Updated

On this day, Oct. 12 ...

2000: Seventeen sailors are killed in a suicide bomb attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.

Also on this day:

  • 1492: According to the Old Style calendar, Christopher Columbus' expedition arrives in the present-day Bahamas.
  • 1810: The German festival Oktoberfest was first held in Munich to celebrate the wedding of Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen.
  • 1870: General Robert E. Lee dies in Lexington, Va., at age 63.
  • 1973: President Richard Nixon nominates House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president.
  • 1984: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escapes an attempt on her life when an Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at a hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people.
  • 1984: Actor Jon-Erik Hexum is mortally wounded on the set of his TV show "Cover Up" when he jokingly shoots himself in the head with a prop pistol loaded with a blank cartridge; he would be declared dead six days later.
  • 1997: Singer John Denver is killed in the crash of his privately built aircraft in Monterey Bay, Calif.
  • 2001: NBC announces that an assistant to anchorman Tom Brokaw has contracted the skin form of anthrax after opening a "threatening" letter to her boss containing powder.
  • 2002: Bombs blamed on al-Qaeda-linked militants destroy a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians and seven Americans.
  • 2007: Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change win the Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm over global warming.
  • 2014: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms that a health care worker at the Texas hospital where Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan was treated before his death tested positive for the illness in the first known case of Ebola being contracted or transmitted in the U.S. (The worker, identified as nurse Nina Pham, would be treated and declared free of Ebola.)

FILE - Archbishop Donald Wuerl (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

  • 2018: Pope Francis accepts the resignation of the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl after he becomes entangled in two major sexual abuse and cover-up scandals.
  • 2018: American pastor Andrew Brunson flies out of Turkey after a Turkish court convicts him of terror links but frees him from house arrest; he'd already spent nearly two years in detention.