Today is the 312th day of 2011. There are 53 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

2005: France declares a state of emergency after nearly two weeks of rioting, clearing the way for curfews in hopes of ending the country’s worst civil unrest in more than 50 years. Its prime minister acknowledges that racial discrimination has inflamed tempers in the heavily immigrant suburbs.

Other Events

1793: The Louvre Museum in Paris opens to the public.

1895: Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, German physicist, discovers X-rays.

1917: Vladimir I Lenin becomes chief commissar in Russia and Leon Trotsky is named premier.

1966: Edward W Brooke of Massachusetts becomes the first black to be elected to the US Senate by popular vote.

1989: Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega offers to end arms imports to his country in exchange for demobilisation of Contra rebels.

1990: US President George Bush orders 200,000 more US troops to the Gulf; The country readies a UN resolution that would authorise an attack on Iraq.

1991: The European Community and Canada impose economic sanctions on Yugoslavia in an attempt to stop the Balkan civil war.

1993: Russian President Boris Yeltsin approves a draft constitution that will give him increased powers at the parliament’s expense.

1996: UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali calls for an international military force to aid and protect a million refugees caught in a civil war in Zaire, but is blocked by the US in the Security Council.

1997: Chinese engineers divert the Yangtze River from its natural course, clearing way for the construction of the enormous Three Gorges dam.

1998: In Bangladesh, 15 former military commanders are sentenced to death for the 1975 assassination of the country’s first prime minister.

1999: Israel’s national airline graduates its first Arab flight attendant in nearly a decade, several months after it came under attack for discriminating against Arabs.

2000: Fusako Shigenobu, a Japanese revolutionary responsible for terrorist massacres in Israel and Italy, is arrested in Japan after decades on the run.

2001: The discovery of eight remains — five skeletons and the partially clad bodies of three young women — in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, ignites fear that a series of 57 rape-murders did not end in the 1990s.

2004: Muslim groups ask the Dutch government to protect Islamic sites after an elementary school is bombed — the latest in escalating tensions following the killing of a filmmaker, allegedly by an Islamic radical.

2006: In a suicide attack on the Pakistani military, a man with explosives strapped to his body runs up to soldiers and blows himself up, killing at least 42 troops.

2007: Russia’s Supreme Court refuses to recognise the executed last czar Nicholas II and his family as victims of political repression — a ruling Kremlin critics said was dictated by the government’s reluctance to condemn the bloodiest chapters of the country’s Communist past.

2009: Iraq’s parliament ends weeks of debate and passes a long-delayed law paving the way for the planned January election to go forward, sidestepping a crisis that could have delayed the US troop withdrawal.

Today’s Birthdays

Edmund Halley, British astronomer (1656-1742); John Milton, English poet (1608-1674); Hermann Rorschach, Swiss psychiatrist (1884-1922); Margaret Mitchell, US author (1900-1949); Katharine Hepburn, US actress (1907-2003); Alain Delon, French actor (1932-); Mary Hart, US television host (1950-); Parker Posey, US actress (1968-).