TODAY IN HISTORY
1788: Connecticut became the fifth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. 1793: Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard, using a hot-air balloon, flew from Philadelphia to Woodbury, N.J..
1861: Mississippi became the second state to secede from the Union, the same day the Star of the West, a merchant vessel bringing reinforcements and supplies to Federal troops at Fort Sumter, S.C., retreated because of artillery fire.
1914: The county of Los Angeles opened the country’s first public defender’s office.
1916: The World War I Battle of Gallipoli ended after eight months with an Ottoman Empire victory as Allied forces withdrew.
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.
1958: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his State of the Union address to Congress, warned of the threat of communist imperialism.
1972: Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, speaking by telephone from the Bahamas to reporters in Hollywood, said a purported autobiography of him by Clifford Irving was a fake.
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.
2012: Iranian state radio reported that a court had convicted former U.S. Marine Amir Mirzaei Hekmati of working for the CIA and sentenced him to death. (The Obama administration and his family denied Hekmati was a CIA spy; Hekmati was released in January 2016 as part of a prisoner swap.) Cincinnati Reds shortstop Barry Larkin was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame. No. 2 Alabama beat No. 1 LSU 21-0 for the first shutout in BCS title game history.
2015: French security forces shot and killed two al-Qaida-linked brothers suspected of carrying out the rampage at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that had claimed 12 lives, the same day a gunman killed four people at a Paris kosher grocery store before being killed by police. 2017: President-elect Donald Trump appointed his influential son-in-law Jared Kushner as a White House senior adviser. The outgoing Obama administration blacklisted five Russians as the feud over U.S. election hacking escalated. In college football’s first national championship rematch, No. 3 Clemson took down top-ranked Alabama 35-31.
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.
2021: Police charged more people in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots as more graphic details of the mob’s violence and brutality emerged. Jacob Anthony Chansley, an Arizona man seen in photos and video with a painted face and wearing a horned, fur hat, was arrested and charged. An Indonesian jetliner nosedived into the Java Sea after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 62 people on board. A California woman, Miya Ponsetto, who wrongly accused a Black teenager of stealing her phone and grabbed at him as he tried to leave a New York hotel, was charged with attempted robbery and other crimes when she returned to New York following her arrest in California.