This Day in History – April 20
Today is the 110th day of 2023. There are 255th days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS
2014: Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the American boxer whose wrongful murder conviction became an international symbol of racial injustice and inspired a Bob Dylan song, dies at age 76.
OTHER EVENTS
1854: Austria and Prussia conclude defensive alliance against Russia.
1859: The Dutch conclude a treaty granting Portugal the right to govern the northern part of Timor, Atauro Island and Oecussi.
1902: Scientists Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive element radium.
1919: King Nicholas is dethroned in Montenegro, which votes for union with Serbo-Slovene-Croat State — now Yugoslavia.
1923: Egyptian Constitution is adopted.
1945: Soviet forces penetrate Berlin defences in World War II.
1959: United Federal Party wins Northern Rhodesia elections.
1968: Pierre Elliott Trudeau is sworn in as Canada’s prime minister.
1972: US Apollo 16 astronauts make safe landing on moon.
1980: The first Cubans sailing to the United States as part of the massive Mariel boatlift reach Florida.
1987: Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat calls for sovereign Palestinian State “with Jerusalem as its capital”.
1993: Heavy fighting between Croat and Muslim troops spreads from central to south-western Bosnia on the fifth day of a battle that has killed more than 200 people.
1994: Israeli and Palestine Liberation Organization negotiators wrap up an agreement transferring civilian government powers to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.
1995: Egyptian aircraft begin a United Nations-approved shuttle of Muslim pilgrims from Libya to Saudi Arabia.
1999: The worst in a rash of school shootings in the United States 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.
2009: Dozens of Western diplomats walk out of a UN conference in Geneva when Iran’s hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls Israel a cruel and racist state and the US denounces his remarks as hateful.
2013: A powerful earthquake strikes the steep hills of China’s south-western Sichuan province, leaving at least 160 people dead.
2014: A non-profit research group says political and military elites are seizing protected areas in one of Africa’s last bastions for elephants, putting broad swaths of Zimbabwe at risk of becoming fronts for ivory poaching.
2015: Prosecutors arrest the Tunisian captain and a Syrian crew member of a boat which sank off Libya, a disaster in which as many as 900 migrants are feared to have drowned.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III), French statesman (1808-1873); Adolf Hitler, German Nazi dictator (1889-1945); Luther Vandross, US singer (1951-2005); Carmen Electra, US actress (1972- )
— AP
