Today is the 10th day of 2022. There are 355 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1994: The trial of Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband’s penis, begins.

OTHER EVENTS

49 BC: Julius Caesar defies the Roman Senate and crosses the Rubicon, uttering “alea iacta est” (the die is cast), signalling the start of a civil war which would lead to his appointment as Roman dictator for life.

1776: Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense, a 50-page pamphlet that sells more than 500,000 copies within a few months and calls for a war of independence that would become the American Revolution.

1839: The first tea from the leaves of the indigenous plants of Assam, India, arrive in the United Kingdom

1861: Florida becomes the third state to break from the Union as it passes an Ordinance of Secession at the State Capitol in Tallahassee by a vote of 62-7.

1863: London’s Metropolitan, the world’s first underground passenger railway, opens to the public.

1878: The US Senate proposes female suffrage.

1889: France establishes a protectorate over the Ivory Coast.

1901: The Texas oil boom starts, ushering in an era of American prosperity as it introduces the world to a new energy source.

1917: Suffragettes the “Silent Sentinels” first protest outside The White House in Washington, led by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party.

1920: The League of Nations is established as the Treaty of Versailles goes into effect.

1928: Leon Trotsky, one of the chief architects of the Soviet Union, is ordered into exile by the Soviet Government.

1932: The Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony comics are syndicated.

1942: Actress Ava Gardner weds actor Mickey Rooney in Ballard, California. The Japanese invade the Dutch East Indies during World War II.

1946: The first General Assembly of the United Nations convenes in London.

1955: The Federal Council of Nigeria meets for the first time.

1956: Elvis records Heartbreak Hotel.

1957: Harold Macmillan becomes prime minister of Great Britain following the resignation of Anthony Eden.

1958: Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire reaches number one on the UK pop charts.

1961: The University of Georgia, under court order, admits its first two black students, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter (now reporter Charlayne Hunter-Gault). Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, dies in New York at age 66.

1962: Some 4,000 die in an avalanche in Ranrahirca, Peru.

1964: The Beatles’ first album in the United States, Introducing the Beatles, is released.

1966: India and Pakistan sign a peace accord.

1967: Republican Edward W Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black person elected to the US Senate by popular vote, takes his seat. Dutch Princess Margret marries Pieter van Vollenhoven.

1969: Sweden becomes the first Western European country to announce it will establish full diplomatic relations with North Vietnam.

1971: Masterpiece Theatre premieres on PBS, with host Alistair Cooke introducing the drama series The First Churchills. French fashion designer Coco Chanel dies in Paris at age 87.

1978: The Soviet Union launches two cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz 27 capsule for a rendezvous with the Salyut VI space laboratory.

1984: The United States and the Vatican establish full diplomatic relations.

1990: the national collegiate athletic association approves random drug testing for college football players. China ends seven months of martial law in Beijing.

1991: Japan ends routine fingerprinting of all adult ethnic Koreans.

1992: Pilots threaten to defect with their planes and sailors warn of mutiny if the two biggest Commonwealth states, Ukraine and Russia, split up the former Soviet military.

1993: At least 15 people are killed in Bombay in the fifth day of renewed rioting between Hindus and Muslims over Hindu militants’ destruction of a mosque in December.

1994: The US, Russia and Ukraine reach an agreement on the destruction of Ukraine’s entire nuclear arsenal.

1996: Chechen rebels flee with about 100 captives from a hospital in Dagestan, Russia; Russian troops kill the rebels and some of the hostages.

1997: In Sofia, Bulgaria, tens of thousands of demonstrators demanding the end of Socialist rule storm into Parliament, smashing windows and furniture and setting fire to one room.

1998: The German Government reaches an agreement to pay US$110 million to Holocaust survivors in eastern Europe.

1999: The Sopranos, starring James Gandolfini as mobster Tony Soprano, debuts on HBO.

2000: America Online agrees to buy Time-Warner for US$162 billion; Time-Warner decided to spin off AOL in 2009.