Today is Thursday, Feb. 16, the 47th day of 2017. There are 318 days left in the year.
Today’s highlight:
On Feb. 16, 1862, the Civil War Battle of Fort Donelson in Tennessee ended as some 12,000 Confederate soldiers surrendered
On this date:
In 1868, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was organized in New York City.
In 1923, the burial chamber of King Tutankhamen’s recently unearthed tomb was unsealed in Egypt by English archaeologist Howard Carter.
In 1937, Du Pont research chemist Dr. Wallace H. Carothers, inventor of nylon, received a patent for the synthetic fiber, described as “linear condensation polymers.”
In 1959, Fidel Castro became premier of Cuba a month and a-half after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista.
In 1968, the nation’s first 911 emergency telephone system was inaugurated in Haleyville, Alabama.
In 1987, John Demjanjuk went on trial in Jerusalem, accused of being “Ivan the Terrible,” a guard at the Treblinka Nazi concentration camp. (Demjanjuk was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but the conviction ended up being overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.)
In 1996, 11 people were killed in a fiery collision between an Amtrak passenger train and a Maryland commuter train in Silver Spring, Maryland.
In 1998, a China Airlines Airbus A300-600R trying to land in fog near Taipei, Taiwan, crashed, killing all 196 people on board, plus six on the ground.
Ten years ago: An Italian judge indicted 25 suspected CIA agents and a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, who was taken from Italy to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured. (The Americans were later convicted in absentia.)
Associated Press
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