Wikipedia:Main Page history/2015 February 11

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Final Fantasy VIII is a role-playing video game released for the PlayStation in 1999 and Windows in 2000. It was developed and published by Square as the Final Fantasy series' eighth title, the first title to consistently use realistically proportioned characters. The game follows a group who have joined the "SeeD" mercenaries and are trying to stop Ultimecia, a sorceress from the future, from casting a spell that compresses time. Playable characters include the duty-bound loner Squall, the outspoken and passionate young woman Rinoa, the patient instructor Quistis, the martial artist Zell, the cheerful airship pilot Selphie, and Irvine, a marksman looking for love. The music was scored by Nobuo Uematsu, a series regular, and in a first for the series, the theme music is a vocal piece, "Eyes on Me", performed by Faye Wong. The game was a commercial success and positively received by critics. Thirteen weeks after its release, it had earned more than US$50 million in sales, making it the fastest-selling Final Fantasy title before Final Fantasy XIII, a multi-platform release. The game had shipped 8.15 million copies worldwide by the second quarter of 2003. (Full article...)

Part of the Final Fantasy VIII series, one of Wikipedia's featured topics.

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From Wikipedia's new and recently improved content:

• ... that Shanghai's Beth Aharon Synagogue (pictured) provided refuge to 400 rabbis and students of the Mir yeshiva, the only Eastern European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact?
• ... that the 2012 London Games was Sierra Leone's tenth appearance at the Summer Olympics?
• ... that according to the Atharvashikha Upanishad, Om represents the Hindu Trinity, the Vedic scriptures, Vedic poetic meters and holy fires?
• ... that a brief conversation with Lawrence of Arabia prompted R. V. C. Bodley to live with a nomadic tribe in the Sahara desert for seven years?
• ... that the main cast and supporting actors of the film Chotoder Chobi were previously non-actors?
• ... that the future Béla III of Hungary was for a time the chosen successor of Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos, who created the title despotes for him?
• ... that four months after Major General Stephen Twitty enacted measures to correct inadequate security at Fort Bliss, the response to the 2015 Fort Bliss shooting was described as "a model of how to respond"?
• ... that the hairstyle, sideburns, life and death of Austrian poacher Pius Walder inspired the Tatort police procedural film Elvis lebt! (Elvis lives!)?

• Sam Smith wins Record of the Year and Beck (pictured) wins Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards.
• In association football, the Africa Cup of Nations concludes with Ivory Coast defeating Ghana in the final.
• Boyhood wins three awards, including Best Film, at the British Academy Film Awards.
• Paul Gauguin's When Will You Marry? sells for $300m (£197m), the highest known price ever paid for any painting.
• Ross Ulbricht is found guilty of seven offenses related to the creation and running of the Silk Road website.
• At least 40 people are killed when TransAsia Airways Flight 235 crashes shortly after takeoff from Taipei Songshan Airport, Taiwan.

Ongoing:

Boko Haram – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – War in Ukraine

Recent deaths:

Billy Casper – Dean Smith – Charlie Sifford

February 11: National Foundation Day in Japan

• 1826 – Swaminarayan wrote the Shikshapatri, a book of 212 verses that serves as the basis of Swaminarayan Hinduism.
• 1858 – Fourteen-year-old peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous (pictured) reported the first of eighteen Marian apparitions in Lourdes, France, resulting in the town becoming a major site for pilgrimages by Catholics.
• 1919 – Friedrich Ebert was elected the first President of the German Weimar Republic by the Weimar National Assembly.
• 1990 – Anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, a political prisoner for 27 years, was released from Victor Verster Prison near Paarl, South Africa.
• 2008 – Rebel East Timorese soldiers invaded the homes of President José Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão, seriously wounding the former.

More anniversaries: February 10 – February 11 – February 12

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New Moon is a 1940 musical film directed by Robert Z. Leonard and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Based on the operetta The New Moon, this film stars Nelson Eddy as a French nobleman who heads to New Orleans and serves as a bondsman, later leading a revolt against his ship's captain.

Poster: Tooker Litho Co.; restoration: Chris Woodrich