Today is Tuesday, May 6, the 126th day of 2025
with 239 to follow.
The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Mars, Mercury, Saturn and Venus. Evening stars are Jupiter, Mars and Uranus.
On this date in history:
In 1863, Confederate forces commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee routed Union troops under Gen. Joseph Hooker at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia.
In 1915, Babe Ruth of the Boston Red Sox hit his first major league home run in a game against the New York Yankees.
In 1935, in the depths of the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order establishing the Works Progress Administration to provide work for the unemployed. Later known as the Work Projects Administration, the agency was dissolved in 1943 after building thousands of new schools, armories, stadiums, parks, and other recreational facilities, and improving existing sites such as the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, S.C.
In 1937, the German passenger airship Hindenburg erupted in a fireball at Lakehurst, N.J., on its arrival from Europe after static electricity ignited the airship's flammable fabric skin. The disaster killed 35 of the 97 passengers and crew aboard the zeppelin.
In 1940, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A rare, first-edition of the novel fetched $48,000 at auction in 2007.
In 1941, Josef Stalin became official leader of the Soviet government.
In 1954, 25-year-old British medical student Roger Bannister cracked track and field's most famous barrier, the 4-minute mile, during a meet at Oxford, England. His time: 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds.
In 1994, the Channel Tunnel, a railway under the English Channel connecting Britain and France, was officially opened.
In 2001, John Paul II became the first pope to enter a mosque -- the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.
In 2006, the largest rebel group in Sudan's Darfur region and the government of Sudan signed a peace agreement ending their three-year armed conflict that claimed an estimated 200,000 lives.
In 2009, Dave Bing, Hall of Fame star for the NBA's Detroit Pistons, was elected mayor of Detroit, succeeding the ousted Kwame Kilpatrick.
In 2010, British voters gave the Conservatives control of Parliament, making David Cameron, 43, Britain's youngest prime minister in almost 200 years.
In 2013, three women missing for 10 years were found alive in Cleveland. The man who had kept them as hostages pleaded guilty to charges including kidnapping and rape. He killed himself in prison.
In 2017, French lawmakers passed a bill that requires models to provide a doctor's note to prove they are healthy, a bid to crack down on dangerously skinny models in the nation's highly competitive fashion industry.
In 2023, King Charles III and Queen Camilla were crowned at Westminster Abbey in London in a lavish, eye-popping ceremony not seen in Britain in nearly 70 years.
In 2024, Columbia University handed out the Pulitzer Prizes, with journalism awards going to ProPublica, The New York Times, the Lookout Santa Cruz in California and The Washington Post.
