This day in History, May 7th

1429 - Joan of Arc ends the Siege of Orleans, pulling an arrow from her own shoulder and returning wounded to lead the final charge. The victory marks a turning point in the Hundred Years' War.

1824 - World premier of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Vienna, Austria.

1847 - In Philadelphia, the American Medical Association (AMA) is founded.

1915 - WWI: a German U-20 submarine sinks the RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. This turned many pro-Germans in the US against the German Empire.

1946 - Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (later remaned Sony) is founded with about 20 employees.

1960 - Cold War: U2 Crisis - Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announces that his nation is holding American U-2 pilot Gary Powers. It is rumored by some that Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK patsy, while serving as a double-agent for the CIA and the KGB, provided the Russians the location of Power's U2 spy plane.

1964 - Pacific Airlines Flight 773, a Fairchild F-27 airliner, crashes near San Ramon, California, killing all 44 aboard. The FBI later report that the cockpit recorder tape indicates that the pilot and co-pilot had been shot by a suicidal passenger.

1998 - Mercedes-Benz buys Chrysler for US$40 Billion and forms DaimlerChrysler in the largest industrial merger in history.

1999 - A jury finds The Jenny Jones Show and Warner Bros. liable in the shooting death of Scott Amedure, after the show purposely deceived Jonathan Schmitz to appear on a secret same-sex crush episode. Schmitz later killed Amedure and the jury awarded Amedure's family $25 million.

2002 - A China Southern Airlines MD-82 plunges into the Yellow Sea, killing 112 people.

2006 - Rolling Stone magazine publishes its 1000th issue.