Following are some of the major events to have occurred on October 28:
1919 – The Volstead Prohibition Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It prohibited the sale of drink containing more than one half of one percent of alcohol.
1981 – A Soviet Whiskey-class submarine armed with nuclear weapons ran aground in Swedish waters. The vessel was released on Nov. 6 after protests to the Soviet Union.
1995 – 289 people died and 270 were injured when a crowded underground railway train caught fire in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku.
1997 – Zambian President Frederick Chiluba survived a coup attempt by junior military officers who said they were acting against corruption and criminality in the government.
1999 – Luis Alfredo Garavito, known as “Goofy”, confessed to killing some 140 children during a seven-year orgy of bloodshed in Colombia’s biggest ever serial murder case.
1999 – Communist poet Rafael Alberti, who spent nearly 40 years in exile after the Spanish civil war, died at the age of 96.
2002 – Senior U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley was assassinated in Jordan, the first western diplomat to be killed there.
2005 – American Richard Smalley, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of a form of carbon called “buckyballs,” and opened the way for the development of the field of nanotechnology, died aged 62.
2007 – U.S. country singer Porter Wagoner, lanky Grand Ole Opry star whose flashy Nudie rhinestone suits dazzled fans when he sang with rising new performer Dolly Parton in the 60s, died.
2009 – NASA launches Ares I-X rocket.
2011 – India hosts its maiden Formula One race.
(Reuters)
