TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, Feb. 16.

TODAY'S HIGHLIGHT

Fidel Castro became premier of Cuba a month and a-half after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista.

ON THIS DATE

In 1804, Lt. Stephen Decatur led a successful raid into Tripoli Harbor to burn the U.S. Navy frigate Philadelphia, which had fallen into the hands of pirates during the First Barbary War.

In 1862, the Civil War Battle of Fort Donelson in Tennessee ended as some 12,000 Confederate soldiers surrendered; Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s victory earned him the moniker “Unconditional Surrender Grant.”

In 1868, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was organized in New York City.

In 1945, American troops landed on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines during World War II.

In 1961, the United States launched the Explorer 9 satellite.

In 1968, the nation’s first 911 emergency telephone system was inaugurated in Haleyville, Alabama, as the speaker of the Alabama House, Rankin Fite, placed a call from the mayor’s office in City Hall to a red telephone at the police station (also located in City Hall) that was answered by U.S. Rep. Tom Bevill.

In 1988, seven people were shot to death during an office rampage in Sunnyvale, California, by a man obsessed with a co-worker who was wounded in the attack. (The gunman is on death row.)

In 1996, eleven people were killed in a fiery collision between an Amtrak passenger train and a Maryland commuter train in Silver Spring, Md.

In 1998, a China Airlines Airbus A300 trying to land in fog near Taipei, Taiwan, crashed, killing all 196 people on board, plus seven on the ground.

In 2001, the United States and Britain staged air strikes against radar stations and air defense command centers in Iraq. President George W. Bush met with Mexican President Vicente Fox on the first foreign trip of Bush’s presidency. Dr. William H. Masters, who with his partner and later wife Virginia Johnson, pioneered research in the field of human sexuality, died in Tucson, Ariz., at age 85.

In 2003, more than 100,000 people demonstrated in the streets of San Francisco to protest a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Ten years ago: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Tokyo to begin her first trip abroad as President Barack Obama’s chief diplomat. Five years ago: Secretary of State John Kerry, during a visit to Indonesia, called climate change perhaps the “most fearsome” destructive weapon and mocked those who denied its existence or questioned its causes, comparing them to people who insist the earth is flat.

One year ago: In an indictment, special counsel Robert Mueller accused 13 Russians of an elaborate plot to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election with a huge but hidden social media trolling campaign aimed in part at helping Donald Trump.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

“There are two kinds of man: the ones who make history and the ones who endure it.” — Camilo Jose Cela, Nobel Prize-winning Spanish author (1916-2002).

— ASSOCIATED PRESS