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May 21

The red-capped parrot (Purpureicephalus spurius) is a species of broad-tailed parrot native to southwest Western Australia. Described by Heinrich Kuhl in 1820, it is classified in its own genus owing to its distinctive elongated beak. Its closest relative is the mulga parrot. It is not easily confused with other parrot species; both adult sexes have a bright crimson crown, green-yellow cheeks, and a distinctive long bill. The wings, back, and long tail are dark green, and the underparts are purple-blue. Found in woodland and open savanna country, the red-capped parrot consumes seeds (particularly of eucalypts), flowers, berries, and occasionally insects. Nesting takes place in tree hollows. Although the red-capped parrot has been shot as a pest, and affected by land clearing, the population is growing and the species is not threatened. In captivity, it has a reputation of being both anxious and difficult to breed. (Full article...)

May 21: World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development

Busoni c. 1897

• 1138 – The Crusades: The siege of Shaizar ended, and the Emir of Shaizar became a vassal of the Byzantine Empire.
• 1864 – American Civil War: The inconclusive Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in Virginia ended with combined Union and Confederate casualties totaling around 31,000.
• 1894 – The Manchester Ship Canal, linking Manchester in North West England to the Irish Sea, officially opened, becoming the world's largest navigation canal at the time.
• 1925 – The opera Doktor Faust, unfinished when composer Ferruccio Busoni (pictured) died, was premiered in Dresden.
• 2014 – A Taiwanese man carried out a stabbing spree on a Taipei Metro train, killing four people and injuring 24 others.

May 21

The black-crowned barwing (Actinodura sodangorum) is a non-migratory bird from Mainland Southeast Asia in the family Leiothrichidae, the laughingthrushes. The species's first sighting was reported in April 1996 at Ngọc Linh, Vietnam, and it was formally described in 1999. The black-crowned barwing is the only bird in the genus Actinodura to have a black crown. It has transverse barring on the wings (wingbars) and a crest, which are characteristic of the genus. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist montane forest, high-altitude shrubland, high-altitude grassland, and plantations. This black-crowned barwing was photographed in the Ngọc Linh Nature Reserve, Vietnam. Photograph credit: JJ Harrison Recently featured: Rhina Aguirre Chester Cathedral El Tatio Archive More featured pictures

May 22

Dracunculiasis, also called Guinea-worm disease, is a parasitic infection by the Guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis. A person becomes infected by drinking water contaminated with Guinea-worm larvae, which penetrate the digestive tract and escape into the body. Around a year later, the adult female migrates to an exit site – usually the lower leg – and induces an intensely painful blister on the skin. Eventually, the blister bursts, creating a painful wound from which the worm gradually emerges. The wound remains painful throughout the worm's emergence, disabling the affected person for the three to ten weeks it takes the worm to emerge. There is no medication to treat or prevent dracunculiasis. Instead, the mainstay of treatment is the careful wrapping of the emerging worm around a small stick or gauze to encourage and speed up its exit. A disease of extreme poverty, there were 14 cases reported worldwide in 2023, as efforts continue to eradicate it. (Full article...)

May 22: National Maritime Day in the United States

Prayut Chan-o-cha

• 1766 – A magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck Constantinople and was followed by a tsunami that caused significant damage.
• 1874 – Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem was first performed in the San Marco church in Milan to commemorate the first anniversary of Alessandro Manzoni's death.
• 1998 – In Public Prosecutor v Taw Cheng Kong, the Court of Appeal of Singapore overruled a High Court decision in the only time a statute in Singapore had been ruled unconstitutional.
• 2014 – Prayut Chan-o-cha (pictured), the commander-in-chief of the Royal Thai Army, launched a coup d'état against the caretaker government following six months of political crisis.

