01|After 18 years of a Conservative Party government, British voters sweep the Labor Party into power in the House of Commons, and party leader Tony Blair becomes prime minister. In the wake of the worst defeat for the Conservative Party since 1832, John Major resigns as prime minister and party leader. Blair, who is 43 years old, is credited with moving Labor from a party dominated by socialists and labor unions to a moderately liberal position.|
02|President Bill Clinton and Republican leaders in Congress agree on a plan designed to balance the federal budget in five years. Democratic provisions include $35 billion in tax credits for college educations, $16 billion to $17 billion in expanded health coverage for uninsured children, and preservation of Medicaid's guaranteed medical coverage for poor people. Republican provisions reduce taxes, including the capital gains and estate taxes, by $85 billion and cut $115 billion from Medicare and $85 billion from other domestic programs.|
03|Five members of the militant Republic of Texas separatist group, including leader Richard L. McLaren, surrender after a seven day standoff with Texas law-enforcement officials. The standoff at the group's travel-trailer headquarters near Fort Davis, Texas, began on April 27, when Republic of Texas members abducted a local couple in response to the arrest of Bob Scheidt, the separatists' security chief. McLaren demanded Scheidt's release, and when authorities released him, McLaren released the couple. The standoff continued for several more days, however. More than 100 law-enforcement officials continue to comb the David Mountains of West Texas for two Republic of Texas members who fled into the mountains on foot.|
04|Thousands of Rwandan refugees swarm onto a train leaving the Biaro refugee camp in Zaire. The severe overcrowding forces the weak to the bottom of the cars, suffocating and crushing to death more than 100 people. Hundreds more are discovered injured when the train arrives in Kisangani, where the refugees were to be airlifted to Rwanda.|
05|Actor Charlton Heston is elected first vice president of the board of the National Rifle Association, the powerful gun lobby that currently advocates repealing the ban on assault weapons. Heston's election is seen by some political observers as an attempt to improve the organization's image.|
06|Thomas Richard Jones, the first American convicted of first-degree murder for homicides resulting from drunken driving, is spared the death penalty by a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, jury and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors claim that the sentence is the toughest ever handed down in such a case.|
07|The United Nations war crimes tribunal, meeting in The Hague, capital of the Netherlands, finds Dusan Tadic, a Bosnian Serb, guilty on multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Tadic's conviction is the first made by the tribunal, which is investigating atrocities committed during the Bosnian War.|
08|The Republican Party returns $100,000 in campaign contributions to the donor, which Republican National Committee Chairman James Nicolson concedes is a dummy corporation controlled by Taiwanese businessmen working out of Hong Kong. The same firm guaranteed $2.2 million in bank loans to the National Policy Forum, a nonprofit research organization established in 1993 by Haley Barbour. Barbour was chairman of the Republican Party during the 1996 presidential campaign, the time period of the loans and contribution.|
09|James Pardew, speaking for the U.S. State Department, announces that the United States is sending 116 large artillery pieces to the Muslim and Croat forces of the Bosnian Federation in anticipation of a 1998 withdrawal of American peacekeeping forces from Bosnia. The Federation currently holds six such pieces. According to Pardew, strengthening the federation army improves chances for maintaining peace by counterbalancing the strength of the Bosnian Serb army, which controls the half of Bosnia and Herzegovina not controlled by the federation. Peace between the groups, brokered in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, has been maintained by U.S. and European troops stationed in Bosnia.|
10|A magnitude 7.1 earthquake shakes a mountainous region in northeastern Iran. Some 200 villages are leveled, leaving at least 4,000 people dead, 6,000 injured, and 50,000 homeless. Three major earthquakes and dozens of aftershocks have rocked northeastern Iran since early February, resulting in the deaths of more than 5,000 people.|
11|World chess champion Garry Kasparov loses a six-game match against Deep Blue, the International Business Machine RS/6000 ST computer. Kasparov crumbles after only 19 moves in the final game to give the computer a 3 1/2 to 2 1/2 victory. Regarded in the chess world as humanity's last, best hope against the relentless march of the computer, Kasparov remained highly competitive through the first four games but became agitated and visibly dispirited in game five on May 10. Kasparov, who has never before lost a multigame match, retains his title, but his defeat goes into the record books as the first time a machine bested a world-class champion at chess.|
