TODAY IN HISTORY - OCTOBER 28

Following are some of the major events to have occurred on October 28


Reuters

1919 - The Volstead Prohibition Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It prohibited the sale of drink containing more than one half of one percent of alcohol.

1981 - A Soviet Whiskey-class submarine armed with nuclear weapons ran aground in Swedish waters. The vessel was released on Nov. 6 after protests to the Soviet Union.

1995 - 289 people died and 270 were injured when a crowded underground railway train caught fire in Azerbaijan's capital Baku.

1997 - Zambian President Frederick Chiluba survived a coup attempt by junior military officers who said they were acting against corruption and criminality in the government.

1999 - Luis Alfredo Garavito, known as "Goofy", confessed to killing some 140 children during a seven-year orgy of bloodshed in Colombia's biggest ever serial murder case.

1999 - Communist poet Rafael Alberti, who spent nearly 40 years in exile after the Spanish civil war, died at the age of 96.

2002 - Senior U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley was assassinated in Jordan, the first western diplomat to be killed there.

2005 - American Richard Smalley, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of a form of carbon called "buckyballs," and opened the way for the development of the field of nanotechnology, died aged 62.

2007 - U.S. country singer Porter Wagoner, lanky Grand Ole Opry star whose flashy Nudie rhinestone suits dazzled fans when he sang with rising new performer Dolly Parton in the 60s, died.

2009 - NASA launches Ares I-X rocket.

2011 - India hosts its maiden Formula One race.