Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 August 15

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From today's featured article

Bernard Fanning (born 15 August 1969) is an Australian musician and singer-songwriter. He is best known as the lead singer and frontman of Queensland alternative rock band Powderfinger. Born and raised in Toowong, Brisbane, he began writing music at 15. With Ian Haug, John Collins, and Darren Middleton, the band released five studio albums in fifteen years and achieved mainstream success in Australia. During Powderfinger's hiatus in 2005, Fanning began his solo music career with the studio album Tea & Sympathy. Powderfinger reunited in 2007 and released two more albums before disbanding in 2010. While Powderfinger's style focuses on alternative rock, Fanning's solo music is generally described as a mixture of blues and acoustic folk. He plays guitar, piano, keyboards and harmonica. Often speaking out against Australian political figures, Fanning has donated much of his time to philanthropic causes. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Wächter der Goitzsche

... that policeman and artist Anatol created the outdoor iron sculpture series Wächter, including a group guarding the environment (pictured) and a memorial to fallen police officers?
... that Lauren Price was the first Welsh woman to win a Commonwealth Games boxing medal?
... that technology developed for use in inkjet printers helped make the automated white blood cell differential, a common blood test, possible?
... that George Dashnau started the first mail order delivery service that supplied human skulls?
... that the brown-cheeked hornbill is among the eleven species of hornbill native to Ivory Coast?
... that Asamardhuni Jivayatra by Tripuraneni Gopichand is regarded as the first psychological novel in Telugu?
... that Polish colonel Andrzej Marecki was one of the victims of the controversial 1943 Gibraltar B-24 crash?
... that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor preserved her house with skim milk?

In the news

Typhoon Lekima

Typhoon Lekima (satellite image shown) impacts the Philippines, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan and East China, killing at least 80 people.
At least 75 people are killed and more than 50 others injured in a fuel tanker truck explosion in Morogoro, Tanzania.
A suicide bombing near a police station in Kabul, Afghanistan, kills 14 people and injures 145 others.
American novelist Toni Morrison dies at the age of 88.

On this day

August 15: Raksha Bandhan (Hinduism, 2019); Independence Day in India (1947)

14th-century painting of Michael VIII

718 – Forces of the Umayyad Caliphate abandoned their year-long siege of Constantinople, causing the caliphate to give up its goal of conquering the Byzantine Empire.
1261 – Michael VIII Palaiologos (depiction shown) was crowned Byzantine emperor in Constantinople.
1915 – The New York World revealed that Germany had purchased excess phenol from Thomas Edison that could be used to make explosives for the Allied war effort and diverted it to Bayer for aspirin production.
1944 – World War II: Allied forces began their invasion of southern France.
1998 – A car bomb attack carried out by the Real Irish Republican Army killed 29 people and injured approximately 220 others in Omagh, Northern Ireland.

Richard de Vere (b. 1385) · Gerty Cori (b. 1896) · Stephen Breyer (b. 1938)

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Today's featured picture

In Ancient Greece, the gorgoneion was a special apotropaic amulet showing the head of a Gorgon, used most famously by the Olympian deities Athena and Zeus: both are said to have worn the gorgoneion as a protective pendant. It was assumed, among other godlike attributes, as a royal aegis to imply divine birth or protection, by rulers of the Hellenistic age, as shown, for instance, on the Alexander Mosaic and the Gonzaga Cameo.

This picture shows a wooden door panel with a carving of a gorgoneion, intended to guard the house from unwanted guests. It is located at the Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil in Paris and was created around 1660 by French sculptor Thomas Regnaudin.

Photograph credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen

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