HOT TOPICS

Quiz

1 Asuncion is the capital of what

South American country?

2 What movie starred Mel Gibson

as William Wallace?

3 What French Impressionist is well known for a series of 250 paintings titled Water Lilies?

4 Who played the titular character in the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle?

5 What song, by the Four Tops opens with the lyric “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch”?

History

1260 Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, becomes ruler of the Mongol Empire

1494 During his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus landed in Jamaica.

1818 Political philosopher Karl Marx, co-author of “The Communist Manifesto” and author of “Das Kapital,” was born in Prussia.

1891 New York’s Carnegie Hall (then named “Music Hall”) had its official opening night, featuring Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky as a guest conductor.

1930 Amy Johnson takes off - first woman to fly solo from England to Australia

1942 Wartime sugar rationing began in the United States.

1961 Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became America’s first space traveler as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury capsule Freedom 7.

1973 Secretariat won the

Kentucky Derby, the first of his Triple Crown victories.

1981 Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands died at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland on his 66th day without food.

2009 Texas health officials confirmed the first death of a U.S. resident with swine flu.

2011 Solemnly honouring victims of the September 11 terror attacks, President Barack Obama hugged survivors at ground zero in New York and declared that the killing of Osama bin Laden was an American message to the world: “When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say.”

2006 Londoners cast votes in an election that gave the city its first Muslim mayor, Labour lawmaker Sadiq Khan, who succeeded outgoing Conservative Boris Johnson.