5 mei

Newly independent Belgium planned the first state railway network and opened its first 20 kilometres before any other country in continental Europe had a steam line. Three British-built engines ran the opening trains.

Two days of blind fighting in scrub forest near the Chancellorsville battlefield. The woods caught fire and wounded men burned where they lay. 29,800 casualties (NPS).

Before farmers, vets and journalists, Pasteur gave anthrax to vaccinated and unvaccinated sheep; on 2 June the vaccinated flock was healthy and the others dead or dying. His notebooks, read by Gerald Geison a century later, show the vaccine had been made with potassium dichromate, close to his…

The coach takes Harker to the Borgo Pass, where no carriage is waiting until the driver turns and a calèche drawn by four coal-black horses arrives, driven by a tall man whose eyes look red in the lamplight. A passenger whispers a line of Bürger: “For the dead travel fast.” After blue flames by…

The first Games to use electric timing and a public-address system, and the first with athletes from every inhabited continent. Japan came for the first time.

Still under Lvov, but with six socialist ministers from the Soviet’s parties, among them the SR leader Viktor Chernov at agriculture and the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli. Kerensky moved to the war ministry. It broke up when the Kadet ministers quit over autonomy for Ukraine.

Liberals and Octobrists, with Kerensky the one socialist. In its first weeks it freed political prisoners, ended the death penalty and legal discrimination by religion and nationality, and promised a Constituent Assembly, but put off land reform and peace until it met.

A secretary from Hull with a second-hand Gipsy Moth named Jason became the first woman to fly alone from England to Australia, in 19 and a half days, landing at Darwin.

A 15-minute hop to 187 km and down into the Atlantic. Shepard lay on his back through four hours of holds before launch and was finally told he could urinate in his suit. Unlike Gagarin, he steered his spacecraft himself for part of the flight.

Pilots flew over the open core and dropped about 5,000 tonnes of boron carbide, dolomite, sand, clay and lead to smother the fire and filter what rose from it.

Countries have reported about 7 million deaths to WHO. WHO’s own estimate of excess deaths for 2020 and 2021 alone is 14.83 million (range 13.2–16.6 million), roughly three times the reported figure for those two years.

On the advice of the Emergency Committee, WHO ended the public health emergency after three years and three months. Tedros warned that the end of the emergency did not mean the end of the threat: the virus still circulates and still kills.