Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 March 13

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Apollo 9 launching from Kennedy Space Center

Apollo 9 (March 3–13, 1969) was the third crewed mission in the United States Apollo program. Launched by a Saturn V rocket and flown in Low Earth Orbit, the mission flight-qualified the Lunar Module, showing that its crew could fly it independently, then rendezvous and dock, as would be required for Apollo 11, the first crewed lunar landing. Commander James McDivitt, Command Module Pilot David Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart tested systems and procedures critical to landing on the Moon. A spacewalk tested the extravehicular life support backpack. McDivitt and Schweickart, entering the lunar module through the docking tunnel, became the first humans to pass between spacecraft without going outside them, two months after Soviet cosmonauts spacewalked to transfer between Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5. Apollo 9, a complete success, was followed by Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal for Apollo 11. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Cover of The Victorian
Railway Murders (1979)

... that Arthur and Mary Sellwood had the idea for a book (cover shown) on Victorian railway murders in the 1940s, but did not write it until after a "violent incident on a night train" in the 1970s?
... that Joywave's third album Possession incorporates samples of audio from the Voyager Golden Record into its songs?
... that as a law student, Burkhard Driest robbed a savings bank shortly before an examination, and later wrote a book and a film script about his experiences?
... that larvae of the tube worm Hydroides ezoensis prefer to settle on a substrate already inhabited by other worms of their own species?
... that Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia does not explicitly endorse married Catholic priests, despite being called for by the Amazon synod?
... that in a January 2020 Premiership Rugby match, referee Luke Pearce appointed Manu Vunipola as Saracens captain, after Pearce decided that he did not want to speak with Jackson Wray?
... that future president John F. Kennedy came in second to Senator Estes Kefauver in the 1956 Democratic vice-presidential ballot?
... that police officers once arrested a Mexican Panther who was involved in drug trafficking?

In the news

Alyssa Healy

The World Health Organization declares the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic, while the Italian government implements a national quarantine.
In cricket, the Women's T20 World Cup concludes with Australia defeating India in the final (player of the match Alyssa Healy pictured).
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara win the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

On this day

March 13

Participants of the Kapp Putsch in Berlin

1567 – A Spanish mercenary army surprised and killed a band of rebels in the Battle of Oosterweel near Antwerp in the Habsburg Netherlands, beginning the Eighty Years' War.
1639 – Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was named after its first principal donor, clergyman John Harvard.
1920 – The Kapp Putsch (participants pictured), an attempted coup aiming to undo the German Revolution of 1918–1919, briefly ousted the government of the Weimar Republic.
1954 – Việt Minh forces under General Võ Nguyên Giáp began a massive artillery bombardment on the French military, beginning the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the climactic battle of the First Indochina War.
1996 – A gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, before committing suicide.

Daniel Lambert (b. 1770) · Mustafa Reşid Pasha (b. 1800) · Encarnacion Alzona (d. 2001)

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From today's featured list

World of Darkness tabletop games have been adapted into video games by different developers, covering several genres including role-playing games, action games, and adventure games. Video game adaptations of the series began with two Werewolf: The Apocalypse games in the 1990s that were never completed; the first released video game in the series was 2000's Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption, which was followed by three Hunter: The Reckoning games in 2002–2003, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines in 2004. Following this, no further World of Darkness video games were released in over a decade, with another Werewolf project and the online game World of Darkness started and canceled in the meantime until 2017's World of Darkness Preludes, which was based on Vampire: The Masquerade and Mage: The Ascension. Since then, several video games have been announced, including Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood and the three Vampire games Coteries of New York, Bloodlines 2, and Swansong. (Full list...)

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The Madagascan magpie-robin (Copsychus albospecularis) is a species of chat in the family Muscicapidae, the Old World flycatchers. Endemic to Madagascar and about 18 cm (7 in) long, the male has mostly black-and-white plumage, whereas the female has a white wing patch, but more subdued greyish-brown overparts with pinkish-buff underparts. The species's diet includes insects, such as cockroaches, beetles, bugs and grasshoppers, as well as spiders, earthworms, small lizards, amphibians, and occasionally fruit. The female tends to feed on the ground, while the male forages higher up in the vegetation.

This picture shows a female Madagascan magpie-robin of the subspecies C. a. pica, photographed in Montagne d'Ambre National Park, located in the far north of Madagascar.

Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp

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