EVENTS:
- 1874 – The first horse-drawn bus makes its début in the city of Mumbai, traveling two routes.
- 1877 – Mihail Kogălniceanu reads, in the Chamber of Deputies, the Declaration of Independence of Romania. This day became the Independence Day of Romania.
- 1877 – A magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Peru kills 2,541, including some as far away as Hawaii and Japan.
- 1901 – Australia opens its first parliament in Melbourne.
- 1961 – Jim Gentile of the Baltimore Orioles becomes the first player in baseball history to hit grand slams in consecutive innings.
- 1987 – An LOT Polish Airlines Ilyushin IL-62M, Tadeusz Kościuszko (SP-LBG), crashes after takeoff in Warsaw, Poland, killing all 183 people on board.
- 2001 – In Ghana 129 football fans die in what became known as the Accra Sports Stadium disaster. The deaths are caused by a stampede (caused by the firing of teargas by police personnel at the stadium) that followed a controversial decision by the referee.
- 2012 – A Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft crashes into Mount Salak in West Java, Indonesia, killing 45 people.
- 2015 – Russia stages its biggest ever military parade in Moscow’s Red Square to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Victory Day.
- 2018 – The historic defeat for Barisan Nasional, the governing coalition of Malaysia since the country’s independence in 1957 in Malaysian General Election, 2018.
- 2018 – At the height of the 2018 East Africa floods, the Patel dam breaks in Solai, Kenya, killing 48 people and displacing another 2000.
- 2020 – The COVID-19 recession causes the U.S. unemployment rate to hit 14.9 percent, its worst rate since the Great Depression.
- 2022 – Russo-Ukrainian War: United States President Joe Biden signs the 2022 Lend-Lease Act into law, a rebooted World War II-era policy expediting American equipment to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.
- 2023 – The May 9 riots following the arrest of Imran Khan in Pakistan.
BIRTHS:
- 1540 – Maharana Pratap, Indian ruler (d. 1597)
- 1837 – Adam Opel, German engineer, founded the Opel Company (d. 1895)
- 1866 – Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Indian economist and politician (d. 1915)
- 1920 – Richard Adams, English author
- 1920 – William Tenn, English-American author (d. 2010)
- 1927 – Manfred Eigen, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1970 – Curtis Bray, American football player and coach (d. 2014)
- 1971 – Jason Lee, English footballer and manager
- 1985 – Jake Long, American football player
- 1989 – Ellen White, English footballer
- 1992 – Dan Burn, English footballer
- 1994 – Ryan Auger, English footballer
HOLIDAYS and OBSERVANCES:
- Europe Day, commemorating the Schuman Declaration. (European Union)
- Independence Day, celebrating the declaration of independence of Romania from the Ottoman Empire in 1877. (Romania)
- Liberation Day, commemorating the end of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II).
