► Today is Friday, Jan. 7, the seventh day of 2011. There are 358 days left in the year.
► Today’s birthdays: Author William Peter Blatty is 83. Country singer Jack Greene is 81. Pop musician Paul Revere is 73. Magazine publisher Jann Wenner is 65. Singer Kenny Loggins is 63. Latin pop singer Juan Gabriel is 61. Actress Erin Gray is 61. Actor Sammo Hung is 59. Actor David Caruso is 55. “
► In 1608, an accidental fire devastated the Jamestown settlement in the Virginia Colony.
► In 1610, astronomer Galileo Galilei began observing three of Jupiter’s moons; he spotted a fourth moon almost a week later.
► In 1789, the first US presidential election was held. Americans voted for electors who, a month later, chose George Washington to be the nation’s first president.
► In 1800, the 13th president of the United States, Millard Fillmore, was born in Summerhill, N.Y.
► In 1894, one of the earliest motion picture experiments took place at the Thomas Edison studio in West Orange, N.J., as Fred Ott was filmed taking a pinch of snuff and sneezing.
► In 1927, commercial trans-Atlantic telephone service was inaugurated between New York and London.
► In 1942, the Japanese siege of Bataan began during World War II.
► In 1949, George C. Marshall resigned as US Secretary of State; President Truman chose Dean Acheson to succeed him.
► In 1972, Lewis F. Powell Jr. and William H. Rehnquist were sworn in as the 99th and 100th members of the US Supreme Court.
► In 1979, Vietnamese forces captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government.
► In 1989, Emperor Hirohito of Japan died in Tokyo at 87; he was succeeded by his son, Crown Prince Akihito.
► In 2006, Jill Carroll, a freelance journalist for The Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped and her translator shot dead in one of Baghdad’s most dangerous Sunni Arab neighborhoods. (Carroll was freed almost three months later.) A Black Hawk helicopter carrying eight US troops and four American civilians crashed near the Iraqi city of Tal Afar, killing all aboard. US Representative Tom DeLay (R-Texas), facing corruption charges, stepped down as House majority leader. (DeLay was found guilty in November of illegally funneling corporate money to Texas candidates; he is appealing his conviction.)
