SatStats

On this day:

293 BC
The oldest known Roman temple to Venus is dedicated.
1040
King Duncan I is killed in battle against his first cousin and rival, Macbeth. The latter succeeds him as King of Scotland.
1057
King Macbeth is killed at the Battle of Lumphanan by the forces of Máel Coluim mac Donnchada.
1185
The cave city of Vardzia is consecrated by Queen Tamar of Georgia.
1281
Mongol invasion of Japan: The Mongolian fleet of Kublai Khan is destroyed by a “divine wind” for the second time in the Battle of Kōan.
1461
The Empire of Trebizond surrenders to the forces of Sultan Mehmet II. This is regarded by some historians as the real end of the Byzantine Empire. Emperor David is exiled and later murdered.
1483
Pope Sixtus IV consecrates the Sistine Chapel.
1534
Saint Ignatius of Loyola and six classmates take initial vows, leading to the creation of the Society of Jesus in September 1540.
1549
Jesuit priest Saint Francis Xavier comes ashore at Kagoshima (Traditional Japanese date: July 22, 1549).
1914
A male servant of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright sets fire to the living quarters of the architect’s Wisconsin home, Taliesin, murders seven people and burns the living quarters to the ground.
1914
The Panama Canal opens to traffic with the transit of the cargo ship SS Ancon.
1920
Battle of Warsaw, so-called Miracle at the Vistula.
1935
Will Rogers and Wiley Post are killed after their aircraft develops engine problems during takeoff in Barrow, Alaska.
1939
13 Stukas dive into the ground during a disastrous air-practice at Neuhammer. There are no survivors.
1940
An Italian submarine torpedoes and sinks the Greek cruiser Elli at Tinos harbour during peacetime, marking the most serious Italian provocation prior to the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War in October.
1945
World War II: Japan surrenders to end the war.
1948
The Republic of Korea is established south of the 38th parallel north.
1965
The Beatles play to nearly 60,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York City, in an event later seen as marking the birth of stadium rock.
1969
The Woodstock Music and Art Festival opens.
1971
President Richard Nixon completes the break from the gold standard by ending convertibility of the United States dollar into gold by foreign investors.
1974
Yuk Young-soo, First Lady of South Korea, is killed during an apparent assassination attempt upon the President of South Korea, Park Chung-hee.


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A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (25 Jul 1902-1983)

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Jason Arday, the former University of Cambridge professor who was at the centre of ​a plagiarism scandal, has been found dead.

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America’s still-multiplying embarrassments are rank weeds fertilized by the manure of populism. And by populism’s inherent, aggressive disdain for the importance of character in politics. Populism is almost everything rejected by America’s unsentimental Founders, who, a few days ago, the nation briefly, and often uncomprehendingly, celebrated.

The clear-eyed Founders, steeped in sobering histories of short-lived republics, constructed a sophisticated constitutional architecture that blends democracy and distrust. They built a bulwark against populism because they believed this: Majorities must rule in the end, but their opinions must be mediated — and cooled — by being filtered through institutions. Those institutions must be occupied by people possessing “republican virtue,” an attribute not evenly distributed among “the people.”

What animated the Founding was the antonym of American populism. Populism celebrates popular passions incited by, and channeled swiftly into action by, an unconstrained executive.--Will

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Can the State protect its citizens from random attack? If not, and that circumstance is accepted by all, what should the response of a free people be?

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Trump also has an opinion on aircraft carrier catapult systems.

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SatStats

About 46,000 objects are tracked around Earth. One collision can create thousands more.

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Incode Technologies reports that agentic fraud—scams run autonomously by AI—now accounts for 40% of attempts and is projected to exceed 90% by 2028, driving record global losses.

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Humans may soon be a minority on the internet, says Elon Musk, after Cloudflare's CFO, Thomas Seifert, predicted that humans will soon be nothing more than a rounding error in internet traffic.

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Americans filed 5.7 million applications last year to start new businesses, according to the Census Bureau, the most in the two decades the government has kept track. New business applications through the first half of this year continued to climb.

More recently, there are signals that A.I. is adding fuel.

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"We are 1,000% going to go bankrupt as a country and fail as a country, without AI and robots," Musk said. "Nothing else will solve the national debt."

According to the Treasury Department, U.S. national debt now stands at roughly $39.6 trillion — and it continues to grow as federal spending outpaces revenue. Through the first nine months of fiscal year 2026, the federal deficit has climbed to around $1.37 trillion.

Without a productivity breakthrough from artificial intelligence and robotics, Musk painted a bleak picture of what lies ahead, saying the country is "actually totally screwed because the national debt is piling up like crazy."

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There are only 20,000 great white sharks in the world. An endangered species?

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Ukraine has only a tenth of the interceptor missiles it urgently needs from the United States to stop surging Russian ballistic missile attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN. He added that if the US “sell us 5%, we will go through the winter and save people’s lives. If they can sell us 10%, we will destroy all the Russians’ ballistic missiles. I have 1%.”

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The British health service now has to spend more money settling maternity malpractice claims than it does on providing maternity care.

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By examining the changes between each successive cohort, Stollard calculates that dementia rates have been declining by 2.5-3% for each calendar-year cohort.

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Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of Manhattan, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970.
In total, around eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed.

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India
We estimate pedestrian sex ratios of 239 and 223 women per 1,000 men, implying 71% and 76% of women expected based on residential ratios are missing from the streets. This pattern holds across road types, and private mobility does not explain the gap; women’s share on two-wheelers is lower still (8.4% and 5.7%). These results provide the first large-scale measurement of gender disparities in urban public life that self-reported data cannot capture.

“The median married women in India leaves home for 30 minutes per day. On a typical day, 45% of married women don’t leave home at all.”--2 papers

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According to MTA data, 48.5% of NYC bus riders did not pay the fare in the second quarter of this year