Today is the 186th day of 2019. There are 179 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2011: A jury in Orlando, Florida, finds Casey Anthony, 25, not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child abuse in the 2008 disappearance and death of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee.

OTHER EVENTS

1587: Sir Francis Drake leads an expedition into the port of Cadiz, Spain, and ravages the Spanish coast. He destroys so many vessels that the Spaniards have to delay their invasion of England for a year.

1687: Isaac Newton first publishes his Principia Mathematica, a three-volume work setting out his mathematical principles of natural philosophy.

1811: Venezuela becomes first South American country to declare its independence from Spain.

1812: Britain makes peace with Russia and Sweden.

1830: French invade Algeria and take Algiers, seizing private and religious buildings and a vast portion of the country’s arable land. The colonisation of Algeria was seen as a way of providing employment for veterans of the Napoleonic wars.

1932: Right-wing politician Antonio de Oliveira Salazar becomes Portugal’s prime minister. He soon creates an authoritarian political order that lasts until 1974.

1946: The bikini, created by Louis Reard, is modelled by Micheline Bernardini during a poolside fashion show in Paris.

1954: Elvis Presley’s first commercial recording session takes place at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee; the song he recorded was That’s All Right.

1959: President Sukarno dissolves Indonesia’s Constituent Assembly.

1962: Independence takes effect in Algeria; the same day civilians of European descent, mostly French, come under attack by extremists in the port city of Oran.

1969: Tom Mboya, likely successor to Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, is assassinated in Nairobi.

1973: General Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, comes to power in Rwanda in a bloodless coup, and remains president until his death in a plane crash in 1994.

1977: Pakistan army seizes power in bloodless coup that unseats Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

1988: Iran’s president says the country has the “right to avenge” the airliner shot down by a US warship.

1991: A worldwide financial scandal erupts as regulators in eight countries shut down the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

1995: Flouting a UN ban on military flights over Bosnia, a suspected Serb warplane fires rockets at a strategic power plant in government-held territory.

1997: Hun Sen, one of the battling prime ministers of Cambodia, gains control of one military base near Phnom Penh and surrounds another.

1998: Protestants erect road blocks in Northern Ireland after the Orange Order is stopped by police from marching through the Catholic neighbourhood of Portadown.

2000: The UN Security Council imposes an 18-month diamond ban on Sierra Leone’s rebels in a bid to strangle their ability to finance a civil war.

2002: South Africa’s Constitutional Court orders President Thabo Mbeki to provide the antiretroviral drug nevirapine to pregnant women in state hospitals who were infected with HIV.

2008: Venus Williams wins her fifth Wimbledon singles title, beating younger sister Serena 7-5, 6-4 in the final. Gas station owner Kent Couch flies a lawn chair rigged with helium-filled balloons more than 200 miles across the Oregon desert, landing in a field in Cambridge, Idaho.

2009: Honduras’ exiled president flies toward home in a Venezuelan jet in a high-stakes attempt to return to power, even as the interim government orders the military to turn away the plane.

2017: The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals rules that two laws passed by Congress did not end the right to a bond hearing for unaccompanied immigrant children who are detained by federal authorities.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Sir Stamford Raffles, British founder of Singapore (1781-1826); Phineas Taylor Barnum, US circus pioneer (1810-1891); Cecil Rhodes, English statesman and Central Africa pioneer (1853-1902); Jean Cocteau, French author-film-maker (1889-1963); Georges Pompidou, French prime minister and president (1911-1974); Huey Lewis, US singer (1951- ); Edie Falco, actress (1963- )

— AP