- 143rd Day of 2012 / 223 Remaining
- 29 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:5:54
- Sunset:8:20
- 14 Hours 26 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:7:10am
- Moon Set:10:02pm
- Moon’s Phase: 3 %
- The Next Full Moon
- June 4 @ 4:11am
- Full Strawberry Moon
- Full Rose Moon
- Full Milk Moon
- This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe. However, in Europe they called it the Rose Moon. Also because the relatively short season for harvesting strawberries comes each year during the month of June, so the full Moon that occurs during that month was christened for the strawberry!
- Tides
- High:1:44pm
- Low:6:35am/6:22pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:15.67
- Last Year:26.96
- Normal To Date:23.46
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Maritime Day
- Neighbor Day-Rhode Island
- National Vanilla Pudding Day
- National Make a Memory Day (Do something silly with a child.)
- UN International Day for Biological Diversity
- Canadian Immigrants' Day-Canada
- National Unity Day-Yemen
- National Heroes Day-Sri Lanka
- Lag B'Omer-Judaism
- National Sovereignty-Haiti
- On This Day In …
- 1455 --- In the opening battle of England's War of the Roses, the Yorkists defeat King Henry VI's Lancastrian forces at St. Albans, 20 miles northwest of London. Many Lancastrian nobles perished, including Edmund Beaufort, the duke of Somerset, and the king was forced to submit to the rule of his cousin, Richard of York. The dynastic struggle between the House of York, whose badge was a white rose, and the House of Lancaster, later associated with a red rose, would stretch on for 30 years. Both families, closely related, claimed the throne through descent from the sons of Edward III, the king of England from 1327 to 1377. The first Lancastrian king was Henry IV in 1399, and rebellion and lawlessness were rife during his reign. His son, Henry V, was more successful and won major victories in the Hundred Years War against France. His son and successor, Henry VI, had few kingly qualities and lost most of the French land his father had conquered. At home, chaos prevailed and lords with private armies challenged Henry VI's authority. At times, his ambitious queen, Margaret of Anjou, effectively controlled the crown. In 1453, Henry lapsed into insanity, and in 1454 Parliament appointed Richard, duke of York, as protector of the realm. Henry and York's grandfathers were the fourth and third sons of Edward III, respectively. When Henry recovered in late 1454, he dismissed York and restored the authority of Margaret, who saw York as a threat to the succession of their son, Prince Edward. York raised an army of 3,000 men, and in May the Yorkists marched to London. On May 22, 1455, York met Henry's forces at St. Albans while on the northern road to the capital. The bloody encounter lasted less than an hour, and the Yorkists carried the day. The duke of Somerset, Margaret's great ally, was killed, and Henry was captured by the Yorkists.
- 1782 --- Responding to a suggestion from military leaders that Congress was inept and that the U.S. should become a monarchy, General George Washington refused the title of King George the First of the United States and insisted the schemers banish such thoughts from their minds.
- 1849 --- Abraham Lincoln received patent number 6469 for his floating dry dock.
- 1868 --- The Great Train Robbery took place near Marshfield, Ind., as seven members of the Reno gang made off with $96,000 in cash, gold and bonds.
- 1892 --- Dr. Washington Sheffeld invented the collapsible metal toothpaste tube.
- 1900 --- A. DeVilbiss, Jr. of Toledo, OH patented his pendulum-type computing scale. Many are still around. Check out your nearest produce stand at the market.
- 1908 --- The Wright brothers registered their flying machine for a U.S. patent.
- 1946 --- The Culinary Institute of America is founded.
- 1954 --- Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) celebrated his bar mitzvah.
- 1955 --- A scheduled dance to be headlined by Fats Domino was canceled by police in Bridgeport, Connecticut because "rock and roll dances might be featured."
- 1966 --- Bruce Springsteen recorded his very first song, along with his band, The Castilles. It was titled, That’s What You Get. The song was never released. Bruce was just practicing. He was just sixteen
- 1967 --- What was to become the Public Broadcasting System’s longest-running children’s program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, debuted on this day.
- 1972 --- President Richard Nixon arrives in Moscow for a summit with Soviet leaders. Although it was Nixon's first visit to the Soviet Union as president, he had visited Moscow once before--as U.S. vice president. During a week of summit meetings with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet officials, the United States and the USSR reached a number of agreements, including one that laid the groundwork for a joint space flight in 1975. On May 26, Nixon and Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), the most significant of the agreements reached during the summit. The treaty limited the United States and the USSR to 200 antiballistic missiles each, which were to be divided between two defensive systems.
- 1987 --- Rick Hansen arrived back home in Vancouver after traveling 24,901 miles across four continents and 34 countries in 26 months in his wheelchair.
- 1990 --- After 150 years apart, Marxist South Yemen and conservative North Yemen are unified as the Republic of Yemen. Ali Abdullah, president of North Yemen, became the new country's president, and Ali Salem Al-Baidh, leader of the South Yemeni Socialist Party, vice president. The first free elections were held in 1993. Situated at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen was divided between the British and the Ottomans in the mid-19th century. The Turks were expelled from the north in 1918, but the British continued to dominate the south until 1967, when the Arab world's first and only Marxist state, the People's Republic of South Yemen, was established. The unification of Yemen in 1990 did not go as smoothly as hoped; economic troubles in 1991 brought Yemen to the brink of collapse, and a civil war in 1994 between southern secessionists and Yemen's northern-based government temporarily dissolved the Yemeni union. Free elections resumed in 1997.
- 1992 --- Johnny Carson hosted "The Tonight Show" for the final time. Announcer Ed McMahon and bandleader Doc Severinson also retired from the show
- 2002 --- In Birmingham, AL, a jury convicted former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry of murder in the 1963 church bombing that killed four girls.
- 2003 --- The final manuscript of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which was annotated by the composer, sold at an auction for $3.47 million.
- 2004 --- Michael Moore’s documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 beats out 18 other films to win the coveted Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It became the first documentary to triumph at Cannes since The Silent World, co-directed by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle, won the Palme d’Or in 1956. The director Quentin Tarantino, president of the Cannes jury, announced the winner in front of an appreciative crowd at the Grand Theatre Lumiere. The previous week, an audience in that same theater gave the film a standing ovation after its screening. It was a surprise win, not least because the Cannes festival had historically shunned documentaries. Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Silent World were two of only three nonfiction films to be allowed in competition in more than five decades. Moore’s film was a fierce critique of the foreign policy decisions made by the presidential administration of George W. Bush, principally its response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and its decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld came under the harshest fire from Moore, who had caused a stir the previous year for his anti-war comments during his acceptance of the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Bowling for Columbine. Miramax Films, the production company that financed Fahrenheit 9/11, was originally set to distribute the film, until its parent company, Walt Disney, blocked it from doing so. The ensuing controversy reportedly led to the 2005 split between Disney and Miramax founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein. When it was eventually distributed by Lion’s Gate, Fahrenheit 9/11 earned some $119 million at the U.S. box office.
- Birthdays
- Harvey Milk
- Laurence Olivier
- Bernie Taupin
- Richard benjamin
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Apolo Anton Ohno
- T Boone Pickens
- Bernard Shaw
- Judith Crist
- Morrissey
- Naomi Campbell
- Wilhelm Richard Wagner
- Mary Cassatt
- Michael Constantine