1932

The British authorities in India arrest and intern Mahatma Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel.

Japan occupies Harbin, China.

George Eastman, founder of Kodak, commits suicide in Rochester, New York.

John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, at the Cavendish Laboratory in the University of Cambridge (England), focus a proton beam on lithium and split its nucleus ("splitting the atom").

May 15 Incident, an attempted military coup in which Japanese prime minister Tsuyoshi Inukai is assassinated by naval officers. Japanese troops leave Shanghai.

The Benelux customs union is negotiated.

The 1932 Summer Olympics open in Los Angeles.

Potempa Murder of 1932: In the eastern town of Potempa, five Nazi "Brownshirts" break into the house of Konrad Pietrzuch, a Communist miner, and proceed to castrate and beat him to death in front of his mother.

The Cortes Generales (Parliament) of the Second Spanish Republic approves the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia which grants full autonomy for Catalonia for the first time in modern history.

The court of Helsinki sentences Vilho Kallio, Ville Saari and Ida Maria Viden to prison for the Tattarisuo mutilation case.

1932 United States presidential election: Democratic governor of New York Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats incumbent Republican president Herbert Hoover in a landslide victory, having promised a New Deal and repeal of Prohibition.

BBC World Service begins broadcasting as the BBC Empire Service using a shortwave radio facility at its Daventry transmitting station in England.