Today in History.....February 17

On this day in …

* 1801, the House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president; Burr became vice president

* 1865, Columbia, S.C., burned as the Confederates evacuated and Union forces moved in. (It's not known which side set the blaze.)

* 1897, the forerunner of the National PTA, the National Congress of Mothers, was founded in Washington

* 1947, the Voice of America began broadcasting to the Soviet Union

* 1964, the Supreme Court ruled that congressional districts within each state had to be roughly equal in population

* 1972, President Nixon departed on his historic trip to China

* 1986, Johnson and Johnson, maker of Tylenol, announced it would no longer sell over-the-counter medications in capsule form, following the death of a woman who had taken a cyanide-laced capsule

* 1992, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced in Milwaukee to life in prison (he was beaten to death in prison in November 1994)

* 1995, Colin Ferguson was convicted of six counts of murder in the December 1993 Long Island Rail Road shootings (he was later sentenced to a minimum of 200 years in prison)

* 1996, world chess champion Garry Kasparov beat IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue," winning a six-game match in Philadelphia (Kasparov had lost the first game, won the second, fifth and sixth games and earned draws in the third and fourth)

* 2001, former Nation of Islam official Khalid Abdul Muhammad, known for his hate rhetoric about Jews and whites, died at a hospital in Marietta, Ga., at age 53

* 2005, President Bush named John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as the government's first national intelligence director.
ALSO: Iraq's electoral commission certified the results of the Jan.
30 elections and allocated 140 of 275 National Assembly seats to the United Iraqi Alliance, giving the Shiite-dominated party a majority in the new parliament