Wikipedia:Main Page history/2013 December 20

Recently featured: Redback spider – Joseph Grimaldi – Nefarious: Merchant of Souls

From Wikipedia's new and recently improved content:

• ... that the thirteen figures (example pictured) who guarded the tomb of General Liu Tingxun in 728 AD are now in London?
• ... that 2012 Spanish Paralympic blind footballer Antonio Jesús Martín Gaitán scored his team's bronze medal winning goal in a shootout watched by the Duchess of Lugo?
• ... that W.H.L. McCourtie Estate was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1991 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992?
• ... that Deborah Rutter, the first woman named to head the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, applied in German for her first art job in Los Angeles?
• ... that the cause of the 1956 Anjar earthquake, which killed at least 115 people, was reverse faulting?
• ... that Angus Wallace performed surgery on another passenger on a British Airways flight?
• ... that the town of Stora Blåsjön, Sweden, has a moose farm featuring a pair of moose named Hilda and Herbert?

• ESA launches the Gaia space observatory to compile a catalogue of astronomical objects.
• A new species of tapir, Tapirus kabomani, is identified in the Amazon.
• Following a federal election in Germany, a third cabinet under chancellor Angela Merkel (pictured) is inaugurated with a grand coalition.
• Michelle Bachelet is elected President of Chile for a second non-consecutive term.
• A reported coup attempt in South Sudan leads to continued fighting and hundreds of casualties.
• Chang'e 3, carrying the Yutu rover, becomes the first spacecraft to land on the Moon since 1976.

Recent deaths: Ronnie Biggs – Joan Fontaine – Peter O'Toole

December 20

• 1860 – South Carolina became the first of eleven slave states to secede from the United States, leading to the eventual creation of the Confederate States of America and later the American Civil War.
• 1955 – Cardiff (Cardiff City Hall pictured) was proclaimed as the capital of Wales.
• 1968 – The Zodiac Killer murdered the first of his five confirmed victims in Vallejo, California, a case which remains unsolved.
• 1988 – The United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances governing international cooperation against the illegal drug trade was signed in Vienna.
• 1995 – As per the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War, the NATO-led IFOR began peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

More anniversaries: December 19 – December 20 – December 21