Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 May 21

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From today's featured article

Brabham BT18-Honda

Brabham was a British racing car manufacturer and Formula One racing team. Founded in 1960 by two Australians, driver Jack Brabham and designer Ron Tauranac, the team won four Drivers' and two Constructors' World Championships in its 30-year Formula One history. Jack Brabham's 1966 Drivers' Championship remains the only such achievement using a car bearing the driver's own name. In the 1960s, Brabham was the world's largest manufacturer of open wheel racing cars for sale to customer teams, building more than 500 cars by 1970. During this period, teams using Brabham cars won championships in Formula Two and Formula Three. Brabham cars also competed in the Indianapolis 500 and in Formula 5000 racing. The team won two more Formula One Drivers' Championships in the 1980s with Brazilian Nelson Piquet. Bernie Ecclestone owned Brabham during most of the 1970s and 1980s. Its last owner was the Middlebridge Group, a Japanese engineering firm. Midway through the 1992 season, the team collapsed financially, and was investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Pregnancy portrait

... that there was a fashion in England for pregnancy portraits (example pictured) in the decades around 1600?
... that Sudhanshu Shekhar Jha was guided in his doctoral studies by Felix Bloch, 1952 Nobel laureate, and in his post-doctoral work by Nicolaas Bloembergen, 1981 Nobel laureate?
... that Jimmy Wales wants WikiTRIBUNE to counter fake news?
... that the 13th-century English royal justice Elias Beckingham was described as being one of only two honest judges in the kingdom?
... that EuropaChorAkademie, a choir formed by students from two universities, participated in an award-winning recording of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Requiem für einen jungen Dichter?
... that Mariano Gagnon was a Franciscan friar who organized airlifts to help refugees escape the Shining Path?
... that Simon Pagenaud's victory at the 2017 Desert Diamond West Valley Phoenix Grand Prix was his first-ever IndyCar Series win on an oval track?
... that the Stumptown scud, a crustacean endemic to the Portland metropolitan area, looks like a "cross between a prawn and a potato bug"?

In the news

Hassan Rouhani

Hassan Rouhani (pictured) is re-elected President of Iran.
Salvador Sobral, representing Portugal, wins the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Amar pelos dois".
A large-scale cyber attack involving ransomware causes severe disruption around the world.
At least 28 people are killed in Mastung, Pakistan, in a suicide attack targeting Abdul Ghafoor Haideri, the Senate Deputy Chairman.
The Free National Movement, led by Hubert Minnis, wins the Bahamian general election.
Remains of Homo naledi are dated to the Middle Pleistocene, suggesting coexistence with early Homo sapiens in southern Africa.

On this day...

May 21: Sanja Matsuri begins in Tokyo (2017)

Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis

878 – Arab–Byzantine wars: The city of Syracuse was captured by the Aghlabids, completing the Muslim conquest of Sicily.
1881 – Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C.
1917 – The Imperial War Graves Commission was established through royal charter to mark, record and maintain the graves and places of commemoration of British Empire military forces.
1927 – Aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, American aviator Charles Lindbergh (pictured) completed the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight, flying from Roosevelt Field near New York City to Paris–Le Bourget Airport.
1981 – The Italian government released the membership list of Propaganda Due, an illegal pseudo-Masonic lodge that had been implicated in numerous Italian crimes and mysteries.

Feng Dao (d. 954) · Armand Hammer (b. 1898) · Al Franken (b. 1951)

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Today's featured picture

Westerlund 2 is an obscured compact young star cluster in the Milky Way with an estimated age of about one or two million years. It contains some of the hottest, brightest, and most massive stars known. The cluster resides inside a stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina. It is half a degree from the Cepheid variable V399 Carinae.

Photograph: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/et al.

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