NOVEMBER 20 IN HISTORY

EVENTS ON 20th NOVEMBER IN HISTORY

• 1739 – Start of the Battle of Porto Bello between British and Spanish forces during the War of Jenkins' Ear.
• 1789 – New Jersey becomes the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.
• 1917 – Ukraine is declared a republic.
• 1945 – Nuremberg trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.
• 1952 – Slánský trials – a series of Stalinist and anti-Semitic show trials in Czechoslovakia.
• 1962 – Cuban missile crisis ends: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.
• 1977 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, when he meets Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and speaks before the Knesset in Jerusalem, seeking a permanent peace settlement.
• 1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released.
• 1989 – Velvet Revolution: The number of protesters assembled in Prague, Czechoslovakia swells from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million.
• 1990 - Saddam Hussein announces plans to release German hostages
• 1995 - "Beatles' Anthology, Vol 1" released
• 1998 – A court in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan declares accused terrorist Osama bin Laden "a man without a sin" in regard to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
• 1998 – The first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched.
• 2008 – After critical failures in the US financial system began to build up after mid-September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest level since 1997.
• 2012 - Toshiba unveils a robot designed to help in nuclear disasters