Today is the 83rd day of 2020. There are 283 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2010: In a major triumph for his presidency, a jubilant Barack Obama signs a massive, nearly US$1-trillion health care overhaul that will for the first time cement insurance coverage as the right of every US citizen.

OTHER EVENTS

1568: Treaty of Longjumean ends Second War of Religion in France.

1775: Patrick Henry calls for America’s Independence from Britain, telling the Virginia Provincial Convention, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

1792: Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No 94 in G Major, also known as the Surprise Symphony, is performed publicly for the first time, in London.

1801: Russia’s Czar Paul I is assassinated by Russian aristocrats and succeeded by Alexander I.

1806: Explorers Lewis and Clark, having reached the US Pacific coast, begin their journey back east.

1914: The first instalment of The Perils of Pauline, the silent film serial starring Pearl White, premieres in the greater New York City area.

1918: Lithuania proclaims its independence.

1919: Benito Mussolini founds fascist movement in Italy.

1933: German Reichstag grants Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers until April 1937.

1935: Soviet Union sells its interest in Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan.

1956: Pakistan becomes an independent republic within the British Commonwealth.

1965: America’s first two-person space mission takes place as Gemini 3 blasts off with astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom and John W Young aboard for a nearly five-hour flight.

1973: Before sentencing a group of Watergate break-in defendants, Chief US District Judge John J Sirica reads aloud a letter received from James W McCord Jr which said there was “political pressure” to “plead guilty and remain silent”.

1978: US Senate raised the mandatory retirement age to 70.

1981: US Supreme Court rules that states could require, with some exceptions, parental notification when teenage girls seek abortions.

1983: US President Ronald Reagan first proposes developing technology to intercept incoming enemy missiles — an idea that came to be known as the Strategic Defence Initiative. Dr Barney Clark, recipient of a Jarvik permanent artificial heart, dies at the University of Utah Medical Center after 112 days with the device.

1988: Contra guerrillas sign a ceasefire agreement with the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua.

1990: Soviet Government orders Western diplomats to leave and restricts entry of foreigners into Lithuania.

1992: Tens of thousands of jubilant Albanians celebrate a crushing election victory by the Democratic party, marking the end of Communist power.

1998: President Boris Yeltsin fires his prime minister and the entire Cabinet in Russia’s biggest government shake-up since the break-up of the Soviet Union. The film Titanic ties an Academy Awards record by winning 11 Oscars, including best picture, director (James Cameron) and song (My Heart Will Go On).

2001: The Mir space station returns to Earth, ending its 15-year odyssey with a fiery plunge into the South Pacific.

2004: Former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix says UN inspectors would have been able to determine that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction had the United States and Britain allowed more time for them to work before going to war.

2005: Marxist rebels in southern Colombia ambush a military convoy with explosives and gunfire, killing 10 Colombian Marines.

2007: Iranian naval vessels seize 15 British sailors and marines who had boarded a merchant ship in Iraqi waters off the Persian Gulf. Britain immediately protests the detentions, which come at a time of high tension between the West and Iran.

2008: A roadside bomb kills four US soldiers in Baghdad, pushing the overall American death toll in the five-year war to at least 4,000. US Vice-President Dick Cheney visits the West Bank, where Palestinian leaders ask him to pressure Israel to halt settlement construction and voiced other complaints. Al Copeland, founder of the Popeyes famous fried chicken chain, dies near Munich, Germany, at age 64.

2011: Egypt’s public prosecutor makes an unprecedented sweep against the top security brass, charging the former interior minister and other officials with aiding the killing and the attempted killing of hundreds of protesters during the uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

2012: Tens of thousands of Syrians brave tear gas and gunfire to protest across the country, vowing to storm the capital Damascus to oust President Bashar Assad.

2014: Turkish fighter jets shoot down a Syrian warplane after it violates the country’s airspace in a move likely to ramp up tensions between the two countries already deeply at odds over Syria’s civil war.

2017: Abandoning negotiations, US President Donald Trump demands a make-or-break vote on health care legislation in the House, threatening to leave “Obamacare” in place and move on to other issues if the next day’s vote failed. (Trump and GOP leaders end up pulling their Bill when it became clear it would fail badly.)

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Erich Fromm, German-born US psychoanalyst (1900-1980); Joan Crawford, US actress (1908-1977); Akira Kurosawa, Japanese film director (1910-1998); Wernher von Braun, German-born rocket expert (1912-1977); Ric Ocasek, British rock singer/producer (1949-2019); Chaka Khan, US singer (1953- ); Keri Russell, US actress (1976- )

— AP