Today is the 146th day of 2014. There are 219 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2010: Jamaican security forces claim a tenuous hold over the slum stronghold of an at large gang leader sought by the US, but only after nearly three days of street battles that killed at least 44 civilians.

OTHER EVENTS

1854: France and Britain occupy Piraeus after declaring blockade of Greece for attempting to attack Turkey.

1868: The US Senate impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson ends with his acquittal as the Senate is one vote short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction.

1924: US President Calvin Coolidge signs bill limiting immigration into United States and completely excluding Japanese.

1940: Evacuation of British troops from France in the face of a German invasion begins at Dunkirk.

1942: German forces begin their drive for Stalingrad and the Caucasus in World War II.

1954: Funeral ship of Pharaoh Cheops is discovered in Egypt near the Pyramid of Giza.

1966: British Guiana becomes independent nation of Guyana.

1977: George H Willig scales the outside of the South Tower of New York’s World Trade Center; he is arrested at the top of the 110-storey building.

1979: Israel formally returns sovereignty of Sinai capital of El Arish to Egypt after a dozen years of occupation.

1987: Sri Lankan troops begin major offensive against Tamil separatist rebels in the northern Jaffna Peninsula.

1990: Boris Yeltsin fails to win a majority in balloting for Russian presidency.

1991: Austrian airliner bound for Vienna explodes and crashes into the jungle in Thailand, killing all 223 people on board.

1992: Russia’s Constitutional Court orders Mikhail Gorbachev, or a stand-in, to represent the Communist Party on its right to exist.

1993: The Supreme Court restores Pakistan’s ousted government, dealing a blow to Benazir Bhutto’s dreams of a political comeback.

1994: US President Bill Clinton renews trade privileges for China, and announces his administration would no longer link China’s trade status with its human rights record.

1995: North Korea acknowledges that it suffers from a grave food shortage, and pleads with Japan for emergency rice aid.

1996: Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi opens a meeting of opposition activists in Yangon, Myanmar, in defiance of the military government, which arrests scores of people.

1997: A week after sweeping into the city, President Laurent Kabila bans political activity and demonstrations in Kinshasa, the capital of Congo.

2000: Police launch an investigation into one of North America’s worst E coli outbreaks as residents of a small Canadian town bury the first of five people killed so far by the bacteria.

2001: The African Union replaces the 38-year-old Organization of African Unity. The move is meant to bring political and economic integration similar to the European Union for 53 African member-nations.

2003: The World Health Organization reclassifies Toronto, Canada, as an area with recent local transmissions of SARS after Canadian health officials inform the WHO of eight new probable cases of the virus.

2005: President George W Bush embraces Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as a courageous democratic reformer and bolsters his standing at home with $50 million in assistance to improve the quality of life in Gaza.

2006: A Russian regional Supreme Court convicts Nur-Pashi Kulayev for 331 deaths in the Beslan school massacre in the southern province of North Ossetia and sentences him to life in prison. Kulayev was the only known surviving attacker.

2007: Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern’s long-dominant party, Fianna Fail, celebrates its sixth straight election win.

2008: Ethiopia’s Supreme Court sentences an exiled former president — dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam — and 18 officials to death for the thousands of people murdered during Mengistu’s 17-year rule.

2009: President Barack Obama chooses federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to be the first Hispanic justice on the US Supreme Court.

2011: A pale and shrunken Ratko Mladic is hauled into a courtroom to face charges of genocide in ordering torture, rape and the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995 after 16 years on the run.

2012: Gruesome video shows rows of dead Syrian children in a mosque in the northwest village of Houla, haunting images of what activists called one of the deadliest attacks yet in the country’s 14-month uprising.

2013: Two rockets hit Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut, tearing through an apartment building and peppering cars with shrapnel, a day after the Lebanese group’s leader pledged to lift President Bashar Assad to victory in Syria’s civil war.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, English general (1650-1722); Isadora Duncan, US dancer (1877-1927); Al Jolson, US singer/actor (1886-1950); Alexander Pushkin, Russian writer (1799-1837); John Wayne, US actor (1907-1979); Hank Williams Jr, US country singer (1949- ); Lenny Kravitz, US rock singer (1964- ); Helena Bonham Carter, British actress (1966- ); Joseph Fiennes, British actor (1970- )

–AP