This is the 167th day of 2022. There are 198 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2003: A drought that began in 2001 puts some 12.6 million Ethiopians at risk of starving to death, United Nations food agencies say, adding that this could lead to the worst famine since a 1984-85 crisis in which a million people died of starvation.

OTHER EVENTS

1567: Mary, Queen of Scots, is imprisoned in Lochleven Castle in Scotland. (She escaped almost a year later but ended up imprisoned again.)

1671: Rebel Cossack leader Stenka Razin is executed by quartering in Moscow’s Red Square.

1779: Spain declares war on Britain and begins a four-year siege of Gibraltar.

1858: Accepting the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination for the US Senate, Abraham Lincoln says the slavery issue has to be resolved, declaring, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

1903: The Ford Motor Company is founded by Henry Ford and 11 associate investors.

1911: IBM has its beginnings as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co, and is incorporated in New York state.

1932: The Lausanne Conference, held to liquidate Germany’s payment of reparations to the former Allied and Associated powers of World War I, opens.

1933: The National Industrial Recovery Act becomes law with President Franklin D Roosevelt’s signature. (The Act is later struck down by the US Supreme Court.) The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp is founded as President Roosevelt signs the Banking Act of 1933.

1942: A second four-man team of Nazi saboteurs lands in Florida, three days after another group arrives on Long Island, New York. (The plot is foiled when two members of the first team agree to betray their comrades.)

1944: George Stinney, a 14-year-old black youth, becomes the youngest person to die in the electric chair as the state of South Carolina executes him for the murders of two white girls, Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7.

1956: Poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes are married in London.

1963: The world’s first female space traveller, Valentina Tereshkova, 26, is launched into orbit by the Soviet Union aboard Vostok 6. She spends 71 hours in-flight, circling the Earth 48 times before returning safely.

1967: The three-day Monterey International Pop Music Festival, a major event of the ‘Summer of Love’, opens in northern California; among the featured acts are Jefferson Airplane, The Who, the Grateful Dead, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and Ravi Shankar.

1976: South African police fire on a group of Soweto students marching in protest against State plans to impose the Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction in black schools, igniting a massive popular uprising.

1977: Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev is named president, becoming the first person to hold both posts simultaneously.

1978: President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos exchange the instruments of ratification for the Panama Canal treaties.

1987: A jury in New York acquits Bernhard Goetz of attempted murder in the subway shooting of four youth he said were going to rob him; however, Goetz is convicted of illegal weapons possession. (In 1996 a civil jury ordered Goetz to pay US$43 million to one of the individuals he had shot.)

1996: Russian voters go to the polls in their first independent presidential election; the result is a run-off between President Boris Yeltsin (the eventual winner) and Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov. Sportscaster Mel Allen dies in Greenwich, Connecticut, at age 83.

1998: Afghanistan’s Taliban religious army orders the closure of more than 100 private schools that had been educating girls.

1999: Amnesty International singles out the United States for human rights abuses, citing use of the death penalty particularly against people who committed crimes before they were 18.

2001: US President George W Bush and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin meet for the first time in Slovenia. They agree to cooperate and have regular consultations.

2007: A North Carolina State Bar disciplinary committee says disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong will be disbarred for his disastrous prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players falsely accused of rape. Six people are killed when a car driven by Australian-born professional drag racer Troy Critchley gets out of control and plows into a parade crowd in Selmer, Tennessee. (Critchley later pleaded guilty to reckless assault, thereby avoiding jail time.) US astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams sets a then-record aboard the international space station for the longest single spaceflight by any woman, surpassing the record of 188 days set by astronaut Shannon Lucid at the Mir space station in 1996. (Williams spent a total of 195 days aboard the station; her record was eclipsed in 2015 by Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency who spent 199 days in spaceflight.)

2012: Egyptians begin going to the polls for a two-day run-off to choose their first freely elected president; Islamist candidate Mohammed Morsi emerges the winner. China launches its most ambitious space mission to date, carrying its first female astronaut, Liu Yang, and two male colleagues on a 13-day mission to an orbiting module that ended safely.

2015: Real estate mogul Donald Trump launches his successful campaign to become president of the United States with a speech at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

2016: President Barack Obama travels to Orlando, Florida, the scene of a deadly nightclub shooting that claimed 49 victims; the president embraces grieving families and cheers on Democrats’ push for new gun control measures. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, in a livestream to his supporters from Vermont, says he will work with Hillary Clinton to transform the Democratic Party, adding that his “political revolution” had to continue to ensure the defeat of Republican Donald Trump. Walt Disney Company opens Shanghai Disneyland, its first theme park in mainland China.

2017: German politician Helmut Kohl, who presided over the integration of East Germany into West Germany in 1990 and became the first chancellor of a unified Germany since 1945, dies at age 87.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Geronimo, Apache Indian leader (1829-1909); Arthur Meighen, leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister of Canada, 1920–21 and 1926 (1874- ); Bobby Clark, US vaudevillian/comedian (1886-1960); Stan Laurel, US actor (1890-1965); Jean Peugeot, French car manufacturer (1896-1966); Barbara McClintock, US geneticist and Nobel laureate (1902-1992); Katharine Graham, American owner and publisher of The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine (1917-2001); Joyce Carol Oates, US author (1938- ); Eddie Levert, US singer (1942- ); Joan Van Ark, US actress (1943- )

–AP