UPI Almanac for Saturday, Feb. 12, 2022

Today is Saturday, Feb. 12, the 43rd day of 2022 with 322 to follow.

The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Mars, Mercury, Uranus and Venus. Evening stars are Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Aquarius. They include Puritan Cotton Mather in 1663; French architect Etienne-Louis Boullee in 1728; former first lady Louisa Adams in 1775; Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States, in 1809; biologist Charles Darwin in 1809; labor leader John L. Lewis in 1880; Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in 1881; German painter Max Beckmann in 1884; U.S. Gen. Omar Bradley in 1893; actor Lorne Greene in 1915; Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli in 1923; baseball player/sports commentator Joe Garagiola in 1926; Charles Van Doren, subject of U.S. TV quiz scandals, in 1926; former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., in 1930; basketball Hall of Fame member Bill Russell in 1934 (age 88); actor Joe Don Baker in 1936 (age 86); author Judy Blume in 1938 (age 84); former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1942 (age 80); actor Maud Adams in 1945 (age 77); actor Joanna Kerns in 1953 (age 69); former talk show host Arsenio Hall in 1956 (age 66); actor John Michael Higgins in 1963 (age 59); actor Lochlyn Munro in 1966 (age 56); actor Josh Brolin in 1968 (age 54); singer Chynna Phillips in 1968 (age 54); actor Jesse Spencer in 1979 (age 43); actor Christina Ricci in 1980 (age 42); rapper Gucci Mane, born Radric Delantic Davis, in 1980 (age 42); singer Elle Varner in 1989 (age 33); actor Katherine Barrell in 1990 (age 32).

On this date in history:

In 1541, Santiago, Chile, was founded.

In 1733, the American colony of Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe.

In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded by Moorfield Storey, Mary White Ovington and W.E.B. Du Bois.

In 1912, China's last emperor, Puyi, abdicated the throne after Sun Yat-sen's revolution. The Qing dynasty ruled for 268 years and the country had been under imperial rule for some 2,000 years.

In 1914, a dedication ceremony was held and the first stone of the Lincoln Memorial was laid. It took eight years to complete the monument honoring the 16th president.

In 1973, 116 prisoners of war were flown from Hanoi to the Philippines in the first release of U.S. POWs in North Vietnam.

In 1988, two Soviet warships deliberately bumped two U.S. Navy ships in international waters in the Black Sea, indicating continued tensions between the two parties despite the Cold War nearing its end.

In 1993, about 5,000 demonstrators marched on Atlanta's Capitol to protest the Confederate symbol on the Georgia state flag.

In 1999, the U.S. Senate acquitted U.S. President Bill Clinton of impeachment charges.

In 2001, NASA's NEAR Shoemaker landed on the asteroid Eros, the first time a near Earth asteroid was visited by a spacecraft.

In 2002, a Russian-built Tupelov-154 aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff near the western city of Khorramabad, Iran, killing all 117 people aboard.

In 2002, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic went on trial at The Hague, Netherlands, on charges of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. He died four years later before the conclusion of the trial.

In 2004, South Korean scientists announced they had created the world's first mature cloned human embryos.

In 2008, General Motors, which offered buyouts to its 74,000 unionized employees, reported a loss of $38.7 billion for 2007, the largest ever for an automaker.

In 2008, U.S. military officials announced capital charges against six al-Qaida members for their roles in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The admitted mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and the others were detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In 2009, a Continental airlines turboprop commuter plane crashed into a house near Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people, including one person in the house.

In 2016, Pope Francis met Patriarch Kirill, the first meeting between the pontiff of the Catholic Church and the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, in Cuba.

In 2021, the U.S. State Department revoked terrorist designation of Houthi rebels in Yemen one week after the Biden administration said it would no longer support military operations in the country.

A thought for the day: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." -- British scientist Charles Darwin