December 20 is the 354th day of the year (355th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 11 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 1192 – Richard the Lion-Heart is captured and imprisoned by Leopold V of Austria on his way home toEngland after signing a treaty with Saladin ending the Third crusade.

• 1522 – Siege of Rhodes: Suleiman the Magnificent accepts the surrender of the surviving Knights of Rhodes, who are allowed to evacuate. They eventually settle on Malta and become known as the Knights of Malta.

• 1606 – The Virginia Company loads three ships with settlers and sets sail to establish Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas.
• 1803 – The Louisiana Purchase is completed at a ceremony in New Orleans.
• 1917 – Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, is founded.
• 1951 – The EBR-1 in Arco, Idaho becomes the first nuclear power plant to generate electricity. The electricity powered four light bulbs.
• 1973 – The Spanish Prime Minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, is assassinated by a car bomb attack in Madrid.
• 1984 – The Summit tunnel fire is the largest underground fire in history, as a freight train carrying over 1 million litres of petrol derails near the town of Todmorden in the Pennines.
• 1987 – History's worst peacetime sea disaster, when the passenger ferry Doña Paz sinks after colliding with the oil tanker Vector 1 in the Tablas Strait in the Philippines, killing an estimated 4,000 people (1,749 official).
• 1995 – NATO begins peacekeeping in Bosnia.
• 2004 – A gang of thieves steal £26.5 million worth of currency from the Donegall Square West headquarters of Northern Bank in Belfast,Northern Ireland, one of the largest bank robberies in UK history.
  • 2007 – The painting Portrait of Suzanne Bloch (1904), by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, is stolen from the São Paulo Museum of Art, along with O Lavrador de Café by the major Brazilian modernist painter Candido Portinari.

  
  

  finally, this GIF symbolizes how i feel about winning the Darvish bidding:

  via i.imgur.com