May 18: Haitian Flag Day in Haiti (1803); Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Crimean Tatar Genocide in Ukraine; Victoria Day in Canada

Aimee Semple McPherson

• 1388 – At the Battle of Buir Lake, a Ming Chinese army led by general Lan Yu defeated the forces of Tögüs Temür, the Mongol khan of Northern Yuan.
• 1926 – Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (pictured) was reportedly kidnapped near Venice Beach in Los Angeles before reappearing five weeks later in Mexico.
• 1936 – In a crime that captivated Japan, Sada Abe strangled her lover, cut off his genitals, and carried them around with her for several days until her arrest.
• 2006 – The Parliament of Nepal unanimously voted to strip King Gyanendra of many of his powers.
• 2018 – Cubana de Aviación Flight 0972 crashed near Santiago de las Vegas shortly after takeoff from José Martí International Airport, killing 112 of the 113 people on board.

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Templeton Library

• ... that a library of religion and science in Tennessee (pictured) never opened to the public?
• ... that the 2020 series finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars brought back the actor who played Darth Maul in Phantom Menace in 1999 to perform a fight scene?
• ... that Byzantine archers hoisted at the ships' masts during the siege of Panormus were elevated above the city walls and caused its Gothic garrison to surrender?
• ... that Edward Hopper painted flowers just once in a major work, dismissing them as fit only for "lady painters"?
• ... that teenage vocalist Alda Risma won Best Pop Female Solo Artist at the Indonesian Music Awards for her debut album?
• ... that Domino's reported what at the time was its biggest day of sales during O. J. Simpson's white Bronco chase?
• ... that Frederick McAlpine called his own party a "Pinocchio government"?
• ... that the Nik-O-Lok Company installed coin-operated locks on an estimated 40,000 toilet stalls before the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America got them banned?
• ... that children smoked their priest off his pulpit before Christ Church was completed?

The Sursock bronze is a gilded bronze sculptural group of Heliopolitan Jupiter dating to the 2nd century AD. A miniature of the cult statue that stood in the Great Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, it depicts the god as a beardless youth wearing a kalathos, a basket-shaped headdress, and an ependytes, a close-fitting dress, under ornate armor. The front of the armor bears busts of seven deities associated with celestial bodies—Sol, Luna, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Juno (replacing Venus), and Saturn—arranged in an order encoding both the Chaldean sequence of planets and the days of the Roman week. The piece illustrates the syncretism of Canaanite, Greek, and Roman traditions, tracing the evolution of Heliopolitan Jupiter from the Canaanite storm god Baal Hadad into a cosmic deity of planetary order and prophecy. Named after its former owner, the Beiruti aristocrat Charles Sursock, and acquired by the Louvre in 1939, the piece inaugurated the first issue of Syria, the leading French journal of Levantine archaeology, in 1920. (Full article...)