Thursday, October 09th
The 283rd day of 2008.
There are 83 days left in the year.
Oct. 9, 1967 - Latin American guerrilla leader Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia while attempting to incite revolution.
Oct. 9, 1899 - Bruce Catton, the American writer and historian known for his books about the Civil War, was born.
On this date in:
1635 - Religious dissident Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1701 - The Collegiate School of Connecticut - later Yale University - was chartered in New Haven.
1776 - A group of Spanish missionaries settled in present-day San Francisco.
1888 - The public was first admitted to the Washington Monument.
1930 - Laura Ingalls became the first woman to fly across the United States as she completed a nine-stop journey from Roosevelt Field in New York to Glendale, Calif.
1936 - The first generator at Boulder (later Hoover) Dam began transmitting electricity to Los Angeles.
1940 - Rock musician and songwriter John Lennon of the Beatles was born in Liverpool, England.
1946 - The Eugene O'Neill drama "The Iceman Cometh" opened on Broadway.
1958 - Pope Pius XII died, 19 years after he was elevated to the papacy.
1975 - Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1985 - The hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise liner surrendered after the ship arrived in Port Said, Egypt.
1990 - David Souter was sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
2001 - Letters postmarked in Trenton, N.J., that later tested positive for anthrax spores were mailed to Sens. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
2002 - A man was gunned down moments after filling his tank at a gas station near Manassas, Va., in the latest sniper shooting in the Washington, D.C., area.
2006 - North Korea announced that it had conducted its first nuclear weapons test, drawing condemnation from around the world.
2006 - Google Inc. announced it was snapping up YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion in a stock deal.