On This Day, June 20: Arctic Circle reaches record-setting 100 degrees
On this date in history:
In 1893, a jury in Fall River, Mass., acquitted Lizzie Borden in the ax murders of her father and stepmother.
In 1898, the U.S. Navy seized Guam, the largest of the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, during the Spanish-American War. The people of Guam were granted U.S. citizenship in 1950.
In 1900, in response to widespread foreign encroachment upon China's national affairs, Chinese nationalists launched the so-called Boxer Rebellion in Beijing.
In 1945, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr. approved the resettlement of Wernher von Braun and his team of Nazi rocket scientists to the United States. Von Braun would go on to lead the U.S. space program.
File Photo courtesy of NASA
In 1963, the United States and Soviet Union agreed to establish a hot line communications link between Washington and Moscow.
In 1967, the American Independent Party was formed to back George Wallace of Alabama for president.
In 1977, oil began to flow through the $7.7 billion, 789-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
In 1988, armed forces commander Lt. Gen. Henri Namphy declared himself leader of Haiti in a military coup overthrowing President Leslie Manigat.
In 1991, the German Parliament voted to move its capital from Bonn to Berlin.
In 2004, Pakistan and India reached agreement on banning nuclear testing.
In 2009, insurgents, striking in a series of attacks as U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq as planned, set off a truck bomb near a Shiite mosque in northern Iraq, killing 82 people and injuring 250.
In 2010, Juan Manuel Santos easily defeated former Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus to become Colombia's president.
File Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI
In 2020, the town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, reached a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic Circle.
In 2023, Romanian authorities charged self-styled lifestyle coach and social media personality Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, with rape and human trafficking. As of 2025, the brothers were expected to stand trial on the charges.
File Photo by Robert Ghement/EPA-EFE
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