Today is Monday, Sept. 26, the 269th day of 2022.
There are 96 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Sept. 26, 1960, the first-ever debate between presidential nominees took place as Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon faced off before a national TV audience from Chicago.
On this date:
In 1777, British troops occupied Philadelphia during the American Revolution.
In 1888, poet T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri.
In 1954, the Japanese commercial ferry Toya Maru sank during a typhoon in the Tsugaru Strait, claiming more than 1,150 lives.
In 1986, William H. Rehnquist was sworn in as the 16th chief justice of the United States, while Antonin Scalia joined the Supreme Court as its 103rd member.
In 1990, the Motion Picture Association of America announced it had created a new rating, NC-17, to replace the X rating.
In 1991, four men and four women began a two-year stay inside a sealed-off structure in Oracle, Arizona, called Biosphere 2. (They emerged from Biosphere on this date in 1993.)
In 1996, President Clinton signed a bill ensuring two-day hospital stays for new mothers and their babies.
In 2003, President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin (POO’-tihn) opened a two-day summit at Camp David.
In 2005, Army Pfc. Lynndie England was convicted by a military jury in Fort Hood, Texas, on six of seven counts stemming from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. (England was sentenced to three years in prison; she ended up serving half that time.)
In 2008, Hollywood screen legend and philanthropist Paul Newman died in Westport, Connecticut, at age 83.
In 2016, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton participated in their first debate of the presidential campaign at Hofstra University in New York; Clinton emphatically denounced Trump for keeping his personal tax returns and business dealings secret from voters while Trump repeatedly cast Clinton as a “typical politician.”
In 2020, President Donald Trump nominated judge Amy Coney Barrett, a former clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, to the Supreme Court, to fill the seat left vacant by the death of liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Barrett would be confirmed the following month, days before the November election.) More than 150 people gathered in the Rose Garden for Trump’s introduction of Barrett; few in the crowd wore masks to protect against the coronavirus, and in the days that followed, a succession of attendees reported that they had contracted COVID-19.