Portugal’s Socialist Party wins in a landslide
1995 — Portugal’s Socialist Party faces a tough challenge meeting the expectations raised by its historic win. The party, which ended a decade in opposition, will have to keep skittish financial markets quiet while at the same time satisfying campaign pledges to improve social services and work for a fairer society. Socialist Party leader Antonio Guterres and the party are the focus of a series of weighty expectations. Guterres, whose party won some 44 per cent of the popular vote, just short of the number needed for an absolute parliamentary majority, ran a hard-hitting campaign that mixed pledges of free market orthodoxy in the economy with promises of more attention to education and social spending. But the fast-talking engineer who will be asked by President Mario Soares to form a government was careful to keep the timing of the proffered improvements vague.
October 2
1870 - Rome becomes the capital of Italy.
1889 - First Pan American Conference is held in Washington.
1919 - US President Woodrow Wilson suffers a stroke, leaving him partially paralysed.
1934 - Royal Indian Navy is formed.
1940 - HMS Empress of Britain, carrying child war refugees to Canada, is sunk during Second World War.
1941 - German army launches all-out drive against Moscow in Second World War.
1944 - Nazi troops crush the two-month-old Warsaw Uprising.
1953 - Earl Warren becomes Chief Justice of the United States.
1962 - Egypt sends troops to Yemen to support republicans against Saudi-backed royalists.
1967 - Thurgood Marshall is sworn in as the first African-American justice of the US Supreme Court.
1984 - Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan lays the foundation stone of the Mareb dam in Yemen.
1985 - American actor Rock Hudson dies from AIDS.
1987 - Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba appoints Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali as Prime Minister.
1990 - A hijacked Chinese jet smashes into two parked aircraft as it tries to land at Canton airport, killing 127 people.
1996 - Yugoslavia broadly welcomed the UN’s decision to end sanctions imposed in 1992.
1999 - Rebels release some 40 diplomats and foreigners after taking them hostage at the Myanmar Embassy in Bangkok.
2010 - A passenger train slams into the back of another train in Indonesia, killing at least 36 people.
2013 - South Korea and the US sign a strategic pact to prevent a North Korean nuclear attack.
