Sunday, March 27, 1689

Forty people are killed in a fire at a migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

At the 94th Academy Awards, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage resulting in Smith being expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and banned from its events for ten years.

North Macedonia became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Himeji Castle, the largest and most visited Japanese castle, re-opened after five years of restoration work.

A failure of the dam holding Situ Gintung, an artificial lake in Tangerang, Indonesia, caused floods that killed at least 100 people.

Second Intifada: A suicide bomber killed around 30 Israeli civilians and injured about 140 others in Netanya, triggering Operation Defensive Shield, a large-scale counter-terrorist military incursion into the West Bank.

NATO bombing of Yugoslavia: A U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth aircraft was shot down by a Yugoslav Army unit.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug sildenafil (chemical structure pictured), better known by the trade name Viagra, as the first treatment approved in the United States for erectile dysfunction.

Jiang Zemin succeeded Yang Shangkun to become President of the People's Republic of China.

The Solidarity movement in Poland staged a warning strike, the largest in the history of the Eastern Bloc, in which at least 12 million Poles walked off their jobs for four hours.

Brothers Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt failed in their attempt to corner the world silver market, causing panic in commodity and futures exchanges.

The Washington Metro (rolling stock pictured), the second-busiest rapid transit system in the U.S., opened to commuters.