Today is Saturday, January 23, the 23rd day of 2010. There are 342 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

1542: King Henry VIII takes the title of King of Ireland.

Other Notable Events

1579: The Union of Utrecht is signed by the provinces of the Netherlands committed to carrying on resistance to Spain. It becomes in fact the foundation of the state of the Netherlands.

1799: French troops capture Italian city of Naples.

1845: The US Congress decides all national elections would be held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

1849: Prussia suggests German union without Austria; Dr Elizabeth Blackwell receives the first doctor of medicine degree awarded to an American woman.

1918: The Soviet government officially severs relations with the church.

1920: Holland refuses to surrender Germany’s former Kaiser Wilhelm II to Allies for punishment as World War I criminal.

1950: The Knesset proclaims Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

1985: Debate in Britain’s House of Lords is carried live on television for the first time.

1991 : The Angolan government accepts a peace plan that ends a 15-year-old civil war with UNITA rebels.

1992: The Salvadoran legislature issues an amnesty for guerrilla fighters of a 12-year civil war, allowing them to return to society.

1996: Yigal Amir confesses in court to killing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

1997: France’s highest court rejects a final appeal and orders Maurice Papon, a former Vichy official, to stand trial for deporting Jews to death camps during World War II.

2000: Over a million people march through downtown Madrid to call for peace after a car-bomb attack is seen as a resurgence of Basque separatists’ 32-year-old campaign of violence which has killed nearly 800 people.

2001: A new administration in the Philippines moves to freeze the bank accounts of ousted President Joseph Estrada and begins a criminal investigation against him.

2002: A previously unknown militant group kidnaps Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the US Wall Street Journal newspaper, in Karachi, Pakistan. Pearl, who had been working on a story about Islamic militant groups in that country, is later killed.

2006: Ugandan rebels ambush UN peacekeepers in Congo, killing eight of them in a gunbattle that also leaves 15 attackers dead near the Sudanese border.

2007: More than 100,000 mourners choke the streets of Istanbul for the funeral of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist who was gunned down in broad daylight on January 19 because of public statements made about the mass killings of Armenians by Turks in the early 20th century.

2008: Tens of thousands of Gazans flood into Egypt through a border fence blown up by militants — puncturing a gaping hole in Israel’s air-tight closure of the Gaza Strip and giving a boost to Hamas militants.

Today’s Birthdays

Marie Henri Beyle Stendahl, French author (1783-1842); Edouard Manet, French artist (1832-1883); Jeanne Moreau, French actress (1928-); Derek Walcott, West Indian poet and Nobel laureate (1930-); Rutger Hauer, Dutch-born actor (1944-); Mariska Hargitay, US actress (1964-).

–AP