Today’s highlight in history

On Jan. 15, 1967, the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League defeated the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League 35-10 in the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, retroactively known as Super Bowl I.

On this date

the original rules of basketball, devised by James Naismith, were published for the first time in Springfield, Mass.

In 1919,

in Boston, a tank containing about 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst, sending the syrup coursing through the city’s North End, killing 21 people.

In 1929,

civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta.

In 1943,

work was completed on the Pentagon, the headquarters of what is now the U.S. Department of Defense.

In 1973,

President Richard M. Nixon announced the suspension of all U.S. offensive action in North Vietnam, citing progress in peace talks.

In 1978,

two students at Florida State University in Tallahassee were murdered in their sorority house. (Ted Bundy was convicted and sentenced to death, but was executed for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl that occurred three weeks after the sorority murders.)

In 1993,

a disarmament ceremony ended in Paris with the last of 125 countries signing a treaty banning chemical weapons.

Ten years ago:

US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger ditched his plane in the Hudson River after a flock of birds disabled both engines; all 155 people aboard survived.

Five years ago:

A bipartisan Senate report said that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, could have been prevented; the report blamed the State Department, the military and U.S. intelligence.

One year ago:

Singer Dolores O’Riordan of the rock band The Cranberries died at a London hotel at the age of 46; a coroner found that she had accidentally drowned in a bathtub after drinking.

Associated Press