Today is the 238th day of 2022. There are 127 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

2011: A car loaded with explosives crashes into the main United Nations building in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja and explodes, killing at least 18 people in one of the deadliest assaults on the international body in a decade. A radical Muslim sect claims responsibility for the blast.

OTHER EVENTS

1071: Turkish Seljuks beat the Byzantine forces at the Battle of Manzikert (now Malazgirt, Turkey), gaining entry into Anatolia and opening the road to Europe.

1346: English archers defeat French knights at the Battle of Crecy in northern France.

1429: In preparation for an attack on Paris, part of Charles VII’s campaign to drive the English from French soil, Joan of Arc and her soldiers reach the city’s outskirts on this day in 1429, but the assault ultimately fails.

1541: Suleiman I, Sultan of Turkey, annexes Hungary.

1682: English astronomer Edmond Halley first observes the comet named after him.

1847: Liberia is proclaimed an independent republic.

1873: First free kindergarten in the US is started by Susan Blow in Carondelet, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri.

1883: The volcano Krakatoa erupts on the island Krakatau, near Indonesia, creating tsunami waves that kill more than 36,000 people.

1896: Insurrection begins in the Philippines against the Spanish.

1914: During World War I the Battle of Tannenberg begins, fought between the Germans and the Russians; several days later the German forces, led by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, hand Russia a crushing defeat.

1915: German army captures Brest-Litovsk in Russia during World War I.

1920: The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing American women the right to vote, is declared in effect.

1934: Adolf Hitler demands that France turn over the Saar region to Germany.

1936: The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty establishes Egypt as a sovereign state, ending 50 years of British occupation except in the Suez Canal zone; Britain and Egypt form an alliance for 20 years.

1937: Japan blockades Chinese shipping.

1942: The German army reaches Stalingrad in Soviet Union during World War II.

1945: Japanese envoys board US battleship Missouri to receive surrender instructions at the end of World War II.

1947: The UN Security Council passes a resolution for both the Dutch and Indonesians to adhere to a ceasefire order.

1951: The film An American In Paris, with music by George Gershwin, directed by Vincente Minnelli, and starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, premieres in London. It wins the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1952.

1952: Floods caused by monsoon rains inundate 90 per cent of Manila, causing at least eight deaths. It is Manila’s third flood in a month.

1957: The Soviet Union announces it has successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile.

1964: Student and Buddhist riots force resignation of Government of Premier Nguyen Khanh in South Vietnam.

1968: Hey Jude, the single released by the Beatles in US, wins Billboard Song of the Year for 1968 and became Billboard’s 10th-biggest song of all time in 2013.

1970: North Vietnam sends its chief negotiator back to Vietnam peace talks in Paris after an 8 1/2-month boycott of negotiations.

1971: Bobby Orr signs a five-year contract with the Boston Bruins worth US$1 million, the first million-dollar contract in NHL history.

1975: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I — who steered his country into the mainstream of African politics after World War II and oversaw its entrance into the League of Nations and the United Nations — dies at age 83, possibly assassinated.

1978: Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice is elected the 264th pope of the Roman Catholic Church, following the death of Paul VI. The new pontiff takes the name John Paul I but dies of a heart attack 33 days later.

1990: The number of US soldiers, airmen and sailors in the Gulf reaches 60,000.

1993: Egyptian-born Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and 14 others are charged in an attack on New York’s World Trade Center earlier in the year.

1996: US President Bill Clinton signs welfare reform into law, representing a major shift in welfare policy.

1997: Former South African President F W de Klerk resigns as the head of the National Party, which created the practice of apartheid, and leaves politics.

2003: Rwandan President Paul Kagame is the overwhelming winner of presidential elections. The election is the first since the 1994 genocide.

2004: Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, makes a dramatic return to Najaf and swiftly wins agreement from a rebel cleric and the Government to end three weeks of fighting between his militia and US-Iraqi forces.

2005: A fire races through a crowded, run-down Paris apartment building housing African immigrants, killing 17 people — mainly children trapped while they slept — and triggers angry calls for decent housing for the needy in the French capital.

2008: Russia recognises the independence claims of two Georgian breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

2009: Edward “Ted” Kennedy dies at 77. The brother of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy, he was the US Senate’s dominant liberal and most skilful deal-maker.

2014: Israel and Gaza’s ruling Hamas agree to an open-ended ceasefire after seven weeks of fighting — an uneasy deal that halts the deadliest war the sides have fought in years.

2015: American civil rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson — an organiser of the Selma March (1965), which was a landmark event in the civil rights movement that led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act — dies at age 104.

2018: American playwright, screenwriter, and TV writer Neil Simon — who was one of the most popular playwrights in the history of American theatre, known for such plays as The Odd Couple and Biloxi Blues — dies at age 91.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Sir Robert Walpole, first prime minister of Britain (1676-1745); Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, French scientist (1743-1794); Guillame Apollinaire, French poet (1880-1918); Peggy Guggenheim, US art collector (1898-1979); Albert Sabin, Polish microbiologist who developed the oral polio vaccine (1906-1993); Julio Cortazar, Argentine writer (1914-1984); Branford Marsalis, US jazz musician (1960- ); Macaulay Culkin, US actor (1980- ).

— AP