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Today-History-May09
Today in History for May 9: In 1092, England's Lincoln Cathedral was consecrated. In 1265, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy, was born. In 1460, witch burnings were held in the courtyard of the episcopal palace in Utrecht in the Netherlands. In 1502, Christopher Columbus left Spain on his fourth and final trip to the New World. In 1671, the Crown jewels were stolen from the Tower of London. The robbers were quickly caught. In 1754, Benjamin Franklin published the first American cartoon. Titled "Join or Die," it showed a snake cut into pieces, each representing a state. In 1860, writer J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, was born in Kirriemuir, Scotland. In 1926, U.S. Navy Admiral Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first men to fly to the North Pole. In 1937, the Canadian Coronation contingent became the first Dominion troops to stand sentry duty at London's St. James and Buckingham Palaces. In 1939, the Roman Catholic Church beatified the first Native American, Kateri Tekakwitha. In 1960, the United States became the first country to legalize use of the birth control pill. In 1961, FCC chairman Newton N. Minow decried the majority of television programming as a "vast wasteland" in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. In 1969, a revised Roman Catholic calendar of church feasts dropped more than 200 saints and added non-European saints. In 1977, a federal royal commission recommended a 10-year ban on pipeline construction in the Mackenzie Valley of northern Canada because of social and environmental hazards. In 1978, the bullet-riddled body of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who'd been abducted by the Red Brigades on March 16, was found in an automobile in the centre of Rome. In 1980, 35 people were killed when a freighter rammed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida, causing a large section to collapse. In 1986, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay died. He and Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand were the first climbers to conquer Mount Everest in 1953. In 1987, 183 people were killed when a New York-bound Polish jetliner crashed while attempting an emergency return to Warsaw. In 1992, a methane gas explosion roared through the Westray coal mine in Plymouth, N.S., killing 26 miners. The bodies of 11 men were recovered almost immediately. A desperate but unsuccessful search for survivors continued for six days. Rescue workers said the danger of a cave-in was too great to continue. In 1994, South Africa's new parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country's first black president. In 1996, the House of Commons approved a bill adding sexual orientation to the Canadian Human Rights Act. In 2002, Palestinians left the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, ending a five-week standoff with Israeli troops. In 2003, James Kopp, the sniper who gunned down Dr. Barnett Slepian, 52, an abortion doctor in his home in 1998 near Buffalo, N.Y., was sentenced to the maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison. In 2004, pro-Moscow Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov was assassinated in an explosion at a soccer stadium during a Victory Day military parade in the capital of Grozny. In 2009, ANC leader Jacob Zuma was sworn in as South Africa's fourth president since apartheid ended 15 years earlier. In 2012, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to throw his support behind same-sex marriage. In 2015, the World Health Organization officially marked the end of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, which accounted for almost half of the more than 11,000 deaths in West Africa. In 2017, disgraced Sen. Don Meredith, the married Pentecostal minister who admitted to a sexual relationship with a teenage girl, declared he would resign his Senate seat, short-circuiting what could have been a historic vote to expel him from the upper chamber. In 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, who had come under intense scrutiny for his role in an investigation into the email practices of Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and was in the midst of an FBI probe into whether Trump's campaign had ties to Russia's meddling in the election that sent him to the White House. In 2017, B.C. had its first minority government in 65 years as Christy Clark's Liberals squeaked out a razor-thin victory over John Horgan's NDP. (In June, the Liberals were defeated in a non-confidence vote in the legislature and the NDP was asked to form a government after reaching a deal with the Green Party on a legislative agenda.) In 2017, Moon Jae-in declared victory in South Korea's presidential election after his two main rivals conceded. In 2018, an alliance of Malaysian opposition parties, led by 92-year-old former authoritarian leader Mahathir Mohamad, won a parliamentary majority in a fiercely contested general election, ousting scandal-tainted Prime Minister Najib Razak and ending his coalition's 60-year grip on power. In 2018, Alex Krushelnyski scored at 6:48 of the fifth overtime period to give the Lehigh Valley Phantoms a 2-1 win over the Charlotte Checkers in the longest game in American Hockey League history. (It began at 7 p.m. ET and lasted 146 minutes, 48 seconds, ending at 1:09 a.m. on May 10.) In 2023, Canada announced that it would be contending for a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council. ---- The Canadian Press
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