Today is the 191st day of 2018. There are 174 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

2006: Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, responsible for terror attacks that led to the deaths of more than 800 people, is killed when a dynamite-laden truck in his convoy explodes.

Other Events

1559: Mary, Queen of Scots, claims title of Queen of England in opposition to Elizabeth I. Her political actions provoke rebellion among the Scottish nobles and she is beheaded in 1587 as a Catholic threat to the English throne.

1609: The Catholic League is formed in Munich to oppose the Protestant Union, raising tensions in Germany that erupts in Thirty Years’ War.

1897: French forces reach Fashoda in the Sudan, two months ahead of the British expedition trying to establish a north-south corridor through Africa.

1943: Allied forces land in Sicily, Italy, during World War II.

1962: Telstar satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bringing live television from the United States to Europe for the first time.

1973: The Bahamas gains independence after three centuries of British rule.

1976: Four mercenaries — three British and one American — are executed by firing squad in Angola as three rebel movements struggle for power after the country’s decolonisation from Portugal in 1975.

1985: Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior is bombed by French saboteurs in Auckland, New Zealand.

1989: Rocket barrage kills 20 people in Kabul, Afghanistan.

1990: Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev is re-elected leader of Soviet Communist Party.

1991: Boris Yeltsin takes oath of office as first elected president of Russia; US President George H W Bush lifts economic sanctions against South Africa.

1992: Polish Parliament approves the country’s first woman prime minister, Hanna Suchocka.

1993: Georgian forces break through separatist lines along the only road to Sukhumi, the capital of the breakaway Abkhazia region, ending a week-long blockade.

1995: Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is freed from house arrest in Rangoon, Burma, now known as Yangon, Myanmar, days before completing her six-year detention.

1996: Unmanned Galileo spacecraft captures stunning close-up pictures of Ganymede, Jupiter’s biggest moon.

1997: Some 100,000 people demonstrate in London against proposed ban of fox hunting.

1998: A UN conference produces a draft treaty on a world criminal court that would grant the prosecutor sweeping authority, a measure vigorously opposed by the US.

1999: Six nations fighting in Congo’s civil war sign a long-awaited peace accord, but squabbling rebels balk, dashing hopes for a speedy end to the continent’s biggest conflict.

2000: A mountain of garbage loosened by rain collapses and bursts into flames at the biggest dump in Manila, Philippines, flattening squatters’ shanties and killing at least 216 people.

2001: A New York jury spares the life of a Tanzanian national in the deadly 1998 bombing of a US embassy in Africa, opting instead for a sentence of life in prison without parole.

2002: Marine archaeologists discover the PT-109 warship piloted by the late US President John F Kennedy during World War II off the Soloman Islands.

2004: Saudi Arabia says it will hold municipal elections in September, the first polls to be held in decades in the conservative kingdom where political parties are banned and press freedoms are limited.

2005: A militant Kurdish group claims responsibility for a bombing in a resort town on Turkey’s Aegean coast that wounds 20 people, including two foreign tourists.

2007: Pakistani troops storm the compound of Islamabad’s Red Mosque after a week-long stand-off, prompting a fierce firefight with pro-Taliban militants accused of holding about 150 hostages inside. At least 50 rebels and eight soldiers are killed.

2008: Kuwait announces it will name its first ambassador to Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded the country in 1990, a major step in healing the two countries’ painful past.

2009: Pope Benedict XVI stresses the church’s opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama, pressing the Vatican’s case with the US leader who is already under fire on those issues from some conservative US Roman Catholics and bishops.

2010: Psychologists in the United States are warned by their professional group not to take part in torturing detainees in US custody.

2011: Rupert Murdoch swoops into Britain to face the growing phone-hacking scandal that prompted the closure of his News of the World tabloid and threatens to derail a US$19-billion broadcasting deal.

2013: Canadian officials tell distraught families that 30 people still missing after the fiery crash of a runaway oil train in eastern Quebec are all presumed dead, bringing death toll in the derailment and explosion to 50.

Today’s Birthdays

Jean Calvin, French religious reformer (1509-1564); Camille Pissarro, French painter (1830-1903); Marcel Proust, French writer (1871-1922); Toyohiko Kagawa, Japanese writer (1888-1960); Giorgio de Chirico, Italian painter (1888-1978); Saul Bellow, US writer (1915-2005); Hugo Banzer, president of Bolivia (1926-2002); Arthur Ashe, US tennis player (1943-1993); Jessica Simpson, pop singer/actress (1980- )

— AP