May 22

In the Loge, also known as At the Opera, is an 1878 impressionist painting by the American artist Mary Cassatt. The oil-on-canvas painting displays a bourgeois woman in a loge at the opera house looking through her opera glasses, while a man in the background looks at her. The woman's costume and fan make clear her upper class status. Art historians see the painting as commentary on the role of gender, looking, and power in the social spaces of the nineteenth century. The painting is currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which also holds a preliminary drawing for the work. Painting credit: Mary Cassatt Recently featured: Black-crowned barwing Rhina Aguirre Chester Cathedral Archive More featured pictures

May 23

Pound in 1918

Ezra Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a World War II collaborator in Fascist Italy. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and the epic poem The Cantos (c. 1917–1962). Pound helped shape the work of contemporaries such as H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He moved to Italy in 1924, where he embraced Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism and supported Adolf Hitler. During World War II, Pound recorded hundreds of radio propaganda broadcasts attacking the United States, praising the Holocaust in Italy, and urging American soldiers to surrender. In 1945 Pound was captured and ruled mentally unfit to stand trial. While incarcerated for over 12 years at a psychiatric hospital his The Pisan Cantos (1948) was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry causing enormous controversy. Released, in 1958 he returned, unrepentant, to Italy, where he died. (Full article...)

May 23: Aromanian National Day

Louis of Nassau

• 1568 – The Dutch Revolt broke out when rebels led by Louis of Nassau (pictured) invaded Friesland at the Battle of Heiligerlee.
• 1873 – The North-West Mounted Police, the forerunner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was established to bring law and order to and assert Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Territories.
• 1934 – During a strike against the Electric Auto-Lite company in Toledo, a fight began between nearly 10,000 American strikers and sheriff's deputies, later involving the Ohio National Guard.
• 1999 – Professional wrestler Owen Hart died immediately before a World Wrestling Federation match after dropping 70 feet (21 m) onto the ring during a botched entrance.

May 23

Entrance sign to Mojave National Preserve

There are 21 protected areas of the United States designated as national preserves. They were established by an act of Congress to protect areas that have resources often associated with national parks but where certain natural resource-extractive activities such as hunting and mining may be permitted, provided their natural values are preserved. Eleven national preserves are co-managed with national parks or national monuments; because hunting is forbidden in those units, preserves provide a similar level of protection from development but allow hunting and in some cases grazing. National preserves are located in eleven states; Alaska is home to ten of them, including the largest, Noatak National Preserve. Their total area is 24,651,566 acres (99,761 km²), 86% of which is in Alaska. All national preserves except Tallgrass Prairie permit hunting in accordance with local regulations. (Full list...)

May 23

May 24

"Chinese character" written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) forms

Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions influenced by Chinese culture. Over more than three millennia, the function, style, and means of writing characters have changed greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that directly reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes—the units of meaning in a language—often encoding aspects of pronunciation as well as meaning. Writing all of a language's frequently used vocabulary requires 2000–3000 characters; as of 2024^[update], nearly 100000 have been identified and included in The Unicode Standard. Characters are composed of strokes written in a fixed order. Historically, methods of writing characters include inscribing stone, bone, or bronze; brushing ink onto silk, bamboo, or paper; and printing with woodblocks or moveable type. More recent technologies using Chinese characters include telegraph codes and typewriters, as well as input methods and text encodings on computers. (Full article...)

May 24: Aldersgate Day (Methodism)

Eric XIV of Sweden

• 1567 – The mentally ill King Erik XIV of Sweden (pictured) and his guards murdered five incarcerated nobles, including some members of the influential Sture family.
• 1689 – The Act of Toleration became law, granting freedom of worship to English nonconformists under certain circumstances, but deliberately excluding Catholics.
• 1798 – The Irish Rebellion of 1798 began, with battles beginning in County Kildare and fighting later spreading across the country.
• 1963 – United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy met with African American author James Baldwin in an unsuccessful attempt to improve race relations.
• 2014 – A gunman involved in Islamic extremism opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels, killing four people.

May 24

Germanicus Julius Caesar (24 May 15 BC – 10 October AD 19) was an ancient Roman general and politician most famously known for his campaigns against Arminius in Germania. The son of Nero Claudius Drusus and Antonia Minor, Germanicus was born into an influential branch of the patrician gens Claudia. The agnomen Germanicus was added to his full name in 9 BC when it was posthumously awarded to his father in honor of his victories in Germania. In AD 4 he was adopted by his paternal uncle Tiberius, himself the stepson and heir of Germanicus' great-uncle Augustus; ten years later, Tiberius succeeded Augustus as Roman emperor. As a result of his adoption, Germanicus became an official member of the gens Julia, another prominent family, to which he was related on his mother's side. His connection to the Julii Caesares was further consolidated through a marriage between him and Agrippina the Elder, a granddaughter of Augustus. He was also the father of Caligula, the maternal grandfather of Nero, and the older brother of Claudius. This bust, depicting Germanicus in AD 4, is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Sculpture credit: unknown; photographed by J. Paul Getty Museum Recently featured: The Cocoanuts In the Loge Black-crowned barwing Archive More featured pictures

