Today is the 265th day of 2022. There are 100 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1989: F W De Klerk takes over as president of South Africa.

OTHER EVENTS

1499: The Turks ravage Vicenza in Italy.

1550: The Holy Roman Empire fleet captures the Port-of-Africa vessel at Mehedia in Tunis, naval headquarters of Turkish corsair Dragut.

1609: The king of Spain orders the deportation of the baptised former Muslims known as Moriscos.

1692: The last eight people are hanged for witchcraft in the US, 19 hanged overall, with six other deaths during the Salem Witch Trials.

1711: Rio de Janeiro is captured by the French.

1792: The French Republic is proclaimed and the revolutionary calendar goes into effect.

1862: US President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in the Confederate States free as of January 1, 1863.

1914: A German submarine sinks three British cruisers in one hour off the Dutch coast; the German cruiser Emden shells Madras in India.

1920: A Chicago grand jury convenes to investigate charges that eight White Sox players conspired to fix the 1919 World Series.

1927: Slavery is abolished in Sierra Leone in Africa.

1940: The Vichy French governor general concludes an agreement that makes Indochina the largest Japanese military staging ground in Southeast Asia. Adventures of Superman actor George Reeves weds Ellanora Needles at the Church of Our Savior in San Gabriel, California.

1949: The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.

1955: Hurricane Janet, the most violent Caribbean hurricane of the season at the time, causes almost 600 deaths around the islands. On BBC Radio Grace Archer is killed in a barn fire on Brookfield Farm — the BBC denies this was to spoil the launch of rival network ITV.

1957: The Western Maverick premieres on ABC television, starring James Garner.

1960: A United States Marine Corps DC-6 plane, en route from Japan to the Philippines, crashes in the ocean 290 kilometres (180 miles) south of Okinawa. All 29 people on-board are killed.

1965: A ceasefire is declared in the war between India and Pakistan, but both sides subsequently violate it.

1970: Arab chiefs of state send envoys to meet with King Hussein and Yasser Arafat to persuade them to find a way to contain the fighting between the Jordanian army and Palestinian guerrillas.

1974: The official death toll from the hurricane that swept Honduras is put at 5,000.

1975: Sara Jane Moore fails in an attempt to shoot US President Gerald Ford outside a San Francisco hotel.

1980: Iraqi tanks enter Iran, marking the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War as a full-scale conflict.

1986: Two hijackers seize a Soviet airliner at Ural Mountains airport and kill two passengers before security agents recapture the plane and shoot the hijackers.

1988: The Government of Canada apologises for the World War II internment of Japanese-Canadians and promises compensation.

1989: F W De Klerk takes over as president of South Africa.

1990: Jordan’s King Hussein appeals to the United States in a televised message to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia to avert “death, destruction and misery”.

1992: Azerbaijani armed forces mount an offensive against the disputed enclave Nagorno-Karabakh.

1993: Abkhazian rebels in Georgia shoot down a second passenger plane in two days, killing 80.

1994: A NATO aircraft strike is directed at Serbian targets near Sarajevo after UN troops patrolling the city came under machine gun and rocket fire. The Friends TV sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman debuts on NBC, starring Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer

1995: America’s Time Warner Inc and Turner Broadcasting System Inc (TBS) announce a merger with Time Warner, purchasing TBS in a deal valued at US$7.5 billion, creating the world’s largest media company.

1997: US President Bill Clinton, speaking at the United Nations, announces he will submit to the Senate a treaty banning all nuclear explosions.

2001: Pope John Paul II visits Kazakhstan and Armenia, and cautions against allowing September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States to create divisions between Muslims and Christians.

2004: The US military drops an espionage charge against a Muslim interpreter accused of spying at the camp for terror detainees at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It is the third Guantanamo spy case of the year to fall apart.

2006: Pope Benedict XVI invites Muslim envoys to meet with him at his summer residence for what the Holy See says is urgently needed dialogue following a crisis ignited by his remarks on Islam and violence.

2007: Monks leading swelling demonstrations against Myanmar’s military regime march past barricades to the home of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, increasing pressure on the junta.

2008: The first excavation of Stonehenge in more than 40 years uncovers evidence that the stone circle drew ailing pilgrims from around Europe for what they believed to be its healing properties, archaeologists say.

2009: Al-Qaeda releases a new, 106-minute-long video predicting President Barack Obama’s downfall at the hands of the Muslim world to mark the 8th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US.

2010: Declassified US documents show former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, a prominent member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, told the FBI that the dictator “delighted” in the 1998 terrorist bombings of two US embassies in East Africa but had no interest in partnering with Osama bin Laden.

2011: American diplomats lead a walkout at the UN General Assembly as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fiercely attacks the United States and major west European nations as “arrogant powers” ruled by greed and eager for military adventurism.

2012: The leaders of the rebel Free Syrian Army say they moved their command centre from Turkey to Syria with the aim of uniting rebels and speeding up the fall of President Bashar Assad’s regime.

2013: A pair of suicide bombers blow themselves up amid hundreds of worshippers at a historic church in north-western Pakistan, killing 78 people in the deadliest-ever attack against the country’s Christian minority.

2014: Fierce fighting between the Islamic State militant group and Kurdish forces just over the border in Syria brings the battle closer to Turkey, triggering a surge of tens of thousands of refugees and raising pressure on the Government to step up efforts to take on the Sunni extremists.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Michael Faraday, British physicist (1791-1862); Caroline Astor, US aristocrat of New York high society (1830-1908); Erich von Stroheim, German director and actor (1885-1957); Louis Botha, South African soldier statesman (1862-1919); John Houseman, US stage/radio actor (1902-1988); Fay Weldon, British writer (1931- ); Melvin Van Peebles, American actor, writer, film-maker and composer (1932-2021); Andrea Bocelli, Italian opera singer (1958- ); Joan Jett, US rock singer (1960- )

— AP