| On this date 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. |
| 1935 |
Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena, Italy. |
| 1960 |
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev disrupted a U.N. General Assembly session by pounding a shoe on his desk.
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| AP Photo/Urbano Medici |
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| 1971 |
“Jesus Christ Superstar,” a rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, opened on Broadway. |
| 1973 |
President Richard Nixon nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president. |
| 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. |
| 1986 |
Superpower talks between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, ended in stalemate. |
| 1998 |
Matthew Shepard, a gay student at University of Wyoming, died five days after he was beaten, robbed and left tied to a wooden fence post outside of Laramie. |
| 1999 |
Pakistan’s military overthrew the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. |
| 2000 |
Two al-Qaida suicide bombers in an explosives-laden boat rammed into the destroyer the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. |
| 2002 |
A bomb destroyed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people. Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida were blamed. |
| 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. |
| 2011 |
A Nigerian al-Qaida operative pleaded guilty to trying to bring down a jetliner with a bomb in his underwear minutes before the plane landed in Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was later sentenced to life in prison.) |
