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• Today is Monday, Feb. 17, the 48th day of 2014. There are 317 days left in the year. This is Presidents' Day.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On Feb. 17, 1864, during the Civil War, the Union ship USS Housatonic was rammed and sunk in Charleston Harbor, S.C., by the Confederate hand-cranked submarine HL Hunley, which also sank.
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• On this date:
• In 1863, the International Red Cross was founded in Geneva.
• In 1865, Columbia, S.C., burned as the Confederates evacuated and Union forces moved in. (It's not clear which side set the blaze.)
• In 1897, the forerunner of the National PTA, the National Congress of Mothers, convened its first meeting in Washington.
• In 1904, the original two-act version of Giacomo Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" received a poor reception at its premiere at La Scala in Milan, Italy.
• In 1913, the Armory Show, a landmark modern art exhibit, opened in New York City.
• In 1933, Newsweek magazine was first published by Thomas J.C. Martyn under the title "News-Week."
• In 1944, during World War II, U.S. forces invaded Eniwetok Atoll, encountering little initial resistance from Imperial Japanese troops. (The Americans secured the atoll less than a week later.)
• In 1947, the Voice of America began broadcasting to the Soviet Union.
• In 1959, the United States launched Vanguard 2, a satellite which carried meteorological equipment.
• In 1964, the Supreme Court, in Wesberry v. Sanders, ruled that congressional districts within each state had to be roughly equal in population.
• In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon departed the White House with his wife, Pat, on a historic trip to China.
• In 1988, Lt. Col. William Higgins, a Marine Corps officer serving with a United Nations truce monitoring group, was kidnapped in southern Lebanon by Iranian-

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