User:Rfl/FeaturedArticle
Featured articles[edit]
Featured articles · candidates · collaboration of the week
May 3[edit]
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Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption was a legally recognized church in the United States established by the comedian and satirist John Oliver (pictured). Announced on August 16, 2015, in an episode of the television program Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the church's purpose was to highlight and criticize televangelists, such as Kenneth Copeland and Robert Tilton, who Oliver argued used television broadcasts of Christian church services for private gain. Oliver also established Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption to draw attention to the tax-exempt status given to churches. During his show on September 13, 2015, Oliver announced that the church had received "thousands of dollars" and a variety of other items from viewers, and stated that the Church would be shutting down. All monetary donations were given to Doctors Without Borders. Oliver set up spinoffs of the Church in 2018 and 2021. The segments and later spinoff segments featured the comedian Rachel Dratch as Oliver's fictional wife, Wanda Jo. (Full article...)
April 3[edit]
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Cardinal Richelieu was a French clergyman, noble, and statesman. Consecrated as a bishop in 1607, he later entered politics, becoming a Secretary of State in 1616. Richelieu soon rose in both the Church and the state, becoming a cardinal in 1622, and King Louis XIII's chief minister in 1624. He remained in office until his death in 1642; he was succeeded by Jules Cardinal Mazarin. As chief minister, the Cardinal de Richelieu sought to consolidate royal power and crush domestic factions. By restraining the power of the nobility, he transformed France into a strongly centralised state. His chief foreign policy objective was to check the power of the Austro-Spanish Habsburg dynasty; although a Roman Catholic cardinal, he did not hesitate to make alliances with Protestant rulers in attempting to achieve this goal. His tenure was marked by the Thirty Years' War that engulfed Europe. Richelieu was also famous for his patronage of the arts; most notably, he founded the Académie française, the learned society responsible for matters pertaining to the French language. Richelieu is also known by the sobriquet l'Éminence rouge ("the Red Eminence"), from the red shade of a cardinal's vestments. (more...)
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March 3[edit]
Weight training can be the most effective technique for developing the strength and size of skeletal muscles. As well as providing functional benefits, this can result in a more attractive physique and improve overall health and wellbeing. The technique involves progressively lifting increasing amounts of weight, and includes a variety of exercises and items of equipment to target specific muscle groups. It is an anaerobic form of exercise. Weight training has become the best-known form of resistance training, which is in turn the best-known form of strength training. It should not be confused with bodybuilding, weightlifting or powerlifting—even though these also involve the lifting of weights—because they are sports rather than forms of exercise. (more...)
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February 3[edit]
Mark Latham is an Australian politician and was leader of the federal parliamentary Australian Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition in Australia from December 2003 to January 2005. He succeeded Simon Crean as leader in December 2003, defeating former leader Kim Beazley in a close vote. Latham captured national attention with his innovative policies and approaches, but also attracted controversy regarding his interesting past. In the October 2004 federal election, Latham and his party were soundly defeated by the incumbent Prime Minister John Howard. Ill-health and deteriorating relations with his own party forced him to step down as Leader on January 18, 2005. (more...)
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January 3[edit]
Henry VIII was King of England and Lord of Ireland (later King of Ireland) from April 22, 1509, until his death. He was the second monarch of the Tudor dynasty, succeeding his father, Henry VII. He is famous for having been married six times and for wielding the most untrammeled power of any British monarch. Notable events to occur during his reign included the establishment of the Church of England, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the union of England and Wales. Several significant pieces of legislation were enacted during Henry VIII's reign. They included several Acts which severed the English Church from the Roman Catholic Church, the Acts of Union 1536-1543 (which united England and Wales into one nation), the Buggery Act 1533 (the first anti-homosexual enactment in England), and the Witchcraft Act 1542. (more...)
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December 3[edit]
India is a large multicultural country in South Asia, with a population of over one billion. The Indian economy is the fourth largest in the world in terms of purchasing power parity and is the world's second-fastest growing economy. India is also the second most populous country in the world, and the world's largest democracy. India has grown significantly, in terms of both population and strategic importance, in the last 20 years. It has also emerged as an important regional power, with one of the world's largest militaries and a declared nuclear weapons capability. Strategically located in Asia, constituting most of the Indian subcontinent, India straddles many busy trade routes. It shares its borders with Pakistan, the People's Republic of China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Afghanistan. Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Indonesia are the nearby island nations in the Indian Ocean. Home to some of the most ancient civilizations in the world, India was formally ruled by the British for almost 90 years before gaining independence in 1947. (more...)
