This Day in History – January 23
Today is the 23rd day of 2014. There are 342 days left in the year.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
1977: The TV miniseries Roots, based on the Alex Haley novel about an African-American family’s heritage, begins airing on ABC television. It becomes one of the most-watched shows in US history.
OTHER EVENTS
1542: King Henry VIII takes the title of King of Ireland.
1570: Earl of Moray, Regent of Scotland, is assassinated.
1579: The Union of Utrecht is signed by the provinces of the Netherlands committed to carrying on resistance to Spain. It becomes the foundation of the state of the Netherlands.
1631: France, under Treaty of Barwalde, undertakes to subsidise Sweden in Thirty Years’ War.
1789: Georgetown University is established in present-day Washington.
1845: US Congress decides all national elections would be held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
1849: Dr Elizabeth Blackwell receives the first doctor of medicine degree awarded to an American woman.
1918: The Soviet government officially severs relations with the church.
1937: Seventeen Communist leaders confess in Moscow that they conspired with Leon Trotsky to undermine Soviet regime of Josef Stalin in the “Great Purge”.
1950: The Knesset proclaims Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
1964: The 24th amendment to the US Constitution, eliminating the poll tax in federal elections, is ratified.
1968: North Korea seizes the US Navy ship Pueblo, charging it had
intruded into the communist nation’s territorial waters on a spying
mission. The crew is released 11 months later.
1973: US President Richard M Nixon announces that an accord has been reached in the Vietnam War.
1985: Debate in Britain’s House of Lords is carried live on television for the first time.
1991: The Angolan government accepts a peace plan that ends 15-year-old civil war with UNITA rebels.
1993: Iraq denies its anti-aircraft batteries fired at US warplanes and again reaffirms a ceasefire it declared.
1994: Gunmen believed to be leftist guerrillas fire at a gathering of
political rivals in north-west Colombia, killing at least 35 people.
1997: France’s highest court rejects a final appeal and orders Maurice Papon, a former Vichy official, to stand trial for deporting Jews to death camps during World War II.
1998: Pakistani Mir Aimal Kasi is sentenced to death in Fairfax, Virginia, for a politically motivated ambush outside the headquarters of the CIA that left two men dead. He is executed in November 2002.
2000: Over a million people march through downtown Madrid to call for peace after a car-bomb attack is seen as a resurgence of Basque separatists’ 32-year-old campaign of violence. Nearly 800 people have been killed during this period.
2001: A new administration in the Philippines moves to freeze the bank accounts of ousted President Joseph Estrada and begins a criminal investigation against him.
2002: A previously unknown militant group kidnaps Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the US Wall Street Journal newspaper, in Karachi, Pakistan. Pearl, who had been working on a story about Islamist militant groups in that country, is later killed.
2005: With Tamil Tiger rebels claiming the Sri Lankan government is blocking tsunami aid to rebel-controlled areas, Norwegian diplomats urge the two sides to create a joint body that would ensure fair distribution of humanitarian supplies.
2007: More than 100,000 mourners choke the streets of Istanbul for the funeral of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was gunned down in broad daylight on Jan 19 because of public statements made about the mass killings of Armenians by Turks in the early 20th century.
2008: Tens of thousands of Gazans flood into Egypt through a border fence blown up by militants — puncturing a gaping hole in Israel’s air-tight closure of the Gaza Strip and giving a boost to Hamas militants.
2009: French President Nicolas Sarkozy orders a frigate deployed immediately to the waters off Gaza in an effort to fight arms smuggling and consolidate a fragile ceasefire.
2011: Allies and adversaries of President Hugo Chavez take to the streets of the capital by the thousands, staging rival demonstrations to commemorate the 53rd anniversary of Venezuela’s democracy.
2012: France’s parliament votes to make it a crime to deny that the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago constituted a genocide, risking more sanctions from Turkey.
2013: The US and Canada object to the Palestinians’ latest bid to capitalise on their upgraded U.N. status when their foreign minister speaks at the Security Council behind a nameplate that read “State of Palestine.”
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Marie Henri Beyle Stendahl, French author (1783-1842); Edouard Manet, French artist (1832-1883); Jeanne Moreau, French actress (1928-); Derek Walcott, Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate (1930-); Rutger Hauer, Dutch-born actor (1944- ); Mariska Hargitay, US actress (1964-)
— AP