Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 May 24

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From today's featured article

New Road, Worcester

On 24 May 1979, in a game against Worcestershire, Somerset County Cricket Club captain Brian Rose chose to declare his team's innings closed after one over, throwing the game to manipulate a loophole in the rules. He was aiming to avoid elimination on a strike rate tie-breaker from the quarterfinals of the 1979 Benson & Hedges Cup, a one-day cricket competition for counties in England and Wales. After Somerset scored one run and declared, Worcestershire scored the two runs they needed to win. The match at New Road (pictured) in Worcester was completed in 18 minutes, with only 16 legal deliveries. Although Somerset's declaration was within the Laws of Cricket, Rose was condemned by the press and cricket officials. Just over a week after the match, the Test and County Cricket Board met for an emergency session and voted to eject Somerset from the competition by a vote of seventeen to one. The Laws were later changed to ban declarations in professional one-day cricket. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Mustafa Wahbi Tal, late 1920s, colorized

... that Mustafa Wahbi Tal (pictured), Jordan's most prominent poet, was arrested in 1926 for displaying the Bolshevik emblem, getting drunk in a bar, and publicly reciting a poem that insulted the Emir?
... that the New York City Subway stations at 9th, 25th, 59th, and Union Streets, as well as Prospect Avenue, were opened with a competition between two trains heading to Coney Island?
... that the developer of Hardcoded wanted to create a game that would appeal to cisgender people with a futanari fetish?
... that with the growth of the Werl pilgrimage to a statue of Mary, a large Romanesque Revival basilica was built adjacent to the former Baroque style church?
... that during the rule of the Greek military junta, archaeologist and museum curator Semni Karouzou was banned from conducting research in the National Archaeological Museum because of her political views?
... that actress Ruth Warrick was said to have "stolen the show" as a sweet young bride who grows into a disillusioned, middle-aged woman in the 1950 Christian film Second Chance?
... that Nico Rosberg announced his retirement from Formula One motor racing five days after winning the 2016 World Championship?
... that author Clinton Heylin flew from England to California to hear Bob Dylan perform "Idiot Wind" live?

In the news

COVID-19 pandemic

The aircraft involved in the accident, in 2015

A Pakistan International Airlines passenger aircraft (pictured) crashes in Karachi, killing ninety-seven people.
Cyclone Amphan impacts eastern India and Bangladesh, killing over one hundred people and forcing the evacuation of more than four million others.
The Iranian Navy frigate Jamaran accidentally strikes the Iranian support vessel Konarak with a missile, killing nineteen sailors.

On this day

May 24: Eid al-Fitr (Islam, 2020); Aldersgate Day (Methodism)

Amy Johnson

1667 – Led by King Louis XIV, the French army invaded the Spanish Netherlands, beginning the War of Devolution.
1830 – The nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was first published as a poem by Sarah Josepha Hale.
1930 – English aviator Amy Johnson (pictured) landed in Darwin, becoming the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia.
1970 – On the Kola Peninsula in Russia, drilling began on the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which eventually reached a depth of 12,262 metres (40,230 ft), making it the deepest borehole ever drilled and the deepest artificial point on Earth.
2014 – A gunman who had links to radical Islamists opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels, killing four people.

Elizabeth Carey, Lady Berkeley (b. 1576)
Arthur Wing Pinero (b. 1855)
Guy Tardif (d. 2005)

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Today's featured picture

A bacteriophage is a virus that infects and replicates within bacteria and archaea. Bacteriophages are among the most common and diverse entities in the biosphere, found wherever bacteria are present. Early evidence of their existence came when the English bacteriologist Ernest Hanbury Hankin reported in 1896 that something in the waters of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India had a marked antibacterial action against cholera, but was so minute that it could pass through a very fine porcelain filter.

This picture is a transmission electron micrograph at approximately 200,000× magnification, showing numerous bacteriophages attached to the exterior of a bacterium's cell wall.

Photograph credit: Graham Beards

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