Today is the 188th day of 2020. There are 178 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2005: New York Times reporter Judith Miller is jailed for refusing to divulge a confidential source to a grand jury investigating the Bush Administration’s leak of an undercover Central Intelligence Agency operative’s name.

OTHER EVENTS

1535: Sir Thomas More is executed in England on the orders of Henry VIII for advocating separation of church and State.

1699: Pirate Captain William Kidd is taken into custody in Boston, Massachusetts. He is later hanged in England.

1747: France and Spain break combined blockade by British fleet and troops of Austria’s Maria Theresa at Genoa, Italy.

1809: Pope Pius VII, having excommunicated Napoleon Bonaparte, is taken prisoner by the French.

1908: Young Turks under Niazi Bey stage revolt at Resina in Macedonia. Government troops sent to quell the riot desert.

1917: Arab horsemen led by British officer T E Lawrence — also known as Lawrence of Arabia — capture the heavily garrisoned Turkish fort at Aqaba.

1919: British dirigible lands at New York’s Roosevelt Field, marking first crossing of Atlantic Ocean by an airship.

1923: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is formed.

1945: Nicaragua becomes first nation formally to accept United Nations charter.

1964: Nyasaland Protectorate, renamed Malawi, becomes independent within British Commonwealth.

1967: Fighting breaks out between Nigerian troops and those of the newly proclaimed “Republic of Biafra”. The fighting later flares into a full-scale, two-year war.

1968: Solomon Islands become independent from Britain.

1971: Kamuzu Banda declares himself president for life in Malawi.

1972: South Vietnamese capture Communist-occupied Quang Tri city.

1986: Two Australians are hanged in Malaysia for drug trafficking, the first Westerners executed under Malaysia’s strict drug laws.

1990: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies pledge to reduce both nuclear and conventional forces in Europe in show of friendship to Soviet Union.

1994: Nigeria’s military government charges Moshood Abiola, winner of an annulled presidential vote in 1993, with treason. He dies in prison in 1998.

1995: Floods cut through some of southern China’s poorest, most isolated areas, raising the death toll to near 600.

1996: Taliban rockets smash into a crowded market in central Kabul, Afghanistan, killing eight people, including five children.

2000: A heat wave baking south-eastern Europe sends temperatures soaring to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit), killing 25 people.

2001: Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen pleads guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy to spy for Russia. Believed to be partly responsible for the deaths of at least three spies, he is later sentenced to life in prison without parole.

2002: Two unidentified gunmen kill Afghan vice-president and Minister of Public Works Haji Abdul Qadir outside his office in Kabul. Qadir’s slaying marks the second assassination of an Afghan cabinet minister in five months since the US -backed post-Taliban Government was formed.

2003: Liberian President Charles Taylor accepts an offer of asylum in nearby Nigeria. US President George W Bush made Taylor’s departure a condition of US troops joining an international peacekeeping force in Liberia.

2004: China confirms a new outbreak of bird flu just four months after claiming to have wiped it out, while Thailand announces a suspected case of the disease that experts fear could jump to humans.

2006: Felipe Calderon wins the official count in Mexico’s disputed presidential race.

2007: Shots are fired as Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s plane takes off from a military base near Islamabad. Police raid nearby home and find two anti-aircraft guns and machine gun on roof.

2009: Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev commit to a year-end deal to slash nuclear stockpiles by about a third, but the US leader fails to crack stubborn Kremlin objections to America’s missile defense plans — a major stumbling block to such an agreement.

2010: France’s justice minister goes before Parliament to defend a hotly debated bill that would ban burqa-style Islamic veils in public, arguing that hiding your face from your neighbours is a violation of French values.

2011: Hundreds of Egyptian protesters lob rocks at the security headquarters and set fire to police cars for a second day in the flashpoint city of Suez as growing impatience over delays in trying former regime officials and police accused of killing protesters threatens to plunge the nation back into crisis.

2012: A top Syrian general’s defection is the first major crack in the upper echelons of President Bashar Assad’s regime, buoying a 100-¢nation conference meant to intensify pressure for his removal, as well as an opposition desperate to bring him down but frustrated by diplomatic efforts.

2013: Islamic militants attack a boarding school before dawn, setting a dormitory ablaze as students slept. At least 30 people were killed in the deadliest attack yet on schools in Nigeria’s embattled north-east.

2014: Israel arrests six Jewish suspects in the grisly slaying of a Palestinian teenager who was abducted and burned alive last week — a crime that set off a wave of violent protests in Arab sections of the country.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Frida Kahlo, Mexican artist (1907-1954); Janet Leigh, US actress (1927-2004); Merv Griffin, entertainment mogul/former talk show host (1925-2007); Sylvester Stallone, US actor (1946- ); the Dalai Lama, exiled Tibetan leader (1935- ); Nanci Griffith, US country singer (1953- ); Geoffrey Rush, actor (1951- ).

— AP