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Record 17042026 · captured 2026-08-25

Friday, 17 April 2026

The world looked up Justin Fairfax. 30 tracked subjects, 25 discussions, 25 papers. This record is frozen and will not change.

Complete record JSON

← 2026-04-16 Friday, 17 April 2026 2026-04-18 →

Attention 30

What the most people looked up, ranked by Wikipedia pageviews for that day.

  1. 639,167views

    Justin Fairfax

    Justin Edward Fairfax was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 41st lieutenant governor of Virginia from 2018 to 2022. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the second African American to be elected to statewide office in Virginia, after Doug

  2. 268,502views

    Alex Manninger

    Alexander Manninger was an Austrian footballer who played as a goalkeeper. He played internationally for the Austria national team on 33 occasions, including at UEFA Euro 2008, and represented football clubs in Italy, Germany, Austria and England.

  3. 161,731views

    Dhurandhar: The Revenge

    Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a 2026 Indian Hindi-language spy action-thriller film written and directed by Aditya Dhar. It is produced by Dhar, Lokesh Dhar, and Jyoti Deshpande under Jio Studios and B62 Studios. It is a sequel to the 2025 film Dhurandhar and the

  4. 144,410views

    List of highest-grossing Indian films

    This ranking lists the highest-grossing Indian films produced by Indian cinema, based on conservative global box office estimates as reported by organisations classified as green by Wikipedia. The figures are not adjusted for inflation. However, there is no of

  5. 133,554views

    Deaths in 2026

    The following notable deaths occurred in 2026. Names are reported under the date of death, in alphabetical order. A typical entry reports information in the following sequence:Name, age, country of citizenship at birth, subsequent nationality, what subject was

  6. 126,044views

    Castalius

    Castalius is a butterfly genus in the family Lycaenidae. They are commonly known as Pierrots. This name is also often used for the very closely related genus Tarucus.

  7. 118,189views

    Food and Drug Administration (Philippines)

    The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the Philippines, formerly the Bureau of Food and Drugs, is a health regulatory agency under the Department of Health. It was created in 1963 by Republic Act No. 3720, amended in 1987 by Executive Order 175 otherwise kn

  8. 112,746views

    Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas Natural Park

    Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas Natural Park is a natural park in the eastern and northeastern part of the province of Jaén, Spain, established in 1986. With an area of 2,099.2 square kilometres (810.5 sq mi), it is the largest protected area in Spain

  9. 109,665views

    Michael Olise

    Michael Akpovie Olise is a professional footballer who plays as a winger or attacking midfielder for Bundesliga club Bayern Munich and the France national team. Widely regarded as one of the best players in the world, he is known for his creative playmaking, t

  10. 98,762views

    Judith Barsi

    Judith Eva Barsi was an American child actress. She began her career in television, making appearances in commercials and television series, as well as the 1987 film Jaws: The Revenge. She also provided the voices of Ducky in The Land Before Time and Anne-Mari

  11. 96,918views

    Lee Cronin's The Mummy

    Lee Cronin's The Mummy is a 2026 supernatural horror film written and directed by Lee Cronin. A reimagining of The Mummy franchise based around the Nasmaranian, an ancient Egyptian demon that possesses victims with exorcism themes, the film stars Jack Reynor,

  12. 88,443views

    Eric Swalwell

    Eric Michael Swalwell is an American former politician who served as a U.S. representative from California from 2013 to 2026. A member of the Democratic Party, Swalwell previously served on the city council for Dublin, California from 2010 to 2013.

  13. 83,407views

    Street Fighter (2026 film)

    Street Fighter is an upcoming American action comedy film directed by Kitao Sakurai and written by Sakurai and T. J. Fixman. It is the third live-action feature-length film based on the Street Fighter video game series by Capcom. It features an ensemble cast i

  14. 80,515views

    Euphoria (American TV series)

    Euphoria is an American psychological drama television series created and written by Sam Levinson for HBO. Based on the Israeli miniseries of the same name created by Ron Leshem, the series stars Zendaya as drug-addicted teenager Rue Bennett, who also serves a

