Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 August 23

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From today's featured article

Taylor Swift (born 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. She has sold more than 50 million albums and 150 million single downloads worldwide. Swift released her self-titled debut album in 2006, which spent more weeks than any other album on the Billboard 200 in the 2000s. Her second album, Fearless (2008), became the best-seller of 2009 in the US and won four Grammy Awards, with Swift becoming the youngest Album of the Year winner. With her later albums Speak Now (2010), Red (2012), 1989 (2014) and Reputation (2017), she became the first act to have four albums sell a million copies within one week in the US. The last three albums spawned the number-one singles "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", "Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Bad Blood", and "Look What You Made Me Do". Swift's many accolades include ten Grammy Awards and appearances in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, Time 100, and Forbes Celebrity 100. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Kiwi engine fire-up

... that during the 1960s and 1970s, Project Rover tested nuclear-powered rocket engines (example pictured) at the Nuclear Rocket Development Station at Jackass Flats?
... that Jörg Breiding, only the second leader of the Knabenchor Hannover in its 69-year history, conducted the choir and the Canadian Brass quintet in folk song arrangements in 2019?
... that Edward Riegelmann was opposed to having the Coney Island Boardwalk named after him?
... that Rathindranath Tagore, the first vice-chancellor of Visva-Bharati University, initially became involved with the school at the urging of his Nobel Prize-winning father?
... that Mark Hamill had his first regular voice-acting job on the 1973 television series Jeannie?
... that after their beloved Canadian leader, Captain Dyer, died, his Slavo-British unit took to carrying a massive portrait of him and would later murder all of the unit's other officers?
... that a solar-powered device for extracting water from the air, co-designed by Evelyn Wang, has been compared to the moisture vaporators in Star Wars?
... that toxic vacuolation, the presence of vacuoles inside certain types of white blood cells, can be a sign of sepsis?
... that when Virginia suffragist Anna Whitehead Bodeker was not allowed to cast a ballot in the 1871 municipal election in Richmond, she put a note in the ballot box claiming her right to vote?

In the news

Ural Airlines Airbus A321 in 2013

Brazil's National Institute for Space Research announces that it has detected more than 39,000 wildfires in the Amazon rainforest since January.
At least 80 people are killed and 160 others injured in a bombing at a wedding in Kabul, Afghanistan.
All 233 people on board Ural Airlines Flight 178 (aircraft pictured) survive a crash following bird strikes in both engines of an Airbus A321.
Typhoon Lekima impacts the Philippines, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan and East China, killing at least 80 people.

On this day

August 23: Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism / Black Ribbon Day in Canada, parts of the European Union, Georgia, and the United States

Part of the human chain forming the Baltic Way

1514 – Ottoman forces defeated the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, gaining control of eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq.
1929 – Palestine riots: Arabs began attacking Jews in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, killing more than sixty people in two days.
1939 – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a 10-year, mutual non-aggression treaty, which also secretly divided Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence.
1989 – Singing Revolution: Approximately two million people joined hands (pictured) to form a human chain spanning 675.5 kilometres (419.7 mi) across the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Soviet republics, to demonstrate their desire for independence.
2006 – Natascha Kampusch, who had been abducted at the age of ten in Vienna, escaped from her captor Wolfgang Přiklopil after more than eight years in captivity.

Radagaisus (d. 406) · Abraham Yates Jr. (b. 1724) · Denny Bautista (b. 1980)

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From today's featured list

Tashichho Dzong in Thimphu

The Kingdom of Bhutan is divided into 20 districts. Bhutan is located between the Tibet Autonomous Region of China and India on the eastern slopes of the Himalayas in South Asia. Dzongkhags are the primary subdivisions of Bhutan. They possess a number of powers and rights under the Constitution of Bhutan, such as regulating commerce, running elections, and creating local governments. The Local Government Act of 2009 established local governments in each of the 20 dzongkhags overseen by the Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs. Each dzongkhag has its own elected government with non-legislative executive powers, called a dzongkhag tshogdu (district council). As of the 2017 census, Thimphu (Tashichho Dzong pictured) is the most populous dzongkhag, with 138,736 residents; Gasa is the least populous, with 3,952 residents. Thimphu is the most densely populated, with 67.1 people per km², whereas Gasa is the least densely populated, with 1.3 people per km². (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

Quedlinburg Abbey was a house of secular canonesses (Frauenstift) in Quedlinburg in what is now Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. It was founded in 936 on the initiative of Saint Matilda, the widow of King Henry the Fowler, as his memorial. For many centuries, the abbey and its abbesses enjoyed great prestige and influence. Quedlinburg Abbey was an Imperial Estate and one of the approximately forty self-ruling Imperial Abbeys of the Holy Roman Empire and was disestablished in 1802/3. Today, the mostly Romanesque buildings are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Photograph credit: Alexander Savin

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