Today is the 215th day of 2017. There are 150 days left in the year.

TODAYS HIGHLIGHT

2005: French authorities find 351 foetuses and stillborn babies stored in bags and jars at a Paris hospital.

OTHER EVENTS

1460: King James II of Scotland is killed by the blast of a cannon saluting the arrival of his wife, Queen Mary, at Roxburgh Castle, England.

1492: Christopher Columbus sets sail from Palos, Spain, looking for a route to India across the Atlantic, encountering the New World instead.

1589: Henry of Navarre, first of the Bourbon line, succeeds the assassinated Henry III as king of France.

1807: Former Vice-President Aaron Burr goes on trial before a federal court in Richmond, Virginia, charged with treason. (He is acquitted less than a month later.)

1914: Germany declares war on France at the start of World War I.

1916: Irish-born British diplomat Roger Casement, a strong advocate of independence for Ireland, is hanged for treason.

1921: Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis refuses to reinstate the former Chicago White Sox players implicated in the “Black Sox” scandal, despite their acquittals in a jury trial.

1936: Jesse Owens of the United States wins the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics as he took the 100-metre sprint.

1943: US Army Lieutenant General George S Patton slaps a private at an army hospital in Sicily, accusing him of cowardice. (Patton was later ordered by General Dwight D Eisenhower to apologise for this and a second, similar episode.) Anti-Nazi demonstrations are held in Milan, Genoa and other northern Italian cities during World War II.

1949: The National Basketball Association is formed as a merger of the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League.

1956: Gold Coast League Assembly adopts Kwame Nkrumah’s resolution demanding independence from Britain.

1958: The nuclear-powered submarine USS Nautilus becomes the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater.

1966: Comedian Lenny Bruce, whose raunchy brand of satire and dark humour landed him in trouble with the law, is found dead in his Los Angeles home; he was 40.

1969: Israeli government leaders announce they will retain the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and a major part of the eastern and southern Sinai Peninsula — the areas captured from the Arabs in the June 1967 war.

1972: The US Senate ratifies the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. (The US unilaterally withdraws from the treaty in 2002.)

1974: The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) declare a de facto ceasefire between rebel and Portuguese troops.

1981: US air traffic controllers go on strike, despite a warning from President Ronald Reagan they would be fired, which they were.

1987: The Iran-Contra congressional hearings end with none of the 29 witnesses tying President Ronald Reagan directly to the diversion of arms-sales profits to Nicaraguan rebels.

1988: Hard-line leader Sein Lwin clamps indefinite martial law on the capital of Myanmar.

1990: The United States and the Soviet Union jointly condemn Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait while Iraqi troops begin massing along Kuwaiti border with Saudi Arabia.

1991: Russian branch formally breaks off from the Soviet Union’s Communist Party to form a new party led by reform-minded communists.

1994: Arkansas carries out the nation’s first triple execution in 32 years. Stephen G Breyer is sworn in as the Supreme Court’s newest justice in a private ceremony at Chief Justice William H Rehnquist’s Vermont summer home.

1995: Delegates from some 100 nations agree at the UN on a global treaty to prevent overfishing on the high seas.

1997: Political moderate Mohammad Khatami takes over as president of Iran.

1999: The US Justice Department rules that the government must pay the heirs of Abraham Zapruder US$16 million for his film of President John F Kennedy’s assassination.

2000: The European Union opens an antitrust case against Microsoft.

2001: The International Monetary Fund announces it will loan US$1.2 billion to Argentina and extend US$15 billion line of credit to Brazil.

2002: Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian calls for legislation that would allow a referendum to be conducted on whether to declare independence from China.

2003: The United Arab Emirates-based Al Arabiya satellite television network broadcasts an audiotape warning allegedly from Ayman al-Zawahiri, a top deputy of Al Qaeda, that the US will pay a “dear price” if it harmed any prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

2007: A 94-year-old great-great-grandmother, Phyllis Turner, who left school at the age of 12, becomes the world’s oldest recipient of a master’s degree from University of Adelaide in Australia. Toyota said its April-June 2007 profit had jumped 32.3 per cent to a then-record high for a quarter, lifted by strong overseas sales and a weaker yen. Iraqis welcomed home their soccer team which had won the Asian Cup.

2008: At least 145 people are killed in a stampede of pilgrims at a remote Hindu temple in India.

2009: Huge crowds reminiscent of the 1986 “people power” demonstration take to Manila’s streets to honour the passing of former President Corazon Aquino, who captured the hearts of Filipinos by ousting a brutal dictator and keeping democracy alive in the Philippines.

2012: The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly denounces Syria’s crackdown on dissent in a symbolic effort meant to push the deadlocked Security Council and the world at large into action on stopping the country’s civil war. Michael Phelps rallied to win the 100-metre butterfly for his third gold of the London Games and No 17 of his career. Missy Franklin set a world record in the 200 backstroke for the 17-year-old’s third gold in London. Falling at speeds of up to 220 mph, 138 skydivers shattered the vertical skydiving world record as they flew heads-down in a massive snowflake formation in northern Illinois. (This record was in turn eclipsed in 2015 by 164 skydivers plunging over central Illinois.)

2016: President Barack Obama cut short the sentences of 214 federal inmates, including 67 life sentences, in what the White House called the largest batch of commutations on a single day in more than a century. An Emirates Boeing 777 crash-landed in Dubai and caught fire; all 300 people on board survived, but one firefighter was killed.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Koshaku Yamagata Aritomo, first prime minister of Japan (1838-1922); Dolores del Rio, US-Mexican film star (1905-1983); Phyllis Dorothy (PD) James, British mystery writer (1920-2014); Tony Bennett, US singer (1926- ); Martin Sheen, US actor (1940- ); Martha Stewart, US lifestyle guru (1941- ); Jay North, actor (TV: Dennis the Menace) (1951- ); Marcel Dionne, hockey hall-of-famer (1951- ); Movie director John Landis (1950- ); JoMarie Payton, actress (1950- ); James Hetfield, Rock singer (Metallica) (1963- ); Ed Roland, rock singer-musician (Collective Soul) (1963- ); Isaiah Washington, actor (1963- ); Ryan Lochte, Olympic gold medal swimmer (1984- ); Whitney Duncan, country singer (1984- ); Jon Foster, actor (1984- ); Georgina Haig, actress (1985- ); Holly Arnstein, singer (Dream) (1985- ); Tanya Fischer, actress (1985- ); Brent Kutzle, pop-rock musician (OneRepublic) (1985-), D.R.A.M, rapper (1988- )