On this date in history:

(2005) Mahmoud Abbas, who was a founder of Fatah in the 1950s and served briefly as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2003 under Yāsir ʿArafāt, was elected president of the PA on this day in 2005. (2001) Apple introduced iTunes, a digital media player application that, with the year’s later debut of the iPod, revolutionized digital music. (1982) Catherine Middleton, who married (2011) Prince William and became the duchess of Cambridge, was born in Reading, Berkshire, England. (1960) Construction began on the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, and upon completion in 1970 it generated enormous amounts of electric power and allowed for the control of the annual Nile flood. (1941) American folksinger and political activist Joan Baez, who was at the forefront of the 1960s folk music revival, was born in Staten Island, New York. (1908) Simone de Beauvoir, French writer and feminist who gave a literary transcription to the themes of existentialism, was born in Paris. (1861) Mississippi became the second U.S. state (after South Carolina) to secede from the Union in the run-up to the American Civil War. (1839) Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre of France proclaimed his invention of the daguerreotype, the first commercially successful form of photography.