Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 July 26

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Carlos Castillo Armas (November 4, 1914 – July 26, 1957) was a military officer and the 28th president of Guatemala. He came to power in a 1954 coup d'état backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency that overthrew the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, and consolidated his position in an October 1954 election in which he was the only candidate. A member of the right-wing National Liberation Movement party, he was also the first of a series of authoritarian rulers in Guatemala who were close allies of the United States. Under Castillo Armas, the reforms of the Guatemalan Revolution were largely undone. Land was confiscated from small farmers and returned to large landowners, and thousands of people were arrested, tortured, or killed under suspicion of being communists. In 1957 Castillo Armas was assassinated by a presidential guard. His policies sparked a series of leftist insurgencies culminating in the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. (Full article...)

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In the news

COVID-19 pandemic

Comet NEOWISE seen from Split, Croatia

A security breach in the administration system of Twitter results in many prominent accounts promoting a bitcoin scam.
At least sixteen people are killed in border clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani armed forces.
Comet NEOWISE (pictured) is visible to the naked eye in the Northern Hemisphere.

On this day

July 26: Independence Day in Liberia (1847)

L. L. Zamenhof

1882 – Boer mercenaries declared their independence from the Transvaal Republic and established the Republic of Stellaland.
1887 – L. L. Zamenhof (pictured) published Unua Libro, the first publication to describe Esperanto, a constructed international language.
1953 – The Battle of the Samichon River, the last engagement of the Korean War, ended only a few hours before the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed.
1968 – After coming second to Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in a rigged presidential election in 1967, Trương Đình Dzu was jailed by a South Vietnamese military court for illicit currency transactions.
2016 – In one of the deadliest crimes in modern Japanese history, a former employee carried out a mass stabbing at a care home for disabled people in Sagamihara, killing 19 people and wounding 26 others.

Robert Todd Lincoln (d. 1926)
Charlotte Serber (b. 1911)
Asif Ali Zardari (b. 1955)

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Today's featured picture

Jacinda Ardern (born 26 July 1980) is a New Zealand politician who has served as the 40th prime minister of New Zealand and the leader of the Labour Party since 2017, when she became the world's youngest female head of government.

In March 2019, Ardern led the country through the aftermath of mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, rapidly introducing strict gun laws in response. This photograph, taken through a glass window, shows her visiting members of the Muslim community at a community centre in Phillipstown less than 24 hours after the attacks, which had left 50 people dead (one more would die later). Widely circulated at the time, the photograph was described by The Guardian as an "image of hope".

Photograph credit: Kirk Hargreaves

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