DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Tuesday, May 31, the 151st day of 2022. There are 214 days left in the year. On this date in:
1790: President George Washington signed into law the first U.S. copyright act.
1859: The Big Ben clock tower in London went into operation, chiming for the first time.
1921: A race riot erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as white mobs began looting and leveling the affluent Black district of Greenwood over reports a Black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator; hundreds are believed to have died.
1949: Former State Department official and accused spy Alger Hiss went on trial in New York, charged with perjury (the jury deadlocked, but Hiss was convicted in a second trial).
1962: Former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann
was hanged in Israel a few minutes before midnight for his role in the Holocaust.
1970: A magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Peru claimed an estimated 67,000 lives.
1977: The Trans-alaska oil pipeline, three years in the making despite objections from environmentalists and Alaska Natives, was completed. (The first oil began flowing through the pipeline 20 days later.)
1989: House Speaker Jim Wright, dogged by questions about his ethics, announced he would resign. (Tom Foley later succeeded him.)
2009: Dr. George Tiller, a rare provider of late-term abortions, was shot and killed in a Wichita, Kansas, church. (Gunman Scott Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 50 years.) Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, died in Southampton, England, at 97.
2014: Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier held prisoner in Afghanistan, was freed by the Taliban in exchange for five Afghan detainees from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Bergdahl, who’d gone missing in June 2009, later pleaded guilty to endangering his comrades by walking away from his post in Afghanistan; his sentence included a dishonorable discharge, a reduction in rank and a fine, but no prison time.)
2019: A longtime city employee opened fire in a municipal building in Virginia Beach, Virginia, killing 12 people on three floors before police shot and killed him; officials said Dewayne Craddock had resigned by email hours before the shooting.
Actor-director Clint Eastwood is 92. Singer Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary is 84. Keyboardist Augie Meyers
of the Texas Tornadoes and the Sir Douglas Quintet is 82. Actor Sharon Gless (“Cagney and Lacey”) is 79. Actor Tom Berenger is 72. Actor Gregory Harrison is 72. Actor Kyle Secor (“Homicide: Life on the Street”) is 65. Actor Roma Maffia
(“Nip/tuck,” “Profiler”) is 64. Comedian Chris Elliott is 62. Actor Lea Thompson (“Caroline in the City,” “Back to the Future”) is 61. Singer Corey Hart is 60. Rapper DMC of RUN-DMC is 58. Actor Brooke Shields is 57. Country bassist Ed Adkins of The Derailers is 55. “The Amazing Race” host Phil Keoghan is 55. Jazz bassist Christian Mcbride is 50.