This Day in History – January 13
Today is the 13th day of 2014. There are 352 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2013: A Cairo appeals court overturns Hosni Mubarak’s life sentence and orders a retrial of the former Egyptian president for failing to prevent the killing of hundreds of protesters during the 2001 uprising that toppled his regime.
OTHER EVENTS
1559: Coronation of Elizabeth I of England.
1794: US President George Washington approves a measure adding two stars and two stripes to the American flag, following the admission of Vermont and Kentucky to the union.
1822: Liberal Constitution is adopted in Greece.
1898: Emile Zola publishes the manifesto J’accuse, an attack on the anti-Semitism in France that sent Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus to prison.
1915: Earthquake in central Italy kills 30,000 people.
1963: West African Republic of Togo’s President Sylvanus Olympio is murdered by Sgt Gnassingbe Eyadema in a military coup.
1966: Robert C Weaver becomes the first black Cabinet member as he is appointed secretary of Housing and Urban Development by US President Lyndon Johnson.
1967: Gnassingbe Eyadema, now a lieutenant colonel, seizes power in Togo in a bloodless coup.
1982: An Air Florida 737 crashes into a bridge after takeoff and falls into the Potomac River, killing 78 people.
1987: An employee of Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is charged with setting a New Year’s Eve fire that killed 96 people and injured more than 140 others.
1988: Taiwanese President Chiang Ching-Kuo dies of heart attack at age 77.
1990: Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani announces the arrest of four officers and four soldiers in slayings of six Jesuit priests; Douglas Wilder of Virginia becomes the nation’s first elected black governor as he takes the oath of office in Richmond, Virginia.
1991: Lithuanian television station in Kaunas is seized by Soviet paratroopers in brutal assault that leaves 14 people dead.
1992: Serial killer Jeffrey L Dahmer pleads guilty but insane to 15 mutilation killings in Milwaukee, United States. He is killed by a fellow prisoner in 1994; Japan apologizes for forcing tens of thousands of Korean women to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II.
1997: Two letter bombs sent to the UN bureau of an Arab-language newspaper force the evacuation of part of UN headquarters, hours after a third letter bomb explodes at the newspaper’s London offices.
2000: Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates promotes company president Steve Ballmer to chief executive officer.
2005: The son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pleads guilty to helping bankroll a botched coup plot in Equatorial Guinea in a plea bargain that allows him to escape prison and rejoin his family in the United States.
2008: China’s government reports that the country has closed more than 11,000 small coal mines as part of a two-year-old safety crackdown aimed at stemming the industry’s high death toll.
2009: After a two-year deployment in Somalia, Ethiopia hands over security duties to a Somali force.
2010: North Korea’s military warns that it will retaliate against South Korea if Seoul does not stop activists from launching propaganda leaflets across their divided border.
2011: The worst floods in recent memory strike mountain towns north of Rio de Janeiro where at least people are killed when torrential rains unleash mudslides in the pre-dawn hours burying Brazilians alive as they slept.
2012: Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s deals a setback to Europe’s ability to fight off a worsening debt crisis by downgrading the government debt of France, Italy, Spain and Austria. But it keeps Germany’s at the coveted AAA level.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Antoinette Bourignon, Flemish mystic (1616-1680); Prosper Jolyot de Crebillion, French dramatist (1674-1762); Pietro Metastasic, Italian poet (1698-1782); Charles Nelson Reilly, US actor (1931-2007); Richard Moll, US actor (1943-); Kevin Anderson, US actor (1960-); Julia Louis-Dreyfus, US actress (1961-); Orlando Bloom, British actor (1977-)
— AP