- 114th Day of 2015 251 Remaining
- Summer Begins in 58 Days
- Sunrise:6:21
- Sunset:7:54
- 13 Hours 33 Minutes
- Moon Rise:11:31am
- Moon Set:12:59am
- Phase:38%
- Full Moon May 3 @ 8:44pm
Full Flower Moon In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name of this Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
- Tides
- High:3;10am/5:35pm
- Low:10:16am/10:55pm
- Holidays
- National Hairball Awareness Day
- National Pigs In A Blanket Day
- National Teach Your Children To Save Day
- World Meningitis Day
- Genocide Memorial Day-Armenia
- National Concord Day-Niger
- World Day For Laboratory Animals
- On This Day
- 1558 --- Mary, Queen of Scotland, married the French dauphin, Francis.
- 1781 --- British General William Phillips lands on the banks of the James River at City Port, Virginia. Once there, he combined forces with British General Benedict Arnold, the former American general and notorious traitor, to launch an attack on the town of Petersburg, Virginia, located about 12 miles away.
- 1792 --- The French national anthem, "La Marseillaise," was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
- 1800 --- President John Adams approves legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress,” thus establishing the Library of Congress. The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the library’s first home.
- 1863 --- The Union army issues General Orders No. 100, which provided a code of conduct for Federal soldiers and officers when dealing with Confederate prisoners and civilians. The code was borrowed by many European nations, and its influence can be seen on the Geneva Convention. The final document consisted of 157 articles written almost entirely by Lieber. The orders established policies for, among other things, the treatment of prisoners, exchanges, and flags of truce. There was no document like it in the world at the time, and other countries soon adopted the code.
- 1908 --- A single tornado travels 150 miles through Louisiana and Mississippi, leaving 143 dead in its wake. In total, 311 people lost their lives to twisters during the deadly month of April 1908 in the southeastern United States.
- 1915 --- The Ottoman Empire rounded up Armenian political and cultural leaders in Constantinople at the start of what many scholars regard as the first genocide of the 20th century, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died.
- 1916 --- On Easter Monday in Dublin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization of Irish nationalists led by Patrick Pearse, launches the so-called Easter Rebellion, an armed uprising against British rule. Assisted by militant Irish socialists under James Connolly, Pearse and his fellow Republicans rioted and attacked British provincial government headquarters across Dublin and seized the Irish capital’s General Post Office. Following these successes, they proclaimed the independence of Ireland, which had been under the repressive thumb of the United Kingdom for centuries, and by the next morning were in control of much of the city.
- 1945 --- President Harry Truman learns the full details of the Manhattan Project, in which scientists are attempting to create the first atomic bomb, on this day in 1945. The information thrust upon Truman a momentous decision: whether or not to use the world’s first weapon of mass destruction.
- 1953 --- Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the British leader who guided Great Britain and the Allies through the crisis of World War II, is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
- 1955 --- The Afro-Asian Conference–popularly known as the Bandung Conference because it was held in Bandung, Indonesia–comes to a close on this day. During the conference, representatives from 29 “non-aligned” nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East met to condemn colonialism, decry racism, and express their reservations about the growing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
- 1961 --- Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers struck out 18 batters becoming the first major-league pitcher to do so on two different occasions.
- 1961 --- President Kennedy accepted "sole responsibility" following Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
- 1961 --- Bob Dylan earned a $50 session fee for playing harmonica on Harry Belafonte's "Midnight Special." It was his recording debut.
- 1962 --- Patti LaBelle and her group the Blue Belles had never even been in a recording studio when their debut single, “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman,” entered the Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1962. In a move that was far from unprecedented at this time—the same thing happened with The Crystals’ “He’s A Rebel” (1961), for instance—Patti and her cohorts were credited with a hit record they had nothing to do with creating.
- 1967 --- At a news conference in Washington, Gen. William Westmoreland, senior U.S. commander in South Vietnam, causes controversy by saying that the enemy had “gained support in the United States that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily.” Though he said that, “Ninety-five percent of the people were behind the United States effort in Vietnam,” he asserted that the American soldiers in Vietnam were “dismayed, and so am I, by recent unpatriotic acts at home.” This criticism of the antiwar movement was not received well by many in and out of the antiwar movement, who believed it was both their right and responsibility to speak out against the war.
- 1980 --- An ill-fated military operation to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Tehran ends with eight U.S. servicemen dead and no hostages rescued. With the Iran Hostage Crisis stretching into its sixth month and all diplomatic appeals to the Iranian government ending in failure, President Jimmy Carter ordered the military mission as a last ditch attempt to save the hostages. During the operation, three of eight helicopters failed, crippling the crucial airborne plans. The mission was then canceled at the staging area in Iran, but during the withdrawal one of the retreating helicopters collided with one of six C-130 transport planes, killing eight soldiers and injuring five. The next day, a somber Jimmy Carter gave a press conference in which he took full responsibility for the tragedy
- 1996 --- The main assembly of the Palestine Liberation Organization voted to revoke clauses in its charter that called for an armed struggle to destroy Israel.
- 2003 --- Canada announced the closure of what remained of the cod fishery in Newfoundland, the Maritime provinces and Quebec due to depleted stocks of cod.
- Birthdays
- Robert Penn Warren
- Shirley MacLaine
- Jill Ireland
- Barbra Streisand
- Cedric the Entertainer
- Sue Grafton
- Doug Clifford
- Kelly Clarkson
- Willem de Kooning
- Justin Wilson
