Today is Thursday, July 10, the 191st day of 2014. There are 174 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2006: Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, responsible for terror attacks that led to the deaths of more than 800 people, is killed when a dynamite-laden truck in his convoy explodes.

OTHER EVENTS

1559: Mary, Queen of Scots, claims title of Queen of England in opposition to Elizabeth I. Her political actions provoke rebellion among the Scottish nobles and she is beheaded in 1587 as a Catholic threat to the English throne.

1962: Telstar satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bringing live television from the United States to Europe for the first time.

1973: The Bahamas gains independence after three centuries of British rule.

1976: Four mercenaries – three British and one American – are executed by firing squad in Angola as three rebel movements struggle for power after the country’s decolonisation from Portugal in 1975.

1990: Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev is re-elected leader of Soviet Communist Party.

1991: Boris Yeltsin takes oath of office as first elected president of Russia; US President George HW Bush lifts economic sanctions against South Africa.

1992: Polish parliament approves the country’s first woman prime minister, Hanna Suchocka.

1995: Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is freed from house arrest in Rangoon, Burma, now known as Yangon, Myanmar, days before completing her six-year detention.

2000: A mountain of garbage loosened by rain collapses and bursts into flames at the biggest dump in Manila, Philippines, flattening squatters’ shanties and killing at least 216 people.

2004: Saudi Arabia says it will hold municipal elections in September, the first polls to be held in decades in the conservative kingdom, where political parties are banned and press freedoms are limited.

2008: Kuwait announces it will name its first ambassador to Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded the country in 1990, a major step in healing the two countries’ painful past.

2010: Psychologists in the United States are warned by their professional group not to take part in torturing detainees in U.S. custody.

2011: Rupert Murdoch swoops into Britain to face the growing phone-hacking scandal that prompted the closure of his News of the World tabloid and threatens to derail a US$19-billion broadcasting deal.

2013: Canadian officials tell distraught families that 30 people still missing after the fiery crash of a runaway oil train in eastern Quebec are all presumed dead, bringing death toll in the derailment and explosion to 50.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Jean Calvin, French religious reformer (1509-1564); Camille Pissarro, French painter (1830-1903); Marcel Proust, French writer (1871-1922); Toyohiko Kagawa, Japanese writer (1888-1960); Giorgio de Chirico, Italian painter (1888-1978); Saul Bellow, US writer (1915-2005); Hugo Banzer, president of Bolivia (1926-2002); Arthur Ashe, US tennis player (1943-1993); Jessica Simpson, pop singer/actress (1980–).