This day in history
Today is Tuesday, Jan. 3, the third day of 2022. There are 362 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Hockey Hall of Famer Bobby Hull is 84. Musician Stephen Stills is 78. Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones is 77. Actor-director Mel Gibson is 67. Musician Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk) is 48. Former NFL quarterback Eli Manning is 42. Actor Nicole Beharie is 38.
▶ In 1777, General George Washington’s army routed the British in the Battle of Princeton in New Jersey.
▶ In 1959, Alaska became the 49th state as President Eisenhower signed a proclamation.
▶ In 1961, President Eisenhower announced the United States was formally terminating diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba.
▶ In 1967, Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, died in a Dallas hospital.
▶ In 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated in Cupertino, Calif., by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mike Markkula Jr.
▶ In 1990, ousted Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega surrendered to US forces, 10 days after taking refuge in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission.
▶ In 2002, a judge in Alabama ruled that former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry was mentally competent to stand trial on murder charges in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls. (Cherry was convicted and served a life sentence until his death in 2004.)
▶ In 2007, Gerald R. Ford was laid to rest on the grounds of his presidential museum in Grand Rapids, Mich.
▶ In 2008, Illinois Senator Barack Obama won Democratic caucuses in Iowa; Mike Huckabee won the GOP caucuses.
▶ In 2013, students from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., reconvened at a building in the town of Monroe about three weeks after the massacre that killed 20 first-graders and six educators. The 113th Congress opened for business, with House Speaker John Boehner reelected to his post despite a mini-revolt in Republican ranks.
▶ In 2017, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled again that the National Security Agency could keep collecting every American’s telephone records every day.
▶ In 2020, the United States killed Iran’s top general in an airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport; the Pentagon said General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds force, had been “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members.” Iran warned of retaliation.
▶ Last year, a jury in San Jose, Calif., convicted Elizabeth Holmes of duping investors into believing that her startup company Theranos had developed a revolutionary medical device that could detect diseases and conditions from a few drops of blood. The East Coast’s main northsouth highway, Interstate 95, became impassable in Virginia after a truck jackknifed, triggering a chain reaction as other vehicles lost control during a winter storm; hundreds of drivers were stuck in place in frigid temperatures, some for over 24 hours.