Historical timeline for October 3

Bengali, Assamese, Marathi, Pali and Prakrit are accorded the Classical language status by the Government of India

Wab Kinew is elected to be the first First Nations Premier of a Canadian province in the 2023 Manitoba general election

Svante Pääbo is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Eight people are killed in an airplane crash near Milan, Italy.

Forty-two people are killed and 33 go missing in the Kunduz hospital airstrike in Afghanistan.

At least 360 migrants are killed when their boat sinks near the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey join in the Turkic Council.

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 for the U.S. financial system is signed by President George W. Bush.

O. J. Simpson murder case: O. J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

An American attack against a warlord in Mogadishu fails; eighteen US soldiers and over 350 Somalis die.

Nadine Gordimer is announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The German Democratic Republic is abolished and becomes part of the Federal Republic of Germany; the event is afterwards celebrated as German Unity Day.

A coup in Panama City is suppressed and 11 participants are executed.

TASCC, a superconducting cyclotron at the Chalk River Laboratories in Canada, is officially opened.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis makes its maiden flight, carrying two DSCS-III Satellites on STS-51-J.

The hunger strike at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland ends after seven months and ten deaths.

A violent coup in Honduras begins two decades of military rule.

Project Mercury: US astronaut Wally Schirra, in Sigma 7, is launched from Cape Canaveral for a six-orbit flight.

The California State Superior Court rules that the book Howl and Other Poems is not obscene.

The United Kingdom successfully tests a nuclear weapon in the Montebello Islands, Western Australia, to become the world's third nuclear power.