Today is the 104th day of 2016. There are 262 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1981: Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke receives a Pulitzer Prize for her feature about an 8-year-old heroin addict named “Jimmy”. Cooke relinquishes the prize two days later, admitting she had fabricated the story.

OTHER EVENTS

1528: Pope Clement VII establishes a commission to determine the validity of King Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon in England.

1589: Britain’s Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris launch expedition of 150 ships and 18,000 men to Portugal.

1742: G F Handel conducts first performance of the Messiah in Dublin.

1796: French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte defeat Austrians at Millesimo in northern Italy.

1868:British forces under Robert Napier capture Magdala in Ethiopia.

1919: British troops fire on a political gathering in Amritsar, India, killing 379 people.

1943: US President Franklin D Roosevelt dedicates the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC.

1961: UN General Assembly condemns South African apartheid.

1964: Sidney Poitier becomes the first black to win an Academy Award for best actor, for his role in Lilies of the Field.

1986: Pope John Paul II visits a Rome synagogue in the first recorded papal visit of its kind.

1990: The Soviet Union accepts responsibility for the World War II murders of thousands of imprisoned Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, a massacre the Soviets had previously blamed on the Nazis.

1992: Hundreds of foreigners scramble for seats on the last flight out of Libya before sanctions seal off the country.

1993: Twelve men accused of plotting the 1991 coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev go on trial for treason.

1995: Ukraine agrees to close by 2000 the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the site of an accident in 1986 that resulted in massive radioactive pollution.

2004: Ousted Liberian warlord-president Charles Taylor defends his deadly tenure at the helm of his war-ravaged West African nation and challenges the UN to find any foreign bank account linked to his name in his first interview since fleeing to Nigeria the previous year.

2005: Eric Rudolph pleads guilty to carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and three other attacks, saying he picked the Summer Games to embarrass the US Government in front of the world “for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand”.

2009: In a measured break with half a century of US policy toward communist Cuba, the Obama administration lifts restrictions on Cuban-Americans who want to travel and send money to their island homeland.

2013: The US and China agree to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons in a test of whether the world powers can shelve years of rivalry and discord and unite in fostering global stability.

2015: A federal judge sentences a former Blackwater security guard to life in prison and three others to 30-year terms for their roles in a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed 14 Iraqi civilians and wounded 17 others.