Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 November 29

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From today's featured article

Josephine Butler (1828–1906) was an English feminist and social reformer in the Victorian era. She campaigned for women's suffrage and better education for women. She was instrumental in the 1886 repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which had subjected prostitutes to invasive medical examinations, and she founded an organisation to combat similar practices across Europe. After she became aware that English women and children were being sold into prostitution on the continent, her allegations led to the sacking of a Belgian police commissionaire and the imprisonment of his deputy and 12 brothel owners. Josephine fought child prostitution with help from the campaigning editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, leading to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 years of age. Her final campaign came in the late 1890s, against medical mistreatment of prostitutes in the British Raj. She wrote more than 90 books and pamphlets, including three biographies. Her Christian feminism is celebrated by the Church of England with a Lesser Festival, and Durham University named one of their colleges after her. (Full article...)

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Elephants in Liwonde National Park

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In the news

Mount Agung erupting

Indonesian officials order the evacuation of 100,000 people in Bali due to the eruption of Mount Agung (pictured).
In Canadian football, the Toronto Argonauts defeat the Calgary Stampeders to win the Grey Cup.
At least 305 people are killed in a terrorist attack on a mosque in Bir al-Abed, Egypt.
Emmerson Mnangagwa succeeds Robert Mugabe as President of Zimbabwe following a military coup.
The Bangladeshi Ministry of Foreign Affairs signs an accord with their counterpart in Myanmar to facilitate the return of Rohingya refugees to Rakhine State.

On this day...

November 29

Queen Maria I of Portugal

1777 – El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first civil settlement in the Spanish colony of Alta California, was founded as a farming community.
1807 – Maria I of Portugal (pictured), the Braganza royal family and its court of nearly 15,000 people departed Lisbon for the colony of Brazil just days before Napoleonic forces invaded.
1947 – The United Nations General Assembly voted to approve the Partition Plan for Palestine, a plan to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict in the British Mandate of Palestine by separating the territory into Jewish and Arab states.
1987 – Korean Air Flight 858 exploded over the Andaman Sea after two North Korean agents left a time bomb in an overhead compartment, killing all 115 people on board.
2007 – Philippine soldiers led by Senator Antonio Trillanes, on trial for the 2003 Oakwood mutiny, staged a mutiny and temporarily seized a conference room in The Peninsula Manila hotel.

Claudio Monteverdi (d. 1643) · Christian Doppler (b. 1803) · Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (b. 1908)

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Today's featured picture

A 50-øre (half-krone) note issued in 1874, the first year of issue for the Greenlandic krone, a version of the Danish krone. The uniface note was issued in Denmark for use in Greenland. It depicts the royal monogram of Christian IX of Denmark on the left and a small crowned polar bear on the right; later issues depicted a larger polar bear.

Banknote: Handelsstederne i Grønland (courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History)

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