1932 – Japanese military forces attack Shanghai city of China. Otherwise known as the January 28th incident, this military campaign would trigger a coup in Japan where nationalist forces would execute Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi. The Japanese attack on Shanghai came after revolted Chinese mobs killed a Japanese Buddhist priest in the city. Shanghai would be fully occupied in 1937.
1936 – Ismail Kadare was born, in the Palorto neighborhood of Gjirokastra, one of the greatest contemporary writers, academic, former member of the People’s Assembly. and deputy chairman of the Democratic Front. As a writer he is mainly known for prose, but he has also published volumes of poetry and essays. He started writing when he was still young, first poems, with which he became famous, and then prose, becoming the main Albanian prose writer. To date, his works have been translated into about 45 different languages, thus being the main representative of Albanian literature around the world. In 1996 Kadare became a permanent member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in France. He has been honored with many international awards, including the Man Booker International Award in 2005, the Princesa de Asturias Award for Arts in 2009 and the Jerusalem Award in 2015. In recent years he has shared his time between France and Albania. Ismail Kadare was decorated by the institution of the President of the Republic of Albania with the Order “Honor of the Nation” and by the French state with the orders “Cross of the Legion of Honor” and “Officer of the Legion of Honor”. Kadare’s work has been studied by foreign authors in their respective mother tongues such as Eric Faye and Jean-Paul Champseix in French, Piet de Moor in Dutch, Peter Morgan in English, Bernardo Joffily in Portuguese, Jose Carlos Rodrigo Breto in Spanish, and Ece Dillioğlu in Turkish
1954 – Born in Paris, Nicholas Sarkozy. Sarkozy is a retired French politician who served as President of France and as Andorra’s top official from May 16, 2007, to May 15, 2012. During his term, he faced the financial crisis of the 2000s ( causing a recession, the European sovereign debt crisis), the Russo-Georgian War, and the Arab Spring.
1964 – – A US military aircraft, the T-39 Sabreliner, is shot over Erfurt, East Germany, by a Soviet MiG-19. The commanders were Lieutenant Colonel Gerald K. Hannaford, Captain Donald Grant Millard, and Captain John F. Lorrene. All three died, becoming some of the confirmed US casualties during the Cold War in Europe. This would be one of the worst airline incidents between the two superpowers.
1977 – The first day of the Great Lakes freezing of 1977, falls 4 feet of snow in one day in New York’s Upstate. The massive freezing of lakes in New York and Ontario would last for about a week, where it would cause real chaos, especially in road traffic. During these snowstorms, 23 people would be killed and dozens more would be injured.
1982 – US Army General James L. Dozier is rescued by special forces of the Italian police who were taken hostage by the Red Brigades. The Red Brigades, in a press statement, stated that the reason for the abduction was that the US and Italian governments had excellent relations and that Dozier was a military man invited to work in Italy, which justified his abduction.
1988 – Klaus Fuchs dies in Berlin at the age of 76. Fuchs was a German physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the Manhattan Allied Project about the Soviet Union during and immediately after World War II. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for important calculations related to nuclear weapons and, later, the hydrogen bomb.
2006 – The roof of one of the buildings of the International Fair in Katowice, Poland collapses due to the weight of snow, killing 65 people and injuring more than 170 others. Most of the victims were of Polish nationality, with the rest coming from Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc. This would be considered the worst accident ever in Poland during an International Fair.