  15. 79,329views

    Neatsville, Kentucky

    Neatsville is an unincorporated community in Adair County, in the U.S. state of Kentucky. It is located at the junction of Kentucky Route 206 and Kentucky Route 76. Its elevation is 705 feet (215 m). For unknown reasons, the town's name was spelled as Neetsvil

  16. 78,926views

    Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans

    Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans is the 50th season of the American competitive reality television series Survivor. It premiered on February 25, 2026, on CBS in the United States, and it is the eighteenth consecutive season to be filmed in the Mamanuca Is

  17. 77,338views

    Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender

    Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is a 2026 American animated fantasy action-adventure film directed by Lauren Montgomery from a screenplay by Tim Hedrick and Christopher Yost, based on a story by Bryan Konietzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Hedrick, and Kenneth Li

  18. 75,778views

    The Boys season 5

    The fifth and final season of the American satirical superhero television series The Boys, the first series in the franchise based on the comic book series of the same name created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, was developed for television by Eric Kripk

  19. 136,055views

    Focker-in-Law

    Focker-in-Law is an upcoming American comedy film written for the screen and directed by John Hamburg from a story by Hamburg, Ilana Glazer, and Austen Earl. It is the fourth installment in the Fockers film series and the sequel to Little Fockers (2010). Rober

  20. 74,132views

    Clavicular (influencer)

    Braden Eric Peters, better known as Clavicular or Clav, is an American livestreamer, internet personality, and influencer. He became known in 2025 on TikTok and Kick for his usage of incelosphere slang, for his "looksmaxxing" content, incorporating controversi

  21. 74,009views

    Project Hail Mary (film)

    Project Hail Mary is a 2026 American science fiction film produced and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and written by Drew Goddard, based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir. It stars Ryan Gosling, who also produced the film, as Ryland

  22. 71,140views

    2026 Iran war

    Since 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel have been at war with Iran and its regional allies. Hostilities broke out after US–Israeli airstrikes killed several Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The strikes were launched amid o

  23. 63,232views

    The Boys (TV series)

    The Boys is an American satirical superhero streaming television series developed by Eric Kripke for Amazon Prime Video. Based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, it follows the eponymous team of vigilantes as they co

  24. 62,326views

    Ruby Rose

    Ruby Rose Langenheim is an Australian actress, television presenter, and model. She gained prominence for her role in season three of the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black (2015–2016) and for portraying Kate Kane / Batwoman in the Arrowverse television fr

  25. 61,043views

    WrestleMania 42

    WrestleMania 42, also promoted as WrestleMania Vegas, was a 2026 professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) and livestreaming event produced by WWE. It was the 42nd annual WrestleMania and took place as a two-night event on Saturday, April 18 and Sunday, April

  26. 60,922views

    Anna's Archive

    Anna's Archive is an open source search engine for shadow libraries that was launched by the pseudonymous Anna shortly after law enforcement efforts to shut down Z-Library in 2022. The site aggregates records from Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis (LibGe

  27. 59,843views

    Samrat Choudhary

    Samrat Choudhary is an Indian politician who is serving as the 24th Chief Minister of Bihar since 15 April 2026. He has been a member of the Bihar Legislative Assembly representing Tarapur Assembly constituency since 2025 and previously served as deputy chief

  28. 56,877views

    Erica Schwartz

    Erica G. Schwartz is an American health official who is Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She previously served as Deputy Surgeon General from January 2019 to April 2021, with the rank of rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health S

  29. 56,140views

    Beef (TV series)

    Beef is an American comedy drama anthology television series created by Lee Sung Jin for Netflix. Season 1 stars Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as Danny Cho and Amy Lau, two strangers whose involvement in a road rage incident escalates into a prolonged feud. Appeari

  30. 52,374views

    2026 West Bengal Legislative Assembly election

    Legislative Assembly elections were held in West Bengal to elect all 294 members of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in two phases on 23 and 29 April 2026, with the votes counted and results for 293 seats released on 4 May 2026. The election saw the defeat

Frontier 25

What the people building things argued about, from Hacker News.

