ON THIS DAY APRIL 27

711 The Moors begin their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal).

1521 Explorer Ferdinand Magellan is killed in the Philippines.

1667 Blind and impoverished, John Milton sells the copyright of famous poem Paradise Lost for £10, then a lot of money.

1749 First performance of George Frideric Handel’s Music For The Royal Fireworks in Green Park, London.

1810 Ludwig van Beethoven composes Für Elise.

1861 West Virginia secedes from Virginia after Virginia secedes from Union during the US Civil War.

1865 The paddle-steamer SS Sultana explodes on the Mississippi River, killing 1 800 of its 2 427 passengers.

1904 The Australian Labour Party under Prime Minister Chris Watson becomes the first Labour government in the world.

1905 William Ayliff, 79, farmer and Cape politician, dies in Grahamstown. The Eastern Cape town of Mt Ayliff is named after him. 1943 Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki escapes from the death camp Auschwitz after having voluntarily gone there to investigate the Holocaust.

1945 Italian partisans capture Benito Mussolini and girlfriend Claretta Petacci at Dongo, near Lake Como. The two had fled Milan for Switzerland on April 25. They were executed the next day. Their bodies were brought back to Milan and hung upside down from a meat grinder in the the Piazzale Loreto for angry Italians to assault and abuse.

1950 The notorious Group Areas Act is passed, formally segregating races.

1953 The US’s Operation Moolah offers huge cash rewards to any pilot who defects to South Korea with a MiG-15, used by the North.

1956 Heavyweight boxing champ Rocky Marciano retires undefeated after 49 bouts, 43 by knock-out.

1986 Soviet authorities order the evacuation of the city of Pripyat a day after the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

1987 Austrian President Kurt Waldheim (a former UN secretary-general) and his wife are barred from the US because of alleged war-crimes.

1989 Protesting students in Beijing take over the city’s Tiananmen Square.

1993 The entire Zambia national football team dies in a plane crash.

1994 Watershed in South Africa’s history as the first free and fair elections extend into a second day of voting. This day is forever remembered as Freedom Day.

2005 The Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft, has its maiden test flight. 2018 At a historic summit, the leaders of the two Koreas – the North’s Kim Jong-un and the South’s Moon Jae-in – agree to officially end the Korean war and rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons.

2023 The findings of the Zoonomia Project are published – where genomes of 240 mammals were collected and compared. The reports reveals that 10.7% of the human genome is identical to almost all species. | The