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From today's featured article

Minas Geraes

The two Minas Geraes-class battleships were built during the first decade of the twentieth century for the Brazilian Navy. Named Minas Geraes and São Paulo, Brazil's order for these "dreadnoughts"—powerful warships whose capabilities far outstripped those of the world's older battleships—initiated a vastly expensive South American naval arms race. Once in service, Minas Geraes and São Paulo were only ever used for or against rebellions. Soon after the ships arrived in Brazil in 1910, their crews revolted against the continued use of corporal punishment (in this case, whipping or "lashing") in the navy. In 1922, the government used both warships to help put down an army rebellion. São Paulo‍ 's crew mutinied in 1924, but eight years later the ship helped the government break a rebel blockade. During the Second World War, the obsolete dreadnoughts were used as harbor defense vessels for ports in northeast Brazil. They were both sold for scrap after the war, but São Paulo sank without a trace while under tow. (Full article...)

Part of the Minas Geraes-class battleships and the South American dreadnought race series, two of Wikipedia's featured topics.

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Anthony Anderson

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In the news

Elizabeth II

Queen Elizabeth II (pictured) becomes the longest-reigning British head of state, surpassing the reign of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina is arrested after resigning amid charges of customs fraud.
The ancient temples of Bel and Baalshamin in Palmyra are destroyed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America, is renamed to its traditional name of Denali by the United States.
Flash floods and mudslides caused by Tropical Storm Erika kill at least 31 people across Dominica in the Lesser Antilles.
India is declared free from maternal and neonatal tetanus.

Ongoing events:
- European migrant crisis
Recent deaths

On this day...

September 10: Paryushana begins (Svetambar Jains, 2015)

Striking miners in Lattimer, Pennsylvania

1570 – A party of ten Jesuit missionaries landed on the Virginia Peninsula to establish the short-lived Ajacán Mission.
1897 – A peaceful labor demonstration made up of mostly Polish and Slovak anthracite coal miners (pictured) in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, US, was fired upon by a sheriff's posse in the Lattimer massacre.
1945 – Mike the Headless Chicken was decapitated in a farm in Colorado; he survived another 18 months as part of sideshows before choking to death in Phoenix, Arizona.
1961 – At the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, German driver Wolfgang von Trips's car collided with another, causing it to become airborne and crash into a side barrier, killing him and 15 spectators.
2000 – Operation Barras successfully freed six British soldiers held captive for over two weeks and contributed to the end of the Sierra Leone Civil War.

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Today's featured picture

Buffalo Bull's Back Fat was chief of the Kainai Nation, one of the three tribes which make up the Blackfoot Confederacy, during the early 19th century. This portrait of him was completed at Fort Union in 1832 by George Catlin and is now held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Painting: George Catlin

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