ON THIS DAY FEBRUARY 27

1803 The Great Fire of Bombay, India, starts in a pub.

1827 The first Mardi Gras celebration takes place in New Orleans. Mardi Gras, meaning

Fat Tuesday, refers to events of the Carnival celebration, beginning on, or after, the Christian feast of the Epiphany (Three Kings’ Day) and culminating on the day before Ash Wednesday (Shrove Tuesday). The name reflects the practice of the last night of eating rich, fatty foods before the ritual fasting of Lent.

1902 Australian soldiers Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock are executed in Pretoria after being convicted of war crimes during the Anglo-boer War.

1942 An Allied strike force is decisively defeated by the Japanese Navy and lose 13 warships in the Java Sea.

1990 Black Tot Day takes place in the Royal New Zealand Navy, with the ending of the traditional rum ration that the Royal Navy started in 1740. Other navies which abandoned the practice were the Royal Australian Navy in 1921, the Royal Navy in 1970, and the Royal Canadian Navy in 1972.

1991 US President George HW Bush announces that ‘Kuwait is liberated’, ending the first Gulf War.

2004 Shoko Asahara, leader of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, is sentenced to death for the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack that killed 13 people.

2004 The bombing of a Superferry, which leaves 116 people dead in the Philippines, is the country’s worst terrorist attack.

2010 An earthquake strikes central Chile, killing 525 people. It triggers a tsunami which strikes Hawaii shortly after, and also causes significant damage on both sides of the Pacific, in Japan and in San Diego.

2014 Chaos erupts after the Swedish Public Employment Service mistakenly invites 61 000 people to a job interview in Stockholm.

2018 US actress Barbra Streisand says she had cloned her dog – twice.

2019 The smallest baby boy ever born and successfully released, goes home from a Tokyo hospital. At birth he weighed a mere 268g. | THE HISTORIAN