  1. 1,235points

    Claude Design

    762 comments

  2. 792points

    Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

    306 comments

  3. 768points

    Ban the sale of precise geolocation

    198 comments

  4. 714points

    Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

    498 comments

  5. 602points

    Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

    153 comments

  6. 499points

    Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

    152 comments

  7. 458points

    All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

    270 comments

  8. 400points

    US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification

    338 comments

  9. 364points

    I’m spending months coding the old way

    357 comments

  10. 336points

    NASA Force

    312 comments

  11. 318points

    "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2

    185 comments

  12. 308points

    Israel escalates attacks on medics in Lebanon with deadly 'quadruple tap'

    230 comments

  13. 290points

    What are skiplists good for?

    70 comments

  14. 286points

    Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

    224 comments

  15. 282points

    Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

    283 comments

  16. 272points

    Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin

    128 comments

  17. 265points

    Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock

    115 comments

  18. 252points

    Slop Cop

    160 comments

  19. 235points

    NIST gives up enriching most CVEs

    54 comments

  20. 226points

    Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

    83 comments

  21. 224points

    Tesla tells HW3 owner to 'be patient' after 7 years of waiting for FSD

    214 comments

  22. 208points

    A simplified model of Fil-C

    136 comments

  23. 195points

    Healthchecks.io now uses self-hosted object storage

    79 comments

  24. 184points

    How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres' environmental toll

    65 comments

  25. 183points

    Up to 8M Bees Are Living in an Underground Network Beneath This Cemetery

    31 comments

Research 25

Papers submitted to arXiv cs.AI that day.

  1. arXiv1901.11429

    Decomposing Generalization: Models of Generic, Habitual, and Episodic Statements

    We present a novel semantic framework for modeling linguistic expressions of generalization---generic, habitual, and episodic statements---as combinations of simple, real-valued referential properties of predicates and their arguments. We use this framework to construct a dataset covering the entirety of the Universal Dependencies English Web Treebank. We use this dataset to probe the efficacy of type-level and token

    Govindarajan, Venkata Subrahmanyan, Van Durme, Benjamin, White, Aaron Steven

  2. arXiv2010.02494

    Help! Need Advice on Identifying Advice

    Humans use language to accomplish a wide variety of tasks - asking for and giving advice being one of them. In online advice forums, advice is mixed in with non-advice, like emotional support, and is sometimes stated explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Understanding the language of advice would equip systems with a better grasp of language pragmatics; practically, the ability to identify advice would drastically increa

    Govindarajan, Venkata Subrahmanyan, Chen, Benjamin T, Warholic, Rebecca, Erk, Katrin et al.

  3. arXiv2209.06687

    How people talk about each other: Modeling Generalized Intergroup Bias and Emotion

    Current studies of bias in NLP rely mainly on identifying (unwanted or negative) bias towards a specific demographic group. While this has led to progress recognizing and mitigating negative bias, and having a clear notion of the targeted group is necessary, it is not always practical. In this work we extrapolate to a broader notion of bias, rooted in social science and psychology literature. We move towards predicti

    Govindarajan, Venkata S, Atwell, Katherine, Sinno, Barea, Alikhani, Malihe et al.

  4. arXiv2209.14774

    RECALL: Rehearsal-free Continual Learning for Object Classification

    Convolutional neural networks show remarkable results in classification but struggle with learning new things on the fly. We present a novel rehearsal-free approach, where a deep neural network is continually learning new unseen object categories without saving any data of prior sequences. Our approach is called RECALL, as the network recalls categories by calculating logits for old categories before training new one

    Knauer, Markus, Denninger, Maximilian, Triebel, Rudolph

  5. arXiv2210.09817

    Universal hidden monotonic trend estimation with contrastive learning

    In this paper, we describe a universal method for extracting the underlying monotonic trend factor from time series data. We propose an approach related to the Mann-Kendall test, a standard monotonic trend detection method and call it contrastive trend estimation (CTE). We show that the CTE method identifies any hidden trend underlying temporal data while avoiding the standard assumptions used for monotonic trend ide

    Pineau, Edouard, Razakarivony, Sébastien

  6. arXiv2211.16780

    An Optimal Transport-driven Approach for Cultivating Latent Space in Online Incremental Learning

    In online incremental learning, data continuously arrives with substantial distributional shifts, creating a significant challenge because previous samples have limited replay value when learning a new task. Prior research has typically relied on either a single adaptive centroid or multiple fixed centroids to represent each class in the latent space. However, such methods struggle when class data streams are inheren

    Tran, Quyen, Nguyen, Hai, Phan, Hoang, Dao, Quan et al.

