TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, May 11, the 132nd day of 2024. There are 234 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

1647: Peter Stuyvesant arrives in New Amsterdam to become governor of New Netherland.

1813: In Australia, William Lawson, Gregory Blaxland and William Wentworth, lead an expedition westwards from Sydney. Their route opens up inland Australia for continued expansion throughout the 19th century.

1917: King George V grants Royal Letters Patent to New Zealand establishing office of GovernorGeneral as Monarch's representative in the country.

1927: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is founded during a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

1935: The Rural Electrification Administration is created as one of US President Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal schemes.

1946: The first CARE packages, sent by a consortium of American charities to provide relief to the hungry of postwar Europe, arrives at Le Havre, France.

1949: Siam renames itself Thailand.

1953: A tornado devastates d Waco, Texas, claiming 114 lives.

1960: Israeli agents captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

1969: British comedy troupe Monty Python forms, made up of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry

Jones, and Michael Palin.

1973: The espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo in the “Pentagon Papers” case comes to an end as Judge William M Byrne dismisses all charges, citing government misconduct.

1981: Legendary reggae artist Bob Marley dies in a Miami hospital at age 36 of acral lentiginous melanoma, a skin cancer that is rare but the most common type found among people of colour.

1981: Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats" (based on poetry by TS Eliot) directed by Trevor Nunn, opens at the New London Theatre in the West End, London; runs for 8949 performances.

1996: An Atlanta-bound ValuJet DC-9 catches fire shortly after takeoff from Miami and crashes into the Florida Everglades, killing all 110 people on board.

2010: Conservative leader David Cameron, at age 43, becomes Britain’s youngest prime minister in almost 200 years after Gordon Brown steps down and ends 13 years of Labour government.

2020: Twitter announces that it will add a warning label to tweets containing disputed or misleading information about the coronavirus.

2022: The US Senate falls far short in a rushed effort toward enshrining Roe v Wade abortion access as federal law, blocked by a Republican filibuster. The move comes after a draft report from the Supreme Court overturning the 50-year-old ruling. (The 6-3 decision is issued essentially as drafted the following month.)

2023: Manhattan prosecutors say they will bring criminal charges against a man accused of using a deadly chokehold on an unruly passenger aboard a New York City subway train.