Today is Sunday, Jan. 10, the 10th day of 2016. There are 355 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1663 – Britain’s King Charles II grants charter to Royal African Colony.
1815 – British declare war against King of Kandy in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.
1863 – London’s Metropolitan, the world’s first underground passenger railway, opens to the public.
1889 – France establishes protectorate over Ivory Coast.
1900 – Frederick Roberts lands in South Africa as commander in chief of British army.
1901 – The Texas oil boom starts, ushering in an era of American prosperity as it introduces the world to a new energy source.
1919 – British Army takes over administration of Baghdad Railway.
1920 – The League of Nations is established as the Treaty of Versailles goes into effect.
1923 – Meml, Lithuania, under Allied occupation, is seized by Lithuania.
1928 – Leon Trotsky, one of the chief architects of Soviet Union, is ordered into exile by Soviet government.
1938 – Japanese troops enter Tsingtao, China.
1942 – Japanese invade Dutch East Indies in World War II.
1946 – The first U.N. General Assembly convenes in London.
1955 – Federal Council of Nigeria meets for first time.
1967 – Edward W. Brooke, the first black elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote, takes his seat.
1968 – U.S. Surveyor 7 spacecraft makes soft landing on moon, ending U.S. series of unmanned explorations of lunar surface.
1969 – Sweden becomes first Western European country to announce it will establish full diplomatic relations with North Vietnam.
1978 – The Soviet Union launches two cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz capsule for a rendezvous with the Salyut VI space laboratory.
1984 – The United States and the Vatican establish full diplomatic relations for the first time in more than a century.
1992 – Pilots threaten to defect with their planes and sailors warn of mutiny if the two biggest commonwealth states, Ukraine and Russia, split up the former Soviet military.
1993 – At least 15 people are killed in Bombay in the fifth day of renewed rioting between Hindus and Muslims over Hindu militants’ destruction of a mosque in December.
1994 – The United States, Russia and Ukraine reach an agreement on the destruction of Ukraine’s entire nuclear arsenal.
1995 – A military court in Haekstep, Egypt, sentences two Muslim radicals to death for taking part in the stabbing of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz.
1998 – The German government reaches an agreement to pay US$110 million to Holocaust survivors in eastern Europe.
2000 – America Online agrees to buy Time-Warner for US$162 billion, making it the largest-ever corporate merger.
2003 – North Korea announces it is withdrawing from the 1970 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which it signed in 1985.
2007 – U.S. President George W. Bush presents plans to send 21,500 additional American forces to Iraq, acknowledging that it was a mistake not to have more U.S. and Iraqi troops before.
2012 – President Bashar Assad vows to use an “iron hand” to crush what he calls the terrorists and saboteurs behind Syria’s 10-month-old uprising in which thousands of people have been killed.
2013 – A series of bombings in different parts of Pakistan kills 115 people, including 81 who died in a sectarian attack in the southwest city of Quetta.
2014 — The United States withdraws a diplomat from India in hopes it will end a bitter dispute that started with the arrest and strip search of an Indian diplomat in New York.
2015 — Supporters of extremist Islamic groups extol the suspects in the massacre at a Paris satirical newspaper as “lions of the caliphate” and praise the killings on social media as revenge for the French satirical publication’s mockery of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and France’s military involvement in Muslim countries.
Today’s Birthdays:
Lazaro Spallanzani, Italian scientist (1729-1799); John Dalberg Action, English historian (1834-1902); Alexander Scriabin, Russian composer (1872-1915); Gisele MacKenzie, Canadian born singer (1927-2003); Frank Sinatra Jr., U.S. singer (1944–); Rod Stewart, British pop singer (1945–); Pat Benatar, U.S. singer (1953–).
Thought for Today:
The force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral — Nicholas Murray Butler, American educator (1862-1947).
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