Today in History....October 30

* 1864, Helena, Montana is founded after four prospectors discover gold at "Last Chance Gulch"

* 1905, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia grants Russia's first constitution, creating a legislative assembly

* 1918, the Ottoman Empire signs an armistice with the Allies, ending the First World War in the Middle East

* 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, causing a nationwide panic
* 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt approves $1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the Allied nations

* 1944, Anne Frank is deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

* 1945, the U.S. government announced the end of shoe rationing, effective at midnight

* 1947, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which is the foundation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is founded

* 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document National Security Council Paper No. 162/2, which states that the United States' arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat

* 1960, Michael Woodruff performs the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary

* 1961, the Soviet Union detonates the hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya; at 58 megatons of yield, it is still the largest nuclear device ever detonated. Nikita Kruschev announces that the scientists had planned to make it 100 megatons, but had reduced the yield so as to avoid breaking all the windows in Moscow. ALSO:
Because of "violations of Lenin's precepts", it is decreed that Josef Stalin's body be removed from its place of honor inside Lenin's tomb and buried near the Kremlin wall with a plain granite marker instead

* 1973, the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey is completed, connecting the continents of Europe and Asia over the Bosporus for the first time in history

* 1995, Quebec sovereignists narrowly lose a referendum for a mandate to negotiate independence from Canada (vote was 50.6% to
49.4%)

* 2002, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's broad-based coalition collapsed when Cabinet ministers from the leftist Labor Party resigned in a dispute over funding for suburban housing, called by the media "settlements"

* 2006, Sen. John Kerry told a California college audience that young people who didn't study hard might "get stuck in Iraq".