Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/January 5

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 * 1675 – Franco-Dutch War: French troops defeated Austrian and Brandenburg forces at the Battle of Turckheim in Alsace.
 * 1922 – Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton (pictured) died of a heart attack during his final expedition.
 * 1925 – Nellie Tayloe Ross was inaugurated as Governor of Wyoming, the first woman to serve as governor of a U.S. state.
 * 1941 – Second World War: Australian and British troops defeated Italian forces in Bardia, Libya, the first battle of the war in which an Australian Army formation took part.
 * 1953 – Waiting for Godot by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, termed the "most significant English language play of the 20th century", premiered in Paris.
 * 1970 – An earthquake registering Mw 7.1 struck Tonghai County in southern China, killing at least 10,000 people and eventually spurring the creation of the nation's largest earthquake monitoring system.
 * 1975 – The bulk carrier Lake Illawarra struck a bridge over the River Derwent in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, causing the deaths of seven of the ship's crewmen and five motorists on the bridge.
 * 1976 – The Troubles: In response to the killings of six Catholics the night before, South Armagh Republican Action Force gunmen killed ten Protestants in County Armagh, Northern Ireland.
 * 1991 – The United States Embassy to Somalia in Mogadishu was evacuated by helicopter airlift days after violence enveloped Mogadishu during the Somali Civil War.
 * 1991 – Georgian troops attacked Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, beginning the First South Ossetia War.
 * 2000 – Sri Lankan Tamil politician Kumar Ponnambalam was killed in an assassination suspected to have been sanctioned by President Chandrika Kumaratunga.
 * 2005 – The dwarf planet Eris was discovered by a team using images from the Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory.
 * 2007 – The Taiwan High Speed Rail opened, connecting Taipei and Kaohsiung.
 * 2008 – Mikheil Saakashvili was decisively re-elected as President of Georgia in "the first genuinely competitive presidential election" in the history of the country.
 * 2009 – In Eng Foong Ho v Attorney-General, the Court of Appeal of Singapore held that equality before the law was satisfied by a "reasonable nexus" between state action and the object of the law.
 * Born/died: | Philippa of England |d|1430|Simon Marius |d|1625| Elizabeth of Russia |d|1762| George Johnston |d|1823|Konrad Adenauer |b|1876| Herbert Swope |b|1882| Henri Herz |d|1888|  Hayao Miyazaki|b|1941| Bradley Cooper |b|1975| Deepika Padukone |b|1986

January 5: Twelfth Night (Western Christianity)


 * 1757 – King Louis XV survived an assassination attempt by Robert-François Damiens, who later became the last person in France to be executed by drawing and quartering.
 * 1869 – Te Kooti's War: After surviving a five-day siege in the pā at Ngātapa, Māori leader Te Kooti escaped from New Zealand's Armed Constabulary.
 * 1919 – The German Workers' Party, the precursor of the Nazi Party, was founded by Anton Drexler.
 * 1949 – In his State of the Union speech, U.S. president Harry S. Truman (pictured) announced: "Every segment of our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government a fair deal."
 * 2003 – The Metropolitan Police arrested six people in conjunction with an alleged terrorist plot to release ricin on the London Underground, although no toxin was found.