1917 - First jazz records are recorded: "Dixie Jazz Band One Step" and "Livery Stable Blues" by the Original Dixieland Jass Band for the Victor Talking Machine Company in NYC 1917 - Russian February Revolution: Tsar Nicolas II orders army to quell civil unrest in Petrograd - army mutinies [NS Mar 11] 1955 - Leigh, Charlap, Styne, Comden and Green's musical "Peter Pan", starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard, closes at Winter Garden Theater, NYC, after 152 performances 1983 - Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album goes #1 and stays #1 for 37 weeks 1991 - Signs of Iran crude now an option for US refiners, but no imports from Iran likely in near future 2004 - US lifts a ban on travel to Libya, ending restrictions that had lasted for 23 years 2017 - 59th Daytona 500: Kurt Busch wins after Kyle Larson runs out of gas on last lap; Jeffrey Earnhardt makes NASCAR history, 1st ever 4th generation driver to compete in Daytona 500 2023 - Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams faces widespread condemnation for his comments about African Americans in a YouTube show, prompting his strip and up-coming book to be cancelled More Historical Events »

It’s hard to recall because it seems like it happened long ago, but there was a time at the outset of the Second Trump Administration where Elon Musk was at the top of the Elitist Media Evening News each and every day. Elon’s long gone from the administration, but this odd brief onABC World News Tonight makes crystal clear that the Elon hate remains. Watch the brief in its entirety, as aired on Wednesday, February 25th, 2026: Take a look at this weirdly brand-specific @ABCWorldNews brief about a car-ramming incident in California, wherein David Muir makes sure to plug "Tesla" in there in a way you never see with other brands. @elonmusk is gone from the admin but the hate remains. pic.twitter.com/OhpiwXznYK — Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 26, 2026 DAVID MUIR: There’s an urgent search tonight for a driver who drove into a crowd in Southern California. Authorities say there was a confrontation involving that Tesla driver who they say then returned, ramming into people in the street. Four people were hurt. Of course, there is much more to the story than bla, bla, bla TESLA. Per Fox News: Video captured the chaotic moment a car barreled into a crowd gathered outside a bar over the weekend in San Bernardino County, California, triggering a burst of gunfire and sending bystanders scrambling for safety. The Redlands Police Department said Monday that four people were rushed to the hospital after the suspected attempted vehicular homicide unfolded early Sunday morning. The incident reportedly stemmed from an altercation that escalated among several people outside a popular restaurant and bar, The Underground, shortly before 1:30 a.m.  Authorities said one of the individuals involved got into a 2022 Tesla and drove away before circling back minutes later, "striking four people who were standing in the street in front of the bar." The report goes on to mention that the bar is located in a place where “people go to after they’ve been kicked out of other bars.”  The Fox item mentions the brand of the ramming vehicle as well, but not as a centerpiece of the report, which is what ABC did. In a three-sentence story, the placement of “Tesla” renders it its protagonist. By design. This is contrary to standard practice with your typical ramming story, which seldom mentions the car’s make, if at all. When was the last time you heard the vehicle’s make feature prominently in a car ramming story? You don’t.  Those other brands don’t get mentioned at all. But things are still (D)ifferent when it comes to Tesla. The media continue to hate Elon Musk with the intensity of a thousand suns, and as though he never left the Trump administration at all.  

