Today in History....January 3

On this day in …

1868, the Meiji Restoration re-established the authority of Japan's emperor and heralded the fall of the military rulers known as shoguns
1924, two years after British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discovered the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen near Luxor, Egypt, they uncover the greatest treasure of the tomb --- a stone sarcophagus containing a solid gold coffin that holds the mummy of Tutankhamen

1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an adult victim of polio, founds the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which he later renamed the March of Dimes Foundation

1947, congressional proceedings were televised for the first time as viewers in Washington, Philadelphia and New York got to see some of the opening ceremonies of the 80th Congress

1959, President Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Alaska to the Union as the 49th state

1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba

1967, Jack Ruby, the man who shot accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, died in a Dallas hospital of cancer. The Texas Court of Appeals had recently overturned his death sentence for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and was scheduled to grant him a new trial

1990, ousted Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces, ten days after taking refuge in the Vatican's diplomatic mission

1993, President George H.W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a historic nuclear missile-reduction treaty in Moscow

2001, a judge in Alabama ruled that former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry was mentally competent to stand trial on murder charges in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls. (Cherry was later convicted, and served a life sentence until his death in November 2004.)

2005, Iran told the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency it planned to resume nuclear fuel research