TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2017

On this day in history:

1793 - During the French Revolution, Queen Marie Antoinette was beheaded after being convicted of treason.

1837 - The first group of German migrants arrives in the new colony of South Australia.

1867 - James Nash sparks off the gold rush in Gympie, Queensland.

1941 - The Nazis advanced to within 60 miles of Moscow. Romanians entered Odessa, USSR, and began exterminating 150,000 Jews.

1964 - China detonated its first atomic bomb becoming the world’s fifth nuclear power.

1967 - NATO headquarters opened in Brussels.

1970 - Anwar Sadat was elected president of Egypt to succeed Gamal Abdel Nassar.

1973 - Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Vietnamese official declined the award.

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 - Poland’s Karol Josef Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II.

1982 - China announced that it had successfully fired a ballistic missile from a submarine.

1987 - 18 die as England is hit by destructive hurricane winds, dubbed The Great Storm 1994 - German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was re-elected to a fourth term.

1996 - It is reported that thieves stole a set of fossilised dinosaur footprints from a sacred Aboriginal site.

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.

2002 - It was reported that North Korea had told the US that it had a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of an 1994 agreement with the US.

2012 - The extrasolar planet Alpha Centauri Bb is discovered.

2013 - Lao Airlines Flight 301 crashes on approach to Pakse International Airport in Laos, killing 49 people.