Often, child abuse happens behind closed doors. But the abuse of Gabriel Fernandez was far from a secret to teachers and social workers. Though some adults attempted to help him, they didn’t do enough, and Gabriel Fernandez was tragically murdered at the age of eight. Since then, Gabriel’s case has provoked anger and repulsion. How did his abuse go uninvestigated for so long? What could the adults in his life have done to save the vulnerable California boy? And how can social workers make sure that what happened to Gabriel never happens again? This is the story of Gabriel Fernandez and the horrific abuse he openly suffered at the hands of his family before he died in May 2013. The Abuse Of Gabriel Fernandez Gabriel Fernandez was just eight years old when he died after being beaten by his mom and her boyfriend. Born on February 20, 2005, in Palmdale, California, Gabriel Fernandez had a difficult family life from the start. According to The Wrap, his mother, Pearl Fernandez, didn’t want another child and even left him at the hospital. In fact, Pearl already had a record of child neglect and abuse. One year earlier, Booth Law reports that a relative had notified Child Protective Services, saying that Pearl was beating another son. But nothing was done. Unwanted by his mother, Gabriel spent much of his life with his great-uncle and his partner. He then later moved in with his grandparents. But in 2012, although Pearl had faced accusations of hitting her daughter and neglecting to feed her, Pearl suddenly insisted that Gabriel wasn’t being properly cared for by his relatives and that she wanted him back. According to The Atlantic, Pearl actually took Gabriel back because she wanted to collect welfare benefits. Despite the objections of Gabriel’s grandparents, she brought the boy back into her house in October 2012. There, Gabriel lived with his mother, her boyfriend Isauro Aguirre, and two older siblings, 11-year-old Ezequiel and 9-year-old Virginia. Soon afterward, Jennifer Garcia, Gabriel’s first-grade teacher at Summerwind Elementary in Palmdale, California, started to notice that the boy showed signs of abuse. In fact, Gabriel even told her about it. “Is it normal for moms to hit their kids?” he asked Garcia one day in October 2012. “Is it normal for your mom to hit you with the part of the belt that has that metal thing on the end? Is it normal for you to bleed?” After school that day, Garcia called a child-abuse hotline, which put her in touch with a caseworker named Stefanie Rodriguez. Although Garcia initially felt reassured, the abuse of Gabriel Fernandez seemed to continue. One day, he came to class with chunks of his hair missing. Another day, Gabriel Fernandez appeared with an injured lip and told Garcia that his mom had punched him. And in January 2013, he showed up with round bruises on his face and admitted to Garcia that his mom had shot him with a BB gun. Garcia continually reached out to Rodriguez, but the caseworker said that she couldn’t discuss the details of Gabriel’s case. Rodriguez had, in fact, visited the Fernandez home, but Gabriel often recanted his stories and Rodriguez noted that the children at the residence seemed “appropriately dressed, visibly healthy, and did not have any marks or bruises.” Sadly, his abuse was actually much worse than Rodriguez or even Garcia seemed to realize. And in May 2013, Gabriel Fernandez’s mom and her boyfriend would brutally beat the eight-year-old to death. The Murder Of Gabriel Fernandez TwitterGabriel Fernandez was tortured for about eight months leading up to his murder. On May 22, 2013, Pearl Fernandez called 911 to report that her son, Gabriel, was not breathing. Paramedics arrived and found the boy with broken ribs, a fractured skull, missing teeth, and BB pellet wounds on his body. “I tried to feel his heart,” Pearl Fernandez’s boyfriend Isauro Aguirre said, placing the blame for Gabriel’s injuries on “roughhousing” with his older brother. “And nothing is moving.” It later came out that Pearl Fernandez and Isauro Aguirre had tortured the eight-year-old with a BB gun, pepper spray, coat hangers, and a baseball bat. Gabriel Fernandez died two days later of his injuries on May 24, 2013. And then, in the months following, the shocking depth of his abuse — and the homophobic motives of his tormenters — came to light. The Atlantic reports that Gabriel Fernandez routinely suffered severe abuse at the hands of his mom and Aguirre. This happened over the course of eight months. Sometimes, they stuffed a sock in his mouth and bound his hands and ankles, then locked him in a cabinet they called “the cubby.” They called him gay (possibly because he had previously been raised by a gay great-uncle), punished him whenever they saw him playing with dolls, and forced him to wear dresses. According to Gabriel’s siblings, Ezequiel and Virginia, the couple also made him eat “a lot” of cat feces, forced him to run from a BB gun, and hit him so hard that he couldn’t breathe. In addition, Gabriel’s therapist had reported before his death that the boy had been forced to perform oral sex on a relative and that he’d written notes saying that he wanted to kill