Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 August 28

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From today's featured article

Artist's rendering of the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 involved in the crash

Artist's rendering of the aircraft involved in the crash

Vesna Vulović (1950–2016) was a Serbian flight attendant who holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 metres (33,330 ft). She was the sole survivor after a briefcase bomb tore through the baggage compartment of JAT Flight 367 on 26 January 1972, causing it to crash over Czechoslovakia. She spent days in a coma with a fractured skull and many broken bones, and was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. Vulović eventually relearned how to walk, but continued to limp for the rest of her life. She was widely regarded as a national hero in Yugoslavia. Guinness recognized her world record in 1985. She was fired from JAT in the early 1990s for taking part in anti-government protests, but continued her work as a pro-democracy activist for decades. The final years of her life were spent in seclusion and poverty, and she struggled with survivor's guilt until her death. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Alina Morse with Zollipops

... that teenage CEO Alina Morse's (pictured) sugar-free candy company had US$6 million in sales when she was thirteen years old?
... that the Argus tortoise beetle is named after the mythical Greek giant Argus Panoptes?
... that Turkish television and film actress Serenay Aktaş was once a women's footballer?
... that department store chain Kastner & Öhler, based in Graz, began as a shop for mercery in 1873, and was the first in Central Europe to introduce fixed prices and run a mail order service?
... that Thomas Perkins Abernethy's dissertation The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815–1828 earned him a doctorate from Harvard University and was published in book form?
... that Japanese literature of the 12th through 16th centuries ceased to be the reserve of the aristocracy and became "national literature"?
... that in 1946, entomologists E. B. Pinniger and Cynthia Longfield were the first to identify the dainty damselfly in Britain?
... that Iggy Azalea joked with Peppa Pig on Twitter over My First Album's release date?

In the news

Wildfire locations in Brazil and the Amazon

Brazil's National Institute for Space Research announces that it has detected more than 75,000 wildfires in the country (satellite rendering shown) since January, at least 40,000 of which have occurred in the Amazon rainforest.
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 survive a crash following bird strikes in both engines of an Airbus A321.

On this day

August 28

Martin Luther King giving his "I Have a Dream" speech

1542 – Ottoman–Portuguese conflicts: During the Battle of Wofla, the Portuguese commander Cristóvão da Gama was captured by the Adal Sultanate and executed the next day.
1619 – Ferdinand II, the King of Bohemia and Hungary, was unanimously elected as Holy Roman Emperor.
1859 – A massive solar storm began, causing a coronal mass ejection to strike the Earth's magnetosphere that generated aurorae that were visible in the middle latitudes.
1963 – American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech (pictured), envisioning a future in which blacks and whites would coexist harmoniously as equals.
1973 – Swedish police used gas bombs to end a seven-day hostage situation in Stockholm; during the incident the hostages had bonded with their captors, leading to the term "Stockholm syndrome".

He Gui (d. 919) · Johannes Banfi Hunyades (d. 1646) · Katharine Abraham (b. 1954)

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Today's featured picture

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (28 August 1592 – 23 August 1628), was an English courtier, statesman and patron of the arts. He was a favourite and possibly also a lover of King James I of England. Despite a patchy political and military record, Buckingham remained at the height of royal favour for the first three years of the reign of King Charles I, until a disgruntled army officer assassinated him.

This picture is an oil-on-panel portrait of Buckingham by Dutch painter Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt, produced around 1625. Buckingham commissioned portraits of himself as "a medium for the cultivation of his personal image". In this painting, he is depicted with a jacket encrusted with pearls that also hang in ropes across it; it may also contain a reference to his diplomatic coup that year in negotiating the marriage of the future Charles I. At his entry to the French court, he is recorded as wearing a grey velvet suit from which the loosely threaded pearls dropped to the ground as he advanced to make his bow to the queen, to general wonder. The painting is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Painting credit: Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt

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