Today is Thursday, Feb. 16, the 47th day of 2017. There are 318 days left in the year.

Birthdays: Actor William Katt is 66. Rhythm-and-blues singer James Ingram is 65. Actor LeVar Burton is 60. Actor-rapper Ice-T is 59. Tennis Hall of Famer John McEnroe is 58. Olympic gold medal runner Cathy Freeman is 44. Actor Mahershala Ali is 43.

In 1804, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a successful raid into Tripoli Harbor to burn the US Navy frigate Philadelphia, which had fallen into the hands of pirates.

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

In 1923, the burial chamber of King Tutankhamen’s recently unearthed tomb was unsealed in Egypt by English archeologist Howard Carter.

In 1937, Du Pont research chemist Wallace Carothers received a patent for nylon, described as ‘‘linear condensation polymers.’’

In 1959, Fidel Castro became premier of Cuba after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista.

In 1968, the nation’s first 911 emergency phone system was inaugurated in Haleyville, Ala.

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, 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, Md.

In 2012, a judge in Detroit ordered life in prison for ‘‘underwear bomber’’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who had tried to blow up a Northwest jetliner. New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, died of an apparent asthma attack in Syria while reporting on the uprising; he was 43.