Today is the 341st day of 2022. There are 24 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1909: Chemist Leo H Baekeland receives a US patent for Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic.

OTHER EVENTS

1787: Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the US Constitution.

1941: During a series of raids in the Pacific, Imperial Japan’s navy launches a pre-emptive attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing 2,400 people, about half of them on the battleship USS Arizona. (The United States declares war against Japan the next day.)

1944: The United States formally announces all six Japanese aircraft carriers involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor were sunk.

1946: Fire breaks out at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, killing 119 people including hotel founder W Frank Winecoff.

1962: Forty-two Soviet IL-28 jets, believed to be the entire bomber fleet sent to Cuba, are observed on the decks of Russian ships leaving that island’s ports.

1965: Pope Paul VI and ecumenical patriarch Athenagoras I of Istanbul abolish the mutual excommunication of the 1054 who split Christianity into Catholic and Orthodox.

1975: Indonesia invades East Timor and annexes the region as its 27th province.

1982: Convicted murderer Charlie Brooks becomes the first US prisoner executed by injection, at a prison in Huntsville, Texas.

1988: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, at the United Nations, announces the unilateral reduction of his country’s troops, tanks, combat aircraft and artillery. A massive earthquake in Soviet Armenia claims at least 25,000 lives.

1989: The Republic of Lithuania abolishes the constitutional guarantee of communist supremacy and legalises the multiparty system.

1990: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks among 107 nations are suspended after the failure to end an impasse between the United States and the European Community over reductions in farm subsidies..

1993: Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Africa’s longest-serving ruler, dies.

1994: Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat pledges to protect Israelis from militant Islamic terrorists and insists all Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza respect his authority as “the law”.

1996: After nearly 18 days aloft, the Columbia space shuttle and its astronauts return to Earth, ending the longest space shuttle flight ever.

2001: A consortium of philanthropic foundations announces an initiative to provide treatment for an estimated 2.5 million pregnant women infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

2002: Iraq turns over to the United Nations weapons inspectors a document detailing its weapons of mass destruction programmes and industries with military applications, as required by a November UN Security Council resolution.

2006: The Liberian Government issues guns to a unit of its police force — the first officers to carry arms since the end of the West African country’s 14-year civil war.

2007: Swarms of desert locusts invade Kenya’s arid north-east for the first time since 1962; the ravenous pests, which can devastate crops, contributed to a major food crisis in West Africa three years prior.

2009: Tens of thousands of students, many shouting “Death to the Dictator!” and burning pictures of Iran’s supreme leader, take to the streets on more than a dozen campuses in the biggest anti-Government protests in months.

2010: US President Barack Obama abandons attempts to persuade Israel to slow West Bank settlement activity — a major blow to the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

2012: US President Barack Obama asks Congress for US$60.4 billion in federal aid for New York, New Jersey and other states hit by Superstorm Sandy (lawmakers pass a US$50.5-billion emergency relief measure in addition to a US$9.7-billion Bill to replenish the National Flood Insurance Program).

2016: Time magazine names US President Donald Trump its Person of the Year.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1587); Seigo Takamori, Japanese Restoration hero (1827-1877); Mario Soares, first elected president of Portugal in 60 years (1924-2017); Noam Chomsky, American linguist and political activist (1928- ); Ellen Burstyn, US actress (1932- )

– AP/ Jamaica Observer