This Day in History – September 20
Today is the 263rd day of 2023. There are102 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2019: Students from 185 countries stage the world’s largest-ever protest on climate change, culminating in a Manhattan rally led by Greta Thunberg.
OTHER EVENTS
1519: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan sets sail from Spain on the first trip around the world, though he is killed on the way.
1870: Italian troops enter Rome, completing the unification of Italy; Pope Pius IX refuses to accept the occupation of the city and declares himself a prisoner in the Vatican, a position maintained by his successors until 1929.
1967: An Israeli tank shelling sinks three Egyptian troop-carrying boats in the Suez Canal; Israel claims the ships violated the Egyptian-Israeli agreement that bans small-craft navigation in the waterway.
1973: In a much-publicised “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, Billie Jean King defeats Bobby Riggs.
1977: Vietnam is admitted as the 149th member of the United Nations; the first Southeast Asian “boat people” arrive in San Francisco under a new US resettlement programme.
1991: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev admits the central government has lost most of its political control over the Soviet republics.
1996: Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s brother, Murtaza Bhutto, is killed, as are seven supporters, in a gun battle with police outside his Karachi home.
2011: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — a US military policy that theoretically lifted a ban on homosexuals in the armed forces, provided individuals kept their sexuality private — officially ends.
2003: Former US President Bill Clinton attends a ceremony in Bosnia to officially open a museum and cemetery dedicated to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which Serb forces executed as many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Chulalongkorn, reformist king of Siam (1853-1910); Maxwell Perkins, American editor for Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe (1884-1947)
– AP