Events January January 6 – The Asian Socialist Conference opens in Rangoon, Burma. January 12 – Estonian émigrés found a government-in-exile in Oslo. January 14 Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen President of Yugoslavia. The CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel first meets to discuss the UFO phenomenon. January 15 – Georg Dertinger, foreign minister of East Germany, is arrested for spying. January 19 – 71.1% of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy, to watch Lucy give birth to Little Ricky, which is more people than those who tune into Dwight Eisenhower's inauguration the next day. This record has yet to be broken. January 20 – Dwight D. Eisenhower is sworn in as the 34th President of the United States. January 24 Mau Mau Uprising: Rebels in Kenya kill the Ruck family (father, mother, and six-year-old son). Leader of East Germany Walter Ulbricht announces that agriculture will be collectivized in East Germany. January 31–February 1 – The North Sea flood of 1953 kills 1,836 people in the southwestern Netherlands (especially Zeeland), 307 in the United Kingdom, and several hundred at sea, including 133 on the ferry in the Irish Sea. February February 1 – The surge of the North Sea flood continues from the previous day. February 3 – Batepá massacre: Hundreds of native creoles, known as forros, are massacred in São Tomé, by the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners. February 5 – Walt Disney's feature film Peter Pan premieres. February 11 United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower refuses a clemency appeal for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Soviet Union breaks diplomatic relations with Israel, after a bomb explosion at the Soviet Embassy, in reaction to the 'Doctors' plot'. February 12 – The Nordic Council is inaugurated. February 13 – Transsexual Christine Jorgensen returns to New York after successful sex reassignment surgery in Denmark. February 19 – Georgia approves the first literature censorship board in the United States. February 25 – Jacques Tati's film, Les Vacances de M. Hulot, is released in France, introducing the gauche character of Monsieur Hulot. February 28 James Watson and Francis Crick of the University of Cambridge announce their discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia sign the Balkan Pact. March March 1 Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke, after an all-night dinner with Soviet Union interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin,