On January 6th these people were born ...
1367 Richard II, king of England.
1412 Joan of Arc, martyr
1811 Charles Sumner, leading Reconstruction Senator
1823 Gustave Dor‚, illustrator (Inferno, Rime of Ancient Mariner)
1854 Sherlock Holmes, according to Arthur Conan Doyle
1871 Aleksandr Scriabin, Russian composer
1878 Carl Sandburg, poet, biographer of Lincoln (The People, Yes)
1880 Tom Mix, silent screen cowboy actor (Dick Turpin)
1882 Samuel Rayburn, Speaker of the House (1940 - 1957)
1883 Khalil Gibran, Lebanese mystic poet (The Prophet, Broken Wings)
1913 Loretta Young, US film actress.
1921 Louis Harris, pollster.
1925 John Z DeLorean, automaker.
1931 P J Kavanagh, novelist.
1934 Sylvia Syms, actress.
1944 Terry Venables, former England football manager.
1946 Syd Barrett, rock musician. (Pink Floyd)
1957 Michael Foale, British astronaut, Mir space station.
1957 Nancy Lopez, golfer.
1957 Rowan Atkinson, English actor and comedian.
1960 Nigella Lawson, TV chef.
1975 Jason King, English radio DJ
1981 Rinko Kikuchi, Japanese actress
... and these people died ...
1840 Fanny Burney, English novelist and diarist.
1884 Gregor Mendel, Austrian monk and biologist.
1919 Theodore Roosevelt, US statesman and former president.
1932 Andre Maginot, French politician.
1950 George Orwell, 1984 Animal author.
1981 Archibald Joseph Cronin, Scottish novelist.
1989 Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito, reigned in Japan for 63 years.
1993 Dizzy Gillespie, US jazz trumpeter.
1993 Rudolf Nureyev, Russian ballet dancer.
1998 Sonny Bono, sixties pop star married to Cher, skiing accident.
2001 Les Brown, US band leader. (88)
2003 Lord (Roy) Jenkins of Hillhead, politician.
2006 Lord Merlyn-Rees, politician.(85)
2006 Lou Rawls, soul and pop singer. (72)
2009 John Scott Martin, actor, the chief Dalek in the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who. (82)
2012 Bob Holness, actor, former host of daytime quiz show Blockbusters. (83)
... and these things happened - On January 6th
Feast of Epiphany (Twelfth Night of Christmas in England)
0871 English King Alfred defeated the Danes at the Battle of Ashdown.
1066 Harold was crowned King of England succeeding Edward.
1540 Anne of Cleaves married Henry VIII, his forth wife.
1663 Great earthquake in New England
1720 Commission of Enquiry into South Sea Bubble published findings.
1838 First public demonstration of telegraph, by Samuel F. B. Morse
1912 New Mexico joined the USA as the 47th state.
1914 Stock brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch founded.
1923 First opera 'The Magic Flute' was broadcast in Britain.
1926 German Airline Lufthansa formed by merging other airlines.
1928 River Thames flooded, paintings damaged in the Tate Gallery.
1930 Australian cricketer Don Bradman scores 452 not out.
1938 Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud escaped to London,
avoiding Nazi persecution.
1941 FDR names 4 freedoms (speech, religion; from want, from fear)
1942 First around world flight by Pan Am "Pacific Clipper"
1964 Pope Paul VI became the first pope to visit the Holy Land.
2000 Following huge Xmas sales, 40% of Britons now own a mobile phone.
2001 Daewoo Cars recalled 200 models due to a gearbox fault.
2001 Holy Door at St Peter's in Rome, opened for Holy Year, was closed
2002 Rail strike in Scotland cancels 25% of trains.
2002 Student pilot crashed into Bank of America skyscaper in Florida.
2002 Venice Logoon in Italy froze over for the first time in 17 yrs.
2003 An unmanned Chinese space capsule landed back safely, in China.
2003 Two suicide bombs rocked Tel Aviv, 23 died.
2004 Guangdong in China killed 10k civet cats linked to SARS outbreak.
2004 Lady Diana and Dodi Al Fayed inquest opened 6 yrs after death
2005 Abbey School in Faversham was first to give pupils random drugs tests.
2005 Mexican govt distributed 1 mil leaflets on how to enter the US illegally
2006 Bird 'flu killed 2 brothers and their sister in Turkey.
2006 Building in Mecca collapsed under the weight of pilgrims gathering for the Haj, over 80 died.
2006 London Eye (135m) beaten as worlds' tallest ferris wheel by one in Nanchang, China at 160m.
2007 Ten police officers were protecting Kate Middleton, the girlfriend of Prince William.
2007 US drug company Eli Lilly paid $500 mil to 18k patients who had side-effects from the drug Zyprexa.
2008 Price of gold topped $860 an ounce well above the $850 record set in 1980.
2008 UK GDP per head was £23,500pa compared with £23,250 in the USA mainly due to the strength of the pound
2009 Gas supplies to six EU countries cut off on coldest night of the year as row beween Russia and Ukraine dramatically worsened.
2009 Israeli tanks widened their ground assault in the Gaza Strip to include Khan Younis the largest city in the south.
2009 The last 200 Woolworths stores closed after 100 years in business.
2010 Googles' rival to the iPhone was launched in the UK, the Nexus One using Googles' Android software. Cost - over £300.
2010 Threats by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula against targets in Yemen prompted the closure of the U.S. and British embassies there.
2011 A giant 342kg blue fin tuna caught off Japan's northern island of Hokkaido sold at auction for a record 32.49m yen ($400,000) in Tokyo.
2011 Social networking website Facebook was valued at $50 billion, surpassed Google as the most visited website and made founder Mark Zuckerberg a new billionaire.
2012 A church whose central tenet is the right to file-share was formally recognised by the Swedish government; The Church of Kopimism - founded by Isak Gerson.
2012 House prices across the UK fell by an average of 1.3% in the last year taking the average house price down to £160,063.
2013 Last year was the second wettest on record in the UK, total rainfall during 2012 was 1,330.7mm (52.4in), just 6.6mm short of the record set in 2000.
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Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in a
mixed company.
Philip Dormer Stanhope (Earl of Chesterfield)
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