TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Tuesday, Jan. 9, the ninth day of 2024. There are 357 days left in the year. On this date in:

1788: Connecticut became the fifth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1945: During World War II, American forces began landing on the shores of Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines as the Battle of Luzon got underway, resulting in an Allied victory over Imperial Japanese forces.

1951: The United Nations headquarters in New York officially opened.

1958: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his State of the Union address to Congress, warned of the threat of Communist imperialism.

1987: The White House released a January 1986 memorandum prepared for President Ronald Reagan by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North showing a link between U.S. arms sales to Iran and the release of American hostages in Lebanon.

2003: U.N. weapons inspectors said there was no “smoking gun” to prove Iraq had nuclear, chemical or biological weapons but they demanded that Baghdad provide private access to scientists and fresh evidence to back its claim that it had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction.

2005: Mahmoud Abbas, the No. 2 man in the Palestinian hierarchy during Yasser Arafat’s rule, was elected president of the Palestinian Authority by a landslide.

2018: Downpours sent mud and boulders roaring down Southern California hillsides that had been stripped of vegetation by a gigantic wildfire; more than 20 people died and hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed.

2020:

Chinese state media said a preliminary investigation into recent cases of viral pneumonia had identified the probable cause as a new type of coronavirus.

2022: Seventeen people, including eight children, died after a fire sparked by a malfunctioning space heater filled a highrise apartment building with smoke in the New York City borough of the Bronx; it was the city’s deadliest blaze in three decades.