Today is the 116th day of 2022. There are 249 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1865: John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, is surrounded by federal troops near Port Royal, Virginia, and killed.

OTHER EVENTS

1532: Suleiman I, Sultan of Turkey, invades Hungary and advances toward Vienna.

1564: William Shakespeare is baptised at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

1607: Captain John Smith lands at Cape Henry, Virginia, with the first group of colonists to establish a permanent English settlement in America.

1777: During the American Revolutionary War, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington, the daughter of a militia commander in Dutchess County, New York, rides her horse into the night to alert her father’s men of the approach of British regular troops.

1798: France declares war on Austria.

1807: Russia and Prussia form alliance to drive France out of German states.

1828: Russia declares war on Turkey.

1860: Spain and Morocco sign peace agreement.

1865: John Wilkes Booth, assassin of US President Abraham Lincoln, is surrounded and killed by troops near Bowling Green, Virginia.

1872: Civil war breaks out in Spain.

1885: Britain occupies Port Hamilton, Korea.

1933: Nazi Germany’s infamous secret police, the Gestapo, is created.

1937: In the Spanish Civil War, German planes bomb the town of Guernica, killing between 1,000 to 1,650 people. Painter Pablo Picasso later immortalises their suffering in one of his masterpieces.

1962: First international satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida — a US-British venture.

1964: African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.

1966: Mt Kelud in Java, Indonesia, erupts, killing 1,000 people. It is the second eruption since 1919 when it claimed 5,000 lives.

1966: A sidewinder missile, launched by a US jet plane, shoots down the first Communist MIG-21 in the Vietnam War.

1968: The United States explodes a 1.3-megaton nuclear device called Boxcar beneath the Nevada desert .

1971: White House commission recommends that China be brought into United Nations, with Nationalist China (Taiwan) retaining its membership.

1977: Legendary nightclub Studio 54 has its opening night in New York.

1986: An explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine cause radioactive fallout to begin spewing into the atmosphere. Dozens of people are killed in the immediate aftermath of the disaster while the long-term death toll from radiation poisoning is believed to number in the thousands.

1989: Actress-comedienne Lucille Ball dies at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at age 77.

1992: Moscow residents celebrate first Russian Orthodox Easter in 74 years.

1993: An Indian airliner hits a truck on take-off and crashes in Aurangabad, India, killing 56 people.

1994: Voting begins in South Africa’s first all-race elections, resulting in victory for the African National Congress and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president. Taiwanese airliner crashes in Japan, killing all 264 aboard. China Airlines Flight 140, a Taiwanese Airbus A-300, crashes while landing in Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 people.

1996: After 16 days, Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon agree to a truce to end a blitz that had left more than 150 people dead and forced a half-million people to flee.

1997: Banners of loyalty and life-size images of Saddam Hussein adorn Iraq’s capital, as Iraqis begin seven days of festivities in celebration of his 60th birthday.

1998: Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading human rights activist in Guatemala, is bludgeoned to death two days after a report he compiled on atrocities during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war was made public.

1999: The Chernobyl computer virus, perhaps the most destructive so far, damages hundreds of thousands of computers around the world.

2000: Vermont Governor Howard Dean signs the United States’s first Bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions.

2002: The UN Commission on Human Rights, in its annual review of human rights, censures Cuba’s human rights policies but drops official condemnations of Russia and Iran.

2005: Syria’s last soldier in Lebanon walks across the border, a quiet end to a once-indomitable, 29-year military presence that was the key to Damascus’s control of its neighbour.

2006: Whitney Cerak and Laura Van Ryn, two students at Indiana’s Taylor University, are involved in a van-truck collision that kills five people. In a tragic mix-up that took five weeks to resolve, a seriously injured and comatose Cerak was mistakenly identified as Van Ryn, who had actually died in the crash and was buried by Cerak’s family. European Union lawmakers announce findings that the CIA has conducted more than 1,000 clandestine flights in Europe since 2001, and some of them secretly took away terror suspects to countries where they could face torture.

