148th day of 2016, 218 days remain
- Sunrise: 5:51
- Sunset: 8:23pm, giving us 14 hours & 31 minutes of daylight, increasing daily
- Moonset: 11:09am
- Moonrise: 12:20am, 77% of the waning moon will be visible
Tides at the Golden Gate
- High: 3:20am/5:37pm
- Low: 10:04am/10:43pm
Special celebrations today include it being…
- Abolition of Slavery - Guadeloupe
- Mother's Day - Bolivia
- Reconciliation Week – Australia
- It’s also
- National Grape Popsicle Day
- Cellophane Tape Day: 27
- Don't Fry Day
- Heat Awareness Day
- Hug Your Cat Day
- National Wig Out Day
On this day in…
1647 - Alse Young (Achsah Young or Alice Young), a resident of Windsor, CT, was executed for being a "witch." It was the first recorded American execution of a "witch."
1668 - Three colonists were expelled from Massachusetts for being Baptists.
1813 - Americans captured Fort George, Canada.
1896 - 255 people were killed in St. Louis, MO, when a tornado struck.
1901 - The Edison Storage Battery Company was organized.
1907 - The Bubonic Plague broke out in San Francisco.
1919 - A U.S. Navy seaplane completed the first transatlantic flight.
1926 - Bronze figures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were erected in Hannibal, MO.
1929 - Colonel Charles Lindbergh and Anne Spencer Murrow were married.
1931 - Piccard and Knipfer made the first flight into the stratosphere, by balloon.
1933 - Walt Disney's "Three Little Pigs" was first released.
1933 - In the U.S., the Federal Securities Act was signed. The act required the registration of securities with the Federal Trade Commission.
1935 - The U.S. Supreme Court declared that President Franklin Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act was unconstitutional.
1937 - In California, the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to pedestrian traffic. The bridge connected San Francisco and Marin County.
1941 - U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed an "unlimited national emergency" amid rising world tensions.
1941 - The German battleship Bismarck was sunk by British naval and air forces. 2,300 people were killed.
1942 - German General Erwin Rommel began a major offensive in Libya with his Afrika Korps.
1944 - U.S. General MacArthur landed on Biak Island in New Guinea.
1960 - A military coup overthrew the democratic government of Turkey.
1964 - Indian Prime Minister Jawaharla Nehru died.
1968 - After 48 years as coach of the Chicago Bears, George Halas retired.
1969 - Construction of Walt Disney World began in Florida.
1977 - George H. Willig was fined for scaling the World Trade Center in New York on May 26. He was fined $1.10.
1982 - Japan announced the elimination of tariffs on 96 industrial goods.
1985 - In Beijing, representatives of Britain and China exchanged instruments of ratification on the pact returning Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997.
1986 - Mel Fisher recovered a jar that contained 2,300 emeralds from the Spanish ship Atocha. The ship sank in the 17th century.
1988 - The U.S. Senate ratified the INF treaty. The INF pact was the first arms-control agreement since the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) to receive Senate approval.
1994 - Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. He had been in exile for two decades.
1995 - In Charlottesville, VA, Christopher Reeve was paralyzed after being thrown from his horse during a jumping event.
1996 - Russian President Boris Yeltsin negotiated a cease-fire to the war in Chechnya in his first meeting with the leader of the rebels.
1997 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones could continue while President Clinton was in office.
1998 - Charlie Sheen was admitted to a hospital in Los Angeles for a drug overdose.
1998 - Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison for not warning anyone about the plot to bomb an Oklahoma City federal building.
1999 - In The Hague, Netherlands, a war crimes tribunal indicted Slobodan Milosevic and four others for atrocities in Kosovo. It was the first time that a sitting head of state had been charged with such a crime.
2010 - Universal Studios reopened its backlot. The area had been destroyed by a fire two years before.
Birthday celebrants today include (or included)…
- Ibn Khaldun 1332
- Cornelius Vanderbilt 1794
- Amelia Jenks Bloomer 1818
- Julia Ward Howe 1819
- Wild Bill Hickok 1837
- Arnold Bennett 1867
- Isadora Duncan 1878
- Dashiell Hammett 1894
- Rachel Carson 1907
- Vincent Price 1911
- Hubert H. Humphrey 1911
- John Cheever 1912
- Herman Wouk 1915
- Yasuhiro Nakasone 1917
- Christopher Lee 1922
- Henry Kissinger 1923
- Ramsey Lewis 1935
- Lee Ann Merriwether 1935
- Louis Gossett, Jr. 1936
- Don Williams 1939
- Cilla Black 1943
- Bruce Weitz 1943
- Bruce Cockburn 1945
- Richard Schiff 1955
- Eddie Harsch 1957
- Siouxsie Sioux 1957)
- Neil Finn 1958
- Cathy Silvers 1961
- Peri Gilpin 1961
- Adam Carolla 1964
- Todd Bridges 1965
- Sean Kinney 1966
- Jeff Bagwell 1968
- Frank Thomas 1968
- Dondre Whitfield 1969- Actor
- Paul Bettany 1971
- Jack McBrayer 1973
- Darnell Dockett 1981
- Chris Colfer 1980
