Today is the 117th day of 2026. There are 248 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2020: Global confirmed cases of COVID-19 pass 3 million with the death toll at 205,000. The US has one third of all new cases.

OTHER EVENTS

1910: Louis Botha and James Hertzog found the South African Party.

1937: The US Social Security system makes its first benefits payment.

1956: Undefeated world heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano retires from the ring.

1978: Mohammed Daoud is thrown out in a bloody coup and replaced by Afghanistan’s first communist ruler, Nur Mohammed Taraki; Daoud and 30 family members, including women and children, are executed.

1981: The Xerox Star personal computer debuts, developed by Xerox PARC, and it included the first mouse sold to consumers. (The mouse had been invented by Douglas Engelbart decades earlier in 1963–64, when he built a device with a carved wood casing and a button to navigate a display screen.)

1987: The US Justice Department bars Austrian President Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States, saying he aided in the deportation and execution of thousands of Jews and others as a German Army officer during World War II.

1992: Russia and 12 other former Soviet republics win entry into the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

1993: Eritreans overwhelmingly choose independence from Ethiopia. Aircraft carrying Zambian national football team crashes killing most of it members off Gabon’s coast. The team was travelling to Senegal for a crucial World Cup qualifying match. The disaster occurred near Libreville while the aircraft approached for refuelling.

1994: The United States and six Arab oil nations join to denounce Iraq and pledge to maintain an international squeeze on Saddam Hussein’s Government.

1996: Rwandan soldiers kill 38 people in retaliation for the slaying of one of their own in a north-western Rwanda village two weeks earlier.

2000: In South Africa palaeontologists unveil the most complete ape-man skull ever excavated, a 1.5- to 2-million-year-old skull of a female Paranthropus robustus, a cousin of early man.

2003: The Colorado Party’s uninterrupted 55 years of rule is extended when Nicanor Duarte Frutos is elected president of Paraguay.

2007: Saudi Arabia announces the arrests of 172 Islamic militants, some who had trained abroad as pilots to fly aircraft in attacks on Saudi oilfields.

2008: Police in Vienna find a woman missing since 1984 who tells authorities her father kept her in a cellar for almost 24 years and impregnated her at least six times, after repeatedly raping her; the accused, Josef Fritzl, 73, is taken into custody. Afghan President Hamid Karzai escapes a rocket and rifle attempt on his life, claimed by the Taliban, during a ceremony in Kabul marking Afghanistan’s victory over Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

2010: Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s pushes Greece to the brink of a financial abyss and downgrades Portugal’s debt, too, fuelling fears of a continent-wide debt meltdown in Europe.

2012: New Yorkers and tourists alike watch with joy and excitement as space shuttle Enterprise
sails over the skyline on top of a modified jumbo jet, on its final flight before it becomes a museum piece.

2013: Centre-left leader Enrico Letta forges a new Italian Government in a coalition with former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s conservatives — an unusual alliance of bitter rivals that breaks a two-month political stalemate from inconclusive elections in the recession-mired country.

2014: Two 20th-century popes who changed the course of the Roman Catholic church become saints as Pope Francis honours John XXIII and John Paul II in a delicate balancing act aimed at bringing together the conservative and progressive wings of the church.

2017: David Dao, the airline passenger who was violently dragged off a flight after refusing to give up his seat, settles with United for an undisclosed sum; cellphone video of the April 9 confrontation aboard a jetliner at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport sparked widespread public outrage over the way Dao was treated.

2018: North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in of South Korea agree to officially end the Korean war and rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons. Mass protests break out across Spain after five men are convicted of sexual abuse but not rape of a teenage girl during the Running of the Bulls festival in Pamplona. Swedish band ABBA announce new songs recorded for the first time since 1982.

2022: Jessica Watkins becomes the first black woman to serve an extended mission on International Space Station when SpaceX launches its Crew Dragon capsule with four astronauts.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Edward Gibbon, English historian (1737-1794); Samuel F B Morse, US inventor of first practical telegraph (1791-1872); Coretta Scott King, American civil rights activist (1927-2006); Anouk Aimee, French actress (1932-2024); Sheena Easton, Scottish singer-actress (1959- ); Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands (1967- )

— AFP & Britannica