Today in history
On May 4,1626, Dutch explorer Peter Minuit landed on present-day Manhattan Island.
In 1886 in what came to be known as the Haymarket riot, at least 10 Chicago police officers and labor demonstrators were killed when a bomb exploded in Haymarket Square during a rally for an eight-hour workday.
In 1904 the United States began building the Panama Canal.
In 1927 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded.
In 1932 mobster Al Capone, convicted of income-tax evasion, entered the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
In 1946 a two-day riot at Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay ended; five people died in the violence.
In 1961 a group of “Freedom Riders” left Washington for New Orleans to challenge racial segregation in interstate buses and bus terminals.
In 1970 Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on anti-war protesters at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine others.
In 1994 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed a historic accord on Palestinian autonomy that granted self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.
In 1998 a federal judge in Sacramento, Calif., sentenced Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski to four life terms plus 30 years under a plea agreement that spared Kaczynski the death penalty.
In 2001Bonny Lee Bakley, wife of actor Robert Blake, was shot to death as she sat in a car near a restaurant in Los Angeles. (Blake, accused of the killing, was acquitted in a criminal trial but was found liable by a civil jury and ordered to pay damages.)
In 2003 Pope John Paul II proclaimed five new saints before a crowd of 1 million people in Madrid.
In 2005 a military judge at Fort Hood, Texas, threw out Pfc. Lynndie England’s guilty plea to abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, saying he was not convinced the Army reservist knew her actions were wrong at the time. (England was later convicted in a court-martial and sentenced to three years in prison.) Also in 2005, a suicide bombing at a police recruitment center in Irbil, Iraq, killed 60 people.
In 2006 a federal judge sentenced Zacarias Moussaoui to life in prison for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks; the convicted terrorist declared: “God save Osama bin Laden — you will never get him.”
In 2008 a riverboat sank in a remote Amazon region in northern Brazil, killing at least 48 people.
In 2013 Utah soccer referee Ricardo Portillo, 46, died from head injuries after being punched in the face by a 17-year-old player a week earlier.