Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 September 15

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From today's featured article

Tirpitz in 1943 or 1944

Operation Paravane was a British air raid of World War II on the German battleship Tirpitz. The attack on 15 September 1944 by 21 Royal Air Force heavy bombers did irreparable damage, rendering the ship unfit for combat. A series of raids conducted from April to August by Royal Navy aircraft carriers had sought unsuccessfully to sink or disable the battleship at her anchorage in Kaafjord in the far north of German-occupied Norway, encountering formidable German defences. In September, Avro Lancaster bombers from two elite squadrons of RAF Bomber Command, flying from an airfield in the Soviet Union, attacked using heavy bombs and air-dropped mines. All of the British aircraft returned to base. The Allies were unable to confirm the extent of the battleship's damage, and conducted two further heavy bomber raids against her in late 1944 that sank the ship with considerable loss of life. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Pholiota squarrosoides

... that the mushroom Pholiota squarrosoides (pictured) has decayed logs of the trees Acer saccharum and Tilia glabra in the Great Lakes region of the US?
... that while Greenpeace activist Steve Sawyer was celebrating his birthday ashore with his crew, French agents bombed and sank their boat, the Rainbow Warrior?
... that Bharatiya Janata Party politicians Maneka Gandhi and Santosh Gangwar, current members of the 17th Lok Sabha, have been elected to the Indian lower house for the eighth time?
... that during the English Civil War, Katherine Stuart smuggled messages from Charles I to royalist sympathisers in London?
... that in 1949, the students of Northwestern Schools underwrote the US$40,000 cost to build KTIS in Minneapolis, the first radio station of Northwestern Media?
... that Australian astrophysicist Kirsten Banks was inspired to learn about her Wiradjuri heritage while training at the Sydney Observatory?
... that Alexander's bush squirrel is named after Lieutenant Boyd Alexander, a British Army officer, explorer, and ornithologist?
... that 19-year-old mxmtoon, who records lo-fi songs in her parents' guest bedroom, reached 100 million streams and nearly sold out an international tour before releasing her first album?

In the news

Artist's impression of K2-18b orbiting red dwarf K2-18

Houthi drone attacks on two major oil facilities force Saudi Arabia to cut more than half of its oil production.
Astronomers announce the detection of water in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b (artist's impression shown), the first such discovery for an exoplanet in the habitable zone around a star.
A stampede during the observance of Ashura in Karbala, Iraq, kills at least thirty-one people and injures more than a hundred others.
The Indian Space Research Organisation loses contact with Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lunar lander shortly before a hard landing on the Moon's surface.

On this day

September 15: Independence Day in Costa Rica (1821); Battle of Britain Day in Canada and the United Kingdom (2019)

John Bull

1530 – According to the Dominican Order, three mysterious women brought the painting of Saint Dominic in Soriano to a friary in Soriano Calabro, Italy.
1831 – The John Bull (pictured), the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world, ran for the first time in New Jersey on the Camden and Amboy Railroad.
1944 – World War II: American and Australian forces landed on the Japanese-occupied island of Morotai.
1959 – Nikita Khrushchev began a state visit to the United States, becoming the first Soviet leader to do so.
2008 – Financial crisis of 2007–2008: The global financial services firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy while holding over $600 billion in assets, the largest such filing in U.S. history.

Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510) · Phil Lamason (b. 1918) · Signe Toly Anderson (b. 1941)

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Today's featured picture

St. Jerome in His Study is an oil-on-panel painting by the Italian Renaissance master Antonello da Messina, thought to have been completed around 1460 to 1475 during Antonello's Venetian sojourn. The small picture portrays Saint Jerome working in his studio, a room without walls and ceiling seen from a kind of triumphal arch (probably within some church of Aragonese style). As in several other works by the Messinese painter, the main scene is accompanied by a host of details that have points of contact with the contemporary Flemish school: books, animals and objects painted with a taste for detail and "optical truth". The painting is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

Painting credit: Antonello da Messina

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