A four-day ceasefire in Gaza between HAMAS and Israeli forces began.
Taylor Swift won six awards at the American Music Awards, including Artist of the Year and Artist of the Decade.
A party boat on Lake Victoria in Uganda capsized and killed 29 people.
An international research team published their discovery of 1,500 new viruses that were in invertebrates in Australia and China.
Psy's 'Gangnam Style' music video became the most viewed video on YouTube, passing 800 million views.
Ireland ended its ban on divorce.
STS 44 Atlantis 10 was launched into space.
D.B. Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 and extorted a ransom of $200,000 before parachuting out of the plane with the money and was never seen again.
The very first Chick-fil-A restaurant opened in Atlanta's Greenbriar Mall.
Photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in Manhattan, New York.
George Hancock, who invented softball, played the first match in Chicago.
Charles Darwin published his revolutionary work, On the Origin of Species.
Abel Tasman became the first European to discover Tasmania and named it Van Diemen's Land.
Astronomers Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree recorded the first known observation of a transit of Venus across the sun.
From this day until February 10, 1435, London's Thames river completely froze.
A catastrophic landslide on Mont Granier destroyed five villages.
