Today is the 120th day of 2020. There are 246 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1945: In a Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun and designates Admiral Karl Doenitz his successor. Hitler kills himself the next day.

OTHER EVENTS

1429: Joan of Arc enters Orleans, France, and defeats English.

1628: Sweden and Denmark sign defence treaty against Duke of Wallenstein, bringing Sweden into the Thirty Years’ War.

1706: Electors of Bavaria and Cologne are outlawed by Holy Roman Empire.

1781: French fleet under Admiral Suffren prevents Britain from seizing Cape of Good Hope.

1798: Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation was rehearsed in Vienna, Austria, before an invited audience.

1826: Liberal constitution is promulgated in Portugal for a hereditary monarchy.

1848: Pope Pius IX dissociates himself from Italian national movement.

1861: Maryland’s House of Delegates votes against seceding from the Union of the United States.

1862: New Orleans falls to Union forces during the American Civil War.

1913: Gideon Sundback of Hoboken, New Jersey, patents the zipper.

1916: The Easter Rising in Dublin collapses as Irish nationalists surrender to British authorities.

1918: Germany’s main offensive on Western Front in World War I ends.

1928: British ultimatum forces Egypt to provide freedom of public meetings.

1931: US President Herbert Hoover receives the king of Siam. It was the first time an absolute monarch had travelled to the White House.

1945: US soldiers in Germany liberate 32,000 Nazi victims from a concentration camp in Dachau in World War II.

1946: Anglo-US committee advises against partition of Palestine; 28 former Japanese leaders are indicted in Tokyo as war criminals.

1957: The SM-1, the first military nuclear power plant, was dedicated at Fort Belvoir, Va.

1965: Australia decides to send troops to South Vietnam.

1968: The counterculture musical Hair opened on Broadway following limited engagements off-Broadway.

1973: Israel decides to expand civil rights of its 336,000 Arab citizens to reward Israeli Arab community for its loyalty.

1974: US President Richard Nixon announces he is releasing edited transcripts of secretly made White House tape recordings related to the Watergate scandal.

1975: US task force evacuates foreigners and Vietnamese by helicopter from Saigon.

1981: Truck driver Peter Sutcliffe admits in a London court to being the “Yorkshire Ripper”, the killer of 13 women in northern England during a five-year period.

1983: Harold Washington was sworn in as the first black mayor of Chicago.

1989: Police arrest about 2,200 workers and students in South Korea to try to block labour rally.

1990: Wrecking cranes tear down the section of the Berlin Wall surrounding the Brandenburg Gate, the wall’s most famous section.

1992: A jury in Los Angeles acquits policemen charged with a videotaped beating of black man Rodney King, setting off three days of riots that kill 55 people and causes US$1 billion in damage.

1993: Gunmen in Costa Rica free 18 Supreme Court justices they had held hostage for four days. Police capture the five gunmen after a brief gun battle. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II announced that, for the first time, Buckingham Palace would be opened to tourists to help raise money for repairs at fire-damaged Windsor Castle.

1994: South Africa’s first democratic elections end after an extra day of balloting intended to overcome delays and confusion.

1995: In Sri Lanka, Tamil separatist rebels down a military jet with a missile, killing 52 people and escalating their 12-year war for a homeland.

1996: Heavy fighting between rival factions sends civilians fleeing for shelter again as a 10-day-old truce collapses in Monrovia, Liberia.

1997: Astronaut Jerry Linenger and cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev go on the first US-Russian space walk.

1998: Brazil announces an unprecedented plan to protect an area of Amazon forest half the size of France.

2000: Police in Azerbaijan beat back more than 1,000 demonstrators seeking to stage an unsanctioned opposition rally in the capital Baku.

2003: Pakistani police in Karachi arrest six suspected members of the al-Qaida terrorist network who allegedly were planning attacks on US targets in Pakistan.

2004: President George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney met behind closed doors with the September 11 commission; afterward, Bush said he’d told the panel his Administration tried to protect America from terrorists as warnings grew before the devastating attack of 2001.

2005: United Nations peacekeepers sexually abused and exploited local women and girls in Liberia, a UN spokesman reports. Allegations that were found to be substantiated in Liberia are the latest to be levelled against UN peacekeepers, who had been accused of sexually abusing the very people they were sent to protect in missions from Bosnia and Kosovo to Cambodia, East Timor and Congo.

2006: Bolivian President Evo Morales joins Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in Havana for an endorsement of a socialist trade initiative aimed at providing an alternative to US-backed free trade efforts in Latin America.

2007: Gunmen seriously wound one of Iraq’s best-known radio and television journalists, Amal al-Moudares, near her home in the capital. On April 5, Baghdad police found the bullet-ridden body of Khamael Muhsin, another famous radio and TV presenter.

2008: The United States and France introduce a UN resolution that would allow countries to chase pirates off Somalia’s coast into the country’s territorial waters and arrest the sea thieves.

2009: During a prime time news conference marking his 100th day in office, US President Barack Obama said that waterboarding authorised by former President George W Bush was torture, and that the information it gained from terror suspects could have been obtained by other means. The World Health Organization raised its alert level for swine flu to its next-to-highest notch.

2011: Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton were married in an opulent ceremony at London’s Westminster Abbey.

2013: Opening statements took place in Los Angeles in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Michael Jackson’s mother, Katherine Jackson, against concert giant AEG Live, claiming it failed to properly investigate a doctor who had cared for Jackson and was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter in his 2009 death. (The jury determined in October 2013 that AEG Live was not liable.)

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

John Arbuthnot, English physicist-satirist (1667-1745); Alexander II, czar of Russia (1818-1881); Japan’s Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989); Sir Malcolm Sargent, English conductor (1895-1967); Zubin Mehta, Indian conductor (1936- ); Jerry Seinfeld, US comedian (1954- ); Michelle Pfeiffer, US actress (1958- ); Daniel Day-Lewis, English-born actor (1957- ); Uma Thurman, US actress (1970- ); tennis player Andre Agassi (1970- ); rapper Master P (1970- ); Jamaican reggae dancehall recording artiste Byiome Muir, better known by his stage name I-Octane (1984- )

— AP/Jamaica Observer