Wikipedia:Main Page history/2018 June 30

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From today's featured article

The More Hall Annex was a nuclear research building on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Built in 1961, it housed a small research reactor until June 30, 1988, operating at a peak of 100 kilowatts thermal (kWt), and was decommissioned in 2007. The building was designed in the Brutalist architectural style by UW faculty members, using reinforced concrete walls. Large windows overlooking the reactor room allowed observation from the outside, in an attempt to demonstrate the safety of nuclear energy. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, after a campaign led by an architecture student in response to a demolition proposal from the university. Despite a lawsuit from preservation groups and the City of Seattle, the university began demolition of the building in July 2016. It will be replaced by a new computer science building that is expected to open in 2019. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Vera Gedroits with patients

... that Princess Vera Gedroits (pictured)—good author but indifferent poet, lesbian but married a man—was a Russian military surgeon who pioneered battlefield laparotomy?
... that Number 12, an investigative documentary by award-winning journalist Anas Anas, shed light on football corruption in Ghana?
... that Claus Wisser founded the services company Wisag, and co-founded the Rheingau Musik Festival which staged a concert of Orff's Carmina Burana for his 60th birthday?
... that locomotives completed a circuit on the Boston and Albany Railroad's Highland Branch?
... that Zhang Youshang was the only student from mainland China at the University of Cambridge in the mid-1960s?
... that chemicals found in members of the St. John's wort family can cause photosensitivity in grazing animals?
... that Gordon Juckes received the Order of the British Empire prior to being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame?
... that the H. J. Heinz Company complex includes buildings named Meat, Bean, and Cereal?

In the news

Lake Toba

The Japanese sample-return spacecraft Hayabusa2 arrives at the asteroid 162173 Ryugu.
Saudi Arabia lifts its ban on women driving.
Canada legalizes the recreational use of cannabis with effect from October 2018, making it the second country to do so.
An overloaded tourist ferry capsizes in Lake Toba (pictured), Indonesia, killing at least 3 people and leaving 193 others missing.
In golf, Brooks Koepka wins the U.S. Open at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club.

On this day

June 30: Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom (2018)

Tower Bridge, London

1559 – During a jousting match, King Henry II of France was mortally wounded when fragments of the splintered lance of Gabriel Montgomery pierced his eye.
1859 – French acrobat Charles Blondin crossed Niagara Gorge on a tightrope, making him one of the world's most famous tightrope walkers.
1894 – London's Tower Bridge (pictured), a combined bascule and suspension bridge over the River Thames, opened.
1960 – The Belgian Congo received its independence from colonial rule, beginning a period of instability that ended in the dictatorship of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu in 1965.
1985 – Ryan White was denied re-admittance to his school due to HIV he had contracted during treatments for hemophilia; his legal battle made him a poster child for the disease in the U.S.

William Oughtred (d. 1660) · Alberto Henschel (d. 1882) · Assia Djebar (b. 1936)

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Today's featured picture

Barge Haulers on the Volga is an oil painting on canvas completed between 1870 and 1873 by the realist artist Ilya Repin. It depicts eleven men physically dragging a barge on the banks of the Volga River. Depicting these men as at the point of collapse, the work has been read as a condemnation of profit from inhumane labor. Barge Haulers on the Volga drew international praise for its realistic portrayal of the hardships of working men, and launched Repin's career. It has been described as "perhaps the most famous painting of the Peredvizhniki movement [for]....its unflinching portrayal of backbreaking labor". Today, the painting hangs in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Painting: Ilya Repin

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