Desmond Daniel Amofah (1990–2019), known as Etika, was an American YouTuber and live streamer, known online for his enthusiastic reactions to Super Smash Bros. character trailers and Nintendo Direct presentations. The son of Ghanaian politician Owuraku Amofah, he resided in Brooklyn. Starting his online career in 2007, Amofah created his main YouTube channel, EWNetwork (Etika World Network), in 2012. He garnered popularity following the release of Super Smash Bros. 4, primarily stemming from his reaction videos of news surrounding the game. Beginning in October 2018, Amofah showed signs of mental distress, and was reported missing on June 20, 2019. Officials confirmed his death on June 25, finding that he committed suicide by drowning. His death was met with shock and grief by fans and fellow YouTubers, with many commenting that Amofah's mental deterioration had been dismissed or ignored. Numerous commemorations were held to honor Amofah, including fan-made memorials and murals. (Full article...)
1374 – An outbreak of dancing mania, in which crowds of people danced themselves to exhaustion, began in Aachen (in present-day Germany) before spreading to other parts of Europe.
1409 – The Council of Pisa elected Peter of Candia as Pope Alexander V, becoming the third simultaneous claimant of the title of leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) was an English author who wrote 34 novels, 7 volumes of short stories and a daily journal of more than a million words. He also wrote or co-wrote 13 plays, wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the UK's Ministry of Information in the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. He was the most financially successful British author of his day. Because his books appealed to a wide public rather than to literary cliques and élites, and for his adherence to realism, Virginia Woolf and other writers and supporters of the modernist school belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. Studies of his writing since the 1970s have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work, and his finest novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works. (Full article...)
"Well he would, wouldn't he?" is an aphorism that is commonly used as a retort to a self-interested denial. It was said by the model Mandy Rice-Davies(pictured) while giving evidence at the 1963 trial of Stephen Ward, who had been accused of living off money paid to Rice-Davies and her friend Christine Keeler for sex: part of the larger Profumo affair. While being cross-examined Rice-Davies was told that Lord Astor, who owned the Cliveden estate that Ward rented a cottage on, had denied an affair with her: she replied "Well he would, wouldn't he?" Political, communications and psychological experts have interpreted it as a phrase which indicates the speaker believes a person is making a self-interested, obvious or irrelevant denial. They have also stated it functions as a retort to mistruths made by public figures. Linguistically, it has been noted for its use of the modal verb would to create rhetorical effect. The phrase has been included in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations since 1979. (Full article...)
1904 – In the worst maritime disaster involving a Danish merchant ship, SS Norge ran aground on Hasselwood Rock and sank in the North Atlantic, resulting in more than 635 deaths.
1989 – President Slobodan Milošević gave a speech in which he described the possibility of "armed battles" in the future of Serbia's national development.
Nihonium is a synthetic chemical element with symbol Nh and atomic number 113. It is extremely radioactive; its most stable known isotope, nihonium-286, has a half-life of about 10 seconds. In the periodic table, nihonium is a transactinide element at the intersection of period 7 and group 13. Its creation was reported in 2003 by a Russian–American collaboration at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and in 2004 by a team of Japanese scientists at Riken in Wakō, Japan. The discoveries were confirmed by independent teams working in the United States, Germany, Sweden, and China. In 2015 the element was officially recognised by the IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party; naming rights were assigned to Riken, as they were judged to have been first to confirm their discovery. The name, approved in the same year (announcement pictured), derives from a Japanese word for Japan, Nihon. Few details are known about nihonium, as it has only been formed in very small amounts that decay away within seconds. (Full article...)
1889 – Hyde Park and several other Illinois townships voted to be annexed by Chicago, forming the largest city by area in the United States and the second-largest by population.
OneShot is a puzzle-adventure game developed by indie studio Future Cat and published by Degica. Based on a free version released online on June 30, 2014, it was released for Windows on December 8, 2016. A console adaptation, OneShot: World Machine Edition, was released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on September 22, 2022. OneShot's gameplay and plot break the fourth wall and involve metafictional elements. Many puzzles involve interacting with the computer's operating system outside of the game. Narratively, the player is separate from the protagonist, Niko. The latter arrives in a world without sunlight and aims to restore it by replacing its sun, a lightbulb, at the top of a tower. OneShot was developed in RPG Maker XP. The game received positive reviews from critics, who praised the story, art, and metafictional aspects of gameplay, including the relationship between the player and Niko. In 2017, the game was nominated for the PC Game of the Year category at the Golden Joystick Awards. (Full article...)
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...)
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's reporting won numerous journalism awards and 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). She wrote the synth-pop, dream pop, and electropop song along with 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 due to 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 given to the delegates, at times outdated or inauthentic. (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...)
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