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November 3[edit]
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and public figure. Yeats was one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. His early work tended towards a romantic lushness and dreamlike quality best described by the title of his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight, but in his forties, inspired by his relationships with modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and his active involvement in Irish nationalism, he moved towards a harder, more modern style. As well as his role as member of the board of the Abbey, Yeats served as an Irish Senator. He took his role as a public figure seriously and was a reasonably hard-working member of the Seanad. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee described as "his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation". (more...)
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October 3[edit]
The History of Greenland, the world's largest island, is the history of life under extreme Arctic conditions; an ice-cap covers about 84 percent of the island, largely restricting human activity to the coasts. Greenland was unknown to Europeans until the 10th century, when it was discovered by Icelandic Vikings. Before this discovery, it had been inhabited for a long time by Arctic peoples, although the direct ancestors of the modern Inuit did not arrive until around 1200 CE. The Inuit were the only people to inhabit the island for several hundred years, but in remembrance of the Viking settlement, Denmark nonetheless claimed the territory, and colonized it in the 18th century. During World War II, Greenland became effectively detached from Denmark, and more connected to the United States and Canada. Eventually the colonial status was lifted, and although Greenland is still a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it has enjoyed home rule since 1979. (more...)
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September 3[edit]
The Behistun Inscription is to cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptian hieroglyphs: the document most crucial in the decipherment of a previously lost script. The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide, and 100 metres up a cliff from an ancient road connecting the capitals of Babylonia and Media (Babylon and Ecbatana). It is extremely inaccessible as the mountainside was removed to make the inscription more visible after its completion. The text itself is a statement by Darius I of Persia, written three times in three different scripts and languages: two languages side by side, Old Persian and Elamite, and Akkadian above them. (more...)
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September 6[edit]
The Warsaw Uprising was an armed struggle during the Second World War by the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) to liberate Warsaw from German occupation and Nazi rule. It started on August 1, 1944 as a part of a nationwide uprising, Operation Tempest. The Polish troops resisted the German-led forces until October 2. An estimated 85% of the city was destroyed during the urban guerrilla war and after the end of hostilities. The Uprising started at a crucial point in the war as the Soviet army was approaching Warsaw. Although the Soviet army was within a few hundred metres of the city from September 16 onward, the link between the uprising and the advancing army was never made. This failure and the reasons behind it have been a matter of controversy ever since. (more...)
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August 3[edit]
Economics is the social science studying the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. Understanding choices by individuals and groups is central in economics, as choosing one alternative often means foregoing another (see opportunity cost). The term economics was coined around 1870 and popularized by Alfred Marshall in his book Principles of Political Economy. Before the 1930s, most economic analysis concentrated on individual firms and industries (microeconomics); however John Maynard Keynes pioneered the more modern macroeconomics, a branch of economics that attempts to make predictions about an entire economy. (more...)
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July 3[edit]
The Eureka Stockade was a miners' revolt in 1854 in Victoria, Australia, against the officials supervising the gold-mining regions of Ballarat. The roots of the Eureka Stockade uprising lay in the inability of a fledgling colonial government to cope with the new demographics of the colony. It is to Australian history what the storming of the Bastille is to French history and the Battle of the Alamo is to American history. Although the revolt failed, it was a watershed event in Australian politics, and is often characterised as the nation's "Birth of Democracy". (more...)
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June 3[edit]
Speech synthesis is the generation of human speech without directly using a human voice. Speech synthesis systems are often called text-to-speech (TTS) systems in reference to their ability to convert text into speech. However, there exist systems that can only render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. A text-to-speech system is composed of two parts: a front end and a back end. Broadly, the front end takes input in the form of text and outputs a symbolic linguistic representation. The back end takes the symbolic linguistic representation as input and outputs the synthesized speech waveform. The naturalness of a speech synthesizer usually refers to how much the output sounds like the speech of a real person. (more...)
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May 3[edit]
Prostitution is the sale of sexual services for money or other kind of return, generally indiscriminately with many persons. A person selling sexual favors is a prostitute, a type of sex worker. Most prostitutes are women offering their services to men. Male customers of prostitutes are known as johns in the United States or punters in the United Kingdom. (more...)
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April 3[edit]
Joshua Abraham Norton was a famous, impoverished and highly eccentric citizen of San Francisco, California in the mid-to-late 19th century. Among his many celebrated and curious activities, he most famously anointed himself as "Emperor of the United States" in 1859, becoming Emperor Norton I. Other notable activities include his ordering the dissolution of the United States Congress and his numerous (and prophetic) decrees that a bridge be built across San Francisco Bay. The King in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is reportedly modeled after him. (more...)
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March 3[edit]
Poker is the most popular of a class of games called vying games. In order to play, one must learn the basic rules and procedures of the game (see Poker game play), the values of the various combinations of cards (see Poker hand), and the rules about betting limits (see Poker betting structure). (more...)
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