This Day in History – November 22
Today is the 326th day of 2013. There are 39 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1963: US President John F Kennedy is assassinated as he rides in motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Vice-President Lyndon B Johnson becomes the 36th president.
OTHER EVENTS
1718: English pirate Edward Teach — better known as “Blackbeard” — is killed during a battle off the Virginia coast.
1906: The “SOS” distress signal is adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin.
1935: The flying boat, The China Clipper, leaves San Francisco on the first trans-Pacific airmail flight.
1943: Lebanon is granted independence after two decades of French mandate rule; Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin D Roosevelt, and China’s Chiang Kai-shek agree in Cairo, Egypt, on measures to defeat Japan in World War II.
1962: Soviet Union announces end of combat-readiness alert of its armed forces imposed at start of Cuban missile crisis.
1972: US President Richard Nixon lifts 22-year-old ban on American travel to China.
1974: UN General Assembly gives the Palestine Liberation Organisation observer status.
1977: The British and French supersonic airliner Concorde begins service out of New York’s Kennedy International Airport after lengthy dispute over noise levels.
1989: Lebanese President Rene Mouawad is assassinated.
1990: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, after being defeated by John Major in a ballot for Conservative Party leader, resigns after 11 1/2 years in office.
1991: Ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide meets with a group of legislators to negotiate an end to Haiti’s constitutional crisis. It is the first meeting between the two sides since Aristide’s overthrow in a military-led coup.
1993: Mexican Senate approves North American Free Trade Agreement.
1994: Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi is placed under investigation in a bribery probe.
2001: The Turkish Parliament approves revisions to the country’s 75-year-old civil code to recognise men and women as equal before the law.
2002: Officials cancel the Miss World pageant in Nigeria and move it instead to London after news that the African nation will host the event sparks deadly riots.
2004: Opposition supporters gather to protest alleged fraud in Ukraine’s presidential run-off, which European monitors say was marred by official interference and suspiciously high turnout figures.
2005: Conservative Angela Merkel takes power as Germany’s first female chancellor and the country’s first leader to grow up under communism in the Soviet-occupied East.