Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 March 11

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From today's featured article

Milovan Đilas

Negotiations between German commanders and the Yugoslav Partisans commenced on 11 March 1943 during an Axis offensive in World War II. Focused on obtaining a ceasefire and establishing a prisoner exchange, the talks were also used to delay the Axis forces while the Partisans crossed the Neretva river and began attacking their Chetnik rivals, led by Draža Mihailović. The talks were accompanied by an informal ceasefire that lasted about six weeks before being called off by Adolf Hitler. The advantage gained by the Partisans was lost when another Axis offensive was launched in mid-May 1943. Some parts of the negotiations were published from 1949 onwards, but many details were little known by historians until the 1970s, including the identity of the chief Partisan negotiator, Milovan Đilas (pictured). The US diplomat Walter Roberts published a description of the talks in 1973 in a well-received book that was protested by the Yugoslav government of Josip Broz Tito for its depiction of the Partisans. Beginning in the 1980s, accounts of the negotiations were published by Yugoslav historians and the main Yugoslav protagonists. (Full article...)

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In the news

Park Geun-hye

South Korea's Constitutional Court removes President Park Geun-hye (pictured) from office.
Donald Tusk is re-elected as President of the European Council despite opposition from his home country, Poland.
An attack on a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, kills 49 people and injures more than 60 others.
The Azure Window, a limestone natural arch on the Maltese island of Gozo, collapses during a storm.
WikiLeaks begins releasing Vault 7, a series of documents detailing activities of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyberwarfare.
The United States begins deployment of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea.

On this day...

March 11: Purim begins at sunset (Judaism, 2017); Independence Day in Lithuania (1990)

Shō Tai

1707 – Queen Anne withheld royal assent from the Scottish Militia Bill, the last time a British monarch vetoed legislation.
1818 – Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a novel by Mary Shelley, was first published in London.
1879 – Shō Tai (pictured), the last king of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, abdicated when the kingdom was annexed by Japan and became Okinawa Prefecture.
1993 – Janet Reno was confirmed by the Senate as the first female United States Attorney General.
2007 – Georgian authorities accused Russia of orchestrating a helicopter attack in the Kodori Valley of the breakaway territory of Abkhazia.

Margaret Oakley Dayhoff (b. 1925) · Helen Rollason (b. 1956) · Katsuhiko Nakajima (b. 1988)

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Today's featured picture

Wivenhoe Park is an oil painting on canvas completed by the English Romantic painter John Constable in 1816. It depicts Wivenhoe Park, an English landscape garden on the eastern edge of Colchester. It is now held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Painting: John Constable

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