2007: Thousands of Buddhist monks demonstrate outside the Thailand Parliament building to demand that the country’s new constitution enshrine Buddhism as the official national religion.

2008: Zimbabwe’s electoral commission says a recount of votes for 10 parliamentary seats shows the Opposition won six of them in the previous month’s elections, making it unlikely that Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party can wrest control of parliament. Police in Amstetten, Austria, arrest Josef Fritzl, freeing his daughter Elisabeth and her six surviving children whom he had fathered while holding her captive in a basement cell for 24 years. (Fritzl was later sentenced to life in a psychiatric ward.)

2009: World governments race to avoid both a pandemic and global hysteria as more possible swine flu cases surface from New Zealand to Canada and the United States declares a public health emergency; officials in Mexico City close everything from concerts to sports matches to churches in an effort to stem the spread of the virus.

2010: Gunmen shoot and kill a Nigerian journalist at his home the same day two others die while attempting to cover fighting between Christians and Muslims in the nation’s restive central highlands, highlighting the daily dangers confronting local journalists in Africa’s most populous nation.

2011: Syrian forces heap more punishment on residents of restive towns, detaining hundreds in raids or at checkpoints, firing on people trying to retrieve the bodies of anti-government protesters, and even shooting holes in rooftop water tanks in a region parched by drought.

2012: Pakistani authorities deport Osama bin Laden’s three widows and his children to Saudi Arabia, less than a week before the first anniversary of the unilateral American raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader in his hideout in a military town.

2013: Rescuers dig through mangled metal and concrete in a collapsed garment factory building in Bangladesh and find more survivors but also more corpses, pushing the death total past 300.

2013: Unable to ignore air travellers’ anger, Congress overwhelmingly approves legislation to allow the Federal Aviation Administration to withdraw furloughs of air traffic controllers caused by budget-wide cuts known as the sequester, ending a week of coast-to-coast flight delays. Fire at a psychiatric hospital near Moscow kills 38 people; only three escaped.

2014: South Korea’s prime minister offers to resign over the Government’s handling of a deadly ferry sinking, blaming “deep-rooted evils” and societal irregularities for a tragedy that left more than 300 people dead or missing and led to widespread shame, fury and finger-pointing.

2014: A British helicopter crashes in southern Afghanistan, killing five NATO troops.

2015: Tens of thousands of Nepalese who spent the night under a chilly sky are jolted awake by strong aftershocks while rescuers aided by international teams clear rubble in search of survivors after a powerful earthquake killed nearly 2,000 people.

2017: Dismissing concerns about ballooning federal deficits, US President Donald Trump proposes dramatic tax cuts for US businesses and individuals. Trump tells the leaders of Mexico and Canada that he will not immediately pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, just hours after Administration officials said he was considering a draft executive order to do just that. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft survives an unprecedented trip between Saturn and its rings, sending back amazing pictures to show for it.

2018: Bill Cosby is convicted of drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia mansion in 2004; it was the first big celebrity trial of the #MeToo era and completed the spectacular downfall of a comedian who broke racial barriers on his way to TV superstardom. (Cosby was later sentenced to three to 10 years in prison.) President Donald Trump’s White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, withdraws his nomination to be veterans affairs secretary in the face of accusations of misconduct. Teachers in Arizona and Colorado converge on state capitals as they launch widespread walkouts in a bid for better pay and education funding.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, engineer, sculptor and architect (1452-1519); David Hume, Scottish philosopher-historian-economist (1711-1776); Alfred Krupp, German metallurgist-industrialist (1812-1887); WF Massey, New Zealand politician (1856-1925); IM Pei, architect (1917-2019); Carol Burnett, US actress-comedienne (1933- ); Maurice Williams, Zodiacs lead singer (1938- ); Giancarlo Esposito, US actor (1958- ); Joan Chen, Chinese actress (1961- ); Albert Lawrence, sprint relay silver medallist at the 1984 Olympics (1961- ); Jet Li, actor (1963- ); Kevin James, actor-comedian (1965- ); T-Boz, rapper of TLC (1970- ); former First Lady Melania Trump (1970- ); Channing Tatum (1980- ).

— AP