Today is the 187th day of 2012. There are 179 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight

1975: Arthur Ashe becomes the first black man to win a Wimbledon singles title as he defeats Jimmy Connors.

Other Events

1556: France's King Henry II renews war against Hapsburgs, one of the principal sovereign dynasties of Europe, in Italy.

1587: Sir Francis Drake leads an expedition into the port of Cadiz, Spain, and ravages the Spanish coast. He destroyed so many vessels that the Spaniards had to delay their invasion of England for a year.

1811: Venezuela becomes first South American country to declare its independence from Spain.

1812: Britain makes peace with Russia and Sweden.

1830: French invade Algeria and take Algiers, seizing private and religious buildings and a vast portion of the country's arable land. The colonisation of Algeria was seen as a way of providing employment for veterans of the Napoleonic wars.

1865: Methodist minister William Booth founds the Christian Revival Association, later to become the Salvation Army, in London.

1932: Right-wing politician Antonio de Oliveira Salazar becomes Portugal's prime minister. He soon creates an authoritarian political order that lasts until 1974.

1940: Vichy government in France breaks off relations with Britain in World War II.

1943: German offensive on Russian front begins with Battle of Kursk in World War II.

1959: President Sukarno dissolves Indonesia's Constituent Assembly.

1969: Tom Mboya, likely successor to Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, is assassinated in Nairobi.

1973: General Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, comes to power in Rwanda in a bloodless coup, and remains president until his death in a plane crash in 1994.

1975: The Cape Verde Islands become independent after 500 years of Portuguese rule.

1977: Pakistan army seizes power in bloodless coup that unseats Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

1988: Iran's president says the country has the "right to avenge" the airliner shot down by a US warship.

1994: Thousands of jubilant Palestinians greet PLO leader Yasser Arafat when he returns to the West Bank for the first time in 27 years and swears in the self-rule government.

1995: Flouting a UN ban on military flights over Bosnia, a suspected Serb warplane fires rockets at a strategic power plant in government-held territory.

1997: Hun Sen, one of the battling prime ministers of Cambodia, gains control of one military base near Phnom Penh and surrounds another.

1998: Protestants erect road blocks in Northern Ireland after the Orange Order is stopped by police from marching through the Catholic neighbourhood of Portadown.

1999: Caribbean leaders gather for a summit in Trinidad to discuss issues such as the sugar and banana trade, and the development of a regional supreme court.

2000: The UN Security Council imposes an 18-month diamond ban on Sierra Leone's rebels in a bid to strangle their ability to finance a civil war.

2001: Former Argentine President Carlos Menem is indicted by a federal judge for heading up an "illicit organisation" that sold rifles and artillery to Croatia in 1991 and Ecuador in 1995 in violation of UN embargoes.

2002: South Africa's Constitutional Court orders President Thabo Mbeki to provide the antiretroviral drug nevirapine to pregnant women in state hospitals who were infected with HIV.

2003: Two female suicide bombers kill themselves and at least 14 others at Tushino airfield on the outskirts of Moscow, where an annual outdoor rock music festival was being held.

2004: The prosecutor for a UN-sponsored war crimes court opens the first trials for rebel military commanders accused in a vicious 10-year campaign for control of diamond-rich Sierra Leone.

2005: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government criticises the US military for killing up to 17 civilians in an airstrike and orders an immediate investigation.

2006: NATO calls for a firm international response to North Korea's missile tests, which the military alliance condemns as a threat to security in Asia and the wider world.

2008: Seven-hour shootout between Russian soldiers and suspected militants in the republic of Ingushetia leaves two dead on each side.

2010: US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rebukes Russia for failing to live up to the ceasefire agreement it signed nearly two years ago to end the fighting in the small former Soviet state of Georgia where she says Moscow is building permanent military bases.

2011: A Bahraini opposition figure says reconciliation talks between the Sunni monarchy and the Shiite opposition started for the first time since anti-government protests erupted in the Gulf kingdom.

— AP