January 15

Do not boast about tomorrow, For you do not know what a day may bring forth.
 

– Proverbs 27:1 

January is:

• Thyroid Awareness Month
  
• Wheat Bread Month

Today is:

• Basketball's Official Birthday - On this day in 1892, the rules of basketball were first published in Springfield, Massachusetts.
  
• Procrastinator's New Year - If you are a procrastinator you should be getting around to celebrating the new year. Do it today. Or tomorrow, there is no hurry. Sponsor: The Life of the Party.

Born on this Day

• 1552: Alberico Gentili, Italian jurist, a founder of international law
  

• 1730: William Whipple, Declaration of Independence signer.
  

• 1741: American general and turncoat Benedict Arnold
  

• 1874: Thornton Waldo Burgess, author of "Peter Rabbit,"
  

• 1875: The medical missionary, organist and musicologist Albert Schweitzer was born in Alsace.
  

• 1892: Silent comedy film director Hal Roach
  

• 1906: Actor William Bendix (For Love or Money, Babe Ruth Story, Blackbeard the Pirate, The Detective Story, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Guadalcanal Diary, Wake Island, Star Spangled Rhythm, The Life of Riley)
  

• 1908: Singer, bandleader, songwriter Russ Columbo ( You Call It Madness, Let’s Pretend There’s A Moon, Prisoner of Love)
  

• 1919: Emmy Award-winning news writer Andy Rooney
  

• 1920: Former CBS newsman George Herman
  

• 1929: Country singer Billy Walker (Thank You for Calling, Charlie’s Shoes, Word Games)
  

• 1931: Singer Caterina Valente (The Breeze and I, Malaguena)
  

• 1936: Blues singer Clarence Carter
  

• 1937: Country singer Billie Jo Spears
  

• 1938: Singer Jack Jones (Lollipops and Roses, Wives and Lovers, The Impossible Dream, Lady, The Race is On, Love Boat theme)
  

• 1938: Singer-songwriter Allen Toussaint
  

• 1940: Civil rights activist Julian Bond
  

• 1941: Actress Faye Dunaway (Network, Don Juan DeMarco, Casanova, Beverly Hills Madam, Christopher Columbus, Mommie Dearest, Voyage of the Damned, Three Days of the Condor, The Towering Inferno, Chinatown, The Deadly Trap, Little Big Man, The Arrangement, Bonnie & Clyde)
  

• 1943: Actress Holland Taylor
  

• 1944: Golfer Graham Marsh
  

• 1948: Actor Carl Weathers ( Happy Gilmore, Dangerous Passion, Hurricane Smith, Rocky series, Force 10 from Navarone, Semi-Tough)
  

• 1948: Singer-producer T-Bone Burnett
  

• 1949: Movie writer-director Lawrence Kasdan
  

• 1959: Rock singer Geoff Tate (Queensryche)
  

• 1963: Movie writer-director Steven Soderbergh
  

• 1965: Rapper Slick Rick
  

• 1966: Actor Dan Schneider ("Head of the Class")
  

• 1967: Actress Emily Watson ("Breaking the Waves")
  

• 1967: Actor-comedian Tom Rhodes ("Mr. Rhodes")
  

• 1968: Rapper-actor (James Todd Smith) LL Cool J
  

• 1969: Actor Jason Bateman (Little House on the Prairie, Breaking the Rules, Necessary Roughness, A Taste for Killing)
  

• 1969: Rock singer-musician Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters)      

Events in History on this day
  

 

• 0936: Death of Rudolph, King of the Franks
  

• 1208: Murder of Pierre de Castelnau, Papal Legate, which touched off the Albigensian "Crusade"
  

• 1237: Marriage of King Henry III of England to Eleanor of Provence
  

• 1331: Death of Odoric, missionary to China
  

• 1478: Novgorod surrenders to the Czar
  

• 1526 Treaty of Madrid
  

• 1604: James I, King of England, meets with Puritan leaders and the principal Bishops
  

• 1639: The first constitution of Connecticut -- the "Fundamental Orders" -- was adopted.
  

• 1690: Clarinet is invented, in NÅrnberg, Germany
  

• 1699: Massachusetts holds day of fasting for wrongly persecuting "witches"
  

• 1742: English astronomer Edmond Halley, who observed the comet that now bears his name, died at age 85.
  

• 1784: The United States ratified a peace treaty with England ending the Revolutionary War.
  

• 1797: Napoleon Bonaparte defeats Austrians at Rivoli in northern Italy.
  

• 1858: French emperor Napoleon the Third escaped an attempt on his life.
  

• 1864: General Sherman tears up railroad tracks and destroys buildings in Meridian, Mississippi.
  

• 1898: Author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson -- better known as "Alice in Wonderland" creator Lewis Carroll -- died in Guildford, England, less than two weeks before his 66th birthday.
  

• 1900: "Tosca" premiered in Rome despite a bomb scare and death threats. Rivals of Puccini were blamed, and sympathy for the composer only increased the opera's success.
  

• 1911: The Arkansas, the largest U.S. battleship, is launched from the yards of NY Shipbuilding Company.
  

• 1914: Henry Ford introduced the assembly line method of manufacturing cars, allowing completion of one Model-T Ford every 90 minutes.
  

• 1915: The French abandon five miles of trenches to the Germans near Soissons.
  

• 1916: British authorities seize German attache von Papen’s financial records confirming espionage activities in the U.S.
  

• 1920: Berlin is placed under martial law as 40,000 radicals rush the Reichstag; 42 are dead and 105 are wounded.
  

