Wikipedia:Main Page history/2015 July 26

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The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season was the first since 1968 with no hurricanes of Category 2 or higher. The first storm of the season, Tropical Storm Andrea, developed on June 5, and the last, unnamed, dissipated on December 7. Humberto and Ingrid were the only two hurricanes, the lowest seasonal total since 1982. Andrea killed four people after making landfall in Florida and moving up the U.S. East Coast. In early July, Tropical Storm Chantal moved through the Leeward Islands, causing one fatality, but minimal damage overall. Tropical storms Dorian and Erin and Hurricane Humberto brought only squally weather to the Cape Verde Islands. Mexico, where Hurricane Ingrid, Tropical Depression Eight, and tropical storms Barry and Fernand all made landfall, was the hardest hit; Ingrid alone caused at least 23 deaths and $1.5 billion worth of damage. In early October, Tropical Storm Karen brought showers and gusty winds to the central U.S. Gulf Coast. All major forecasting agencies had predicted an above-average season, but an unexpected weakening of the Gulf Stream and other thermohaline currents prolonged the spring weather pattern over the Atlantic Ocean, suppressing tropical storm formation. (Full article...)

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Franklin with Loxley's house key

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... that there was a 19th-century secret society in Minnesota dedicated to eliminating native Americans from the state?
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In the news

Pierre Nkurunziza

Pierre Nkurunziza is re-elected president of Burundi for a third term.
The Kepler space telescope discovers Kepler-452b, the first potentially rocky exoplanet discovered in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star.
An explosion in the Turkish district of Suruç, Şanlıurfa, kills 32 people and injures more than 100 others.
The United States and Cuba restore full diplomatic relations after fifty-four years.
Formula One driver Jules Bianchi dies at the age of 25, nine months after an accident at the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix left him in a coma.
At least 120 people are killed and 130 injured by a suicide bombing in Diyala Province, Iraq.

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- Greek debt crisis
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On this day...

July 26: Parents' Day in the United States (2015)

1882 premiere of Parsifal

811 – Bulgarian forces led by Khan Krum defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Pliska, annihilating almost the whole army and killing Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros I.
1759 – French and Indian War: Rather than defend Fort Carillon near present-day Ticonderoga, New York, from an approaching 11,000-man British force, French Brigadier General François-Charles de Bourlamaque withdrew his troops and attempted to blow the fort up.
1882 – Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal, loosely based on Wolfram von Eschenbach's epic poem Parzival about Arthurian knight Percival and his quest for the Holy Grail, officially premiered at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Bavaria (present-day Germany).
1945 – The Labour Party won the United Kingdom general election of July 5 by a landslide, replacing Winston Churchill as Prime Minister with Clement Attlee.
1990 – U.S. President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act, a wide-ranging civil rights law that prohibits, under certain circumstances, discrimination based on disability.

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George Catlin (1796–1872) was an American painter, author and traveler who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Catlin was fascinated with Native American culture from a young age. He began depicting them in art in the 1820s, and between 1830 and 1836 he visited almost fifty Plains Indians tribes in the American west. From his experiences, he produced a collection of over five hundred paintings which he exhibited on tour. These works are now housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Painting: William Fisk

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