Today in HistoryToday is Monday, January 15, the 15th day of 2007. There are 350 days left in the year.

ON THIS DATE<$>

In 1559, England’s Queen Elizabeth I was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

In1919 German Communist leader Rosa Luxembourg and her colleague Karl Liebknecht were arrested and shot by soldiers after the failure of their uprising in Berlin.

In 1929, US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia.

In 1942, Jawaharlal Nehru was named to succeed Mohandas K. Gandhi as head of India’s National Congress Party.

In 1943, work was completed on the Pentagon, now the headquarters of the US Department of Defense.

In 1947, the mutilated remains of Elizabeth Short, the 22-year-old aspiring actress known as the Black Dahlia, were found in a vacant Los Angeles lot.

In 1973, US president Nixon announced the suspension of all US offensive action in North Vietnam, citing progress in peace negotiations.

In 1976, Sara Jane Moore was sentenced to life in prison for her attempt on the life of President Ford in San Francisco.

In 1987, entertainer Ray Bolger, perhaps best known for playing the Scarecrow in the 1939 MGM musical The Wizard of Oz, died in Los Angeles at age 83.

In 1997, a bitterly divided Israeli Cabinet agreed to withdraw troops from most of Hebron and rural West Bank areas, approving an accord wrapped up hours earlier by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

“I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘is-ness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the ‘ought-ness’ that forever confronts him.” — Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968).