GOOD MORNING – TODAY IS MONDAY, January 30, the 30th day of 2017 with 335 to follow. Sunrise in the Boston area is @ 7:00 and sunset is @ 4:54. The moon is waxing. The morning stars are stars are Jupiter, Saturn & Mercury. The evening stars are Mars, Neptune, Uranus & Venus.

ON THIS DAY IN: 1649 – England’s King Charles I was beheaded. 

1790 – The first purpose-built lifeboat was launched on the River Tyne. 

1798 – The first brawl in the U.S. House of Representatives took place. Congressmen Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold fought on the House floor. 

1844 – Richard Theodore Greener became the first African American to graduate from Harvard University. 

1847 – The town of Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco. 

1862 – The U.S. Navy’s first ironclad warship, the “Monitor”, was launched. 

1889 – Rudolph, crown prince of Austria, and his 17-year-old mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, were found shot in his hunting lodge at Mayerling, near Vienna. 

1894 – C.B. King received a patent for the pneumatic hammer. 

1900 – The British fighting the Boers in South Africa ask for a larger army. 

1910 – Work began on the first board-track automobile speedway. The track was built in Playa del Ray, CA. 

1911 – The first airplane rescue at sea was made by the destroyer “Terry.” Pilot James McCurdy was forced to land in the ocean about 10 miles from Havana, Cuba. 

1933 – “The Lone Ranger” was heard on radio for the first time. The program ran for 2,956 episodes and ended in 1955. 

1933 – Adolf Hitler was named the German Chancellor. 

1948 – Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu extremist. 

1950 – NBC-TV debuted “Robert Montgomery Presents.” The show lasted for seven seasons. 

1958 – Yves Saint Laurent, at age 22, held his first major fashion show in Paris. 

1958 – The first two-way moving sidewalk was put in service at Love Field in Dallas, TX. The length of the walkway through the airport was 1,435 feet. 

1960 – The women’s singles U.S. figure skating championship was won by Carol Heiss. 

1962 – Two members of the “Flying Wallendas” high-wire act were killed when their seven-person pyramid collapsed during a performance in Detroit, MI. 

1964 – January 30 – The U.S. launched Ranger 6. The unmanned spacecraft carried television cameras and was intentionally crash-landed on the moon. The cameras did not return any pictures to Earth. 

1968 – The Tet Offensive began as Communist forces launched surprise attacks against South Vietnamese provincial capitals. 

1972 – In Northern Ireland, British soldiers shot and killed thirteen Roman Catholic civil rights marchers. The day is known as “Bloody Sunday.” 

1979 – The civilian government of Iran announced it had decided to allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to return. He had been living in exile in France. 

1989 – The U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan was closed. 

1994 – Peter Leko became the world’s youngest-ever grand master in chess. 

1995 – The U.N. Security Council authorized the deployment of a 6,000-member U.N. peace-keeping contingent to assume security responsibilities in Haiti from U.S. forces. 

1995 – Researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced that clinical trials had demonstrated the effectiveness of the first preventative treatment for sickle cell anaemia. 

1996 – Gino Gallagher, the reputed leader of the Irish National Liberation Army, was shot and killed as he queued for his unemployment benefit. 

1997 – A New Jersey judge ruled that the unborn child of a female prisoner must have legal representation. He denied the prisoner bail reduction to enable her to leave the jail and obtain an abortion. 

2002 – Slobodan Milosevic accused the U.N. war crimes tribunal of an “evil and hostile attack” against him. Milosevic was defending his actions during the Balkan wars. 

2002 – Japan’s last coal mine was closed. The closures were due to high production costs and cheap imports. 

2005 – In Iraq, the first free Parliamentary elections since 1958 took place.