12|The deputy chief of a Mount Everest search-and-rescue service announces that six climbers--three Russians, a German, a South Korean, and a Nepalese--from three expeditions attempting to scale the mountain's north face appear to have been lost in a blizzard on May 11 and are probably dead. One year ago, eight climbers died under similar circumstances while attempting to climb the world's tallest mountain. Since the May 1996 disaster, climbers have debated imposing minimum standards for prospective climbers to keep amateurs off the mountain. No action, however, has been taken by climbing organizations or the businesses that organize Everest expeditions.|
13|A bomb explodes in the heart of Beijing, the Chinese capital, in a park across from the compound where national leaders are housed. The bombing is the third such incident in Beijing since the death of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping on Feb. 19, 1997.|
14|Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance consisting of the United States, Canada, and 14 Western European countries, agree to terms under which NATO will expand into European countries that were former satellites of the Soviet Union. NATO, formed in 1949 to discourage a Soviet attack on non-Communist, European countries, agrees to establish a NATO-Russian security council. While NATO refuses to place a ceiling on numbers of troops that will be stationed in newly admitted countries, it pledges not to store or deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members. The Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary are expected to be the first former Communist countries to join the alliance.|
15|Janet Reno, U.S. attorney general, announces that she has authorized federal prosecutors in the Unabomber case to seek the death penalty for suspect Theodore J. Kaczynski. The suspect was arrested in 1996, after his brother alerted authorities to the role Kaczynski may have played in the bombings, which resulted in the deaths of 3 people and the wounding of 23 others over a 17-year period.|
16|The Dow Jones industrial average stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange decline by 138.88 points, 1.89 percent of their May 15 closing market value.|
17|As residents of Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, cheer the victorious rebel army entering the city, rebel leader Laurent Kabila pronounces himself president and changes the country's name back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Former President Mobutu Sese Seko, who gave the name Zaire to the country that he controlled for nearly 32 years, fled the capital on May 16.|
18|Palestinian security officials announce that the body of a murdered man who had been accused of selling land to Israelis has been discovered in the West Bank town of Ramallah. The body, shot in the head at point-blank range, is the second to turn up in Ramallah since the Palestinian Authority announced on May 5 that it would impose a death sentence on any Arab who sold land to Jews. The authority, which denies involvement in both incidents, claims it would try any person so accused before executing him.|
19|More than 100 people are killed in Bangladesh when a cyclone with winds of 125 miles (200 kilometers) per hour sweeps over the islands of Maheshkhali, Kutubdia, and St. Martin's and crashes into the area around Cox's Bazar on the flat southeastern coast. The storm destroys approximately 400,000 houses, leaving as many as 1 million people homeless.|
20|Steven Burmeister, a Federal Bureau of Investigation chemist testifying at the Timothy McVeigh trial in Denver, Colorado, discloses that he found residue of an explosive on McVeigh's clothing and personal belongings after the man accused of the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was arrested less than two hours after the explosion that left 168 people dead.|
21|British officials meet with leaders of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) for the first time since the IRA broke a cease-fire in February 1996 with a London bomb attack that resulted in the deaths of two people. British Prime Minister Anthony Blair suggested reopening negotiations with Sinn Fein just two weeks after he took office on May 2, 1997.|
22|America's first female B-52 pilot, Lieutenant Kelly Flinn, agrees to a general discharge from the U.S. Air Force rather than face charges of adultery, lying, fraternization, and disobedience of direct orders. Through much of the previous week, Flinn had maintained that if she were not granted an honorable discharge, she would demand a hearing before a military court, a spectacle that the Air Force wanted to avoid. If convicted, Lieutenant Flinn could have been sentenced to a nine-year prison term.|
