- 28th Day of 2015 / 337 Remaining
- Spring Begins in 52 Days
- Sunrise:7:16
- Sunset:5:29
- 10 Hours 13 Minutes
- Moon Rise:12:37pm
- Moon Set:1:55am
- Phase: 67%
- Full Moon February 3 @ 3:10pm
- Tides
- High:5:12am/6:59pm
- Low:12:25pm/11:51pm
- Rainfall:
- This Year to Date:15.14
- Last Year:2.12
- Avg YTD:13.17
- Annual Avg:23.80
- Holidays
- Fun At Work Day
- National Kazoo Day
- Data Privacy Day
- National Blueberry Pancake Day
- Thank A Plug-in Developer Day
- Democracy Day-Rwanda
- On This Day
- 1521 --- The Diet of Worms began, at which Protestant reformer Luther was declared an outlaw by the Roman Catholic church.
- 1547 --- England's King Henry VIII died. He was succeeded by his 9 year-old son, Edward VI.
- 1807 --- London's Pall Mall became the first street to be lighted by gaslight.
- 1813 --- The novel "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen was first published anonymously in London.
- 1855 --- The Panama Railway, which carried thousands of unruly miners to California via the dense jungles of Central America, dispatches its first train across the Isthmus of Panama.
- 1873 --- Louis Pasteur, of Paris, France received U.S. patent # 135,245 for Improvement in Brewing Beer And Ale ("new and useful Improvements in the Process of Making Beer")
- 1878 --- The first telephone switchboard was installed in New Haven, CT.
- 1902 --- The Carnegie Institution was established in Washington, DC. It began with a gift of $10 million from Andrew Carnegie.
- 1904 --- Enrico Caruso signed his first contract with Victor Records. He debuted at the Metropolitan Opera two months before.
- 1915 --- The Coast Guard was created by an act of Congress.
- 1916 --- In Canada, the Manitoba Legislature passes the Temperance Act, allowing the use of liquor at home but prohibits public bars.
- 1916 --- President Woodrow Wilson nominates Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. After a bitterly contested confirmation, Brandeis became the first Jewish judge on the Supreme Court. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Brandeis quickly earned a reputation in Boston as the people's attorney for taking on cases pro bono. Brandeis advocated progressive legal reform to combat the social and economic ills caused in America by industrialization.
- 1917 --- American forces are recalled from Mexico after nearly 11 months of fruitless searching for Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who was accused of leading a bloody raid against Columbus, New Mexico.
- 1956 --- Elvis Presley made his first appearance on national television on "The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show" on CBS.
- 1964 --- The U.S. State Department angrily accuses the Soviet Union of shooting down an American jet that strayed into East German airspace. Three U.S. officers aboard the plane were killed in the incident. The Soviets responded with charges that the flight was a "gross provocation," and the incident was an ugly reminder of the heightened East-West tensions of the Cold War era.
- 1975 --- President Gerald Ford asks Congress for an additional $522 million in military aid for South Vietnam and Cambodia. He revealed that North Vietnam now had 289,000 troops in South Vietnam, and tanks, heavy artillery, and antiaircraft weapons "by the hundreds." Ford succeeded Richard Nixon when he resigned the presidency in August 1974. Despite his wishes to honor Nixon's promise to come to the aid of South Vietnam, he was faced with a hostile Congress who refused to appropriate military aid for South Vietnam and Cambodia.
- 1980 --- Six Americans who had fled the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran, on November 4, 1979, left Iran using false Canadian diplomatic passports. The Americans had been hidden at the Canadian embassy in Tehran.
- 1985 --- Singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte was the initiator of the events that led to the recording of "We Are the World." Inspired by the recent success of "Do They Know It's Christmas?"—the multimillion-selling charity record by the British-Irish collective Band Aid—Belafonte talked Lionel Ritchie, Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones into helping him organize an American response under the name "USA for Africa." Ritchie and Jackson wrote the song over the course of several days in January, and Belafonte's manager, Ken Kragen, who would go on to serve as President of the USA for Africa Foundation, the nonprofit organization that managed the profits from "We Are the World," came up with the plan to hold the session on the night of the AMA's in order to guarantee that the greatest number of big names would be able to participate. Among the 45 stars who sang on "We Are the World" that night were huge-in-the-80s figures like Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis; Country stars like Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson; pop icons like Smokey Robinson, Tina Turner and Paul Simon; and musical giants like Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan. Also in the studio that night were half of the Jackson family, one Irishman (Bob Geldof, co-organizer of Band Aid) and one party-crashing Canadian, comedian Dan Aykroyd. Egos fully in check, the group laid down the chorus and solos before sunrise on the 29th, and "We Are the World" was in the stores and on the airwaves just five weeks later.
- 1986 --- The space shuttle Challenger lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Christa McAuliffe is on her way to becoming the first ordinary U.S. civilian to travel into space. McAuliffe, a 37-year-old high school social studies teacher from New Hampshire, won a competition that earned her a place among the seven-member crew of the Challenger. She underwent months of shuttle training but then, beginning January 23, was forced to wait six long days as the Challenger's launch countdown was repeatedly delayed because of weather and technical problems. Finally, on January 28, the shuttle lifted off. Seventy-three seconds later, hundreds on the ground, including Christa's family, stared in disbelief as the shuttle exploded in a forking plume of smoke and fire. Millions more watched the wrenching tragedy unfold on live television.
- 1997 --- In South Africa, four apartheid-era police officers, appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, admit to the 1977 killing of Stephen Biko, a leader of the South African "Black consciousness" movement. The former police officers, including Police Colonel Gideon Nieuwoudt, appeared before the commission and admitted to killing Stephen Biko two decades earlier. The commission agreed to hear their request for political amnesty but in 1999 refused to grant amnesty because the men failed to establish a political motive for the brutal killing. Other amnesty applications are still in progress.
- Birthdays
- Sarah McLachlan
- Arthur Rubenstein
- Jose’ Marti
- (Sidone-Gabrielle) Colette
- Jackson Pollock
- Susan Sontag
- Alan Alda
- Elijah Wood
Wednesday January 28, 2015
