On This Day, Oct. 29: Superstorm Sandy makes landfall in New Jersey

Oct. 29 (UPI) -- On this date in history:

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

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

In 1901, Leon Czolgosz was electrocuted for the assassination of President William McKinley inside the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y.

In 1923, following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, was proclaimed from the capitol city of Ankara.

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 1946, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin responds to United Press questions, says Winston Churchill is the greatest threat to peace, denies tension growing with America.

File Photo by Anatoli Zhdanov/UPI

In 1956, Israeli forces, in a plan later found to have been coordinated with Britain and France, invade the Sinai Peninsula, pushing Egyptian forces back to the Suez Canal. The Suez Crisis, which lasted just over a week, would keep the waterway closed from Oct. 1956 until March 1957.

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 1971, Duane Allman, guitarist and leader of the Allman Brothers band, died in a motorcycle crash in Georgia.

In 1994, a Colorado man was arrested after he sprayed the White House with bullets with 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 became the oldest person to travel in space.

File Photo courtesy NASA

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.

In 2015, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was elected as speaker of the House, replacing John Boehner, R-Ohio, who resigned.

In 2015, China announced it was ending its nearly 40-year one-child policy, allowing couples to have two children without facing punishment.