Today is the 331st day of 2020. There are 35 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1789: A day of Thanksgiving is set aside by US President George Washington to observe the adoption of America’s Constitution.

OTHER EVENTS

1716: A lion is first exhibited in America.

1095: Pope Urban urges the faithful to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims, heralding start of Crusades.

1580: Peace of Fleix ends Seventh War of Religion in France.

1764: Jesuit order is suppressed in France.

1825: The first US college social fraternity, Kappa Alpha, is formed at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

1857: The first Australian Parliament opens in Melbourne.

1896: Russia discloses plan to seize Constantinople if Britain intervenes in Crete.

1922: King Tutankhamen’s tomb is opened in Egypt.

1939: Soviet Union attacks Finland leading to 105-day Winter War.

1940: Half-million Jews of Warsaw, Poland, are ordered to live within a walled ghetto.

1942: The film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, has its world premiere at the Hollywood Theater in New York.

1943: The HMT Rohna, a British transport ship carrying US soldiers, is hit by a German missile off Algeria; 1,138 men are killed, including 1,015 American troops.

1949: India adopts constitution as federal republic within British Commonwealth.

1950: China enters the Korean conflict, launching a counteroffensive against soldiers from the UN, the US and South Korea.

1965: France launches its first satellite, sending a 41- kilogramme (92-pound) capsule into orbit.

1967: Death toll is put at 250 in floods in central Portugal.

1970: A Bolivian painter, disguised as a priest, tries to kill Pope Paul VI in Manila, Philippines, but pontiff escapes injury.

1975: A federal jury in Sacramento, California, finds Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, guilty of trying to assassinate US President Gerald Ford.

1978: Muslim religious leaders and politicians seeking to topple Shah of Iran call general strike that virtually paralyses the country.

1986: Iranian missile slams into crowded residential district of Baghdad, Iraq, killing 48 civilians and wounding 52.

1987: Powerful typhoon whips across Philippines, killing 270 people and damaging or destroying 14,000 homes.

1989: El Salvador breaks relations with Nicaragua after weapons-loaded plane from that country is downed in El Salvador.

1990: Five permanent members of UN Security Council agree on peace plan for Cambodia.

1991: UNICEF says fighting and crop failures in southern Sudan have forced an unprecedented exodus of 200,000 people.

1992: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II announces she would start paying taxes on her personal income and take her children off the national payroll.

1994: A major offensive by the Russian-backed opposition fails to wrest Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, from its Government.

1996: Supporters of President Alexander Lukashenko break away from Belarus’s Parliament, setting up their own assembly.

1997: Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invites foreign experts to live in his presidential palaces to prove that he has nothing to hide. The palaces remain closed to weapons inspectors.

2000: Florida certifies George W Bush as the winner of the state’s electoral votes for the US presidential election. US vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore challenges the decision.

2001: Former French intelligence chief General Paul Aussaressess says in testimony that the orders he issued to torture and kill prisoners during the Algerian independence war were justifiable acts of duty.

2002: Attorney Gloria Allred asks California authorities to investigate singer Michael Jackson because of news videotape of the star holding his baby son over a fourth-floor railing at a hotel in Germany.

2007: A British teacher is arrested in Sudan for allegedly insulting Islam by naming a teddy bear Muhammad. Gillian Gibbons, 54, is jailed for more than a week and eventually freed.

2008: Teams of heavily armed gunmen storm luxury hotels, a popular tourist attraction and a crowded train station in Mumbai, India, killing at least 172 people and wounding 239 others after a 60-hour rampage.

2009: Dubai is now so swamped in debt that it is asking for a six-month reprieve on paying its bills — causing a drop on world markets and raising questions about Dubai’s reputation as a magnet for international investment.

2012: The United States claims “enormous” strides in reducing greenhouse emissions at the opening of UN climate talks despite failing to join other industrialised nations in committing to binding cuts.

2013: US bombers fly across new Chinese air defence zone in defiance of Beijing’s claims to disputed islands in the East China sea.

2014: US forces take part in a rescue mission that freed eight hostages in a remote corner of Yemen, but a Yemeni official says that it did not liberate five others who were moved elsewhere by their al-Qaeda captors days before the raid.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Eugene Ionesco, Romanian-born French dramatist (1909-1994); Bruce Paltrow, US director/producer (1943-2002); Tina Turner, US pop singer (1939- ); Illona Staller (La Cicciolina), porn star and Italian Member of Parliament (1951- )

— AP