HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, May 14, the 134th day of 2022. There are 231 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlights in History:

1643: Louis XIV became King of France at age 4 upon the death of his father, Louis XIII.

1796: English physician Edward Jenner inoculated 8-year-old James Phipps against smallpox by using cowpox matter. 1804: The Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Louisiana Territory as well as the Pacific Northwest left camp near present-day Hartford, Illinois.

1879: The first group of 463 Indian indentured labourers arrive in Fiji aboard the Leonidas.

1940: The Netherlands surrendered to invading German forces during World War I.

1955: Representatives from eight

Communist bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, signed the Warsaw Pact in Poland. (The Pact was dissolved in 1991.) 1973: Skylab launched, the first space station.

1986: Netherlands Institute for War Documentation publishes Anne Frank’s complete diary.

1988: Twenty-seven people, mostly teens, were killed when their church bus collided with a pickup truck going the wrong direction on a highway near Carrollton, Kentucky. (Truck driver Larry Mahoney served 9 years in prison for manslaughter.)

1998: Singer-actor Frank Sinatra died at a Los Angeles hospital at age 82.

2001: The Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that there is no exception in federal law for people to use marijuana for medical purposes. 2003: More than 100 immigrants were abandoned in a locked trailer at a Texas truck stop; 19 of them died. (Truck driver Tyrone Williams was later sentenced to nearly 34 years in prison for his role in the deaths.)

2008: The Interior Department declared the polar bear a threatened species because of the loss of Arctic sea ice.

2020: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned doctors about a serious rare inflammatory condition in children linked with the coronavirus.

Ten years ago: President Barack Obama sought to tarnish Republican Mitt Romney as a corporate titan who got rich by cutting rather than creating jobs; Romney’s campaign responded that the former Massachusetts governor alone helped spur more public and private jobs than Obama had.