GOOD MORNING – TODAY IS SATURDAY, May 27, the 145th day of 2017 with 220 to follow. Sunrise in the Boston area is @ 5:12 and sunset is @ 8:10. The moon is waxing. The morning stars are stars are Jupiter, Saturn & Mercury. The evening stars are Mars, Neptune, Uranus & Venus.
ON THIS DAY IN: 1647 – Alse Young (Achsah Young or Alice Young), a resident of Windsor, CT, was executed for being a “witch.” It was the first recorded American execution of a “witch.”
1668 – Three colonists were expelled from Massachusetts for being Baptists.
1813 – Americans captured Fort George, Canada.
1896 – 255 people were killed in St. Louis, MO, when a tornado struck.
1901 – The Edison Storage Battery Company was organized.
1907 – The Bubonic Plague broke out in San Francisco.
1919 – A U.S. Navy seaplane completed the first transatlantic flight.
1926 – Bronze figures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were erected in Hannibal, MO.
1929 – Colonel Charles Lindbergh and Anne Spencer Murrow were married.
1931 – Piccard and Knipfer made the first flight into the stratosphere, by balloon.
1933 – Walt Disney’s “Three Little Pigs” was first released.
1933 – In the U.S., the Federal Securities Act was signed. The act required the registration of securities with the Federal Trade Commission.
1935 – The U.S. Supreme Court declared that President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act was unconstitutional.
1937 – In California, the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to pedestrian traffic. The bridge connected San Francisco and Marin County.
1941 – U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency” amid rising world tensions.
1941 – The German battleship Bismarck was sunk by British naval and air forces. 2,300 people were killed.
1942 – German General Erwin Rommel began a major offensive in Libya with his Afrika Korps.
1944 – U.S. General MacArthur landed on Biak Island in New Guinea.
1960 – A military coup overthrew the democratic government of Turkey.
1964 – Indian Prime Minister Jawaharla Nehru died.
1968 – After 48 years as coach of the Chicago Bears, George Halas retired.
1969 – Construction of Walt Disney World began in Florida.
1977 – George H. Willig was fined for scaling the World Trade Center in New York on May 26. He was fined $1.10.
1982 – Japan announced the elimination of tariffs on 96 industrial goods.
1985 – In Beijing, representatives of Britain and China exchanged instruments of ratification on the pact returning Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997.
1986 – Mel Fisher recovered a jar that contained 2,300 emeralds from the Spanish ship Atocha. The ship sank in the 17th century.
1988 – The U.S. Senate ratified the INF treaty. The INF pact was the first arms-control agreement since the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) to receive Senate approval.
1994 – Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. He had been in exile for two decades.
1995 – In Charlottesville, VA, Christopher Reeve was paralyzed after being thrown from his horse during a jumping event.
1996 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin negotiated a cease-fire to the war in Chechnya in his first meeting with the leader of the rebels.
1997 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones could continue while President Clinton was in office.
1998 – Charlie Sheen was admitted to a hospital in Los Angeles for a drug overdose.
1998 – Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison for not warning anyone about the plot to bomb an Oklahoma City federal building.
1999 – In The Hague, Netherlands, a war crimes tribunal indicted Slobodan Milosevic and four others for atrocities in Kosovo. It was the first time that a sitting head of state had been charged with such a crime.
2010 – Universal Studios reopened its backlot. The area had been destroyed by a fire two years before.