot the poppy crop, the source of half the world’s heroin supply.

1998: America Online confirms it will buy Netscape Communications in a deal worth US$10 billion.

1999: After 16 months of negotiations, the European Union and Mexico reach an accord establishing the most comprehensive free trade deal ever negotiated by the European body, and the first with a Latin American partner.

2000: Japan announces that Peru’s disgraced ex-President Alberto Fujimori can live permanently in the land of his ancestors if he so wishes because proof exists that his parents were Japanese. It also means he cannot be extradited.

2002: Venezuelan and French Marines participate in Suriname’s Independence Day parade, marking 27 years since the country won its freedom from the Netherlands.

2003: The High Court in Glasgow, Scotland, rules that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent convicted in 2001 for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, will serve 27 years in prison before becoming eligible for parole.

2005: In a potential blow to Caribbean markets, the European Union agrees on a major overhaul of its sugar subsidy programme, cutting prices by 36 per cent in a landmark deal that the EU says will strengthen its hand in upcoming world trade talks.

2007: Australia’s Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffers a humiliating defeat to the left-leaning Opposition Labor Party head Kevin Rudd in elections.

2009: President Barack Obama tries to calm India’s fears about Asian rival China, salving bruised feelings in the world’s largest democracy with an elaborate State visit for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and assurances of India’s “rightful place as a global leader”.

2010: Anger and fear about Europe’s seemingly unstoppable debt crisis courses through the continent as striking workers shut down much of Portugal, Ireland proposes its deepest budget cuts in history, and seething Italian and British students clash with police over education cuts.

2012: The number two leader in the Islamic military group Hamas, which rules Gaza, says the group will not stop arming itself because only a strong arsenal, not negotiations, can extract concessions from Israel.

2013: Iran strikes a landmark deal with the United States and five other world powers, agreeing to a temporary freeze of its nuclear programme in the most significant agreement between Washington and Tehran in more than three decades of estrangement.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Baruch Spinoza, Dutch philosopher (1632-1677); Abdel-Illah, crown prince of Iraq (1913-1958); William F Buckley, US magazine publisher and conservative thinker (1925-2008); Alfredo Kraus, Spanish tenor (1927-1999); Arthur Chaskalson, first chief justice of South African Constitutional Court (1931-2012); Billy Connolly, Scottish actor-comedian (1942-)

— AP