Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 June 25b

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From today's featured article

Grevillea juniperina, the prickly spider-flower, is a plant of the family Proteaceae native to eastern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland in Australia. It is a small prickly-leaved shrub from 0.2 to 3 m (8 in to 10 ft) high, generally growing on clay-based or alluvial soils in eucalypt woodland. Scottish botanist Robert Brown described G. juniperina in 1810, and seven subspecies are recognised. The flower heads (inflorescences) appear from winter to early summer and are red, orange or yellow. Birds visit and pollinate the flowers. G. juniperina plants are killed by bushfire, regenerating afterwards from seed. The species adapts readily to cultivation and has been important in horticulture as it is the parent of many popular garden hybrids. G. j. juniperina, a subspecies restricted to western Sydney and environs, has its habitat threatened by housing development and other factors. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Bush Tower

... that the Bush Tower (pictured), near New York City's Times Square, was an attempt at a trade center before the World Trade Center itself?
... that Stina Quint was the founder and editor of Kamratposten, one of the earliest children's magazines in Sweden?
... that an 18th-century carillon-music manuscript by Joannes de Gruytters was discovered at a book auction?
... that comic book creator Brandon Dayton chose medieval Russia as the setting for his minicomic Green Monk after watching Andrei Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev?
... that How Doth the Little Crocodile by Leonora Carrington was based on Lewis Carroll's poem of the same name?
... that Edith Kanakaʻole's acceptance speech for a 1978 Na Hoku Hanohano Award was given entirely in the Hawaiian language?
... that the causes of the Armenian genocide are considered to include both long-term structural problems of the Ottoman Empire and wartime radicalization?
... that the piano businessman Edwin Bechstein received a Nazi state funeral, and his wife Helene taught Hitler table manners?

In the news

Benigno Aquino III

In Saskatchewan, Canada, 751 unmarked graves are discovered at the site of the Marieval Indian Residential School.
In the United States, a condominium tower near Miami collapses, killing at least 4 people and leaving 159 others missing.
Former president of the Philippines Benigno Aquino III (pictured) dies at the age of 61.
Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper accused of violating the national security law in Hong Kong, closes.
In cricket, New Zealand defeat India to win the inaugural World Test Championship Final.

On this day

June 25

CIA diagram of Area 51

1678 – Venetian philosopher Elena Cornaro Piscopia became the first woman to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
1944 – World War II: U.S. Navy and Royal Navy ships bombarded Cherbourg, France, to support U.S. Army units engaged in the Battle of Cherbourg.
1978 – The rainbow flag representing gay pride was first flown at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade.
2013 – In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA acknowledged the existence of Area 51 (diagram pictured), a secretive U.S. Air Force facility in Nevada and a subject of various UFO and other conspiracy theories.

Giovanni Battista Riccioli (d. 1671)
Eloísa Díaz (b. 1866)
Raymond Leane (d. 1962)

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From today's featured list

Daniel Chester French

American sculptor Daniel Chester French created 92 public sculptures from 1871 until his death in 1931. In 1876, he accepted a contract to produce a set of statues for the United States Post Office Department. He created statues for the Post Office throughout the 1880s. In 1883, French was commissioned to create John Harvard. For the rest of his career, French produced commissions for state, federal, and private groups as well as private individuals. His sculptures are mostly in the eastern and midwestern United States, but one, Thomas Starr King, is in San Francisco, and two, General George Washington and the Marseillaise Memorial, are in France. The majority of the sculptures are bronze castings or made of stone, but Progress of the State is gilded copper, and Alma Mater and The Republic are gilded bronze. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

Westerhout 40 (W40) is a star-forming region in the Milky Way located in the constellation Serpens, approximately 1,420 light-years from the Solar System. This photograph, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, reveals the stellar nursery in infrared light. A young cluster of several hundred stars is located at the center of the nebula, and stellar winds and radiation emanating from these stars have blown bubbles in the surrounding gas; the expanding bubbles have produced the rough shape of a butterfly seen in the image. Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera took this mid-infrared image in the 8.0-micron, 5.8-micron, 4.5-micron and 3.6-micron bands, here represented by red, orange, green and blue, respectively.

Photograph credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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