Today is the 150th day of 2018. There are 215 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2017: Kathy Griffin appears in a brief video holding what looked like President Trump’s bloody, severed head; the comic ended up apologising, saying she had gone way too far.

OTHER EVENTS

1431: After being handed over by the church, who judged her a heretic, Joan of Arc is burned at the stake in Rouen, France, by the English and their French collaborators.

1588: Spanish Armada under Duke of Medina sails from Lisbon for England.

1593: Playwright Christopher Marlowe is killed in a lodging house brawl outside London.

1606: Sikh Guru Arjun is tortured to death in Lahore — now part of Pakistan — on the orders of Mughal Emperor Jahangir, becoming Sikhism’s first martyr.

1808: France’s Napoleon Bonaparte annexes Tuscany in Italy.

1814: First Treaty of Paris is signed between European countries and France, ending Napoleonic wars until the return of Napoleon from exile on Elba.

1913: Turkey loses almost all of its European holdings to the Balkan states in a treaty signed in London, ending the First Balkan War.

1925: British police kill 13 demonstrators in Shanghai, provoking months of demonstrations and boycotts against British goods in China. The incident greatly bolsters the tiny Communist party.

1942: British convoy reaches Murmansk, Soviet Union, despite heavy air attacks in World War II; Britain’s Royal Air Force stages massive raid on Cologne, Germany.

1943: American forces secure the Aleutian island of Attu from the Japanese during World War II.

1958: Unidentified US soldiers killed in World War II and the Korean conflict are buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

1961: Rafael Trujillo, dictator of Dominican Republic, is assassinated by machine-gun fire while driving.

1963: Official death toll in windstorm that struck East Pakistan is put at 10,000.

1967: Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein sign a mutual defence treaty, prompting Israel to strike pre-emptively a week later, starting the Six-Day War.

1987: Mob of militant low-caste villagers massacre at least 42 members of upper-caste landlord families in India’s impoverished eastern state of Bihar.

1989: Student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing erect a 33-foot (10-metre) statue they call the “Goddess of Democracy”.

1990: Israeli soldiers kill four Palestinian guerrillas and capture 12 as they speed toward the coastline, apparently to launch attacks coinciding with Jewish holiday of Shavuot.

1991: Car bomb explodes near Civil Guard barracks in Vic, Spain, killing at least nine people and injuring 50.

1992: The UN Security Council imposes trade sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro.

1993: Heavy machine gun and artillery fire booms in Kabul, Afghanistan, as rival Muslim guerrilla factions shatter a weeklong truce.

1994: Israel releases hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as part of its autonomy agreement with the PLO.

1996: Britain’s Prince Andrew and the former Sarah Ferguson are granted an uncontested decree ending their 10-year marriage.

1998: A powerful earthquake rocks northern Afghanistan, burying entire villages and killing thousands of people.

1999: Fifty-two teenagers are trampled to death as they try to escape a sudden hailstorm that interrupted an outdoor rock concert in Minsk, Belarus.

2000: Moving to end Fiji’s leadership crisis, the country’s army commander imposes martial law and begins to isolate the rebels who have been holding the prime minister and other government officials hostage.

2003: The UN Security Council votes unanimously to send a peacekeeping force to Congo’s north-eastern Ituri province. The European Union approves the force to restore order and security in a region plagued by violence among ethnic militias.

2007: Mountaineering officials confirm that Katsusuke Yanagisawa, a retired schoolteacher, became the oldest person to climb Mount Everest at 71 years, two months and two days old when he reached the 29,035-foot (8,850-metre) peak on May 22.

2008: Zimbabwe’s main opposition group declares itself the country’s new ruling party and convenes what it calls a session of parliament, in defiance of President Robert Mugabe. A construction crane snaps and smashes into an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, killing two workers in New York City’s second such tragedy in 2 1/2 months. Diplomats from 111 nations meeting in Dublin, Ireland, formally adopt a landmark treaty banning cluster bombs. (The United States and other leading cluster bomb makers — Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan — boycotted the talks.) Lorenzo Odone, whose parents’ battled to save him from the rare nerve disease ALD inspired Lorenzo’s Oil dies in Fairfax, Virginia, a day after his 30th birthday.

2009: Lebanon charges four people with collaborating with Israel, bringing to 23 the number of suspected spies who have been charged in the past few months.

2010: China holds back from joining the chorus of nations condemning North Korea over the sinking of a South Korean warship, making quick international sanctions unlikely but perhaps buying time while China quietly leans on its unpredictable, nuclear-armed neighbour.

2011: Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, announces plans to abandon nuclear energy over the next 11 years, outlining an ambitious strategy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster to replace atomic power with renewable energy sources.

2012: Iran and other Mideast countries are hit with a computer virus that can eavesdrop on computer users and their co-workers and filch information from nearby cellphones. Suspicion immediately falls on Israel.

2013: Syria’s President Bashar Assad says in an interview with Lebanese television that he is “confident of victory” in his country’s civil war, and he warned Damascus would retaliate for any future Israeli air strike on his territory.

2017: The Pentagon scores an important success in a test of its oft-criticised missile defence programme, destroying a mock warhead over the Pacific Ocean with an interceptor. Michael Dubke, a top communications aide to US President Donald Trump, announces his resignation.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Mikhail Bakunin, Russian anarchist (1814-1876); Howard Hawks, US film director (1896-1977); Hannes Alfven, Swedish astrophysicist/Nobel Prize laureate (1908-1995); Mel Blanc, US entertainer (1908-1989); Benny Goodman, US musician (1909-1986); Clint Walker, actor (1927-2018); Wynonna Judd, US country singer (1964- )

— AP