  7. arXiv2304.02594

    Competitive plasticity to reduce the energetic costs of learning

    The brain is not only constrained by energy needed to fuel computation, but it is also constrained by energy needed to form memories. Experiments have shown that learning simple conditioning tasks already carries a significant metabolic cost. Yet, learning a task like MNIST to 95% accuracy appears to require at least 10^{8} synaptic updates. Therefore the brain has likely evolved to be able to learn using as little e

    van Rossum, Mark CW

  8. arXiv2305.16409

    Counterfactual Probing for the Influence of Affect and Specificity on Intergroup Bias

    While existing work on studying bias in NLP focues on negative or pejorative language use, Govindarajan et al. (2023) offer a revised framing of bias in terms of intergroup social context, and its effects on language behavior. In this paper, we investigate if two pragmatic features (specificity and affect) systematically vary in different intergroup contexts -- thus connecting this new framing of bias to language out

    Govindarajan, Venkata S, Mahowald, Kyle, Beaver, David I., Li, Junyi Jessy

  9. arXiv2309.11452

    Using deep learning to construct stochastic local search SAT solvers with performance bounds

    The Boolean Satisfiability problem (SAT), as the prototypical $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem, is crucial in both theoretical computer science and practical applications. To address this problem, stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms, which iteratively and randomly update candidate assignments, present an important and theoretically well-studied class of solvers. Recent theoretical advancements have identified cond

    Kramer, Maximilian J., Boes, Paul, Eisert, Jens

  10. arXiv2310.17591

    Lil-Bevo: Explorations of Strategies for Training Language Models in More Humanlike Ways

    We present Lil-Bevo, our submission to the BabyLM Challenge. We pretrained our masked language models with three ingredients: an initial pretraining with music data, training on shorter sequences before training on longer ones, and masking specific tokens to target some of the BLiMP subtasks. Overall, our baseline models performed above chance, but far below the performance levels of larger LLMs trained on more data.

    Govindarajan, Venkata S, Rodriguez, Juan Diego, Bostrom, Kaj, Mahowald, Kyle

  11. arXiv2311.01956

    Towards Adaptive, Learning-Based Security in Decentralized Applications

    Web3 systems expose a fundamentally different security landscape from centralized platforms, characterized by composability, pseudonymous identities, decentralized governance, and rapidly evolving attack strategies that span social, application, and protocol layers. Existing security mechanisms, such as static smart contract analysis, blacklist-based phishing detection, and network-level mitigation, operate in isolat

    Behfar, Stefan Kambiz, Crowcroft, Jon

  12. arXiv2311.04799

    DA-Cramming: Enhancing Cost-Effective Language Model Pretraining with Dependency Agreement Integration

    Pretraining language models is still a challenge for many researchers due to its substantial computational costs. As such, there is growing interest in developing more affordable pretraining methods. One notable advancement in this area is the Cramming technique (Geiping and Goldstein, 2022), which enables the pretraining of BERT-style language models using just one GPU in a single day. Building on this innovative ap

    Kuo, Martin, Zhang, Jianyi, Li, Dongting, Chen, Yiran

  13. arXiv2311.11841

    High Probability Guarantees for Random Reshuffling

    We consider the stochastic gradient method with random reshuffling ($\mathsf{RR}$) for tackling smooth nonconvex optimization problems. $\mathsf{RR}$ finds broad applications in practice, notably in training neural networks. In this work, we provide high probability complexity guarantees for this method. First, we establish a high probability ergodic sample complexity result (without taking expectation) for finding a

    Yu, Hengxu, Li, Xiao

  14. arXiv2402.08780

    Enhanced Deep Q-Learning for 2D Self-Driving Cars: Implementation and Evaluation on a Custom Track Environment

    This research project presents the implementation of a Deep Q-Learning Network (DQN) for a self-driving car on a 2-dimensional (2D) custom track, with the objective of enhancing the DQN network's performance. It encompasses the development of a custom driving environment using Pygame on a track surrounding the University of Memphis map, as well as the design and implementation of the DQN model. The algorithm util

