November 27 ...

In 1901 the US Army War College was established in Washington, DC. In 1910 New York City's Pennsylvania Station opened. In 1942 the French navy at Toulon scuttled its ships and submarines to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. In 1945 Gen. George C. Marshall was named special US envoy to China to try to end hostilities between the Nationalists and the Communists. In 1953 playwright Eugene O'Neill died in Boston at age 65. In 1963 President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress. In 1970 Pope Paul VI, visiting the Philippines, was slightly wounded at the Manila airport by a dagger-wielding Bolivian painter disguised as a priest. In 1971 the Soviet Union's unmanned Mars 2 landed on the Red Planet. In 1973 the Senate voted 92-3 to confirm Gerald R. Ford as vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew, who'd resigned. In 1978 San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay-rights activist, were shot to death inside City Hall by former supervisor Dan White. In 1983 183 people were killed when a Colombian Avianca Airlines Boeing 747 crashed near Madrid's Barajas airport. In 1985 the British House of Commons approved the Anglo-Irish accord, giving Dublin a consultative role in the governing of British-ruled Northern Ireland. In 1989 107 people were killed when a bomb blamed by police on drug traffickers destroyed a Colombian jetliner. In 1990 the British Conservative Party chose John Major to succeed Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In 1992 for the second time in a year, military forces tried to overthow president Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela. In 1999 the New Zealand Labour Party's Helen Clark became the first elected female Prime Minster in the country's history. In 2001 the Hubble Space Telescope detected a hydrogen atmosphere on the extrasolar planet Osiris, the first first time an atmosphere was detected on an extrasolar planet.