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.
1916 Jack London, pioneering American novelist, short story writer and social activist dies.
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.
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
1991
Frenchman conquers Pacific in his kayak
Frenchman Gerard d’Aboville ended his epic four-month row across the Pacific saying desalination units had kept him supplied with drinking water. D’Aboville, 46, stepped, ashore on America’s West Coast after rowing his kayak alone across 8,800km of the North Pacific from Choshi, Japan. “I did not really relax until I arrived,” he told a news conference after a medical checkup that found him in good health and about 14 kilogrammes lighter than when he left Japan on July 11. He said his drinking water came from desalination units aboard his boat which were powered by the motion of his rowing seat. D’Aboville’s journey made him the first person to row across the North Pacific alone. The Frenchman said he constantly feared for his life and was never comfortable, at one point the vessel was tossed into the air and plummeted eight metres. D’Aboville appealed teary-eyed as he rowed up to a dock in the Washington state fishing port of Ilwaco and greeted his wife and children for the first time since he left Japan.
