Wikipedia:Main Page history/2011 April 16

... that three million trees, including pine, oak, sweet chestnut, and acacia (pictured), are being planted every year as part of reforestation efforts in Cape Verde?

... that Edward Litt Laman Blanchard, who later became a prominent writer for the Drury Lane pantomime, began writing for The Town when he was 17 years of age?

... that Epitaphium, composed for string trio by Graham Waterhouse, is performed today in Wigmore Hall in a memorial concert for his father, the bassoonist William Waterhouse?

... that the Natural Bridges National Monument Solar Power System in Utah was the world's largest solar cell power plant when it opened in 1980?

... that singer Jenny Silver debuted with the Swedish dance band Candela, when it was signed to Bert Karlsson's label Mariann Grammofon?

... that in the Indian state of Bihar, pressure from communist Party Unity guerrillas forced the upper-caste paramilitary Bhoomi Sena to surrender to the peasant organisation MKSS?

... that the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript, compiled around 1430-1440 by an amateur scribe and country gentleman, contains the only extant copies of Sir Degrevant and the Alliterative Morte Arthure?

... that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s new opera about student activism, Kommilitonen!, was intended to be performed by students?

BRICS states meet in Sanya, China, for an annual summit that features South Africa for the first time.

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (pictured) and his sons are detained, two months after having resigned amid widespread protests.

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency raises the severity of the Fukushima I nuclear accidents to level 7, the highest on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

Former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo is arrested after a five-month standoff with Alassane Ouattara.

At least 12 people are killed and over 200 injured in a bomb attack on the Metro in Minsk, Belarus.

France implements a controversial ban on full-length face covering.

1818 – The United States Senate ratified the Rush–Bagot Treaty, which laid the basis for a demilitarized boundary between the U.S. and British North America.

1919 – Polish–Soviet War: The Polish army launched the Vilna offensive to capture Vilnius in modern Lithuania.

1947 – American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch (pictured) first described the post–World War II tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States as a "cold war".

2001 – India and Bangladesh began a five-day conflict over their disputed border, which ended in a stalemate.

2007 – In one of the deadliest shooting incidents in United States history, a gunman killed 32 people and wounded over 20 more before committing suicide at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia.