Complicated and tension-filled negotiations between the United States and
the Soviet Union finally result in a plan to end the two-week-old Cuban
Missile Crisis. A frightening period in which nuclear holocaust seemed
imminent began to come to an end. 

Since President John F. Kennedy’s October 22 address warning the Soviets
to cease their reckless program to put nuclear weapons in Cuba and
announcing a naval “quarantine” against additional weapons shipments
into Cuba, the world held its breath waiting to see whether the two
superpowers would come to blows. U.S. armed forces went on alert and
the Strategic Air Command went to a Stage 4 alert (one step away from
nuclear attack). On October 24, millions waited to see whether Soviet
ships bound for Cuba carrying additional missiles would try to break
the U.S. naval blockade around the island. At the last minute, the vessels
turned around and returned to the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev                Castro                                 Kennedy

CARLATA BRADLEY

On this day in 2001, President George W. Bush signs the renewal of
the U.S. Patriot Act after a long battle with Congress.

Pat Sajak (Patrick Leonard Sajdak) is 73 today. 

Sajak is a former weatherman and talk show host, best
known as the host of the syndicated television game
show Wheel of Fortune.

“Wheel of Fortune” hosts Pat Sajak and Vanna White.

In a dramatic reversal of its long-standing commitment to the Nationalist
Chinese government of Taiwan, and a policy of non-recognition of the
communist People’s Republic of China, America’s U.N. representatives
vote to seat the PRC as a permanent member. Over American objections,
Taiwan was expelled.

The reasons for the apparently drastic change in U.S. policy were not
hard to discern. The United States had come to value closer relations
with the PRC more than its historical commitment to Taiwan. U.S.
interest in having the PRC’s help in resolving the sticky Vietnam
situation; the goal of using U.S. influence with the PRC as diplomatic
leverage against the Soviets; and the desire for lucrative economic
relations with the PRC, were all factors in the U.S. decision.

“

CARLATA BRADLEY

The D.C. sniper attacks (also known as the Beltway sniper attacks) were
a series of coordinated shootings that occurred during three weeks in
October 2002 in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. Ten
people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the
Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area and along Interstate 95
in Virginia.

The snipers were John Allen Muhammad (aged 41 at the time) and Lee
Boyd Malvo (aged 17 at the time), who traveled in a blue 1990 Chevrolet
Caprice sedan. Their crime spree, begun in February 2002, included
murders and robberies in the states of Alabama, Arizona, Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, and Washington, which resulted in seven
deaths and seven wounded people; in ten months, the snipers killed
17 people and wounded 10 others.

In September 2003, Muhammad was sentenced to death, and in October,
the juvenile, Malvo, was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences
without parole. In November 2009, Muhammad was put to death by
lethal injection.

 
Law enforcement officers search the car that John Allen Muhammad
and John Lee Malvo were in when police arrested them at a rest stop along I-70 west of Myersville.

 
"The Bushmaster rifle used by the convicted snipers.

On October 23, 2002, about 50 Chechen rebels storm a Moscow theater,
taking up to 700 people hostage during a sold-out performance of a
popular musical.

The second act of the musical “Nord Ost” was just beginning at the
Moscow Ball-Bearing Plant’s Palace of Culture when an armed man
walked onstage and fired a machine gun into the air. The terrorists—
including a number of women with explosives strapped to their bodies,
identified themselves as members of the Chechen Army. They had one
demand: that Russian military forces begin an immediate and complete
withdrawal from Chechnya, the war-torn region located north of the
Caucasus Mountains.

Russian special forces officers make their way toward the theater
seized by Chechen rebels.