Today is the 356th day of 2014. There are nine days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1984: New York City resident Bernhard Goetz shoots four black youths on a Manhattan subway, claiming they were about to rob him.

OTHER EVENTS

1636: Archduke Ferdinand, son of the Emperor, is elected leader of the Romans.

1793: Napoleon Bonaparte, aged 24, is promoted to brigadier general in recognition of his decisive part in the capture of Toulon from British forces.

1807: US Congress passes the Embargo Act, designed to force peace between Britain and France by cutting off all trade with Europe.

1905: Insurrection of Moscow workers; Revolution in Persia begins.

1941: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrives in Washington for a wartime conference with US President Franklin Roosevelt.

1944: During the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans demand the surrender of American troops at Bastogne, Belgium, and Brigadier General Anthony C McAuliffe reportedly replies, “Nuts!”

1963: Greek liner Laconia catches fire and sinks in North Atlantic; 150 people die.

1985: Winnie Mandela, defying expulsion order, is arrested by police who drag her from her home in Soweto, South Africa.

1989: Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is toppled in an uprising. He and his wife Elena flee Bucharest, Romania.

1990: Lech Walesa is sworn in as Poland’s first popularly elected president.

1991: Twenty-one US sailors drown when an Israeli ferry taking them from shore capsizes; the body of Lt Col William R Higgins, an American hostage murdered by his captors, is found dumped along a highway in Lebanon.

1992: A Libyan Boeing 727 on a domestic flight crashes, killing all 157 people aboard.

1993: Alina Fernandez Revuelta, daughter of Cuban President Fidel Castro, leaves Cuba and is granted political asylum in the United States.

1996: In a “Christmas gesture”, Tupac Amaru rebels free 225 hostages from the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, Peru, but keep 140.

1998: Israel’s Parliament votes overwhelmingly for early elections, signalling the demise of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ailing hard-line government and effectively freezing the already troubled peace process with the Palestinians.

2001: Passengers and crew aboard an American Airlines jet en route to Miami subdue Briton Richard Reid as he tries to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes.

2002: North Korea confirms it removed and disabled monitoring devices that had been placed at its Yongbyon nuclear reactor to ensure compliance with a 1994 international agreement.

2003: The Roman Catholic archdiocese of Boston pays the 542 plaintiffs who agreed to a sexual abuse settlement with the archdiocese. The archdiocese will sell church property to fund the part of the $85-million settlement not covered by insurers.

2004: Saudi Arabia announces it is withdrawing its ambassador to Libya in what the kingdom called a measured response to reports Tripoli had plotted to assassinate its crown prince.

2005: An Istanbul court separately fines an author and a journalist for insulting the State, the latest convictions in Turkey under a law that European Union officials say limits freedom of expression and must be changed.

2007: Guatemalan congressman-elect Marco Antonio Xicay of the conservative Patriotic Party is shot to death by unidentified attackers outside a popular resort in the country.

2009: Assailants gun down the mother, aunt and siblings of a marine killed in a raid that took out one of Mexico’s most powerful cartel leaders — sending a chilling message to troops battling the drug war: “You go after us, we wipe out your families.”

2010: Iraq’s Christian leaders call off Christmas celebrations amid new al-Qaeda threats on the tiny community still terrified from a bloody siege on a Baghdad church.

2012: Egypt’s Islamist-backed constitution heads toward approval in a final round of voting, but the deep divisions it has opened up threaten to fuel continued turmoil.