May ninth

Today's Highlight in History:
On May ninth, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved a pill as safe for birth control use. (The pill, Enovid, was made by G.D. Searle and Company of Chicago.)

On this date:
In 1502, Christopher Columbus left Cadiz, Spain, on his fourth and final trip to the Western Hemisphere.

In 1754, a cartoon in Benjamin Franklin's "Pennsylvania Gazette" showed a snake cut into sections, each part representing an American colony; the caption read, "Join or die."

In 1926, Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first men to fly over the North Pole.

In 1936, Italy annexed Ethiopia.

In 1945, US officials announced that the midnight entertainment curfew was being lifted immediately.

In 1961, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow condemned television programming as a "vast wasteland" in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters

In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee opened hearings on whether to recommend the impeachment of President Nixon.

In 1978, the bullet-riddled body of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who'd been abducted by the Red Brigades, was found in an automobile in the center of Rome.

In 1980, 35 motorists were killed when a Liberian freighter rammed the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida, causing a 14-hundred-foot section to collapse.

In 1994, South Africa's newly elected parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the country's first black president.

Ten years ago: President Bush and congressional leaders announced plans for emergency budget talks, with tax increases and spending cuts on the negotiating table.

Five years ago: President Clinton arrived in Moscow for a summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The city of Kinshasa, Zaire, was placed under quarantine after an outbreak of the Ebola virus. The United States returned 13 Cuban boat people to their homeland, the first refugees to be sent back under a new policy bitterly protested by Cuban-Americans.

One year ago: A chartered bus carrying members of a casino club on a Mother's Day gambling excursion flipped off a highway in New Orleans, killing 22 people. Furious Chinese demonstrators hurled rocks and debris into the US Embassy in a second day of protests against NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia.

"Ah, les bons vieux temps ou nous etions si malheureux!" (Oh, the good old times when we were so unhappy!)

-- French saying.