1570
Apr 27, Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I

1759
Apr 27, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (d.1797), English writer, feminist (Female Reader), was born. "The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force."

1927
Apr 27, Actress Mae West was released from jail after 10 days. She and the entire cast and producers of her Broadway play “Sex" had been thrown in jail. The 1926 Mae West comedy-drama "Sex" caused a scandal and police closed it down after 375 performances.

1937
Apr 27, Sandy Dennis, actress (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), was born in Nebraska.

2002
Apr 27, Palestinian gunmen attacked the Israeli settlement of Adora and killed 4 people including a 5-year-old girl. 3 gunmen escaped but one was later found and killed in a nearby village.

2006
Apr 27, Liliana Gaviria (52), sister of the former Colombian president Cesar Gaviria (1990-1994), died in a botched kidnapping in the province of Risaralda, 110 miles west of Bogota. She was real estate agent and owner of a transport company. On Feb 26, 2010, Beatriz Villalba (25) was arrested after being under observation for four months. She had been conducting spying operations for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in Bogota. Prosecutors alleged that Villalba was in charge of buying a building and modifying a vehicle used in the abduction and transportation of Liliana Gaviria Trujillo. Gaviria's bodyguard was shot dead during the kidnapping in Pereira.

2006
Apr 27, A sister of Iraq's new Sunni Arab vice president was killed in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad, a day after the politician called for the Sunni-dominated insurgency to be crushed by force. In southern Iraq a bomb blast rocked an Italian convoy at a base, killing three Italian soldiers and a Romanian.

2010
Apr 27, In Nepal Oh Eun-sun (44), a South Korean mountaineer, became the first woman to scale the world's 14 highest mountains, crawling on all fours as she reached the last summit. She reached the summit of Annapurna 13 years after she scaled her first Himalayan mountain, Gasherbrum II, in 1997. She scaled Everest in 2004.

2012
Apr 27, In Sudan a mother and her two children were killed when a Sudanese plane bombed a village around Umm Durain, South Kordofan state. Government troops were reported killed when they tried to retake a position from rebels in the Talodi area.