Today is the 174th day of 2022. There are 191 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1998: The first large-scale test of an AIDS vaccine begins in the US city of Philadelphia when the first of 5,000 volunteers get injections.

OTHER EVENTS

963: Luxembourg becomes an independent principality when Siegfried, Count of Ardennes, exchanges his lands for a small but strategically placed Roman castle along the Alzette River.

1532: England’s King Henry VIII and France’s King Francis I sign secret alliance against Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

1757: British under Robert Clive defeat forces of the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey, leaving British masters in Bengal.

1760: Austrians defeat Prussians guarding passes into Silesia at Landshut, Bavaria.

1797: Peasant “Army of the Holy Faith” enters Naples, ending the republic installed by the French and paving the way for the return of the Bourbon king.

1848: “June Days” civil war begins when workers fired by the Government put up barricades in Paris. They are brutally put down by the army three days later.

1934: Saudi Arabia and defeated Yemen sign peace treaty after seven-week border war.

1952: US Air Force bombs hydroelectric plants in North Korea.

1956: Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser is elected president of Egypt.

1970: Japanese students clash with police in Tokyo in huge demonstration against continuing US-Japan security pact.

1980: Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and her “heir apparent”, dies when his aerobatics plane crashes.

1985: All 329 people aboard an Air-India Boeing 747 die as it crashes into the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Toronto to Bombay. Sikh separatists are accused of planting a bomb.

1992: With a peace platform, the Labour Party defeats ruling right wing Likud Party in Israeli elections.

1993: Nigeria’s military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida, voids results of presidential elections and halts a return to democracy.

1995: Chechen and Russian negotiators agree to extend a ceasefire in the secessionist southern republic, despite violations on both sides.

1997: In the Central African Republic, soldiers fire on foreign peacekeepers in the third major rebellion since May 1996. The army objects to the 1993 election of President Ange-Felix Patasse and eventually deposes him in 2003.

1999: The European Union says it will fund efforts to undermine Slobodan Milosevic’s rule in Yugoslavia.

2001: Peru’s fugitive ex-spy Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos, wanted on human rights and corruption charges, is captured in Caracas, Venezuela.

2002: China allows 26 North Korean migrants who had sought asylum in foreign diplomatic compounds in Beijing to leave the country for South Korea.

2003: The US Supreme Court upholds the use of race as one of many factors in University of Michigan’s admissions, but rejects a “points-based method” of racial preferences that fails to examine each student application on an individual level.

2004: Facing global opposition fuelled by the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, the United States drops a contentious UN resolution that seeks to renew an exemption shielding American troops from international prosecution for war crimes.

2005: Rights groups show a smuggled video of hundreds of thousands of poor Zimbabweans living in the open in the winter cold after the Government tore down their homes in what it described as an urban renewal project.

2006: The World Health Organization details the first evidence that a person likely caught the bird flu virus from a human, then passed a slightly mutated version to another person. But experts say the genetic change does not increase the threat of a pandemic.

2007: A Yemeni guard opens fire on a group of foreign oil workers shortly after they land at Occidental Petroleum Corp’s airstrip, killing one and wounding five.

2008: A Pakistani court rules that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is not eligible to run in upcoming parliamentary elections because he had been convicted of a crime.

2009: US President Barack Obama condemns the violence against protesters in Iran and lends his strongest support yet to their accusations that a victory by hardliners in a presidential election is a fraud.

2010: President Barack Obama fires his loose-lipped Afghanistan commander, a seismic shift for the military order in wartime, and chooses General David Petraeus, the highly regarded former commander in Iraq, to replace him.

2011: Syrian troops push to the Turkish border in their sweep against a three-month-old pro-democracy movement, sending panicked refugees, including children, rushing across the frontier to havens in Turkey.

2012: Pope Benedict XVI convenes a special meeting of cardinals for advice on how to deal with the Vatican’s leaked document scandal.

2013: Islamic militants disguised as policemen kill 10 foreign climbers and a Pakistani guide in a brazen overnight raid against their campsite at the base of one of the world’s tallest mountains in northern Pakistan.

2014: An Egyptian court convicts three Al-Jazeera journalists and sentences them to seven years in prison on terrorism-related charges, after a trial dismissed by rights groups as a sham.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Josephine, French empress and wife of Napoleon Bonaparte (1763-1814); Edward VIII (Duke of Windsor), abdicated king of England (1894-1972); Anna Akhmatova (pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko), Russian poet (1889-1966); James Edward Meade, English economist (1907-1995); Alan Turing, British mathematician and computer pioneer (1912-1954); Bob Fosse, US dancer/choreographer (1927-1987); Randy Jackson, talent judge on American Idol (1956- ); Frances McDormand, US actress (1957- ).

— AP