Today is the 170th day of 2019. There are 195 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

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

OTHER EVENTS

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

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

1862: US Congress prohibits slavery in US territories.

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

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.

1986: Artificial heart recipient Murray P Haydon dies in Louisville, Kentucky, after 16 months on the man-made pump.

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.

1999: Britain’s Prince Edward marries commoner Sophie Rhys-Jones in Windsor, England.

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.

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 US soldiers launch an offensive against al-Qaeda in Iraq north-east 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 wartime pontiff who critics say did not do enough to stop the Holocaust.

2012: The dispute over the Falklands Islands reaches the G-20 summit when the leaders of Britain and Argentina have an uncomfortable exchange on the conference’s sidelines.

2013: President Barack Obama cautions the US and Europe against “complacency” brought on by peace, pledging to cut America’s deployed nuclear weapons by one-third if Cold War foe Russia does the same.

2013: Afghan President Hamid Karzai suspends talks with the US on a new security deal to protest the way his Government was left out of initial peace negotiations with the Taliban.

2017: Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old American college student released by North Korea in a coma after more than a year in captivity, dies in a Cincinnati hospital. A man drives a van into worshippers near a London mosque, killing one man and injuring a dozen others; a suspect was later sentenced to at least 43 years in prison.

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- )

— AP