TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Saturday, April 27, the 118th day of 2024. There are 248 days left in the year.
On April 27, 1521, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed by natives in the Philippines.
ON THIS DATE
In 1865, the steamer Sultana, carrying freed Union prisoners of war, exploded on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee; death toll estimates vary from 1,500 to 2,000.
In 1941, German forces occupied Athens during Wo r II.
In 1973, acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray resigned after it was revealed that he’d destroyed files removed from the safe of Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt.
In 1978, 51 construction workers plunged to their deaths when a scaffold inside a cooling tower at the Pleasants Power Station site in West Virginia fell 168 feet to the ground.
In 1992, Russia and 12 other former Soviet republics won entry into the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
In 2010, former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was extradited from the United States to France, where he was convicted of laundering drug money and received a seven-year sentence.
In 2011, powerful and deadly tornadoes raked the South and Midwest; more than 60 tornadoes crossed parts of Alabama, leaving about 250 people dead and thousands of others injured in the state.
In 2012, the space shuttle Enterprise, mounted atop a jumbo jet, sailed over the New York City skyline on its final flight before becoming a museum piece aboard the USS Intrepid.
In 2015, rioters plunged part of Baltimore into chaos, torching a pharmacy, setting police cars ablaze and throwing bricks at officers hours after thousands attended a funeral for Freddie Gray, a Black man who died from a severe spinal injury he’d suffered in police custody.
In 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made history by crossing over to South Korea to meet with President Moon Jae-in; it was the first time a member of the Kim dynasty had set foot on southern soil since the Korean War’s end in 1953.
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour for federal contractors, providing a pay bump to hundreds of thousands of workers.
In 2022, Russia cut off natural gas to NATO members Poland and Bulgaria and threatened to do the same to other countries, using its most essential export as an attempt to punish and divide the West for its united support of Ukraine.
In 2023, Jerry Springer, the onetime mayor and news anchor whose namesake TV show featured a threering circus of dysfunctional guests willing to bare all — sometimes literally — as they brawled and hurled obscenities before a raucous audience, died at 79.