From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From today's featured article
Asahi pre-dreadnought battleship built in Britain for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the late 1890s. As flagship of the Standing Fleet, Asahi was in every major naval battle of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. The ship saw no combat during World War I, but participated in the Siberian Intervention in 1918. Reclassified as a coastal defence ship in 1921, Asahi was disarmed two years later to meet the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty , then served as a training and submarine depot ship . The ship was modified for marine salvage and rescue before being placed in reserve in 1928. Asahi was recommissioned in late 1937, after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War , and used to transport Japanese troops. In 1938 the ship was converted into a repair ship and based first at Japanese-occupied Shanghai , China, and then Camranh Bay , French Indochina , from late 1938 to 1941. The ship was transferred to occupied Singapore in early 1942 to help repair a damaged light cruiser and ordered to return home in May. Asahi was sunk en route by the American submarine USS Salmon , but most of the crew survived. (Full article...
Did you know...
York City War Memorial
In the news
On this day...
March 13 Passion Sunday Anglicanism , 2016)
624 – Led by Muhammad , the Muslims of Medina defeated Quraysh of Mecca in Badr , present-day Saudi Arabia.1781 – Astronomer and composer William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus (pictured) while in the garden of his house in Bath, Somerset , thinking it was a comet .1845 – German composer Felix Mendelssohn 's Violin Concerto violin concertos of all time, was first played in Leipzig .1943 – The Holocaust : Nazi German troops began liquidating the Jewish Ghetto Kraków , Poland, sending about 8,000 Jews deemed able to work to the Plaszow labor camp , with the rest either killed or sent to Auschwitz .1986 – Claiming the right of innocent passage , American warships USS Yorktown and USS Caron entered territorial waters in the Black Sea , inciting Soviet combat readiness.
Today's featured picture
Wagner VI map projection . It is a compromise projection, not having any special attributes other than a low-distortion appearance similar to the more common Robinson projection . The 2:1 aspect ratio of the equator to the central meridian matches their actual ratio on the Earth.
Map: Strebe , using Geocart
Other areas of Wikipedia
Community portal Help desk Local embassy Reference desk Site news Village pump
Wikipedia's sister projects Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation , a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other projects :
Wikipedia languages
This Wikipedia is written in English . Started in 2001 (2001 ) , it currently contains 5,103,512 articles. Many other Wikipedias are available; some of the largest are listed below.
More than 1,000,000 articles:
More than 250,000 articles:
More than 50,000 articles:
