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• Today is Saturday, Dec. 28, the 362nd day of 2013. There are three days left in the year.
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• Today's Highlights in History:
• On Dec. 28, 1973, the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. Alexander Solzhenitsyn published "The Gulag Archipelago," an expose (eks-poh-SAY') of the Soviet prison system.
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• On this date:
• In 1612, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed the planet Neptune, but mistook it for a star. (Neptune wasn't officially discovered until 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle.)
• In 1832, John C. Calhoun became the first vice president of the United States to resign, stepping down because of differences with President Andrew Jackson.
• In 1846, Iowa became the 29th state to be admitted to the Union.
• In 1856, the 28th president of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, was born in Staunton (STAN'-tun), Va.
• In 1879, a section of the Tay Bridge in Dundee, Scotland, collapsed as a train was traveling over it, sending an estimated 75 people to their deaths in the river below.
• In 1912, San Francisco's Municipal Railway began operations with Mayor James Rolph Jr. at the controls of Streetcar No. 1 as 50,000 spectators looked on.
• In 1917, the New York Evening Mail published "A Neglected Anniversary," a facetious essay by H.L. Mencken supposedly recounting the history of bathtubs in America.
• In 1937, composer Maurice Ravel died in Paris at age 62.
• In 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance.
• In 1961, the Tennessee Williams play "Night of the Iguana" opened on Broadway. Former first lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the second wife of President Woodrow Wilson, died in Washington at age 89.

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