31 January Events

January 31 is the 31st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 334 days remaining until the end of the year (335 in leap years). This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Friday or Saturday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Wednesday (56).

Events
314 – Pope Sylvester I succeeds Pope Miltiades.
1504 – France cedes Naples to Aragon.
1578 – The Battle of Gembloux takes place.
1606 – Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes is executed for plotting against Parliament and King James.
1747 – The first venereal diseases clinic opens at London Lock Hospital.
1801 – John Marshall is appointed the Chief Justice of the United States.
1814 – Gervasio Antonio de Posadas becomes Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (present-day Argentina).
1846 – After the Milwaukee Bridge War, Juneautown and Kilbourntown unify as the City of Milwaukee.
1848 – John C. Frémont is court-martialed for mutiny and disobeying orders.
1849 – Corn Laws are abolished in the United Kingdom pursuant to legislation in 1846.
1862 – Alvan Graham Clark discovers the white dwarf star Sirius B, a companion of Sirius, through an 18.5-inch (47 cm) telescope now located at Northwestern University.
1865 – American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery and submits it to the states for ratification.
1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Robert E. Lee becomes general-in-chief.
1891 – History of Portugal: The first attempt at a Portuguese republican revolution breaks out in the northern city of Porto.
1897 – Czechoslav Trade Union Association is founded in Prague.
1900 – Datu Muhammad Salleh is assassinated in Kampung Teboh, Tambunan, ending the Mat Salleh Rebellion.
1915 – World War I: Germany is the first to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare in the Battle of Bolimów against Russia.
1917 – World War I: Germany announces that its U-boats will resume unrestricted submarine warfare after a two-year hiatus.
1918 – A series of accidental collisions on a misty Scottish night leads to the loss of two Royal Navy submarines with over a hundred lives, and damage to another five British warships.
1919 – The Battle of George Square takes place in Glasgow, Scotland.
1929 – The Soviet Union exiles Leon Trotsky.
1930 – 3M begins marketing Scotch Tape.
1942 – World War II: Allied forces are defeated by the Japanese at the Battle of Malaya and retreat to the island of Singapore.
1943 – World War II: German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad, followed 2 days later by the remainder of his Sixth Army, ending one of the war's fiercest battles.
1944 – World War II: American forces land on Kwajalein Atoll and other islands in the Japanese-held Marshall Islands.
1944 – World War II: During the Anzio campaign the 1st Ranger Battalion (Darby's Rangers) is destroyed behind enemy lines in a heavily outnumbered encounter at Battle of Cisterna, Italy.
1945 – US Army private Eddie Slovik is executed for desertion, the first such execution of an American soldier since the Civil War.
1945 – World War II: About 3,000 inmates from the Stutthof concentration camp are forcibly marched into the Baltic Sea at Palmnicken (now Yantarny, Russia) and executed.
1945 – World War II: The end of fighting in the Battle of Hill 170 during the Burma Campaign, in which the British 3 Commando Brigade repulsed a Japanese counterattack on their positions and precipitated a general retirement from the Arakan Peninsula.
1946 – Yugoslavia's new constitution, modeling that of the Soviet Union, establishes six constituent republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia).
1946 – The Democratic Republic of Vietnam introduces the đồng to replace the French Indochinese piastre at par.
1949 – These Are My Children, the first television daytime soap opera is broadcast by the NBC station in Chicago.
1950 – United States President Harry S. Truman announces a program to develop the hydrogen bomb.
1953 – A North Sea flood causes over 1,800 deaths in the Netherlands and over 300 in the United Kingdom
1957 – Eight people on the ground in Pacoima, California are killed following the mid-air collision between a Douglas DC-7 airliner and a Northrop F-89 Scorpion fighter jet.
1958 – The first successful American satellite detects the Van Allen radiation belt.
1961 – Project Mercury: Mercury-Redstone 2: Ham the Chimp travels into outer space.
1966 – The Soviet Union launches the unmanned Luna 9 spacecraft as part of the Luna program.
1968 – Vietnam War: Viet Cong guerrillas attack the United States embassy in Saigon, and other attacks, in the early morning hours, later grouped together as the Tet Offensive.
1968 – Nauru gains independence from Australia.
1971 – Apollo program: Apollo 14: Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell, aboard a Saturn V, lift off for a mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.
1971 – The Winter Soldier Investigation, organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to publicize war crimes and atrocities by Americans and allies in Vietnam, begins in Detroit.
1996 – An explosives-filled truck rams into the gates of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka in Colombo, killing at least 86 people and injuring 1,400.
2000 – Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crash: An MD-83, experiencing horizontal stabilizer problems, crashes in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Point Mugu, California, killing all 88 aboard.
2001 – In the Netherlands, a Scottish court convicts Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and acquits another Libyan citizen for their part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
2003 – The Waterfall rail accident occurs near Waterfall, New South Wales, Australia.
2007 – Suspects are arrested in Birmingham in the UK, accused of plotting the kidnap, holding and eventual beheading of a serving Muslim British soldier in Iraq.
2009 – In Kenya, at least 113 people are killed and over 200 injured following an oil spillage ignition in Molo, days after a massive fire at a Nakumatt supermarket in Nairobi killed at least 25 people.
2010 – Avatar becomes the first film to gross over $2 billion worldwide.
2011 – A winter storm hits North America for the second time in the same month, causing $1.8 billion in damage across the United States and Canada and killing 24 people.

Holidays and observances
Christian feast day:
Blessed Ludovica
Geminianus
John Bosco
Marcella
Samuel Shoemaker (Episcopal Church (USA))
January 31 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Amartithi (Meherabad, India, followers of Meher Baba)
Independence Day (Nauru), celebrates independence from Australia in 1968.
Street Children's Day (Austria)

Source: Wikipedia