Following are some of the major events to have occurred on February 27:
1933 – Fire destroyed Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag.
1973 – Native Americans began an occupation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, scene of a massacre in 1890.
1990 – Nelson Mandela arrived in Zambia on his first foreign trip since his release after 27 years in South African jails.
1999 – Nigerians voted in presidential elections to end 15 years of military rule. General Olusegun Obasanjo, a military leader 20 years earlier, won power through the ballot box.
2002 – Spike Milligan, the zany genius behind the British radio comedy series the Goon Show, died aged 83.
2003 – Rowan Williams was enthroned as the 104th archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the world’s 70 million Anglicans.
2003 – The U.N. war crimes court at The Hague sentenced former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic to 11 years in jail.
2004 – Shoko Asahara, who led the Aum Shinri Kyo (Supreme Truth Sect), was sentenced to hang for masterminding a sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 12.
2007 – University of Palermo displays face of woman reconstructed from 14,000-year-old remains.
2010 – Magnitude 8.8 earthquake strikes Chile, triggering tsunami.
2015 – Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov murdered in Moscow.
(Reuters, Photo from the Guardian)
