| 1261 | Constantinople falls to Michael VIII of Nicea and his army. | |
| 1598 | Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, leads an Irish force to victory over the British at the Battle of Yellow Ford. | |
| 1760 | Frederick II defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Liegnitz. | |
| 1864 | The Confederate raider Tallahassee captures six Federal ships off New England. | |
| 1914 | The Panama Canal opens to traffic. | |
| 1935 | American comedian and “cowboy philosopher” Will Rogers dies in an airplane accident, along with American aviation pioneer Wiley Post. | |
| 1942 | The Japanese submarine I-25 departs Japan with a floatplane in its hold which will be assembled upon arriving off the West Coast of the United States, and used to bomb U.S. forests. | |
| 1944 | American, British and French forces land on the southern coast of France, between Toulon and Cannes, in Operation Dragoon. | |
| 1945 | Gasoline and fuel oil rationing ends in the United States. | |
| 1947 | Britain grants independence to India and Pakistan. | |
| 1950 | Two U.S. divisions are badly mauled by the North Korean Army at the Battle of the Bowling Alley in South Korea, which rages on for five more days. | |
| 1971 | Nixon announces a 90-day freeze on wages and prices in an attempt to halt rapid inflation. | |
| 1986 | Ignoring objections from Reagan‘s junta, the US Senate approves economic sanctions against South Africa to protest that country’s apartheid policies. | |
| 1994 | The infamous terrorist Carlos the Jackal is captured in Khartoum, Sudan. |
But a bitter dispute between the town hall and heirs of the Smurf creator, the Belgian comics artist Pierre Culliford whose pen name was Peyo, resulted in locals agreeing to pay 12 percent in royalties on all Smurf-related income.So if you are determined to see the Smurf Village in all it's smurfiness, you'll have to get to Júzcar in the next four days.
However, in a noticed posted on the council website last week, the mayor’s office announced that from August 15th, all smurf related activities must cease – although the village will remain blue.
Labelled “important information for tourists”, the communique stated that Júzcar had “lost the authorization to market itself as a Smurf town” and “from Tuesday August 15th there will be no more statues or references to that brand”.
Like a number of other products that first came to market in the 1920s, Kotex sanitary pads originated as a wartime invention. Kimberly-Clark, an American paper products company formed in the 1870s, produced bandages from a material called Cellucotton for World War I. Cellucotton, which was made of wood pulp,, was five times as absorbent as cotton bandages but much less expensive.They found a way to advertise their product, too, although figuring out what the ads were talking about was strictly on a need-to-know basis. Once again, that was discussed only with the women in one's family, for the next 50 years or so, when other brands gave Kotex some competition. Read up on the history of Kotex and its discreet advertising campaigns at Smithsonian.
In 1919, with the war over, Kimberly-Clark executives were looking for ways to use Cellucotton in peacetime. The company got the idea of sanitary pads from the American Fund for the French Wounded, according to historians Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor. The Fund “received letters from Army nurses claiming they used Cellucotton surgical dressings as makeshift sanitary napkins,” the pair write.
Kimberly-Clark employee Walter Luecke, who had been tasked with finding a use for Cellucotton, understood that a product designed to appeal to about half the country’s population could create enough demand to take the place of the wartime demand for bandages. He jumped on the idea.
But Luecke ran into problems almost immediately. The firms he approached to manufacture sanitary napkins from Kimberly-Clark’s Cellucotton refused to do so. “They argued that sanitary napkins were “too personal and could never be advertised,” Heinrich and Batchelor write. Similar doubts plagued Kimberly-Clark executives, but Luecke kept pushing and they agreed to try the idea, making the sanitary napkins themselves.
A drunk American man was punched as he gave a Nazi salute in the German
city of Dresden, police said. Dresden police said the 41-year-old
tourist suffered minor injuries in the assault, which took place at 8am
on Saturday, reported Associated Press. 
With a body weight reaching up to one or two tons and a brain the size of a chicken egg, Moschops‘s brain was probably one of the smallest among its contemporaneous species. However, small brain size is not an issue when you are the largest animal of your time. Unlike mammals and humans, the ability of the Moschops to survive and reproduce was not a matter of how smart it was, but how strong it was, particularly when it came to fierce head-to-head combat.Okay, so they weren't stupid. But thanks to natural selection, they were rather ugly. Read more about the new research into Moschops and their skulls at the Conversation.
Their anatomy shows that male Moschops were ramming into each other like giant, overweight goats using their skulls as a weapon.
The very fact that Moschops was practising headbutting testifies to a certain level of social organisation, which is often associated with hierarchical ranking in modern species. So, despite its small brain, the Moschops wasn’t stupid.
| 1457 | The first book ever printed is published by a German astrologer named Faust. He is thrown in jail while trying to sell books in Paris. Authorities concluded that all the identical books meant Faust had dealt with the devil. | |
| 1559 | Spanish explorer Tristan de Luna enters Pensacola Bay, Florida. | |
| 1605 | The Popham expedition reaches the Sagadahoc River in present-day Maine and settles there. | |
| 1756 | French commander Louis Montcalm takes Fort Oswego, New England, from the British. | |
| 1793 | Republican troops in France lay siege to the city of Lyons. | |
| 1900 | The European allies enter Beijing, relieving their besieged legations from the Chinese Boxers. | |
| 1917 | The Chinese Parliament declares war on the Central Powers. | |
| 1942 | Dwight D. Eisenhower is named the Anglo-American commander for Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. | |
| 1945 | Japan announces its unconditional surrender in World War II. | |
| 1947 | Pakistan becomes an independent country. | |
| 1969 | British troops arrive in Northern Ireland in response to sectarian violence between Protestants and Roman Catholics. | |
| 1973 | The United States ends the “secret” bombing of Cambodia. | |
| 1987 | Mark McGwire hits his 49th home run of the season, setting the major league home run record for a rookie. | |
| 1995 | Shannon Faulkner becomes the first female cadet in the long history of South Carolina’s state military college, The Citadel. Her presence is met with intense resistance, reportedly including death threats, and she will leave the school a week later. | |
| 2007 | Four coordinated suicide bomb attacks in Yazidi towns near Mosul, Iraq, kill more than 400 people. | |
| 2010 | First-ever Summer Youth Olympic Games open, in Singapore. Athletes must be 14–18 years old. |
