On Oct. 25, 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer died in London.
In 1760 George III ascended the British throne.
In 1838 composer Georges Bizet was born in Paris.
In 1962 writer John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
In 1971 the UN expelled Taiwan and seated China.
In 1983 a U.S.-led force invaded Grenada.
In 1989 novelist Mary McCarthy died at 77 in New York.
In 1993 actor Vincent Price died at 82 in Los Angeles.
In 1994 Susan Smith of Union, S.C., falsely claimed that a carjacker had driven off with her two sons. (Smith later confessed to drowning her children and was convicted of murder.)
In 1995 a Metra commuter train slammed into a school bus in Fox River Grove, killing seven McHenry County high school students. Also, tennis hustler Bobby Riggs died at 77 in Leucadia, Calif.
In 1999 pro golfer Payne Stewart, 42, and five others were killed when their Learjet flew uncontrolled for four hours before crashing in South Dakota.
In 2000 divers found the first bodies from the Barents Sea wreckage of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, which sank in August, killing all 118 sailors aboard.
In 2002 Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) died with his wife, daughter and five others in a Minnesota plane crash 11 days before Election Day; he was 58.
In 2003 Florida State’s Bobby Bowden became the winningest coach in major college football history with his 339th victory.
In 2004 the Supreme Court announced that Chief Justice William Rehnquist had thyroid cancer.
