Today in History: Friday, October 12, 2012

On Oct. 12, 1492 (Old Style calendar; Oct. 21st New Style), Christopher Columbus arrived with his expedition 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.

1935 Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena, Italy.

1960 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev disrupted a U.N. General Assembly session by pounding a shoe on his desk.

1971 "Jesus Christ Superstar," a rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, opened on Broadway.

1973 President Richard Nixon nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president.

1984 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped an attempt on her life when an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at a hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people.

1986 Superpower talks between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, ended in stalemate.

1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay student at University of Wyoming, died five days after he was beaten, robbed and left tied to a wooden fence post outside of Laramie.

1999 Pakistan's military overthrew the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

2000 Two al-Qaida suicide bombers in an explosives-laden boat rammed into the destroyer the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors.

2002 A bomb destroyed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people. Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida were blamed.

2007 Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm over global warming.

2011 A Nigerian al-Qaida operative pleaded guilty to trying to bring down a jetliner with a bomb in his underwear minutes before the plane landed in Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was later sentenced to life in prison.)