Today is Sunday, Jan. 3, the 3rd day of 2016. There are 362 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1521 – Martin Luther is excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.
1648 – English military leader Oliver Cromwell condemns King Charles I before Parliament. The Royalists soon take up arms again and the Second Civil War begins.
1739 – Convention of the Pardo to settle Anglo-Spanish disputes opens.
1777 – Gen. George Washington’s army defeats the British in the Battle of Princeton, New Jersey.
1778 – Palatinate recognizes Austrian claim to Lower Bavaria.
1795 – Secret treaty takes place between Russia and Austria for third partition of Poland.
1815 – Austria, Britain and France form defensive alliance against Prussia and Russia.
1868 – The Meiji Restoration re-establishes the authority of Japan’s emperor and heralds the fall of the military rulers known as shoguns.
1896 – Anglo-German relations reach crisis over German support to Transvaal leaders.
1915 – Rebellion breaks out in Albania.
1921 – First Indian Parliament meets.
1925 – Benito Mussolini, prime minister and leader of Italy’s Fascists, assumes responsibility for the murder of an opposition politician and dares parliament to prosecute him. He launches a crackdown that makes him dictator of Italy.
1938 – The March of Dimes campaign to fight polio is organized in the United States.
1941 – Italian forces surrender at Bardia, Libya, in World War II.
1947 – U.S. Congressional proceedings are televised for the first time as viewers in Washington, Philadelphia and New York City see some of the opening ceremonies of the 80th Congress.
1961 – United States severs diplomatic relations with Cuba.
1962 – Indonesia’s President Sukarno proclaims West New Guinea an independent province.
1974 – Kuwait reaches agreement with Gulf Oil and British Petroleum companies for 60 percent takeover of their operations in Gulf state.
1977 – International Monetary Fund gives largest loan in its 30-year history — almost $4 billion — to Britain to bolster the country’s currency.
1985 – Israel reluctantly concedes it mounted an airlift recently to relocate large numbers of Ethiopian Jews from the famine-wracked country to Israel.
1990 – Ousted Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega surrenders to U.S. forces, 10 days after taking refuge in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission.
1993 – U.S. President George H. W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin sign an arms control treaty to reduce nuclear weapons by two-thirds.
1997 – A Rwandan court sentences two Hutu men to death, the first verdict in the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, most of them Tutsis, in 1994.
2000 – Assailants protesting Russia’s crackdown on Chechnya fire rocket-propelled grenades at the Russian Embassy in Beirut. A policeman and a Palestinian attacker die.
2005 – President George W. Bush enlists two former presidents, his father George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, for an ambitious private fund-raising drive for victims of the deadly tsunamis in south Asia.
2007 – Myanmar’s repressive military government frees 2,831 prison inmates, including about 20 political prisoners, ahead of the 59th anniversary of its independence from Britain.
2009 – After seven days of pummeling Gaza from the air, Israel unsheathes its land forces, raising its war against Gaza’s Hamas rulers to a new level.
2013 – An American drone strike in Pakistan kills a top Taliban commander who sent money and fighters to battle the U.S. in Afghanistan but had a truce with the Pakistani military.
2015 — Israel halts transfer of tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinians in retaliation for their move to join the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
Today’s Birthdays:
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Italian musician (1710-1736); Clement Attlee, British statesman (1883-1967); David W. Griffith, pioneer U.S. film producer (1875-1948); J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien, British fantasy writer (1892-1973); Victor Borge, Danish pianist-humorist (1909-2000); John Paul Jones, English bassist w/rock group Led Zeppelin (1946–); Mel Gibson, U.S.-Australian actor (1951–).
Thought for today:
Very few men are wise by their own counsel; or learned by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by himself, had a fool for his master — Ben Jonson, English dramatist and poet (1572-1637).
