According to widely followed Theravada Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha Gautama was born in Lumbini, in present-day Nepal, to Queen Maya of the Shakya clan. Though the precise historical date is debated by scholars, this day is commemorated across South and Southeast Asia as part of Vesak, marking the Buddha's birth, enlightenment, and death, all believed to have occurred on the same lunar day.

Pope Clement VII arranged the marriage contract binding Catherine de' Medici, orphaned heiress of Florence's ruling family, to Henry, Duke of Orléans, second son of King Francis I of France. The union bound the Medici fortune and papal ambition to the French crown, and though childless and unhappy for years, Catherine would eventually become queen and one of the most powerful women in French history.

Amid published German threats that ships flying Allied flags in war zones were liable to destruction, the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania left Pier 54 in New York bound for Liverpool with nearly 1,900 passengers and crew aboard. German embassy notices in American newspapers that very morning warned travelers of the danger. On May 7, a German U-boat torpedoed the ship off the Irish coast, killing 1,198 people and inflaming American opinion against Germany.

Pope Pius XI presided over the opening of a new pinacoteca and museum wing within Vatican City, part of an ambitious expansion that consolidated centuries of papal art collecting into a coherent public institution. The project reflected the Vatican's efforts, after the 1929 Lateran Treaty settled its territorial status, to present itself as both a spiritual and cultural capital.

After days of brutal street fighting and a Soviet assault that reduced much of the city to rubble, General Helmuth Weidling signed the unconditional surrender of Berlin. Adolf Hitler had killed himself two days earlier in the Führerbunker. The city's fall marked the practical end of Nazi Germany, though the formal instrument of surrender would not be signed until May 7-8.

As Soviet forces closed in on victory in Europe, SMERSH counterintelligence officers arrested Captain Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a decorated artillery officer, for letters criticizing Stalin and Soviet conduct of the war. He was stripped of rank and sent to labor camps for eight years, an ordeal that would furnish the raw material for 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' and 'The Gulag Archipelago.'

Israeli archaeologist Eleazar Sukenik made public his acquisition and study of ancient manuscripts, purchased through Bedouin intermediaries, that had been found in caves near the Dead Sea. The scrolls, later dated to between the third century BCE and first century CE, included some of the oldest known biblical texts and transformed scholarly understanding of Judaism and early Christianity.

In the early hours of May 2 local time, members of SEAL Team Six flew into Abbottabad, Pakistan, aboard stealth helicopters and stormed a walled compound where al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been hiding for years. The 40-minute raid killed bin Laden and several others; President Barack Obama announced the operation to the world that night, closing a chapter that began with the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.