UN
Day
World
Food Day
Events
of the day
456 – Magister militum
Ricimer defeats Emperor Avitus at Piacenza
and becomes master of the Western Roman
Empire.
1384 – Jadwiga is crowned King of Poland,
although she is a woman.
1590 – Carlo Gesualdo, composer, Prince
of Venosa and Count of Conza, murders
his wife, Donna Maria d'Avalos, and her
lover Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria
at the Palazzo San Severo in Naples.
1780 – Royalton, Vermont and Tunbridge,
Vermont are the last major raids of the
American Revolutionary War.
1781 – George Washington captures Yorktown,
Virginia after the Siege of Yorktown.
1793 – Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis
XVI, is guillotined at the height of the
French Revolution.
1793 – The Battle of Wattignies ends in
a French victory.
1813 – The Sixth Coalition attacks Napoleon
Bonaparte in the Battle of Leipzig.
1834 – Much of the ancient structure of
the Palace of Westminster in London burns
to the ground.
1841 – Queen's University is founded in
Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
1843 – Sir William Rowan Hamilton comes
up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative
extension of complex numbers.
1846 – William TG Morton first demonstrated
ether anesthesia at the Massachusetts
General Hospital in the Ether Dome.
1859 – John Brown leads a raid on Harpers
Ferry, West Virginia.
1869 – The Cardiff Giant, one of the most
famous American hoaxes, is "discovered".
1869 – Girton College, Cambridge is founded,
becoming England's first residential college
for women.
1875 – Brigham Young University is founded
in Provo, Utah.
1882 – The Nickel Plate Railroad opens
for business.
1905 – The Partition of Bengal in India
takes place.
1906 – The Captain of Köpenick fools the
city hall of Köpenick and several soldiers
by impersonating a Prussian officer.
1916 – In Brooklyn, New York, Margaret
Sanger opens the first family planning
clinic in the United States.
1923 – The Walt Disney Company is founded
by Walt Disney and his brother, Roy Disney.
1934 – Chinese Communists begin the Long
March; it ended a year and four days later,
by which time Mao Zedong had regained
his title as party chairman.
1939 – World War II: First attack on British
territory by the German Luftwaffe.
1940 – Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto is
established.
1944 – Wally Walrus, Woody Woodpecker's
first steady foil, was debuted at the
The Beach Nut, a Walter Lantz's cartoon.
1945 – The Food and Agriculture Organization
is founded in Quebec City, Canada.
1946 – Nuremberg Trials: Execution of
the convicted Nazi leaders of the Main
Trial.
1949 – Nikolaos Zachariadis, leader of
the Communist Party of Greece, announces
a "temporary cease-fire", effectively
ending the Greek Civil War.
1949 – The diplomatic relations between
the Soviet Union and the German Democratic
Republic are established.
1951 – The first Prime Minister of Pakistan,
Liaquat Ali Khan, is assassinated in Rawalpindi.
1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis between the
United States, and Cuba and the USSR,
begins.
1964 – The People's Republic of China
detonates its first nuclear weapon.
1964 – Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev
and Alexei Kosygin are inaugurated as
General Secretary of the CPSU and Premier,
respectively and the collective leadership
is established.
1968 – United States athletes Tommie Smith
and John Carlos are kicked off the US
team for participating in the 1968 Olympics
Black Power salute.
1968 – Kingston, Jamaica is rocked by
the Rodney Riots, inspired by the barring
of Walter Rodney from the country.
1970 – In response to the October Crisis
terrorist kidnapping, Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau of Canada invokes the War Measures
Act.
1973 – Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho
are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1975 – The Balibo Five, a group of Australian
television journalists based in the town
of Balibo in the then Portuguese Timor
(now East Timor), are killed by Indonesian
troops.
1975 – Rahima Banu, a two-year old girl
from the village of Kuralia in Bangladesh,
is the last known person to be infected
with naturally occurring smallpox.
1975 – The Australian Coalition opposition
parties using their senate majority, vote
to defer the decision to grant supply
of funds for the Whitlam Government's
annual budget, sparking the 1975 Australian
constitutional crisis.
1978 – Pope John Paul II is elected after
the October 1978 Papal conclave.
1978 – Wanda Rutkiewicz is the first Pole
and the first European woman to reach
the summit of Mount Everest.
1984 – The Bill debuted on ITV, eventually
becoming the longest-running police procedural
in British television history.
1984 – Desmond Tutu is awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
1986 – Reinhold Messner becomes the first
person to summit all 14 Eight-thousanders.
1991 – Luby's massacre: George Hennard
runs amok in Killeen, Texas, killing 23
and wounding 20 in Luby's Cafeteria.
1993 – Anti-Nazi riot breaks out in Welling
in Kent, after police stop protesters
approaching the British National Party
headquarters.
1995 – The Million Man March occurs in
Washington, D.C.
1995 – The Skye Bridge is opened.
1996 – Eighty-four people are killed and
more than 180 injured as 47,000 football
fans attempt to squeeze into the 36,000-seat
Estadio Mateo Flores in Guatemala City.
1998 – Former Chilean dictator General
Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London
on a warrant from Spain requesting his
extradition on murder charges.
2002 – Bibliotheca Alexandrina in the
Egyptian city of Alexandria, a commemoration
of the Library of Alexandria that was
lost in antiquity, is officially inaugurated.
2006 – Hawaii Earthquake: A magnitude
6.7 earthquake rocks Hawaii, causing property
damage, injuries, landslides, power outages,
and the closure of Honolulu International
Airport.
Holidays
and observances
Air
Force Day (Bulgaria)
Boss's Day (United States and Canada)
Christian Feast Day:
Fortunatus of Casei
Gall
Gerard Majella
Hedwig of Andechs
Marguerite Marie Alacoque
Marie-Marguerite d'Youville
Silvanus of Ahun
October 16 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Day of Pope John Paul II (Poland)
Death anniversary of Liaquat Ali Khan
(Pakistan)
Teacher's Day (Chile)
World Food Day (International)
For details, contact Datacentre
