On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Three small children were killed yesterday in an electrical fire that swept through a row house in Brooklyn. Consolidated Edison Company officials said that electricity was being illegally siphoned through a tangle of extension cords from a power box under the sidewalk. It was the second time in a year that such an illegal hookup had been discovered at the one-family house.
The nation's mayors today denounced President Bush's proposal to give states control over $15 billion worth of Federal programs, saying it would permit governors to skim money that now flows directly from Washington to hundreds of cities around the country. Speaking officially through the bipartisan United States Conference of Mayors, the mayors also contended that Mr. Bush's proposal would add a new layer of bureaucracy, at the state level, to many health, education, welfare, housing and law-enforcement programs.
The disbelief, the disbelief that lingers among strangers even yet, stings Kimberly Bergalis almost as much as the disease. Two weeks after her 23d birthday, she repeats the story of how she got AIDS. She speaks in a just-the-facts monotone, until she begins to talk about the doctors, the friends, the strangers who would not believe her. Then the monotone gives way to the quick cadences of rage, and color comes to her drawn face. "Here I was, 21 years old," she says. "Faced with a diagnosis of AIDS. It's a fatal illness. It's hard enough to deal with the stress of having a terminal illness. And I have to deal with people and organizations that don't believe me. They want to believe you were using IV drugs. They want to believe you were sleeping around."
The scene outside the Parliament evokes images of Warsaw, Prague and many other settings of recent campaigns against Communist power -- the bunches of flowers, the photographs of heroes and martyrs, the defiant banners, the crucifixes and candles, the bravado and the hope. But here the massive barricades of concrete, steel and barbed wire that ring the modern Parliament, the taped-up windows on surrounding houses and the Soviet Army's armored cars around the television tower a mile away, declare that this is a different story.
The White House has drafted a national energy policy that would encourage the growth of the domestic oil industry and remove obstacles to the construction of nuclear power plants. But the plan calls for only a modest effort to encourage energy efficiency. The plan, which is taking final form as war in the oil-rich Persian Gulf has focused new attention on long-term energy supply problems, is intended to make the nation less dependent on foreign sources. Through deregulation and tax breaks, it would encourage the oil, gas and coal industries to begin aggressive programs for increasing the domestic output of fossil fuels in the United States. The Office of Management and Budget circulated a draft of the legislation embodying the policy to Federal departments and agencies this week.
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of February 6, 1991, covering February 9, 1991.
Vanilla Ice
Mariah Carey
Madonna
The Simpsons
M.C. Hammer
1991Helena Kmieć, Polish Roman Catholic missionary (died 2017)[†]
Helena Agnieszka Kmieć was a Polish Catholic missionary who was awarded the Polish Gold Cross of Merit. In May 2024, her sainthood cause was opened and she was named a Servant of God.
1991Logan Ryan, American football player[†]
Logan Daniel Ryan is an American former professional football defensive back who played in the National Football League (NFL) for eleven seasons. He played college football for the Rutgers Scarlet Knights as a cornerback and was selected by the New England Patriots in the third round of the 2013 NFL draft. Ryan also played for the Tennessee Titans, New York Giants, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and San Francisco 49ers. He played cornerback for the first seven seasons of his career before switching to safety in 2020 and playing the position in his last four seasons.
1991Dissolution of the Soviet Union: Voters in Lithuania vote for independence from the Soviet Union.[†]
The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. It also brought an end to the Soviet Union's federal government and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide. The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and Gorbachev continuing the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members, the Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian SSRs, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to dissolve the union the following day.
In 1991, the world population was approximately 5,418,735,891 people[†]