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Hiyō (Flying Hawk) was the name ship of her class of two aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Begun as the ocean liner Izumo Maru in 1939, she was purchased by the Navy Ministry in 1941 for conversion to an aircraft carrier. Completed shortly after the Battle of Midway in June 1942, she participated in the Guadalcanal campaign, but missed the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October because of an electrical generator fire. The carrier's aircraft were disembarked several times and used from land bases in battles in the South West Pacific. Hiyō was torpedoed in mid-1943 and spent three months under repair. She spent most of the next six months training and ferrying aircraft before returning to combat. She was sunk by a gasoline-vapour explosion caused by an American torpedo hit during the Battle of the Philippine Sea on 20 June 1944 with the loss of 247 officers and ratings, about a fifth of her complement. (This article is part of a featured topic: Hiyō class aircraft carrier.)

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Did you know ...

Victory Salute

... that the sprinter Peter Norman requested that he be left off the Olympic Black Power Statue (pictured) so that others could stand in his place?
... that a Japanese samurai was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI, nearly 400 years after his execution during the Great Martyrdom of Edo?
... that the Picts disappeared from the historical record after the devastation suffered following the Battle of Dollar?
... that until 2017 Minnesota State Highway 36 used a lift bridge to cross the St. Croix River?
... that the classicist Adam Parry said that he had only ever considered three careers: academia, law and beachcombing?
... that Isaac Watts, the "father of English hymnody", described one of Charles Wesley's hymns as "worth all the verses he himself had written"?
... that a Buddhist android preacher regularly gives sermons on the Heart Sutra?
... that the Nabisco Shredded Wheat Factory was used as a marketing tool, with an image of the factory on every cereal packet it produced until 1960?
... that Bills plays for the Bills?

In the news (For today)

Willie Mays in 1961

American baseball player Willie Mays (pictured) dies at the age of 93.
A fire in a residential building in Mangaf, south of Kuwait City, kills fifty people.
A plane crash near Chikangawa, Malawi, kills nine people, including Vice President Saulos Chilima.
In tennis, Iga Świątek wins the women's singles and Carlos Alcaraz wins the men's singles titles at the French Open.

On the next day

June 20: World Refugee Day

Queen Victoria

1837 – Queen Victoria (pictured) acceded to the British throne, beginning a 63-year reign.
1921 – British Army officer Thomas Stanton Lambert was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army near Moydrum, Ireland.
1959 – The extratropical remnants of an Atlantic hurricane reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada, causing 22 fishing boats to capsize and killing 35 people.
1979 – Bill Stewart, an American journalist, was executed by Nicaraguan Guardia forces.
1982 – The International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, the first major conference in genocide studies, opened despite Turkish attempts to cancel it due to the inclusion of presentations on the Armenian genocide.

John of Lancaster (b. 1389)
Fritz Koenig (b. 1924)
Edith Windsor (b. 1929)
Ulf Merbold (b. 1941)

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Featured picture (Check back later for tomorrow's.)

The six-spot burnet (Zygaena filipendulae) is a moth of the family Zygaenidae. It is a common species throughout Europe, except the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula, northern Scandinavia and the Great Russian North, and is also present in Asia Minor, through the Caucasus to Syria and Lebanon. It inhabits meadows, woodland clearings, sea-cliffs and area rich in grasses and flowers, up to 2,000 m altitude. The adults fly on hot, sunny days and are attracted to a wide variety of flowers such as knapweed and scabious, as well as the larval food plants bird's foot trefoil, Dorycnium, Coronilla and clover. This six-spot burnet was photographed in Kulna, Estonia.

Photograph credit: Ivar Leidus

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