Events on January 7 38
Year 1131
Canute Lavard was murdered at Haraldsted, Denmark by his cousin, Magnus I of Sweden.
Year 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.
Year 1785
Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.
Year 1904
The distress signal "CQD" is established only to be replaced two years later by "SOS".
Year 1919
Montenegrin guerrilla fighters rebel against the planned annexation of Montenegro by Serbia, but fail.
Year 1920
The New York State Assembly refuses to seat five duly elected Socialist assemblymen.
Year 1927
The first transatlantic telephone service is established from New York City to London.
Year 1931
Guy Menzies flies the first solo non-stop trans-Tasman flight (from Australia to New Zealand) in 11 hours and 45 minutes, crash-landing on New Zealand's west coast.
Year 1935
Benito Mussolini and French Foreign minister Pierre Laval sign the Franco-Italian Agreement.
Year 1940
Winter War: The Finnish 9th Division stop and completely destroy the numerically superior Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi road.
Year 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.
Year 1948
Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of a supposed UFO.
Year 1954
Georgetown-IBM experiment: The first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held in New York at the head office of IBM.
Year 1955
Contralto Marian Anderson becomes the first person of color to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera.
Year 1968
Surveyor Program: Surveyor 7, the last spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off from launch complex 36A, Cape Canaveral.
Year 1973
Mark Essex fatally shoots ten people and wounds 13 others at Howard Johnson's Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, before being shot to death by police officers.
Year 1979
Third Indochina War: Cambodian-Vietnamese War: Phnom Penh falls to the advancing Vietnamese troops, driving out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Year 1980
U.S. President Jimmy Carter authorizes legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out the Chrysler Corporation.
Year 1984
Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Year 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.
Year 1991
Roger Lafontant, former leader of the Tonton Macoute in Haiti under François Duvalier, attempts a coup d'état, which ends in his arrest.
Year 1993
Bosnian War: The Bosnian Army executes a surprise attack at the village of Kravica in Srebrenica.
Year 2012
A hot air balloon crashes near Carterton, New Zealand, killing all 11 people on board.
Year 2015
Two gunmen commit mass murder at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, shooting twelve people execution style, and wounding eleven others.
Year 2015
A car bomb explodes outside a police college in the Yemeni capital Sana'a with at least 38 people reported dead and more than 63 injured.