Today is the 102nd day of 2017 There are 263 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1861: US Civil War starts as Confederates take Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.

OTHER EVENTS

1606: Great Britain adopts the Union Jack.

1861: US Civil War starts as Confederates take Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.

1945: US President Franklin D Roosevelt dies at age 63 of a cerebral haemorrhage, and Harry S Truman is sworn in as his successor.

1955: The Salk vaccine for polio is declared safe and effective.

1981: The space shuttle Columbia blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on its first test flight.

1983: Harold Washington is elected Chicago’s first black mayor.

1988: Harvard University is granted the first animal life-form patent, allowing researchers to build a genetically engineered mouse.

1989: Relentless artillery battles rage between Christians and Muslims as Lebanon’s civil war enters its 15th year.

1990: East German parliament names Lothar de Maiziere as prime minister, supports swift reunification, apologises for Holocaust and recognises Polish border.

1990: East German parliament names Lothar de Maiziere as prime minister, supports swift reunification, apologises for Holocaust and recognises Polish border.

1991: Iraqi forces attack Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, as hundreds of thousands of refugees suffer from starvation and exposure.

1992: Euro Disneyland, a US$4-billion theme park, opens in Marne-La-Vallee, France.

1993: NATO planes begin patrolling no-fly zone over Bosnia.

1995: PLO chief Yasser Arafat widens his crackdown on Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip by ordering them to register guns or face confiscation of the firearms.

1996: Israeli helicopters fire missiles on Beirut’s slums in an effort to wreck the nerve centre of Lebanese guerrillas, hitting a Syrian army position and wounding at least 12 Syrian soldiers.

1997: Pope John Paul II visits Sarajevo on a long-delayed mission of peace to Bosnia. Freshly planted mines are found along his motorcade route.

1999: Colombian rebels hijack a domestic flight and force the plane to land at a remote airstrip, where they kidnap the 46 passengers and crew.

2000: An overloaded wooden Philippine ferry boat headed for Malaysia capsizes off the southern Philippines, killing more than 130 people.

2002: An alliance of Venezuelan military, business and labour leaders oust President Hugo Chavez and install Pedro Carmona Estanga, the head of Venezuela’s largest business association, as interim president. Chavez returns to power in 48 hours.

2003: Philippine troops free the last four Indonesian hostages held on the southern island of Jolo since June 2002 by Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim separatist group.

2005: Officials recruit tribal elders and musicians to help educate villagers in an area of northern Angola where the Marburg virus, a haemorrhagic virus, has killed scores of people.

2006: Police arrest three people suspected of aiding Italy’s No 1 fugitive and reputed Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, who is captured a day earlier after more than four decades on the run.

2008: Prachanda, the former leader of Nepal’s decade-long Maoist insurgency, wins a seat in the country’s constitution-writing assembly.

2010: The Vatican makes clear for the first time that bishops and other church officials should report clerical sex abuse to police if required by law. But the policy fails to satisfy victims who charge that the church deliberately hid abuse for decades.

2011: Japan ranks its nuclear crisis at the highest possible severity on an international scale — the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster — even as it insists that radiation leaks are declining at its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY’S

Christopher Smart, English poet (1722-1771); Vajirananavarorasa, prince-patriarch of Buddhism in Siam, institutionalised Thai Buddhism (1860-1912); Montserrat Caballe, Spanish operatic soprano (1933- ); Alan Ayckbourn, English playwright (1939- ); Herbie Hancock, US jazz musician (1940-); David Letterman, US television personality (1947-); Andy Garcia, US actor (1956- ); Claire Danes, US actress (1979- ); Shannen Doherty, US actress (1971-).

— AP