SMS Goeben was the second of two
Moltke-classbattlecruisers of the
Imperial German Navy, launched in 1911 and named after the German
Franco-Prussian War veteran General
August Karl von Goeben. Compared to their British rivals in the
Indefatigable class, Goeben and her
sister ship were significantly larger and better armored. After her commissioning, Goeben, with the
light cruiserBreslau, patrolled the Mediterranean during the
Balkan Wars. After the outbreak of
World War I on 28 July 1914, Goeben and Breslau evaded British naval forces and reached
Constantinople. The two ships were transferred to the
Ottoman Empire on 16 August 1914, and Goeben became the flagship of the
Ottoman Navy as Yavuz Sultan Selim. By bombarding Russian facilities in the Black Sea, she brought Turkey into World War I on the German side. In later service, she carried the remains of
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk from
Istanbul to
İzmit in 1938. She was decommissioned in 1950 and scrapped in 1973, after the West German government declined to buy her back. She was the last surviving ship built by the Imperial German Navy, and the longest-serving
battlecruiser or
dreadnought-type ship in any navy. (
Full article...)
1866 – At the age of 18, Vinnie Ream(pictured) became the first and youngest female artist to receive a commission from the United States government for a statue—that of
Abraham Lincoln in the
U.S. Capitol rotunda.
1976 – An earthquake measuring at least 8.2 on the
Richter scale, one of the deadliest in history, flattened
Tangshan, China, killing at least 240,000 people.
The majority of species in Armillaria, a
genus of
fungi commonly known as honey mushrooms, are
saprotrophic and live mainly on dead wood, but some are
parasites that can cause
root and
butt rot in over 600
species of woody plants. Some Armillaria species, such as A. gallica(pictured), A. mellea, and A. tabescens, are
bioluminescent. The genus once served as a
wastebasket taxon; due largely to differing interpretations on the limits of the genus, over 270 species and
varieties have been placed in Armillaria. A comprehensive 1995 study by Tom Volk and Harold Burdsall evaluated all of the
epithets that have been used in Armillaria. They determined that about 40 species belong to Armillariasensu stricto; the remaining names belong to species that are distributed among 43 other modern fungal genera. Many species are difficult or impossible to distinguish from each other using observable characteristics. (Full list...)
According to Islamic tradition,
Muhammad was transported from the
Sacred Mosque in
Mecca to al-Aqsa during the
Night Journey. This tradition holds that Muhammad led
prayers towards this site until the seventeenth month after the
emigration, when
God directed him to turn towards the
Kaaba.
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