Wikipedia:Main Page history/2014 August 2

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From today's featured article

Florence Fuller (1867–1946) was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s. In 1892 she left Australia, travelling first to South Africa, where she met and painted for Cecil Rhodes, and then on to Europe. Between 1895 and 1904 her works were exhibited at the Paris Salon and London's Royal Academy. In 1904, Fuller returned to Australia to live in Perth. She became active in the Theosophical Society and painted some of her best-known works. From 1908, Fuller travelled extensively, living in India and England before ultimately settling in Sydney where she was the inaugural teacher of life drawing at a women's art school. Highly regarded in her lifetime as a portrait and landscape painter, by 1914 Fuller was represented in four public galleries—three in Australia and one in South Africa—a record for an Australian female painter at that time. She subsequently suffered mental illness and sank into obscurity. (Full article...)

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From Wikipedia's new and recently improved content:

... that in Hinduism Devasena represents Heaven while her co-wife Valli (both pictured with their husband) represents the earth?
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... that after the 1986 Boat Race, the Cambridge stroke said he was "just stirring the tea while the others did the work"?

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In the news

Gas explosions in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, kill at least 26 people and injure more than 250.
Heavy rains trigger a landslide in the Pune district of India, killing at least 50 people.
The 45th Pacific Islands Forum opens in Koror, Palau, with climate change as the main topic.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration orders Russia to repay US$50 billion to shareholders of the Yukos Oil Company for breaching the Energy Charter Treaty.
Fuad Masum is elected President of Iraq by the Iraqi parliament.
The Séléka and anti-balaka militias agree to a ceasefire in the Central African Republic civil war.

Ongoing: Commonwealth Games – Gaza conflict – Ebola outbreak – Ukrainian unrest

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On this day...

August 2: Day of the Republic in Macedonia; Qixi Festival in the Chinese calendar (2014)

216 BC – Second Punic War: Carthaginian forces led by Hannibal defeated a numerically superior Roman army, near the town of Cannae in Apulia in southeast Italy.
1790 – The first United States Census was conducted, as mandated by the United States Constitution to allocate Congressional seats and electoral votes.
1897 – The Siege of Malakand ended when a relief column was able to reach the British garrison in the Malakand region of colonial India's North West Frontier Province.
1939 – Physicist Leó Szilárd (pictured) wrote a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed by Albert Einstein, warning that Germany might develop atomic bombs, which led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project.
1989 – Sri Lankan Civil War: The Indian Peace Keeping Force began killing 64 minority Sri Lankan Tamil civilians over a two-day period in Valvettithurai, Sri Lanka.

More anniversaries: August 1 – August 2 – August 3

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Today's featured picture

A chocolate factory designed by the architect Jules Saulnier for Menier Chocolate in Noisiel, France. Completed in 1872, it has been cited as the first true skeleton structure, with exterior walls needing only simple infill. The factory was designated by the government of France as an official Monument historique in 1992, and it is on the tentative list to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Photograph: Myrabella

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