Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 January 31

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Ambrose Rookwood (c. 1578 – 31 January 1606) was a member of the failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy to replace the Protestant English King James I with a Catholic monarch. Born into a wealthy family of Catholic recusants, and educated by Jesuits at Flanders, Rookwood became a horse-breeder. He was enlisted into the plot in September 1605 by Robert Catesby, a religious zealot whose impatience with James's treatment of English Catholics had grown so severe that he conspired to blow up the House of Lords with gunpowder, looking to kill the king and much of the Protestant hierarchy. Rookwood's stable of fine horses was seen as essential for the uprising to succeed. The plan failed when the man left in charge of the gunpowder stored beneath the House of Lords, Guy Fawkes, was discovered there and arrested. After surviving an attack by the Sheriff of Worcestershire, Rookwood was imprisoned in the Tower of London and executed. (Full article...)

Part of the Gunpowder Plot series, one of Wikipedia's featured topics.

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Skeletal diagram of Puertasaurus

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In the news

Aftermath of the Jolo Cathedral bombings

Two bombs at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (aftermath pictured) in Jolo, Philippines, kill at least eighteen people and leave more than eighty others injured.
A mining dam collapses in Brumadinho, Brazil, leaving more than eighty people dead and hundreds of others missing.
More than sixty people are killed in flooding across South Sulawesi, Indonesia.
More than a hundred Afghan National Security Forces members are reportedly killed in an attack on a military compound in Maidan Shar.

On this day

January 31: Independence Day in Nauru (1968)

Ham the Chimp

1578 – Eighty Years' War: Spain won a crushing victory in the Battle of Gembloux, leading to a break up of the United Seventeen Provinces into the Union of Arras (Catholic South) and Union of Utrecht (Protestant North).
1747 – The London Lock Hospital, the first clinic specialising in the treatment of venereal diseases, opened.
1862 – American astronomer Alvan Graham Clark first observed the faint white dwarf companion of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.
1961 – Aboard NASA's Mercury-Redstone 2, Ham the Chimp (pictured) became the first hominid launched into outer space.
2007 – Suspects were arrested in Birmingham, England, accused of plotting to kidnap, and eventually behead, a Muslim British soldier serving in Iraq.

Franz Schubert (b. 1797) · Cilibi Moise (d. 1870) · Adelaide Tambo (d. 2007)

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Jackie Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) became the first African-American Major League Baseball player of the modern era when he debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. As the first black man to openly play in the major leagues since the 1880s, he was instrumental in bringing an end to racial segregation in professional baseball, which had relegated African-Americans to the Negro leagues for six decades. Apart from his cultural impact, Robinson had an exceptional baseball career. Over ten seasons, he played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Championship. He was selected for six consecutive All-Star Games from 1949 to 1954, was the recipient of the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949 – the first black player so honored. After retirement he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and in 1997, Major League Baseball retired his uniform number, 42, across all major league teams.

Photograph: Bob Sandberg; Restoration: Adam Cuerden

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