DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Friday, Feb. 17, the 48th day of 2023. There are 317 days left in the year. On this date in:
1801: The U.S. House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president; Burr became vice president.
1815: The United States and Britain exchanged the instruments of ratification for the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.
1863: The International Red Cross was founded in Geneva.
1864: During the Civil War, the Union ship USS Housatonic was rammed and sunk in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, by the Confederate hand-cranked submarine HL Hunley in the first naval attack of its kind; the Hunley also sank.
1897: The forerunner of the National PTA, the National Congress of Mothers, convened its first meeting in Washington.
1944: During World War II, U.S. forces invaded Eniwetok Atoll, encountering little initial resistance from Imperial Japanese troops. (The Americans secured the atoll less than a week later.)
1959: The United States launched Vanguard 2, a satellite that carried meteorological equipment.
1964: The Supreme Court, in Wesberry v. Sanders, ruled that congressional districts within each state had to be roughly equal in population.
1972: President Richard M. Nixon departed the White House with his wife,
Pat, on a historic trip to China.
1988: Lt. Col. William Higgins, a Marine Corps officer serving with a United Nations truce monitoring group, was kidnapped in southern Lebanon by Iranianbacked terrorists (he was later slain by his captors).
1995: Colin Ferguson was convicted of six counts of murder in the December 1993 Long Island Rail Road shootings (he was later sentenced to a minimum of 200 years in prison).
2015: Vice President Joe Biden opened a White House summit on countering extremism and radicalization, saying the United States needed to ensure that immigrants were fully included in the fabric of American society to prevent violent ideologies from taking root at home.
Comedian Dame Edna (Barry Humphries) is 89. Actor Christina Pickles (“The Wedding Singer,” “St. Elsewhere”) is 88. Football player-turned-actor Jim Brown (“The Dirty Dozen”) is 87.Actor
Becky Ann Baker (“Girls,” “Freaks and Geeks”) is 70. Actor Rene Russo is 69. Actor Richard Karn (“Home Improvement”) is 67. Director Michael Bay (“Transformers,” “Armageddon”) is 59. Guitarist
Tim Mahoney of 311 (three-eleven) is 53. Actor Denise Richards is 52. Singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day is 51. Actor Jerry O’connell is 49. Actor
Joseph Gordon-levitt is 42. TV personality Paris Hilton is 42. Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is 32. Actor Sasha Pieterse (“Pretty Little Liars”) is 27.