Today is the106th day of 2018. There are 259 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2007: A 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech kills 32 people in the deadliest campus shooting in US history.

OTHER EVENTS

1746: The Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Culloden defeats the last Scottish rebellion seeking the reinstatement of the Stuart dynasty.

1804: War between British East India Company and Holkar of Indore begins in India.

1818: The Rush-Bagot agreement is ratified between the US and Canada, which leads to the creation of the world’s largest demilitarised, unfortified national border.

1856: Declaration of Paris abolishes privateering, defines nature of contraband and blockade, and recognises principle of “free ships, free goods”.

1862: France’s Napoleon III declares war against Benito Juarez, the Mexican leader.

1900: The first books of US postage stamps are issued.

1906: Pacific cable between United States and China is completed.

1917: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returns to Russia after years of exile.

1922: Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and the Soviet Union recognises the Soviet Union as a “great power” and leads to resumption of diplomatic and trade relations.

1942: India’s Congress party rejects terms of self-government offered by Britain.

1944: The city of Seattle, Washington, suffers a severe labour shortage.

1945: US troops enter Nuremberg, Germany, in World War II; in his first speech to Congress, President Harry S Truman pledges to carry out the war and peace policies of his predecessor, President Franklin D Roosevelt.

1947: Fires and explosions wreck Texas City, Texas, as French freighter Grandcamp, loaded with ammonium nitrate fertiliser blows up. Another ship explodes the next day. The disaster kills more than 500 people and leaves 200 others missing.

1970: Alpine avalanche plunges down on a children’s sanitarium at Sallanches, France, killing 72 people.

1975: Cambodian Government in Phnom Penh asks for truce and offers to yield to Khmer Rouge forces sweeping into city.

1987: The US Federal Communications Commission warns broadcasters it plans to impose a broader definition of indecency over the airwaves.

1988: Israeli commando unit, commanded by Ehud Barak — later to become prime minister — kills Palestine Liberation Organization military commander Abu Jihad in Tunis.

1989: Three bomb blasts on the fifth day of ceasefire kills one man and injures 20 people in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

2001: Israel launches an air strike against a Syrian radar station, the first time Israel had targeted a significant Syrian outpost in almost two decades.

2002: Premier Wim Kok and the members of his ruling three-party coalition resign en masse in response to a published report that faulted the Dutch government and the UN in a 1995 massacre by Serbs of more than 7,500 Muslims in Srebrenica, Bosnia.

2003: The European Union holds a ceremony in Athens, Greece, where 10 nations scheduled to join the group in May 2004 sign an accession treaty. The 10 prospective members are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

2004: Colombian authorities announce an embarrassing discovery as Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo arrives to discuss anti-drug strategies: a large stash of cocaine and heroin on the naval warship he is to visit.

2006: A passenger train in northern Greece crashes into a truck at a crossing and derails, killing three people and injuring at least 40.

2008: The US military frees AP photographer Bilal Hussein after more than two years in custody in Baghdad.

2009: President Barack Obama pledges in Mexico to help a deeply troubled neighbour in its battle against drugs and violence, including action to slow the dangerous flow of weapons from the United States.

2010: Thick drifts of volcanic ash blanket parts of rural Iceland as a vast, invisible plume of grit drifts over Europe, emptying the skies of planes and sending hundreds of thousands in search of hotel rooms, train tickets or rental cars.

2011: President Raul Castro draws a line in the Caribbean sand across which Cuba’s economic reforms must never go, telling delegates to a key Communist Party summit that he has rejected dozens of suggested reforms that would have allowed the concentration of property in private hands.

2013: The International Monetary Fund lowers its outlook for the global economy this year, predicting that government spending cuts will slow US growth and keep the euro currency alliance in recession.

2014: Scores of female students kidnapped by Islamic militants from a north-eastern Nigerian school are freed.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Jacques Thibaut, French novelist (1844-1924); Charles Chaplin, English-born actor-director (1889-1977); Henry Mancini, US composer-conductor (1924-1994); Herbie Mann, US musician (1930-2003); Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (1940- ); Ellen Barkin, US actress (1954- ); Martin Lawrence, US actor/comedian (1965- )

— AP