This day in history

Today is Wednesday, Nov. 22, the 326th day of 2023. There are 39 days left in the year.

Birthdays: Animator and movie director Terry Gilliam is 83. Astronaut Guion Bluford is 81. Tennis Hall of Famer Billie Jean King is 80. Rock musicianactor Steve Van Zandt (a.k.a. Little Steven) is 73. Actor Jamie Lee Curtis is 65. Actor Mariel Hemingway is 62. Actor-turned-producer Brian Robbins is 60. Actor Mark Ruffalo is 56. Tennis Hall of Famer Boris Becker is 56. Actor Sidse Babett Knudsen is 55. Actor Scarlett Johansson is 39. Actor Jamie Campbell Bower is 35. Actor Dacre Montgomery is 29.

► In 1718, English pirate Edward Teach — better known as “Blackbeard” — was killed during a battle off what is now North Carolina.

► In 1744, Abigail Adams, the second first lady of the United States, was born in Weymouth.

► In 1906, the “S-O-S” distress signal was adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin.

► In 1935, a flying boat, the China Clipper, took off from Alameda, Calif., carrying more than 100,000 pieces of mail on the first trans-Pacific airmail flight.

► In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo to discuss measures for defeating Japan.

► In 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was shot to death during a motorcade in Dallas; Texas Governor John B. Connally, riding in the same car as Kennedy, was seriously wounded. Suspected gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president.

► In 1967, the UN Security Council OK’d Resolution 242, which called for Israel to withdraw from territories it had captured the previous June and implicitly called on adversaries to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

► In 1977, regular passenger service between New York and Europe on the supersonic Concorde began on a trial basis.

► In 2005, Angela Merkel took power as Germany’s first female chancellor.

► In 2010, thousands of people stampeded during a festival in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, leaving some 350 dead and hundreds injured in what the prime minister called the country’s biggest tragedy since the 1970s reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge.

► In 2014, a 12-year-old Black youth, Tamir Rice, was shot and killed by police outside a Cleveland recreation center after brandishing what turned out to be a pellet gun. (A grand jury declined to indict either the patrolman who fired the fatal shot or a training officer.)

► In 2017, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general whose forces carried out the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, was convicted of genocide and other crimes by the United Nations’ Yugoslav war crimes tribunal and sentenced to life behind bars.