Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 January 29b

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From today's featured article

Formation sign of the 23rd Division

The 23rd (Northumbrian) Division was an infantry division of the British Army in the Second World War. Formed in 1939 from a cadre of the Territorial Army's 50th (Northumbrian) Motor Division, it was sent to France in April 1940 with scant training and preparation and inadequate administration, logistics, and heavy weapons. When Germany invaded Belgium, the British Expeditionary Force and French armies advanced, leaving the 23rd Division behind to guard airfields. After the main German attack came through the Ardennes, the division was ordered to the front line to defend the Canal du Nord—the only watercourse obstacle between the main German assault and the English Channel. By the time the division arrived, the Germans had already crossed south of their sector where French forces had yet to take up positions. One of the division's brigades was caught by armoured forces and overrun; the other conducted rearguard actions during the retreat to Dunkirk. The remnants of the division were evacuated on 31 May 1940, having suffered heavy losses. (Full article...)

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In the news

Billie Eilish

At the Grammy Awards, Billie Eilish (pictured) wins the major categories of Best New Artist, and Song, Record, and Album of the Year.
American former basketball player Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others die in a helicopter crash near Los Angeles.
An earthquake in Elazığ, Turkey, kills at least thirty-eight people and injures more than a thousand others.

On this day

January 29

Queen Liliʻuokalani

1856 – Queen Victoria introduced the Victoria Cross, originally to recognise acts of valour by British military personnel during the Crimean War.
1891 – Liliʻuokalani (pictured), the last monarch and only queen regnant of the Hawaiian Kingdom, ascended the throne.
1944 – World War II: At least 38 civilians were killed and about a dozen others injured when the Polish village of Koniuchy was attacked by a Soviet partisan unit with a contingent of Jewish partisans.
1991 – The first major ground engagement of the Gulf War began with Iraq's invasion of the Saudi Arabian city of Khafji, which would be recaptured three days later by Coalition forces.
2006 – India's Irfan Pathan became the only bowler to take a Test cricket hat-trick in the opening over of a match.

Giuliano Bugiardini (b. 1475) · Józefa Joteyko (b. 1866) · Colleen McCullough (d. 2015)

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Today's featured picture

Alice Catherine Evans (January 29, 1881 – September 5, 1975) was a pioneering American microbiologist who conducted research at the United States Department of Agriculture. She worked on refining manufacturing processes for cheese and butter and investigated the sources of bacterial contamination in milk products. She studied the disease brucellosis, then known as undulant fever, linking it to the consumption of cow's milk containing the bacterium Brucella abortus. Evans advocated the pasteurization of milk, but her results were greeted with skepticism, partially because she was a woman and did not have a PhD, only being accepted when scientists around the world confirmed her findings in the 1920s.

This photograph shows Evans at work in a laboratory at the Dairy Division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, taken some time between 1913 and 1918.

Photograph credit: National Photo Company; restored by Adam Cuerden

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