[CaptainCrunch]

Jan 7

1558 – French troops, led by Francis, Duke of Guise, take Calais, the last continental possession of England.

1610 – Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, although he is not able to distinguish the last two until the following day.

1782 – The first American commercial bank, the Bank of North America, opens.

1785 – Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.

1835 – HMS Beagle drops anchor off the Chonos Archipelago.

1894 – William Kennedy Dickson receives a patent for motion picture film.

1904 – The distress signal "CQD" is established only to be replaced two years later by "SOS".

1920 – The New York State Assembly refuses to seat five duly elected Socialist assemblymen.

1927 – The first transatlantic telephone service is established from New York City to London.

1935 – Benito Mussolini and French Foreign minister Pierre Laval sign the Franco-Italian Agreement.

1940 – Winter War: The Finnish 9th Division stop and completely destroy the numerically superior Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi road.

1942 – World War II: The siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.

1945 – World War II: British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge.

1948 – Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of a supposed UFO.

1954 – Georgetown-IBM experiment: The first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held in New York at the head office of IBM.

1959 – The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.

1979 – Third Indochina War: Cambodian–Vietnamese War: Phnom Penh falls to the advancing Vietnamese troops, driving out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

1980 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter authorizes legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out the Chrysler Corporation.

1985 – Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launches Sakigake, Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the United States or the Soviet Union.

1991 – Roger Lafontant, former leader of the Tonton Macoute in Haiti under François Duvalier, attempts a coup d'état, which ends in his arrest.

1992 – The Jeep Grand Cherokee is introduced at the Detroit Auto Show.

1993 – Bosnian War: The Bosnian Army executes a surprise attack at the village of Kravica in Srebrenica.

1999 – The Senate trial in the impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton begins.

2015 – Two gunmen commit mass murder at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, shooting twelve people execution style, and wounding eleven others.