Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 December 7b

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Beli Orao was a royal yacht built for the Yugoslav Royal Navy in 1938–1939. She was captured in April 1941 by the Italians during the World War II invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers. Re-armed, she saw service as a gunboat in the Italian Royal Navy, briefly as Alba then Zagabria, undertaking harbour protection and coastal escort duties. She was then used to train anti-submarine warfare specialists. After the Italian armistice with the Allies in September 1943, she was handed back to the Yugoslav navy-in-exile on 7 December. Refitted, and under her original name, she became a tender for a flotilla of motor gunboats. In this role she operated out of Malta, off the western coast of Italy, and later off the Yugoslav coast. After the war she remained in Yugoslav hands under the names Biokovo then Jadranka, serving as a naval yacht, as a presidential yacht and as a dispatch boat. In 1978, she was still in service, but was scrapped soon after. (Full article...)

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Opal embedded in jasper

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In the news

Karl Nehammer

Karl Nehammer (pictured) becomes Chancellor of Austria following the resignation of Alexander Schallenberg.
On the Indonesian island of Java, Mount Semeru erupts, killing at least 34 people and injuring more than 160 others.
The Indian agriculture acts are repealed after a year of protests by farmers.
Xiomara Castro is elected as the first female President of Honduras.

On this day

December 7: Feast day of Saint Ambrose (Christianity); National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day in the United States (1941)

Artist's impression of the Galileo spacecraft

574 – Suffering from mental illness, Eastern Roman emperor Justin II had his general Tiberius proclaimed Caesar, adopting him as his own son.
1862 – American Civil War: The Battle of Prairie Grove ended a Confederate attempt to regain control of northwestern Arkansas.
1936 – Australian cricketer Jack Fingleton became the first player to score centuries in four consecutive Test innings.
1975 – The Indonesian military invaded East Timor under the pretext of anti-colonialism, beginning an occupation.
1995 – The Galileo spacecraft (illustration shown) arrived at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.

Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (b. 903)
Willa Cather (b. 1873)
Robert Graves (d. 1985)

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Today's featured picture

The Cape starling (Lamprotornis nitens) is a medium-sized passerine bird in the starling family, Sturnidae, found in southern Africa. It is a gregarious bird and forms large flocks outside the breeding season. It usually feeds on the ground, often foraging alongside other species of starlings. Habituated to humans, its diet includes fruit, insects and nectar. It sometimes feeds on ectoparasites that it picks off the backs of animals or visits bird tables for scraps. This Cape starling, of the subspecies L. n. phoenicopterus, was photographed in Damaraland, Namibia.

Photograph credit: Charles James Sharp

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