Today is the 258th day of 2022. There are 107 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1935: The Nuremberg laws are passed, making discrimination against Jews part of Germany’s national policy and making the swastika the official symbol of Nazi Germany.

OTHER EVENTS

1590: Giovanni Battista signs a treaty with French Huguenots to bring an army of 156,000 German and Swiss mercenaries into France.

1776: British forces occupy New York City during the American Revolution.

1777: Polish Count Casimir Pulaski is commissioned major general in the American Revolutionary Army.

1789: The US Department of Foreign Affairs is renamed the Department of State.

1810: Mexico rejects Spanish rule.

1821: Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador declare their independence.

1882: British forces occupy Cairo; Arab Pasha surrenders and is banished to Ceylon — now Sri Lanka.

1916: Tanks are used for the first time in war — in a British attack on German lines near the Somme in France.

1917: Russia is proclaimed a republic by Alexander Kerensky, the head of a provisional government. The first issue of Forbes magazine is published.

1918: Serb and French forces break through Bulgarian lines on the Salonika front during World War I; Bulgaria soon sues for peace.

1938: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain visits Germany’s Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, where Hitler states his determination to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.

1940: The Royal Air Force inflicts heavy losses on the Luftwaffe as the tide turns in the Battle of Britain during World War II.

1942: German armies attack the Russian city of Stalingrad in World War II. The aircraft carrier USS Wasp is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine; the US Navy ends up sinking the badly damaged vessel.

1946: A People’s Republic is formed in Bulgaria after a referendum rejects the monarchy.

1950: United Nations forces under US General Douglas MacArthur land at Inchon, South Korea, halting North Korea’s advance.

1953: The United Nations General Assembly rejects communist demands that China be admitted into the organisation in order to help plan a Korean peace conference.

1959: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is welcomed by United States President Dwight Eisenhower as he arrives for an unprecedented two-week visit to the US.

1963: Four black girls are killed when a bomb goes off during Sunday services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. (Three Ku Klux Klansmen were eventually convicted for their roles in the blast.)

1972: A federal grand jury in Washington indicts seven men in connection with the Watergate break-in.

1976: The South African Government begins removing 45,000 Bakalobeng tribesmen from a Transvaal area into the Bophutatswana homeland as part of its policy to assign black tribes to autonomous areas.

1982: Iran’s former foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh is executed after being convicted of plotting against the Government.

1988: Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir says Hungary has agreed to renew ties with Israel after a 21-year break.

1993: Hijackers, brandishing grenades, force a Russian jetliner with 52 people aboard to land in Norway, then surrender to police and ask for political asylum.

1995: Tanks, howitzers and other heavy weaponry roll away from Sarajevo as Bosnian Serbs begin complying with a US-brokered agreement to ease the shattered city’s siege.

1997: An Egyptian military court convicts 72 Islamic militants of subversion and sentences four of them to death. Two of the nation’s most popular diet drugs — dexfenfluramine and fenfluramine — are pulled off the market because of new evidence they could seriously damage patients’ hearts.

2000: Mexicans are free to publicly toast their independence from Spain for the first time in 70 years. The 2000 Summer Olympics opens in Sydney, Australia, with a seemingly endless parade of athletes and coaches and a spectacular display; Aborigine runner Cathy Freeman ignites an Olympic ring of fire.

2001: Tropical Storm Gabrielle heads out to sea after leaving half a million Florida homes without electricity.

2003: A fire at Saudi Arabia’s largest prison, al-Hair in Riyadh, kills 67 inmates and wounds 23 others. The blaze is the deadliest prison fire in Saudi history.

2007: The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq offers money for the murder of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks and his editor who had shortly before produced images deemed insulting to Islam.

2008: Zimbabwe’s Opposition Leader Morgan Tsvangirai signs a power-sharing agreement with his nemesis President Robert Mugabe.

2009: Jamaican playwright and screenwriter Trevor Rhone dies.

2010: A mortar attack by Palestinian militants and air strikes by Israel form the grim backdrop as Mideast leaders end their latest round of peace talks, still divided on major issues.

2011: Denmark elects its first female prime minister, ousting the right-wing Government from power after 10 years of pro-market reforms and ever-stricter controls on immigration.

2014: US Secretary of State John Kerry says he will not shut the door on the possibility of working with Iran against a common enemy in the Islamic State militant group, but rules out coordinating on military action.

2016: A report issued by the Republican-led House intelligence committee condemns Edward Snowden, saying the National Security Agency leaker is not a whistle-blower and that the vast majority of the documents he stole were defence secrets that had nothing to do with privacy; Snowden’s attorney blasts the report, saying it is an attempt to discredit a “genuine American hero”.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

James Fenimore Cooper, US writer (1789-1851); Robert Benchley, US drama critic (1849-1945); Agatha Christie, British mystery writer (1890-1976); Claude McKay, renowned Jamaican author and poet (1889-1948); Jean Renoir, French film director (1894-1979); Jessye Norman, US soprano (1945-2019); Tommy Lee Jones, US actor (1946- ); Oliver Stone, US film director (1946- ); Britain’s Prince Harry (1984- )

— AP/ Jamaica Observer