January 3

Tamaseseri Festival (Hakozaki Shrine, Fukuoka)
Tamaseseri, a lively New Year's Festival held on January 3, in Hakozaki Shrine in Fukuoka-city, and is a traditional form of fortune-telling. Several hundred men wearing lion cloths compete on piggy-back in two teams, the "sea" team and the "land" team team, for possession of a wooden ball.

f the sea team wins, a bountiful fishing catch is predicted for the year; if the land team wins a rich harvest is predicted.
http://www.kyushu-tourist.com/tamaseseri.html

1868
Meiji Restoration returns authority to Japan's emperors

1910
British miners strike for 8 hour working day

1911
7.7 Richter scale earthquake destroys Almaty city in Russian Turkestan.

1921
Turkey makes peace with Armenia

1925
Mussolini dissolves Italian parliament / becomes dictator

1918
US employment service opens as a unit of Department of Labor

1932
Martial law is declared in Honduras to stop revolt by banana workers fired by United Fruit.

1938
Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself a victim of polio, founds the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was later renamed the March of Dimes Foundation.

1941
Canada & US acquire air bases in Newfoundland (99 yr lease)
Italian counter offensive in Albania

1943
1st missing persons telecast (NYC)

1947
1st opening session of US Congress to be televised

1958
The West Indies Federation is formed.

1959
Separatists in the Maldives declare the establishment of the United Suvadive Republic.

1962
Prime Minister , the leader of Cuba at this time, was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Other official leaders of Cuba’s communist regime of this time were thrown out as well. He was thrown out for violating a large number of the Roman Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law.

1965
Thousands of antigovernment demonstrators in Saigon clash with government marines and police over concern that American influence in South Vietnam was increasing.

1970
Marxist government takes over in Congo

1974
Burma accepts its constitution

1994
More than seven million people from the former Apartheid Homelands, receive South African citizenship.
100s killed in Venezuela in prison revolt

1997
China announces it will spend US$27.7 billion to fight erosion and pollution in the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys.

2008
As the arguments continue over the long term future of the Polar Bear specifically if it should be listed as a threatened species. The U.S. federal Minerals Management Service has announced it will hold a lease sale for exploration rights for oil and gas in a north-western region of Alaska which include sectors of the Chukchi Sea. The Chukchi Sea is home to one of two populations of polar bears in the US and environmental groups fear the effects on wildlife in the region, including the polar bear population.

2011
The state of Queensland in Northeastern Australia experienced massive flooding, affecting over twenty towns and over 200,000 people.

For details, contact Datacentre