Today in History: Russian airliner with 224 aboard crashes in Egypt’s Sinai

The following are some of the major events to have occurred on October 31:

1918 Spanish Flu - kills 21,000 people in the US in a single week..

1918 – In Hungary, former prime minister Count Istvan Tisza was assassinated by disaffected soldiers. Tisza, who had resigned in 1917, had been held responsible by many for the plight Hungary found itself in after World War One.

1926 – The American escape artist Harry Houdini died. Born in Hungary as Ehrich Weiss, he named himself after the French magician Jean Robert-Houdin.

1940 – The Battle of Britain, a struggle between Germany and Britain for air control of the English Channel early in World War Two, ended.

1984 – Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by three Sikh members of her bodyguard while walking in the garden of her New Delhi home.

1999 – An EgyptAirBoeing 767 went down in the Atlantic Ocean off the island of Nantucket on a flight from New York to Cairo with 217 people on board.

2000 – A Soyuz TM-31 rocket blasted off from Russia to the International Space Station carrying two Russians and an American, the first people to live on the station.

2001 – France’s top woman skier, Regine Cavagnoud, died aged 31 from head injuries sustained in a high-speed collision in Austria two days earlier. She had won eight World Cup races in her career.

2004 – Uruguay elected its first leftist president, Tabare Vazquez, and gave his coalition a majority in Congress with a mandate to rebuild after an economic crisis.

2006 – P.W. Botha, the face of white South Africa as president at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, died aged 90.

2011 - The world population reaches 7 billion inhabitants according to the United Nations.

2015 – Russian airliner with 224 aboard crashes in Egypt’s Sinai.

2017 – Eight dead after truck drives into people in Manhattan, New York.

(Reuters)