On May 31, 455 A.D., Emperor Petronius Maximus was stoned to death by an angry mob while fleeing Rome.
On that date in 1578, King Henry III laid the first stone of the Pont Neuf (New Bridge), the oldest bridge of Paris, France.
In other rock history, May 31, 2013, marked the closest approach to Earth that the asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon will get until two centuries hence.
In 2005, Vanity Fair revealed that Mark Felt, then Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was Watergate informer “Deep Throat.” While the Watergate business was, at core, about a hotel office break-in by a contract team for Richard M. Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, Felt himself, along with Edward S. Miller, ordered FBI agents to break into homes secretly in 1972 and 1973, sans search warrants, on nine separate occasions. These “black bag jobs” occurred at five addresses in New York and New Jersey, of relatives and acquaintances of Weather Underground members. Felt and Miller were prosecuted and found guilty of these crimes, and Nixon himself testified on his behalf and gave his defense fund money. President Ronald Reagan pardoned both Miller and Mark “Deep Throat” Felt.