Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 June 28

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From today's featured article

The Norfolk, Virginia, Bicentennial half dollar is a half dollar commemorative coin struck by the United States Mint in 1937, though it bears the date 1936. Designed by William Marks Simpson and Marjory Emory Simpson, the coin commemorates the 200th anniversary of Norfolk being designated as a royal borough, and the 100th anniversary of it becoming a city. Virginia Senator Carter Glass sponsored a bill for a Norfolk half dollar, but it was amended in committee to provide for commemorative medals instead. Unaware of the change, Glass and other advocates shepherded it through Congress. A bill calling for coins was passed in 1937, but by then, the anniversaries had passed, and sales were poorer than hoped; almost a third of the coins could not be sold. The Norfolk half dollar is the only U.S. coin to depict the British crown, shown on the reverse on the city's ceremonial mace. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Sylvia Geszty as Cleopatra

... that the Hungarian coloratura soprano Sylvia Geszty (pictured) was a member of the Berlin State Opera in East Germany before joining the Stuttgart State Opera in the West?
... that ten years ago today, the United States played in the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup Final after ending Spain's 35-match unbeaten streak?
... that Swedish entomologist Carl H. Lindroth suggested that more than 40 species of North American ground beetle were inadvertently transported from Europe in ship ballast?
... that NASA Astronaut Group 4, selected in 1965 for the Apollo program, was the first recruited primarily on the basis of scientific experience?
... that voice actress Karin Takahashi originally aspired to become a lawyer?
... that in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, players control a lineage of apes until it reaches a stage that resembles Lucy?
... that Kyle Garlick set the single-season home run record for the Cal Poly Pomona Broncos?
... that the sea hedgehog is a cannibal?

In the news

Se'are Mekonnen

The Italian cities of Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo are chosen as the joint hosts of the 2026 Winter Olympics and Winter Paralympics.
In the Amhara Region of Ethiopia, regional president Ambachew Mekonnen and national-military chief of staff Se'are Mekonnen (pictured) are assassinated.
At least 184 people are killed during a heat wave in India.
Former President of Egypt Mohamed Morsi dies during his trial, at the age of 67.

On this day

June 28: Vidovdan in Serbia

The Stonewall Inn in 1969

572 – Alboin, king of the Lombards, was assassinated in a coup d'état instigated by the Byzantines.
1914 – Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated by a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, sparking the outbreak of World War I.
1969 – In response to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn (pictured) in New York City, groups of gay and transgender people began to riot, a watershed event for the worldwide gay rights movement.
1989 – President Slobodan Milošević gave a speech in which he described the possibility of "armed battles" in the future of Serbia's national development.
2009 – Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was ousted by a local military coup following his attempt to hold a referendum to rewrite the constitution.

William Hooper (b. 1742) · Charles Cruft (b. 1852) · Meralda Warren (b. 1959)

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From today's featured list

Trần Anh Hùng

Vietnam has submitted films for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film since 1993. The award is presented annually by the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States that contains primarily non-English dialogue. The Scent of Green Papaya, directed by Trần Anh Hùng (pictured), was Vietnam's first submission for the 1993 awards. It is the only Vietnamese film to secure a nomination and was the first nomination received by a Southeast Asian country in the category. The Scent of Green Papaya and the three subsequent Vietnamese submissions – Hồ Quang Minh's Gone, Gone Forever Gone (1996), Tony Bui's Three Seasons (1999) and Hùng's Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000) – were directed by overseas Vietnamese directors and chosen without any support councils, deriving solely from the directors' relationship with foreign partners. The Buffalo Boy was the first selection by Vietnam's Ministry of Culture and Information, following an invitation to participate in 2006. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta Appraised by Dante and Virgil is a composition painted in at least five very similar versions by Dutch–French Romantic painter Ary Scheffer; all are in oils on canvas. The paintings depict a scene from Dante's Inferno. A pair of lovers, Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, are shown in Hell, while Dante and Virgil are on the right viewing them. A stab wound is visible on Malatesta's chest, signifying the pair's murder by his brother, Giovanni, who was da Rimini's husband.

This picture is the version of painting painted in 1855, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris. The original, dating to 1835, is now in the Wallace Collection in London. Others exist in collections in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art.

Painting credit: Ary Scheffer

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