Wikipedia:Main Page history/2014 April 30

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From today's featured article

The Iranian Embassy siege took place from 30 April to 5 May 1980, after a group of six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy in London. The gunmen, members of an Iranian Arab group campaigning for Arab national sovereignty in Khūzestān Province, took 26 hostages and demanded the release of Arab prisoners from jails in Khūzestān. Police negotiators gradually secured the release of five hostages in exchange for minor concessions. On the sixth day the gunmen, frustrated at the lack of progress, killed a hostage and threw his body out of the embassy. The British government ordered the Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces regiment, to rescue the hostages. During the 17-minute raid, the SAS rescued all but one of the remaining hostages, and killed five of the gunmen. The hostage-takers and their cause were largely forgotten afterwards, but the operation brought the SAS to public attention. It was overwhelmed by the number of applications it received from people inspired by the operation and experienced greater demand for its expertise from foreign governments. The building suffered major damage from fire (aftermath pictured) and did not reopen as the embassy until 1993. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

From Wikipedia's new and recently improved content:

... that eight years after rowing a Titanic lifeboat and honoring her drowned son with a Harvard library, Eleanor Widener waited on a yacht (pictured) while her new husband fought "scantily-clad, ferocious cannibals"?
... that "La Popola" was banned in the Dominican Republic because of its sexual lyrics?
... that former IAS cadre Pancham Lal is one of the candidates of the All India Forward Bloc in the 2014 election?
... that Meldon Viaduct, on Dartmoor in Devon, is one of only two surviving lattice truss railway bridges in Britain?
... that the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora feeds on the copepod Dioithona oculata which swarms in sunlit patches of water among mangrove roots?
... that a symposium on Genghis Khan led to the removal of Daramyn Tömör-Ochir from the Mongolian Politburo for being a "nationalist"?

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In the news

Gjorge Ivanov (pictured) is re-elected President of the Republic of Macedonia, while the ruling coalition led by VMRO-DPMNE win plurality in the Parliament.
The Catholic Church canonizes Popes John XXIII and John Paul II.
China strengthens its environmental protection law in an effort to fight pollution.
Kryptodrakon is classified as the oldest pterodactyloid discovered to date.
A train derails in Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing at least 48 people.

Ongoing: Ukrainian unrest – MV Sewol

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On this day...

April 30: Children's Day in Mexico; Consumer Protection Day in Thailand

1006 – SN 1006 (remnant pictured), the brightest supernova in recorded history, first appeared in the constellation Lupus.
1636 – Eighty Years' War: Dutch Republic forces recaptured a strategically important fort from Spain after a nine-month siege.
1982 – Sixteen monks and a nun belonging to Ananda Marga in Calcutta, India, were dragged out of taxis by persons unknown in three different locations, beaten to death and then set on fire.
1993 – Monica Seles, the number-one ranked women's tennis player at the time, was stabbed in the back during a match by a man obsessed with her rival Steffi Graf.
2004 – The New Yorker magazine posted an article and supporting pictures online, postdated May 10, detailing accounts of torture and abuse by American personnel of prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

More anniversaries: April 29 – April 30 – May 1

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Today's featured picture

Gun-type fission weapons are fission-based nuclear weapons whose design assembles their fissile material into a supercritical mass by the use of the "gun" method: shooting one piece of subcritical material into another. This design is rather inefficient owing to the slowness of the process and the amount of uranium required, and has fallen out of use. The bomb Little Boy, which was detonated over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was of this type.

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