Today is Saturday, Oct. 8, the 282nd day of 2016. There are 84 days left in the year.
On this date:
In 1869, the 14th president of the United States, Franklin Pierce, died in Concord, New Hampshire.
In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire erupted; fires also broke out in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and in several communities in Michigan.
In 1918, U.S. Army Cpl. Alvin C. York led an attack that killed 25 German soldiers and resulted in the capture of 132 others in the Argonne Forest in France.
In 1934, Bruno Hauptmann was indicted by a grand jury in New Jersey for murder in the death of the kidnapped son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
In 1945, President Harry S. Truman told a press conference in Tiptonville, Tennessee, that the secret scientific knowledge behind the atomic bomb would be shared only with Britain and Canada.
In 1970, Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was named winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
In 2001, an SAS airliner taking off from Milan, Italy, hit a private jet, careened into an airport building and exploded; all 110 people on the MD-87, four people in the private jet and four people on the ground were killed.
In 2005, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake flattened villages on the Pakistan-India border, killing an estimated 86,000 people.
Comments are not available on this story. Read more about why we allow commenting on some stories and not on others.
We believe it's important to offer commenting on certain stories as a benefit to our readers. At its best, our comments sections can be a productive platform for readers to engage with our journalism, offer thoughts on coverage and issues, and drive conversation in a respectful, solutions-based way. It's a form of open discourse that can be useful to our community, public officials, journalists and others.
We do not enable comments on everything — exceptions include most crime stories, and coverage involving personal tragedy or sensitive issues that invite personal attacks instead of thoughtful discussion.
You can read more here about our commenting policy and terms of use. More information is also found on our FAQs.
Show less