Wikipedia:Main Page history/2014 December 7

Ford Island is an islet in the center of Pearl Harbor, Oahu, in the US state of Hawaii. Its original area of 334 acres (135 ha) was increased during the 1930s to 441 acres (178 ha) with fill dirt after the US Navy dredged Pearl Harbor to accommodate battleships. The island was the site of an ancient Hawaiian fertility ritual, which was stopped by Christian missionaries during the 1830s. It was given by Kamehameha I to Spanish deserter Francisco de Paula Marín, and was later owned by Seth Porter Ford. In 1916 the US Army bought part of it for use by an aviation division, and by 1939 it was taken over by the US Navy, for whom it was a strategic center of operations in the Pacific Ocean. Ford Island was at the center of the attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. By the late 1990s hundreds of millions of dollars had been invested in real-estate development and infrastructure. Ford Island is home to the USS Arizona memorial, the USS Missouri museum, the Pacific Warfighting Center, and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. The island has been featured in films such as Tora! Tora! Tora! and Pearl Harbor. (Full article...)

Recently featured: 2008 ACC Championship Game – "Irreplaceable" – Greed (film)

From Wikipedia's new and recently improved content:

• ... that the Allenville Mill Storehouse (pictured) was erroneously considered to be a mill, not a storehouse, for almost one hundred years?
• ... that fashion designer Alain Manoukian sent four airplane loads of relief supplies to earthquake victims in Armenia in 1988?
• ... that an SS Republic passenger described the ship as a "floating palace"?
• ... that while Jesse More Greenman was curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden he increased its plant collection from 600,000 to about 1,500,000 specimens?
• ... that the Anand Patwardhan documentary Jai Bhim Comrade, released in 2011, took 14 years to produce?
• ... that the Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University, designed by Antoine Predock, is named for its fourteenth president, J. Russell Nelson?
• ... that Hibutsu ("hidden buddhas") are found only in Japan?

• Former Chinese domestic security chief Zhou Yongkang (pictured) is arrested and expelled from the Communist Party of China.
• NASA successfully conducts the maiden flight of its Orion spacecraft.
• Dozens of people are killed or injured in clashes between security forces and insurgents in Grozny, Chechen Republic, Russia.
• In Canadian football, the Calgary Stampeders defeat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to win the Grey Cup.
• Australian Test cricketer Phillip Hughes dies after being struck in the neck by a ball bowled to him.
• A previously unknown copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, dated to 1623, is discovered at a library in Saint-Omer, near Calais, France.

Ongoing:

Ebola outbreak –

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

Recent deaths:

Queen Fabiola of Belgium – Jean Béliveau – Go Seigen

December 7: Day of the Little Candles in Colombia; Armed Forces Flag Day in India; Pearl Harbor Day in the United States

• 43 BC – Cicero, widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists, was killed after having been proscribed as an enemy of the state.
• 1815 – Michel Ney, Marshal of France, was executed by a firing squad near Paris' Jardin du Luxembourg for supporting Napoleon.
• 1972 – The crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft took the photograph "The Blue Marble" (pictured), the first clear image of an illuminated face of Earth, on their way to the Moon.
• 1999 – The Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit against the peer-to-peer file sharing network Napster, alleging the service facilitated widespread copyright infringement.
• 2007 – A crane barge that had broken free from a tugboat crashed into an oil tanker near Daesan, South Korea, causing the country's worst-ever oil spill.

More anniversaries: December 6 – December 7 – December 8

{| style="margin:0 3px 3px; width:100%; text-align:left; background-color:transparent; border-collapse: collapse; "

|style="padding:0 0.9em 0 0;"| File:East Brother Light on a stormy evening in March.jpg

|style="padding:0 6px 0 0"|

The East Brother Island Lighthouse is a lighthouse located on the East Brother Island, near the tip of Point San Pablo in Richmond, California. This lighthouse was designed by Paul J. Pelz and completed in 1874, then operated manually until 1969. After the light was automated, the former keeper's house was converted into a bed and breakfast; the island is now a tourist attraction.

Photograph: Frank Schulenburg