May 25

Capturing a redoubt by throwing rocks

In the Rhine campaign of 1796, two First Coalition armies under the overall command of Archduke Charles of Austria defeated two French Republican armies in the last campaign of the War of the First Coalition, part of the French Revolutionary Wars. The French military intended to capture Vienna and force the Holy Roman Emperor to surrender. The French Army of Sambre and Meuse commanded by Jean-Baptiste Jourdan opposed the Austrian Army of the Lower Rhine in the north. The Army of the Rhine and Moselle, led by Jean Victor Marie Moreau, fought the Austrian Army of the Upper Rhine in the south. At the Battle of Amberg on 24 August and the Battle of Würzburg on 3 September, Charles defeated Jourdan's northern army. During the winter the Austrians forced Moreau's army back to France. Despite Charles's success in the Rhineland, Austria lost the war when the French Army of Italy, commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte, advanced on Vienna, resulting in the Peace of Campo Formio. (Full article...)

May 25: Africa Day (1963); Independence Day in Jordan (1946)

A memorial to George Floyd following his murder.

• 1810 – The Primera Junta, the first independent government in Argentina, was established in an open cabildo in Buenos Aires, marking the end of the May Revolution.
• 1940 – Second World War: German troops captured Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, forcing British forces to evacuate via Dunkirk.
• 1955 – Joe Brown and George Band, members of the British Kangchenjunga expedition, made the first ascent of the world's third-highest mountain but deliberately did not set foot on the summit.
• 1967 – Having purged a group of rivals, Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Il-sung delivered the "May 25 teaching", entrenching his son Kim Jong-il as his designated successor.
• 2020 – George Floyd, a black American man, was murdered (memorial pictured) during an arrest by a white police officer in Minneapolis, sparking protests in the U.S. and other countries.

May 25

Many artworks related to the Black Lives Matter movement have been created. These works are seen as a direct tribute to those who have died or more broadly to the movement. Often the pieces are created in the streets as to be more publicly visible. This mural in Greenpoint, Brooklyn lists the names of African Americans killed by law enforcement officers in the United States, ending with George Floyd, whose murder on May 25, 2020 sparked global protests that raised the visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement. Mural credit: unknown; photographed by Rhododendrites Recently featured: Germanicus The Cocoanuts In the Loge Archive More featured pictures

May 26

An RATP Group electric Heuliez Bus shuttles athletes from the Olympic Village

Transportation during the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics constituted a major challenge for the organisers due to the scale of the event. Over €500 million was invested in improvements to transportation infrastructure for the games. A mobile app was developed to facilitate travel by offering a route calculator, and 5,000 agents were deployed at stations and bus stops to assist travellers. A goal of Paris 2024 was to halve the average carbon footprint of the London 2012 and Rio 2016 games. The organisers estimated that more than a third of the greenhouse gas emissions would be from the transport of athletes and spectators. All venues were made accessible by public transport and bicycle, with 415 kilometres (258 mi) of cycle paths created to link the venues and 27,000 bicycle racks installed. Public transport was extended and services increased. The goal was met, with an estimated 54.6% reduction, representing 1.59 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. (Full article...)

May 26: Memorial Day (2025) in the United States; National Sorry Day in Australia; Independence Day in Georgia (1918), Lag BaOmer (Judaism, 2024)

Damage to the Interstate 40 bridge

• 1644 – Portuguese Restoration War: Portuguese and Spanish forces both claimed victory at the Battle of Montijo.
• 1894 – Germany's Emanuel Lasker defeated Wilhelm Steinitz to become the world chess champion, beginning a record 27-year reign.
• 1999 – Manchester United won the UEFA Champions League final to become the first English football club to win three major championships in the same season.
• 2002 – Barges being towed destroyed part of a bridge (aftermath pictured) near Webbers Falls, Oklahoma, causing vehicles to fall into the Robert S. Kerr Reservoir on the Arkansas River.

