Today is Wednesday, Jan. 5, the fifth day of 2011. There are 360 days left in the year.

Today’s highlight::

On Jan. 5, 1896, an Austrian newspaper, Wiener Presse, reported the discovery by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen of a type of radiation that came to be known as “X-rays.”

On this date:

In 1781, a British naval expedition led by Benedict Arnold burned Richmond, Va.

In 1925, Nellie T. Ross of Wyoming became the first female governor in U.S. history.

In 1933, the 30th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, died in Northampton, Mass., at age 60.

In 1970, Joseph A. Yablonski, an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the United Mine Workers of America, was found murdered with his wife and daughter at their Clarksville, Pa. home. (UMWA President Tony Boyle and seven others were convicted of, or pleaded guilty in the killings.) The soap opera “All My Children” premiered on ABC-TV.

In 1994, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, died in Boston at age 81.

In 1998, Sonny Bono, the 1960s pop star-turned-politician, was killed when he struck a tree while skiing at the Heavenly Ski Resort on the Nevada-California state line; he was 62.

In 2001, in a blizzard of last-minute executive orders, President Bill Clinton curtailed road building and logging on federal forest land and reorganized the nation’s counterintelligence efforts.

One year ago: President Barack Obama scolded 20 of his highest-level officials over the botched Christmas Day terror attack on an airliner bound for Detroit, taking them jointly to task for “a screw-up that could have been disastrous” and should have been avoided.

Associated Press