1904: Cy Young pitches the first perfect game in modern Major League baseball. A game is considered perfect when none of the opposing players reach the first base. Young’s team, the Boston Americans, won 3-0 over the Philadelphia Athletics.
1905: British murder trial begins, the first to be solved by fingerprint evidence. The trial starts in the murder case of Thomas and Ann Farrow, shopkeepers in South London. The case would be the first resolved based on fingerprint evidence.
1912: Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda begins publishing.
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1934: The first Three Stooges film is released. The comedy trio soon became famous, especially in the U.S., for their short films featuring slapstick humor.
1941: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie returns triumphantly to Addis Ababa
1949: The Council of Europe is founded. The organization was the first to work for European integration. It has 47 member countries and is a completely separate entity from the European Union (EU).
1955: West Germany regains full sovereignty after World War II. The Federal Republic of Germany had been established in 1949. Its provisional capital was Bonn. After the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany, Berlin was declared the country’s capital.
1960: Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) independence leader Kenneth Kaunda meets U.S. Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King (pic: left) in Atlanta, Georgia in the U.S., forging ties between the African liberation and Civil Rights movements. They address issues of mutual concern at a joint press conference at King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.
1961: On May 5, 1961, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
1980: The British Special Air Service (SAS) terminated the Iranian Embassy siege in London
Six gunmen had held 26 people hostage for six days, demanding the release of Iranian Arab prisoners. Two of the hostages were killed.
1981: After 66 days on hunger strike, 26-year-old Provisional IRA member and British MP Bobby Sands dies in a Prison Maze. Nine more hunger strikers die in the next 3 months.
1998: The European Union officially declares Nigeria’s transition to civil rule programme a failure.
2000: A conjunction of the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon occurred. A conjunction is when planets meet at a specific angle which creates an optical illusion – leading to Doomsday predictions of massive natural disasters, although such a ‘grand confluence’ occurs about once in every century.
2008: Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. American actor Charlton Heston—who possessed a commanding screen presence and was best known for such films as Ben-Hur (1959), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Planet of the Apes (1968)—died at the age of 84.
BIRTHS ON THIS DAY: May 5
Hafsat Abdulwaheed, 72 years
Hafsat was born on 5 May 1952. She is a Nigerian writer and women’s rights activist, in Kano City, Northern Nigeria. The first Hausa woman to have published a novel. She has also written more than 30 books, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Unsuccessful in her attempt to be elected to a governance position in Northern Nigeria, where no women held high office, she pursued a feminist agenda in her writings.
Adele, 36 years
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins MBE, known mononymously as Adele, was born on 5 May 1988. She is an English singer-songwriter and known for her mezzo-soprano vocals and sentimental songwriting. Adele has received numerous accolades including 16 Grammy Awards, 12 Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
Thomas Hobbes (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679)
English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes, best known for his publications on individual security and the social contract, was born on 5 April 1588 prematurely due to his mother’s fear of the Spanish Armada. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. He died at the age of 91.
Karl Marx (1818–1883)
Karl Max was born on 5 May 1818 and is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to find many thinkers who can be said to have had comparable influence in the creation of the modern world. He died at the age of 64.
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