Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 May 11b

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From today's featured article

Ted Kaczynski (born 1942), also known as the Unabomber, is an American domestic terrorist, eco-anarchist and former mathematics professor. He was accepted to Harvard College at the age of 16 and, after graduating and earning his PhD, he taught at UC Berkeley for three years. He then moved to a small cabin in Montana to pursue a simple life. Kaczynski began sending mail bombs to people associated with universities, airlines, and the advancement of modern technology in 1978. He mailed a total of sixteen bombs, killing 3 people and injuring 23 others. Kaczynski's bombing campaign came under investigation by the FBI, who employed over 150 people in the most expensive FBI investigation ever conducted at the time. Kaczynski's manifesto, an anarcho-primitivist essay, was published in The Washington Post on the condition that he would desist from terrorism. He was eventually arrested in 1996 (mug shot pictured) and later imprisoned at ADX Florence in Colorado. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Columnar basalt at Cape Stolbchaty, Russia

... that more than 90 percent of all volcanic rock on Earth is basalt (example pictured)?
... that Les McKeown worked at a paper mill before becoming the frontman of the Bay City Rollers?
... that some microprocessors feature a compressed instruction set that packs machine-language instructions into a more memory-efficient size?
... that Curley Christian was the only soldier in the First World War to survive a quadruple amputation?
... that critic Jack Anderson described Patricia Bowman as "the first American ballerina to win critical acclaim and wide popularity as a classical and a musical-theater dancer"?
... that the Soviet frigate Zadornyy was named after the Russian word for "provocative"?
... that Daniel Post Senning studied molecular biology and modern dance but ultimately became an expert in etiquette?
... that William Lescaze and his wife lived in a glass house and were not afraid of stone throwers?

In the news

Mohamed Nasheed

At least nine people are killed in a school shooting in Kazan, Russia.
Israeli air-strikes and Hamas militant missile launches kill at least 26 people and injure hundreds more following clashes at the al-Aqsa Mosque and elsewhere in Jerusalem.
Maldives speaker of parliament and former president Mohamed Nasheed (pictured) is injured with four others in a car bombing in Malé.

On this day

May 11

Cast of a 2011 production of Cats

868 – A copy of the Diamond Sutra was printed in Tang-dynasty China, making it the world's oldest dated printed book.
1867 – The major powers of Europe signed the Treaty of London to resolve a crisis over the political status of Luxembourg between France and Prussia.
1894 – In response to a 28-percent wage cut, 4,000 Pullman Palace Car Company workers went on strike in Illinois, bringing rail traffic west of Chicago to a halt.
1981 – Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats (performers pictured), the first megamusical, opened at the New London Theatre to become an unprecedented commercial success.
1998 – India began the Pokhran-II nuclear-weapons test, its first since the Smiling Buddha test 24 years earlier.

Frank Schlesinger (b. 1871)
Lise de Baissac (b. 1905)
Douglas Adams (d. 2001)

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Today's featured picture

Boy Bitten by a Lizard is an oil-on-canvas painting from around 1595 by the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. It exists in two versions, both believed to be authentic works of Caravaggio; one is in the collection of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, while the other, shown here, is in the National Gallery, London. The identity of the sitter (theorised to be Mario Minniti) and the symbolism of the painting have been the subjects of much debate.

Painting credit: Caravaggio

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