January 20, 2006 (Friday)
- At 4 o'clock UTC NASA's Pluto probe New Horizons crossed the orbit of the Moon, eight hours and thirty-five minutes after launch. This is a new Earth-to-Moon-distance flight record.
- Three former workers at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio are indicted for repeatedly falsifying inspection reports and other information to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The plant's owner, FirstEnergy Corporation, accepts a plea bargain and $28 million in fines in lieu of criminal prosecution. (Toledo Blade)
- Archeologists digging under the Roman Forum, Rome, Italy, discover a tomb estimated at 3000 years old, predating the creation of the Forum by several centuries. (USA Today)
- Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan have defused a huge car bomb found not far from their base near Kandahar. The discovery comes just days after a suicide bomber killed Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry and seriously wounded three soldiers travelling with him. (CBC)
- Embroiled in a nuclear standoff with the West, Iran says it is moving funds out of Europe to shield them from possible U.N. sanctions. (Reuters)
- Iraq's election commission says that an alliance of Shiite religious parties, the United Iraqi Alliance, has won the most seats in Iraq's new National Assembly after the December 2005 legislative elections. (CBS)
- At least 52 people including five children are killed after an overcrowded bus plunges down a deep gorge in Indian Kashmir. (CBC)
- Israel says it has proof that Iran financed the bombing of a fast-food restaurant in Tel Aviv, and that Syria carried it out. (ABC)
- Rescue teams search for two West Virginia miners missing after a coal mine fire. (ABC)
- Japan has halted the import of U.S. beef after an animal spine was found in a beef shipment at Tokyo International Airport. A ban has now been reinstated. (CNN)
- Turkish police are reported to have taken into custody, Mehmet Ali Ağca, the man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 after an appeals court ordered his return to prison to serve more time for killing a journalist. (CNN)
- A whale, identified as a 5 metre (17') long Northern Bottlenose whale, is observed in the River Thames in Central London passing upstream of the Houses of Parliament. The "River Thames whale" is believed to have passed through the Thames Barrier about 1515 UTC on Thursday afternoon. Attempts are being made to guide it back to the Thames estuary, where a second whale has been sighted off Southend on Sea. (BBC), (Sky News)
- Protests by the pro-government Young Patriots in Côte d'Ivoire end after their leader, Charles Blé Goudé, tells them to "go home and clean up the streets". (BBC)