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• ...that Joseph Farington (pictured) kept a diary almost daily from 13 July 1793 until 30 December 1821 that has provided historians with insight into the London art world as well as first-hand accounts of important political events of the day?
• ...that Cape Leeuwin, the most south-westerly point of the Australian continent, is named after the Dutch galleon Leeuwin?
• ...that when Jean-Paul Sartre's classic first novel Nausea appeared in 1938, it was reviewed by Albert Camus, still a journalist in Algeria working on his own later-classic first novel, The Stranger?
• ...that the indigenous Nambikwara language of Brazil has a special implosive consonant used only by elderly people?
• ...that tradition has it that Warren Hastings hunted with elephants in the jungle in Chowringhee, now a business district in Kolkata, India?
• ...that Tiggy Legge-Bourke was the nanny of Prince William of Wales and his brother Prince Harry?
• ...that due to the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, English letter writers often used two dates on their letters, a practice known as dual dating?
  

• The New York Giants defeat the previously unbeaten New England Patriots 17–14 in Super Bowl XLII.
• Boris Tadić (pictured) is reelected as President of Serbia, defeating Tomislav Nikolić.
• An earthquake kills at least 30 people in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• UFD rebels fight Chadian government troops in a battle for the capital, N'Djamena.
• Severe winter storms cause at least 63 deaths across central and southern China.
• Internet services are disrupted in parts of Asia and Africa after three undersea cables, SEA-ME-WE 4, FLAG and FALCON, are damaged.

February 4: Independence Day in Sri Lanka (1948); Lichun begins in East Asia (11:00 UTC, 2008).

• 1703 – Forty-six of the Forty-Seven Ronin committed seppuku (ritual suicide) in Edo, present-day Tokyo, as recompense for avenging the death of their master, Daimyo of Akō Asano Naganori.
• 1859 – German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf rediscovered the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th century uncial manuscript of the Greek Bible, in Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt.
• 1899 – An American soldier shot a Filipino soldier in Manila after a misunderstanding occurred between the two, igniting the Philippine-American War.
• 1945 – World War II: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met at the Yalta Conference (pictured) in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula.
• 1957 – USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, logged her 60,000th nautical mile, matching the endurance of the fictional Nautilus described in Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

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