This Day in History – January 27
Today is the 27th day of 2012. There are 339 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight
1998: Bowing to the wish of the pope, the Catholic Church in Germany stops issuing certificates allowing abortion.
Other Events
1822: Greek independence is formally proclaimed.
1865: Treaty between Spain and Peru virtually recognises Peru’s independence.
1880: Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.
1888: The National Geographic Society is incorporated in the United States.
1943: Germany begins civil conscription of women.
1945: Soviet troops liberate the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.
1964: France establishes diplomatic relations with China.
1973: Accords are signed in Paris, providing for the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, leading to the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.
1977: The Vatican reaffirms the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on female priests.
1992: Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government survives no-confidence motions in Israeli parliament.
1995: Burmese soldiers win a key battle against one of the world’s oldest insurgencies, capturing the base of Burma’s largest Karen rebel army in the Burmese jungle.
1996: Niger’s first democratically elected president, Mahamane Ousmane, is ousted in a coup and army Colonel Barre Mainassara Ibrahim takes over as head of state.
2001: Police fire tear gas and warning shots as thousands of rock-throwing students in Jakarta storm the gates of Indonesia’s Parliament in the largest protest yet against the country’s president.
2002: Munitions at an army base in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, explode, sending fireballs and shrapnel into the air forcing hundreds of area residents to flee. As many as 600 people drown in a canal that blocked their way to safety.
2005: A court sentences Peru’s former spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos to eight years in prison for paying tabloids hundreds of thousands of dollars to run smear campaigns against opponents of ex-President Alberto Fujimori.
2006: Bolivian President Evo Morales cuts his salary in half and orders that no Cabinet minister collect a higher wage than his own, with the savings being used to hire more public school teachers.
2011: Chilean judicial officials vow to investigate the death of President Salvador Allende for the first time, 37 years after the socialist leader was found shot through the head with a machine gun during a withering attack on the presidential palace.
Today’s Birthdays
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer (1756-1791); Edouard Lalo, French composer (1823-1892); Lewis Carroll, English mathematician and writer (1832-1898); Jerome Kern, US composer (1885-1945); Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler (1931-2001); James Cromwell, US actor (1940-); Mikhail Baryshnikov, Russian ballet dancer (1948-).
— AP
