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George Washington was a Founding Father and the first president of the United States. Born in Virginia, he opposed the perceived oppression of the American colonists by the British Crown and was commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. After being forced to retreat from New York City, he crossed the Delaware River and won the battles of Trenton and Princeton. Washington led a decisive victory at Yorktown, then served as president of the Constitutional Convention that drafted the US Constitution. As president, he set precedents for the office of president, such as republicanism, a peaceful transition, and the two-term tradition. Washington owned many slaves but opposed the practice near the end of his life. His image is an icon of American culture and he has been extensively memorialized. In both popular and scholarly polls, he is consistently considered one of the greatest presidents in American history. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Douglas at the 2016 Olympic Games

... that gymnast Gabby Douglas (pictured) has a Barbie doll modeled after her?
... that one of former British prime minister Rishi Sunak's favourite books is the 1988 romance Rivals?
... that when Matthew Wild directed Wagner's Tannhäuser, he made its main character gay?
... that after a tornado strike at a St. Louis–area Amazon warehouse killed six workers, the rebuilt warehouse still had no proper storm shelter?
... that Jamaican-Welsh noblewoman Justina Jeffreys was the inspiration for the character of Anthelia in the 1817 novel Melincourt?
... that Grand Theft Auto V is a popular video game in North Korea?
... that Frank Page's sons stole his corpse after he died, leaving their stepmother to bury an empty casket?
... that following the sinking of HNLMS Kortenaer, an officer responded to ethnic tensions on the lifeboats by beating his subordinates with a paddle?
... that after playing just one game, Michael Basinger retired from the NFL and became a country music performer?

In the news

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

Astronomers announce the discovery of 3I/ATLAS (pictured), an interstellar object passing through the Solar System.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile releases the first light images from its new 8.4-metre (28 ft) telescope.
In basketball, the Oklahoma City Thunder defeat the Indiana Pacers to win the NBA Finals.
An attack on a Greek Orthodox church in Damascus, Syria, kills at least 25 people.
The United States conducts military strikes on three nuclear facilities in Iran.

On this day

July 4: Independence Day in the United States (1776); Republic Day in the Philippines (1946); Liberation Day in Rwanda (1994)

The Brazilian cruiser Bahia

1837 – The Grand Junction Railway, the world's first long-distance railway with steam traction, opened between Birmingham and Newton Junction.
1918 – World War I: Allied forces led by the Australian general John Monash won the Battle of Hamel, demonstrating the effectiveness of combined-arms techniques in trench warfare.
1941 – German AB-Aktion in Poland: After capturing Lwów, the Nazis executed professors of the University of Lwów along with their families.
1945 – The Brazilian cruiser Bahia (pictured) was accidentally sunk by one of its own crewmen, killing more than 300 people.
1998 – The monster movie Pulgasari, the most-widely-seen North Korean film ever made, premiered in Tokyo, Japan.

Usama ibn Munqidh (b. 1095)
Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (b. 1715)
Andre Spitzer (b. 1945)
Swastima Khadka (b. 1995)

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Aerial view of Guam on 13 November 1944

The United States Navy began building a series of battlecruisers in the 1920s, more than a decade after their slower and less heavily armed armored cruisers had been rendered obsolete by the Royal Navy's Invincible-class battlecruisers. At first unconvinced of the importance of the superior speed of the British battlecruisers, the US Navy changed its position after evaluating the new type of ship in fleet exercises and Naval War College wargames, and after the Japanese acquisition of four Kongō-class battlecruisers in the early 1910s. When Congress authorized a large naval building program in 1916, six Lexington-class battlecruisers were included. None were completed before the arms-limiting Washington Naval Treaty was ratified in 1922. Two ships in the Alaska class were commissioned in time to serve during the last year of World War II but were decommissioned two years after the war. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is centered on a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills near Keystone, South Dakota. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum created the sculpture's design and oversaw the project's execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features the 60-foot-tall (18 m) heads of four United States Presidents recommended by Borglum: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), chosen to represent the nation's birth, growth, development and preservation, respectively.

Photograph credit: Thomas Wolf

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