Today is Thursday, January 13, the twelfth day of 2005.
There are 352 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
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.
1813 - British fleet blockades Chesapeake and Delaware bays in United States during Civil War.
1822 - Liberal Constitution is adopted in Greece.
1849 - Sikhs are defeated at Chillianwalla in India, but British suffer heavy casualties.
1893 - Britain's Independent Labour Party, a precursor to the current Labor Party, meets for the first time.
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 - South African troops occupy Swakopmund in German South-West Africa; Earthquake in central Italy kills 30,000 people.
1935 - Saar votes to return to Germany after being administered by France under League of Nations supervision.
1945 - Soviet forces begin offensive in Silesia, Germany, in World War II.
1959 - Belgium grants reforms in Belgian Congo following disturbances.
1966 - Robert C. Weaver becomes the first black Cabinet member as he is appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson.
1972 - A group of junior officers overthrows civilian government of Ghana in West Africa.
1982 - An Air Florida 737 crashes into a bridge after takeoff and falls into the Potomac River, killing 78 people.
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 US'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.
1993 - Former EGerman leader Erich Honecker flies to Chile as a free man after his trial for manslaughter ends because of his ill health. He dies a year later.
1994 - Italian Premier Carlo Ciampi resigns, opening the way for parliamentary elections that oust the scandal-scarred parties that have dominated Italy for five decades.
1995 - A fast moving passenger train rams into a stationary train in Bangladesh, killing 39 people.
1996 - Artillery fire is traded by nominally allied Croat & Muslim forces in Bosnia.
1997 - Two letter bombs sent to the U.N. bureau of an Arab-language newspaper force the evacuation of part of U.N. headquarters, hours after a third letter bomb explodes at the newspaper's London offices.
1998 - Mexican army troops are called in to arrest a police unit in Chiapas state that shot and killed an indigenous woman in a riot two days earlier.
1999 - The chief of Brazil's Central Bank, Gustavo Franco, unexpectedly resigns and his successor devalues the currency by 8 percent, roiling world financial markets.
2000 - Microsoft chairman Bill Gates promotes company president Steve Ballmer to chief executive officer.
2001 - In a rare disclosure, China says it has punished 242 organizers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and sent an undisclosed number of followers to labor camps during an 18-month-old crackdown.
2002 - Chinese authorities grant an early release to imprisoned pro-democracy activist Wang Ce and immediately deport him. In 1999 he had been sentenced to four years in prison for loaning US$1,000 to a founder of the illegal China Democracy Party.
2003 - Ivory Coast's two western rebel groups, the Movement for Justice and Peace and the Ivorian Popular Movement of the Greater West, sign a truce with the government and agree to participate in peace talks.
2004 - Taking on critics in Congress who say America needs a bigger army, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says the military is under strain but he is not yet convinced a permanent expansion is in the best interests of the Pentagon or taxpayers.
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, U.S actor (1931--)
Richard Moll, U.S. actor (1943--)
Kevin Anderson, U.S. actor (1960--)
Julia Louis-Dreyfus U.S. actress (1961--)
