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From today's featured article

Yamato on sea trial

The Yamato-class battleships were two battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Yamato (pictured) and Musashi, laid down leading up to the Second World War and completed as designed. A third hull was converted to the aircraft carrier Shinano during construction. Displacing nearly 72,000 long tons (73,000 t), the completed battleships were the heaviest ever constructed. The class carried the largest naval artillery ever fitted to a warship, nine 460 mm (18.1 in) naval guns, capable of firing 1,460 kg (3,220 lb) shells over 42 km (26 mi). Because of the threat of U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers, Yamato and Musashi spent the majority of their careers in naval bases. All three ships were sunk by the U.S. Navy: Musashi by air strikes while participating in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, Shinano after being torpedoed by the submarine USS Archerfish in November 1944, and Yamato by air strikes while en route to Okinawa in April 1945. (This article is part of a featured topic: Yamato-class battleships.)

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Did you know ...

Coconuts

... that the coconut (examples pictured) may have bisexual flowers?
... that Franz Wilczek played a violin made of wood from a table that was handcrafted generations earlier by Native Americans?
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... that parents of a Columbine High School student sought to recall the sheriff managing the response to the massacre there after he wrongly named their son as a suspect?
... that the unusual wing pattern of the moth Epiphryne verriculata allows it to camouflage on dead Cordyline leaves?
... that Spencer Cobb was a Kentucky senator for three and a half hours?
... that an urban park once simultaneously hosted a drug rehabilitation facility and an annual strawberry festival?
... that some scholars believe that Leonardo da Vinci's mother was a slave?
... that the success of one version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was almost derailed by allegations of communism?

In the news

Delcy Rodríguez

Faustin-Archange Touadéra is re-elected as the president of the Central African Republic.
Delcy Rodríguez (pictured) is sworn in as interim president of Venezuela following the capture of Nicolás Maduro during United States strikes on the capital.
Luke Littler wins the PDC World Darts Championship.
A fire at a bar during New Year's Eve celebrations in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, kills 40 people.
Bulgaria adopts the euro, becoming the 21st member of the eurozone.

On this day

January 8

Covent Garden Theatre

1735 – George Frideric Handel's opera Ariodante premiered at the Covent Garden Theatre (pictured) in London.
1790 – George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in New York City, then the provisional capital of the United States.
1939 – The New Deal for Aborigines was formally announced by the Australian government, providing for full civil rights for Indigenous Australians in exchange for cultural assimilation.
1991 – Jeremy Wade Delle committed suicide in his high-school class in Richardson, Texas, an event that inspired the Pearl Jam song "Jeremy".
2010 – Gunmen from an offshoot of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda attacked the bus transporting the Togo national football team to the Africa Cup of Nations in Angola, killing three people.

Athelm (d. 926)
Fanny Bullock Workman (b. 1859)
Zdeněk Mácal (b. 1936)
Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell (d. 1941)

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Today's featured picture

A. J. Muste (January 8, 1885 – February 11, 1967) was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. He is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, the pacifist movement, the anti-war movement, and the civil rights movement in the United States. Muste became involved in trade-union activity in 1919, when he led a 16-week-long textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In 1929, he organized the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, which became the American Workers Party in 1933. Muste resigned from the Workers Party in 1936 and left socialist politics to return to his roots as a Christian pacifist. In the 1960s, he was a leader in the movement against the Vietnam War. This photograph of Muste was taken by Bernard Gotfryd in Central Park, New York City, between 1965 and 1967. The image is part of a collection of Gotfryd's photographs in the Library of Congress.

Photograph credit: Bernard Gotfryd; restored by Yann Forget

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