Today is the 172nd day of 2022. There are 193 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2011: The Food and Drug Administration announces that cigarette packs in the US will have to carry macabre images that includ rotting teeth and gums, diseased lungs, and a sewn-up corpse of a smoker as part of a graphic campaign aimed at discouraging Americans from lighting up.

OTHER EVENTS

1788: The United States Constitution goes into effect as New Hampshire becomes the ninth state to ratify it.

1798: The British, under Lord Lake, defeat Irish rebels at Vinegar Hill and enter Wexford, stronghold of Irish Rebellion.

1834: Cyrus Hall McCormick receives a patent for his reaping machine.

1887: Britain annexes Zululand, blocking Transvaal’s attempts to gain access to Africa’s coast.

1913: Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick becomes the first woman to parachute from an aeroplane as she jumps over Los Angeles.

1945: Japanese forces on Okinawa surrender to Americans in World War II.

1955: The David Lean movie Summertime, starring Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi, opens in New York.

1960: Britain, France, Netherlands and the United States provide for a Caribbean organisation for economic cooperation.

1963: Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini is chosen, during a conclave of his fellow cardinals, to succeed the late Pope John XXIII; the new pope takes the name Paul VI.

1964: Civil rights workers Michael H Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E Chaney are slain in Philadelphia, Mississippi; their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.

1966: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Mike Nichols’ film version of the Edward Albee play starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, has its world premiere in Hollywood.

1970: Indochina war erupts on a dozen fronts in heaviest fighting since Vietnam conflict spread to Cambodia in April.

1971: International Court of Justice in The Hague rules that South Africa’s administration of the territory of Southwest Africa is illegal.

1973: The US Supreme Court, in Miller v California, rules that states may ban materials found to be obscene according to local standards.

1976: Rioting breaks out in black townships around Pretoria in South Africa.

1982: A jury in Washington, DC, finds John Hinckley Jr not guilty by reason of insanity in the shootings of President Ronald Reagan and three other men.

1985: Scientists announce that skeletal remains exhumed in Brazil are those of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

1989: A sharply divided Supreme Court rules that burning the American flag as a form of political protest is protected by the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.

1990: Massive earthquake strikes northern Iran, killing as many as 100,000.

1992: Ethiopians vote in their country’s first multiparty elections, but balloting is marred by Opposition boycotts.

1994: US President Bill Clinton’s Administration offers North Korea high-level talks if it will confirm a willingness to halt its nuclear programme.

1996: In Managua, Nicaragua, dozens of election officials who had been kidnapped and held for two days by rearmed Contra rebels are released.

1997: The United States, France and Russia agree to toughen sanctions against Iraq until UN inspectors confirm Baghdad is cooperating in the elimination of its weapons of mass destruction.

2000: Chile’s Senate approves a plan aimed at investigating what happened to 1,000 people who disappeared during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

2001: A US federal grand jury indicts 13 Saudis and one Lebanese in the 1996 bombing that killed 19 Americans servicemen in Saudi Arabia.

2003: Iran says it will increase its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency but suggests that the country will keep up controversial plans to enrich uranium. The United States accuses Iran of trying to build a nuclear bomb but Iran denies the charge.

2004: Assailants armed with grenades and rocket launchers seize the Interior Ministry headquarters in Ingushetia, a Russian region bordering warring Chechnya, killing the acting minister, local officials report.

2005: Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, is convicted of manslaughter in the slayings of three civil rights workers exactly 41 years before, which helped spur the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He is sentenced to 60 years in prison.

2006: The parties behind Ukraine’s Orange Revolution agree to form a coalition government, ending talks to preserve a pro-Western Administration that has sought to shed Russia’s influence. The US Marine Corps announces that seven marines and a sailor have been charged with murder for pulling an unarmed Iraqi civilian from his home and shooting him to death, without provocation, the previous April. (The group’s leader, Sgt Lawrence G Hutchins III, is sentenced to 15 years in prison after being convicted of unpremeditated murder; five cut deals with prosecutors in which they plead guilty to lesser charges.) President George W Bush, addressing the annual US-European Union summit in Vienna, accuses Iran of dragging its feet on a Western incentive package aimed at getting Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment activity.

2007: International efforts to shut down North Korea’s nuclear programme take a surprise turn when the US sends a top American official to Pyongyang for direct talks, the first high-level visit by a US official there in more than 4 1/2 years.

2008: The Olympic torch winds through the streets of Tibet’s capital Lhasa, the scene of bloody riots in March that helped fuel demonstrations at some of the flame’s international stops. Tight security accompanies the flame on its three-hour journey.

2009: Mexico deploys 1,500 more troops to the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez where homicides related to the drug trade have surged.

2010: A Pakistan-born US citizen pleads guilty to trying to bomb New York’s Times Square and says he is “part of the answer to the US terrorising the Muslim nations and the Muslim people”.

2011: Amid street protests, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou survives a confidence vote.

2015: Four days after it welcomed a young stranger who sat for prayer and then allegedly opened fire, killing nine people, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church holds its first worship service with themes of love and healing, plus a note of defiance. (Suspect Dylann Roof faces murder charges.) Jordan Spieth becomes the sixth player to win the Masters and the US Open after Dustin Johnson three-putted from 12 feet on the final hole at Chambers Bay with a chance to win the championship himself.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Jean-Paul Sartre, French existentialist (1905-1980); Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan (1953- 2007); Jane Russell, US actress (1921-2011); Sonia Eloise Pottinger, Jamaica’s first female record producer (1931-2010); Francoise Quoirez (Francoise Sagan), French author (1933-2004); Monte Markham, actor (1935- ); Don Black, songwriter (1938- ); Mariette Hartley, actress (1940- ); Joe Flaherty, comedian (1941- ); Meredith Baxter, US actress (1947- ); Michael Gross, US actor (1947- ); Robyn Douglass, actress (1953- ); Leigh McCloskey, actor (1955- ); Sammi Davis, actress (1964- ); Doug Savant, actor (1964- ); Michael Dolan, actor (1965- ); Lana Wachowski, writer/director ( 1965- ); Carrie Preston, actress (1967- ); Paula Irvine, actress (1968- ); Pete Rock, rapper/producer (1970-); Allison Moorer, country singer (1972- ); Juliette Lewis, US actress (1973- ); Maggie Siff, actress (1974- ); Brandon Flowers, rock singer (1981- ); Britain’s Prince William (1982- ); Jussie Smollett, actor (1982- ); Benjamin Walker, actor (1982- ); Michael Malarkey, actor (1983- ); Kris Allen, pop singer (1985- ); Jascha Washington, actor (1989- ); Rebecca Black, pop singer (1997- )

— AP and Jamaica Observer