Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 April 26

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Stephen Breyer

Heffernan v. City of Paterson was a U.S. Supreme Court case concerning the First Amendment rights of public employees, decided on April 26, 2016. Jeffrey Heffernan, a detective with the Paterson, New Jersey, police force, was seen with a lawn sign for the candidate challenging the city's incumbent mayor. Heffernan's supervisors mistakenly thought that he was actively supporting the challenger and demoted him. He brought suit alleging that his demotion violated his right to free speech. Writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer (pictured) cited the Court's precedents, which had held that it is unconstitutional for a government agency to discipline an employee for engaging in partisan political activity, as long as that activity is not disruptive to the agency's operations. Even if Heffernan was not actually engaging in protected speech, he wrote, the discipline against him sent a message to others to avoid exercising their rights. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, in which he agreed that Heffernan had been harmed but not that his constitutional rights had been violated. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Unita Blackwell

... that civil rights activist Unita Blackwell (pictured) was the first African-American woman to be elected mayor in the state of Mississippi?
... that soldiers lined up on the sinking British troopship SS Tyndareus began to sing "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" while waiting for orders?
... that many reviewers compared the superhero comic Ultra to the television series Sex and the City?
... that the recently named fossil egg Suchoolithus dates to the Late Jurassic, making it tied for the oldest-known crocodylomorph egg?
... that the film The Brainwashing of My Dad received funding from Kickstarter?
... that the term elastance, the inverse of capacitance, was coined by Oliver Heaviside to promote an analogy of a capacitor as a spring rather than a container of charge?
... that "Christ ist erstanden", possibly the oldest German hymn as mentioned in the 12th century, was set for choir in the 21st century?
... that despite topping his class at Sandhurst, John Gellibrand found the prospects for promotion in the British Army so bleak that he resigned his commission and moved to Tasmania to grow apples?

In the news

Mary Keitany and Daniel Wanjiru

In the London Marathon, Mary Keitany and Daniel Wanjiru (pictured) win the women's and men's races, respectively.
A Taliban attack on an Afghan National Army base kills 140 soldiers.
Turkey votes in a constitutional referendum in favour of replacing its parliamentary system of government with an executive presidency.
A suicide bombing of civilian evacuation buses near Aleppo, Syria, kills more than 120 people, including at least 80 children.
Emma Morano, the last known living person born before 1900, dies at the age of 117.

On this day...

April 26: World Intellectual Property Day; Feast day of Our Lady of Good Counsel (Roman Catholic Church)

Statue of Sybil Ludington

1777 – American Revolutionary War: Sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington (statue pictured) rode forty miles through the night to warn militiamen under the control of her father that British troops were planning to invade Danbury, Connecticut.
1865 – U.S. Army soldiers cornered and fatally shot John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of US President Abraham Lincoln, in rural northern Virginia, ending a twelve-day manhunt.
1945 – World War II: Both the German and Polish–Soviet sides claimed victory as major fighting in the Battle of Bautzen ended.
1989 – An editorial was published in the People's Daily denouncing the growing unrest in Tiananmen Square, which would remain contentious through the remainder of the protests.
2007 – Controversy surrounding the relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, a Soviet Red Army World War II memorial in Tallinn, Estonia, erupted into mass protests and riots.

Alice Ayres (d. 1885) · I. M. Pei (b. 1917) · Morihei Ueshiba (d. 1969)

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Today's featured picture

The Storm is a painting by French artist Pierre Auguste Cot completed in 1880. Currently on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was commissioned by Catharine Lorillard Wolfe. Suggested inspirations have included the Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe by Longus as well as the romantic tale Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

Painting: Pierre Auguste Cot

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