Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/May 9

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 * 1864 – Second Schleswig War: The Battle of Heligoland (depicted), the last naval engagement fought by squadrons of wooden ships, took place between the Danish and Austro-Prussian fleets.
 * 1918 – First World War: Germany repelled Britain's second attempt to blockade the Belgian port of Ostend.
 * 1960 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it would approve the use of Searle's Enovid, the first combined oral contraceptive pill.
 * 1961 – In a speech to U.S. broadcasters, FCC chairman Newton Minow described commercial television programming as "a vast wasteland".
 * 1964 – Ngô Đình Cẩn, a younger brother and the confidant of South Vietnam's first president, Ngô Đình Diệm, was executed by Nguyễn Khánh's military junta.
 * 1979 – Prominent Iranian Jew Habib Elghanian was executed after having been convicted by a revolutionary tribunal of various charges, triggering a mass exodus of Jews from Iran.
 * 1992 – An underground methane explosion occurred at the Westray Mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, killing all 26 Canadian coal miners who were working at the time.
 * 2005 – Pope Benedict XVI began the beatification process for his predecessor Pope John Paul II, waiving the standard five years required after the nominee's death.
 * 2012 – The pilots of a Sukhoi Superjet, ignoring alerts from the terrain warning system, crashed the aircraft into Mount Salak in Indonesia, resulting in the deaths of all 45 people on board.
 * Born/died this day: | Shi Pu |d|893| Maharana Pratap |b|1540| William Bradford |d|1657| Gaspard Monge |b|1746| Francis Hopkinson |d|1791| Ferdinand Monoyer |b|1836| Zita of Bourbon-Parma |b|1892| Hilde Levi |b|1909| Anthony Wilding |d|1915| Kate Molale |d|1980| Nuala O'Faolain |d|2008