Following are some of the major events to have occurred on May 4:
1945 – The U.S. 7th Army captured Hitler’s Alpine retreat of Berchtesgaden.
1970 – National Guards shot four students dead and wounded 11 at Kent State University in the United States during demonstrations against the Vietnam war.
1980 – Yugoslav wartime partisan leader Josip Broz Tito died aged 87. He became leader of the country in 1945 and president in 1953.
1989 – Colonel Oliver North was found guilty in U.S. investigations in the Iran-Contra affair.
2001 – World’s first space tourist Dennis Tito speaks to media from International Space Station.
2004 – Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government entered the record books, having survived 1,060 days to become Italy’s longest-serving administration since World War Two.
2005 – Constantin Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” shattered the record for a sculpture at auction when it soared to an astonishing $27,450,000 at Christie’s sale of Impressionist and modern art.
2006 – Reuters and Chicago Mercantile Exchange launch world’s first centrally cleared foreign exchange marketplace.
2007 – A tornado wiped out most of the small farming town of Greensburg in southwestern Kansas, killing 10 people and injuring at least 63.
2007 – Hotel heiress Paris Hilton ordered to spend 45 days in jail for violating probation for alcohol-related reckless driving.
2008 – Cyclone Nargis killed more than 130,000 people in military-ruled Myanmar, ripping through Yangon and the Irrawaddy delta.
