| 904 | Arabs capture Thessalonica. | |
| 1703 | English novelist Daniel Defoe is made to stand in the pillory as punishment for offending the government and church with his satire The Shortest Way With Dissenters. | |
| 1760 | Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, drives the French army back to the Rhine River. | |
| 1790 | The U.S. Patent Office opens. | |
| 1882 | Belle and Sam Starr are charged with horse stealing in the Indian territory. | |
| 1875 | Former president Andrew Johnson dies at the age of 66. | |
| 1891 | Great Britain declares territories in Southern Africa up to the Congo to be within its sphere of influence. | |
| 1904 | The Trans-Siberian railroad connecting the Ural mountains with Russia’s Pacific coast, is completed. | |
| 1917 | The third Battle of Ypres commences as the British attack the German lines. | |
| 1932 | Adolf Hitler‘s Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) doubles its strength in legislative elections. | |
| 1944 | The Soviet army takes Kovno, the capital of Lithuania. | |
| 1962 | Federation of Malaysia formally proposed. | |
| 1971 | Apollo 15 astronauts take a drive on the moon in their land rover. | |
| 1987 | An F4 tornado in Edmonton, Alberta kills 27 and causes $330 million in damages; the day is remembered as “Black Friday.” | |
| 1988 | Bridge collapse at Sultan Abdul Halim ferry terminal in Butterworth, Malaysia, kills 32 and injures more than 1,600. | |
| 1990 | Bosnia-Herzegovina declares independence from Yugoslavia. | |
| 1991 | The US and the USSR sign a long-range nuclear weapons reduction pact. | |
| 1999 | NASA purposely crashes its Discovery Program’s Lunar Prospector into the moon, ending the agency’s mission to detect frozen water on Earth’s moon. | |
| 2006 | Fidel Castro temporarily hands over power to his brother Raul Castro. | |
| 2007 | The British Army’s longest continual operation, Operation Banner (1969-2007), ends as British troops withdraw from Northern Ireland. |
Thomas
Morris is working on a book about the history of heart surgery, and
keeps a blog of the most curious and hard-to-believe stories in medical
literature that he has encountered in his research (motto: Making you
grateful for modern medicine). It is not a site for the squeamish, but
it doesn't rely on photographs. A gruesome case from 1874 Virginia may
make you cringe, yet it has a happy ending. Dr. A.W. Fontaine wrote of
the case,J.T., a Welsh quarryman, aged about twenty-five years, of sound constitution, but somewhat “addicted to spirits,” whilst in a state of intoxication, fell from a four-horse slate wagon, in rapid motion, and loaded with five or six other persons. The vehicle thus loaded, ran over him and across the middle of his body; it broke the neck off a large glass bottle, the stump of which, it seems, penetrated his abdomen, emptying his bowels, which were crushed into the sand by the rolling wheels.The good news was that the intestines that spilled out were bruised but not cut, and the puncture wound in his abdomen was small. The bad news was that there was plenty of broken glass and dirt on the entrails that needed to be removed before they were stuffed back in. Surprisingly to everyone involved, the patient survived. Read Dr. Fontaine's account of the procedure at Thomas Morris.
In Short Creek, just two surnames dominate the local records – Jessop and Barlow. According to local historian Benjamin Bistline, who spoke to news agency Reuters back in 2007, 75 to 80% of people in Short Creek are blood relatives of the community’s founding patriarchs, Joseph Jessop and John Barlow.Read how the isolation of a community can lead to an explosion of genetic disorders in an article at BBC Future.
This is all very well, but we now know that most people are walking around with at least one lethal recessive mutation (one that would kill us before we reach reproductive age) in their genome, around the same number as in fruit flies. Humans haven’t gone extinct because, being recessive, they’re only unmasked if we have children with someone who also just so happens to carry a copy of that exact same mutation too.
Addressing a report showing gun thefts are up in the deep south, an NRA
spokesperson said any attempt to criminalize gun owners for not locking
up their weapons would be the same as “shaming rape survivors.” 
Dog
owners hope for the best when they hire a sitter, so if the dog seems
to genuinely like their sitter that's usually a good sign since dogs
don't hide their feelings about humans.But if your dog straight
up loves hanging out with their sitter then you might want to watch the
two of them in action, because there's probably something adorable going
on there.
Look
at this goat. Just look at it! Redditor arnathor met this goat and had
to take a picture to share. According to commenters, the goat has the
hair of Gandalf or Tom Petty (personally, I thought of Leon Russell),
the smirk of McKayla Maroney or Natalie Dormer, and the general look of Owen Wilson, Jeff Bridges, or Ron Perlman. I can't see Ron Perlman, unless you are thinking of his character in Beauty and the Beast, but he is a ridiculously photogenic goat.
