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From Wikipedia's newest articles:

• ... that Samuel Johnson (pictured) bragged he could recite an entire chapter of Niels Horrebow's Natural History of Iceland?
• ... that the Purple-crowned Lorikeet is colloquially known as the "Zit Parrot" from its shrill tsit call?
• ... that the 17th-century Chinese world map Shanhai Yudi Quantu was derived from the work of Father Matteo Ricci of the Jesuit China missions?
• ... that Viktor Nogin, mayor of Moscow during the Bolshevik Revolution, is buried in the Kremlin in Red Square, Moscow?
• ... that in the Texas Revolution battle of Lipantitlán, Texian insurgents captured in 30 minutes a Mexican fort they described as a "second-rate hog pen"?
• ... that aviator Jack De Garis faked his own suicide by drowning before being the subject of an Australia-wide search in 1925?
• ... that a 15th-century bell from the Gokoku-ji Buddhist temple in Japan was sent to the U.S. in 1854 and rung when the Naval Academy at Annapolis won the annual Army-Navy football game?
  

• A series of bomb blasts in Bangalore, India kills two people and injures twenty.
• The International Olympic Committee bans Iraq's team from competing in the 2008 Summer Olympics because of interference by the government in the national-level committee.
• Cape Verde joins the World Trade Organization, becoming its 153rd member.
• India's United Progressive Alliance-led government (Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pictured) survives a confidence vote, held after the Left Front withdraws its support over the Indo-US nuclear deal.
• The first trial of a Guantanamo Bay detention camp inmate begins with Salim Hamdan, the former driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, pleading not guilty to charges of conspiracy and supporting terrorism.

July 26: Independence Day in Liberia (1847) and Maldives (1965)

• 811 – Bulgarian forces led by Khan Krum defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Pliska, annihilating almost the whole army and killing Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros I.
• 1139 – After a victory over the Almoravid Moors at the Battle of Ourique, Afonso the Conqueror was proclaimed the first king of an independent Portugal by his soldiers.
• 1822 – José de San Martín met with Simón Bolívar in Guayaquil to plan for the future of Peru and South America in general.
• 1882 – Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal (pictured) premiered at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany.
• 1908 – Unable to use the services of U.S. Secret Service agents as investigators because of a federal law, U.S. Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte established what is now known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation to organize his own staff of special agents.

More events: July 25 – July 26 – July 27