Today is the 32nd day of 2022. There are 333 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1960: Protesting a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, four African Americans began a sit-in; its success led to a wider sit-in movement throughout the South.

OTHER EVENTS

1587: Queen Elizabeth I of England signs a death warrant for her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots of Scotland.

1669: French King Louis XIV limits freedom of religion.

1775: Peasants in Bohemia revolt against servitude.

1788: The first US steamboat patent is issued by Georgia to Briggs & Longstreet.

1790: The US Supreme Court convenes for the first time in New York.

1793: A patent is granted to Ralph Hodgson of New York for linen.

1810: The first insurance company managed by African Americans, The African Insurance Company, opens in Philadelphia

1865: J S Rock, the first African American lawyer to practise in US Supreme Court, is admitted to the Bar. US President Lincoln signs the 13th Amendment of US Constitution, abolishing slavery in the US.

1881: The first signs of a nationalist movement appear in Egypt as military officers stage an uprising.

1884: The first of 10 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary are published in London.

1887: Harvey Wilcox subdivides his 120 acres in Southern California and starts selling them off as a real estate development (now Hollywood).

1893: Thomas Edison completes the world’s first movie studio at West Orange, New Jersey.

1898: The first auto insurance policy in the US is issued by Travelers Insurance Company.

1906: The first federal penitentiary building is completed in Leavenworth, Kansas.

1917: Germany decides to let its submarines attack merchant ships from neutral nations going to Britain, a move that triggers the United States’s entry into World War I.

1920: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police forms as the Royal Northwest Mounted Police merge with the Dominion Police.

1923: The private army of Blackshirts which helped Benito Mussolini to power in Italy is officially transformed into the “Voluntary Fascist Militia for National Security” national militia.

1929: Pi Alphha Phi, the first Asian-American interest fraternity in the United States, is founded at UC Berkeley.

1932: Australian cricket’s master batsman Don Bradman scores 299 not out in a 10-wicket, fourth-Test win vs South Africa in Adelaide and runs out of partners going for 300.

1934: Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss dissolves all political parties but his.

1948: South African anti-apartheid novel Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton is published in the US.

1951: The first X-ray moving picture process is demonstrated.

1959: A Swiss referendum rejects female suffrage in federal elections.

1964: Indiana Governor Mathew Walsh tries to ban Louie Louie for obscenity.

1965: Martin Luther King Jr and 700 demonstrators are arrested in Selma, Alabama.

1968: Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Vietcong fighter, Nguyen Van Lem, with a pistol shot to head; the execution is captured by photographer Eddie Adams and becomes an anti-war icon.

1972: The British Embassy in Dublin is bombed as anti-British demonstrations sweep Ireland. The first scientific, hand-held calculator (HP-35) is introduced.

1979: Spacecraft Voyager 1 photographs Jupiter from a distance of 20.3 million miles (32.7 million km).

1996: President Jacques Chirac announces that France has finished its nuclear testing “once and for all”.

2001: US President George W Bush unveils a plan to spend US$1 billion over five years on New Freedom Initiative programmes to help disabled Americans buy homes and stay in the workforce.

2002: Fighters loyal to Afghan warlord Bacha Khan retreat from the city of Gardez after several days of heavy fighting between his forces and the local council which rejects his leadership; nearly 60 people are killed.

2004: US President George W Bush, under mounting political pressure, plans to sign an executive order to establish a full-blown investigation of US intelligence failures that led to the invasion of Iraq.

2008: Two female suicide bombers with a history of psychiatric treatment kill almost 100 people at two pet markets in central Baghdad; Iraqi and US officials have said the women may have been unwitting bombers strapped with remote-control explosives.

2012: At least 74 people are killed and 248 injured after soccer fans rush the field in the seaside city of Port Said following an upset victory by the home team over Egypt’s top club.

2021: The military stage a coup in Myanmar, detaining civilian leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi, and declare a one-year state of emergency.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Clark Gable, US actor (1901-1960); Langston Hughes, American writer and a foremost interpreter to the world of the black experience in the United States (1902-1967); Renata Tebaldi, Italian opera singer (1922-2004); Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, Russian president (1931-2007); Sherman Hemsley, US actor (1938-2012); Dennis Brown, Jamaica’s “Crown Prince of Reggae” (1957-1999 ); Takashi Murakami, Japanese artist and entrepreneur (1962- ); Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s daughter (1968-2023)

– AP/Jamaica Observer