The flag of Canada is a red flag with a white square in its centre, featuring a stylized 11-pointed red maple leaf. It has become the predominant and most recognizable national symbol of Canada. It was adopted in 1965 to replace the Union Flag for most official purposes, although the Canadian Red Ensign had also been unofficially used since the 1860s and approved by a 1945 Order in Council. In 1964, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson appointed a committee to discuss these issues, sparking a serious debate about a flag change. Out of three choices, the maple leaf design by George Stanley, based on the flag of the Royal Military College of Canada, was chosen. It made its first appearance on February 15, 1965, a date now celebrated annually as National Flag of Canada Day. Other flags, usually containing the maple leaf motif in some fashion, have been created for use by Canadian officials, government bodies, and military forces. (Full article...)
1964 – The Civil Rights Act was signed into law, outlawing segregation in schools, at the workplace, and other facilities that served the general public in the United States.
Ed Bradley (1941–2006) was an American broadcast journalist best known for reporting with 60 Minutes and CBS News. Bradley started his television news career in 1971 as a stringer for CBS at the Paris Peace Accords. He won Alfred I. duPont and George Polk awards for his coverage of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. Returning to the United States, he became CBS's first Black White House correspondent. Bradley joined 60 Minutes in 1981 and reported on more than 500 stories with the program during his career, the most of any of his colleagues. Known for his fashion sense and disarming demeanor, Bradley won numerous journalism awards for his reporting, which has been credited with prompting federal investigations into psychiatric hospitals, lowering the cost of drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS, and ensuring that the accused in the Duke lacrosse case received a fair trial. He died of lymphocytic leukemia in 2006. (Full article...)
"Wildest Dreams" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift; it is the fifth single from her fifth studio album, 1989 (2014). Described by critics as synth-pop, dream pop, and electropop, the song was written by Swift and its producers Max Martin and Shellback. The lyrics feature Swift pleading with a lover to remember her even after their relationship ends. Retrospectively, critics have described "Wildest Dreams" as one of Swift's most memorable songs. The single peaked within the top five on charts in Australia, Canada, Poland, South Africa, and also the United States, where it became 1989's fifth consecutive top-ten single on the Billboard Hot 100. The track was certified four-times platinum. The music video depicts Swift as a classical Hollywood actress who falls in love with her co-star; media publications praised the production as cinematic but accused the video of glorifying colonialism. (This article is part of a featured topic: 1989 (album).)
Tales of Monkey Island is a graphic adventure video game developed by Telltale Games under license from LucasArts. It is the fifth game in the Monkey Island series, released a decade after the previous installment. The game was released in five episodic segments between July and December 2009. Players assume the role of Guybrush Threepwood, who accidentally releases a voodoo pox and seeks a cure. The game was conceived in late 2008 following renewed interest in adventure game development within LucasArts. Production began in early 2009, led by Dave Grossman(pictured). The game received generally positive reviews, with praise for its story, writing, humor, voice acting and characterization. Complaints focused on the quality of the game's puzzle design, a weak supporting cast in the early chapters, and the game's control system. Tales of Monkey Island garnered several industry awards and was Telltale's most commercially successful project until Back to the Future: The Game. (Full article...)
1983 – After writing a letter to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov, American schoolgirl Samantha Smith(pictured) visited the Soviet Union as Andropov's personal guest, becoming known as "America's Youngest Ambassador".
RoboCop is a 1987 American science fiction action film directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner. Set in a crime-ridden Detroit in the near future, it centers on police officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), who is murdered by a gang of criminals and revived by the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products as a cyborg. The director emphasized violence throughout the film, making it so outlandish that it became comical. RoboCop was a financial success upon its release in July 1987, earning $53.4million. Reviewers praised it as a clever action film with deeper philosophical messages and satire, but were conflicted about the violence. The film won an Academy Award for sound editing. RoboCop has been critically reevaluated since its release and hailed as one of the best films of the 1980s for its depiction of a cyborg coming to terms with the lingering fragments of its humanity. (Full article...)
The oceanic whitetip shark is a large requiem shark inhabiting tropical and warm temperate seas. It has a stocky body with long, white-tipped, rounded fins. The species is typically solitary but can congregate around food concentrations. It is found worldwide between 45°N and 43°S latitude in deep, open oceans. Bony fish and cephalopods are the main components of its diet. Females give live birth after a gestation period of nine to twelve months. Though slow-moving, it is opportunistic, aggressive, and reputed to be dangerous to shipwreck survivors. The shark was once extremely common and widely distributed; up to the 16th century, mariners noted that this species was the most common ship-following shark. The species has now been listed as critically endangered, and recent studies show steeply declining populations worldwide as the sharks are harvested for their fins and meat, like many other shark species. (Full article...)
1981 – Nintendo released the arcade game Donkey Kong(cabinet pictured), which featured the debut of Mario, one of the most famous characters in video-game history.
