This day in history
Today is Sunday, Oct. 23, the 296th day of 2022. There are 69 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Movie director Philip Kaufman is 86. Soccer great Pele is 82. Former ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross is 74. Movie director Ang Lee is 68. Movie director Sam Raimi is 63. Parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic is 63. CNN medical reporter Dr. Sanjay Gupta is 53. Actor Ryan Reynolds is 46. TV personality Meghan McCain is 38. R&B singer Miguel is 37. Actor Emilia Clarke is 36.
▶In 1707, the first Parliament of Great Britain, created by the Acts of Union between England and Scotland, held its first meeting.
▶In 1910, Blanche S. Scott became the first woman to make a public solo airplane flight, reaching an altitude of 12 feet at a park in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
▶In 1915, tens of thousands of women paraded up Fifth Avenue in New York City, demanding the right to vote.
▶In 1942, during World War II, Britain launched a major offensive against Axis forces at El Alamein in Egypt, resulting in an Allied victory.
▶In 1944, the World War II Battle of Leyte Gulf began, resulting in a major Allied victory against Japanese forces.
▶In 1956, a student-sparked revolt against Hungary’s Communist rule began; as the revolution spread, Soviet forces started entering the country, and the uprising was put down within weeks.
▶In 1973, President Richard Nixon agreed to turn over White House tape recordings subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor to Judge John J. Sirica.
▶In 1983, 241 US service members, most of them Marines, were killed in a suicide truck-bombing at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon; a near-simultaneous attack on French forces killed 58 paratroopers.
▶In 1987, the US Senate rejected, 58-42, the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork.
▶In 2009, President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment.
▶In 2012, during a debate with Democratic rival Joe Donnelly, Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that when a woman becomes pregnant during rape, “it is something that God intended to happen.” (Other Republican candidates moved to distance themselves from Mourdock, who went on to lose the November election to Donnelly.)
▶In 2014, officials announced that an emergency room doctor who’d recently returned to New York City after treating Ebola patients in West Africa tested positive for the virus, becoming the first case in the city and the fourth in the nation. (Dr. Craig Spencer later recovered.)
▶Last year, a driver lost control during a Texas drag racing event on an airport runway and slammed into a crowd of spectators, killing two children and injuring eight other people.