Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 January 2

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From today's featured article

Type 23 torpedo boat schematic

Albatros was the fourth of six Type 23 torpedo boats (schematic shown) built for the German Navy. Launched in July 1926 and commissioned in May 1927, she often served as a flagship of various torpedo boat units. The ship made multiple non-intervention patrols during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. After an attack by aircraft of the Spanish Republican Air Force that killed German sailors in 1937, Albatros participated in the retaliatory bombardment of Almería. At the beginning of World War II in 1939, she helped to lay minefields and made anti-shipping patrols before participating in Operation Weserübung, the German invasion of Norway in April 1940. Albatros fired the first shots of the campaign when she encountered and crippled a Norwegian patrol boat. She was lightly damaged during the Battle of Horten Harbor. Albatros then ran aground and was wrecked while maneuvering in an attempt to avoid Norwegian coastal artillery. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Colossal Buddha head in Ratnagiri

... that the Buddhist site of Ratnagiri (Buddha head pictured) in Odisha, India, includes rare carved scenes that seem to combine eroticism and hair-cutting?
... that Cheng Sihan, a former driver and art-school dropout, started a successful acting career after becoming homeless and desperate for work?
... that Twenty One Pilots had concerns over the sensitivity of their handling of the topic of suicide in their song "Neon Gravestones", but still kept it in their album Trench?
... that Andrew Watt Kay's paper describing his augmented histamine test was the single most cited paper in the British Medical Journal between 1945 and 1989?
... that the Century Building in New York City was built in 1880 as a speculative project, the developers having purchased the land more than a decade earlier?
... that Oskar Cohn initiated protests against the deportation of Jews from Tel Aviv and Jaffa in the German parliament?
... that although it is classified as a commuter rail line, Cercanías Madrid's C-9 line primarily serves ski resorts?
... that upon his election in 1970, Cecil Andrus became the first Democratic governor of Idaho in 24 years, and began 24 consecutive years of Democratic governors?

In the news

Jamal Khashoggi

More than 85 people are killed in a suicide truck bombing at a police checkpoint in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Bek Air Flight 2100 crashes near Almaty, Kazakhstan, killing at least 12 people and injuring 54 others.
A court in Saudi Arabia sentences five people to death for the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi (pictured).

On this day

January 2: Feast day of Saint Basil of Caesarea and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (Catholicism, Anglicanism)

Replica of Luna 1

1492 – The Granada War, the last part of the Reconquista, ended with the surrender of Muslim forces in Granada to the Catholic Monarchs of Spain.
1865 – Uruguayan War: Brazilian and Colorado Party forces captured the city of Paysandú from its Uruguayan defenders.
1920 – Under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, U.S. Department of Justice agents launched a series of raids against radical leftists and anarchists in more than 30 cities and towns across 23 states.
1959 – The Soviet spacecraft Luna 1 (replica pictured), the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon, was launched by a Vostok rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
1976 – An extratropical cyclone began affecting parts of western Europe, resulting in coastal flooding around the southern portions of the North Sea and leading to at least 82 deaths over the next few days.

Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza (b. 1566, d. 1614) · Bob Marshall (b. 1901) · Edgar Martínez (b. 1963)

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Today's featured picture

Vaxholm Fortress is a historic fortification on the island of Vaxholmen in the Stockholm archipelago just east of the Swedish town of Vaxholm. The first structure, a wooden blockhouse, was constructed by King Gustav I in 1548 as a defensive structure and customs post at this strategic site on the sea approach to Stockholm. It was replaced by a round stone tower during John III's reign. The present buildings date to 1833; their design was inspired by ideas on fortifications propounded by French engineers the marquis de Montalembert and Lazare Carnot. The fortress has been listed as a state monument since 1935 and now houses the Vaxholm Fortress Museum.

Photograph credit: Arild Vågen

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