Today in history
1492 - Christopher Columbus makes his first landfall in the New World, in present-day Bahamas.
1917 - New Zealand suffers its ‘‘blackest day’’, as the battle at Passchendaele in Belgium leaves 2700 New Zealand soldiers dead, wounded or missing.
1933 - Bank robber John Dillinger escapes from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of his gang.
1942 - American forces defeat the Japanese in Battle of Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal in World War II.
1945 - Allied Control Council in Germany orders dissolution of Nazi Party after World War II.
1960 - Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev upsets the decorum of UN General Assembly by pounding the desk with his shoe during a dispute.
1964 - United States forces take control in South Vietnam, ousting government of Major General Nguyen Khanh.
1973 - US President Richard Nixon nominates House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to succeed Spiro Agnew as vice president. Agnew resigned after the Justice Department revealed he had taken kickbacks.
1984 - An Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at a hotel in Brighton, England, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was attending a conference, killing five people.
1993 - German Chancellor Helmut Kohl pledges to move most of nation’s government to Berlin from Bonn, the current capital, by the end of the year 2000.
1996 - Commander Ramona of the Zapatista rebel movement marches into Mexico City at the head of a demonstration by indigenous people on the 504th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in America.
1997 - Cuban President Fidel Castro appoints his brother Raul as successor and urges the party to be unified in maintaining communism.
1999 - A military coup throws Pakistan into political disarray as conflict with India continues over the disputed Kashmir territory. Army Chief General Pervez Musharraf becomes the new leader.
2002 - A bomb explodes in a resort area on the Indonesian island of Bali, destroying two nightclubs, killing more than 180 people and wounding nearly 300.
2006 - Britain and Ireland announce they will present a plan to Northern Ireland’s rival leaders spelling out how to resurrect a Catholic-protestant administration as the province’s peace deal intended.
2012 - Thousands of supporters and opponents of Egypt’s new Islamist president clash in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, as tensions over the new regime boil over.
Today’s Birthdays:
England’s King Edward VI (1537-1553); Luciano Pavarotti, Italian tenor (1935-2007).