Today in History....March 27

On this day in …

* 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon sighted Florida

* 1794, Congress approved "An Act to provide a Naval Armament" of six armed ships

* 1964, Alaska was rocked by a powerful earthquake that killed 131 people

* 1968, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the earth, died in a plane crash

* 1996, an Israeli court convicted Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's confessed assassin of murder, then sentenced former law student Yigal Amir to life in prison

* 1997, Dexter King, son of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., met with James Earl Ray, the man in prison for the older King's assassination. Ray denied having had anything to do with the shooting, to which King replied, "I believe you."

* 2002, 29 Israelis were killed in a suicide bombing during a Passover Seder in Netanya, Israel. ALSO: A gunman killed eight members of the Nanterre city council outside Paris; a suspect killed himself the next day while in police custody

* 2006, Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified at his federal trial that he was supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House