Today in History....May 9

On this day 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"

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

* 1936, Italy annexed Ethiopia

* 1945, U.S. officials announced that a midnight entertainment curfew was being lifted immediatel

* 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved the pill Enovid as safe for birth control use

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

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

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

* 2006, freed by rescuers drilling round-the-clock by hand, two men walked out of an Australian mine where they had been trapped for two weeks by an earthquake. (The joy over the survival of Brant Webb and Todd Russell was tempered by the loss of Larry Knight, who died in the same rock collapse.)