On October 12

Twelve people were killed in an apartment-building collapse in Medellín, leading to new construction laws being passed in Colombia.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 or 5.9 struck south of Cairo, Egypt, killing 545 people.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, in a failed attempt to assassinate British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.

Typhoon Tip, the largest and most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded, reached a worldwide record-low sea-level pressure of 870 mbar (25.69 inHg) in the western Pacific Ocean.

While in prison for murder, boxer James Scott defeated Eddie "The Flame" Gregory, a leading light heavyweight.

Japan Socialist Party leader Inejirō Asanuma (pictured) was assassinated during a live television recording by a far-right ultra-nationalist using a short sword.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reportedly pounded his shoe on a desk during a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in protest at a speech by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong.

Il Canto degli Italiani is adopted as national anthem by the newly formed Italian Republic.

The United States Department of Justice acquired a military prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, to be transformed into the last-resort Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.

The iron lung (example pictured), a type of medical ventilator, was used for the first time at the Boston Children's Hospital to treat an eight-year-old girl paralyzed by polio.

First World War: New Zealand troops suffered more than 2,000 casualties, including more than 800 deaths, in the First Battle of Passchendaele, making it the nation's largest loss of life in one day.

The Pledge of Allegiance of the United States was first used in public schools to coincide with the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The Uddevalla Suffrage Association was founded in Uddevalla, Sweden, with the purpose of bringing about universal suffrage.

Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin became the first woman to make a parachute descent, falling 900 metres (3,000 ft) in the gondola of a hot air balloon.

The Peasants' War began in Overmere, Southern Netherlands, with peasants taking up arms against the French occupiers.

Believing he had reached the East Indies, Christopher Columbus made landfall on an island in the Caribbean, sparking a series of events that led to the European colonization of the Americas.

Chen Yanxiang, the only person from Indonesia known to have visited dynastic Korea, reached Seoul after having set out from Java four months before.