September 12: Ramadan begins at sunset (Islam, 2007); Rosh Hashanah begins at sunset (Judaism, 2007); Year 2000 begins in the Ethiopian calendar (2007); New Year's Day in the Coptic calendar (2007); National Day in Cape Verde.

• 1683 – Great Turkish War: Polish troops led by John III Sobieski (pictured) joined forces with a Habsburg army to defeat the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna.

• 1848 – Switzerland became a federal state with the adoption of a new constitution.

• 1933 – Hungarian-American physicist Leó Szilárd conceived of the idea of the nuclear chain reaction while waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, London.

• 1974 – Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, considered to be the religious symbol for God incarnate among the Rastafari movement, was deposed in a coup d'état by the Derg, a military junta.

• 1992 – Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Peruvian Maoist guerrilla organization Shining Path, was captured in Lima.

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