Today is the 178th day of 2020. There are 188 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2000: Scientists announce that the human genetic code has essentially been deciphered, a monumental achievement that opens a dramatic new frontier in medicine.

OTHER EVENTS

1483: Richard III begins his reign as King of England (he was crowned the following month at Westminster Abbey).

1541: Francisco Pizarro, Spanish conqueror of Peru, is slain in Lima by rival conquistadors.

1549: The 17 provinces of the Netherlands are declared independent of the Holy Roman Empire.

1714: Spain and Holland sign Peace of Utrecht.

1848: Artillery blasts apart the barricades put up by rebelling workers in Paris, ending the “June Days” civil war with the loss of 1,500 lives.

1858: Treaty of Tientsin ends war between Britain and China, whereby China opens additional ports to British commerce and legalises opium trade.

1870: The first section of Atlantic City, New Jersey’s Boardwalk, is opened to the public.

1941: Finns side with Germans in attack against Soviet Union, leading to three-year Finnish-Soviet war.

1945: Charter establishing United Nations is signed in San Francisco, California, by 50 nations.

1948: The Berlin airlift begins after the Soviets blockade West Berlin. The lift feeds two million Berliners for eleven months.

1960: Madagascar proclaims its independence as the Malagasy Republic; British Somaliland becomes independent.

1964: The Roman Catholic Church and Spain’s Government say they have reached basic agreement on proposed legislation to grant legal recognition and certain rights to Spain’s Protestants.

1989: Hungary’s new Communist Party chief says his country is “breaking away from Stalinism”.

1990: Nelson Mandela speaks before US Congress, thanking it for imposing sanctions against South Africa and asking that sanctions be maintained until “irreversible” reforms are enacted.

1991: Martial law is lifted in Kuwait and death sentences for 29 people convicted of collaborating with the Iraqis during their invasion of Kuwait are commuted to life imprisonment.

1993: American President Bill Clinton announces that the US had launched missiles against Iraqi targets because of “compelling evidence” Iraq had plotted to assassinate former President George H W Bush.

1996: Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd offers a US$2.7-million reward for those responsible for a truck bomb that killed at least 19 Americans and wounded hundreds.

1997: Attackers fire grenades at police in Northern Ireland in an apparent rebuff to a British offer of peace talks participation in exchange for a new IRA ceasefire.

1998: US President Bill Clinton opens a State visit to China in Tiananmen Square, where a protest movement for democracy was brutally suppressed nine years earlier.

1999: Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos Horta returns to East Timor, his place of birth, following 24 years in self-exile during which the country was occupied by Indonesia.

2006: A suicide attacker rams his bomb-packed car into a Pakistani army checkpoint, killing at least five soldiers and wounding 10 in a northern extremist hotbed near the Afghan border.

2007: Pope Benedict XVI changes the rules for electing popes, requiring that two-thirds of the cardinals in a conclave agree on the new pontiff, reversing a 1996 decision by Pope John Paul II.

2008: South Korea lifts its ban on US beef imports and President Lee Myung-bak urges the country to move past the dispute that has paralysed his Government with weeks of tumultuous protests. The US Supreme Court strikes down a handgun ban in the District of Columbia as it affirms, 5-4, that an individual right to gun ownership exists. Juan Alvarez, who triggered a 2005 rail disaster in Glendale, California, by parking a sport-utility vehicle on the tracks, is convicted of 11 counts of first-degree murder. (Alvarez is later sentenced to 11 consecutive life terms.)

2011: Men riding motorcycles throw bombs into outdoor beer gardens in north-eastern Nigeria, killing at least 25 people in attacks bearing striking similarities to others carried out by a radical Islamic sect in the region.

2013: The Central Intelligence Agency begins shipping weapons to Jordan and plans to start arming groups of vetted Syrian rebels. In deciding its first cases on the issue, the US Supreme Court gives the nation’s legally married gay couples equal federal footing with all other married Americans and also cleared the way for same-sex marriages to resume in California.

2014: The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and other European nations commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I and vow to preserve peace on the continent.

2017: US President Donald Trump welcomes India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House as the two leaders heralds an increasingly close strategic partnership. The Supreme Court says President Trump can forge ahead with a limited version of his ban on travel from six mostly Muslim countries.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

George Morland, English artist (1763-1804); Bartolome Mitre, Argentine president (1821-1906); Baron William Homson Kelvin, English physicist (1824-1907); Pearl Buck, US author (1892-1973); Peter Lorre, Hungarian actor (1904-1964); Chris Isaak, US singer (1956- ); Chris O’Donnell, actor (1970- ); Patty Smyth, singer (1957- ); Sean Hayes, US actor (1970- )

— AP