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• Today is Friday, May 9, the 129th day of 2014. There are 236 days left in the year.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson, acting on a joint congressional resolution, signed a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day.
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• On this date:
• In 1754, a political cartoon in Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette depicted a snake cut into eight pieces, each section representing a part of the American colonies; the caption read, "JOIN, or DIE."
• In 1814, the Jane Austen novel "Mansfield Park" was first published in London.
• In 1864, Union Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick was killed by a Confederate sniper during the Civil War Battle of Spotsylvania in Virginia.
• In 1914, country music star Hank Snow was born in Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, Canada.
• In 1926, Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett supposedly became the first men to fly over the North Pole. (However, U.S. scholars announced in 1996 that their examination of Byrd's recently discovered flight diary suggested he had turned back 150 miles short of his goal.)
• In 1936, Italy annexed Ethiopia.
• In 1945, U.S. officials announced that a midnight entertainment curfew was being lifted immediately.
• In 1951, the U.S. conducted its first thermonuclear experiment as part of Operation Greenhouse by detonating a 225-kiloton device on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific nicknamed "George."
• In 1961, in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton N. Minow decried the majority of television programming as a "vast wasteland."
• In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee opened public hearings on whether to

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