Today in history
On Oct. 12, 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped an attempt on her life when an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at a hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people.
In 1492 (according to the Old Style calendar), Christopher Columbus’ expedition arrived in the present-day Bahamas.
In 1810, the German festival Oktoberfest was first held in Munich to celebrate the wedding of Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen.
In 1942, Attorney General Francis Biddle announced during a Columbus Day celebration at Carnegie Hall in New York that Italian nationals in the United States would no longer be considered enemy aliens.
In 1976, it was announced in China that Hua Guofeng had been named to succeed the late Mao Zedong as chairman of the Communist Party; it was also announced that Mao’s widow and three others, known as the “Gang of Four,” had been arrested.
In 1997, singer John Denver was killed in the crash of his privately built aircraft in Monterey Bay, California; he was 53.
In 2000, 17 sailors were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
In 2007, Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm over global warming.
Five years ago: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that a health care worker at the Texas hospital where Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan was treated before his death had tested positive for the illness in the first known case of Ebola being contracted or transmitted in the U.S. (The worker, later identified as nurse Nina Pham, was treated and declared free of Ebola.) Mississippi State was the new No. 1 in The Associated Press college football poll, replacing Florida State and making the fastest rise to the top spot in the history of the poll. (The Bulldogs were the first team in the poll’s 78-year history to go from unranked to No. 1 in five weeks.)
One year ago: Search and rescue teams found the body of a hurricane victim in Mexico Beach, the Florida panhandle town that was nearly obliterated by Hurricane Michael; the death toll across the South reached at least 14. Pope Francis accepted the resignation of the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, after he became entangled in two major sexual abuse and cover-up scandals. American pastor Andrew Brunson flew out of Turkey after a Turkish court convicted him of terror links but freed him from house arrest; he’d already spent nearly two years in detention.