Dec 20 (Reuters) – Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 20:
1922 – Poland names politician, scholar and activist Stanislaw Wojoichewski as new president.
1968 – The American novelist John Steinbeck died; he achieved fame in the 1930s with powerful novels about agricultural workers, notably “The Grapes of Wrath”.
1973 – In Spain, General Franco’s prime minister and right-hand man, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, was assassinated by a bomb as his car drove through Madrid.
1989 – The United States invaded Panama and installed a new government, but initially failed in its key objective of seizing the country’s leader, General Manuel Antonio Noriega.
1993 – Property developer Donald Trump marries Marla Maples at the Plaza Hotel in New York.
1996 – Japanese carmaker Honda announces it has developed the first human-shaped robot which can move independently and do basic tasks.
1998 – China freed the prominent labour activist Liu Nianchun and sent him and his family into exile in the United States.
1999 – International peacekeepers arrested General Stanislav Galic, commander of the Bosnian Serb unit that laid siege to Sarajevo during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
2001 – Argentine Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo quit after 27 people died in the worst civil unrest in a decade, triggered by the austerity measures he had introduced.
2002 – A Paris court found U.S. billionaire George Soros guilty of using inside information to make money on shares in the bank Societe Generale, fining him 2.2 million euros ($2.9 million).
2004 – Thieves steal an estimated 30 million pounds ($58 million) from Northern Bank in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
