Today in History.....February 22

On this day in …

* 1819, Spain ceded Florida to the United States

* 1879, Frank Winfield Woolworth opened a 5 cent store in Utica, N.Y.

* 1889, President Cleveland signed a bill to admit the Dakotas, Montana and Washington state to the Union

* 1924, Calvin Coolidge delivered the first presidential radio broadcast from the White House

* 1935, it became illegal for airplanes to fly over the White House

* 1973, the United States and Communist China agreed to establish liaison offices

* 1984, a 12-year-old Houston boy known publicly only as "David,"
who'd spent most his life in a plastic bubble because he had no immunity to disease, died 15 days after being removed from the bubble for a bone-marrow transplant

* 1996, the space shuttle Columbia blasted into orbit on a mission to unreel a satellite on the end of a 12.8-mile cord

* 2001, President Bush held his first full-fledged presidential news conference, in which he defended his tax-cutting and budget-tightening plans and gave FBI director Louis Freeh a vote of confidence following the arrest of veteran agent Robert Hanssen on spying charges. ALSO: A U.N. war crimes tribunal convicted three Bosnian Serbs standing trial on charges of rape and torture in the first case of wartime sexual enslavement to go before an international court

* 2005, a Virginia practitioner of that "religion of peace" was charged with plotting with al-Qaida to kill President Bush. (Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was convicted on all counts in November 2005.) ALSO:
Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth III would not attend the civil marriage ceremony of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles
--- but that her absence should not be interpreted as a snub