Thursday, January 28 ---1621 - Camillo Borghese, Pope Paul V from 1605 to 1621, died. His reign was noted for his conflicts with the kingdom of Naples and the Venetian Republic. 1768 - Frederick VI, king of Denmark from 1808-1839 and of Norway from 1808-14, born. 1807 - London's Pall Mall became the first street to be illuminated by gaslight. 1822 - Alexander Mackenzie, first Liberal prime minister of Canada from 1873-78, born.

1829 - Irish murderer and body-snatcher William Burke was hanged. With William Hare, he roamed the streets of Edinburgh snatching corpses which a local doctor used for dissection. When demand exceeded supply they took to murdering their victims. 1855 - William Seward Burroughs, U.S. inventor of first commercially successful calculating machine, born. 1871 - Paris surrendered to the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian war.

1878 - The first commercial telephone switchboard went into operation in New Haven, Connecticut. 1902 - Scottish steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Institution in Washington. 1915 - Congress passed legislation creating the U.S. Coast Guard, combining the Life Saving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service. 1928 - Vicente Blasco Ibanez, Spanish politician and writer, most notably The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, died.

1930 - The dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera ended in Spain. 1932 - The Japanese Army occupied Shanghai to force an end to a Chinese boycott of Japanese goods. 1935 - Iceland became the first country to legalize abortion on medical-social grounds. 1939 - William Butler Yeats, Irish poet and dramatist, died; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.

1943 - Adolf Hitler mobilized the whole of the German adult population for the country's war effort. 1944 - Charles de Gaulle made his landmark appeal for a new relationship between France and Africa. 1945 - A convoy of U.S. trucks from India crossed the Burmese-Chinese border, opening the famous Burma Road. 1950 - The French Assembly ratified the agreement under which Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos became independent states within the French Union. 1953 - James Scullin, Australian Labor prime minister 1929-31, died; he guided his country through the early years of the Great Depression. 1963 - Black student Harvey Gantt entered Clemson College in South Carolina, the last state to hold out against integration.

1982 - Italian anti-terrorist police rescued U.S. Brigadier-General James Dozier from Red Brigades guerrillas who kidnapped him 42 days earlier. 1986 - Seven astronauts died when the Challenger space shuttle exploded 72 seconds after lift-off from Cape Canaveral. 1988 - Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs died; his information enabled Moscow to detonate its first nuclear weapon in August 1949. 1994 - Christian Democrat Giovanni Goria became Italy's second former prime minister to be committed for trial on corruption charges.

1996 - General San Yu, president of Burma from 1981-88, died. 1997 - At South Africa's Truth Commission, police confessed to the 1977 murder of Steve Biko. 1998 - An Indian judge sentenced to death all 26 people accused of conspiring to assassinate former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. 1998 - Japanese Finance Minister Hiroshi Mitsuzuka was forced to step down because of a bribery case.