TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

Today is the 28th day of 2016. There are 338 days left in the year.

2008: Thousands of machete-wielding youths riot in Kenya, setting buses and homes ablaze and hunting down members of President Mwai Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe. A month of violence triggered by rigged presidential elections gathers frightening momentum with a death toll topping 800.

OTHER EVENTS

1547: England’s King Henry VIII dies and is succeeded by his 9-year-old son, Edward VI.

1596: English navigator Sir Francis Drake dies off Panama’s coast and is buried at sea.

1871: France surrenders in the Franco-Prussian War.

1885: British relief force reaches Khartoum, and the Sudan is evacuated.

1909: US control in Cuba is ended.

1912: A lynch mob drags former President General Eloy Alfaro and his lieutenants through the streets of Quito, Ecuador, and burn them to death.

1916: Louis D Brandeis is appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to the Supreme Court, becoming its first Jewish member.

1961: Rwanda’s provisional Government proclaims republic.

1980: Six US diplomats who avoided being taken hostage at their embassy in Tehran fly out of Iran with the help of Canadian diplomats.

1986: Space shuttle Challenger explodes moments after lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing all seven crew members.

1993: France’s ambassador to Zaire is killed by a stray bullet as soldiers riot and loot shops and foreigners’ homes in Kinshasa.

1994: Three Italian journalists are killed by a mortar shell in Mostar, Bosnia.

1998: A judge in Poonamallee, India, convicts 26 conspirators linked to Sri Lanka’s separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in the 1991 suicide bombing assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and orders all to be hanged.

1999: India and Pakistan meet in their first cricket match in the subcontinent in 12 years. Pakistan walks away with a 12-run victory after a nail-biting finish.

2000: A plane brings 19 sick and weak-looking adolescents home to Uganda after months — or possibly years — of captivity under Ugandan rebels based in southern Sudan. Some 5,000 children are believed to have been kidnapped by the rebels over the past decade according to UNICEF.

2001: A Ukrainian vessel sinks in the Black Sea, killing at least 14 people. Five were reported missing and 32 were rescued.

2003: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s right-wing Likud party wins the parliamentary elections, soundly defeating the centre-left Labour Party and extending Sharon’s leadership for another four-year term. The Labour Party suffered its worst-ever defeat at the polls.

2007: The Israeli Government overwhelmingly approves the appointment of Raleb Majadele, the country’s first Muslim Cabinet minister, billing it as an important step for a long-suffering minority.

2010: A court rules that former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin did not take part in a smear campaign against President Nicolas Sarkozy, a verdict that means the two rivals may soon be sparring in the political arena again.

2011: Embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak appears on television for the first time since protests erupted demanding his ouster, and says he will press ahead with social, economic and political reforms.

2012: The Arab League halts its observer mission in Syria because of escalating violence that killed nearly 100 people over the past three days, forces supporting President Bashar Assad battle dissident soldiers on the eastern edge of Damascus.

2013: With French support, Malian troops enter the fabled city of Timbuktu after al-Qaeda-linked militants flee into the desert, setting fire to a library that held thousands of manuscripts dating to the Middle Ages.

2014: Ukraine’s prime minister resigns and parliament repeals anti-protest laws that had set off violent clashes between protesters and police, moves aimed at defusing the country’s political crisis.