TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS SATURDAY, MAY 27, 2017

On this day in history:

1647 - Alse Young (Achsah Young or Alice Young), a resident of Windsor, CT, was executed for being a “witch.” It was the first recorded American execution of a “witch.”

1668 - Three colonists were expelled from Massachusetts for being Baptists.

1897 - The mummified bodies of Australian explorers Charles Wells and George Jones are discovered.

1933 - Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs was first released. 1933 - In the U.S., the Federal Securities Act was signed. The act required the registration of securities with the Federal Trade Commission.

1941 - The German battleship Bismarck was sunk by British naval and air forces. 2,300 people were killed.

1942 - German General Erwin Rommel began a major offensive in Libya with his Afrika Korps.

1944 - US General MacArthur landed on Biak Island in New Guinea.

1960 - A military coup overthrew the democratic government of Turkey.

1964 - Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru died.

1967 - An Australian referendum recognises more Aboriginal rights as equal citizens. 1982 - Japan announced the elimination of tariffs on 96 industrial goods.

1985 - In Beijing, representatives of Britain and China exchanged instruments of ratification on the pact returning Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997.

1986 - Mel Fisher recovered a jar that contained 2300 emeralds from the Spanish ship Atocha. The ship sank in the 17th century.

1994 - Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. He had been in exile for two decades. 1995 - In Charlottesville, VA, Christopher Reeve was paralysed after being thrown from his horse during a jumping event.

1996 - Russian President Boris Yeltsin negotiated a cease-fire to the war in Chechnya in his first meeting with the leader of the rebels.

1999 - In The Hague, Netherlands, a war crimes tribunal indicted Slobodan Milosevic and four others for atrocities in Kosovo. It was the first time that a sitting head of state had been charged with such a crime.