Today is the 300TH day of 2022. There are 65 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1960: George William Gordon House (also called Gordon House), the Jamaican Parliament building, is named in honour of George William Gordon (who was conferred with the Order of National Hero in 1969).

OTHER EVENTS

939: Athelstan, the first king to rule over all of England, dies.

1492: Christopher Columbus sails to Cuba and claims the island for Spain.

1807: Spain and France agree to conquer Portugal.

1871: Britain annexes the diamond fields of Kimberly, South Africa.

1904: The first rapid transit subway opens in New York City.

1922: A Southern Rhodesia referendum rejects joining the Union of South Africa.

1938: US company DuPont announces the invention of nylon.

1966: The UN General Assembly proclaims the termination of South Africa’s mandate over south-west Africa.

1968: Physicist Lise Meitner, whose research (along with that of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann) led to the discovery of nuclear fission, dies in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England.

1975: Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

1977: US President Jimmy Carter rules out any US embargo on trade with South Africa or any ban on US investments to protest its racial policies.

1979: Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, an island country lying within the Lesser Antilles in the eastern Caribbean Sea, achieves its independence.

1987: South Korean voters approve a new constitution, clearing the way for the first direct presidential elections in 16 years.

1989: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announces an end to the ceasefire with US-backed anti-Sandinista rebels.

1990: Roman Catholic bishops conclude a month-long synod in Rome, reaffirming the policy of celibacy for priests; the possibility of easing the church’s opposition to married priests came up as a way to help overcome a shortage of clerics in some dioceses.

1992: Israeli jets bomb southern Lebanon, avenging the deaths of six Israelis, but the Israeli Government resists calls to withdraw from Middle East peace talks.

1995: After eluding a massive manhunt for three days, a North Korean spy is fatally shot when he tries to break through a cordon of South Korean commandos on a mountain near the border between the two countries.

1997: The Dow Jones industrial average tumbles 554.26 points, forcing the stock market to shut down for the first time since the 1981 assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan.

2000: At a concert near Tel Aviv the music of German composer Richard Wagner, which many associate with the Nazi regime, is played for the first time in public in Israel.

2001: Britain announces it will provide up to 600 special forces for operations in Afghanistan, in a sign that allied forces are preparing for a sustained campaign of raids.

2002: Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wins Brazil’s presidential run-off election, becoming the nation’s first leftist and working-class president.

2003: Five coordinated suicide bombing attacks kill at least 35 people in Baghdad, and wound more than 200 others.

2009: Seven former Guantanamo Bay detainees ask the High Court in London to reject a Government request to use secret sessions to hear allegations that Britain was complicit in their torture overseas.

2010: Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden threatens in a new audio tape to kill French citizens so as to avenge their country’s support for the US-led war in Afghanistan and a new law that will ban face-covering Muslim veils.

2014: American singer Taylor Swift releases 1989, a blockbuster hit that later wins the Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

2017: Catalonia’s Parliament votes to declare the region independent from Spain, resulting in the central government dismissing that legislative body and calling for new elections in which the majority of seats were claimed by the pro-independence movement.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

James Cook, British explorer (1728-1779); Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US president (1858-1619); Sylvia Path, American author and poet (1932-1963); John Cleese, British actor (1939- ); John Gotti, American gangster and boss of Gambino crime family (1940-2002); Marla Maples, American actress and model (1963- )

— AP/ Jamaica Observer