23|Mohammed Khatami, a moderate who campaigned on a platform of social reform and tolerance, is overwhelmingly elected president of Iran. Receiving 69 percent of the vote in a race against three other candidates, Khatami is the first moderate since the 1979 Islamic revolution to be elected to office by a broad mandate. Khatami, who was not the candidate favored by Iran's ruling Islamic clerics, was forced from public office in 1992 for being "too permissive."|
24|Soldiers of the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist group that controls much of Afghanistan, capture Mazar-I-Sharif, a northern city that was the last obstacle to uniting the country for the first time since the Soviet invaders left in 1989. Since taking control of Kabul, the capital, in September 1996, the Taliban has imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law, barring women from holding jobs or appearing in public without a veil, forcing men to pray in mosques, and banning most sources of entertainment.|
25|Mutinous soldiers in Sierra Leone seize the national legislature and burn the treasury in Freetown, the capital. Grenades and mortar fire damage the American embassy. The president of Sierra Leone, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, flees to neighboring Guinea.|
25|Senator Strom Thurmond, the oldest person ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, breaks the record of Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona to become the longest serving senator in history. The 94-year-old Republican, who ran against Harry Truman for president in 1948 on the Dixicrat ticket, has served in the Senate for 41 years and 10 months.|
26|France's conservative prime minister, Alain Juppe, announces that he will resign his post regardless of the outcome of the second round of legislative elections on May 29. In the first round on May 22, the two parties making up Juppe's coalition took less than 30 percent of the vote.|
27|The U.S. Supreme Court rules 9 to 0 that a sitting president of the United States can be sued while in office for actions unrelated to official duties. The decision allows Paula Corbin Jones, a former employee of the state of Arkansas, to sue President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment. Jones, who filed the suit two days before the three-year statute for limitations expired, asks $700,000 in damages for what she alleges was an unwanted sexual overture made to her by Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, in a hotel room in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991.|
27|Violent tornadoes cut a swath through central Texas, hitting towns in a line stretching from just south of Dallas to west of San Antonio. Twenty-seven people are killed and more than 300 houses leveled when a tornado, with winds up to 260 miles (418 kilometers) per hour, rips through Jarrell, a town of 1,000 residents, 38 miles (61 kilometers) north of Austin, the state capital.|
28|Louis Frank of the University of Iowa reports to the American Geophysical Union, meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, that thousands of dirty snowballs, individually weighing as much as 40 short tons (36 metric tons), bombard Earth's atmosphere daily. According to Frank, the snowballs add water to the air and oceans and, over millions of years, may have played an integral role in the development and maintenance of life on Earth. The snowballs were detected by an instrument, developed by Frank, aboard the Polar spacecraft launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1996.|
29|Laurent Kabila, leader of the rebel forces that took control of Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo) on May 17, is sworn in as president in Kinshasa, the capital. In his inaugural address, Kabila promises a new constitution and free elections in 1999. The ceremony is attended by the presidents of Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia--countries that many believe supplied aid to Kabila and his forces in the civil war that ousted dictator Mobutu Sese Seko after nearly 32 years in power.|
30|In Indonesia, President Suharto's Golkar party wins 74 percent of all votes cast in the May 29 national election. Suharto, who is 75 and has held power for 31 years, waged a campaign that was marred by antigovernment protests and violent confrontations that resulted in the deaths of more than 200 people.|
31|Demonstrators rallying in opposition to the policies of President of Kenya Daniel arap Moi are attacked in the streets of Nairobi, the capital, by hundreds of riot police, some of whom are on horseback. The demonstrators, who took to the streets demanding constitutional reforms, are fired on with tear gas and rubber bullets and beat with truncheons. In the ensuing riot, passing cars are stoned and turned over and shops broken into and looted. Critics of Moi's government argue that existing election laws favor incumbents and allow people in opposition to the government to be placed in detention without trial.|
