Today is the 171st day of 2012. There are 195 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

1885: Statue of Liberty arrives in New York City from France.

Other Events

1522: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V visits England and signs Treaty of Windsor with King Henry VIII, calling for invasion of France.

1586: Under threat from Indians, colonists sail from Roanoke Island, North Carolina, ending first settlement by English in America.

1819: US ship Savannah arrives in Liverpool, England, marking the first Atlantic crossing by a steamship.

1821: Turkish forces defeat Greek rebels at Dragashan, Turkey.

1862: US Congress prohibits slavery in US territories.

1867: Mexican Emperor Maximilian I is executed by firing squad on the orders of President Benito Juarez.

1908: The ship Kasato Maru arrives in Santos with 168 Japanese families, beginning Japanese immigration to Brazil.

1944: US troops take Saipan Island in Pacific from Japanese during World War II.

1953: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of nuclear espionage for the Soviet Union, are executed in the United States.

1961: Kuwait becomes independent of Britain.

1975: UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim opens first major world conference on status of women, in Mexico City.

1984: Michael Jordan is signed to the Chicago Bulls basketball team.

1987: Explosion in Barcelona department store garage kills 12 people and injures 31. Basque separatists claim responsibility.

1991: Hundreds of militant South Korean students clash with riot police on the eve of the second round of that country’s first local elections in 30 years.

1995: Chechen rebels free 1,500 hostages and leave the hospital in Budyonnovsk, where they holed up for six days, after Moscow agrees to a ceasefire and new peace talks for Chechnya.

1996: Rearmed Contra rebels kidnap 35 election officials in Nicaragua and demand the withdrawal of army and police from the area. The hostages are released two days later.

1997: Multinational force soldiers sent to Albania to protect humanitarian aid shipments kill an Albanian gunman and rescue international observers being threatened by two armed gangs.

1998: Serb troops seal Kosovo’s border with Albania, closing a refugee escape route and choking the supply route of the province’s separatist militants.

2000: British officials find 58 bodies in a truck container in an English port. Eight men are later convicted in the deaths of the Chinese migrants, who suffocated during the trip from Belgium.

2001: A UN fuel barge sails into Kisangani reopening the Congo River after war severed the African nation’s most important transportation route in 1998.

2002: Villages across Rwanda begin convening traditional gacaca, or “grass” courts, to try suspects in the country’s 1994 genocide. More than 100,000 people await trial, more than the legal system can handle. Under the gacaca system, communities hold public meetings where residents name those who had allegedly killed or been killed, and judges determine punishment.

2003: The Turkish parliament passes a package of human rights reforms, the latest in a series of laws aimed at improving Turkey’s chances of being admitted to the European Union.

2004: Saudi Arabia announces that it has killed Abdulaziz al-Moqrin, considered the leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, and three other militants in a clash with security forces in Riyadh hours after the terror group posts grisly photographs of beheaded American hostage Paul M Johnson Jr on an Internet site.

2005: Palestinian militants fire light arms and rocket-propelled grenades at Israelis near an army post on the Gaza-Egypt border, killing one Israeli and wounding two others. One militant is killed in the attack.

2006: The United Nations inaugurates its new Human Rights Council, vowing to uphold the highest standards of human rights and erase the tarnished image of its predecessor despite lingering doubts about its effectiveness.

2007: A car bomb strikes near the revered Shiite Khillani mosque in Baghdad, killing at least 78 people and wounding more than 200, the same day about 10,000 U.S. soldiers launch an offensive against al-Qaeda in Iraq northeast of Baghdad, killing at least 22 insurgents.

2008: Serbia’s Supreme Court sentences Radomir Markovic, who was security chief for the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic, to 40 years in prison for organising an attack on a prominent dissident in which four people died.

2009: The Vatican condemns as ‘unjustified and inopportune” a claim by a church official that pressure from Jewish organisations is delaying the beatification of Pope Pius XII, the war-time pontiff who critics say did not do enough to stop the Holocaust.

2010: Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin launches a new political movement to act as an alternative to the policies of President Nicolas Sarkozy, his long-time rival.

2011: Libya’s government says NATO warplanes struck a residential neighbourhood in the capital and killed nine civilians, including two children. Hours later, NATO confirms one of its airstrikes went astray.

Today’s Birthdays

Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and

philosopher (1623-1662); Lou Gehrig, US

baseball player (1903-1941); Aung San Suu Kyi,

Myanmar opposition leader/Nobel peace prize

winner (1945-); Salman Rushdie, Anglo-Indian

writer (1947-); Phylicia Rashad, US actress

(1948-); Kathleen Turner, US actress (1954-);

Paula Abdul, US singer/dancer (1962-).