himself. But despite the many warning signs, he was tragically never rescued. The Aftermath Of The Eight-Year-Old’s Death Public DomainPearl Fernandez was sentenced to life in prison for Gabriel Fernandez’s murder, while Isauro Aguirre was sentenced to death. In the aftermath of Gabriel Fernandez’s death, both Pearl Fernandez and Isauro Aguirre were arrested and charged with the boy’s murder. Pearl pled guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. “I want to say I’m sorry to my family for what I did,” Pearl Fernandez said in court in 2018, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I wish Gabriel was alive. Every day I wish that I’d made better choices. I’m sorry to my children, and I want them to know that I love them.” The judge, however, didn’t mince words. He said that Gabriel’s death had been so horrific that he’d almost call it animalistic — except “animals know how to take care of their young.” Aguirre was also found guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death. (Currently, however, California has suspended all capital punishment, so Aguirre remains in prison for the foreseeable future.) But they weren’t the only people to face consequences for Gabriel Fernandez’s death. Four social workers — Stefanie Rodriguez, Patricia Clement, Kevin Bom, and Gregory Merritt — faced felony charges of child abuse and falsifying public records. However, TIME reports that an appellate panel in January 2020 decided that they should not face criminal charges. Now, Gabriel Fernandez’s loved ones can only hope that his horrific death wasn’t entirely in vain. Though he had clearly slipped through the cracks of the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services, the department vowed to begin “a new era of reform” after his murder. TIME reports that the organization added new policies to ensure child safety, hired more than 3,000 new social workers since 2013 to lighten caseloads, and retrained current caseworkers on how to effectively interview witnesses and notice physical signs of abuse before it’s too late. Tragically, Gabriel Fernandez’s death was entirely preventable. After his teacher notified social workers of the abuse, something could have been done. Instead, the little boy was left to suffer — and die — at the hands of his own caregivers, as the city of Los Angeles turned a blind eye. After reading about the tragic murder of Gabriel Fernandez, learn about five horrifying acts of child abuse that used to be totally legal. Then, take a look at the “Alaskan Avenger” who attacked pedophiles with a hammer. The post The Heartwrenching Story Of Gabriel Fernandez, The 8-Year-Old Tortured To Death By His Mother And Her Boyfriend appeared first on All That's Interesting.

Alvintrusty/Wikimedia CommonsArtist and photographer Walter Wick, one of the creators of the I Spy series. Most people might not immediately recognize the name Walter Wick, but they are most assuredly familiar with his work. In 1991, Wick began collaborating with writer Jean Marzollo to create a series of books that would go on to sell millions of copies worldwide: the I Spy picture riddles. Wick began as a commercial photographer, but by the 1980s, he’d started creating photo illustrations and puzzles for books and magazines. That hobby expanded into an incredible career, and today, he’s celebrated for his pictures that appear in the I Spy and Can You See What I See? books. Walter Wick didn’t just photograph the elaborate puzzles, though — he built them. From miniature towns to intricate Rube Goldberg machines, Wick painstakingly designed each page of his books to capture the whimsy of childhood. Even now, more than 30 years after Wick’s first I Spy book was published, his work continues to enthrall children around the world. Walter Wick’s Early Life And Career Walter Wick was born in Connecticut on Feb. 23, 1953, and grew up in East Granby. Living in a small, rural town meant that he had to find ways to entertain himself. So, he began to tinker with things, making his own toys out of various objects he found lying around the house. When he was eight, his brother introduced him to photography. Wick reflected on the first roll of film he ever used in a blog post on his website, describing the excitement and frustration of learning how to take good photos. “I distinctly remember the moment for both the failures and success when the prints came back from the drugstore,” he wrote. “The cause-and-effect aftermath lingered in my head years later. But lost pictures are no different than any other undocumented childhood memories: over time, you begin to wonder if certain events of your life actually happened.” Walter WickWalter Wick at the age of eight. It wasn’t until later in life, after high school, that Walter Wick decided to seriously pursue photography as a career. He studied photojournalism at Paier College of Art in Connecticut, graduating in 1973. He then spent several years working as a lab technician and photographer’s assistant. In 1978, Wick moved to New York City and opened a small commercial photography studio. However, finding clients was difficult, so he spent much of his time developing new ideas