Monday, July 6

Today is Monday, July 6, the 187th day of 2015. There are 178 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

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 - 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 southeastern Europe sends temperatures soaring to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit), killing 25 people.

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.

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 CIA operative’s name.

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

2009 - Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev commit to a year-end deal to slash nuclear stockpiles by about a third, but the U.S. 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 neighbors is a violation of French values.

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 northeast.

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, U.S. actress (1927-2004); Merv Griffin, entertainment mogul/former talk show host (1925-2007); Sylvester Stallone, U.S. actor (1946--); the Dalai Lama, exiled Tibetan leader (1935--); Nanci Griffith, U.S country singer (1953--); Geoffrey Rush, actor (1951--).

Thought For Today:

Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form. — Andre Maurois, French author (1885-1967).