Electroshock weapons, common instruments of non-scarring torture

Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for various reasons, including punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. Some definitions of torture are restricted to acts carried out by the state, but others include non-state organizations. A variety of methods of torture are used, including psychological methods to provide deniability. Beating is the most common form of physical torture. Most victims of torture are poor and marginalized people suspected of crimes, although torture against political prisoners or during armed conflict has received disproportionate attention. Torture is prohibited under international law for all states under all circumstances and is explicitly forbidden by several treaties. Opposition to torture stimulated the formation of the human rights movement after World War II, and torture continues to be an important human rights issue. ( Full article...)

Clark House

• ... that Clark House (pictured) hosted Cold War meetings?
• ... that a 2022 book lamented that American painter Edna Hibel did not have a Wikipedia article?
• ... that there are more than 9,000 swamps in Belarus?
• ... that before becoming a voice actor, Kenichirou Matsuda attended law school trying to become a civil servant?
• ... that the first Hindu temple in Wisconsin was built "in the middle of nowhere"?
• ... that Alan Choe was tasked with developing Queenstown, Singapore's first satellite town, after its British architects left the country in the mid-1950s?
• ... that Google's Client Hints proposal was initially classified as "harmful" by Mozilla?
• ... that Dick Walker's discovery of Saturn's moon Epimetheus was only realized twelve years later?
• ... that Richard Linklater's original concept for Dazed and Confused took place entirely within a car as its characters listened to ZZ Top?

Aleksander Barkov

• In ice hockey, the Florida Panthers (captain Aleksander Barkov pictured) defeat the Edmonton Oilers to win the Stanley Cup Finals.
• Coordinated attacks in Dagestan, Russia, leave 28 people dead.
• The Iberian lynx is reclassified from endangered to vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.
• Thailand's parliament passes a bill to recognise same-sex marriage.
• American baseball player Willie Mays dies at the age of 93.

June 26

Julia Gardiner Tyler

• 1409 – The Council of Pisa elected Peter of Candia as Alexander V, becoming the third simultaneous claimant of the papacy during the Western Schism.
• 1844 – Julia Gardiner (pictured) married President John Tyler at the Church of the Ascension in New York, becoming the first lady of the United States.
• 1889 – Bangui, the capital and largest city of the present-day Central African Republic, was founded in French Congo.
• 1907 – Organized by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, among others, Bolshevik revolutionaries robbed a bank stagecoach in Tiflis, present-day Georgia.
• 1997 – Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first book in the Harry Potter series of fantasy novels by J. K. Rowling, was published.