February 17 belongs to Claudia Peña

On February 17, 1600, Italian philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori by the Inquisition, after seven years of trial. Bruno defended the infinity of the universe, the plurality of worlds and heliocentrism. He refused to recant and died with a gag in his mouth. He is considered a martyr of science and freedom of thought.

On February 17, 2008, the Kosovo Assembly unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, becoming Europe's youngest state. Kosovo, with its Albanian majority, had been under UN administration since 1999 following the war between Serbian forces and the KLA. Independence was recognised by more than 100 countries, though Serbia, Russia and China still do not recognise it.

On February 17, 1933, Newsweek magazine was published for the first time in New York, becoming one of the most influential weekly news magazines of the twentieth century. The publication would compete for decades with Time for leadership of the English-language news magazine market. In 2012 it abandoned print format to publish exclusively in digital form.