Today is Monday, June 4, the 156th day of 2012. There are 210 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

1783: The Montgolfier brothers fly a hot-air balloon with no passengers in it publicly, for the first time, on a t10-minute flight from the marketplace in their hometown of Annonay, France.

1805: United States concludes a favuorable peace treaty with the pirates of Tripoli.

1859: Austrians are defeated at Magenta by French, who free Milan in Italy.

1878: Turkey turns Cyprus over

to the British.

1896: Henry Ford makes a successful predawn test run of his horseless carriage, called a quadricycle, through the streets of Detroit.

1940: The Allied evacuation from Dunkirk, France, is completed. In a week, a flotilla of navy and civilian ships saved 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops from the invading Germans.

1942: Battle of Midway begins in the Pacific, with US ships inflicting the first decisive defeat of Japanese.

1943: Troops march into Buenos Aires and overthrow government of Argentine President Ramon Castillo.

1944: Allied forces enter Rome in World War II.

1954: French Premier Joseph Laniel and Vietnamese Premier

Buu Loc initial treaties in Paris according “complete independence” to Vietnam.

1956: Egypt announces it will not extend Suez Canal Company’s concession after expiration in 1959, leading to Suez Crisis.

1970: Kingdom of Tonga in

Pacific becomes member of

British Commonwealth.

1974: Death toll from smallpox is listed as at least 10,000 in Indian state of Bihar, one of the worst epidemics since vaccination began.

1984: Indian troops attack the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar to flush out occupying militants. About 1,200 people die in the fighting, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is killed in reprisal by her Sikh bodyguards four months later.

1989: First partially free parliamen-tary elections in Poland in nearly 50 years end Moscow-imposed communist rule.

1992: Russia and other former Soviet republics pledge to slash tanks and other weapons in a landmark arms control accord.

1993: The UN Security Council authorises the United States and its allies to use air strikes against Serbian forces besieging six Muslim enclaves in Bosnia.

1994: Five Iraqis and a Kuwaiti are sentenced to death in Kuwait for plotting to kill former US President George HW Bush with a car bomb during his visit to Kuwait in 1993.

1996: Three Red Cross workers are killed when their vehicle is ambushed in Burundi.

1997: The UN Security Council extends the program that allows Iraq to sell oil to buy food, medicine and other civilian supplies.

1998: A three-week hostage drama in Colombia ends when a right-wing paramilitary group announces that it has killed 25 people abducted from an oil-refining city.

2000: A 7.9-magnitude earthquake and strong aftershocks kill more than 100 people on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Several thousand are injured or left homeless.

2001: Nepal’s Crown Prince Dipendra dies. Three days earlier he shot the king, queen and seven members of the royal family before turning the gun on himself.

2002: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak says that shortly before September 11, 2001, Egyptian intelligence officials warned the United States that al-Qaeda was planning an attack on an

American target.

2003: The Special Court for Sierra Leone, set up to try war crimes suspects from the country’s civil conflict, make public a 17-count indictment against Charles

Taylor, the president of neighboring Liberia.

2004: UN peacekeepers take control of a strategic eastern Congolese city as renegade soldiers withdraw and President Joseph Kabila attempts to calm the nation after the largest and most violent protests since he took office.

2005: Opposition parties in Azerbaijan muster their biggest rally in years, bringing about 10,000 protesters into the streets of the capital, Baku, to call for free elections after authorities back down and give them permission to hold a demonstration.