1917 – Battle of Passchendaele: Canadian troops capture the village of Passchendaele in the Third Battle of Ypres, after 250,000 casualties on both sides
1939 – Adolf Hitler announces plans to regulate Jewish problem
1944 – Canadians free Austria
1948 – The 1948 Ashgabat earthquake kills 100,000 in the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic
1948 – Paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey finds the first partial fossil skull of Proconsul africanus, an ancestor of apes and humans on Rusinga Island, Kenya
1951 – Joseph Stalin proclaims the Soviet Union has the atomic bomb
1956 – Scientist Albert Sabin announces that Polio vaccine is ready for testing; it would soon supplant Jonas Salk’s vaccine in many parts of the world
1966 – LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is first declared illegal in state of California, other states follow.
1973 – On the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, which suffered heavy casualties, but Israeli forces successfully fought back, and the war eventually ended inconclusively.
1980 – John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) sentenced to 3 months imprisonment on assault charges
2000 – Near Sakaiminato, Japan, an earthquake of magnitude 7.3 struck, the most powerful earthquake since the devastating Kōbe earthquake of 1995, but damage and casualties were relatively low because the epicentre was in a sparsely inhabited area.
2012 – Paolo Gabriele, Pope Benedict XVI’s butler, is found guilty of leaking confidential documents and is sentenced to 18 months imprisonment
2018 – Oil tanker collision with a car leaves at least 50 people dead and one hundred with serious burns near Kisantu, Democratic Republic of Congo
2019 – 99 Iraqis have died and 4,000 injured in protests over 5 days against living conditions, unemployment and corruption according to human rights group
2019 – Tens of thousands of Hong Kong protesters march in defiance of a new ban on face masks
Births & Deaths:
1981 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by members of the radical fringe of the Muslim opposition.
1960 – The American adventure film Spartacus, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, had its world premiere; it won several Academy Awards, including best supporting actor for Peter Ustinov.
Film & TV:
1927 – “The Jazz Singer”, directed by Alan Crosland, starring Al Jolson and May McAvoy, released, 1st film with a soundtrack (Honorary Academy Award 1928)
1960 – “Spartacus”, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier, premieres in NYC
1978 – “Midnight Express” film premieres directed by Alan Parker starring Brad Davis, Randy Quaid and John Hurt
Sport:
1882 – 1st World Series game, Cincinnati (AA) beats Chicago (NL) 4-0
1993 – Michael Jordan retired from professional basketball, saying “I don’t have anything else to prove,” only to return in March 1995.
