On this date in history:

In 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded in London. He had been accused of plotting against King James 1.

In 1787, Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, had its first performance.

In 1901, Leon Czolgosz was electrocuted for the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley.

In 1923, the musical Runnin' Wild, which introduced the Charleston, opened on Broadway.

In 1929, the sale of 16 million shares marked the collapse of the stock market, setting the stage for the Great Depression. (This day became known as Black Tuesday.)

In 1969, the first connection on what would become the Internet was made when bits of data flowed between computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute.

In 1994, a Colorado man was arrested after he sprayed the White House with bullets from an assault rifle. U.S. President Bill Clinton was inside at the time but no one was injured. (The gunman was sentenced to 40 years in prison.)

In 1998, U.S. Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, who in 1962 became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit Earth, returned to space aboard the shuttle Discovery. At 77, he was the oldest person to travel in space.

In 2004, Osama bin Laden, in a videotape to the American people, said he ordered the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

In 2006, a Boeing 737 crashed near Nigeria's Abuja airport, killing 96 of the 104 people aboard. Officials said the pilot took off after disobeying an air traffic controller and the plane crashed moments later.

In 2011, Michael D. Higgins, a 70-year-old poet and longtime member of Ireland's Parliament, was elected the country's president with 39.6 percent of the vote.

In 2012, the storm that began as Hurricane Sandy, which had hit several Caribbean countries, made landfall in New Jersey -- after being reclassified as a still-powerful post-tropical cyclone -- and continued on a destructive path in the Northeast. (Differing death tolls were reported in subsequent days. Eventually, the National Hurricane Center reported 72 deaths in the United States, 54 in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, three in the Dominican Republic, two in the Bahamas, two at sea and one each in Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Canada.)

In 2013, the Marmaray rail tunnel that partly runs under the Bosphorus Strait was opened in Turkey, creating a link between the Asia and Europe sides of Istanbul. It's the first undersea tunnel connecting two continents. About 1 mile of the 8.5-mile-long tunnel is under the strait.

Copyright 2014 by United Press International