April 16
1862 France’s Napoleon III declares war against Benito Juarez, the Mexican leader.
1883 Paul Kruger becomes president of the South African Republic.
1900 The first books of US postage stamps are issued.
1906 Pacific cable between the US and China is completed.
1917 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returns to Russia after years in exile.
1942 India’s Congress party rejects terms of self-government offered by Britain.
1947 Fires and explosions wreck Texas City as a French freighter loaded with ammonium nitrate fertiliser blows up.
1951 The British submarine HMS Affray sank in the English Channel, killing all 75 crew.
1953 Royal yacht Britannia is launched in Scotland.
1970 Alpine avalanche plunges down on children’s sanitarium at Sallanches, France, killing 72.
1984 Malik Singh Bhatia, a senior official of the “Talwandi Group”, a faction of the Akali Dal, is shot dead in the grounds of the Sikh’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple.
1988 Abu Jihad, military commander of PLO is assassinated.
1990 Fire caused by a leaking gas cylinder roars through two cars of a crowded train in India’s eastern Bihar state, killing at least 72 passengers.
1992 Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah is stripped of power.
1993 Mahamane Ousmane is inaugurated as president of Niger.
1999 Abdul Aziz Bouteflika becomes president of Algeria.
2001 Israel launches an airstrike against a Syrian radar station.
2006 A passenger train in northern Greece crashes into a truck at a crossing and derails, killing three people.
2007 At least 32 people, including the suspected gunman, are killed at Virginia Tech university.
2008 US military frees AP photographer Bilal Hussain after he spent more than two years in custody in Baghdad.
2009 The second largest US mall owner, General Growth Properties, files for bankruptcy.
2011 Nigerians vote in masses what they hope will be their first credible presidential election for decades and could set an example across Africa.
2013 A 7.8 major earthquake strikes on a border area of southeast Iran and kills 35 people.
2014 A ferry carrying 459 people capsizes off South Korea, killing 304 people.
HIGHLIGHT
1991
British director David Lean dies
Sir David Lean, the British film director, whose films collected 28 Oscars in a career spanning five decades, died in London after a long illness. He was 83. Sir David was known for such classics as Brief Encounter (1945), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984). His death puts in doubt the future of his £23 million adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo, the script of which had been completed. His sudden illness forced suspension of pre-production work. He was flown from the south of France to London with a throat infection, but he never recovered. Sir David, who was knighted in 1984, received the prestigious Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1990. After learning his trade as a clapperboard boy in the 1920s he took charge of editing and commentary for Gaumont Sound News in 1930 - later moving to British Movietone News.
