Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 February 23

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From today's featured article

Margaret (born 1991) is a Polish singer and songwriter. Before her mainstream debut, she performed with underground bands, recorded soundtracks for television commercials and produced a fashion blog. Through her blogging, she was discovered by music manager Sławomir Berdowski and signed by the record label Extensive Music. Margaret gained international recognition with her singles "Thank You Very Much" (2013) and "Cool Me Down" (2016), the first of which was included on her first extended play (EP) All I Need, and charted in several European countries. In 2014, she released her debut studio album Add the Blonde, which reached the top ten in the Polish charts. By re-releasing it in 2016, Margaret had her first Polish top five and Sweden-charting single with "Cool Me Down". In 2015, she recorded a collaborative jazz album with Matt Dusk titled Just the Two of Us. Her third studio album, Monkey Business (2017), became her second top-ten album in Poland. (This article is part of a featured topic: Overview of Margaret.)

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Did you know ...

Humphrey Bogart in Brother Orchid (1940)

... that after signing his first movie contract, Humphrey Bogart (pictured) boasted: "I'm going to become the biggest movie star Hollywood's ever seen"?
... that American band the Body's album I've Seen All I Need to See opens with a reading of the poem "The Kaleidoscope" by Scottish poet Douglas Dunn?
... that Cajun accordion musician Sheryl Cormier has been named the Cajun Queen in the United States and Europe?
... that when the manga series Antique Bakery was adapted into a live-action television drama in 2001, a character who was gay in the source material was changed to having a fear of women?
... that veterinarian Matt Brash treated some of the owls that appeared in the first Harry Potter film and concluded that they had leukocytozoonosis?
... that as part of the Israel–Morocco normalization agreement, the US agreed to recognize Morocco's claim to Western Sahara?
... that when Imants Lešinskis defected from the Soviet Union while working for the UN in New York, Kofi Annan, future UN secretary-general, complained that he did not show up to work?
... that the medieval Breton Gwerz Santes Enori tells the story of a woman who sacrificed a breast to cure her father, and is rewarded with a golden breast?

In the news

Naomi Osaka and Novak Djokovic

In tennis, Naomi Osaka wins the women's singles and Novak Djokovic wins the men's singles at the Australian Open (both winners pictured).
Porfirije is enthroned as the 46th Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
NASA's Perseverance rover, carrying the Ingenuity helicopter, successfully lands on Mars.
A winter storm in North America leaves at least 70 people dead and several million others without clean water or power.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala becomes the first woman and the first African to be appointed Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

On this day

February 23: The Emperor's Birthday in Japan

Button of plutonium metal above a calcium chloride salt cake

1739 – The identity of English highwayman Dick Turpin was uncovered by his former schoolteacher, who recognised his handwriting, leading to Turpin's trial.
1854 – The Orange River Convention was signed in Bloemfontein, with Britain agreeing to recognise the independence of the Orange Free State in present-day South Africa.
1941 – Plutonium (sample pictured) was first chemically identified by chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and his team at the University of California, Berkeley.
1944 – In response to an insurgency in Chechnya, the Soviet Union began the forced deportation of native Chechen and Ingush of North Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
2008 – A B-2 Spirit stealth bomber crashed on the runway shortly after takeoff from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam in the most expensive crash in U.S. Air Force history.

Richard Price (b. 1723)
Zygmunt Krasiński (d. 1859)
Julien Ries (d. 2013)

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Today's featured picture

The phenakistiscope was the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion. A series of pictures showing sequential phases of the animation are seen through small slots spaced evenly around the rim of a disc. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the images reflected in a mirror, seeing a rapid succession of images that appear to be a single moving picture. This animation shows one such phenakistiscope disc, entitled Running rats, created by Thomas Mann Baynes in 1833.

Illustration credit: Thomas Mann Baynes; animated by Basile Morin

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