Today is Wednesday, Feb. 4, the 35th day of 2026. There are 330 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On Feb. 4, 2004, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched “TheFacebook,” the site that became Facebook.
Also on this date:
In 1789, electors unanimously chose George Washington as the first president of the United States.
In 1801, John Marshall took office as chief justice of the United States, a post he held for 34 years.
In 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin began the wartime Yalta conference.
In 1974, 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was kidnapped in California by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was later photographed participating in a bank robbery, was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years; President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence and she was later pardoned.
In 1976, a magnitude-7.5 earthquake in Guatemala killed more than 23,000 people.
In 1997, a civil jury in Santa Monica, California, found O.J. Simpson liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the victims’ families.
In 2013, British scientists announced skeletal remains found beneath a Leicester parking lot were, beyond reasonable doubt, those of 15th-century monarch King Richard III.
In 2023, the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic, saying it carried high-tech equipment for military-linked surveillance; China denied it was spying, calling it a stray weather balloon.
Today’s birthdays: Former Argentine President Isabel Perón is 95. Rock singer Alice Cooper is 78. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is 73. Football Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor is 67. Country singer Clint Black is 64. Boxing Hall of Famer Oscar De La Hoya is 53. Singer Natalie Imbruglia is 51. Rapper Cam’ron is 50. Singer-songwriter Gavin DeGraw is 49. Olympic gymnastics gold medalist Carly Patterson is 38. Actor Edvin Ryding is 23.
