Today in history
On May 5,1494,
during his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus first sighted Jamaica.
In 1821 Napoleon
Bonaparte died in exile on the island of St. Helena.
In1892
Congress passed the Geary Chinese Exclusion Act, which required Chinese in the United States to be registered or face deportation.
In1925
John Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, Tenn., was arrested for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in violation of a state statute. (Hewould be found guilty in the famous “monkey trial.”)
In 1961 astronaut
Alan Shepard Jr. became America’s first space traveler as he madea15-minute suborbital flight in a capsule launched from Cape Canaveral.
In 1985 President Ronald
Reagan kept a vow to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl by leading a wreath laying ceremony at the military cemetery in Bitburg.
In 1994 Singapore
caned American teenager Michael Fay for vandalism, a day after the sentence was reduced from six lashes to four in response to an appeal by President Bill Clinton, who thought the punishment was too harsh.
In 2004 seeking
to calm international outrage, President George W. Bush acknowledged mistakes but stopped short of an apology as he condemned the abuse and deaths of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. soldiers during appearances on Arabic-language television. Also in 2004, Pablo Picasso’s 1905 painting “Boy With a Pipe” sold for $104 million at Sotheby’s in New York, breaking the record for an auctioned painting.
In 2005 Tony
Blair won a historic third term as Britain’s prime minister.
In 2006 CIA
Director Porter Goss resigned in a second term shake-up of President George W. Bush’s team.
In 2008 Irvine Robbins,
co-founder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain, died at 90.
In 2014 Indiana
reported a health care worker who had been working in Saudi Arabia contracted MERS, the first U.S. case of the often fatal Middle East respiratory virus. Also in the 2014, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in a Greece, N.Y., case that local officials can open public meetings with prayers, even if it favors a specific religion.