This is the 24th day of 2024. There are 342 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1999: Olympic leaders recommend the expulsion of six members of the International Olympic Committee, in an unprecedented response to the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the Games.

OTHER EVENTS

661: Islam’s Caliph Ali, one of Shiite Islam’s key saints, is killed by a murderer with a poisoned saber.

1634: The Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II secretly deprives the duke of Wallenstein of his command and declares him a traitor.

1848: James Marshall finds a gold nugget in the US territory of California, touching off the Gold Rush of 49.

1899: A rubber heel for boots or shoes is patented by American Humphrey O’Sullivan.

1908: The first Boy Scout troop is organised in England by Robert Baden-Powell.

1927: Alfred Hitchcock releases his first film as director — The Pleasure Garden
— in England.

1943: Jewish patients, nurses, and doctors are incinerated at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Adolf Hitler orders German troops at Stalingrad to fight to the death.

1946: UN General Assembly votes to create the UN Atomic Energy Commission.

1964: CBS purchases the 1964 & 1965 NFL TV rights for US$28.2 million.

1967: South Vietnam’s Premier Nguyen Cao Ky runs into a wild, anti-war demonstration on a visit to New Zealand.

1972: The US Supreme Court strikes down laws that deny welfare benefits to people who have resided in a state for less than a year. Japanese Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi is found hiding in a Guam jungle, where he had been since the end of World War II.

1973: US negotiator Henry Kissinger says the Vietnam peace agreement worked out in Paris also means an end to fighting in Laos and Cambodia.

1986: Guerrillas advance into the Ugandan capital of Kampala as the army Opposition crumbles, pushing the military Government to the edge of collapse.

1991: Lithuania asks the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from buildings seized in the Baltic republic.

1992: A judge sentences an army colonel and lieutenant to 30 years in prison for the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador.

1993: American lawyer and civil rights activist Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the US Supreme Court (1967-91), dies at age 84.

1995: In a move of uncertain efficacy, US President Bill Clinton freezes, in American banks, the assets of suspected terrorist groups.

1998: The Government of the Mexican state of Chiapas frees 300 prisoners as a way of opening talks with the indigenous rebels.

2001: Japan’s military dumped swarms of infected fleas on China that triggered outbreaks of the bubonic plague in the 1940s, two Chinese doctors testify at a trial in Tokyo; nearly 200 Chinese plaintiffs demand compensation and an apology from the Japanese Government for the deaths of their relatives.

2002: John Walker Lindh, a US citizen captured while fighting alongside Afghanistan’s deposed Taliban militia, appears in US District Court to face charges of conspiring to kill Americans and supporting terrorist groups.

2005: With calls of “never again”, UN General Assembly commemorates the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps with a special session — a stark change for a body that had been reluctant to address the extermination of the Jews during World War II.

2007: Israeli President Moshe Katsav, facing charges of rape and abuse of power, asks Parliament to temporarily remove him from office in an effort to blunt a growing demand for his resignation.

2008: French bank Societe Generale uncovers an alleged 4.9 billion-euro (US$7.14-billion) fraud by futures trader Jerome Kerviel, who fooled regulators and overstepped his authority.

2009: Hundreds of migrants and refugees break out of an overcrowded immigration facility on a Sicilian island to protest their treatment; about 2,000 people had been crammed into a facility built for 850.

2010: Osama bin Laden threatens new attacks against the United States in an audio message that appears aimed at asserting he maintains some direct command over al-Qaeda-inspired offshoots.

2011: Human Rights Watch singles out UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for especially harsh criticism as it takes world leaders to task for what it calls their failure to be tougher on rights offenders.

2016: TV drama The X-Files returns after 13 years, reuniting lead actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

2018: Former US Olympic team doctor Larry Nassar is found guilty of molesting over 150 girls and is sentenced up to 175 years in prison.

2019: The search for missing Argentine footballer Emiliano Sala is called off after rescuers fail to find the aircraft that disappeared from the radar over the English Channel three days earlier; the search resumes on funding by soccer community donations, and the wreckage is discovered February 3. The US Government recognises Venezuelan Opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s president.

2022: At least 34 people are killed and 65,000 left homeless after two tropical storms batter Madagascar and Mozambique, with Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo particularly affected.

2023: Adani Enterprises, owned by the world’s third-richest man Gautam Adani, loses US$108 billion in value after investment firm Hindenburg Research publishes a report alleging stock manipulation and accounting fraud.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Frederick II, king of Prussia (1712-1786); E T A Hoffmann, German writer, composer, and painter (1776-1822); Walther Model, German military officer (1891-1945); Neil Diamond, US singer (1941- ); Aaron Neville, US singer with The Neville Brothers (1941- ); Michael Ontkean, Canadian actor (1946- ); Tatyana Ali, US actress-singer (1979- )

– AP