Today is the 279th day of 2023. There are 86 days left in the year

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1999: Overwhelmed by rising waters on the Niger River, officials open the floodgates of two major dams, submerging 400 villages and leaving more than 300,000 homeless. Some 500 are believed drowned.

OTHER EVENTS

1536: William Tyndale, who translated the first English Bible, is executed for heresy in Vilvoorde, the Netherlands.

1789: An irate crowd enters the Versailles palace outside Paris. Troops of the Marquis de Lafayette protect the royal family, who are taken to Paris as hostages of the revolution.

1889: Inventor Thomas Edison shows his first motion pictures in West Orange, New Jersey.

1927: In the United States, the era of talking pictures arrives with the opening of The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. It features both silent and sound-synchronised scenes.

1949: American-born Iva Toguri D’Aquino, convicted as Japanese wartime broadcaster “Tokyo Rose”, is sentenced in San Francisco to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000.

1964: As Cambodia is dragged into the Vietnam war, China pledges to Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodian chief of state, that it will give his country economic and military aid.

1972: Train carrying religious pilgrims derails and catches fire near Saltillo, Mexico, killing at least 208 people.

1979: Pope John Paul II becomes the first pontiff to visit the White House, where he is received by US President Jimmy Carter.

1981: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is shot to death by extremists while reviewing a military parade.

1991: An Indonesia air force plane crashes into a government building in Jakarta, killing 102 people and injuring more than 5,000.

1992: The UN Security Council unanimously votes to create a war-crimes commission for Bosnia-Herzegovina.

1996: Yao Wenyaun, the last surviving member of the “Gang of Four”, which promoted class struggle under Chairman Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution, is freed from prison. In jail for 20 years, he was convicted in 1981 for plotting to seize power after Mao’s death in 1976.

1997: The spiritual leader of Muslim militant group Hamas is released by Israel in exchange for two Mossad agents captured after a bungled assassination attempt in Jordan.

2000: An official inquiry into the infection of more than 200 Irish haemophiliacs with HIV and hepatitis C confirms that the government’s Blood Transfusion Service Board knowingly put them at risk in the early 1980s by selling infected blood products to hospitals.

2002: The Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite television network broadcast an audiotape made by Osama bin Laden where the speaker on the tape warned the US of future attacks.

2004: The European Union recommends setting mostly Muslim Turkey on a course for full membership in the union. The commissioners set stiff conditions to prevent far poorer Turkey from backtracking on the sweeping democratic and human rights reforms being demanded.

2005: Rescue workers dig through mud, searching for victims of landslides and pulling bodies from swollen rivers, after a week of steady rain in Central America and Mexico leaves more than 160 dead.

2006: The fledgling UN Human Rights Council ends its second session after failing to approve any decisions addressing the world’s worst abuses.

2008: Wall Street joins in a worldwide cascade of despair over the financial crisis, driving the Dow Jones industrials to their biggest loss ever during a trading day. They close below 10,000 for the first time since 2004.

2012: Israel scrambles fight jets to intercept a drone that crossed deep into Israeli airspace from the Mediterranean sea, shooting the aircraft down over the country’s southern desert.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Louis Philippe, king of France (1773-1850); Jenny Lind, Swedish soprano (1820-1887); Charles Edouard Jeanneret, Swiss architect known as “Le Corbusier” (1887-1965); Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian anthropologist and leader of Kon-Tiki expedition (1914-2002); Hafez Assad, former Syrian president (1930-2000); Britt Ekland, Swedish actress (1942- ); Elizabeth Shue, American actress (1963-)

– AP