Wikipedia:Main Page history/2016 May 21

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From today's featured article

The 1987 Giro d'Italia was the 70th event in the series, one of cycling's Grand Tour races. It began on 21 May with a 4 km (2.5 mi) prologue in San Remo, and concluded on 13 June with a 32 km (19.9 mi) individual time trial in Saint-Vincent. A total of 180 riders from 20 teams entered the 22-stage, 3,915 km (2,433 mi) race. Defending champion Roberto Visentini of the Carrera Jeans–Vagabond team led the first stage, and Dutchman Erik Breukink led the second. Irishman Stephen Roche, Visentini's teammate, took the overall lead after his team won the stage three team time trial. Visentini regained the lead for two days, but Roche rode ahead of him in the fifteenth stage, against orders from the team management, and held onto the lead for the win. Second place was taken by British rider Robert Millar, and Breukink took third. It was the second time in the history of the Giro that there were no Italian riders on the winners' podium. Roche was the second rider ever to win the Giro d'Italia, the Tour de France, and the World Championship road race in the same year, a feat commonly called the Triple Crown of Cycling. (Full article...)

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Katie Morrow

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... that for campaigning against indefinite psychiatric imprisonment for opponents of the regime, Vladimir Bukovsky was confined for years in Soviet psychiatric prison-hospitals, labor camps, and prisons?
... that Arsenal goalkeeper Dan Lewis blamed a greasy shirt for letting in the only goal of the 1927 FA Cup Final, gifting victory to Cardiff City?
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... that Trefelin BGC's women's football team broke away from the club after two years in the Welsh women's top division?
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In the news

EgyptAir SU-GCC

EgyptAir Flight 804 (aircraft pictured), with 66 people on board, crashes into the Mediterranean en route from Paris to Cairo.
Flooding and landslides produced by Cyclone Roanu kill at least 58 people and leave more than 130 missing in Sri Lanka.
The Vegetarian, written by Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith, wins the Man Booker International Prize.
Max Verstappen becomes the youngest driver to win a Formula One race by winning the Spanish Grand Prix at the age of 18.
Jamala, representing Ukraine with the song "1944", wins the Eurovision Song Contest in Stockholm, Sweden.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is suspended after both houses of the National Congress vote to impeach her.
Ongoing events
Recent deaths:
- Morley Safer

On this day...

May 21: Navy Day in Chile

A boat on the Manchester Ship Canal

1403 – King Henry III of Castile sent an embassy to the court of Timur (Tamerlane) to discuss the possibility of an alliance between Timur and Castile against the Ottoman Empire.
1674 – John III Sobieski, elected by the szlachta, became the monarch of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
1894 – The Manchester Ship Canal (pictured), linking Greater Manchester in North West England to the Irish Sea, officially opened, becoming the largest navigation canal in the world at the time.
1946 – Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin accidentally triggered a fission reaction at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and gave himself a lethal dose of hard radiation, making him the second victim of a criticality accident in history.
1991 – Former Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu.

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Today's featured picture

Taurus is a large and prominent constellation in the Northern Hemisphere's winter sky, and one of the oldest constellations. Taurus marked the location of the Sun during the spring equinox and thus influenced various bull figures in the mythologies of Ancient Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Taurus hosts two of the nearest open clusters to Earth, the Pleiades and the Hyades, both of which are visible to the naked eye; it also hosts the red giant Aldebaran (the brightest star in the constellation) and the supernova remnant Messier 1, more commonly known as the Crab Nebula.

This illustration comes from Urania's Mirror, a set of 32 astronomical star chart cards first published in November 1824.

Lithograph: Sidney Hall; restoration: Adam Cuerden

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