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From today's featured article

The Princesse de Broglie is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Painted between 1851 and 1853, it shows Pauline de Broglie, who adopted the courtesy title princesse, and married Albert de Broglie, the 28th prime minister of France. She was aged 28 at the time of its completion. Although highly intelligent and widely known for her beauty, Pauline suffered from profound shyness, and the painting captures her melancholia. She contracted tuberculosis and died in 1860 aged 35. The painting is considered one of the artist's finest later-period female portraits, along with those of Comtesse d'Haussonville, of Baronne de Rothschild and of Madame Moitessier. As with many of Ingres's female portraits, details of costume and setting are rendered with a chilly precision while her body seems to lack a solid bone structure. The portrait is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Sadko

... that the submarine Sadko (pictured) carries up to 40 tourists and has 22 underwater portholes?
... that Rudolf Gerlach-Rusnak was the stage name of a tenor from Ukraine, with the first name chosen for his favourite role in La bohème?
... that Coretta Scott King condemned the music video for Public Enemy's "By the Time I Get to Arizona", which depicts violent revenge for her assassinated husband?
... that the 1922 electoral platform of the Union of Town and Country Proletariat called for the creation of a World Federation of Socialist Republics?
... that NASA engineer William H. Robbins worked on what was the world's largest windmill when it was dedicated in 1979?
... that the Canadian Toy Testing Council often had a waiting list of families wanting to test toys and games?
... that Dolores Cabrera y Heredia, a Spanish Romantic poet and novelist, was a prominent member of Hermandad Lírica (Lyrical Sisterhood)?
... that Leonardo DiCaprio actually set actors on fire with his flamethrower in the 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?

In the news

COVID-19 pandemic: Disease; Virus; By location; Impact; Vaccines; Portal

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing

Former President of France Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (pictured) dies at the age of 94.
In baseball, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks defeat the Yomiuri Giants to win their fourth-straight Japan Series.
Ingrida Šimonytė takes office as Prime Minister of Lithuania.
Argentine footballer Diego Maradona dies at the age of 60.

On this day

December 3

Christiaan Barnard

1800 – War of the Second Coalition: French forces defeated Austrian and Bavarian troops at Hohenlinden, eventually resulting in the Austrians signing the Treaty of Lunéville.
1904 – Himalia, Jupiter's largest irregular moon, was discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine at the Lick Observatory in California.
1927 – Putting Pants on Philip, the first official film featuring the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, was released.
1967 – Cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard (pictured) performed the first successful human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.
1982 – The United States Environmental Protection Agency tested soil from Times Beach, Missouri, which revealed high concentrations of dioxin and led to the abandonment of the town.

Octavia Hill (b. 1838)
Sheng Shicai (b. 1895)
Julianne Moore (b. 1960)

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Today's featured picture

The mantled guereza (Colobus guereza) is a species of Old World monkey native to much of western central and eastern Africa. Although its colouring is somewhat variable across its range, it has a distinctive pelage which is mostly black, with a white facial disc and long white fringes of silky hair along the sides of its body. The tail is long and ends in a white tuft of variable length. It is a diurnal, mostly arboreal monkey, with groups moving through the canopy feeding mainly on leaves, with some fruits and other food items. This male of the subspecies C. g. guereza, also known as the Omo River guereza or the Abyssinian black-and-white colobus, was photographed in Amora Gedel Park in Awasa, Ethiopia.

Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp

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