Today is the 273rd day of 2020. There are 93 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1982: Extra-strength Tylenol capsules laced with deadly cyanide claim the first of seven victims in the Chicago area. (To date, the case remains unsolved.)
OTHER EVENTS
1567: Second War of Religion begins in France between Huguenots and King Charles IX.
1650: France’s Parliament imposes peace on Bordeaux, which virtually ends second Fronde revolt.
1789: The US War Department establishes a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.
1829: London’s reorganised police force, which becomes known as Scotland Yard, goes on duty.
1875: Rebellion in Cuba leads to deterioration of Us-spanish relations.
1902: William Topaz Mcgonagall, affectionately considered Britain’s possibly worst-ever poet, dies in Edinburgh, Scotland.
1910: The National Urban League has its beginnings in New York as
The Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes.
1911: Italy declares war on Turkey, eventually conquering Libya.
1918: Allied forces score decisive breakthrough of German Hindenburg line in France.
1923: Britain begins ruling Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.
1938: British, French, German and Italian leaders conclude the
Munich Agreement, which is aimed at appeasing Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
1943: US General Dwight D Eisenhower and Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio sign an armistice during
World War II aboard the British ship Nelson off Malta.
1957: The San Francisco-bound New York Giants play their last game at the Polo Grounds, losing to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 9-1. The Brooklyn Dodgers play their last game before moving to Los Angeles, losing to the Phillies 2-1 in Philadelphia.
1963: The second session of Second Vatican Council opens in Rome.
1965: Soviet Union admits it is supplying arms to North Vietnam.
1967: Author Carson Mccullers dies in Nyack, New York, at age 50.
1972: China and Japan normalise relations.
1976: Syrian troops in Lebanon drive out Palestinian guerrillas from most of their key mountain positions east of Beirut.
1977: The Billy Joel album The Stranger was released by Columbia Records.
1978: Pope John Paul I is found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.
1987: Henry Ford II, long-time chairman of Ford Motor Co, dies in Detroit at age 70.
1988: The space shuttle Discovery blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, marking America’s return to manned space flight following the Challenger disaster.
1990: The United States meets with Vietnam in the first high-level meeting between the two nations since the Vietnam War.
1992: Brazilian lawmakers impeach President Fernando Collor de Mello.
1993: US President Bill Clinton announces plans to liberalise existing restrictions on exports of a wide range of computers and other high-technology equipment. An estimated $35 billion worth of exports will be affected.
1996: Bosnia’s first post-war elections are watched by international groups that certify victories by nationalist parties and the new president, Alija Izetbegovic.
1999: Israel acknowledges for the first time that its agents helped train interrogators at a southern Lebanon prison where militiamen are accused of torturing suspects.
2002: The United Nations World
Food Program says it is cutting off grain rations to three million North Koreans because of a shortfall in food aid from donor nations.
2004: The Vatican, in its first speech ever to the UN General Assembly’s annual autumn session for world leaders, calls for a total ban on human cloning and criticises the war in Iraq and unilateral responses to terrorism.
2005: John G Roberts Jr is sworn in as the nation’s 17th chief justice after winning Senate confirmation.
2006: A Brazilian jetliner clips a smaller jet in mid-air and crashes into the Amazon jungle, killing all 155 on board in the nation’s worst air disaster.
2007: President George W Bush signs a Bill to prevent a government shutdown, but lambasts Democrats controlling Congress for sending him the stop-gap measure while they continued to work on more than a dozen spending Bills funding the day-to-day operations of 15 Cabinet departments. Actress Lois Maxwell, who starred as Miss Moneypenny in 14 James Bond movies, dies in Fremantle, Australia, at age 80.
2008: Egyptian and Sudanese troops, backed by European commandos, rescue a tour group that had been kidnapped in Egypt and taken on a 10-day dash across the Sahara to the frontier of Chad.
2009: Iran’s nuclear chief says the country’s new uranium enrichment site was built for maximum protection from aerial attack; carved into a mountain and near a military compound of the powerful Revolutionary Guard.
2011: Angry supporters of President Bashar Assad’s regime hurl tomatoes and eggs at the US ambassador to Syria as he enters the office of a leading opposition figure and then try to break into the building, trapping him inside for three hours.
2012: Omar Khadr, the last Western detainee held at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, returns to Canada after a decade in custody.
2013: The death toll from a building that collapsed in Mumbai rises to 60 as the rescue operation is called off.
2014: Afghanistan swears in Ashraf Ghani as its second elected president embarking on a new era with a national unity government poised to confront the Taliban.
2016: A New Jersey Transit commuter train slams into the Hoboken station, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Jacopo Tintoretto, Italian artist (1518-1594); Robert Clive, English soldier-statesman (1725-1774); Horatio Nelson, British admiral (17581805); Enrico Fermi, Italian physicist (1901-1954); Anita Ekberg, Swedish actress (1931-2015); Lech Walesa, Polish president and Nobel Peace
Prize winner (1943-); Jerry Lee Lewis, singer (1935- ); Bryant Gumbel, TV personality, (1948- ); Sebastian Coe, Olympic gold medal runner, (1956- )