Today is Tuesday, January 19, the 19th day of 2010. There are 346 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

1825: Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kinsett patent the tin canning process for food, pioneering the age of convenience for housewives and armies alike.

Other Notable Events

1918: The Bolsheviks dissolve Russian Constitutional Assembly in Petrograd.

1937: Millionaire Howard Hughes sets a transcontinental air record by flying his monoplane from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, in seven hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds.

1938: General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist air force bombs Spanish cities of Barcelona and Valencia, killing 700 people.

1945: Soviet troops take Krakow, Poland, in World War II.

1956: Sudan joins Arab League as ninth member.

1960: United States (US) and Japan sign treaty of mutual security.

1966: India’s new prime minister, Indira Gandhi, pledges to follow path of nonalignment in world affairs.

1974: Five Russians, including a senior diplomat and two other members of the Soviet embassy staff, are expelled from China on espionage charges.

1975: Britain and Irish Republican Army announce first direct negotiations since start of guerrilla activity in Northern Ireland six years earlier.

1981: The US and Iran sign an agreement paving the way for the release of 52 Americans held hostage for more than 14 months.

1988: Czechoslovak government rules out any chance that ousted Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek be allowed to return to public life.

1989: Soviet Union announces it will unilaterally withdraw some of its short-range nuclear missiles from Europe.

1992: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s coalition government loses its parliamentary majority.

1993: The Israeli parliament votes to repeal a law prohibiting contact with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

1995: Separatist fighters abandon Chechnya’s presidential palace after Russian artillery and rocket fire destroy it.

1996: Chechen sympathisers who hijacked a Turkish ferry surrender, ending a four-day ordeal for more than 240 hostages.

1997: A powerful car bomb explodes outside a café in downtown Algiers, killing at least 20 people and wounding 60 others — hours after attackers massacred 36.

1998: Peru and Ecuador agree on a timetable for a peace treaty to formally end their 1995 border war.

2000: Michael Skakel, nephew of the late Sen Robert Kennedy surrenders in Greenwich, Connecticut, to face charges that he beat a childhood friend to death 24 years before.

2002: The Sudanese government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the main rebel group involved in the country’s 19-year-old civil war, sign a cease-fire agreement for the disputed Nuba Mountains region.

2003: Indian officials say an intense cold spell in parts of India, Bangladesh and Nepal has claimed 1,300 lives across the region since December 2002. Millions of people living outdoors and in uninsulated homes are threatened with exposure.

2005: The presidents of Colombia and Brazil meet on their Amazon jungle border to discuss the dispute between Colombia and another neighbour, Venezuela, sparked by the abduction of a Marxist guerrilla on Venezuelan soil. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, emerges as a potential mediator.

2007: The United Nations’ first all-female peacekeeping contingent — made up of 105 Indian policewomen who have been training since September — is set to deploy to Liberia.

2008: The bodies of nearly 50 Africans trying to immigrate wash up on Yemen’s shores after their boat capsizes in the treacherous waters of the Gulf of Aden. The 35 survivors tell authorities that at least 135 people, all Somalis and Ethiopians, were crammed into the boat.

2009: Russia and Ukraine sign a deal that restores natural gas shipments to Ukraine and paves the way for an end to the nearly two-week cut-off of most Russian gas to a freezing Europe.

Today’s Birthdays

James Watt, Scottish engineer/inventor (1736-1819); Auguste Comte, French philosopher (1798-1857); Edgar Allen Poe, US writer (1809-1849); Paul Cezanne, French artist (1839-1906); Robert MacNeil, Canadian-born newsman/writer (1931-); Shelley Fabares, US actress (1944-); Dolly Parton, US singer/actress (1946-).