Today is the 161st day of 2022. There are 204 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1940: Jamaican-born pan-African nationalist Marcus Garvey dies in London at 52.

OTHER EVENTS

1190: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa) drowns while trying to cross the Saleph River on the Third Crusade to the Holy Land.

1692: Being found guilty of “certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft and Sorceries”, Bridget Bishop on this day in 1692 becomes the first person to be hanged during the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1772: Rhode Islanders in the American colonies board and sink the British revenue cutter Gaspee in Narragansett Bay.

1786: A landslide dam on the Dadu River caused by earthquake 10 days earlier collapses, killing 100,000 in the Sichuan province of China

1865: Tristan und Isolde, the earliest example of what Richard Wagner called music drama, was first performed, and it became the greatest German opera of the late 19th century.

1868: Serbian Prince Michael III is assassinated, derailing the Balkan League’s plans for a coordinated rebellion against the Ottomans and destroying the league.

1898: US Marines invade Cuba in Spanish-American War.

1916: Great Arab Revolt begins against ruling Ottoman turks

1935: Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio, by Dr Robert Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson.

1940: Italy, under the rule of Benito Mussolini, declares war against France and Great Britain, entering World War II.

1942: German SS kills the 172 male residents of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, and deports the women to concentration camps in retaliation for the assassination of the deputy SS leader Reinhard Heydrich.

1944: Germans kill 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, France, in retaliation for a resistance attack. Only 10 villagers survive. In 1953, 21 of the 200 SS perpetrators are brought to trial.

1963: US Equal Pay Act signed into law by President John F Kennedy.

1971: United States lifts 21-year-old embargo on trade with China.

1977: Apple Computer ships its first Apple II computers. James Earl Ray, the convicted killer of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, escapes from a prison in Tennessee; he is captured some 54 hours later. The International Labor Organization and the United Nations meet to discuss apartheid in South Africa and possible steps to prevent further violence and repression of the government.

1986: In South Africa, the three-year-old ‘Emergency Situation’ was renewed for 12 months, followed by an organised civil disobedience campaign against it.

1991: Eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard of South Lake Tahoe, California, is abducted by Phillip and Nancy Garrido; Jaycee was held by the couple for 18 years before she was found by authorities.

1994: In one incident of the Rwandan genocide, Hutu militiamen massacre 170 people hiding in a Roman Catholic church.

1997: Top Khmer Rouge Lieutenant Son Sen and his family are executed on the orders of leader Pol Pot. This later leads to a coup against Pol Pot.

1999: Yugoslav troops begin pulling out of Kosovo and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) suspends its punishing 78-day air war.

2000: Hours after Eritrea accepts a regional peace plan and agrees to a ceasefire, Ethiopian troops storm three Eritrean military positions on the disputed border.

2001: Media baron Silvio Berlusconi becomes Italy’s premier for the second time after his party wins 30 per cent of the vote, more than any other party. His Government is Italy’s 59th since World War II. Pope John Paul II canonised Lebanon’s first female saint, Saint Rafqa.

2003: The Spirit Rover is launched, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

2004: Singer-musician Ray Charles dies in Beverly Hills, California, at age 73.

2005: Torrential rains in north-western Colombia unleash mudslides on an impoverished mountainside neighbourhood in the South American country’s coffee-growing region, killing at least six people. For the first time The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl is released in the USA.

2007: HBO airs the last episode of its landmark TV series The Sopranos, which centred on Mafia boss and family man Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini). Taliban militants launch a barrage of rockets on President Hamid Karzai as he speaks with elders in central Afghanistan, narrowly missing him. It is the third attempt on Karzai’s life since he became president.

2008: The chief of Saddam Hussein’s tribal clan is killed by a bomb glued to the undercarriage of his car. Sheik Ali al-Nida, 65, was the leader of the al-Bu Nasir tribe, a large Sunni Arab clan of about 20,000 members, including Saddam’s family.

2009: Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi hails a new era in relations with Italy on arrival in Rome, saying a history of hatred and destruction during 30-year colonial rule had been replaced by a future of friendship and cooperation. Eighty-eight-year-old James Wenneker von Brunn opens fire inside the US Holocaust Museum and shot dead Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Some guards open fire, injuring von Brunn, who is arrested.

2010: Pope Benedict XVI strongly defends celibacy for priests as a sign of faith in an increasingly secular world during a rally that draws some 15,000 priests from around the world to Rome.

2011: In a stern rebuke, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates warns that the future of the historic NATO military alliance is at risk because of European penny-pinching and distaste for frontline combat, and says the United States won’t carry the alliance as a charity case.

2012: Opposition Leader Henri Capriles marches through the Venezuelan capital of Caracas accompanied by hundreds of thousands of supporters as he formerly launches his campaign to run against President Hugo Chavez.

2015: President Barack Obama orders the deployment of up to 450 more American troops to Iraq in an effort to reverse major battlefield losses to the Islamic State. Pope Francis takes the biggest step yet in cracking down on bishops who covered up for priests who raped and molested children, creating a new tribunal inside the Vatican to hear cases of bishops accused of failing to protect their flocks.

2016: Canadian ice hockey player Gordie Howe — who was one of the game’s best players, known for his extraordinary puck handling, wrist shots, and legendary toughness — dies in Toledo, Ohio.

2019: The Agusta A109E Power plane crashes at the AXA Equity Center on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, New York City, which set fire to the building. The pilot of the helicopter dies.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Gustave Courbet, French artist (1819-1877); Nikolaus August Otto, German developer of internal combustion engine (1832-1891); Henry Stanley, British-American journalist and explorer (1840-1904); Saul Bellow, US novelist and Nobel laureate (1915-2005); Judy Garland, US actress (1922-1969); Britain’s Prince Philip (1921-2021); Jeff Greenfield, US TV commentator (1943- ); Maxi Priest, British reggae/dancehall singer (1961- ); Elizabeth Hurley, British model/actress (1965- ); Faith Evans, US singer (1973- ); Jeanne Tripplehorn, US actress (1963- ).

– AP