Today is the 363rd day of 2022. There are two days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

2001: A series of firework explosions spark a massive fire in downtown Lima, Peru, killing 291 people. The blaze, fuelled by dozens of sidewalk stands selling illegal fireworks, quickly spreads throughout the crowded commercial district.

Other Events

1170: Archbishop Thomas Becket is slain at the altar in Cathedral of Canterbury, England.

1721: French occupy Mauritius and rename it Ile de France.

1808: The 17th president of the United States, Andrew Johnson, is born in Raleigh, North Carolina.

1845: Texas is admitted as the 28th state.

1890: US troops massacre 200 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

1901: Commonwealth of Australia is inaugurated after being constituted by an Act of the Imperial Parliament the previous year.

1916: James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is first published in book form in New York after being serialised in London.

1921: United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan sign Washington treaty to limit naval armaments.

1933: Romanian Premier Ion Duca is slain by Iron Guard, and George Tartarescu succeeds him.

1934: Japan renounces Washington naval treaty limiting naval armaments.

1940: German bombers inflict greatest damage on London since Great Fire of 1666.

1957: Singers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme are married in Las Vegas (the marriage lasts until Gorme’s death in 2013).

1965: Independence is announced for Bechuanaland, which becomes Botswana.

1967: Hyundai Motor Company is founded in Seoul, South Korea.

1972: Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, crashes into the Florida Everglades near Miami International Airport, killing 101 of the 176 people aboard.

1973: Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos ends his elected term and begins to rule on basis of a takeover decree.

1975: A bomb explodes in the main terminal of New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing 11 people (It has never been determined who was responsible).

1986: Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dies in Sussex, England, at age 92.

1989: Czechoslovak Parliament elects dissident playwright Vaclav Havel as its president without opposition.

1990: Johan Kraag is sworn in as president of Suriname after bloodless military coup on December 24 ousts former president.

1992: Premier Milan Panic, the Serb-born American who pushed for peace in fragmented Yugoslavia, is ousted by Parliament in a vote that strengthens Serbia’s hard-line President Slobodan Milosevic. David and Sharon Schoo of St Charles, Illinois, are arrested at O’Hare International Airport upon their return from a Mexican vacation for leaving their four- and nine-year-old daughters at home, alone. (The Schoos pleaded guilty to child neglect and were sentenced to probation; the children were put up for adoption.)

1993: A dozen packed buses ride across rural Bosnian battlegrounds, taking about 900 Sarajevans to a new life as refugees in Croatia.

1994: A Turkish Airlines jet crashes in Turkey with 76 people aboard. Twenty-three people survive.

1995: Russian President Boris Yeltsin returns to the Kremlin after a hospital stay.

1996: Guatemalan Government and guerrilla leaders sign an accord ending 36 years of civil conflict, bringing Central America’s last and longest civil war to an official close.

1998: In Yemen, troops surround and fire on a band of Islamic extremists holding 16 tourists hostage, ending a kidnapping that leaves six of the hostages dead.

2002: Election commission officials in Serbia say the five-year term of Serbian President Milan Milutinovic expires at midnight, opening the possibility of his extradition to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands.

2003: International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohammed El Baradei says that Libya’s attempts to build a nuclear weapon were in very early stages, and that many components of the nuclear programme are in storage.

2004: Paramedics spray Indian beaches with bleach and vaccinate tsunami survivors, as Indonesian authorities bulldoze mass graves for thousands of corpses lining the streets and lawns of Banda Aceh.

2006: Turkish Cypriots begin dismantling a bridge that blocked plans to relink war-divided Nicosia’s commercial centre and was seen as the strongest symbol of the island’s partition. The bridge is gone 11 days later, but no breakthrough in reunification talks is evident.

2007: Thousands of Kenyans enraged over delays in announcing the country’s next president after December 27 elections burn down homes and attack political rivals with sticks and machetes. Australian David Hicks, who had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, is freed from prison in Adelaide after completing a nine-month sentence struck under a plea deal that followed more than five years’ detention without a trial at Guantanamo. The New England Patriots ends its regular season with a remarkable 16-0 record following a 38-35 comeback victory over the New York Giants. (New England became the first NFL team since the 1972 Dolphins to win every game on the schedule.)

2008: An estimated 47 million people visited New York City in 2008, beating the previous year by one million visitors, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announces.

2009: North Korea acknowledges it has detained an American for illegally entering the reclusive country, news welcomed by relatives of a missionary who feared they would never hear from him again after he sneaked across the border.

2010: Police in Denmark and Sweden say they thwarted a terrorist attack possibly hours before it was to begin, arresting five men they say planned to shoot as many people as possible in a Copenhagen building housing the newsroom of a paper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

2012: Shocked Indians mourn the death of a woman who had been gang-raped and beaten on a bus in New Delhi nearly two weeks earlier; six suspects are charged with murder. (Four are later sentenced to death; one dies in prison; the sixth, a juvenile at the time of the attack, was sentenced to a maximum of three years in a reform home.) Russia’s foreign minister says that Syrian President Bashar Assad has no intention of stepping down and it would be impossible to try to persuade him otherwise. Maine’s same-sex marriage law goes into effect.

2013: Saudi Arabia pledges $3 billion to Lebanon to help strengthen the country’s armed forces and purchase weapons from France as the troops struggle to contain a rising tide of violence linked to neighbouring Syria’s civil war.

2016: The United States strikes back at Russia for hacking the US presidential campaign with a sweeping set of punishments targeting Russia’s spy agencies and diplomats; Moscow calls the Barack Obama Administration in the US “losers” and threatens retaliation. Tennis star Serena Williams announces her engagement to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian — on Reddit. (The couple marries on November 16, 2017.)

Today’s Birthdays

Jeanne d’Etoiles, Marquise de Pompadour, mistress of France’s King Louis XV (1721-1764); Pablo Casals, Spanish cellist (1876-1973); Viveca Lindfors, Swedish-born actress (1920-1995); Mary Tyler Moore, US actress (1937-2017); Gelsey Kirkland, US ballet dancer (1952-); Ted Danson, US actor (1947-); Jude Law, British actor (1972-); Alvin Marriott, renowned Jamaican sculptor (1902-1192)

— AP/Jamaica Observer