1302 In Bruges, weaver Pieter de Coninck led an insurrection of local, untrained Flemish militia against the occupying forces of French King Philip IV. 2,000 people died, mostly French troops.
1593 British authorities issued an arrest warrant for Elizabethan poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe on charges of heresy. Thomas Kyd, the playwright's former roommate, had been arrested but under torture claimed the "vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ" found in his room belonged to Marlowe.
1619 The States General of Netherlands sentenced Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius to life in prison for his role in the intra-Calvinist dispute of the Dutch Republic. Grotius supported religious tolerance vs. the Calvinist hard-liners. He escaped in a trunk “full of books” two years later.
1631 In violation of the colony’s charter with England, officers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony granted voting rights only to church-going Puritan males.
1643 Anne of Austria, widow of French King Louis XIII, convinced the Parlement of Paris to annul her husband's will and make her sole and absolute regent until her son became of age. Louis XIV began his rule in 1661.
1652 The colony of Rhode Island passed the first anti-slavery legislation in North America.
1852 Massachusetts ruled all children 8-14 must attend school for at least three months out of the year. Violators faced a maximum fine of $20 and prosecution by local authorities.
1896 The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson as "separate but equal." The precedent was overturned in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education.
1904 Moroccan tribal leader Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli and his bandits kidnapped Greek-American playboy Ion H. Perdicaris and his stepson in Morocco. Raisuli demanded a ransom of $70,000, the release of political prisoners, control of more districts, and other political stipulations. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt sent warships to the Mediterranean, with armed support from England, France, and Spain. Sultan Abdelaziz of Morocco acceded to most of Raisuli's demands and the hostages returned home June 24.
1926 Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished from a beach in Santa Monica, California. She reappeared a month later claiming she had been kidnapped.
1927 In the worst school massacre in history, 55-year-old Michigan farmer and school board member Andrew Kehoe killed his wife and firebombed his house and outbuildings before proceeding to the Bath Consolidated School building, where he set off a series of explosions that killed 45 people, mostly children, and injured 58 more. He had been planting explosives in the basement of the elementary school for more than a year. As rescuers arrived, Kehoe detonated dynamite inside his shrapnel-filled truck, killing himself and four others. Rescuers searching for survivors in the debris found 500 pounds of dynamite in the south wing of the school that failed to detonate. Kehoe was angered by higher school taxes and his defeat for the office of Bath Township Clerk and faced eviction from his farm.
1944 The Soviet government deported 200,000 Crimean Tatars en masse to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin accused them of collaborating with the Germans during World War II. Nearly half of those deported, mostly women and children, perished between 1944 and 1947 in the harsh exile conditions.
1971 Police in Calgary discovered the last victim of vampire rapist Wayne Boden. An orthodontist matched impressions of the bite marks on Elizabeth Anne Porteou to suspect Boden, who admitted to killing four women during rough sex. He would reach a frenzy while strangling his victims and feel compelled to feast on their breasts. An Alberta jury sentenced him to life in prison, making Boden the first murderer convicted in North America on odontological evidence. He received additional life sentences for the three murders committed earlier in Montreal.
1980 In Kwangju South Korea, government troops beat 600 students at Chonnam University gathered to protest the suppression of academic freedom. Civilians opposed to military rule soon joined them, with nearly a quarter of a million people participating in the uprising nationwide over the next three days. By May 27, troops had completely crushed the rebellion, killing as many as 2,000 civilians.
1983 The U.S. Senate passed a revision of immigration laws that would give millions of illegal aliens legal status under an amnesty program.
1992 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled states cannot force mentally unstable criminal defendants to take anti-psychotic drugs.
1993 Italian police arrested fugitive Mafia boss Benedetto "Nitto" Santapaola in a farmhouse in Sicily. "All things have to end," he reportedly told the arresting officers. Italy’s “Most Wanted Man” had been on the run for 11 years.
1998 The U.S. Department of Justice and attorneys general of twenty states filed a sweeping antitrust case against Microsoft Corp., claiming Microsoft made it difficult for consumers to install competing software on computers operated by Windows and was therefore a monopoly. The software giant appealed a federal judge’s order to split into two entities and won, but agreed to share computing interfaces with other companies.
1998 U.S. Treasury and Justice Department officials arrested 142 people and seized $35 million in what is believed to be the largest money laundering case in history. U.S. Customs-led undercover agents of “Operation Casablanca” investigated the money laundering operations of a dozen Mexican banks linked to Colombian and Mexican drug-smuggling cartels.
2003 President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia declared martial law and sent 30,000 troops into Aceh, Sumatra, to suppress a separatist rebellion. The movement finally collapsed in 2005 after the crackdown by the Indonesian military and the devastation wrought by the 2004 tsunami.
2009 The 25-year civil war in Sri Lanka ended. The government announced it had gained control of the last bit of territory held by the Tamil Tigers separatist group and killed its leader.
2010 John Langley, co-owner of the Red and Black Café, in Portland, Oregon, asked police officer James Crooker to leave his store, claiming Crooker's uniformed presence made the customers of his vegan coffeeshop uncomfortable.
2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as head of the International Monetary Fund after his arrest May 15 on charges that he sexually assaulted a housekeeper in a midtown New York hotel room. The state eventually dropped the charges of attempted rape, sex abuse, forcible touching, and unlawful imprisonment, although the one-time candidate for the French presidency later settled a civil case for a confidential amount purported to be $6 million.
2018 Armed with a 12-gauge Remington 870 shotgun, a Rossi .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, and explosives, 17-year-old student Dimitrios Pagourtzis opened fire at the Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas near Houston, fatally shooting eight students and two teachers and wounding 13 others. Police officers stationed at the school returned fire and wounded Pagourtzis, who then surrendered.
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