Today is Saturday, Jan. 30, the 30th day of 2016. There are 336 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1641 – Portuguese surrender Malacca in Malaya to the Dutch.
1648 – Peace between Spain and the Netherlands is signed at Muenster.
1649 – England’s King Charles I is beheaded.
1781 – The U.S. Articles of the Confederation, a forerunner of the Constitution, are adopted by Maryland, the last of the original 13 colonies to do so.
1788 – Charles Edward Stuart, young pretender to British throne, dies in Rome.
1835 – Demented painter Richard Lawrence tries to assassinate U.S. President Andrew Jackson.
1889 – Crown Prince Rudolf and his lover Baroness Mary Vetsera, 18, are found dead in possible suicide pact at the Mayerling hunting lodge outside Vienna.
1902 – Britain signs treaty with Japan providing for independence of China and Korea.
1933 – Adolf Hitler is named chancellor of Germany.
1943 – Soviets destroy German army southwest of Stalingrad in World War II.
1948 – Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in New Delhi, India.
1957 – United Nations calls on South Africa to reconsider its apartheid policy.
1962 – U.N. General Assembly adopts Asian-African resolution calling on Portugal to halt repressive measures against Angola.
1964 – South Vietnamese General Nguyen Khanh seizes power in coup in Saigon.
1968 – The Tet Offensive begins as Communist forces launch surprise attacks against South Vietnamese provincial capitals.
1972 – Thirteen Roman Catholic civil rights marchers are shot to death by British soldiers in Northern Ireland on what becomes known as “Bloody Sunday.”
1986 – President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines pledges to relinquish power peacefully if he loses to Corazon Aquino in the Feb. 7 election.
1990 – Communist Party loses majority in Czech parliament, which it dominated for four decades.
1991 – Iraqi forces attack allied positions in Saudi Arabia near Kuwaiti border, holding abandoned coastal city of Khafji for a time. Eleven U.S. marines are killed, seven by friendly fire.
1992 – U.S. military announces it will halt or cut back operations at 83 additional military sites in Europe.
1995 – A car bomb explodes in Algiers, killing at least 20 people and injuring about 60 in the worst bombing during a three-year insurgency by Islamic militants.
2002 – The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland agrees to pay US$10 million to children sexually abused by clergy over the past few decades.
2003 – Richard Reid, who in October 2002 pleaded guilty to attempting to bomb a trans-Atlantic flight, is sentenced by a court in Boston to life in prison.
2008 – The Australian government says it will issue its first formal apology to its indigenous people on Feb. 13, a milestone that could ease tensions with a minority whose mixed-blood children were once taken away on the premise that their race was doomed.
2010 – China suspends military exchanges with the United States, threatens unprecedented sanctions against American defense companies and warns that cooperation would suffer after Washington announced $6.4 billion in planned arms sales to Taiwan.
2011 – Hundreds of South Africans fill a church in the township of Soweto to pray for former president Nelson Mandela after his release from a hospital where he was treated for an acute respiratory tract infection.
2014 — An appeals court in Florence upholds the guilty verdict against U.S. student Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend for the 2007 murder of her British roommate, raising the specter of a long legal battle over her extradition if the conviction is upheld.
2015 — Philippine president orders the hunt for a Filipino terror suspect who has escaped an anti-terrorist operation that resulted in the killings of 44 police commandos, the biggest single-day combat loss in recent years.
Today’s Birthdays:
Franklin D. Roosevelt, U.S. president (1882-1945); Gene Hackman, U.S. actor (1930–); Vanessa Redgrave, English actress (1937–); Phil Collins, English pop singer (1951–); Brett Butler, U.S. actress/comedian (1958–); Christian Bale, English actor (1974–); Jody Watley, U.S. singer (1959–).
Thought For Today:
It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn’t know — and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything — Joyce Cary, English author (1888-1957).
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