On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Receiver Jerry Rice, 40, set to play for Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl, has maintained level of excellence in 18 seasons in pro football that astonishes even his peers; his intense training regimen has allowed him to adjust to increased size and speed of defenders; tables of his career statistics; photos (M)
Giovanni Agnelli, the shrewd, dashing and politically influential international business figure who turned his family's auto company, Fiat, into a worldwide conglomerate and helped industrialize postwar Italy, died this morning at his home here. He was 81. The cause was prostate cancer, his family said.
Dow Jones industrial average falls 238.46 points, or 2.9 percent, to 8,131.01; Standard & Poor's 500-stock index drops 25.94 points, or 2.9 percent, to 861.40; Nasdaq composite index plunges 46.14 points, or 3.3 percent, to 1,342.14; dollar sinks almost one percent against euro, to $1.0844, and 0.3 percent against Japanese yen, to 117.69 per dollar; gold prices soar one percent to six-year high of $368.40 an ounce on investors' geopolitical and financial insecurities; crude oil for March delivery rises $1.03, or 3.2 percent, to $33.28 a barrel on hawkish Bush administration rhetoric toward Iraq; Treasury's 10-year note gains 3/32, costs 100 19/32 and its yield slips to 3.93 percent; tables of key rates, most-volatile stocks and favorite stocks; graph of DJIA (M)
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp, federal agency that insures pensions of some 44 million Americans, has been pounded by succession of big corporate bankruptcies and burned through $8 billion surplus in year; can continue to make current payments, but is expected to report deficit at end of January; faces worsening prospects as more companies struggle to emerge from bankruptcy under weight of large underfunded pension plans; agency's plight is fueling debate over whether guaranteed pensions of millions of Americans are at risk, and, if so, who should pay to protect them; raising premiums businesses pay to support agency too sharply could spur companies to stop offering pensions; graphs of pension underfunding and agency's financial position (M)
New Jersey Nets defeat Los Angeles Lakers, 89-83; photos (M)
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of January 22, 2003, covering January 25, 2003.
Norah Jones
Jennifer Lopez
Avril Lavigne
Dixie Chicks
Soundtrack
2003Sheldon Reynolds, American director, producer, and screenwriter (born 1923)[†]
Sheldon Reynolds was an American television producer best known for his involvement in the Sherlock Holmes franchise.
2003Samuel Weems, American lawyer and author (born 1936)[†]
Samuel A. Weems was an American lawyer and convicted felon. His personal conduct and misconduct allegations made him the subject of substantial scrutiny. An Armenian genocide denialist, he wrote Armenia: The Secrets of a "Christian" Terrorist State. He was disbarred by the Arkansas Bar Association for mixing clients' money with his own, convicted of arson and insurance fraud.
2003Invasion of Iraq: A group of people leave London, England, for Baghdad, Iraq, to serve as human shields, intending to prevent the U.S.-led coalition troops from bombing certain locations.[†]
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion began on 20 March 2003 and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations, in which a United States-led combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded the Republic of Iraq. Twenty-two days after the first day of the invasion, the capital city of Baghdad was captured by coalition forces on 9 April after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad. This early stage of the war formally ended on 1 May when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations" in his Mission Accomplished speech, after which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as the first of several successive transitional governments leading up to the first Iraqi parliamentary election in January 2005. U.S. military forces later remained in Iraq until the withdrawal in 2011.
In 2003, the world population was approximately 6,420,361,634 people[†]