Today is the 329th day of 2022. There are 36 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1999: Five-year-old Elian Gonzalez is rescued at sea after a boat capsizes during a voyage from Cuba, killing his mother and 10 others. Elian is turned over to his Miami relatives but his Cuban father demands the boy’s return, and a highly politicised custody battle rages for seven months.

OTHER EVENTS

1758: British forces capture Senegal; in the French and Indian War the British capture Fort Duquesne in present-day Pittsburgh.

1783: The British evacuate New York, their last military position in the United States during the Revolutionary War.

1905: Telimco makes the first-ever advertisement for a radio set by advertising a US$8.50 set in the Scientific American, which claimed to receive signals for up to one mile.

1917: A plebiscite approves separation of state and church in Uruguay. Russia holds its last free election for more than a half-century.

1942: A special Moscow communiqué reports 15,000 more Germans are captured and 6,000 are killed, raising the total in the seven-day Stalingrad offensive to 51,000 captured and 47,000 killed.

1952: The world’s longest-running play, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, opens in London.

1973: Greece’s President George Papadopoulos is ousted in a bloodless military coup.

1975: Netherlands grants Suriname its independence.

1977: The UN General Assembly condemns Israel for its occupation of Arab lands.

1981: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak frees 31 journalists and political figures, including five former Cabinet officials, who were arrested in Anwar el-Sadat’s crackdown on political opposition in September.

1986: The Iran-Contra affair erupts as US President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese reveal that profits from secret arms sales to Iran had been diverted to Nicaraguan rebels.

1988: Radical students and Buddhist monks battle riot police in Seoul, South Korea, demanding the arrest of former President Chun Doo Hwan for corruption.

1991: President Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to hold the Soviet Union together suffer a setback when seven republics fail to initial the proposed Union Treaty as scheduled.

1992: Representatives of 93 nations agree to speed efforts to phase out the production and use of chemicals that damage the Earth’s ozone layer; under the agreement industrialised nations will move up their deadlines for eliminating some harmful chemicals.

1994: Guerrillas loyal to Yasser Arafat fight Palestine Liberation Organization dissidents in Lebanon’s largest refugee camp.

1995: In Warsaw, Poland’s President-elect Aleksander Kwasniewski resigns from the former communist party in a bid to be seen as a leader above politics.

1996: More than 100,000 people march through Belgrade, Yugoslavia, accusing Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic of stealing municipal elections.

1997: A former member of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s entourage testifies before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he saw her stab a young activist to death.

1998: President Jiang Zemin arrives in Tokyo for the first visit to Japan by a Chinese head of state since World War II.

2000: Russia introduces a plan for a State monopoly on caviar production and exports, a move that would cut off illegal sales to the luxury market abroad and increase revenues coming into the Government’s coffers.

2005: An Austrian court rules that British historian David Irving must remain in custody on Holocaust denial charges despite his assertion that he now acknowledges the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers.

2006: Lebanon’s US-backed Government approves the creation of an international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

2007: Pakistan’s exiled former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif returns home to a hero’s welcome and calls on President General Pervez Musharraf to end emergency rule before elections.

2012: Fire races through a garment factory in Bangladesh that supplies major retailers in the West, killing at least 112 people, many of whom were trapped by the flames because the eight-storey building lacked emergency exits.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Lope Felix de Vega, Spanish dramatist (1562-1635); Joe DiMaggio, former US baseball player (1914-1999); Ricardo Montalban, Mexican-born actor (1920-2009); Mauno Koivisto, Finland’s president from 1982 to 1994 (1923-2017); Amy Grant, US singer (1960- ); Christina Applegate, US actress (1971- )

— AP