Today is the 142nd day of 2018. There are 223 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1868: The Great Train Robbery takes place near Marshfield, Indiana, as seven members of the Reno gang make off with $96,000 in cash, gold and bonds.

OTHER EVENTS

1761: The first life insurance policy in the United States is issued in Philadelphia.

1819: The American steamboat Savannah makes its first trans-Atlantic crossing.

1833: A new constitution in Chile gives greater power to the president and establishes Roman Catholicism as State religion.

1822: United States and Korea sign treaty of peace and friendship.

1840: Transportation of British convicts to New South Wales, Australia, officially ends.

1867: Canada becomes the first dominion of the British Empire, gaining a parliament, cabinet and large measure of independence.

1914: Britain acquires control of oil properties in Gulf from Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

1939: Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini sign ‘Pact of Steel’, a 10-year political and military alliance.

1969: The lunar module of Apollo 10 separates from the command module and flies to within 14 kilometres (nine miles) of the moon’s surface in a dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing.

1972: Richard Nixon becomes the first US president to visit Russia, where he signs a pact with Leonid Brezhnev to reduce the risk of military confrontation; the island nation of Ceylon becomes the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka with the adoption of a new constitution.

1975: White-ruled African nation of Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, is expelled from Olympics because of its racial policies.

1985: A car bomb explodes in a Beirut suburb, killing 60 people and wounding 190 others.

1989: India successfully test-fires its first medium-range surface-to-surface missile.

1990: After years of conflict, pro-Western North Yemen and pro-Soviet South Yemen merge to form the Republic of Yemen.

1992: The United States slaps political and diplomatic sanctions against Serbia for perpetuating a “humanitarian nightmare” in the Balkans.

1994: Tutsi rebels capture international airport in Rwanda’s capital and overrun military base nearby.

1995: Half a million Poles turn out to catch a glimpse of their native son Pope John Paul II during his 10-hour visit in southern Poland.

1996: American and French planes carry foreigners out of Bangui, Central African Republic, as President Ange-Felix Patasse rejects army mutineers’ demands that he resign.

1998: Voters in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland vote overwhelmingly for a peace agreement to end 20 years of sectarian strife.

2006: US warplanes hunting Taliban fighters bomb a religious school and mud-brick homes in southern Afghanistan, killing dozens of suspected militants and 17 civilians in one of the deadliest strikes since the American-led invasion in 2001.

2008: A Texas appeals court says the state had no right to take more than 400 children from a polygamist group’s ranch the previous month; the children are returned to their parents. Britain’s Conservative Party wins a special election that was viewed as a rebuke to Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Gordon Brown.

2011: Armed supporters of Yemen’s leader trap US, European and Arab ambassadors at a diplomatic mission in new turmoil that sweeps across the capital as the president refuses to sign an agreement calling for him to step down in 30 days.

2012: Opening a new, entrepreneurial era in spaceflight, a ship built by a billionaire businessman speeds toward the International Space Station with a load of groceries and other supplies after a spectacular middle-of-the-night blastoff.

2013: Two men with butcher knives hack another man to death near a military barracks in London before police wound them in a shoot-out in what authorities say appears to be an act of terrorism.

2014: Pro-Russian insurgents attack a military checkpoint in eastern Ukraine, killing 16 soldiers in the deadliest raid yet on the nation’s soldiers.

2017: A suicide bomber sets off an improvised explosive device that killed 22 people at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. In a historic gesture, President Donald Trump solemnly places a note in the ancient stones of Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Richard Wagner, German composer (1813-1883); Mary Cassatt, US Impressionist painter (1844-1926); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, English author (1859-1930); Daniel F Malan, South African statesman, instituted apartheid (1874-1959); Sir Laurence Olivier, English actor (1907-1989); Bernard Shaw, US journalist (1940- ); Naomi Campbell, British model (1970- ); Bernie Taupin, songwriter (1950- )

— AP