This Day in History – October 28
This is the 301st day of 2022. There are 64 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2006: Jamaican leading heavyweight boxer of the 1980s Trevor Berbick — the only man in professional boxing history to have fought all three of the greatest fighters of all-time, Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson — having eventually become a preacher, is killed in a Jamaican church by his nephew, at the age of 52, over a land dispute.
OTHER EVENTS
1533: Prince Henry of France (later Henry II), at the age of 14, marries Florentine noblewoman Catherine de’ Medici, also 14, in Marseille.
1538 The first university in the New World, the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino, is established on Hispaniola.
1636: Harvard University, the oldest institute of higher learning in the United States, is founded by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1726: Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift anonymously publishes Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (later called Gulliver’s Travels), a keystone of English literature that helps give birth to the novel form.
1746: The Peruvian cities of Lima and Callao are demolished by earthquake and 18,000 perish.
1886: The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France, is dedicated in New York Harbour by US President Grover Cleveland.
1893: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducts the first performance of his Symphony Number Six in B minor, Pathetique, in St Petersburg, Russia, nine days before his death.
1904: St Louis police try a new investigation method — fingerprints.
1919: Congress enacts the Volstead Act which provides for enforcement of Prohibition — the ban on alcoholic beverages — over US President Woodrow Wilson’s vetoes.
1922: Fascism comes to Italy as Benito Mussolini takes control of the Government.
1962: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev capitulates to US demands to halt delivery of nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba, bringing to an end the Cuban missile crisis.
1965: Pope Paul VI issues a decree absolving Jews of collective guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
1998: Hurricane Mitch pauses over Honduras with 205 kph (120 mph) winds, sweeping away bridges, flooding neighbourhoods and killing hundreds of people.
2001: US President George W Bush announces the creation of a Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force to find and deport foreigners who are in the United States illegally.
2007: First Lady Cristina Fernandez claims victory in Argentina’s presidential election to become the first woman elected to the post.
2011: The Commonwealth countries agree to change the centuries-old rules of succession that put sons on the British throne ahead of any older sisters.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Francis Bacon, British painter (1909-1992); Dr Jonas Salk, US doctor and developer of first polio vaccine (1914-1995); Bob Andy (birth name Keith Anderson), Jamaican reggae singer-songwriter (1944-2020); Bill Gates, US chairman of Microsoft (1955- ); Julia Roberts, US actress (1967-)
– AP/ Jamaica Observer