    Pathak, Sagar, Shrestha, Bidhya

  15. arXiv2406.15003

    Real-Time Hand Gesture Recognition: Integrating Skeleton-Based Data Fusion and Multi-Stream CNN

    Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) enables intuitive human-computer interactions in various real-world contexts. However, existing frameworks often struggle to meet the real-time requirements essential for practical HGR applications. This study introduces a robust, skeleton-based framework for dynamic HGR that simplifies the recognition of dynamic hand gestures into a static image classification task, effectively reducin

    Yusuf, Oluwaleke, Habib, Maki, Moustafa, Mohamed

  16. arXiv2408.14728

    Improving Clean Accuracy via a Tangent-Space Perspective on Adversarial Training

    Adversarial training has proven effective in improving the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial attacks. However, this enhanced robustness often comes at the cost of a substantial drop in accuracy on clean data. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing Tangent Direction Guided Adversarial Training (TART), a novel method that enhances clean accuracy by exploiting the geometry of the d

    Yi, Bongsoo, Lai, Rongjie, Li, Yao

  17. arXiv2410.01540

    Edge-preserving noise for diffusion models

    Classical diffusion models typically rely on isotropic Gaussian noise, treating all regions uniformly and overlooking structural information important for high-quality generation. We introduce an edge-preserving diffusion process that generalizes isotropic models via a hybrid noise scheme with an edge-aware scheduler that smoothly transitions from edge-preserving to isotropic noise. This enables the model to capture

    Vandersanden, Jente, Holl, Sascha, Huang, Xingchang, Singh, Gurprit

  18. arXiv2410.05882

    Frame forecasting in cine MRI using the PCA respiratory motion model: comparing recurrent neural networks trained online and transformers

    Respiratory motion complicates accurate irradiation of thoraco-abdominal tumors during radiotherapy, as treatment-system latency entails target-location uncertainties. This work addresses frame forecasting in chest and liver cine MRI to compensate for such delays. We investigate RNNs trained with online learning algorithms, enabling adaptation to changing respiratory patterns via on-the-fly parameter updates, and tra

    Pohl, Michel, Uesaka, Mitsuru, Takahashi, Hiroyuki, Demachi, Kazuyuki et al.

  19. arXiv2410.08329

    Survey of Deep Learning and Physics-Based Approaches in Computational Wave Imaging

    Computational wave imaging (CWI) extracts hidden structure and physical properties of a volume of material by analyzing wave signals that traverse that volume. Applications include seismic exploration of the Earth's subsurface, acoustic imaging and non-destructive testing in material science, and ultrasound computed tomography in medicine. Current approaches for solving CWI problems can be divided into two catego

    Lin, Youzuo, Feng, Shihang, Theiler, James, Chen, Yinpeng et al.

  20. arXiv2410.16593

    Sampling Transferable Graph Neural Networks with Limited Graph Information

    Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong performance on graph learning tasks, but training on large-scale networks remains computationally challenging. Transferability results show that GNNs with fixed weights can generalize from smaller graphs to larger ones drawn from the same family, motivating the use of sampled subgraphs to boost training efficiency. Yet most existing sampling strategies rely on reliable acce

    Wang, Haoyu, Ma, Renyuan, Mateos, Gonzalo, Ruiz, Luana

  21. arXiv2410.17448

    In Context Learning and Reasoning for Symbolic Regression with Large Language Models

    Large Language Models (LLMs) are transformer-based machine learning models that have shown remarkable performance in tasks for which they were not explicitly trained. Here, we explore the potential of LLMs to perform symbolic regression -- a machine-learning method for finding simple and accurate equations from datasets. We prompt GPT-4 and GPT-4o models to suggest expressions from data, which are then optimized and

    Sharlin, Samiha, Josephson, Tyler R.

