Today in history, August 27: Nigerian officers announce a military coup in 1985, and say the army chief of staff is asked to form a new government

Highlights in history on this date:

1660: Published books of poet John Milton are burned in London because of his attacks on King Charles II.
1813: French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte wins his last great battle at Dresden, Germany, against a larger Austrian, Prussian and Russian force.
1859: Colonel Edwin L Drake creates the first productive oil well in Pennsylvania in the US.
1883: The most powerful volcanic eruption ever recorded continues to blow apart Mount Krakatau in the Sunda Straits, Indonesia. Shockwaves travel around the earth and tidal waves kill an estimated 36,000 people.
1890: Perth GPO is officially opened.
1891: The first Brisbane wool sales are held.
1900: A devastating hurricane hits Galveston in Texas, killing more than 6000 people.
1902: Women are granted the vote in NSW.
1921: British install Faisal, son of Sherif Hussein who led Arab revolt against Turks, as king of Iraq.
1939: Nazi Germany demands Danzig and the Polish Corridor; German pilot Erich Warshitz flies the first jet plane, the Heinkel HE-178.
1941: In World War II, the Iranian government resigns just two days after British and Russian troops enter the country.
1945: US troops begin landing in Japan at end of World War II.
1946: France and Laos conclude an agreement establishing a kingdom under French domination.
1948: In a trial of alleged wartime Ustashi (pro-Axis) agents, 43 people are sentenced to death in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, for war crimes and violence against the Tito regime.
1954: The first men cross the Arctic Circle’s Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
1966: French President Charles de Gaulle arrives in Ethiopia from Somaliland, where his visit is marred by bloody rioting.
1967: Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, dies in his London flat from an overdose of sleeping pills.

1969: Israeli commando force penetrates deep into Egyptian territory to stage a mortar attack on regional army headquarters in the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt.
1972: US jets bomb Haiphong, North Vietnam’s major port.
1975: Haile Selassie, deposed emperor of Ethiopia, dies in exile aged 83.
1979: British war hero Lord Louis Mountbatten is killed off the coast of Ireland in a boat explosion. The Irish Republican Army claims responsibility.
1985: Nigerian officers announce a military coup, and say the army chief of staff is asked to form a new government.
1992: US and British warplanes impose an allied flight ban over southern Iraq.
1994: Algeria closes its border with Morocco in an escalating dispute over the arrest of two Algerians accused of plotting to attack Moroccan banks, security forces and civilians.
1995: Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation sign an agreement turning over eight more governmental duties in the West Bank to Palestinians, ranging from delivering the mail to regulating insurance.
1996: Seven armed Iraqi hijackers surrender aboard a Sudanese airliner at London’s Stansted Airport, ending a 16-hour drama that began on a flight from Sudan to Jordan.
1997: Israel lifts a 28-day blockade of Bethlehem imposed after suicide bombings by Islamic militants in Jerusalem; The first Iraqi minister to visit Syria in 17 years enters through the newly opened border crossing at Tanef.
2001: Peru’s Congress votes to lift the constitutional immunity of former President Alberto Fujimori, clearing the way for prosecutors to charge him with crimes against humanity; Israel kills Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in a missile attack in the West Bank.
2002: A judge in Tokyo District Court issues a ruling acknowledging Japan engaged in biological warfare in China in World War II and conducted experiments on Chinese prisoners of war.
2003: Mars passes just 55.76 million kilometres from Earth in the closest such encounter since the Stone Age.
2007: Under pressure to solve the contract-style killing of journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s chief prosecutor announces the arrest of 10 suspects, including a Chechen crime boss and five law enforcement officers.
2009: Fighting reportedly breaks out between an ethnic militia and government security forces in northeastern Myanmar, breaching a two-decade ceasefire.
2010: Cuba issues a pair of surprising free-market decrees, allowing foreign investors to lease government land for up to 99 years — potentially touching off a golf-course building boom — and loosening state controls on commerce to let islanders grow and sell their own fruit and vegetables.
2011: US and Pakistani officials say that al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, has been killed in Pakistan, delivering another big blow to a terrorist group that the US believes to be on the verge of defeat.
2011: Hundreds of soldiers and federal agents raid a casino in Monterrey in northern Mexico, two days after an arson attack on a gambling house killed 52 people and stunned a country that had become numb to massacres and beheading.
2013: Australian journalist and former host of ABC’s This Day Tonight current affairs program, Bill Peach, dies aged 78.
2014: Israel and the Palestinians reach a deal on a long-term ceasefire aimed at ending their seven-week conflict in Gaza.
2015: The body of Queensland teen Jayde Kendall is found at Upper Tenthill, 14km from her Gatton home, 13 days after she disappeared.
2017: Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby is named joint winner of the Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the year before she would become famous worldwide for Netflix special Nanette.
2018: French-born Australian artist Mirka Mora, praised for helping to transform Melbourne into a creative and cosmopolitan city, dies aged 90.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian (1906-1945).