Moments in Time – October 18, 2023

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• On Oct. 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated Tsar Bomba, or Big Ivan, over the Mityushikha Bay test range on the Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Circle. The unique, 57-megaton nuclear bomb’s flash of light was visible more than 1,000 kilometers away when it exploded at a height of 13,000 feet.
• On Oct. 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi, the first female prime minister of India, was assassinated by two of her bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, while walking through the garden of her residence on the way to an interview with British actor Peter Ustinov. Her death sparked riots in India and New Delhi, where several thousand Sikhs were killed.
• On Nov. 1, 1953, Canon Mervyn Stockwood, an English clergyman, returned from a trip to Russia and reported that an atheist tour guide there had claimed that Jesus was a Christian invention. Stockwood also announced that only 45 of Russia’s 1,600 churches were still open.
• On Nov. 2, 1990, President George Bush rallied in Ohio for the removal of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from Kuwait without the firing of a single shot. He also promised the return of American troops “very soon.”
• On Nov. 3, 1838, the world’s largest English-language daily newspaper was launched as a bi-weekly publication, the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, in Bombay, India.
• On Nov. 4, 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first woman to be elected as an American state governor, as well as the first and to date only female governor of Wyoming, following the death of her husband, William Ross, from complications of an appendectomy. In addition, she was also the first female director of the United States Mint.
• On Nov. 5, 2003, Gary Ridgway, a commercial truck painter and serial killer also known as the “Green Valley Killer,” pleaded guilty to killing 48 women in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2011, he further confessed to a 49th murder and was sentenced to a 49th consecutive life term in the Washington State Penitentiary.

© 2023 King Features Synd., Inc.