Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 October 4

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The 2005 Azores subtropical storm was the nineteenth nameable storm of that year's record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season. It developed on October 4 in the eastern Atlantic Ocean out of a low-pressure area that gained subtropical characteristics. Crossing over the Azores later that day, it became extratropical again the following day. No damage or fatalities were reported. The storm was not officially named by the US National Hurricane Center as it was classified at the time as a non-tropical low, partly due to its unusual location and wide wind field. Months after the hurricane season, when the Center was performing its annual review of the season and its named storms, forecasters Jack Beven and Eric Blake identified a well-defined center convecting around a warm core—the hallmark of a subtropical storm. After being absorbed into a cold front, the system went on to become Hurricane Vince. Weakening to a tropical depression, this storm became the first tropical system to make landfall on the Iberian Peninsula since the 1842 Spain hurricane. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Siphopteron quadrispinosum copulating

... that while mating, some species of bat-winged slugs (pictured) stab each other with a two-pronged penis?
... that after William Lunn's wedding, people destroyed the door of a police watch house in Montreal?
... that Nicholas Nabokov composed an opera Love's Labour's Lost, setting the same play by Shakespeare as the fictional hero of Mann's Doctor Faustus, "in a spirit of the most artificial mockery"?
... that Christine Murrell was the first woman elected to the British General Medical Council, but died before she could take her seat?
... that the California Central Valley city of Porterville purchased an abandoned rail right-of-way to preserve it for the proposed Cross Valley Corridor passenger rail service?
... that Judge Orfa Jean Shontz created an all female juvenile court with a homelike setting?
... that the Ethiopian highland hare was originally described as a subspecies of the cape hare, but it was later raised to full species status?
... that when operatic soprano Cynthia Clarey's voice lowered with age, she took up cabaret singing instead?

In the news

Las Vegas Strip

In the United States, at least 59 people are killed and more than 500 others injured in a mass shooting at a concert near Las Vegas (location pictured).
Amidst a constitutional crisis, an independence referendum takes place in Catalonia, Spain.
In Saudi Arabia, a decree by King Salman effectively removes a longstanding ban on women driving in the country.
Iraqi Kurdistan votes in favour of independence, though the vote is dismissed as unconstitutional by the Iraqi federal government.
The CDU/CSU, led by Angela Merkel, wins the most seats in the German federal election.

On this day...

October 4: Mid-Autumn Festival (Chinese calendar, 2017)

Sputnik 1

1876 – Texas A&M University opened as the first public institution of higher education in the US state of Texas.
1917 – First World War: The British devastated the German defence in the Battle of Broodseinde, which prompted a crisis among the German commanders and caused a severe loss of morale in the German Fourth Army.
1957 – Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 1 (replica pictured), the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, was launched by an R-7 rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
2003 – A suicide bomber killed 21 people and injured more than 50 others inside the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, Israel.
2010 – The dam holding a waste reservoir in western Hungary collapsed, freeing 1 million cubic metres (1,300,000 cu yd) of red mud, which flooded nearby communities and killed at least nine people.

Gabriele Paleotti (b. 1522) · Agneta Matthes (b. 1847) · Henrietta Lacks (d. 1951)

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Today's featured picture

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) was an American soldier and politician who was elected the 19th President of the United States, serving from 1877 to 1881. The election, at the end of the Reconstruction Era, was highly contentious and he was declared the winner through the Compromise of 1877. As president he ended Army support for Republican state governments in the South, promoted civil service reform, and attempted to reconcile the divisions left over from the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Engraving: Bureau of Engraving and Printing; restoration: Andrew Shiva

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