Today is Sunday, Feb. 16, the 47th day of 2025. There are 318 days left in the year.

On Feb. 16, 1959, Fidel Castro was sworn in as premier of Cuba, six weeks after dictator Fulgencio Batista announced his resignation and fled the country into exile.

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

In 1960, the nuclear submarine USS Triton departed New London, Connecticut, on the first submerged circumnavigation by a vessel.

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

In 2018, in an indictment, special counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians and three Russian companies of an elaborate plot to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election via a social media trolling campaign, aimed in part at helping Donald Trump win the presidency.

In 2024, Russia’s prison agency announced that Alexei Navalny, activist and Russian opposition leader, had died in the Arctic penal colony where he was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism; the news brought outrage and criticism from world leaders toward Russian president Vladimir Putin.