1213        May 15, King John submitted to the Pope, offering to make England and Ireland papal fiefs. Pope Innocent III lifted the interdict of 1208. He named Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury.

1718        May 15, James Puckle, a London lawyer, patented the world’s 1st machine gun

1800        May 15, King George III survived a 2nd assassination attempt.

1935        May 15, Kasimir Malevich (b.1878), Ukraine-born Cubist painter, died. He was a leader of the Suprematist movement in Russian painting. He pioneered the use of abstract geometrical elements and limited colors to demonstrate the supremacy of expressing feelings.

1958        May 15, Vice President Richard Nixon received a hero’s welcome on his return from a violence-marred tour of Latin America.

1973        May 15, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer teamed up on NPACT’s coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings. In 1975 the MacNeil-Lehrer Report” premiered on PBS.

 

1987        May 15, President Reagan told a gathering of out-of-town reporters at the White House he did not consider himself “mortally wounded” by the Iran-Contra affair.

 

1996        May 15, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of the Lincoln, Nebraska, diocese in a March diocesan newspaper ordered Catholics to quit 12 proscribed groups or face excommunication. The groups included: Planned Parenthood, Call to Action, Catholics for a Free Choice, The Hemlock Society, and Masonic organizations such as the Rainbow Girls and others.

 

1997        May 15, Pres. Fidel Ramos of the Philippines visited California and planned to announce a pact with Oracle Corp. to wire the country for long-distance phone service.

 

2003        May 15, June Carter Cash (73), the Grammy-winning scion of one of country music’s pioneering families and the wife of Johnny Cash, died of complications from heart surgery.

 

2004        May 15, William Hinton (b.1919), American agronomist and author: “Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village” (1966), died.

 

2007        May 15, Pres. Bush tapped Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as a new White House War Czar. At least 5 four-star generals had turned the offer down.

 

2007        May 15, The Rev. Jerry Falwell (73), the television minister whose 1979 founding of the Moral Majority galvanized American religious conservatives into a political force, died.

 

2007        May 15, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Brazil will push to improve working conditions for sugarcane cutters who harvest most of the cane that is turned into ethanol for the nation’s booming biofuel industry. A jury voted 5-2 to convict rancher Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura of masterminding the shooting of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang, an American nun and rain forest defender on Feb. 12, 2005, in a case seen as an important test of justice in the largely lawless Amazon region. This ruling was overturned in 2008 after the man who confessed to shooting Stang recanted earlier testimony, insisting that he’d acted alone. Gunman Rayfran das Neves Sales was sentenced to 28 years in prison. In 2009 Para state’s top court reversed the 2008 not-guilty verdict for Vitalmiro Moura on a technicality.

 

2008        May 15, Bob Florence (b.1932), a Grammy Award sinning bandleader, died in LA. His 18-piece Bob Florence Limited Edition band was considered one of the most musically challenging bands in jazz.

 

2008        May 15, In Mexico Pres. Calderon held a signing ceremony for an agreement with Elba Esther Gordillo, head of the national teacher’s union, to promote the “Alliance for Educational Quality, an effort to improve teacher quality.

 

2010        May 15, Moshe Greenberg (81), an influential Bible scholar, died in Jerusalem. His work won the first-ever Israel Prize for biblical studies (1994). His definitive two-volume commentary on the Book of Ezekiel described, among other things, how the prohibition of murder became an unbreakable taboo with the Abrahamic religions because of the rise of a belief in man’s connection to God.

 

2010        May 15, Thailand’s PM Abhisit Vejjajiva defended the deadly army crackdown on the Red Shirt protesters besieging the capital, saying there was no turning back as clashes raged in the center of Bangkok. Violence Bangkok claimed 8 more lives as the embattled premier vowed no turning back and the army threatened a crackdown on thousands of protesters.

 

2012        May 15, Francois Hollande became president of France.

 

2013        May 15, Pres. Obama announced the resignation of Steven Miller, acting com missioner of the IRS. US Attorney General Eric Holder promised angry lawmakers that the Justice Department will undertake a national investigation into the IRS wrongdoing. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew forced out Steven Miller. A Treasury Department Inspector General’s report had detailed how the IRS in 2010 had targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.

2014        May 15, An Azerbaijan opposition journalist Parviz Gashimly was sentenced on to eight years in prison in a case critics say highlights a government-led crackdown on dissent in the oil-rich former Soviet republic. He was arrested last September after police raided his apartment and reported finding firearms.