Wikipedia:Main Page history/2015 January 8

The Hillsgrove Covered Bridge, a 186-foot (57 m) one-lane bridge with a roof and sides to protect the wooden structure from the weather, crosses Loyalsock Creek in Hillsgrove Township, Sullivan County, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Built by Sadler Rodgers around 1850 and serving as a landing site for lumber rafts between 1870 and 1890, it has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973. Nineteenth-century regulations restricting speed, number of animals, and fire are still posted on the bridge. It gets its strength and rigidity from load-bearing Burr arches sandwiching multiple vertical king posts on each side. Restoration work was carried out in 1963, 1968, 2010, and, after serious flood damage (pictured), again in 2012. The bridge was still in use in 2015, and its average daily traffic was 54 vehicles in 2012, but the same year, the National Bridge Inventory found the bridge to be "Structurally Deficient" despite the restorations, with problematic railings and a 16.5 percent structural sufficiency rating. Only three of the 30 covered bridges that were in Sullivan County in 1890 remain in 2015: Forksville, Hillsgrove, and Sonestown. Pennsylvania had the first covered bridge in the United States, and has had more of them than any other state since the mid-19th century. (Full article...)

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• Gunmen kill 12 people at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
• Archaeologists announce the discovery of the tomb of the previously unknown ancient Egyptian queen Khentakawess III.
• Angola, Malaysia, New Zealand, Spain, and Venezuela take their seats on the United Nations Security Council.
• Lithuania becomes the 19th member of the Eurozone.
• At least 36 people are killed as a result of a stampede at a New Year's Eve celebration in Shanghai.
• Authorities confirm the discovery of debris and bodies from Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 (aircraft pictured), which crashed en route to Singapore with 162 people on board.

Ongoing:

Floods in Southeast and South Asia –

Ebola outbreak –

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

Recent deaths:

Edward Brooke – Mario Cuomo – Luise Rainer

January 8: Kim Jong-un's Birthday in North Korea

• 1297 – Francesco Grimaldi, disguised as a monk, led his men to capture the fortress protecting the Rock of Monaco, establishing his family as the rulers of Monaco.
• 1889 – Statistician Herman Hollerith (pictured) received a patent for his electric tabulating machine, the precursor to modern computers.
• 1920 – The steel strike of 1919, an attempt to organize the United States steel industry in the wake of World War I, collapsed in complete failure for the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.
• 1964 – During his State of the Union address, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a "War on Poverty".
• 2010 – Gunmen from an offshoot of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda attacked the bus transporting the Togo national football team to the Africa Cup of Nations, killing three.

More anniversaries: January 7 – January 8 – January 9

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