Some interesting things have happened on December 28th in our brief history here on this earth:

• 1793, Thomas Paine is arrested in France for treason
• 1832, John C. Calhoun became the first vice president of the United States to resign, stepping down over differences with President Jackson
• 1895, the world’s first commercial screening of a film takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris
• 1917, the New York Evening Mail published a facetious — as well as fictitious — essay by H.L. Mencken on the history of bathtubs in America
• 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance
• 1972, Hanoi announces return to the Paris peace talks
• 1973, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published “Gulag Archipelago,” an expose of the Soviet prison system
• 1995, President Clinton vetoed a $265 billion-dollar defense bill, saying it would waste money on an unneeded missile defense system.
  (Congress failed to override the veto.)
• 2000, the Census Bureau released its first numbers from the 2000 national count; they showed that America’s population had risen to
  281,421,906 — up 13-point-two percent from 1990
• 2004, the US Agency for International Development said it was adding $20 million to an initial $15 million contribution for Asian tsunami relief as Secretary of State Colin Powell bristled at a United Nations official’s suggestion the United States was being “stingy”.