This Day in History for May 9

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.)

1502 - Christopher Columbus left Cadiz, Spain, on his fourth and final trip to the Western Hemisphere.

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 - US officials announced that the midnight entertainment curfew was being lifted immediately.

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 Nixon.

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.

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.

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