Portal:Current events/2009 August 20
August 20, 2009 (Thursday)
- Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, is released on compassionate grounds due to terminal cancer, and boards a flight to Libya. (BBC)
- A bicycle bomb explodes near a restaurant in Baghdad, killing two people. (Yahoo! news)
- 18 prospectors are killed overnight in a diamond mine in Kasai province in central Democratic Republic of the Congo. (IOL)
- A line of severe thunderstorms rolls through Ontario, Canada, spawns over 18 tornadoes in one day which has been declared to be the largest tornado outbreak in Canadian history, at least four F-2 tornadoes were confirmed, including one touching down in the town of Durham, Ontario, northwest of Toronto where at least one person was killed, and the other in a Toronto suburb of Vaughan, Ontario where over 600 homes were damaged or destroyed.(CTV)
- Switzerland's president, Hans-Rudolf Merz, apologizes to the Libyan government for last year's arrest of a son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. (MSNBC)
- Elizabeth Ramos and Louis Williams, owners of defense contracting company Technical Logistics, admit to bribing an employee of the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in exchange for defense contracts. (UPI)
- For the first time video ads will appear in a magazine, using a screen similar to a cell phone that can store 40 minutes of video. (BBC)