On January 5, 1531, Pope Clement VII sends a letter to King Henry VIII of England forbidding him to remarry under penalty of excommunication. Henry, who was looking for a way out of his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, ignored the pope's warning. He went on to marry Anne Boleyn (and four subsequent wives), leading to his excommunication and one of the most significant schisms in the history of Christianity.

French officer Alfred Dreyfus, condemned for passing military secrets to the Germans, is stripped of his rank in a humiliating public ceremony in the courtyard of Paris’ Ecole Militaire. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence on the notorious Devil’s Island Prison in French Guyana four months later.

On January 5, 1920, the New York Yankees major league baseball club announces its purchase of the heavy-hitting outfielder George Herman “Babe” Ruth from the Boston Red Sox for the sum of $125,000.

On January 5, 1933, construction begins on the Golden Gate Bridge, as workers began excavating 3.25 million cubic feet of dirt for the structure’s huge anchorages.

Samuel Beckett's “Waiting for Godot” premieres in Paris, to mixed reviews. Despite audiences' initial reaction, the play becomes a landmark of modern theater. In a 1998 poll of more than 800 theater professionals conducted by the UK's Royal National Theatre, "Godot" was voted the most important English-language play of the 20th century.

Antonin Novotny, the Stalinist ruler of Czechoslovakia, is succeeded as first secretary by Alexander Dubcek, a Slovak who supports liberal reforms. In the first few months of his rule, Dubcek introduced a series of far-reaching political and economic reforms, including increased freedom of speech and the rehabilitation of political dissidents.

The bodies of dissident union leader Joseph "Jock" Yablonski, his wife, and daughter are discovered in their Clarksville, Pennsylvania, farmhouse by Yablonski’s son Kenneth. The family had been dead for nearly a week, killed on New Year’s Eve by [killers hired by the United Mine Workers (UMW) union leadership](http://killers hired by the United Mine Workers). Yablonski’s murder eventually brought down the whole union leadership and ended the widespread corruption of the union under UMW President Tony Boyle.

On January 5, 1976, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot announces a new constitution changing the name of Cambodia to Kampuchea and legalizing its Communist government. During the next three years his brutal regime was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1 to 2 million Cambodians.

On January 5, 1998, Sonny Bono, best known as half of the 1960s singing and acting husband-and-wife duo Sonny & Cher, is killed in a skiing accident while on vacation with his family in South Lake Tahoe, California.