This is the 326th day of 2022. There are 39 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1963: US President John F Kennedy is assassinated as he rides in an open-topped motorcade in Dallas, Texas; vice-president Lyndon B Johnson becomes the 36th president.

OTHER EVENTS

1497: Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope during the first voyage from Europe to reach India.

1718: English pirate Edward Teach — better known as Blackbeard — is killed during a battle off the Virginia coast.

1906: The “SOS” distress signal is adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin.

1910: Arthur Knight patents steel shaft golf clubs.

1926: The Imperial Conference ends, giving autonomy inside the British Commonwealth.

1935: The flying boat, The China Clipper, leaves San Francisco on the first trans-Pacific airmail flight.

1955: RCA Records make its best investment, paying US$35,000 to Sun Records for Elvis Presley’s contract.

1962: The Soviet Union announces the end-of-combat-readiness alert of its armed forces imposed at the start of the Cuban missile crisis.

1964: Actress Rosemary Clooney weds actor José Ferrer for the second time in Los Angeles, California.

1967: The BBC unofficially bans I Am the Walrus by The Beatles due to the suggestive lyric, “Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down.”

1972: US President Richard Nixon lifts a 22-year-old ban on American travel to China.

1974: The UN General Assembly gives the Palestine Liberation Organization observer status.

1977: The British and French supersonic airliner Concorde begins service out of New York’s Kennedy International Airport after a lengthy dispute over noise levels.

1980: American actress Mae West dies today at the age of 87.

1986: With a second-round knockout of Trevor Berbick, 20-year-old Mike Tyson becomes the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history.

1989: Lebanese President Rene Mouawad is assassinated.

1990: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, after being defeated by John Major in a ballot for Conservative Party leader, resigns after 11 1/2 years in office.

1991: Ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide meets with a group of legislators to negotiate an end to Haiti’s constitutional crisis; it is the first meeting between the two sides since Aristide’s overthrow in a military-led coup.

1993: The Mexican Senate approves the North American Free Trade Agreement.

1994: Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi is placed under investigation in a bribery probe. Mount Merapi, on the island of Java, erupts, killing 64 people.

1995: Toy Story, the first entirely computer-animated feature-length film, is released and becomes a critical and commercial hit.

2001: The Turkish Parliament approves revisions to the country’s 75-year-old civil code to recognise men and women as equal before the law.

2002: Officials cancel the Miss World pageant in Nigeria and move it instead to London after news that the African nation will host the event sparks deadly riots.

2004: Opposition supporters gather to protest alleged fraud in Ukraine’s presidential run-off, which European monitors say was marred by official interference and suspiciously high turnout figures.

2007: A transport strike that has crippled France for nine days, in open defiance of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reform agenda, collapses as rail workers around the country vote “yes” to return to work.

2008: China denounces a US congressional panel that issued a report accusing it of stepping up computer espionage attacks on the American Government, its defence contractors, and businesses.

2009: Iran begins large-scale air defence war games aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from attack, as an air force commander boasts the country can deter any military strike by Israel.

2010: Thousands of people stampede during a festival in the Cambodian capital, leaving more than 330 dead and hundreds injured in what the prime minister calls the country’s biggest tragedy since the 1970s reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge.

2011: South Korea’s ruling party forces a long-stalled free trade deal with the United States through parliament, enraging Opposition lawmakers who blast their political rivals with tear gas. Singer-songwriter and actress Ashlee Simpson divorces rock band Fall Out Boy’s bassist Pete Wentz due to irreconcilable differences after two and a half years of marriage.

2012: The top leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood denounces peace efforts with Israel and urges a holy war to liberate Palestinian territories — one day after the country’s president, who hails from the movement, mediated a ceasefire between Israelis and Palestinians to end eight days of fierce fighting.

2017: Vanellope Wilkins, born with her heart outside her body, becomes the first UK baby to survive birth and operations to reinsert her heart.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

George Eliot, Victorian English novelist (1819-1880); Charles de Gaulle, French general-statesman (1890-1970); Benjamin Britten, English composer (1913-1976); Rodney Dangerfield, American comedian and actor (1921-2004); Lew Hoad, Australian tennis champion (1934-1994); Billie Jean King, American tennis legend (1943- ); Jamie Lee Curtis, American actress (1958- ); Mariel Hemingway, American actress (1961-); Boris Becker, German tennis professional and Wimbledon champion (1967- ); Scarlett Johansson, American actress (1984- ); Oscar Pistorius (aka the Blade Runner), South African athlete (1986- )

– AP