This Day in History — October 26
Today is the 299thday of 2022. There are 66 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1960: Gordon House becomes the offical meeting place of the Jamaican Government, replacing Headquarters House.
OTHER EVENTS
1863: An international conference begins in Geneva aimed at improving medical conditions on battlefields — the beginning of the Red Cross. The Football Association forms in England, standardising soccer and splitting with rugby.
1881: A gunfight at the OK Corral unfolds as the most famous shoot-out in the Wild West and involves lawmen (including Wyatt Earp) and cowboys, with Tom and Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton killed.
1952: Hattie McDaniel, the first African American actress to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in Gone With The Wind, dies this day of breast cancer at age 57. McDaniel was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975.
1963: Actress Elizabeth Montgomery, at age 30, weds 42-year-old director-producer William Asher in El Paso, Texas.
1970: Following an absence of more than three years, American boxer Muhammad Ali returns to the ring, defeating Jerry Quarry; Ali had been barred from fighting after he refused to be inducted into the US Army during the Vietnam War.
1975: Anwar Sadat becomes the first Egyptian president to pay an official visit to the United States.
1977: The last natural case of smallpox is discovered in Merca district, Somalia; reagrded as the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, this is considered the most spectacular vaccination success.
1979: South Korean President Park Chung Hee is assassinated by his lifelong friend Kim Jae Kyu, head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who was sentenced to death for his actions.
1984: The Terminator, directed by James Cameron and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, is released in the US.
1987: US President Ronald Reagan announces an embargo on all US imports from Iran because of its “unprovoked attacks” on American military forces and merchant ships.
1990: President Alberto Fujimori announces a plan to employ free market incentives as a way to turn Peruvian farmers away from their economic dependence on growing coca, the plant used to make cocaine.
1992: An elaborate pageant for Queen Elizabeth II, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of her accession to the British throne, is held in London.
1999: Britain’s House of Lords votes to end the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in Britain’s upper chamber of Parliament.
2000: Supporters of Ivory Coast’s president-elect and his political rival engage in bloody clashes in Abidjan over a demand for new presidential elections.
2001: US President George W Bush signs a sweeping anti-terrorism Bill into law, giving police and intelligence agencies vast new powers.
2002: Elite Russian counter-terrorism forces storm a theatre in Moscow, bringing an end to a hostage crisis that had begun with the theatre’s seizure by more than 50 Chechen guerrillas. At least 119 of the 750 hostages die.
2005: The Chicago White Sox defeat the Houston Astros to win the team’s first World Series title since 1917.
2014: Ukrainians overwhelmingly vote in several pro-Western parties in a landmark parliamentary election, another nudge in the former Soviet nation’s drift away from Russia.
2019: A raid by US Special Forces kills ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria. Robert Evans, American film producer (Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather) dies this day at age 89.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Domenico Scarlatti, Italian composer (1685-1757); Georges Jacques Danton, French revolutionary leader (1759-1794); William Charles Wentworth, Australian explorer (1790-1872); François Mitterrand, president of France and that country’s first socialist to hold the office (1916-1996); Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, deposed Shah of Iran (1919-1980); Bob Hoskins, British actor (1942-2014); Hillary Rodham Clinton, former US secretary of state and former US first lady (1947- ); Jaclyn Smith, US actress (1945- ); Natalie Merchant, US singer (1963- ); Keith Urban, Australian country singer (1967- )
– AP/ Jamaica Observer
