Wikipedia:Main Page history/2016 December 1

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From today's featured article

The white-winged fairywren (Malurus leucopterus) is a bird species in the family Maluridae, unrelated to true wrens. It lives in the drier parts of central Australia, from central Queensland and South Australia to Western Australia. Like other fairywrens, this species displays marked sexual dimorphism, and one or more males of a social group grow brightly coloured blue plumage during the breeding season. The females, sandy-brown with light-blue tail feathers, are smaller, and almost indistinguishable from the younger sexually mature males. A subspecies is found on Dirk Hartog Island, and another on Barrow Island off the coast of Western Australia, both having black rather than blue male plumage. The white-winged fairywren mainly eats insects, and lives in heathland and arid scrubland. It is a cooperative breeding species, and small groups of birds maintain and defend territories year-round. Groups consist of a socially monogamous pair with several helper birds who assist in raising the young. As part of a courtship display, the male wren plucks petals from flowers and brings them to female birds. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Kalākaua is received by President Ulysses S. Grant

... that King Kalākaua of Hawaii was the first foreign leader to head a state visit to the United States (reception pictured)?
... that in 1981 Bobbi Campbell became the first person to publicly identify as a person living with HIV/AIDS?
... that the joystick shipped with the Atari 2600 was described as "the pinnacle of home entertainment controllers in its day"?
... that eleven publishers vied for the rights to Jessie Burton's debut novel The Miniaturist?
... that Don Martina, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Antilles, successfully campaigned for a slave leader to become a national hero?
... that the eggs of Oberländer's ground thrush have yet to be described?
... that the elected council of the Free City of Danzig Government in Exile was supposedly recognised in secret as the legal successor to the Danzig Senate by Danzig expatriates in 1951 and 1961?
... that the first known specimen of the dinosaur Tongtianlong limosus, which may have died trapped in mud, was nearly blown up by Chinese workmen?

In the news

Fidel Castro

LaMia Airlines Flight 2933 crashes in Medellín, Colombia, with the Chapecoense football team on board, killing 71 people.
In Canadian football, the Ottawa Redblacks defeat the Calgary Stampeders to win the Grey Cup.
Former leader of Cuba Fidel Castro (pictured) dies at the age of 90.
At least 44 people are killed after two passenger trains collide between Semnan and Damghan in Iran.
Over 100 Shia pilgrims are killed in a truck bomb attack in Hillah, Iraq.
A train derailment near Kanpur, India, kills more than 140 people.

On this day...

December 1: World AIDS Day; Great Union Day in Romania (1918)

The Pit

1577 – Queen Elizabeth I of England's principal secretary and spymaster Francis Walsingham was knighted.
1828 – Juan Lavalle, returning to Buenos Aires with troops that fought in the Cisplatine War, deposed the provincial governor Manuel Dorrego, reigniting the Argentine Civil Wars.
1918 – With the signing of the Act of Union, Denmark recognized the Kingdom of Iceland as a fully sovereign state in personal union with Denmark through a common monarch.
1966 – The Pit (pictured), one of college basketball's premier arenas in the US, opened on the campus of the University of New Mexico.
1966 – The first Gävle goat, a Swedish Yule Goat tradition, was constructed in Gävle and then burned to the ground that same night.
1991 – Over 92% of Ukrainian voters approved their country's independence as declared by the Ukrainian parliament on 24 August.

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Today's featured picture

Banquet Still Life, a 1644 oil-on-canvas painting by the Flemish artist Adriaen van Utrecht (1599–1652). Van Utrecht, born in Antwerp, studied under Herman de Neyt before going on a tour of France, Germany and Italy. He focused predominantly on banquet still lifes, showing banquets, game and fruit, garlands, or flowers, as well as market and kitchen scenes.

Painting: Adriaen van Utrecht

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