Today is the 16th day of 2023. There are 349 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1978: NASA names 35 candidates to fly on the space shuttle, including Sally K Ride who became America’s first woman in space, and Guion S Bluford Jr who became America’s first black astronaut in space.

OTHER EVENTS

27 BC: Caesar Augustus is declared the first emperor of the Roman Empire by the Senate.

1547: Ivan the Terrible is crowned Russia’s first czar.

1761: The British take Pondicherry after a siege, marking the end of French dominion in India.

1816: Portugal’s South American colony, Brazil, becomes a kingdom.

1865: Union Major General William T Sherman decrees that 400,000 acres of land in the south will be divided into 40-acre lots and given to former slaves; the order, later revoked by US President Andrew Johnson, is believed to have inspired the expression, “forty acres and a mule”.

1883: The US Civil Service Commission is established.

1917: Germans propose in a telegram that Mexico become Germany’s ally with a view to recovering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona; the telegram is intercepted, hastening entry of the US into World War I.

1920: Prohibition, the legal prevention of the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic drinks, begins as the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution takes effect; it is later repealed.

1935: Fugitive gangster Fred Barker and his mother, Kate “Ma” Barker, are killed in a shoot-out with the FBI at Lake Weir, Florida.

1942: Actress Carole Lombard, 33, her mother Elizabeth, and 20 other people are killed when their plane crashes near Las Vegas, Nevada, while en route to California from a war-bond promotion tour.

1957: Three B-52’s take off from Castle Air Force Base in California on the first non-stop, round-the-world flight by jet planes, which lasts 45 hours and 19 minutes.

1966: Major General Aguiyi Ironsi takes over power in Nigeria after announcing that an attempted coup had been smashed.

1969: Soviet cosmonauts achieve the first link-up of two manned spaceships while in orbit around Earth.

1971: Swiss ambassador to Brazil, Giovanni Enrico Bucher is freed in Rio de Janeiro after being held by kidnappers for 40 days.

1973: The United States and South Vietnam declare a ceasefire in Vietnam War in hopes of a full peace pact.

1979: In the face of growing unrest Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi flees Iran, never to return.

1988: Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder is fired as a CBS television sports commentator one day after telling a TV station in Washington, DC, that, during the era of slavery, blacks had been bred to produce stronger offspring.

1989: Three days of rioting erupt in Miami when a police officer fatally shoots a black motorcyclist, causing a crash that also claims the life of a passenger.

1990: The Bulgarian Government grants the Opposition the right to publish newspapers but continues to deny their access to radio and television.

1991: US and allied fighters and heavy bombers start pounding targets in Iraq and Kuwait after Iraq fails to meet a deadline for withdrawal from Kuwait (Operation Desert Storm).

1992: A special high court in Greece acquits former Socialist Premier Andreas Papandreou of involvement in a US$210-million bank embezzlement scheme. Officials of the Government of El Salvador and rebel leaders sign a pact in Mexico City ending 12 years of civil war that had left at least 75,000 people dead.

1993: Somali civilians lead US troops to bunkers overflowing with more than 1,000 tons of arms and ammunition; a marine spokesman calls the find “the mother lode of arms caches”.

1995: Five hundred motorists are stranded in the Jawahar tunnel in northern India by a snow slide that kills at least 183 people.

1997: In the West Bank city of Hebron, Palestinians dance and sing outside Israeli army headquarters as troops begin departing after 30 years of military rule.

1998: Turkey’s high court outlaws the Islamic-oriented Welfare Party. NASA announces that John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, will fly aboard the space shuttle later in the year.

2000: Ricardo Lagos is elected as Chile’s first socialist president following Salvador Allende whose Government was toppled in a bloody 1973 military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.

2001: Laurent Kabila, president of Congo, is killed in a shooting at his home.

2003: The space shuttle Columbia blasts off for what turned out to be its last flight; on board was Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon.

2004: Spain’s Constitutional Court, acting on a suit filed by the Government under a law outlawing parties that incite terrorism, upholds the banning of Batasuna, a party long considered to be the political wing of the armed Basque independence group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna).

2005: Massive protests against social benefit cuts paralyse traffic in cities across Russia in the most serious outburst of public discontent since President Vladimir Putin took office.

2006: Ernest Johnson Jr, 55, who deserted the US Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, is arrested in Texas after more than 36 years on the run.

2007: Pakistani helicopter gunships attack a suspected al-Qaeda hideout in a forest near the Afghan border, killing up to 10 people and sparking anger among tribesmen who say the dead are woodcutters, not terrorists.

2008: Sri Lanka’s ceasefire deal ends in a spasm of violence as suspected Tamil Tiger rebels bomb a bus, shoot the fleeing passengers, and attack farmers as they retreat into the bush, killing 27 people. Archbishop Earl Paulk, the 80-year-old leader of a megachurch, pleads guilty in Atlanta to lying under oath about his sexual affairs and is sentenced to 10 years’ probation; Paulk died in March 2009.

2009: A wealthy US businessman with a passion for books about the Middle East is sentenced to two years in jail for stealing pages from rare texts at two of Britain’s most venerable libraries.

2010: Egypt’s largest Opposition movement, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, announces it has chosen a new leader, Mohammed Badie, a conservative academic who looks unlikely to challenge the Government’s relentless crackdown on the group.

2011: An Egyptian court convicts and sentences to death a Muslim man for killing six Christians and a Muslim guard the previous year — the latest in a series of moves by authorities seeking to calm religious tensions after a massive suicide bombing outside a church two weeks prior.

2012: The political crisis engulfing Pakistan deepens when the nation’s top court clashes with a beleaguered Government already under attack from the powerful army — a combined assault that could bring down the US-backed Administration.

2013: US President Barack Obama unveils the most sweeping proposals for curbing gun violence in two decades, pressing a reluctant Congress to pass universal background checks plus bans on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting. Pauline Friedman Phillips, better known as advice columnist Dear Abby, dies in Minneapolis at age 94.

2014: A suicide bomber kills four people and injures 26 in the Lebanese town of Hermel, a Hezbollah stronghold near the Syrian border.

2017: Turkish authorities capture an Uzbek national suspected of killing 39 people during an attack on an Istanbul nightclub during new year celebrations. A shooting attack at an electronic music festival in Mexico’s Caribbean coastal resort of Playa del Carmen leaves five people dead, including three foreigners. President Barack Obama, his days in office dwindling, celebrates the World Series champion Chicago Cubs at the White House. Former NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan, to date the last man to walk on the moon, dies in Houston at age 82.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Richard Savage, English author (1697-1743); Niccolo Piccinni, Italian musician (1728-1800); André Michelin, French publisher and industrialist of Michelin tyre company (1853-1931); Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar, Cuban president and dictator (1901-1973 ); Debbie Allen, US actress/dancer/choreographer (1950- ); Sade, US singer (1959- ); Maxine Jones, US R&B singer of En Vogue (1966- ); Kate Moss, English model (1974- )

— AP