Today is the 148th day of 2018. There are 217 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1929: The first all-colour talking picture, On with the Show! , produced by Warner Bros, opens in New York.

OTHE EVENTS

1533: The archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, declares the marriage of England’s King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn valid.

1674: Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I declares war on France.

1863: The first black regiment from the North leaves Boston to fight in the American Civil War.

1864: Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian lands in Veracruz, Mexico, to become emperor.

1892: The Sierra Club is organised in San Francisco.

1912: The Senate Commerce Committee issues its report on the Titanic disaster that cites a “state of absolute unpreparedness”, improperly tested safety equipment, and an “indifference to danger” as some of the causes of an “unnecessary tragedy”.

1918: American troops fight their first major battle during World War I as they launch an offensive against the German-held French village of Cantigny; the Americans succeed in capturing the village.

1923: The US attorney general determines it is legal for women to wear trousers.

1934: The Dionne quintuplets — Annette, Cecile, Emilie, Marie and Yvonne — are born to Elzire Dionne at the family farm in Ontario, Canada.

1937: President Franklin D Roosevelt pushes a button in Washington signalling that vehicular traffic could begin crossing the just-opened Golden Gate Bridge in California. Neville Chamberlain becomes prime minister of Britain. In Nazi Germany, Volkswagen is founded by the German Labour Front.

1940: During World War II, the Belgian army surrenders to invading German forces.

1957: National League owners give permission for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to move to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

1961: Paris-Bucharest Orient Express train makes final trip after 78 years; human rights organisation Amnesty International is founded.

1968: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the band’s debut album, is released by Fantasy Records.

1971: Soviet Union launches spacecraft toward planet Mars, containing the first capsules to land on the planet.

1987: To the embarrassment of Soviet officials, Mathias Rust, a young West German pilot, lands a private plane in Moscow’s Red Square without authorisation. (Rust is freed by the Soviets the following year).

1992: To raise pressure on Haiti, the United States announces it will close the refugee camp at the naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and bar ships that trade with Haiti from US ports.

1995: At least 1,500 people die in an earthquake that destroys a coastal village on Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East.

1998: Comic actor Phil Hartman, 49, of Saturday Night Live and NewsRadio fame is shot to death at his home in Encino, California, by his wife Brynn, who then kills herself.

2002: The Libyan Government offers to pay US$2.7 billion to the families of 270 victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in exchange for an end to US and UN sanctions against Libya.

2006: Pope Benedict XVI visits the Auschwitz concentration camp as “a son of the German people” and asks God why he remained silent during the “unprecedented mass crimes” of the Holocaust.

2007: The United States and Iran break a 27-year diplomatic freeze with a four-hour meeting in Baghdad about Iraqi security.

2008: The White House reacts angrily to a highly critical memoir by President George W Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, who writes that Bush had relied on an aggressive “political propaganda campaign”, instead of the truth to sell the Iraq war. Nepal’s lawmakers abolish the monarchy and declare the country a republic, ending 239 years of royal rule.

2013: Calling it perhaps the biggest money-laundering scheme in US history, federal prosecutors charge seven people with running what amounted to an online, underworld bank, saying that Liberty Reserve handled US$6 billion for drug dealers, child pornographers, identity thieves, and other criminals around the globe.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

William Pitt, English statesman (1759-1806); Edouard Benes, Czechoslovak statesman (1884-1948); Ian Fleming, British writer (1908-1964); Patrick White, Australian author (1912-1990); Carroll Baker, US actress (1931- ); Gladys Knight, US singer (1944- ); Jeff Fenech, Australian boxer (1964- ); Kylie Minogue, Australian singer (1968- )

— AP