This Day in History, May 31

On May 31st, 1678, the Godiva procession through Coventry began.

In 1790, U.S. President George Washington signed into law the first U.S. copyright law.

In 1889, a flood in Johnstown, Pa., left more than 2,200 people dead.

In 1902, Britain and South Africa signed a peace treaty ending the Boer War.

In 1962, Israel hanged Adolf Eichmann for his part in the killing of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany in World War II.

In 1973, the U.S. Senate voted to cut off funds for U.S. bombing of Cambodia.

In 1985, seven federally insured banks in Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska and Oregon were closed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. It was a single-day record for closings since the FDIC was founded in 1934.

In 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev opened a four-day summit in Washington, focusing on the role of a united Germany in Europe.

In 1991, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney announced the United States had begun storing military supplies in Israel for use in future conflicts.

In 1994, U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., was indicted on felony charges, including embezzlement.

In 2003, Eric Robert Rudolph, the long-sought fugitive in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing and attacks on abortion clinics and a gay nightclub, in which two died, was arrested while rummaging through a dumpster in North Carolina.

In 2004, a bomb ripped through a Shiite mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, while worshippers were saying evening prayers. Sixteen people were killed.

In 2005, Mark Felt admitted that, while No. 2 man in the FBI, he was "Deep Throat," the shadowy contact whose help to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the 1972 Watergate break-in led to U.S. President Richard Nixon's resignation.

In 2006, officials said an estimated 200,000 people had died in the three-year civil in Sudan's Darfur region and 2 million more had become refugees. The government and one rebel group agreed to stop fighting earlier in the month.

Also in 2006, Kimberly Dozier, the 39-year-old CBS reporter injured in a Baghdad bomb blast, was listed in critical but stable condition at a military hospital in Germany. Two members of the crew were killed.

In 2007, U.S. President George Bush called on the world's top polluters to develop together a strategy to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.

Also in 2007, a civilian Nigerian president was succeeded by another civilian for the first time in history.