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year.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On Jan. 27, 1944, during World War II, the Soviet Union announced the complete end of the deadly German siege of Leningrad, which had lasted for more than two years.
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• On this date:
• In 1756, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria.
• In 1880, Thomas Edison received a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.
• In 1888, the National Geographic Society was incorporated in Washington, D.C.
• In 1901, opera composer Giuseppe Verdi died in Milan, Italy, at age 87.
• In 1913, the musical play "The Isle O' Dreams" opened in New York; it featured the song "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" by Ernest R. Ball, Chauncey Olcott and George Graff Jr.
• In 1943, some 50 bombers struck Wilhelmshaven in the first all-American air raid against Germany during World War II.
• In 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.
• In 1951, an era of atomic testing in the Nevada desert began as an Air Force plane dropped a one-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flat.
• In 1964, E.I. Du Pont de Nemours and Co. introduced its artificial leather substitute, Corfam. (The product ultimately failed in large part because of consumer complaints that shoes made of Corfam could not be "broken in" like leather shoes.)
• In 1967, astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo spacecraft. More than 60 nations signed a treaty banning the orbiting of nuclear weapons.
• In 1973, the Vietnam peace accords were signed in Paris.
• In 1984, singer Michael Jackson suffered serious burns to his scalp when pyrotechnics set his hair on fire during the filming of a Pepsi-Cola TV commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
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• Ten years ago: John Kerry won the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. A jury in New York heard opening arguments in the trial of Martha Stewart, who was accused of lying about a stock sale (she was convicted in March 2004 and sentenced to five months in prison). Former "Tonight Show" host Jack Paar died in Greenwich, Conn., at age 85.

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