Today in History
June 27
1844 Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, is shot dead by a mob in Carthage, Illinois.
1890 George Dixon becomes the first black world boxing champion.
1893 The New York stock market crashes.
1898 Joshua Slocum becomes the first man to circumnavigate the world solo when he lands in Rhode Island.
1923 American airmen Lowell Smith and John Richard performs the first ever aerial refuelling of a plane.
1929 Colour television technology is first demonstrated in New York.
1932 A constitution is proclaimed in Siam, now Thailand.
1940 Soviet Union invades Romania during Second World War.
1954 The world’s first nuclear power station opens in Obninsk, near Moscow.
1957 More than 500 people are killed as Hurricane Audrey hits Louisiana and Texas.
1967 The world’s first ATM machine goes into operation at Barclays Bank in Enfield, UK.
1976 Portuguese general Antonio Eanes is elected president.
1977 French Somaliland becomes Africa’s 49th independent state, Djibouti.
1978 Seasat I, the first oceanographic satellite, is launched by the US.
1981 Cambodia adopts its constitution.
1982 US space shuttle Columbia carries its first commercial and military payloads.
1984 France is crowned European football champions with a 2-0 victory over Spain.
1988 A runaway commuter train crashes into another at a station in Gare de Lyon, Paris, 59 people die.
1991 The last Soviet troops left Czechoslovakia, nearly 23 years after the
Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968.
1992 Crown Prince Alexander, the heir to the Yugoslav throne, receives an emotional welcome upon his return.
1995 Qatar’s Crown Prince Shaikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani takes over control from his father.
1998 An earthquake rattles Adana in southern Turkey, killing 144 people.
2007 Gordon Brown replaces Tony Blair as Britain’s Prime Minister.
2010 Kyrgyzstan votes in favour of a new constitution.
2011 The International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for Muammar Gaddafi, accusing him of killing civilians.
2014 16 people are killed after a gas pipeline exploded in East Godavari district in Hyderabad.
2015 More than 516 people are injured in an explosion at a water park in Taipei, Taiwan.
HIGHLIGHT
1997
Chicago Beach Hotel goes in one blast
It took less than half a minute and one not-too-loud blast for the once majestic and serene Chicago Beach Hotel to turn into a heap of rubble. A team of six Britons from the Controlled Demolition Group Ltd heaved a sigh of relief at a job well done as the sprinklers from fire trucks reached upwards to contain the clouds of dust. An awesome 12,000 tonnes of debris is what is left of the 19-year-old property, one of the first seaside resorts built in Dubai. The demolition was part of a plan to improve the property by building a new 600-room resort hotel and a water theme park to be laid out on the 120,000sqm of land where the old hotel building once stood proudly. The Police had cordoned off the demolition site, and the beach road leading to the hotel was closed for all traffic half an hour before 2,000 detonators went off simultaneously, blowing the seven-floor structure into bits.
