Today is the 126th day of 2015. There are 240 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight:

1941: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa after the Italians were driven out with the help of Allied forces.

Other Events:

1821: Napoleon Bonaparte, 51, died in exile on the island of St Helena.

1862: Mexican troops defeated French occupying forces in the Battle of Puebla.

1891: New York’s Carnegie Hall (then named “Music Hall”) had its official opening night, featuring Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky as a guest conductor.

1925: Schoolteacher John T Scopes was charged in Tennessee with violating a state law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution. Scopes was found guilty, but his conviction was later set aside.

1936: The Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, fell to Italian invaders.

1945: In the only fatal attack of its kind during World War II, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon, killing the pregnant wife of a minister and five children. Denmark and the Netherlands were liberated as a German surrender went into effect.

1955: West Germany became a fully sovereign state. The baseball musical “Damn Yankees” opened on Broadway.

1961: Astronaut Alan B Shepard Jr became America’s first space traveller as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury capsule Freedom 7.

1973: Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby, the first of his Triple Crown victories.

1981: Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands died at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland on his 66th day without food.

1994: Singapore caned American teenager Michael Fay for vandalism, a day after the sentence was reduced from six lashes to four in response to an appeal by President Bill Clinton.

2006: A military transport helicopter crashed in eastern Afghanistan, killing all 10 US soldiers on board. CIA Director Porter Goss resigned in a second-term shake-up of President George W Bush’s team. British Prime Minister Tony Blair shuffled his Cabinet, replacing Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

2011: Solemnly honouring victims of the September 11 terror attacks, President Barack Obama hugged survivors at ground zero in New York and declared that the killing of Osama bin Laden was an American message to the world: “When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say.”

2015: Secretary of State John Kerry made an unannounced trip to Somalia in a show of solidarity with a government trying to defeat al-Qaeda-allied militants and end decades of war in the African country; Kerry was the first top US diplomat ever to visit Somalia.

Today’s Birthdays:

Actress Pat Carroll (1927-); Actor John Rhys-Davies (1944-); Rock correspondent Kurt Loder (1945); NBC newsman Brian Williams (1959-); Actress Tina Yothers (1973-); Singer Craig David (1981); Actress Danielle Fishel (1981-); Actor Henry Cavill (1983-); Soul singer Adele (1988-); R&B singer Chris Brown (1989-)

—AP