January 31

January 31 in history:

• 1917, Germany served notice it was beginning a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare

• 1929, the Soviet Union expelled communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. He was later assassinated in Mexico

• 1934, President Roosevelt devalued the dollar in relation to gold

• 1944, during World War II, U.S. forces began invading Kwajalein Atoll and other parts of the Japanese-held Marshall Islands

• 1945, Private Eddie Slovik became the only U.S. soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion as he was shot by an American firing squad in France

• 1950, President Truman announced he had ordered development of the hydrogen bomb

• 1958, the United States entered the Space Age with its first successful launch of a satellite into orbit, Explorer 1

• 1971, astronauts Alan B. Shepard Jr., Edgar D. Mitchell and Stuart A. Roosa blasted off aboard Apollo 14 on a mission to the moon

• 1998, astronaut David Wolf returned to Earth aboard space shuttle Endeavour after four months on the Russian space station Mir

• 2000, a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands convicted one Libyan, acquitted a second, in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. ALSO: The state of Georgia hoisted its new flag above its statehouse, one featuring a smaller Confederate battle emblem

• 2003, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met at the White House; Bush said he would welcome a second U.N. resolution on Iraq but only if it led to the prompt disarming of Saddam Hussein. Pushing for a new resolution, Blair called confronting Iraq "a test of the international community."