This Day in History — October 19
This is the 292nd day of 2022. There are 73 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2007: A global manhunt that began three years before, when police found hundreds of photos on the Internet of a man having sex with a dozen young Asian boys, ends with the arrest in Thailand of Canadian schoolteacher Christopher Paul Neil.
OTHER EVENTS
1216: King John of England dies at Newark-on-Trent and is succeeded by his nine-year-old son Henry III.
1330: Seventeen-year-old English King Edward III captures his mother’s lover and the country’s de facto ruler, Roger Mortimer, at Nottingham Castle and later has him hanged.
1492: Christopher Columbus sights “Isabela”, now Fortune Island/Long Cay, The Bahamas.
1512: Martin Luther becomes a doctor of theology (Doctor in Biblia).
1789: John Jay, a Founding Father of the United States, is sworn in as the first chief justice of the US Supreme Court.
1853: The first flour mill in Hawaii begins operations.
1901: Santos-Dumont proves an airship is manoeuvrable by circling the Eiffel Tower.
1914: During World War I the First Battle of Ypres begins in western Flanders; the Allies and Germans settle into the trench warfare that would characterise the remainder of the war on the Western Front.
1919: The first US Distinguished Service Medal is awarded to a living female recipient, Anna Howard Shaw.
1925: The Italian army takes Somalia.
1926: John C Garand patents the semi-automatic rifle.
1943: Streptomycin, the first antibiotic remedy for tuberculosis, is isolated by researchers at Rutgers University in Pistcaway, New Jersey.
1944: The US Navy announces black women will be allowed into the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES).
1954: An Anglo-Egyptian treaty providing for the withdrawal of British armed forces from the Suez Canal Zone during the ensuing 20 months is signed in Cairo, with Egypt taking complete control of the Suez in seven years.
1960: The US imposes an embargo on exports to Cuba covering all commodities except medical supplies and certain food products.
1977: The supersonic Concorde aeroplane makes its first landing in New York after 19 months of delays caused by residents concerned about the aircraft’s noise.
1983: The commander of Grenada’s armed force announces that Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, who was under house arrest, was killed by soldiers after he tried to seize army headquarters.
1984: Mike McCallum becomes the first Jamaican to win a world boxing title (at Madison Square Garden, New York). A young, Polish, pro-Solidarity priest, the Reverend Jerzy Popieluszko, is abducted and murdered by communist secret police.
1987: The stock market crashes as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 508 points, or 22.6 per cent in value — its biggest-ever percentage drop in decades.
1991: A clandestine assembly of ethnic Albanian legislators proclaim Kosovo to be an independent republic. (The republic of Serbia annexed Kosovo in 1990.)
1992: African National Congress (ANC) President Nelson Mandela acknowledges that prisoners in ANC military camps had been tortured during the 1980s and early 1990s. The camps, located in other African countries, had been training sites during the ANC’s guerrilla war against the South African Government.
1994: A bomb on a crowded city bus kills 20 people in Tel Aviv, Israel.
1995: A powerful bomb explodes at Sri Lanka’s main oil storage tank in a Colombo suburb, causing mass evacuations as fires rage out of control.
1996: Chechen separatists install their military commander, Aslan Maskhadov, as prime minister of a makeshift coalition Government.
2000: A suspected Tamil Tiger suicide bomber blows himself up in Colombo, Sri Lanka; the explosion occurs minutes before President Chandrika Kumaratunga swears in a new Cabinet to cement her shaky coalition and end a week-long political crisis.
2001: US special forces begin operations on the ground in Afghanistan, opening a significant new phase of the assault against the Taliban and terrorists.
2004: Myanmar’s secretive military regime forces out its prime minister, the long-powerful General Khin Nyunt, and places him under house arrest on corruption charges.
2005: Chile’s Supreme Court strips former dictator, General Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution for corruption charges related to his multimillion-dollar bank accounts overseas.
2006: Suicide bombings in the south and east of Afghanistan kill a British soldier, two children and a policeman, as President Hamid Karzai calls on NATO forces to use caution during military operations a day after 20 civilians are killed.
2008: One of only two portraits of painter Francis Bacon by his friend and fellow British artist Lucian Freud is sold at auction for more than 5.4 million pounds (US$9.4 million).
2011: Hundreds of youth smash and loot stores in central Athens and clash with riot police during a massive anti-Government rally against painful new austerity measures that won initial parliamentary approval.
2012: A car bomb rips through Beirut, killing a top security official and seven others, shearing balconies off apartment buildings, and sending bloodied residents into the streets in the most serious blast the Lebanese capital has seen in four years.
2015: US scientists from the University of California find evidence life on earth may have begun 4.1 billion years before, 300 million earlier than previously thought.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Auguste Lumiere, Frenchman credited with making the first movie (1862-1948); John Le Carre, British writer (1931-2020); Peter Tosh (Winston Hubert McIntosh), Jamaican singer-songwriter and founding member of the Wailers (1944-1987); Jennifer Holliday, US singer (1960- ); Evander Holyfield, US heavyweight boxing champion (1962- ); John Lithgow, US actor (1945- )
— AP/ Jamaica Observer
