Today in History for April 27:
In 1278, St. Zita, patroness of servants, died. She was credited with many miracles in helping the poor in Italy.
In 1509, Pope Julius II excommunicated everyone in the entire Italian state of Venice, from the Doge right down to the common gondolier.
In 1521, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed by natives in the Philippines.
In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I.
In 1644, wheat was planted in Canada for the first time near what is now Montreal.
In 1667, Puritan poet John Milton, blind, bitter and poor, sold the copyright for "Paradise Lost" for 10 pounds.
In 1791, Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph and Morse code, was born in Massachusetts.
In 1813, a force of 1,800 Americans landed at York (now Toronto) and the outnumbered British garrison withdrew. The town was sacked and the parliament buildings were burned down. In retaliation for this action and the destruction of Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.), the British raided Buffalo and Washington and set fire to the White House.
In 1831, the first Canadian steamboat to cross the Atlantic entirely under steam power, the "Royal William," was launched at Quebec City.
In 1838, martial law was revoked in Lower Canada. It was imposed the previous year because of the Papineau rebellion.
In 1865, the steamer "Sultana" exploded on the Mississippi near Memphis, killing more than 1,400 Union prisoners of war from the recently-ended U.S. Civil War.
In 1928, Prince Edward Island changed to driving on the right-hand side of the road.
In 1942, in a national plebiscite, Canadians voted in favour of conscription for overseas service.
In 1965, broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow died in Pawling, N.Y., two days after turning 57.
In 1967, the Expo World's Fair was opened in Montreal by Prime Minister Lester Pearson.
In 1973, acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray resigned after it was revealed that he had handed over bureau files on the Watergate burglary to the Nixon White House.
In 1977, the Parti Quebecois government proposed legislation to make French the working language in almost all phases of Quebec life.
In 1982, the trial of John Hinckley Jr., who shot four people in 1981 -- including U.S. President Ronald Reagan -- began in Washington. Hinckley was acquitted by reason of insanity and sent to a mental institution.
In 1987, the American Justice Department barred Austrian President Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States. It said he aided in the deportation and execution of thousands of Jews and others while serving as a German army officer during the Second World War.
In 1992, Lina Haddad, 27, gave birth in Montreal to the first quintuplets ever born in Quebec -- three boys and two girls.
In 1992, Russia and 12 other former Soviet republics won entry into the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
In 2000, Nova Scotia allowed its black community mandatory representation on anglophone school boards.
In 2005, Hockey Hall of Fame defenceman Red Horner died at age 95.
In 2006, the Supreme Court of Canada, in a 4-3 decision, upheld key provisions of the national DNA databank that stores genetic profiles of sexual and dangerous offenders.
In 2006, Canada and the U.S. reached a seven-year tentative deal on softwood lumber that would return US$4 billion of the $5 billion in duties collected from Canadian firms.
In 2010, after spending two decades in a Miami prison for drug trafficking, former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was extradited to Paris where he was immediately arrested on charges of laundering drug money in France in the 1980s. He was convicted on July 7 and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In 2010, chaos erupted in the Ukraine parliament after approval of a treaty allowed Russia to extend the lease on a naval base in a Ukrainian port on the Black Sea until 2042. Ukraine would get cheap natural gas from Russia in exchange. Lawmakers attacked each other, punching and brawling in the aisles.
In 2010, South Korean Oh Eun-sun, 44, crawled on all fours for the final, steep stretch to the peak of Annapurna, making history in the Himalayas by becoming the first woman to scale the world's 14 highest mountains.
In 2010, Peter Milliken, Speaker of the House of Commons, delivered a historic ruling saying that the government's refusal to hand over uncensored documents on Afghan detainees violated the privilege of the House. The documents at issue were believed to contain information related to the alleged torture of prisoners transferred to Afghan authorities by Canadian soldiers. On June 17, Milliken gave his seal of approval to a multi-party deal (except the NDP, which walked out of last-ditch negotiations) that would give select MPs access to thousands of sensitive Afghan detainee documents.
In 2011, a powerful storm spawned 312 tornadoes in seven southern states over a 24-hour period -- the highest one-day total in U.S. history -- killing 340 people, two-thirds in Alabama. There were also fatalities in Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky.
In 2011, responding to critics' relentless claims, U.S. President Barack Obama produced a detailed Hawaii birth certificate in an extraordinary attempt to bury the issue of where he was born and confirm his legitimacy to hold office.
In 2014, two 20th-century popes who changed the course of the Catholic Church became saints as Pope Francis honoured John XXIII and John Paul II. Francis invited Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI to join him on the altar of St. Peter's Square, the first time a reigning and retired pope have celebrated Mass together in public in the 2,000-year history of the church.
In 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made history by crossing over the Korean Demilitarized Zone to greet South Korean President Moon Jae-in for talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons.
In 2021, a Quebec woman in her 50s died of a blood clot that occurred after she received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
In 2022, a court in military-ruled Myanmar convicted the country's former leader Aung San Suu Kyi of corruption and sentenced her to five years in prison. Suu Kyi, who was ousted in an army takeover in February 2021, denied allegations she accepted gold and hundreds of thousands of dollars given her as a bribe by a top political colleague. Her supporters and independent legal experts had decried her prosecution as unjust and meant to simply remove her from politics.
In 2022, Russia opened a new front in its war over Ukraine by shutting off gas to two European Union nations that staunchly back the Ukrainian government -- Poland and Bulgaria. That represented a dramatic escalation in a conflict increasingly becoming a wider battle with the West.
In 2022, Russia released a U.S. marine veteran jailed in Moscow for nearly three years in return for the U.S. releasing a convicted drug trafficker serving a long prison sentence. U.S. President Joe Biden said the negotiations to bring Trevor Reed home required difficult decisions that he did not take lightly.
In 2022, the House of Commons unanimously adopted a motion declaring that Russia was committing acts of genocide against the Ukrainian people in the ongoing war. New Democrat MP Heather McPherson introduced a motion stating there was clear evidence of systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by Russian forces.
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The Canadian Press