Today is the 347th day of 2022 There are 18 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1989: South African President F W de Klerk meets for the first time with imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela at de Klerk’s office in Cape Town.

OTHER EVENTS

1294 : Saint Celestine V abdicates the papacy after only five months, hoping to return to his previous life as an ascetic hermit.

1545: The Council of Trent, the 19th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church which helped revitalise the Church in many parts of Europe after the Protestant Reformation, opens in Trent, Italy.

1577: Sir Francis Drake of England sets out with five ships on a near three-year journey that would take him around the world.

1642: Dutch Mariner Abel Tasman discovers New Zealand.

1784: Samuel Johnson, regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th century life and letters for his biographies and essays, dies in London.

1789: The Austrian Netherlands declares independence as Belgium.

1808: Madrid capitulates to Napoleon Bonaparte.

1862: Confederate forces deal Union troops a major defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia during the American Civil War.

1897: Russian forces occupy Port Arthur on the Yellow Sea.

1916: About 9,000 Austro-Hungarian troops are killed in an avalanche in the Alps.

1918: US President Woodrow Wilson arrives in France, becoming the first chief executive to visit Europe while in office.

1920: Francis G Pease’s interferometer at Mount Wilson Observatory is the first to measure the diameter of a star known as the Betelgeuse.

1921: The Four-Power Pact is signed during the Washington Conference by the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and France, stipulating that all the signatories will be consulted in the event of a controversy between two of them over “any Pacific question”.

1928: George Gershwin’s An American in Paris is publicly performed for the first time at Carnegie Hall in New York.

1937: The Japanese Imperial Army seizes Nanjing, China, during the Sino-Japanese War, leading to the Nanjing Massacre in which up to 300,000 Chinese may have been killed.

1950: South Africa refuses to place south-west Africa (Namibia) under UN trusteeship.

1972: US Apollo 17 astronauts, on their last US moon mission, unveil a plaque on the lunar surface dedicated to peace .

1974: Egypt demands a 50-year freeze on Israel’s population as a condition for peace in Middle East.

1981: Communist authorities impose martial law in Poland to crush the Solidarity labour movement; martial law formally ends in 1983.

1989: Driving Miss Daisy, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy, is released; it wins Best Picture the following year, 1990.

1990: African National Congress President Oliver Tambo arrives in South Africa after 30 years in exile.

1991: Leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan agree that they will join the new Commonwealth of Independent States.

1994: President Sam Nujoma and his governing party are declared winners of Namibia’s first post-Independence election.

1999: New York City police officer Justin Volpe is sentenced to 30 years in prison for his part in sodomising a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, with a broken broomstick.

2001: The United States formally withdraws from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In India five suicide attackers storm Parliament, killing seven people; all the attackers are eventually killed.

2003: US forces capture former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in a small underground hideout near the Iraqi city of Tikrit; although Hussein is armed, no shots are fired as he is taken into custody. Italian operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti weds Nicoletta Mantovani at Modena Italy’s Teatro Comunale.

2004: Bucharest mayor and reformist Opposition candidate Traian Basescu wins an unexpected victory in Romania’s presidential run-off election, ending a decade of rule by successors to this country’s former communist regime.

2006: The UN Human Rights Council votes to send a team of investigators to the war-torn region of western Sudan to report on civilian deaths, rapes and destruction of villages.

2007: EU leaders sign the Lisbon Treaty — a slimmed-down version of the aborted EU Constitution; the 50-article charter creates the post of EU president and overhauls voting rules. The Mitchell Report is publicly released, listing the names of 89 Major League Baseball players who have presumably used anabolic steroids and human growth hormones; notable players named include Roger Clemens and Miguel Tejada.

2008: The Indian navy captures 23 pirates who threatened a merchant vessel in the Gulf of Aden, and a German naval helicopter thwarts another attack on a freighter being chased by speedboats off Yemen.

2009: An attacker hurls a statuette at Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, striking the leader in the face at the end of a rally and leaving the stunned 73-year-old media mogul with a broken nose and bloodied mouth.

2010: Ukraine plans to open up the sealed zone around the Chernobyl reactor to visitors who wish to learn more about the nuclear disaster that occurred nearly a quarter of a century before.

2011: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aerospace pioneer Burt Raton engage in building the world’s biggest plane to help launch cargo and astronauts into space, in the latest of several ventures fuelled by technology tycoons clamouring to write the next chapter in US space history.

2012: A European court issues a landmark ruling that condemns the CIA’s so-called extraordinary renditions programmes and bolsters those who say they were illegally kidnapped and tortured as part of an overzealous fight against terrorism.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Heinrich Heine, German poet (1797-1856); Ernst Werner von Siemens, German engineer (1816-1892); Emily Carr, Canadian painter-writer (1871-1945); Carlos Montoya, Spanish-American flamenco guitarist (1903-1993); Archie Moore, American boxer and world light heavyweight boxing champion from 1952 to 1962 (1913-1998 ); George Rhoden, Jamaican Olympian with two gold medals from the 1952 Olympics in the 400m and 4x400m (1926- ); Christopher Plummer, Canadian-born actor (1929-2021 ); Dick Van Dyke, US actor (1925- ); Steve Buscemi, US actor (1957- ); Jamie Foxx, American comedian, musician, and actor (1967- ); Taylor Swift, American country music singer-songwriter (1989- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer