#TodayInHistory – January 8

January 8 – Some important events on this day

871 👉🏼 Battle of Ashdown: Ethelred I of Wessex and his brother Alfred the Great beat invading Danish army
1297 👉🏼 Monaco gains its independence.
1598 👉🏼 Jews are expelled from Genoa, Italy
1610 👉🏼 Simon Marius. a German astronomer, independently discovers the first three moons of Jupiter one day after Galileo
1656 👉🏼 Oldest surviving commercial newspaper begins (Haarlem, Netherlands)
1705 👉🏼 George Frideric Handel’s 1st opera “Almira” premieres in Hamburg
1708 👉🏼 Spanish armada headed by the San Jose and loaded with gold sunk after British squadron attacks off coast of Colombia (rediscovered 2015)
1790 👉🏼 1st US President George Washington delivers 1st state of the union address
1816 👉🏼 Sophie Germain is the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her paper on elasticity
1835 👉🏼 US national debt is $0 for the first and only time in history

1902 👉🏼 New York state assemblyman Francis G. Landon gets a bill passed to criminalize men turning around on a street and “looking at a woman in that way”
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1912 👉🏼 Chiefs, representatives of people’s and church organisations, and other prominent individuals form the African National Congress and declare its aim to bring all Africans together as one people to defend their rights and freedoms
1916 👉🏼 WWI: ANZAC forces withdraw from the Gallipoli Peninsula after Ottoman forces successfully defend access to Constantinople
1926 👉🏼 Abdulaziz Ibn Saud becomes King of Nejd and Hejaz; forerunner of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
1993 👉🏼 Michael Jordan’s game-high 35 points leads Chicago to 120-95 win over Milwaukee; gives him exactly 20,000 points in 620th game of his NBA career; 2nd-fastest to reach milestone after Wilt Chamberlain (499)
2004 👉🏼 RMS Queen Mary 2, the largest passenger ship ever built, is christened by her namesake’s granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II

2016 👉🏼 Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announces the recapture of drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, six months after he escaped prison.
The Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was as famous for his ability to escape captivity as he was for his immense power and brutality as the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.
By the time of his arrest Guzmán had delivered more narcotics to the United States than any other trafficker. He was first arrested in 1993 and spent 20 years in prison before escaping in 2001 by hiding in a laundry cart while his accomplices rolled him out of prison. He spent the next 13 years on the run before being recaptured in 2014.
He then escaped once more in 2015 through an elaborate tunnel built underneath the maximum security prison where he was staying. A year later he was captured by security forces in Los Michos, Sinaloa state.
On 19 January 2017 Guzmán was extradited to the United States where he is undergoing trial. The US federal government called Guzmán “”the most ruthless, dangerous, and feared man on the planet.”