HOT TOPICS

Quiz

1 The 2009 film Nowhere Boy tells the story of what British music icon?

2 In the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers, what are the first names of the titular characters?

3 Covered by Celine Dion nine years later, who recorded the original version of The Power of Love in 1984?

4 What team is the defending World

Series champion in MLB?

5 What country’s flag can be described as “a white saltire defacing a blue field”?

History

1860 Writer J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, was born in Kirriemuir, Scotland.

1901 The first Australian Parliament opens in Melbourne, though the first working session will not be until May 21.

1914 President Woodrow Wilson, acting on a joint congressional resolution, signed a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

1945 With World War II in Europe at an end, Soviet forces liberated Czechoslovakia from Nazi occupation.

1962 Scientists at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology succeeded in reflecting a laser beam off the surface of the moon.

1974 The House Judiciary Committee opened public hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. (The committee ended up adopting three articles of impeachment against the president, who resigned before the full House took up any of them.)

1980 Thirty-five people were killed when a freighter rammed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over

Tampa Bay in Florida, causing a 1400-foot section of the southbound span to collapse.

1994 South Africa’s newly elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country’s first black president.

2019 Pope Francis issued a groundbreaking new church law requiring all Catholic priests and nuns to report clergy sexual abuse and cover-ups by their superiors to church authorities.

2020 Rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Little Richard died in Tennessee at the age of 87 after battling bone cancer; he had helped shatter the colour line on the music charts while introducing black R&B to white America.