There are 240 days left in the year.
ON THIS DATE IN HISTORY
On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became Americas first space traveler as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury capsule Freedom 7.
1494 During his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus landed in Jamaica.
1821 Napoleon Bonaparte, 51, died in exile on the island of St. Helena.
1925 Schoolteacher John T. Scopes was charged in Tennessee with violating a state law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution. (Scopes was found guilty, but his conviction was later set aside.)
1942 Wartime sugar rationing began in the United States.
1945 In the only fatal attack of its kind during World War II, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon, killing the pregnant wife of a minister and five children. Denmark and the Netherlands were liberated as a German surrender went into effect.
1973 Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby, the first of his Triple Crown victories, in a time of 1:59.4, a record that still stands.
1981 Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands died at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland on his 66th day without food.
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.
2009 Texas health officials confirmed the first death of a US resident with swine flu.
2014 A narrowly divided Supreme Court upheld Christian prayers at the start of local council meetings.
2016 Former Los Angeles trash collector Lonnie Franklin Jr. was convicted of 10 counts of murder in the Grim Sleeper serial killings that targeted poor, young Black women over two decades.
2017 President Donald Trump signed his first piece of major legislation, a $1 trillion spending bill to keep the government operating through September.
2018 Justify, on his way to a Triple Crown sweep, splashed through the slop at Churchill Downs to win the Kentucky Derby by 2½ lengths, becoming the first horse since Apollo in 1882 to win the Derby without having raced as a 2-year-old.
2020 Tyson Foods said it would resume limited operation of its huge pork processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, with enhanced safety measures, more than two weeks after closing the facility because of a Coronavirus outbreak among workers.
