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$700bn bailout for US banks is approved

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, commonly referred to as a bailout of the U.S. financial system, is a law enacted subsequently to the subprime mortgage crisis authorizing the United States Secretary of the Treasury to spend up to $700 billion to purchase distressed assets, especially mortgage-backed securities, and supply cash directly to banks.

Battle of Mogadishu

The battle of Mogadishu was a two-day battle between the U.S. soldiers operating in Somalia supported by UNOSOM II and rebels led by self-proclaimed Somali president Mohamed Farrah Aidid. One of the Black Hawk helicopters got taken down by the rebels, leaving few survivors to be rescued later on. The Black Hawk Down movie was based on these events.

German Unity Day

The German Unity Day is the National Day of Germany, celebrated on 3 October as a public holiday. It commemorates the anniversary of German reunification in 1990 when the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were unified, so that for the first time since 1945 there existed a single German state. The German Unity Day on 3 October has been the German National Holiday since 1990, when the reunification was formally completed.

Britain successfully tests its first atomic bomb

Operation Hurricane was the test of the first UK atomic device in 1952. A plutonium implosion device was detonated in the lagoon in the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia. With the success of Operation Hurricane, Britain became the third nuclear power after the United States and the Soviet Union.

Second Italo-Ethiopian War

The Second Italo-Ethiopian War was a colonial war from 1935 until 1939, despite the Italian claim to have defeated Ethiopia by 1936, the year of the capture of Addis Ababa. The war was fought between the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy and those of the Ethiopian Empire. Ethiopia was defeated, annexed and subjected to military occupation.

Iraq wins independence

The kingdom of Iraq was granted full independence in 1932, after the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty. The independent Iraqi Kingdom under the Hashemite rulers underwent a period of turbulence through its entire existence. Establishment of Sunni religious domination in Iraq was followed by Assyrian, Yazidi and Shi'a unrests, which were all brutally suppressed.

US Federal income tax is signed into law

The Revenue Act of 1913 re-imposed the federal income tax after the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment and lowered basic tariff rates from 40% to 25%. It was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson and sponsored by Alabama Representative Oscar Underwood.

Italy obtained Venice

According to the Treaty of Vienna signed in October 1866, the Austrian Empire ceded Venetia to the French Empire, which in turn would cede it to the Kingdom of Italy, under the reservation of the "consent of the people duly consulted". This represented the final division of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, as Lombardy had been ceded to the Kingdom of Sardinia by the Treaty of Zurich in 1859.

Abraham Lincoln announces official Thanksgiving holiday

Thanksgiving has been celebrated as a federal holiday every year since 1863, when, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens," to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November.

Anniversaries of the (in)famous

born 1971

Sean Duffy

born 1925

Gore Vidal

born 1954

Sathyaraj