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Local

Feb. 2, 2011: The Freeborn County Law Enforcement Center installed a secured drop box in the lobby for the disposal of drugs.

Feb. 4, 1991: Alan Clark, brother of music show personality Dick Clark, appeared at the Constant Reader Bookstore in Albert Lea.  Clark was in town to promote his latest volume of “Rock ’N’ Roll Legends. A Tribute to Eddie Cochran — Never to be Forgotten.” Cochran was born in Albert Lea on Oct. 3, 1938.

Feb. 3, 1961: The Freeborn County Historical Society voted unanimously to proceed with fund raising for a museum.

National

1783: Britain’s King George III proclaimed a formal cessation of hostilities in the American Revolutionary War.

1789: Electors chose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.

1861: Delegates from six southern states that had recently seceded from the Union met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Confederate States of America.

1913: Rosa Parks, a Black woman whose 1955 refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus to a white man sparked a civil rights revolution, was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee.

1944: The Bronze Star Medal, honoring “heroic or meritorious achievement or service,” was authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

1962: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was founded in Memphis, Tennessee, by entertainer Danny Thomas.

1974: Newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, 19, was kidnapped in Berkeley, California, by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.

1976: More than 23,000 people died when a severe earthquake struck Guatemala with a magnitude of 7.5, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

1983: Pop singer-musician Karen Carpenter died in Downey, California, at age 32.

1997: A civil jury in Santa Monica, California, found O.J. Simpson liable for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

1999: Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was shot and killed in front of his Bronx home by four plainclothes New York City police officers. (The officers were acquitted at trial.)

2004: The Massachusetts high court declared that gay couples were entitled to nothing less than marriage, and that Vermont-style civil unions would not suffice.

2011: President Barack Obama appealed to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to focus on his legacy and begin an orderly process to relinquish the power he’d held for 30 years; however, Obama stopped short of calling for Mubarak’s immediate resignation. Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said he would return half of his annual salary to the public treasury in a symbolic gesture that appeared calculated to insulate him against anti-government unrest spreading across the Middle East.