Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 November 15

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From today's featured article

Portrait of Maria Portinari (c. 1470–72) is a small tempera and oil-on-wood painting by Hans Memling. It portrays Maria Maddalena Baroncelli, about whom very little is known. Around 14 years old, she is depicted shortly before her wedding to the Italian banker Tommaso Portinari, who was an intimate of Charles the Bold and manager of the Bruges branch of a bank controlled by Lorenzo de' Medici. Maria is dressed in the height of late 15th-century fashion, with an elaborate jewel-studded necklace and a long black hennin with a transparent veil. Her headdress is similar and necklace identical to those in her depiction in Hugo van der Goes's Portinari Altarpiece (c. 1475), a painting that may have been partly based on Memling's portrait. The panel is the right wing of a hinged devotional triptych; the lost center panel is recorded in 16th-century inventories as a Virgin and Child. Maria and Tommaso's portraits are hung alongside each other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Harrods at night

... that Zamira Hajiyeva spent £16.3 million at the London department store Harrods (pictured) over a ten-year period?
... that the foliage of the cauliflower hakea is so prickly that gloves are recommended when collecting seed?
... that racist graffiti on mathematician Chawne Kimber's college campus, along with George Carlin's seven dirty words, inspired her to politicize her quilting?
... that the Georgetown Car Barn, opened in 1897, operated as a terminal for cable cars for less than a year?
... that Marcel Comeau was a minor league Most Valuable Player, and a junior league Coach of the Year, but never played or coached in the National Hockey League?
... that 694 Italians have been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust in Italy?
... that following his retirement from playing, footballer Andy Kerr became a financial advisor in the Far East?
... that Peter Kubelka's experimental film Schwechater was originally commissioned as a beer commercial?

In the news

Maithripala Sirisena

Amidst a constitutional crisis, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka suspends the attempt by President Maithripala Sirisena (pictured) to dissolve parliament.
American comic book creator Stan Lee dies at the age of 95.
An outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed more than 200 people since August.
Four wildfires in California, including the Camp Fire and Woolsey Fire, burn more than 230,000 acres (93,000 hectares) and kill at least 59 people.

On this day

November 15: Republic Day in Brazil (1889)

Buran

1315 – A 1,500-strong force from the Swiss Confederacy ambushed a group of Austrian soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire on the shores of Lake Ägerisee in Switzerland.
1760 – The chapel of the new Castellania Palace in Valletta, Malta, was consecrated.
1859 – Sponsored by Greek businessman Evangelos Zappas, the first modern revival of the Olympic Games took place in Athens.
1943 – The Holocaust: Heinrich Himmler ordered that Romanies were to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps".
1988 – The Soviet Buran spacecraft (pictured), a reusable vehicle built in response to NASA's Space Shuttle program, was launched, unmanned, on its only flight.

Odo II, Count of Blois (d. 1037) · The Duke of Hamilton & Lord Mohun (d. 1712) · Gus Poyet (b. 1967)

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Today's featured picture

The Rentenmark was a currency introduced on 15 November 1923 in Weimar Germany after the value of the previous currency had been destroyed by hyperinflation.

Banknote: Weimar Republic, National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History

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