Today is Saturday, Oct. 29, the 302nd day of 2022. There are 63 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is 84. Rock musician Denny Laine is 78. Actor Richard Dreyfuss is 75. Actor Dan Castellaneta (TV: “The Simpsons”) is 65. Comic strip artist Tom Wilson (“Ziggy”) is 65. Singer Randy Jackson (the Jacksons) is 61. Rapper Paris is 55. Actor Rufus Sewell is 55. Actor Winona Ryder is 51. Olympic gold medal bobsledder Vonetta Flowers is 49.
In 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh, the English courtier, military adventurer and poet, was executed in London for treason.
In 1787, the opera “Don Giovanni” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had its world premiere in Prague.
In 1891, actor, comedian and singer Fanny Brice was born in New York.
In 1929, “Black Tuesday” descended upon the New York Stock Exchange. Prices collapsed amid panic selling and thousands of investors were wiped out as America’s “Great Depression” began.
In 1940, a blindfolded Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson drew the first number — 158 — from a glass bowl in America’s first peacetime military draft.
In 1956, during the Suez Canal crisis, Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” premiered as NBC’s nightly television newscast.
In 1960, a chartered plane carrying the California Polytechnic State University football team crashed on takeoff from Toledo, Ohio, killing 22 of the 48 people on board.
In 1987, following the confirmation defeat of Robert H. Bork to serve on the US Supreme Court, President Ronald Reagan announced his choice of Douglas H. Ginsburg, a nomination that fell apart over revelations of Ginsburg’s previous marijuana use. Jazz great Woody Herman died in Los Angeles at age 74.
In 1998, Senator John Glenn, at age 77, roared back into space aboard the shuttle Discovery, retracing the trail he’d blazed for America’s astronauts 36 years earlier.
In 2004, four days before Election Day in the United States, Osama bin Laden, in a videotaped statement, directly admitted for the first time that he’d ordered the September 11 attacks and told Americans “the best way to avoid another Manhattan” was to stop threatening Muslims’ security.
In 2005, mourners slowly filed past the body of civil rights icon Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, just miles from the downtown street where she’d made history by refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man.
In 2012, superstorm Sandy slammed ashore in New Jersey and slowly marched inland, devastating coastal communities and causing widespread power outages; the storm and its aftermath were blamed for at least 182 deaths in the United States.
In 2015, Paul Ryan was elected the 54th speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 2017, all but 10 members of the Houston Texans took a knee during the national anthem, reacting to a remark from team owner Bob McNair to other NFL owners that “we can’t have the inmates running the prison.” The head of Puerto Rico’s power company said the agency was cancelling its $300 million contract with a tiny Montana company to restore the island’s power system; the company was based in the hometown of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
In 2018, a new-generation Boeing jet operated by the Indonesian budget airline Lion Air crashed in the Java Sea minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board; it was the first of two deadly crashes involving the 737 Max, causing the plane to be grounded around the world for nearly two years as Boeing worked on software changes to a flight-control system.
Last year, the Food and Drug Administration paved the way for children ages 5 to 11 to get Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine; the FDA cleared kid-size doses — just a third of the amount given to teens and adults — for emergency use. Eighteen states filed three separate lawsuits to stop President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors, arguing that the requirement violated federal law. Biden held extended and highly personal talks with Pope Francis at the Vatican, and came away saying the pontiff told him he was a “good Catholic” and should keep receiving Communion, although conservatives had called for him to be denied the sacrament because of his support for abortion rights.