This day in history
Today is Thursday, Jan. 18, the 18th day of 2024. There are 348 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Director John Boorman is 91. Former senator Paul Kirk, Democrat of Massachusetts, is 86. Singer-songwriter Bobby Goldsboro is 83. Actordirector Kevin Costner is 69. Actor Mark Rylance is 64. is 62. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is 61. Comedian Dave Attell is 59. Actor Jesse L. Martin is 55. Rapper DJ Quik is 54. Rock singer Jonathan Davis of Korn is 53. Former NAACP CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous is 51. Actor Jason Segel is 44. Actor Samantha Mumba is 41. Actor Devin Kelley is 38. Actor Ashleigh Murray is 36. Tennis player Angelique Kerber is 36.
▶ In 1778, English Captain James Cook reached the presentday Hawaiian Islands, which he named the “Sandwich Islands.”
▶ In 1903, Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor of wireless telegraphy, transmitted from Wellfleet to London the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission, a message from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII.
▶ In 1911, the first landing of an aircraft on a ship took place as pilot Eugene B. Ely brought his Curtiss biplane in for a safe landing on the deck of the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Harbor.
▶ In 1943, during World War II, Jewish insurgents in the Warsaw Ghetto launched their initial armed resistance against Nazi troops, who eventually succeeded in crushing the rebellion.
▶ In 1990, a jury in Los Angeles acquitted former preschool operators Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, of 52 child molestation charges.
▶ In 1991, Eastern Airlines shut down after more than six decades in business.
▶ In 1993, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was observed in all 50 states for the first time.
▶ In 2012, President Obama rejected the Keystone XL project, a Canadian company’s plan to build a 1,700-mile pipeline to carry oil across six US states to Texas refineries.
▶ ºIn 2019, Jason Van Dyke, the white Chicago police officer who gunned down Black teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014, was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison.
▶ In 2020, ahead of opening statements in the first Senate impeachment trial of President Trump, House prosecutors wrote that Trump had “used his official powers to pressure a foreign government to interfere in a United States election for his personal political gain,” while Trump’s legal team denounced what it called a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election.”
▶ Last year, a helicopter carrying Ukraine’s interior minister crashed into a kindergarten in a foggy residential suburb of Kyiv, killing him and about a dozen other people, including a child.