On Jan. 17, 1706, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston.
In 1899 Al Capone, the gangster who dominated the Chicago mob during the prohibition era, was born Alphonse Capone in Brooklyn, N.Y.
In 1919 pianist and statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski became the first premier of the newly created republic of Poland.
In 1945 Soviet and Polish forces liberated Warsaw during World War II.
In 1977 convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, 36, was shot by a firing squad at Utah State Prison in the first U.S. execution in a decade.
In 1991 in the first day of Operation Desert Storm, U.S.-led forces hammered Iraqi targets in an effort to drive Iraq out of Kuwait; a defiant Iraqi President Saddam Hussein declared that the “mother of all battles” had begun.
In 1994 a 6.7-magnitude earthquake struck Southern California, killing at least 61 people and causing $20 billion worth of damage.
In 1995 more than 6,000 people were killed when an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 hit the city of Kobe, Japan.
In 2006 the Supreme Court protected Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, ruling that doctors there who helped terminally ill patients die could not be arrested under federal drug laws.
