January 16th Major News Events

1969 Vietnam Peace Talks

An agreement on this date was made to start peace talks. These were to take place in Paris, and representatives of countries such as Vietnam (both North and South Vietnam), the United States, and the National Liberation Front (NLF-an organization that advocated the freedom of South Vietnam). The representatives from these countries alone with the NLF sat in a special arrangement during this long-awaited peace negotiation meeting. The agreement is that representatives of these countries and the NLF would sit at a round table without name plates, flags, or any other identifiable markings. The original intention of the round table theory was that it would hopefully foster togetherness. However, there was even a long discussion about how the tables should be arranged. The resolution of that was to place a round table in between two square tables. One would not think the position of tables would matter. However, in a case as extreme as a war-peace talk it can make quite a bit of difference-especially in an extremely tense situation such as this.

1973 Attorney General

Chauncey Browning, Jr. returned as Attorney General, and was sworn in by Judge Thornton Berry. Browning had followed in his late father's footsteps-who was also Attorney General at one time. Edgar F. Heiskell III was sworn in as secretary of state on this day as well. He had followed John D. Rockefella. Inauguration was not only meaningful for those voting and running for office, but it was also profitable for businesses. Businesses experienced higher-than-normal sales for after the first of the year than in other years.

1974 Jack Tenet

1974 : Jack Tenet, Mountaineer Scholarship Fund representative at West Virginia University, is sent to Louisville, Kentucky. Tenet was offered a position as the University of Louisville's Athletic Director.

1979 The Shah of Iran

The Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the leader of Iran since 1941, is forced to flee the country when his army mutiny and violent demonstrations in the streets against his rule .

1981 Bernadette Devlin

Bernadette McAliskey formerly known as Bernadette Devlin, was shot by gunmen who burst into her home at Coalisland in County Tyrone. The injuries are serious, but not life-threatening

1995 India Avalanches

1995 : Avalanches following heavy rain sweep two buses off the highway between Srinagar and Jammu in Kashmir. Two more days of avalanches in the area eventually killed more than 200 people; 5,000 others had to be rescued.

2001 Galapagos Islands Ecological Disaster

The fuel supply tanker 'Jessica' has run aground on the Island of San Cristobal in the Galapagos Islands, marine biologists are warning of an ecological disaster to the Archipelago. ( the ship did leak 180,000 gallons of oil which caused an ecological disaster with up to 62% of the marine iguana population on one island killed off.

2006 Bird Flu Pandemic

The number of victims dying from the H5N1 strain of Bird Flu has increased this week with deaths reported in Indonesia and Turkey. The number of reported cases is increasing and many more countries are now affected spreading to Africa and Europe. Around the world where cases are reported governments are culling millions of chickens hoping to contain the spread of the disease.

2009 Bank Of America Bail Out

Bank Of America the largest in the U.S. will receive $20bn in fresh US government aid and $118bn worth of guarantees against bad assets. This is in addition to the $25bn in capital injections from the Troubled Assets Relief Programme, known as Tarp Bank of America has already received.

2011 Beatles Memorabilia Museum Opens

2011 :  An Argentine man by the name of Rodolfo Vazquez puts his collection of Beatles memorabilia on display at the new museum. Vazquez holds the Guinness record of having the largest collection of Beatles memorabilia in the world and began collecting Beatles items at the age of ten.   

2012 Jon Huntsman Ends Bid for Republican Presidential Nomination

Jon Huntsman, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination announced that he was ending his race for the White House after coming in third in the New Hampshire primary. Huntsman ended his campaign by endorsing Mitt Romney as his choice for candidate.

2013 Suicide Attack Outside Political Office

2013 : A suicide attack in northern Iraq killed at least ten people and injured another ninety people outside an office of the Kurdish Democratric Party.

2014 Lebanon Historic Tribunal Begins

The first session of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon opened this day, nearly nine years after the assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, the main focus of the trial. The trial is the first in in legal history that would feature an international court to try a case based on terrorism charges. It is also the first trial since the Nuremberg trials that would look for prosecutions "in absentia" as all of the suspects have disappeared.