Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 November 17b

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From today's featured article

HMS Hood was a battlecruiser of the British Royal Navy, commissioned in 1920. Hood was the largest warship in the world for 20 years and was nicknamed "the Mighty Hood". She was involved in several showing-the-flag exercises prior to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. She was scheduled to undergo a major rebuild in 1941 but the war prevented this. In July 1940 she participated in the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. On 24 May 1941 Hood and the battleship Prince of Wales intercepted the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Battle of the Denmark Strait. Hood was struck by several German shells, exploded, and sank with the loss of all but three of her crew of 1,418. The Royal Navy conducted two inquiries; both concluded that Hood's aft magazine exploded after a shell penetrated her armour. Hood's wreck was discovered in 2001. (This article is part of a featured topic: Battlecruisers of the world.)

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Did you know ...

Susan Catania

... that Susan Catania (pictured) shocked male legislators by bringing her infant daughter to the floor of the Illinois House of Representatives and nursing her baby in the women's restroom?
... that the Allenby Formation has been called part of a "Great Canadian Lagerstätte"?
... that Satrio used water buffaloes to vaccinate 240,000 people against smallpox?
... that the Cello Sonata by John Foulds features quarter tones in the second movement, but it is uncertain if he introduced them in the 1905 version or the 1927 revision?
... that Scottish novelist Isla Dewar said "if ... a thing is not worth doing then it's worth doing fabulously, amazingly, with grace, style and panache"?
... that The West Wing episode "17 People" has an entire website created by a "superfan" with the sole purpose of explaining it?
... that Indian cricketer Bangalore Jayaram's English styled Mashie Lodge, was named after his favourite golf club, the Mashie Niblick?
... that the developers of the video game Golf Club: Wasteland jokingly announced that they would only sell one copy at a price of $500 million?

In the news

Kiril Petkov

Kosmos 1408 is destroyed by a Russian anti-satellite weapon and turned into space debris.
We Continue the Change, led by Kiril Petkov (pictured) and Asen Vasilev, wins the most seats in the Bulgarian general election.
SpaceX's Crew-3 mission takes four astronauts to the International Space Station.
Former South African president F. W. de Klerk, who negotiated the end of apartheid with Nelson Mandela, dies at the age of 85.

On this day

November 17

14th Dalai Lama

1796 – French Revolutionary Wars: French forces defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Arcole in a manoeuvre to cut the latter's line of retreat.
1950 – The 14th Dalai Lama (pictured) assumed full temporal power as ruler of Tibet at the age of fifteen.
1968 – NBC controversially cut away from an American football game between the Oakland Raiders and New York Jets to broadcast Heidi, causing viewers in the Eastern United States to miss the game's dramatic ending.
2009 – Administrators at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit discovered that their servers had been hacked and thousands of emails and files on climate change had been stolen.

Nikephoros Melissenos (d. 1104)
Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (d. 1818)
Petra Burka (b. 1946)

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Today's featured picture

Georg Braun (1541 – 10 March 1622) was a Catholic cleric and topo-geographer from Cologne. From 1572 to 1617, he edited the Civitates orbis terrarum, which contains 546 prospects, bird's-eye views and maps of cities from around the world. This copper plate print was published in the first volume of the work; it was engraved by the Flemish mapmaker Frans Hogenberg and shows a historical view of Trier.

Credit: Frans Hogenberg and Georg Braun

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