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Latest News

Abdel Fattah al-Burhan

A military coup in Sudan, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan (pictured), deposes the government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
Ahead of Barbados becoming a republic, Sandra Mason is elected as the country's first president.
Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny is awarded the Sakharov Prize.
PAICV candidate José Maria Neves is elected President of Cape Verde.

Today in History

October 28: Feast day of Saint Jude the Apostle (Western Christianity)

1776 – American Revolutionary War: As George Washington's Continental Army retreated northward from New York City, the British Army captured the village of White Plains.
1891 – The Mino–Owari earthquake, the strongest known inland earthquake in Japan's history, caused widespread damage and 7,273 deaths.
1928 – Indonesian composer Wage Rudolf Supratman introduced "Indonesia Raya", now the country's national anthem.
1971 – Prospero (flight spare pictured), the first British satellite launched on a British rocket, lifted off from Launch Area 5B at Woomera, South Australia.
2013 – The first terrorist attack in Beijing's recent history took place when members of the Turkistan Islamic Party drove a vehicle into a crowd, killing five people and injuring thirty-eight others.

Robert Liston (b. 1794)
Max Henry Ferrars (b. 1846)
Rosalie Slaughter Morton (b. 1876)

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Did You Know?

Suzanne Stephens

... that In Freundschaft was composed in friendship by Karlheinz Stockhausen as a clarinet solo for Suzanne Stephens (pictured), and later adapted to the instruments of other friends?
... that Zeb Noland was named the starting quarterback for the South Carolina Gamecocks despite being on the coaching staff?
... that A Passage North, which is shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, is set in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil War?
... that Eberhard Panitz wrote his novel, My Father's Tram, with autobiographic elements around his father—a tram conductor in Dresden?
... that Digital pulled their HiNote Ultra laptop out of a manila envelope on television nearly 15 years before Apple did the same?
... that Carl Freedman viewed science fiction as the most sound genre for academic study?
... that pollen study was needed to clarify the identity of a Dipteronia brownii fossil?
... that a tenant of the Bryant Park Studios once tried to evict their landlord from the building's top floor?

Today's Featured Article

Etta Lemon (1860–1953) was a British bird conservationist and a founder of what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Born into an evangelical family in Kent, she became a campaigner against the use of plumage in hatmaking. She co-founded the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk in 1889, which two years later merged with Emily Williamson's Society for the Protection of Birds, and was the society's first honorary secretary. Her future husband Frank Lemon wrote its constitution and became its legal adviser. The society became the RSPB in 1904, and the Lemons led it for 35 years, although Etta's management style led to clashes with its committee. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1920 for her management of a local war hospital. She worked for many other organisations, including the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, and was one of the first female honorary members of the British Ornithologists' Union. (Full article...)

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Today's Featured Picture

Wheat Fields is a series of paintings by the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh. This 1889 work, entitled Enclosed Field with Ploughman, is one of many oil-on-canvas paintings he created that included wheat cultivation. He wrote to his brother Theo of his approach to painting, "One must undertake with confidence, with a certain assurance that one is doing a reasonable thing, like the farmer who drives his plow ... (one who) drags the harrow behind himself. If one hasn't a horse, one is one's own horse." This painting is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Painting credit: Vincent van Gogh