Today is the 213th day of 2018. There are 152 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1936: The Olympic games open in Berlin with a ceremony presided over by Adolf Hitler.

OTHER EVENTS

1291: The Swiss cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Nidwalden sign a mutual defence pact and are later joined by surrounding areas to form the Republic of Switzerland. It is the oldest government still in existence.

1560: Scotland’s Parliament abolishes papal jurisdiction and approves a Calvinistic confession of faith, thus founding the Church of Scotland.

1589: Henry III, the last of the Valois line of French kings, is fatally stabbed by a Jacobin monk while laying siege to Paris, occupied by Catholic rebels.

1625: The British Parliament moves to Oxford to save itself from decimation as the black plague rages through London, killing thousands each week.

1714: Britain’s Queen Anne dies at age 49; she was succeeded by George I.

1790: The first US census is completed; showing a population of 4 million people.

1798: Britain’s Admiral Horatio Nelson destroys French fleet in Battle of the Nile, stranding Napoleon Bonaparte and his forces in Egypt.

1807: Jerome Bonaparte becomes King of Westphalia, created from former Prussian possessions west of Elbe River.

1876: Colorado is admitted as the 38th US state.

1894: Japan and China declare war on each other over dominance in Korea. China is forced to cede Taiwan when the war ends after a year.

1911: Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to receive a US pilot’s certificate from the Aero Club of America. (Quimby’s accomplishments included being the first woman to fly across the English Channel; she was killed in an accident in July 1912 at age 37.)

1914: Germany declares war on Russia at the start of World War I.

1927: Communists rise in Nanchang, China, and hold the city for a few days. The event is now celebrated as the origin of the People’s Liberation Army.

1944: The people of Warsaw rise against the Nazis, in the hope of liberating the city before the arrival of the Red Army. The city is largely destroyed in two months of fighting.

1957: The United States and Canada announce they have agreed to create the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD).

1958: Jordan’s King Hussein dissolves federation of Jordan with Iraq.

1966: The Chinese Communist Party opens a meeting that declares the start of the ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution, which lasts 10 years. Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, goes on an armed rampage at the University of Texas in Austin that killed 14 people, most of whom were shot by Whitman while he was perched in the clock tower of the main campus building. (Whitman, who had also slain his wife and mother hours earlier, was finally gunned down by police.)

1975: Leaders of 35 nations meet in Helsinki, Finland, and affirm a peace charter in Europe.

1981: Rock-music video channel MTV makes its first broadcast.

1988: An explosion by the Irish Republican Army kills a British soldier at an army barracks in London and wounds 10 others. The attack was the first by the IRA on the British mainland since 1984.

1990: Talks between Iraq and Kuwait over oil and border disputes break off, with 100,000 Iraqi troops massed on the Kuwaiti border.

1993: The US Coast Guard stops listening for Morse code distress signals on the 500-kilohertz radio frequency, which it had monitored continuously since 1924.

1994: Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley confirmed they’d been secretly married 11 weeks earlier. (Presley files for divorce from Jackson in January 1996, citing irreconcilable differences.)

1995: A Swiss woman, Bea Wyler, 44, becomes Germany’s first female rabbi since the Holocaust. The appointment stirs controversy within Germany’s Jewish community.

1996: Former Nazi SS Captain Erich Priebke is absolved by a military court in Rome of charges for a World War II massacre of 335 Italian civilians.

1997: Rocket fire sends more than 7,000 Cambodian refugees fleeing to Thailand as forces of coup leader Hun Sen attack rival bases along the border.

1998: Milan Kovacevic, a Serb doctor implicated in some 2,000 deaths in concentration camps during the Bosnia-Herzegovina war, dies of a heart attack weeks after the start of his trial on war crimes charges in The Hague, Netherlands.

1999: Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat meets with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a leftist Palestinian faction opposed to the peace process. It is the first such meeting since the 1993 Oslo accord with Israel.

2000: Philippine ambassador Leonides Caday escapes assassination in Indonesia when a bomb blows up his car; Philippine Muslim separatists are blamed for the attack, which killed two people and injured 20.

2001: Azerbaijan switches to the Latin alphabet from Cyrillic to reduce Russian influence on Azeri culture. Pro Bowl tackle Korey Stringer, 27, dies of heat stroke, a day after collapsing at the Minnesota Vikings’ training camp on the hottest day of the year.

2002: Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri invites UN weapons inspectors to visit Iraq for the first time since 1998.

2003: A suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden truck in Russia smashes through the gates of a military hospital in the southern republic of North Ossetia and kills 50 people.

2004: Assailants trigger a coordinated series of explosions outside five churches in Baghdad and Mosul during evening services, killing 11 people and injuring more than 50 others in the first major assault on Iraq’s Christian minority since the 15-month-old insurgency began.

2007: A bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, jammed with rush-hour traffic suddenly breaks into huge sections and collapses into the Mississippi River, pitching dozens of cars 60 feet (18 metres) into the water and killing at least four people. The eight-lane Interstate 35W bridge, a major Minneapolis artery, collapses into the Mississippi River during evening rush hour, killing 13 people.

2008: At least 32 people are killed after a train catches fire in southern India. Some 30 mountaineers begin a disastrous attempt to scale K2 in Pakistan; 11 of them die in a series of accidents, including icefalls. Crowds of Chinese watched a total solar eclipse along the country’s ancient Silk Road, one week before the start of the Summer Games in Beijing.

2010: The death toll from massive floods in north-western Pakistan rises to 1,100 as rescue workers struggle to save more than 27,000 people still trapped by the raging water.

2011: Muqtada al-Sadr lambasts the American “enemy” in Iraq during his first speech in the country since returning from exile, fiery rhetoric from a new powerbroker in the government that will make it difficult to extend the US military deployment beyond the end of this year.

2013: Russia defies the United States and grants Edward Snowden temporary asylum, allowing the National Security Agency leaker to slip out of Moscow airport where he has been hold up for weeks in hopes of evading espionage charges back home. US President Barack Obama faces congressional critics of the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ telephone records as he and US Vice-President Joe Biden joined lawmakers on both sides of the issue for an Oval Office meeting.

2018: By a vote of 92-5, the Senate confirms US President Donald Trump’s nomination of Christopher Wray as FBI director. He replaced James Comey, who was fired by Trump amid the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Herman Melville, US author (1819-1891); Richard Henry Dana, US writer (1815-1862); Yves St Laurent, French fashion designer (1936-2008) ; Dom DeLuise, US actor (1933-2009); Chuck D, US rapper (1960- ); Coolio, US rapper (1963- ); Sam Mendes, British film director (1965- ); Tempestt Bledsoe, US actress (1973- )

— AP