Today, Tuesday, April 20, is the 110th day of 2010. There are 255 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

2009: Security forces invade CanJet flight 918 at Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica and overpower attempted hijacker Stephen Fray. Hours earlier, an armed Fray seized the flight — headed to Halifax, Canada — and ordered to be flown to Cuba.

Other Notable Events

1902: Scientists Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive element radium.

1923: Egyptian constitution is adopted.

1959: United Federal Party wins Northern Rhodesia elections.

1968: Pierre Elliott Trudeau is sworn in as Canada’s prime minister.

1971: US Supreme Court upholds the use of busing students to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

1980: The first Cubans sailing to the US as part of the massive Mariel boatlift reach Florida.

1987: PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat calls for sovereign Palestinian state “with Jerusalem as its capital”.

1994: Israeli and PLO negotiators wrap up an agreement transferring civilian government powers to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

1997: In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escapes political disaster when prosecutors decide not to indict him in an influence-peddling scandal.

1999: The worst in a rash of school shootings in the US kills 15 people, including the two student gunmen, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

2004: A Panamanian court sentences five Cuban exiles who had been accused of plotting to kill Fidel Castro to between seven and eight years in prison. The men were arrested after Castro announced a plot to kill him during an Ibero-American summit to Panama in November 2000.

2005: Ecuador’s congress removes embattled President Lucio Gutierrez from office after a week of escalating street protests against him and swears in Vice President Alfredo Palacio as the country’s new leader.

2006: Lawmakers approve President Hamid Karzai’s choices for key ministries in a Cabinet vote that gave the US-backed leader a boost as he tries to curb an intensified insurgency more than four years since the Taliban’s ouster.

2007: South Africa’s veterinary association announces that 30 dogs in the country have been killed in the last two weeks because of pet food laced with melamine, an industrial chemical traced to China. U.S. recalled pet foods with laced ingredients in March after the deaths of 16 pets.

2008: Pope Benedict XVI begins the final day of his US journey by blessing the site of the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and praying for peace.

2009: Dozens of Western diplomats walk out of a UN conference in Geneva when Iran’s hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls Israel a cruel and racist state and the US denounces his remarks as hateful.

Today’s Birthdays

Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III), French statesman (1808-1873); Adolf Hitler, German Nazi dictator (1889-1945); Joan Miro, Spanish artist (1893-1983); Luther Vandross, US singer (1951-2005); Betty Cuthbert, Australian Olympic champion athlete (1938-); Jessica Lange, US actress (1949-); Carmen Electra, US actress (1972-).

–AP and Jamaica Observer archives