Today is Tuesday, May 5, the 125th day of 2015. There are 240 days left in the year.

1570 - Turkey declares war on Venice for refusing to surrender Cyprus, and Spain comes to Venice's aid.

1646 - British forces under King Charles I surrender to Scots at Newark, England.

1762 - Russia and Prussia sign Treaty of St Petersburg, under which Russia restores all conquests and forms defensive and offensive alliance.

1788 - Three First Fleet vessels, Scarborough, Charlotte and Lady Penrhyn, leave NSW for England.

1821 - France's Napoleon Bonaparte dies in exile on the island of St Helena.

1824 - British troops take over Rangoon, Burma.

1865 - Australian bushranger Ben Hall is shot dead by one-time friend Billy Dargin at Billabong Creek, near Forbes, NSW.

1860 - Giuseppe Garibaldi and his "Thousand Redshirts" sail from Genoa to conquer Sicily and Naples.

1862 - Mexican army defeats invading French forces in the Battle of Puebla. May 5 is now Mexico's National Day.

1862 - In the American Civil War, the Confederates with 32,000 men succeed in blocking 40,000 Union troops at the battle of Williamsburg.

1893 - Stocks in New York drop sharply as investors sell at the start of the "panic of 1893".

1906 - Melbourne's first electric trams begin running, from St Kilda to Brighton.

1911 - New Zealand pilot JJ Hammond makes first flight over Sydney.

1925 - John Scopes is arrested in Tennessee for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.

1930 - Mahatma Gandhi is arrested by the British in India after his campaign of disobedience.

1930 - Amy Johnson begins the first solo flight by a woman between England and Australia.

1931 - People's National Convention in Nanking, China, adopts provisional constitution.

1936 - Italian forces occupy Addis Ababa, ending Abyssinian (Ethiopian) War.

1942 - Battle of the Coral Sea begins.

1945 - US poet Ezra Pound is arrested in Italy for treason over his World War II broadcasts and taken back to the United States. (He was declared insane and allowed to return to Italy.)

1947 - Sixteen people die in train derailment at Camp Mountain, Queensland.

1951 - Death of Rev John Flynn, founder of Australia's Royal Flying Doctor Service.

1954 - General Alfredo Stroessner heads coup against civilian president Federico Chavez, beginning 34-year dictatorship in Paraguay.

1955 - The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) becomes a sovereign state after the Allied High Commission dissolves itself.

1961 - Alan Shepard becomes the first American into space in a 15-minute sub-orbital flight in a Mercury spacecraft.

1964 - Israel announces that first water is flowing from its new pipeline from Sea of Galilee to Negev Desert, despite Arab objections to the project.

1965 - First large US military units arrive in Vietnam.

1966 - First Australian National Servicemen arrive in Vietnam battle zone.

1978 - Red Brigades in Italy announce they are carrying out death sentence against former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, whose body is found two days later.

1979 - Terrorists in El Salvador storm the French, Venezuelan and Costa Rican embassies demanding the release of political prisoners.

1980 - SAS troops storm the Iranian Embassy in London, killing four of the five gunmen who take over the building and seize hostages; the first US B-52 bomber touches down at Darwin to the quiet protests of 250 people, the first of regular B-52 flights to the city.

1981 - Bobby Sands becomes the first of the 10 IRA hunger strikers to die in the Maze prison, Northern Ireland.

1988 - French assault team storms cave in French Pacific territory of New Caledonia and frees 22 gendarmes and prosecutor held hostage by Melanesian separatists.

1989 - Estonia's Communist Party removes 22 party leaders in sweep that gives greater strength to reformers.

1990 - Talks on German unification, involving Britain, France, Soviet Union, United States and two Germanies, open in Bonn.

1990 - Australian comedian-actor Paul Hogan weds US actress Linda Kozlowski.

1994 - Warplanes from North and South Yemen attack each other's cities.

1995 - John Major's governing Conservative Party in Britain is nearly obliterated in local elections.

1996 - Bob Bellear is appointed as Australia's first Aboriginal judge, in the NSW District Court.

1997 - Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, the political leader of militant Islamic organisation HAMAS, is deported from the United States to Jordan after the US fails to find evidence enough to prosecute him for involvement in terrorist attacks.

1999 - Indonesia and Portugal sign an agreement allowing the people of East Timor to vote on whether to remain part of Indonesia or seek independence.

2001 - The world's first paying space tourist, Dennis Tito, returns to Earth after a week in space.

2001 - In Angola UNITA rebels kidnap 51 boys and nine girls from a boarding school for war orphans outside Caxito, northeast of Luanda. Some 200 civilians die in the raid.

2002 - The world's second space tourist, the South African Mark Shuttleworth, returns to earth in a Russian Soyuz capsule after a 10-day trip to space that cost him $US24 million ($A38.4 million).

2002 - The conservative Jacques Chirac wins 82 per cent of the vote in second round of a French presidential election, crushing the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen with the largest vote in the Fifth Republic's 44-year history.

2003 - Rwanda frees more than 22,000 detainees, most of whom were held in connection with the 1994 massacre of some 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu by Hutu militias. Around 80,000 genocide suspects remain in prison, with many yet to stand trial.

2004 - Greece's attempts to calm security fears about the Summer Olympics are rocked by three bombs that explode before dawn - 100 days before the games begin. No one is injured in the blasts that officials attribute to self-styled anarchists or other domestic extremists.

2004 - Picasso's Boy With the Pipe sets a new world record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction when it fetches $US104,168,000 ($A125.92 million) at Sotheby's in New York.

2006 - Five-year-old Car crash burns victim Sophie Delezio is hit by a car while crossing a Sydney road with her carer. She isn't expected to survive but astounds medical staff by pulling through again.

2007 - A Kenya Airways Boeing 737-800 carrying 114 and bound for the Kenyan capital Nairobi, crashes just 5 kilometres from the Cameroonian city of Douala, where it had taken off during a storm, killing all aboard.

2008 - Troops open fire and kill at least two people as tens of thousands of people riot over high food prices in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu.

2009 - Russia's foreign minister pulls out of a meeting with NATO this month to protest the alliance's upcoming military exercises in Georgia and the expulsion of two Russian diplomats from its headquarters.

2010 - Rioting over harsh austerity measures leaves three people dead in a torched Athens bank and clouds of tear gas drift past parliament, in an outburst of anger that underlined the long and difficult struggle Greece faces to stick with painful cutbacks that come with an international bailout.

2011 - Pakistan's army breaks its silence over the US commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden, acknowledging its own "shortcomings" in efforts to find the al-Qaida leader but threatening to review cooperation with Washington if there is another similar violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

2011 - Claude Stanley Choules, the last surviving combatant from World War I, dies in Perth, aged 110. British-born Choules served in Britain's Royal Navy in what comes to be known as the Great War before moving to Australia and serving in the navy for 40 years, including through WWII.

2012 - The self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US repeatedly declines to answer a judge's questions and his co-defendants kneel in prayer in what appeared to be a concerted protest against the military proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

2013 - The death toll from Bangladesh's worst industrial disaster surpassed 600 after dozens of bodies were pulled from the wreckage of a nine-storey building housing garment factory.

2014 - Egypt's former military chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, seen as certain to become the next president, says the Muslim Brotherhood will never return if he is elected, accusing it of using militant groups to destabilise the country.