Doesn’t it seem like it was just yesterday…?
1939 — Germany invades Poland, marking the beginning of World War II.
1969 — Muammar al-Qaddafi (27) launches a coup against Libya’s King Idris I.
1983 — Korean Air Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter. All 269 on board perish.
1985 — Some French and American guys (and gals?) find the RMS Titanic about 400 miles east of Newfoundland.
2010 — President Obama declares an end to US combat operations in Iraq.
Is it anti-Semitic? 
Maybe before too long it will write and sign a declaration of independence, thanks to the work of Israeli hackers. 
Soorena-2, named after an ancient Persian warrior, was unveiled by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday. It is 1.45 metres 4.7 feet tall and weighs 45 kilograms 99 pounds, the report said.
Source: Iran unveils human-like robot
OK, that’s the first declaration referenced in the title.
The second is the US Declaration of Independence.
Just like I have a question to go along with the first declaration above, I have one to go with the second….
How come the Colonists were entitled to independence but not the Confederates?
Today. Long ago. (And not so long ago.)
1942 — About 1,000 British Royal Air Force bombers raid Bremen, Germany. 1000 bombers?!! Imagine the outcry today!
1948 — The Berlin Airlift begins.
1950 — The Korean War begins with the invasion of South Korea by North Korea.
1962 — The Supreme Court, in Engel v. Vitale, rules that recital of a state-sponsored prayer in New York State public schools was unconstitutional. What’s a state-sponsored prayer?
1997 — The Supreme Court strikes down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, designed to limit the government’s ability to regulate religious practices. So that means the government does have the ability to regulate religious practices? Isn’t that state-sponsored something-or-other?
1998 — The Supreme Court rejects a 1997 line-item veto law as unconstitutional.
2007 — A Washington (DC) judge rules in favor of a dry cleaner sued by a dissatisfied customer who was demanding $54 million for his missing pants. I remember that. I wonder if the judge lost his pants at a dry cleaner once upon a time.
2010 — Closing VBS program at Hopewell Mennonite Church. Also, Mark Roth places his first CraigsList ad (in which he casts out a low-hope lure for a place to rent).
1529 — At the Second Diet of Speyer, a group of rulers and independent cities protests the reinstatement of the Edict of Worms, beginning the Protestant Reformation.
1775 — The American Revolutionary War begins with the battles of Lexington and Concord.
1919 — Leslie Irvin makes the first successful voluntary free-fall parachute jump using a new kind of self-contained parachute.
1961 — The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba ends in success for the defenders.
1971 — Charles Manson is sentenced to death for the Sharon Tate murders. (As far as I know, that was never carried out.)
1993 — The 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco (Texas) ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die.
1995 — The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed, killing 168. (Timothy McVeigh has since been tried, convicted, and executed. See 1971 entry above for perspective.)
2005 – Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is elected Pope Benedict XVI on the second day of the Papal conclave.
2010 — US Supreme Court justices seem to split sharply on whether a law school can deny recognition to a Christian student group because it won’t let gays join.
January 27 is the day established by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Amazingly, today is only the fifth observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day! What was the UN’s hurry?!
Anyway, here are excerpts from two stories I read/scanned a few minutes ago:
Survivors and world leaders gathered in the bitter chill at Auschwitz on Wednesday to remember the hundreds of thousands who perished in one of Nazi Germany’s infamous concentration camps, 65 years to the day since troops of the Red Army liberated the camp.
[...]
Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau of Tel Aviv, a holocaust survivor, recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, and sirens wailed across the barracks and barbed wire where an estimated 1.1 million people died.
Source: Holocaust Memorial Day marked on Auschwitz liberation anniversary
Here’s one other article excerpt:
During the Holocaust, 6 million Jews and millions of others were systematically murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Yet many lived to tell their stories.
Arthur Berger, spokesman for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the first-hand accounts are important, especially in the Internet age when misinformation is easily spread. Those memories must be documented as much as possible, Berger said, in the hope that, by preserving the truth about what happened, future atrocities can be prevented.
Source: Victims, survivors honored International Holocaust Remembrance Day
According to Wikipedia, on this day in 1945, “The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.”
In case you forgot, I titled this post “Lest We Forget.” So I ask, Have the world’s powers that be forgotten Nazi Germany as Iran’s leaders make their anti-Israel, anti-Jew comments and threats? We shall see.
