Today is Saturday, Jan. 28, the 28th day of 2006. There are 337 days left in the year. On this date

Today is Saturday, Jan. 28, the 28th day of 2006. There are 337 days left in the year. On this date in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven of its crew members: flight commander Francis R. "Dick" Scobee; pilot Michael J. Smith; Ronald E. McNair; Ellison S. Onizuka; Judith A. Resnik; Gregory B. Jarvis; and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.
In 1853, Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti is born in Havana. In 1878, the first commercial telephone switchboard goes into operation, in New Haven, Conn. In 1878, the first daily college newspaper, the Yale News, begins publication in New Haven, Conn. In 1909, the United States ends direct control over Cuba. In 1915, the Coast Guard is created by an act of Congress. In 1916, Louis D. Brandeis is appointed by President Wilson to the Supreme Court, becoming its first Jewish member. In 1945, during World War II, Allied supplies begin reaching China over the newly reopened Burma Road. In 1973, a cease-fire officially goes into effect in the Vietnam War. In 1980, six U.S. diplomats who had avoided being taken hostage at their embassy in Tehran fly out of Iran with the help of Canadian diplomats. In 1982, Italian anti-terrorism forces rescue U.S. Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier, 42, days after he had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades.
January 28, 1981: Former hostage Gary Lee, a YSU graduate, says while visiting his family in California that the capture of Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran "never made any sense in the beginning ... we finally decided it's because Iran wants America as an enemy." Meanwhile, President Reagan warns Americans to stay away from Iran, even though a travel ban was lifted after the hostages were released.
Two deputies have filed suit to stop Sheriff James A. Traficant Jr. from using reserve and part-time deputies to beef up patrols while regular deputies are laid off.
A two-county program to keep career criminals in prison will continue in Trumbull County but is being ended in Mahoning County after federal funding for the program is lost. Atty. Wyatt McKay, chief counsel for the unit, will be paid by the Trumbull County prosecutor's office.
January 28, 1966: Dr. Ilarion N. Dombczewsky is the new superintendent and medical director of the Mahoning Tuberculosis Sanatorium.
Ramada Inns of America will build its first motel in the Youngstown area, a 131-unit, $3 million complex on Belmont Ave. near I-80 in Liberty Township.
A Youngstown man voluntarily drops his lawsuit seeking to block construction of the Strouss-Hirshberg new parking complex at Commerce and Wick.
January 28, 1956: U.S. Rep. James Van Zandt of Altoona, Pa., in the Youngstown area for the McKinley Dinner, says both the United States and Russia are aware of the potential danger of an atomic confrontation and the world is farther away from war than it was a year earlier.
The Ohio Highway Department hires Michael Baker Jr. of Rochester, Pa., to determine the route and estimate the cost of construction for the proposed Lake Erie-to-Ohio River highway. The engineering contract is for $75,000.
An unidentified man is found shot to death near the home of Mrs. Georgia Neese Clark, former treasurer of the United States, hours after her husband exchanged shots with an intruder in their Richland, Kansas, home.
January 28, 1931: A near-penniless man dressed in old clothes who was picked up by Campbell police begging for food or work turns out to be Clyde Gibson, the brilliant and successful New Castle lawyer who disappeared in 1929 after charges of embezzling clients' funds were brought against him.
The New York Stock Exchange announces it will no longer release its daily total stock sales figure because gamblers were using it as a "bug" number.
H.B. Keller, chief of Pittsburgh's bureau of smoke regulation, tells the American Society of Heating and Ventilating Engineers, that the acrid compounds and minute particles in smoke damage the delicate tissues of the body, causing sickness and even death.