GOOD MORNING – TODAY IS THURSDAY, May 11, the 131st day of 2017 with 244 to follow. Sunrise in the Boston area is @ 5:26 and sunset is @ 7:54. The moon is waning. The morning stars are stars are Jupiter, Saturn & Mercury. The evening stars are Mars, Neptune, Uranus & Venus.
ON THIS DAY IN: 0330 – Constantinople, previously the town of Byzantium, was founded.
1573 – Henry of Anjou became the first elected king of Poland.
1647 – Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam to become governor.
1689 – French and English naval battle takes place at Bantry Bay.
1745 – French forces defeat an Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian army at Fontenoy.
1792 – The Columbia River was discovered by Captain Robert Gray.
1812 – British prime Minster Spencer Perceval was shot by a bankrupt banker in the lobby of the House of Commons.
1816 – The American Bible Society was formed in New York City.
1857 – Indian mutineers seized Delhi from the British.
1858 – Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. state.
1860 – Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at Marsala, Sicily.
1889 – Major Joseph Washington Wham takes charge of $28,000 in gold and silver to pay troops at various points in the Arizona Territory. The money was stolen in a train robbery.
1894 – Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois went on strike.
1910 – Glacier National Park in Montana was established.
1927 – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded.
1934 – A severe two-day dust storm stripped the topsoil from the great plains of the U.S. and created a “Dust Bowl.” The storm was one of many.
1944 – A major offensive was launched by the allied forces in central Italy.
1947 – The creation of the tubeless tire was announced by the B.F. Goodrich Company.
1949 – Siam changed its name to Thailand.
1960 – Israeli soldiers captured Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires.
1967 – The siege of Khe Sanh ended.
1985 – More than 50 people died when a flash fire swept a soccer stadium in Bradford, England.
1995 – The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was extended indefinitely. The treaty limited the spread of nuclear material for military purposes.
1996 – An Atlanta-bound ValuJet DC-9 caught fire shortly after takeoff from Miami and crashed into the Florida Everglades. All 110 people on board were killed.
1997 – Garry Kasparov, world chess champion, lost his first ever multi-game match. He lost to IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue. It was the first time a computer had beaten a world-champion player.
1998 – India conducted its first underground nuclear tests, three of them, in 24 years. The tests were in violation of a global ban on nuclear testing.
1998 – A French mint produced the first coins of Europe’s single currency. The coin is known as the euro.
2001 – U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced his decision to approve a 30-day delay of the execution of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh had been scheduled to be executed on May 16, 2001. The delay was because the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had failed to disclose thousands of documents to McVeigh’s defense team.