HISTORY At A Glance

TODAY is Wednesday, November 4, the 309th day of 2020. There are 57 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:

1921 Japanese Prime Minister Hara Takashi is assassinated in Tokyo.

1942 World War II: Second Battle of El Alamein: Disobeying a direct order by Adolf Hitler, General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel leads his forces on a five-month retreat.

1956 Soviet troops enter Hungary to end the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union, that started on October 23. Thousands are killed, more are wounded, and nearly a quarter million

leave the country.

1970 Salvador Allende takes office as President of Chile, the first Marxist to become president of a Latin American country through open elections.

1979 Iran hostage crisis: A mob of Iranians, mostly students, overruns the US embassy in Tehran and takes 90 hostages (53 of whom are American).

1993 The China Airlines Flight 605 overruns Runway 13 at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak International Airport while landing

during a typhoon, injuring 22 people.

1995 Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by an extremist Israeli.

2002 China and the 10 member states of the ASEAN group signed a deal to create the biggest free trade zone on earth, encompassing more than 1.7 billion people.

2008 Barack Obama becomes the first person of African-American descent to be elected President of the United States.