Today in History
November 22
1906 The SOS distress signal is adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin.
1915 British and Turks battle indecisively at Tsiphon, Mesopotamia.
1935 The flying boat China Clipper leaves San Francisco on the first trans-Pacific airmail flight.
1943 Lebanon gains independence after two decades of French mandate rule.
1947 Iran Assembly nullifies oil agreements with Soviet Union.
1963 US President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
1967 UN Security Council approves Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to withdraw from territories it captured in 1967 Six Day War.
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.
1975 Juan Carlos I becomes King of Spain.
1986 American Mike Tyson becomes the youngest boxer to win world heavyweight crown after knocks out Trevor Berbick in Las Vegas.
1988 The US Air Force unveils the B-2 stealth bomber to the public.
1989 Lebanese President Rene Muawad and at least 15 other people are killed in a powerful blast in Beirut.
1990 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigns after 11 years in office.
1992 NATO warships begin a blockade of Yugoslav territorial waters and a cease-fire virtually collapses.
1993 Mexican Senate approves North American Free Trade Agreement.
1997 Australian rock singer Michael Hutchence is found dead in a hotel room, Sydney.
1999 Abdul Khader Hachani, a moderate leader of Algeria’s banned Islamic Salvation Front, is fatally shot in Algiers.
2001 Steve Bennett launches “the world’s first private spaceship” from Cumbria.
2003 England wins the Rugby World Cup for the first time.
2005 Angela Merkel becomes first female Chancellor of Germany.
2006 Nepal celebrates the end of a bloody 10-year-old communist insurgency.
2008 The UAE Ministry of Finance announces the merger of Amlak Finance PJSC and Tamweel PJSC, two leading real estate companies in Dubai.
2010 378 died in a stampede in Cambodia’s annual water festival.
2011 Two AC coaches of the Howrah-Dehradun Express catch fire in Jharkhand’s Giridih district and killing seven people.
2012 Sudan arrest former spy chief Sala Gosh and other senior military and security officers for foiled plot.
2014 Large numbers of voters cast their ballots in Bahrainis parliamentary elections.
HIGHLIGHT
2000
Paniagua sworn in as Peru’s interim president
Peru’s Congress leader Valentin Paniagua sworn in as the country’s interim president, replacing disgraced Alberto Fujimori after the legislature sacked him and declared him “morally unfit.” Paniagua, seen as a moderate member of the opposition during Fujimori’s rule, took the oath of interim president before a packed chamber. He has a mandate to lead Peru into early elections in April after a decade of Fujimori’s hardline rule in the Andean nation. He will hand over the presidency to the winner of the general elections on July 28. Paniagua is a 64-year-old constitutional lawyer expected to draw consensus support in this polarised country ahead of the elections - called four years early after Fujimori decided to quit office in the face of an escalating corruption scandal. Congress rejected Fujimori’s resignation - sent from Tokyo where the former strongman was sheltering from the political storm - and instead fired him in disgrace, marking the first time in Peru’s history a president had been declared morally unfit for office.