May 26

Tom Cruise

Top Gun: Maverick, a 2022 American action drama film directed by Joseph Kosinski, garnered accolades in a variety of categories, with particular recognition for Tom Cruise's (pictured) performance as well as its sound and visual effects, cinematography, and film editing. It received six nominations at the 95th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won Best Sound. At the 76th British Academy Film Awards, The film was nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Sound, and Best Special Visual Effects. Maverick received six nominations at the 28th Critics' Choice Awards and won Best Cinematography. It garnered two nominations at the 80th Golden Globe Awards. In addition to two National Board of Review Awards, Maverick was named one of the ten-best films of 2022 by the American Film Institute. (Full list...)

May 26

The featured picture for this day has not yet been chosen.

In general, pictures of the day are scheduled in order of promotion to featured status. See Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Guidelines for full guidelines.

May 27

The first UK Phantom on a test flight in 1968

From 1968 to 1992, the United Kingdom used the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II as one of its principal combat aircraft. The Phantom was procured to serve in both the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Air Force (RAF) in several different roles. Most Phantoms operated by the UK were built as a special batch containing a significant amount of British technology. Two variants were initially built: the F-4K was a carrier-based air-defence interceptor for the Fleet Air Arm, while the F-4M was initially used by the RAF for tactical strike and reconnaissance, before transitioning to an air defence role in the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, a third Phantom variant was obtained when fifteen former US Navy F-4J aircraft were purchased to augment the UK's air defences. Although the Fleet Air Arm ceased using the Phantom in 1978, the RAF retained it until 1992, when it was withdrawn as part of a series of post-Cold War defence cuts. (Full article...)

May 27

Manchu Prince Dorgon

• 1644 – Manchu regent Dorgon (depicted) defeated rebel leader Li Zicheng of the Shun dynasty at the Battle of Shanhai Pass, allowing the Manchus to enter and conquer the capital city of Beijing.
• 1799 – War of the Second Coalition: Austrian forces defeated the French Army of the Danube, capturing the strategically important Swiss town of Winterthur.
• 1954 – The security clearance of American nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of Project Y, was revoked.
• 1967 – Australians voted overwhelmingly to include Indigenous Australians in population counts for constitutional purposes and to allow the federal government to make special laws affecting them in states.
• 1997 – A destructive F5-rated tornado tracked through a subdivision of homes northwest of Jarrell, Texas, killing 27 people.

May 27

The featured picture for this day has not yet been chosen.

In general, pictures of the day are scheduled in order of promotion to featured status. See Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Guidelines for full guidelines.

May 28

Beach on Nosy Komba

Nosy Komba is a small volcanic island in Madagascar, situated between Nosy Be and the northwest coast of the main island. The lowlands of the island are divided between secondary forest and a patchwork of farmland and plantations (notably including shade-grown coffee), while the highlands are mainly scrubland, with a bamboo forest in the northern portions. Ampangorina is the main village and administrative center. The island attracts significant ecotourism, thanks in part to its black lemurs. During the early 1800s, the region was heavily settled by Sakalava refugees and their slaves fleeing the hegemony of the Merina. France gained control of the island in 1840 and converted it to a logistic center for the import of indentured servants. Although Nosy Komba hosts a traditionally protected forest and an arboretum established in the colonial era, protection for the latter is essentially unenforced, and illegal logging continues. Only small pockets of old-growth forest remain, in remote areas. (Full article...)

May 28: Republic Day in Armenia (1918); Independence Day in Azerbaijan (1918)

Mozaffar ad-Din

• 585 BC – According to the Greek historian Herodotus, a solar eclipse, accurately predicted by Thales of Miletus, abruptly ended the Battle of Halys between the Lydians and the Medes.
• 1644 – English Civil War: Royalist troops stormed and captured the Parliamentarian stronghold of Bolton, leading to a massacre of defenders and local residents.
• 1754 – French and Indian War: Led by 22-year-old George Washington, a company of Virginia colonial militiamen ambushed a force of 35 Canadiens at the Battle of Jumonville Glen.
• 1901 – Mozaffar ad-Din (pictured), Shah of Persia, granted exclusive rights to prospect for oil in the country to William Knox D'Arcy.
• 1937 – The rise of Neville Chamberlain culminated with his accession as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, being summoned to Buckingham Palace to "kiss hands".
• 2002 – An independent commission appointed by the Football Association voted two-to-one to allow Wimbledon F.C. to relocate from London to Milton Keynes.

May 28

The featured picture for this day has not yet been chosen.

In general, pictures of the day are scheduled in order of promotion to featured status. See Wikipedia:Picture of the day/Guidelines for full guidelines.