and techniques. Walter WickWalter Wick working on a scene called “Toppled” from his book Hey Seymour! Wick married his wife, Linda Cheverton — a photo prop stylist for magazines and cookbooks — in 1980, and as his career continued to grow, he began working with magazines such as Psychology Today and Discover. Then, in 1981, he crafted his first photographic puzzle, “The Amazing Mirror Maze,” for the magazine Games. He continued to contribute small puzzles to various publications over the next decade, but it wasn’t until 1991 that he and Jean Marzollo came up with the idea for I Spy. At the time, Marzollo was the editor of the Scholastic children’s magazine Let’s Find Out, and she hired Wick to photograph “fasteners” to include as a poster in an upcoming issue. “I was organizing screws, paper clips and other odds and ends,” Wick recalled to Deseret News in 2009. “As I began sorting, I liked the way the objects looked spread out on my light box. After hours of careful arranging, I took a picture. This photograph of odds and ends was the spark that inspired the first I Spy book.” Creating The Beloved I Spy Books The first I Spy book was published in 1992, and it was a breakout success. Wick built the scenes and photographed them for each of the book’s pages, while Marzollo wrote the rhyming riddles that accompanied the images. Walter WickWalter Wick designing one of his elaborate photographic illusions in 1993. The popularity of the first I Spy book spawned seven more in the original series, in addition to compilations and spin-offs, each releasing to critical acclaim. But Walter Wick was no one-trick pony. In 1997, he published A Drop of Water: A Book of Science and Wonder, which won the Boston Globe-Horn Book prize for nonfiction. The next year, The New York Times named Wick’s Optical Tricks one of the year’s “best illustrated children’s books.” And in 2002, Can You See What I See? remained on the bestseller list for a staggering 22 weeks. Part of what made Wick’s work so successful was the sheer dedication he had to his craft. Speaking to PEOPLE in 2024, Wick revealed that one of his most popular photographs from I Spy — “Levers, Ramps, and Pulleys” — was actually a functional machine, despite the fact that it would only appear in a still frame. Walter Wick/I Spy“Levers, Ramps, and Pulleys” from I Spy School Days. “[Jean Marzollo] just thought I was gonna do some levers, ramps, and pulleys in a scene, which would’ve been perfectly sufficient,” he said. “But I decided to make this machine and I said, ‘Well, it’s gotta do something. What’s it gonna do?’ I said, ‘I think it’s gonna pop a balloon.'” So, Wick spent the next three weeks building what was effectively a Rube Goldberg machine out of tiny objects. “I came up with this Tinkertoy stand that held the balloon and held the thing that popped it at the same time,” he said. He settled on a pencil as the popper, but it had to be sharp, or “it would just bounce off the balloon,” explained Wick. “So I sharpened it and then I accidentally triggered it and almost killed myself with it.” Wick has called creating these sets and scenes “a joy” — but his greatest pleasure is seeing how children react to his work. How Walter Wick Continues To Spark Children’s Curiosity And Creativity Feedback and questions from young readers were some of the motivating factors for Wick to continue making his books over the decades. In 2023, he told CT Insider about an instance in which a four-year-old asked him how he managed to get a doll pictured in one book to balance on one foot as if it was running. “This is a child who couldn’t read but understood the toy shouldn’t be able to balance as I had it,” Wick said. “That question stuck with me. When you get questions like this, you realize they’re trying to reconcile their understanding of how the world works. I consider these inquiries from kids to be high-value engagement, so I try to always amplify that as much as I can.” Walter WickWalter Wick working in his studio. In order to expose his work to even more curious children, Wick has allowed his illustrations and models to appear at exhibitions across the country. An exhibit titled “I Spy! Walter Wick’s Hidden Wonders” also went on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum in 2025, showcasing decades of Wick’s photography. Through these photos, Wick has provided millions of readers with hours of entertainment. But for the man behind the camera, creating the images brought just as much joy. More than three decades into his career, Walter Wick continues to inspire. After learning about Walter Wick and his mind-bending photographs, meet Rosalind Walter, the woman behind Rosie the Riveter. Then, read about Stephen Wiltshire, the autistic artist who can draw entire cities from memory. The post The Remarkable Worlds Of Walter Wick And His Beloved ‘I Spy’ Series appeared first on All That's Interesting.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., are calling for an investigation after Cuban authorities allegedly opened fire on a U.S.-registered boat Wednesday, killing four people in waters near the island.

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