City to Liverpool. The best-known of the celebrities on board was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. American sportsman (b. 1877) May 9 – WWI – Second Battle of Artois: German and French forces fight to a standstill; German forces defeat the British at the Battle of Aubers Ridge. May 17 – The last purely Liberal government in the United Kingdom ends, when the prime minister H. H. Asquith forms an all-party coalition government, the Asquith coalition ministry, effective May 25. May 19 – WWI: The third attack on Anzac Cove by Ottoman forces is repelled by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. May 22 Quintinshill rail disaster in Scotland: The collision and fire kill 226, mostly troops, the largest number of fatalities in a rail accident in the United Kingdom. Lassen Peak, one of the Cascade Volcanoes in California, erupts, sending an ash plume 30,000 feet in the air, and devastating the nearby area with pyroclastic flows and lahars. It is the only volcano to erupt in the contiguous United States this century, until the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. May 23 – WWI: Italy joins the Allies after declaring war on Austria-Hungary. May 25 – China agrees to the Twenty-One Demands of the Japanese. May 27 – Armenian genocide: The Tehcir Law is promulgated by the Turkish Ottoman Empire authorizing deportation of the Ottoman Armenian population to Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert, leading to the deaths of anywhere between 800,000 and over 1,500,000 civilians and confiscation of their property. May 28 – International Congress of Women meets at the Hague as a major peace initiative. May 29 – Teófilo Braga becomes president of Portugal. June June – Armenian genocide: 15,000 civilians from the Ottoman Armenian population of Bitlis are massacred by Ottoman Turks and Kurds. June 3 – Mexican Revolution: Troops of Álvaro Obregón and Pancho Villa clash at León; Obregón loses his right arm in a grenade attack, but Villa is decisively defeated. June 5 – Women's suffrage in national elections is introduced in Denmark. June 9 – U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigns over a disagreement regarding his nation's handling of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. June 11 – Friar Leonard Melki and hundreds of other Christians are driven out of Mardin and massacred by Ottoman troops. June 16 – Women's Institutes are established in Britain. June 19 – In Iceland, at this