Today is Sunday, Feb. 5, the 36th day of 2017. There are 329 days left in the year.
Today's Highlights in History:
On Feb. 5, 1917, Mexico's present-day constitution was adopted by the Constitutional Convention in Santiago de Queretaro. The U.S. Congress passed, over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, an act severely curtailing Asian immigration.
On this date:
In 1783, Sweden recognized the independence of the United States.
In 1887, Verdi's opera "Otello" premiered at La Scala.
In 1897, the Indiana House of Representatives passed, 67-0, a measure offering a new (as well as fundamentally flawed) method for determining the area of a circle, which would have effectively redefined the value of pi as 3.2. (The bill died in the Indiana Senate.)
In 1922, the first edition of Reader's Digest was published.
In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices; the proposal, which failed in Congress, drew accusations that Roosevelt was attempting to "pack" the nation's highest court.
In 1940, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra recorded "Tuxedo Junction" for RCA Victor's Bluebird label.
In 1953, Walt Disney's animated feature "Peter Pan" was first released.
In 1967, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" premiered on CBS-TV.
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell stepped onto the surface of the moon in the first of two lunar excursions.
In 1973, services were held at Arlington National Cemetery for U.S. Army Col. William B. Nolde, the last official American combat casualty before the Vietnam cease-fire took effect.
In 1989, the Soviet Union announced that all but a small rear-guard contingent of its troops had left Afghanistan.
In 1994, white separatist Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in Jackson, Mississippi, of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, and was immediately sentenced to life in prison. (Beckwith died Jan. 21, 2001 at age 80.) Sixty-eight people were killed when a mortar shell exploded in a marketplace in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
