Today is Thursday, Jan. 28, the 28th day of 2016. There are 338 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1547 – England’s King Henry VIII dies and is succeeded by his 9-year-old son, Edward VI.
1596 – English navigator Sir Francis Drake dies off Panama’s coast and is buried at sea.
1689 – Britain’s Parliament declares that James II has abdicated; Germany’s Baron Melas devastates the Palatinate.
1846 – East India Company troops defeat Sikhs at Aliwal in India.
1871 – France surrenders in the Franco-Prussian War.
1885 – British relief force reaches Khartoum, and the Sudan is evacuated.
1902 – The Carnegie Institute, a nonprofit organization to conduct basic research and advanced education in biology, astronomy and earth sciences is established in Washington, D.C.
1909 – U.S. control in Cuba is ended.
1915 – The U.S Coast Guard is created by an Act of Congress.
1916 – Louis D. Brandeis is appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to the Supreme Court, becoming its first Jewish member.
1932 – Japanese troops occupy Shanghai in China.
1945 – First U.S. truck convoy reopens Burma Road in World War II.
1949 – U.N. Security Council adopts resolution to establish a cease-fire in Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies.
1961 – Rwanda’s provisional government proclaims republic.
1962 – U.S. unmanned spacecraft, Ranger III, fails to hit moon and passes it at distance of 35,200 kilometers (22,000 miles).
1964 – Riots break out in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia — known today as Harare, Zimbabwe.
1980 – Six U.S. diplomats who avoided being taken hostage at their embassy in Tehran fly out of Iran with the help of Canadian diplomats.
1983 – Labor group Solidarity’s underground leaders call on Poland’s factory workers to prepare for nationwide general strike as “the only way to break down the existing dictatorship.”
1986 – Space shuttle Challenger explodes moments after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing all seven crew members.
1990 – Life in Azerbaijani capital of Baku returns to normal as Armenian and Azerbaijani separatists withdraw from border regions.
1992 – Leadership of National Liberation Front, which won Algeria’s independence and ruled for three decades, resigns.
1996 – In Sarajevo, three British soldiers are killed when their armored personnel carrier hits a land mine and a Swedish soldier dies when his vehicle slides off the road.
1997 – In Algiers, an assassin shoots and kills the leader of Algeria’s largest labor union — a key presidential ally and an opponent of the Islamic insurgency.
1998 – A judge in Poonamallee, India, convicts 26 conspirators linked to Sri Lanka’s separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in the 1991 suicide bombing assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and orders all to be hanged.
1999 – India and Pakistan meet in their first cricket match in the subcontinent in 12 years. Pakistan walks away with a 12-run victory after a nail-biting finish.
2003 – Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s right-wing Likud party wins the parliamentary elections, soundly defeating the center-left Labor Party and extending Sharon’s leadership for another four-year term. The Labor Party suffered its worst-ever defeat at the polls.
2009 – A caterpillar plague in Liberia spreads, affecting 400,000 people in more than 100 villages in the West African nation, the U.N. says.
2013 — With French support, Malian troops enter the fabled city of Timbuktu after al-Qaida-linked militants flee into the desert, setting fire to a library that held thousands of manuscripts dating to the Middle Ages.
2014 — Ukraine’s prime minister resigns and parliament repeals anti-protest laws that had set off violent clashes between protesters and police, moves aimed at defusing the country’s political crisis.
2015 — a pathologist testifies that the body of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko was so radioactive that his post-mortem was “one of the most dangerous” ever undertaken.
Today’s Birthdays:
John Barclay, Scottish satirist (1582-1621); John Baskerville, English typographer (1716-1775); Alan Alda, U.S. actor (1936–); Joey Fatone Jr., U.S.
singer/game show host (1977–); Nick Carter, U.S. singer (1980–); Elijah Wood, U.S. actor (1981–); Sarah McLachlan, Canadian singer (1968–).
Thought For Today:
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops — Henry Brooks Adams, American historian-author (1838-1918).
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