• 1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders all U.S. aliens to register with the government.
  

• 1943: President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill opened a 10-day World War II strategy conference in Casablanca, Morocco. In doing this he became the first U.S. President to fly in an airplane while in office
  

• 1943: Italian occupation authorities refuse to deport any Jews living on their territories in France.
  

• 1949: The U.S. brings a monopoly suit against AT&T.
  

• 1952: NBC's "Today" show premiered.
  

• 1953: "Sinfonia Antartica" premiered. Ralph Vaughan Williams made this, the seventh of his nine symphonies, from soundtrack music he wrote for a movie.
  

• 1953: Josip Broz Tito was elected president of Yugoslavia by the country's Parliament.
  

• 1963: George C. Wallace was sworn in as governor of Alabama with a pledge of "segregation forever."
  

• 1969: 25 crew members of the US aircraft carrier "Enterprise" were killed in an explosion that ripped through the ship off Hawaii.
  

• 1972: Comedian Redd Foxx, whose last name was really Sanford, debuted on NBC-TV in "Sanford & Son". Demond Wilson starred as Fred Sanford’s son.
  

• 1973: The Miami Dolphins became the first NFL team to go undefeated
  

• 1980: UN votes 104-18 to deplore the Soviet Afghan acts.
  

• 1985: The British pound sank to a record low, $1.11, and the Bank of England raised interest rates to halt the decline.
  

• 1985: Former Miss America, Phyllis George, joined Bill Kurtis as host of "The CBS Morning News".
  

• 1986: Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance called the Reagan administration's decision to secretly sell arms to Iran an expensive blunder.
  

• 1988: The UN Security Council voted 14-to-zero -- with the United States abstaining -- to call on Israel to stop deporting Palestinians and to allow those already expelled to return.
  

• 1989: President Reagan delivered his 331st nd last weekly radio address, telling listeners, "Believe me, Saturdays will never seem the same. I'll miss you."
  

• 1990: The Denver Broncos and the San Francisco 49ers earned a trip to the Super Bowl by winning the American and National Football Conference championships.
  

• 1991: With time running out before a United Nations deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, Iraq's National Assembly voted to give President Saddam Hussein full authority over the Persian Gulf crisis. 
  

• 1992: Historic Mideast peace talks continued in Washington, with Israel and Jordan holding their first-ever formal negotiations, and the Israelis continuing exchanges with Palestinian representatives.
  

• 1993: Retreating from a campaign promise, President-elect Clinton said he would continue President Bush's policy of forcibly returning Haitian boat people to Haiti. Talk show host David Letterman announced he was moving from NBC to CBS.
  

• 1994: In post-Cold War breakthroughs, President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed Kremlin accords to stop aiming missiles at any nation and to dismantle the nuclear arsenal of Ukraine.
  

• 1994: In Phoenix, Arizona, Shane Stant, who admitted to being the "hit man" in the clubbing assault on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, surrendered to authorities.
  

• 1995: Russian troops in the breakaway republic of Chechnya captured the Council of Ministers building, a key rebel position in the capital Grozny.
  

• 1995: Pope John Paul the Second addressed a huge rally in Manila, urging young people to reject cynicism.
  

• 1996: Several thousand government, Serb and Croat troops withdrew from their front-line trenches and bunkers across central and northeastern Bosnia, beating a deadline to create buffer zones.
  

• 1996: The Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the Indianapolis Colts, 20-to-16, to win the AFC championship. The Dallas Cowboys beat the Green Bay Packers, 38-to-27, to win the NFC championship.
  

• 1997: The House ethics committee's ranking Democrat, Jim McDermott of Washington state, removed himself from the investigation of Speaker Newt Gingrich, bowing to pressure that built quickly concerning his role in the handling of an illegally taped phone call involving the House leader.
  

• 1998: Whitewater prosecutors questioned Hillary Rodham Clinton at the White House for ten minutes about the gathering of FBI background files on past Republican political appointees. (Sources quoted Mrs. Clinton as saying she knew nothing about any such collection of files.)
  

• 1998: NBC agreed to pay Warner Bros. $13 million per episode to retain the highly-rated TV show "ER."
  

• 1998: A jury convicted Luis "El Gallo" Cano and his right-hand man of running a vast cocaine-trafficking network supplying the New York market. Cano, 37, organized the smuggling of more than 35,000 pounds of cocaine from Colombia into the U.S. He laundered about $28 million in cocaine profits.
  

• 1998: Iraq prevented an American-led U.N. arms inspection team from doing its work for the second successive day. Team leader Scott Ritter, accused by Iraq of being a spy, said Iraqi monitors had failed to show up at U.N. headquarters, despite being told that his team would be waiting for them at 9 a.m. (local time) to begin work.
  

• 1998: Bristol-Myers Squibb won approval for the first migraine headache medication available to U.S. consumers without a prescription. Bristol-Myers, which sells the Excedrin, Bufferin and Nuprin products received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market Excedrin Migraine.
  

• 1999: Before a jury of 100 silent senators, House prosecutors demanded President Clinton's removal from office, charging he had "piled perjury upon perjury" and obstructed justice.
  

• 2000: A UN tribunal sentenced five Bosnian Croat militiamen to up to 25 years in prison for a 1993 murder rampage that emptied a Bosnian village of every one of its Muslim inhabitants.
  

• 2000: In a massive demonstration demanding the return of Elian Gonzalez, tens of thousands of Cuban women marched to the U-S mission in Havana, waving Cuban flags and chanting, "Bring back our son!" 

 

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