Today is Tuesday, August 17, the 229th day of 2010. There are 136 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

1510 - Pedro Navarro, having taken Algiers and Tripoli for Spain, is killed in ambush in North Africa.

1577 - Peace of Bergerac ends Sixth War of Religion in France, whereby Huguenots secure important concessions for exercising their religion.

1626 - Flemish forces under Count Tilly defeat Denmark's King Christian IV at Lutter, east Germany, leading to the sack of Jutland and Denmark's exit from the Thirty Years' War.

1743 - Sweden cedes southern Finland to Russia in the Peace of Abo.

1759 - British fleet under Admiral Boscawen defeats French off Cape St. Vincent in West Indies.

1863 - Federal ships bombard Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, harbor during America's Civil War.

1896 - Gold is discovered in Klondike territory, Canada, attracting 100,000 adventurers in a two-year rush.

1920 - Romania joins Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in alliance that becomes Triple Entente, where each country pledges not to conclude peace separately.

1945 - Sukarno proclaims Indonesian independence, but it is refused by the Dutch.

1954 - Two-thousand religious pilgrims drown in a flash flood at the Muslim shrine of the Imam Zadeh Davud in Farahzad, Iran.

1962 - East German border guards shoot and kill an 18-year-old who attempted to cross over the Berlin Wall into the western sector.

1964 - Congolese Premier Moise Tshombe appeals to five African nations to help put down rebellion in the Congo.

1969 - Hurricane Camille hits the Gulf Coast, killing 248 people.

1972 - Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan offers an interim peace agreement with Egypt based on a truce line dividing the Sinai Peninsula.

1976 - Tidal wave on Philippine island of Mindanao leaves estimated 8,000 people dead or missing.

1980 - Diplomatic officials close the British Embassy in Iran because of hostile demonstrations.

1985 - A car packed with dynamite explodes outside crowded supermarket in Lebanon's Christian east Beirut, Lebanon, killing at least 50 people and wounding 80.

1986 - Rescuers continue evacuating by boat more than 100,000 people marooned in flood-swept southeastern India.

1988 - Pakistan's President Zia ul-Haq and U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel are killed when their Pakistani military plane explodes.

1990 - Iraq announces policy of holding foreign nationals in Iraq and Kuwait as human shields against attack.

1991 - Italy repatriates the last of an estimated 18,000 Albanian refugees who arrived in southern Italy by boat earlier in the month. The Italian government admitted the offer of asylum was a ruse to persuade Albanians to give up their often-violent resistance. Only 154 refugees stayed in Italy.

1992 - Mortar shells blast a crowded refugee hotel in Sarajevo, setting it ablaze. At least two people die.

1993 - Miners massacre 73 Yanomami Indians in the Brazilian Amazon.

1994 - Food distribution to 350,000 Rwandan refugees in camps in Congo is suspended because of riots and thefts by machete-wielding gangs.

1996 - Despite an appeal for restraint from King Hussein, stone-throwing demonstrators in Amman, Jordan, clash with police for a second day to protest the doubling of bread prices.

1997 - The NATO-led peace force intervenes to keep a standoff between policemen backing Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic and her opponents from breaking into violence.

1998 - The impoverished Russian government devalues the ruble and defaults on billions of dollars in debt, causing a collapse in financial markets; President Clinton admits to an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

1999 - A powerful 7.4 earthquake hits western Turkey, killing at least 17,200 and injuring more than 20,000. Officials estimate that the numbers are higher; many families buried relatives without notifying authorities.

2001 - A protest in Guyana over the recent shooting deaths of three Muslims leave four persons dead after police open fire on the protesters.

2003 - Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana, 41, is shot dead, apparently by U.S. soldiers while filming outside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq. Dana was videotaping outside the prison after a mortar attack, in which six prisoners were killed and about 60 others were wounded.

2004 - Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a leader of a paramilitary group in Haiti, is acquitted of killing some 3,000 people. The 14-hour murder trial angers human rights groups and provokes criticism of the new U.S.-backed government.

2005 - Russian navy ships and long-range bombers head to a Chinese peninsula jutting into the Yellow Sea for the first-ever joint military exercises between the two countries.

2006 - Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemns a U.S. airstrike that Afghan officials say killed 10 border policemen.

2007 - The rescue mission to reach six miners trapped inside a mountain in Utah since Aug. 6 is suspended indefinitely after a cave-in kills three rescuers inside a mountainside mine.

2008 - Israel's Cabinet approves the release of some 200 Palestinian prisoners as a goodwill gesture to the government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

2009 - The Libyan convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, is expected to drop his appeal, a step that could lead to his rapid release and puts Scotland's left-of-center government into a rare international spotlight.

Today's Birthdays:

Pierre de Fermat, French mathematician (1601-1665); Jan III Sobieski, king of Poland (1629-1696); William Carey, English pioneer missionary (1761-1834); Marcus Garvey, Jamaican black leader (1887-1940); Mae West, U.S. actress (1892-1980); Maureen O'Hara, Irish-born actress (1920--); V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul, Trinidadian writer (1932--); Robert DeNiro, U.S. actor (1943--); Sean Penn, U.S. actor (1960--).

Thought For Today:

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story -- John Barth, American author.