Mutsu was the second of two Nagato-class dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Japanese Navy at the end of World War I. Named after Mutsu Province, the ship was launched on 31 May 1920. In 1923, a year after commissioning, she carried supplies for the survivors of the Great Kantō earthquake. The ship was modernised in the mid 1930s with improvements to her armour and machinery, and a rebuilt superstructure in the pagoda mast style. Other than participating in the battles of Midway and the Eastern Solomons in 1942, where she saw no significant combat, Mutsu spent most of the first year of the Pacific War in training. She returned to Japan in early 1943. That June, one of her aft magazines detonated while she was at anchor, sinking the ship with the loss of 1,121 crew and visitors. The navy conducted a perfunctory investigation into the cause of her loss, concluded that it was the work of a disgruntled crewmember, and dispersed the survivors in an attempt to conceal the sinking within Japan. Much of the wreck was salvaged after the war and many of its artefacts and relics are on display in Japanese museums. (Full article...)

Aruncus sawfly larva

• ... that all aruncus sawflies (larva pictured) are female?
• ... that actress Charlotte Salt likened her Casualty character Sam Nicholls to Lara Croft?
• ... that freight derailments occurred at both of Wachusett's predecessor stations?
• ... that mezzo-soprano Eva Randová was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for her performance as the Kostelnička Buryjovka in Janáček's Jenůfa at the Royal Opera House?
• ... that the cyberpunk science-fiction genre was named after the 1983 short story "Cyberpunk" by Bruce Bethke?
• ... that anchovy paste has been used for centuries to provide flavor for foods and as a source of nutrition?
• ... that Mary Florence Potts patented various styles of cold-handle clothes irons that were the most popular irons ever used?
• ... that in the 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets, the actor Alec Guinness plays nine members of the same family?

Ruben Östlund

• The Square, directed by Ruben Östlund (pictured), wins the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
• Masked gunmen attack a bus convoy of Coptic Christians in Egypt, and Egyptian warplanes strike alleged militant camps in Libya in response.
• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declares martial law in Mindanao amidst armed clashes with the Islamist Maute group in Marawi City.
• A suicide bombing after an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in the United Kingdom kills 22 people and injures more than 100 others.
• In ice hockey, the IIHF World Championship concludes with Sweden defeating Canada in the final.

May 31: World No Tobacco Day; Feast of the Visitation (Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism)

The first Madison Square Garden

• 1223 – Mongol invasions: Mongol forces defeated a combined army of Kiev, Galich, and the Cumans at the Kalchik River in present-day Ukraine.
• 1879 – Gilmore's Garden in New York City was renamed Madison Square Garden (pictured), the city's first venue to use that name.
• 1902 – The Second Boer War came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging.
• 1935 – An earthquake of magnitude 7.7 M_w struck Balochistan in the British Raj, now part of Pakistan, killing between 30,000 and 60,000 people.
• 1981 – An organized mob of police and government-sponsored paramilitias began burning the public library in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, destroying over 97,000 items in one of the most violent examples of ethnic biblioclasm of the 20th century.

Albertino Mussato (d. 1329) · Walt Whitman (b. 1819) · Chien-Shiung Wu (b. 1912)