TODAY IN HISTORY
' Eugene B. Ely '
Today is Thursday, Jan. 18, the 18th day of 2024. There are 348 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History: On Jan. 18, 1778, English navigator Captain James Cook reached the present-day Hawaiian Islands, which he named the "Sandwich Islands."
On this date:
In 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.
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.
In 1975, the situation comedy "The Jeffersons," a spin-off from "All in the Family," premiered on CBSTV.
In 1990, a jury in Los Angeles acquitted former preschool operators Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, of 52 child molestation charges.
In 1991, financially strapped Eastern Airlines shut down after more than six decades in business.
In 1993, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was observed in all 50 states for the first time.
In 2005, the world's largest commercial jet, the Airbus A380 "superjumbo" capable of flying up to 800 passengers, was unveiled in Toulouse, France.
In 2012, President Barack Obama rejected the Keystone XL project, a Canadian company's plan to build a 1,700-mile pipeline to carry oil across six U.S. states to Texas refineries.
In 2013, former Democratic New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was indicted on charges that he'd used his office for personal gain, accepting payoffs, free trips and gratuities from contractors while the city was struggling to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. (Nagin was later convicted and released from prison in 2020.)
In 2019, Jason Van Dyke, the white Chicago police officer who gunned down Black teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014, was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison.
In 2020, ahead of opening statements in the first Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, House prosecutors wrote that Trump had "used his official powers to pressure a foreign government to interfere in a United States election for his personal political gain," while Trump's legal team denounced what it called a "brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election."