Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 December 28

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From today's featured article

Leelah Alcorn (November 15, 1997 – December 28, 2014) was an American transgender girl whose suicide attracted international attention. At age 14, she came out as transgender to her parents, and at 16, she asked to undergo transition treatment; instead, they sent her to conversion therapy. After she revealed her attraction toward males to her classmates, her parents removed her from school and revoked her access to social media. She killed herself by walking into highway traffic. In her suicide note, Alcorn blamed her parents for her loneliness and alienation, and asked people to pay more attention to discrimination and abuse faced by transgender youth. LGBT rights activists cited the incident as evidence of the problems she wrote about, and vigils were held in her memory. Petitions that called for the establishment of "Leelah's Law", a ban on conversion therapy in the U.S., received a supportive response from President Barack Obama. Within a year, her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, criminalized conversion therapy. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Nagtahan Interchange

... that the Rotonda de Sampaloc, now the Nagtahan Interchange (pictured), originally demarcated the boundary between Manila's suburbs and its urban core?
... that Chief Suah Koko fought several battles against the Liberian government before granting them her land?
... that the underground journey of a metamorphic rock can be shown with a pressure-temperature-time path?
... that South Korean singer Kang In-soo was accepted as a dance major in Sejong University despite not having learned how to dance?
... that My Journey into the Heart of Terror was authored by Jürgen Todenhöfer, the first western journalist to be invited to travel to the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria?
... that Rudolf Peierls was awarded the Medal of Freedom, but was later refused entry to the United States because he was suspected of being a spy?
... that 22 August 1914, the date of the Battle of the Frontiers, was the deadliest single day on the Western Front in World War I?
... that Ana Lucía Armijos, president of the Ecuadorian Monetary Board, went into hiding for a year after the Supreme Court of Ecuador called for her arrest in the case of a $200 million bank bailout?

In the news

Carles Puigdemont

Typhoon Tembin sweeps through the southern Philippines, killing more than two hundred people and leaving dozens of others missing.
In the Catalan election, pro-independence parties, spearheaded by the exiled Carles Puigdemont (pictured), secure a majority.
Sebastián Piñera is elected President of Chile for a second time.
In the United States, an Amtrak Cascades passenger train derails in DuPont, Washington, killing three people and injuring more than seventy others.
Incumbent Juan Orlando Hernández is declared the winner of the Honduran presidential election, with the Organization of American States calling for a new vote amidst widespread irregularities.

On this day...

December 28: Tenth of Tevet (Judaism, 2017); Proclamation Day in South Australia (1836)

Neptune

484 – Alaric II succeeded his father Euric as king of the Visigoths.
1612 – Galileo became the first person to observe the planet Neptune (pictured), although he mistakenly catalogued it as a fixed star.
1895 – History of film: Using their cinematograph in Paris, the Lumière brothers showed motion pictures to a paying audience for the first time.
1943 – World War II: After eight days of brutal house-to-house fighting, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division captured Ortona, Italy.
2014 – The passenger ferry MS Norman Atlantic caught fire in the Adriatic Sea, resulting in nine deaths, with a further 19 missing.

Arthur Hunter Palmer (b. 1819) · Thomas Babington Macaulay (d. 1859) · Maurice Ravel (d. 1937)

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Today's featured picture

The yacare caiman (Caiman yacare) is a species of caiman found in central South America. About ten million individuals, such as this one, exist within the Brazilian pantanal, representing what may be the largest single crocodilian population on Earth. This small-to-medium sized species feeds mainly on fish (especially piranha), but also eats birds, reptiles, and small mammals.

Photograph: Charles J. Sharp

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