DeLancey W. Gill (1859–1940) was an American drafter, landscape painter, and photographer. As a teenager, he moved in with an aunt in Washington, D.C., after his mother and stepfather travelled west. He eventually found himself employed as an architectural draftsman for the Treasury. He created sketches and watercolor paintings of the city, with a particular focus on the still-undeveloped rural and poorer areas of the district. While working as an illustrator for the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology in the 1890s, he was appointed as the agency's photographer without prior photographic training. He took portrait photographs that circulated widely of thousands of Native American delegates to Washington, including notable figures such as Chief Joseph and Geronimo. These photographs have come under modern criticism for his frequent use of props and clothing, sometimes outdated or inauthentic, given to the delegates. (Full article...)
Still Reigning is a live performance DVD by the thrash metal band Slayer, released in 2004 through American Recordings. Filmed at the Augusta Civic Center on July 11, 2004, the performance showcases Reign in Blood (1986), Slayer's third studio album and its first to enter the Billboard 200. The album was played in its entirety with the four original band members on a set resembling their 1986 Reign in Pain Tour. Still Reigning was voted "best live DVD" by the readers of Revolver magazine, and received gold certification in 2005. In the finale, the band is covered in stage blood while performing the song "Raining Blood", leading to a demanding mixing process plagued by production and technical difficulties. The DVD's producer Kevin Shirley spent hours replacing cymbal and drum hits one-by-one. Later, Shirley publicly aired his financial disagreements with the band and criticized the quality of the recording. (Full article...)
1405 – Marking the start of Ming China's treasure voyages, an expeditionary fleet led by Zheng He(depicted) set sail for foreign regions of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Hypericum sechmenii (Seçmen's St John's wort) is a rare species of flowering plant in the St John's wort family that is found in Eskişehir Province in central Turkey. It was first described and assigned to the genus Hypericum in 2009, and was later placed into the section Adenosepalum. H. sechmenii is a perennial herb that grows 3–6 centimeters (1–2 inches) tall and blooms in June and July. The stems of the plant are smooth and lack hairs, while the leaves are leathery and lack leafstalks. Its flowers are arranged in corymbs, and each has five bright yellow petals. Similar species are H. huber-morathii, H. minutum, and H. thymopsis. Found among limestone rocks, H. sechmenii has an estimated distribution of less than 10 square kilometers, with fewer than 250 surviving plants. Despite containing druse crystals and toxic chemicals that may deter herbivory, the species is threatened by overgrazing, as well as climate change and habitat loss. (Full article...)
Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. Beginning as a cellist and conductor, Offenbach first wrote small-scale one-act pieces due to theatricial licensing laws. These eased by 1858 when he premiered his first full-length operetta, Orphée aux enfers. La belle Hélène (1864) and other successes followed. The risqué humour (often about sexual intrigue) and gentle satire in these pieces, together with his facility for melody, made them internationally known, and he was a powerful influence on later operetta and musical theatre composers. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory. (Full article...)
The Hanford Engineer Works (HEW) was a nuclear production complex in Benton County in the US state of Washington, established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Plutonium manufactured at the HEW was used in the atomic bomb detonated in the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, and the Fat Man bomb used in the bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. DuPont was the prime contractor for its design, construction and operation. The land acquisition was one of the largest in US history. Construction commenced in March 1943, and its workforce reached a peak of nearly 45,000 workers in June 1944. B Reactor, the world's first full-scale plutonium production nuclear reactor, went critical in September 1944, followed by D and F reactors in December 1944 and February 1945 respectively. The HEW suffered an outage on 10 March 1945 due to a Japanese balloon bomb. The total cost of the HEW up to December 1946 was over $348million (equivalent to $4.1billion in 2023). (Full article...)
Cora Agnes Benneson (1851–1919) was an American attorney, lecturer, and writer. She graduated from the University of Michigan, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1878, a Bachelor of Laws in 1880, and a Master of Arts in 1883, and was thereafter admitted to the bars of Illinois and Michigan. From 1883 to 1885, she traveled the world to learn about legal cultures and how they affected women. When she returned to the United States, she undertook a nationwide lecture tour to speak about her travels and observations. In 1886 Benneson briefly worked as an editor of West Publishing's law reports before taking up a history fellowship at Bryn Mawr College under then-professor Woodrow Wilson. In 1888 she moved to Boston, where she continued to write and lecture. She was licensed to practice law in Massachusetts in 1894 and opened a law practice. She was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1899 and elected secretary of its Social and Economic Science Section in 1900. (Full article...)
The Alpine ibex (Capra ibex), also known as the steinbock, is a species of goat that lives in the Alps of Europe. Its closest living relative is the Iberian ibex. They have brownish grey coats and sharp hooves adapted to steep, rough terrain. The males are larger than the females. Found at elevations as high as 3,300 m (10,800 ft), they are active throughout the year, primarily feeding on grass in open alpine meadows. Adult males and females segregate for most of the year, coming together only during the breeding season, when males fight for access to females using their long horns. The Alpine ibex has been successfully reintroduced to parts of its historical range, but all individuals living today descend from a population bottleneck of fewer than 100 individuals from Gran Paradiso National Park in Italy. The species has few predators and is not threatened, but it has very low genetic diversity. (Full article...)
Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s; these included seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. His wartime experiences as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I formed the basis for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, and he drew on his experience as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway was with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. (Full article...)
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