Today is Monday, Jan. 18, the 18th day of 2016. There are 348 days left in the year. This is the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Jan. 18, 1911, the first landing of an aircraft on a ship took place as pilot Eugene B. Ely brought his Curtiss biplane in for a safe landing on the deck of the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Harbor.
On this date:
In 1778, English navigator Captain James Cook reached the present day Hawaiian Islands, which he named the “ Sandwich Islands.”
In 1862, the tenth president of the United States, John Tyler, died in Richmond, Virginia, at age 71, shortly before he could take his seat as an elected member of the Confederate Congress.
In 1919, the Paris Peace Conference, held to negotiate peace treaties ending the First World War, opened in Versailles (vehr- SY’), France.
In 1936, Nobel Prize-winning author Rudyard Kipling, 70, died in London.
In 1943, during World War II, Jewish insurgents in the Warsaw Ghetto launched their initial armed resistance against Nazi troops, who eventually succeeded in crushing the rebellion. A U.S. ban on the sale of pre- sliced bread — aimed at reducing bakeries’ demand for metal replacement parts — went into effect.
In 1957, a trio of B-52’s completed the first non-stop, round-the-world flight by jet planes, landing at March Air Force Base in California after more than 45 hours aloft.
In 1967, Albert DeSalvo, who claimed to be the “Boston Strangler,” was convicted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of armed robbery, assault and sex offenses. (Sentenced to life, DeSalvo was killed in prison in 1973.)
In 1970, David Oman McKay, the ninth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, died at the age of 96.
In 1988, a China Southwest Airlines Ilyushin 18 crashed while on approach to Chongqing Airport, killing all 108 people on board.
In 1993, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was observed in all 50 states for the first time.
In 1996, Lisa Marie Presley- Jackson filed for divorce from Michael Jackson.
In 2001, President Bill Clinton, in a farewell from the Oval Office, told the nation that America had “done well” during his presidency, with record-breaking prosperity and a cleaner environment.
Ten years ago: The Supreme Court gave New Hampshire a chance to salvage its restrictions on abortion, reaffirming that states can require parental involvement in abortion decisions but also ordering a lower court to fix problems with New Hampshire’s 2003 notification law. (New Hampshire ended up repealing the never-implemented law in 2007; a new law was enacted in 2012.)
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