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Dick Cresswell (27 July 1920 – 12 December 2006) was an officer and pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Born in Tasmania, he joined the RAAF in July 1938. He commanded No. 77 (Fighter) Squadron from April 1942 to August 1943, in Australia's North Western Area Campaign, against Japanese raiders. He claimed the squadron's first victory—the first by an Australian over the mainland—in November 1942. He commanded No. 81 (Fighter) Wing from May 1944 to March 1945, and simultaneously No. 77 Squadron between September and December 1944. In September 1950, during the Korean War, he took command of No. 77 Squadron for the third time. He oversaw its conversion to Gloster Meteors, becoming the first RAAF commander of a jet squadron in war, and earned the Commonwealth and US Distinguished Flying Crosses. Cresswell resigned from the RAAF in 1957, and flew with Bobby Gibbes's Sepik Airways in New Guinea before joining de Havilland Australia in 1959. He retired in 1974. (Full article...)

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In the news

Ozzy Osbourne

Armed clashes erupt in the Cambodia–Thailand border conflict.
Ozzy Osbourne (pictured), the lead singer of Black Sabbath, dies at the age of 76.
A fighter jet crashes into a college in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing more than 30 people.
In golf, Scottie Scheffler wins the Open Championship.
A tourist boat capsizes during a thunderstorm in Hạ Long Bay, Vietnam, leaving at least 36 people dead.

On this day

July 27

Colonial Pipeline system map in 2012

1689 – First Jacobite rising: Scottish and Irish Jacobites defeated Williamite forces at Killiecrankie, Scotland.
1955 – The Austrian State Treaty came into effect, ending the Allied occupation of Austria, although the country was not free of Allied troops until October.
1965 – Mattachine Midwest, a gay rights organization in Chicago, held its first meeting.
2007 – While covering a police pursuit in Phoenix, Arizona, two news helicopters collided in mid-air, killing both crews.
2020 – A major oil spill from the Colonial Pipeline was discovered in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (system map pictured).

Joe Tinker (b. 1880; d. 1948)
Carlos Vila Nova (b. 1959)
Piet de Jong (d. 2016)
Edna O'Brien (d. 2024)

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Today's featured picture

Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple) is a painting of the Romantic era by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830 that toppled King Charles X. A bare-breasted "woman of the people" with a Phrygian cap personifying the concept and Goddess of Liberty, accompanied by a young boy brandishing a pistol in each hand, leads a group of various people forward over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen while holding aloft the flag of the French Revolution—the tricolour, which again became France's national flag after these events—in one hand, and brandishing a bayonetted musket with the other. The figure of Liberty is also viewed as a symbol of France and the French Republic known as Marianne. The painting is displayed in the Louvre in Paris.

Painting credit: Eugène Delacroix; photographed Shonagon

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