  22. arXiv2411.00361

    Direct Preference Optimization for Primitive-Enabled Hierarchical RL: A Bilevel Approach

    Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) enables agents to solve complex, long-horizon tasks by decomposing them into manageable sub-tasks. However, HRL methods face two fundamental challenges: (i) non-stationarity caused by the evolving lower-level policy during training, which destabilizes higher-level learning, and (ii) the generation of infeasible subgoals that lower-level policies cannot achieve. To address the

    Singh, Utsav, Chakraborty, Souradip, Suttle, Wesley A., Sadler, Brian M. et al.

  23. arXiv2411.05472

    Bridging the Gap between Learning and Inference for Diffusion-Based Molecule Generation

    The paradigm shift toward structure-driven molecule generation has been propelled by advances in deep generative models, such as variational auto-encoders and diffusion models. However, these generative models for molecular design remain constrained by exposure bias, error accumulation, and suboptimal handling of activity cliffs. Here, we introduce DiffGap, a diffusion-based framework that integrates adaptive samplin

    Liu, Peidong, Zhang, Wenbo, Ju, Wei, Lv, Jiancheng et al.

  24. arXiv2411.09209

    JoyVASA: Portrait and Animal Image Animation with Diffusion-Based Audio-Driven Facial Dynamics and Head Motion Generation

    Audio-driven portrait animation has made significant advances with diffusion-based models, improving video quality and lipsync accuracy. However, the increasing complexity of these models has led to inefficiencies in training and inference, as well as constraints on video length and inter-frame continuity. In this paper, we propose JoyVASA, a diffusion-based method for generating facial dynamics and head motion in au

    Cao, Xuyang, Wang, Guoxin, Shi, Sheng, Zhao, Jun et al.

  25. arXiv2412.14751

    Query pipeline optimization for cancer patient question answering systems

    Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) by using query pipelines to retrieve relevant external information and grounding responses in retrieved knowledge. However, query pipeline optimization for cancer patient question-answering (CPQA) systems requires separately optimizing multiple components with domain-specific considerations. We propose a novel three-aspect op

    He, Maolin, Gao, Rena, Conway, Mike, Chapman, Brian E.

On this calendar day 17

Notable events recorded on this day and month across all years.

  1. 2014year

    NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, the first exoplanet with a radius similar to Earth's discovered in the habitable zone of another star.

  2. 2013year

    An ammonium nitrate explosion occurred at a fertilizer company facility in West, Texas, U.S., killing 15 people and injuring 160 others.

  3. 2006year

    A Palestinian suicide bomber detonated explosives in a restaurant in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing 11 people and injuring 70 others.

  4. 1986year

    The Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly declared peace, having hypothetically been at war for 335 years without a single shot being fired and no casualties incurred.

  5. 1984year

    Metropolitan Police officer Yvonne Fletcher was shot and killed while on duty during a protest outside the Libyan embassy in London, resulting in an 11-day police siege of the building and a breakdown of Libya–United Kingdom relations.

  6. 1975year

    The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the capital of the Khmer Republic, ending the Cambodian Civil War and establishing the socialist state of Democratic Kampuchea.

  7. 1973year

    George Lucas began writing a 13-page film treatment that later formed the basis of Star Wars.

  8. 1969year

    Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubček was deposed.

  9. 1969year

    Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of the assassination of U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy.

  10. 1951year

    The Peak District was designated the first national park in the United Kingdom.

  11. 1942year

    World War II: Captured French general Henri Giraud escaped from German captivity in the Königstein Castle.

  12. 1907year

    Minas Geraes (pictured), the first of three Brazilian dreadnought battleships, was laid down, sparking a vastly expensive South American naval arms race with Argentina and Chile.

  13. 1809year

    Napoleonic Wars: After a three-day chase, the French ship D'Hautpoul was captured off Puerto Rico by a British squadron under Alexander Cochrane.

  14. 1797year

    French Revolutionary Wars: British forces commanded by Lieutenant-General Ralph Abercromby invaded the Spanish colonial port of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

  15. 1783year

    The Mechanical Turk (pictured), a fraudulent chess-playing "machine" by Wolfgang von Kempelen that was secretly controlled by a hidden human, began a tour of Europe.

  16. 1362year

    Lithuanian Crusade: After a month-long siege, the Teutonic Order captured and destroyed Kaunas Castle, which was defended by troops of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

  17. 1080year

    Canute IV became King of Denmark upon the death of his brother Harald III.