Today is the 327th day of 2022. There are 38 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1998: The European Union lifts a worldwide export ban on British beef. The ban was imposed after experts announced a possible link between mad cow disease and a fatal disease in humans.

OTHER EVENTS

1584: The English Parliament expels Jesuits.

1644: Areopagitica, a pamphlet by John Milton decrying censorship, is published.

1835: Henry Burden patents a horseshoe manufacturing machine in Troy, New York.

1848: The Female Medical Educational Society is established in Boston, Massachusetts, the same year the all-male American Medical Association is formed.

1852: Just past midnight, a sharp jolt likely caused by heavy rains causes Lake Merced, California, to drop 30 feet (9m).

1863: A patent is granted for a process of making colour photographs.

1868: Louis Ducos du Hauron patents the trichrome colour photo process.

1869: The clipper Cutty Sark is launched In Dumbarton, Scotland, one of the last clippers ever built and the only one still surviving.

1876: Columbia, Harvard and Princeton form the Intercollegiate Football Association.

1889: Debut of the first jukebox at Palais Royale Saloon, San Francisco, USA.

1890: King William III of the Netherlands dies without a male heir and a special law is passed to allow his daughter, Princess Wilhelmina, to inherit.

1891: Deodoroda Fonseca, the first president of Brazil, is ousted by a navy revolt.

1892: Pierre de Coubertin launches a plan for the modern Olympic Games at the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques annual general meeting.

1897: American inventor Andrew Jackson Beard invents the “jerry coupler” to connect railroad cars. The portable pencil sharpener is patented by American inventor John Lee Love.

1904: The third Summer (Modern) Olympic Games close in St Louis.

1909: The Wright brothers form a million-dollar corporation to manufacture aeroplanes.

1913: Jim Larkin and James Connolly establish the Irish Citizens Army in order to protect strikers

1921: US President Warren G Harding signs the Willis Campell Act (anti-beer Bill) forbidding doctors prescribing beer or liquor for medicinal purposes.

1935: Lincoln Ellsworth lands on Ellsworth Land, Antarctica, and claims it for the United States, a claim the US Government has never taken up.

1945: Most US wartime rationing of foods, including meat and butter, ends.

1963: The first episode of the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who airs, and the show later becomes a landmark of British popular culture.

1971: China takes its seat as a permanent member of UN Security Council.

1989: At least 300,000 people jam Prague’s Wenceslas Square to demand democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia.

1990: British author Roald Dahl — best known for his irreverent children’s books including James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) — dies in Oxford, England. Iraq ends a curfew in occupied Kuwait but begins calling up army reservists in their thirties.

1993: Doggystyle, the debut album by Snoop Doggy Dogg, is released; it later wins Billboard Album of the Year in 1994.

1999: Kuwait’s Parliament rejects a decree giving women the right to vote and run for office.

2000: The US presidential election stretches into the Thanksgiving Day holiday without a president-elect as the fierce tug of war between George W Bush and Al Gore over Florida’s crucial electoral votes reaches the US Supreme Court.

2005: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is confirmed the winner in Liberia’s first post-war elections; the new president says her victory marks a new beginning for her country and for African women.

2006: In London a rare radioactive substance is used to kill ex-KGB spy-turned-Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who called Russian President Vladimir Putin “barbaric and ruthless” and blamed him personally for the poisoning.

2010: In a seismic shift on one of the most profound — and extremely contentious — Roman Catholic teachings, the Vatican says that condoms are the lesser of two evils when used to curb the spread of AIDS, even if their use prevents a pregnancy.

2011: Yemen’s autocratic leader Ali Abdullah Saleh agrees to step down after months of demonstrations against his 33-year rule, pleasing the US and its Gulf allies.

2012: American actor Larry Hagman, from 1965 sitcom I Dream of Jeannie and as JR in TV soap opera Dallas from 1978-1991, dies this day at age 81 due to complications from throat cancer.

2018: The US federal climate report finds that climate change will reduce the economy by 10 per cent by 2100, with US$141 billion in costs from heat-related deaths and US$118 billion from sea level rise.

2019: The Sumatran rhino is officially declared extinct in Malaysia after the last-known specimen, 25-year-old Iman, dies of cancer in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Thomas Birch, English historian (1705-1766); Billy the Kid (William Henry McCarty, Jr), frontier outlaw (1859-1881); Boris Karloff, British-born actor in 1931’s Frankenstein (1887-1969); Paul Celan, Romanian poet (1920-1970); Vo Van Kiet, former Vietnamese prime minister (1922-2008); Krzysztof Penderecki, Polish composer (1933- ); Marcia Griffiths, Jamaican legendary “Queen of Reggae” (1949- ); Bruce Hornsby, US singer (1954- ); Oded Fehr, Israeli actor (1970- ); Miley Cyrus (Destiny Hope Cyrus), US actress and singer (1992- )

— AP/ Jamaica Observer