Today is the 198th day of 2023. There are 167 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

180: Six inhabitants of Carthage, North Africa, are executed for being Christians — the earliest record of Christianity in this part of the world.

OTHER EVENTS

1453: The French defeat the English at the battle of Castillon, ending the Hundred Years’ War.

1586: Sir Francis Walsingham, diplomat and principal secretary to England’s Queen Elizabeth, exposes the Babington Plot — a letter from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Anthony Babington planning Queen Elizabeth’s murder; Mary is executed a year later.

1762: Peter III, Czar of Russia, is assassinated a week after he abdicates the throne.

1917: During World War I the British royal family adopts the name Windsor, replacing the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

1918: The last Russian czar, Nicholas II, and his family are killed by communists when a Bolshevik firing squad executes them in the basement of Ipatiev House, following the October Revolution, in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg, Siberia.

1945: US President Harry S Truman, British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin meet at Potsdam, Germany, to settle the post-World War II future of Europe, in a conference that lasts until August 2.

1955: The first Disney amusement park, Disneyland, opens its gates in Anaheim, California.

1976: The 21st modern Olympic games opens in Montreal; 25 African teams (later rising to 33 nations) boycott the games due to New Zealand playing rugby in apartheid South Africa.

1991: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H W Bush announce a treaty to make historic cuts in nuclear weapons.

1994: Brazil makes World Cup soccer history with a fourth title.

2011: An intensifying voicemail hacking and police bribery scandal cuts closer than ever to Rupert Murdoch and Scotland Yard with the arrest of the media magnate’s former British newspaper chief and the resignation of London’s police commissioner.

2015: Scientists solve the mystery of a sleeping sickness in two villages in northern Kazakhstan — uranium mining had caused an increase in carbon monoxide.

2016: Eric Garner, an unarmed black man accused of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, dies shortly after being wrestled to the ground by New York City police officers; a video of the takedown shows Garner repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe.” All 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 are killed when the Boeing 777 is shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine. Microsoft announces the biggest layoffs in its 39-year history, outlining plans to cut 18,000 jobs.

2017: The latest Republican effort to repeal and replace “Obamacare” is dealt a fatal blow in the Senate when two more Republican senators announce their opposition to the measure. A white former Texas police officer, Roy Oliver, is indicted on a murder charge in the April shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, who was in a car with four other black teens.

2018: Bloomberg estimates NFL made US$14 billion in revenue in 2017, distributing a record US$8.1 billion to the league’s 32 teams, US$255 million each.

2019: World Health Organization declares the DR Congo Ebola outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern”.

2020: American civil rights leader and politician John Lewis — who helped lead the march halted by police violence on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, a landmark event in the history of the civil rights movement — dies at age 80.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), German and the first US multimillionaire; Diahann Carroll, US actress-singer (1935-2019); Donald Sutherland, Canadian actor (1935- ); Camilla, queen of the United Kingdom (1947- ); David Hasselhoff, US actor (1952- ); Angela Merkel, German chancellor (1954- ); Wong Kar-Wai, Chinese director (1958- ); Terence Tao Australian mathematician (1975- )

– AP