November 27th

Today's Highlight in History:
On November 27th, 1973, the Senate voted 92-to-3 to confirm Gerald R. Ford as vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew, who'd resigned.

On this date:
In 1901, Army War College was established in Washington DC.

In 1910, New York's Pennsylvania Station opened.

In 1939, the play "Key Largo," by Maxwell Anderson, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York.

In 1942, during World War Two, the French navy at Toulon scuttled its ships and submarines to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis.

In 1945, General 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 1970, Pope Paul the Sixth, visiting the Philippines, was slightly wounded at the Manila airport by a dagger-wielding Bolivian painter disguised as a priest.

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.

Ten years ago: 107 people were killed when a bomb blamed by police on drug traffickers destroyed a Colombian jetliner, minutes after the plane had taken off from Bogota's international airport.

Five years ago: Defense Secretary William Perry, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," suggested the Bosnian government had lost the war in the Balkans, and acknowledged NATO was powerless to stop the Serbs.

One year ago: Answering 81 questions put to him three weeks earlier, President Clinton wrote the House Judiciary Committee that his testimony in the Monica Lewinsky affair was "not false and misleading."

"Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof; it is a temporary expedient."

-- James Russell Lowell, American editor (1819-1891).