Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 March 6

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From today's featured article

The water pipit (Anthus spinoletta) is a small songbird which breeds in the mountains of Southern Europe and Southern Asia eastwards to China. It is a short-distance migrant; many birds move to lower altitudes or wet open lowlands in winter. In breeding plumage it has greyish-brown upperparts, weakly streaked with darker brown, and pale pink-buff underparts fading to whitish on the lower belly. The head is grey with a broad white eyebrow, and the outer tail feathers are white. The winter colours are duller, with more brown. Water pipits construct a cup-like nest on the ground under vegetation or in cliff crevices and lay four to six speckled greyish-white eggs, which hatch in about two weeks with about two more weeks until the chicks fledge. Although pipits occasionally catch insects in flight, they feed mainly on small invertebrates picked off the ground or vegetation, and also on some plant material. The species population is large and stable overall. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

SARS-CoV-2

... that infectious disease specialist Daniel R. Lucey has hypothesised that the SARS-CoV-2 virus (pictured) that caused the 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak may have been quietly circulating among humans since at least November 2019?
... that President Idi Amin ensured the Uganda Army's loyalty with the so-called "whisky run"?
... that the British security services described Lisa von Pott as the organiser of a pro-Nazi espionage group in wartime Vienna?
... that the Strokes revealed the release date for their sixth album The New Abnormal while performing at a rally for U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders?
... that three Roman Catholic bishops of Hong Kong have been elevated to the College of Cardinals, even though the diocese is nominally only a suffragan of the Archdiocese of Guangzhou?
... that baritone Michael Volle has appeared as Wagner's Hans Sachs at the Bayreuth Festival and was awarded Der Faust for portraying Wozzeck?
... that 110 North Wacker in Chicago replaced a building that was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places?
... that dillegrout was so delicious that it earned the cook a manor, but to keep it he and his descendants had to serve the dish at every future English coronation?

In the news

Yvonne Farrell

Yvonne Farrell (pictured) and Shelley McNamara win the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
In the United States, a tornado outbreak hits four counties around Nashville, Tennessee, killing at least twenty-five people.
Muhyiddin Yassin becomes the prime minister of Malaysia following a political crisis which led to the resignation of his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad.
The United States and the Taliban sign an agreement which establishes a framework for ending the War in Afghanistan.

On this day

March 6: Independence Day in Ghana (1957)

Svetlana Alliluyeva

845 – The Abbasid Caliphate executed 42 Byzantine officials who had been captured in the Sack of Amorium of 838 for refusing to convert to Islam.
1853 – Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata premiered at La Fenice in Venice, but the performance was considered so bad that it caused him to revise portions of the opera.
1930 – Organized by the Communist International, hundreds of thousands of people in major cities around the world marched to protest mass unemployment associated with the Great Depression.
1943 – World War II: National Liberation Front forces defeated Italian occupiers in the Battle of Fardykambos, a major sign of the Greek Resistance's growth.
1967 – Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva (pictured) defected to the United States.

Luigi Alamanni (b. 1495) · Ella P. Stewart (b. 1893) · Francisco Xavier do Amaral (d. 2012)

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Sieber map (1818)

The cartography of Jerusalem is the creation, editing, processing and printing of maps of Jerusalem from ancient times until the rise of modern surveying techniques. Almost all extant maps known to scholars from the pre-modern era were prepared by Christian mapmakers for a Christian European audience. Maps of Jerusalem can be categorised between original factual maps, copied maps and imaginary maps, the latter being based on religious books. The maps were produced in a variety of materials, including parchment, vellum, mosaic, wall paintings and paper. Scholars have published cartographic histories of the city, from Titus Tobler and Reinhold Röhricht's studies in the 19th century to those of Hebrew University of Jerusalem academics Rehav Rubin and Milka Levy-Rubin in recent decades. These maps focus on the Old City; the expansion of the city from the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the production of the first modern map (shown) by Franz Sieber. (Full list...)

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Florence Cathedral, formally the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, is a basilica in Florence, Italy. It was begun in 1296 in the Gothic style to a design of Arnolfo di Cambio, and was structurally completed by 1436, with the dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi. The exterior of the cathedral is faced with polychrome marble panels in various shades of green and pink, bordered by white, and has an elaborate 19th-century Gothic Revival facade by Emilio De Fabris.

This picture shows the curved interior of the dome; the surface was originally whitewashed, but Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, decided to have it painted with a representation of the Last Judgment. This enormous work, comprising 3,600 m² (39,000 sq ft) of painted surface, was started in 1568 by Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari, and not completed until 1579. The upper portion, near the roof lantern, represents the Twenty-Four Elders of the Book of Revelation, and was finished by Vasari before his death in 1574. Zuccari and his collaborators finished the other portions – from top to bottom, choirs of angels; Christ, Mary and saints; virtues, gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Beatitudes; and capital sins and Hell. These frescoes are considered Zuccari's greatest work, but the quality of the artwork is uneven because of the input of different artists and their varying techniques.

Photograph credit: Livioandronico2013

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