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Today's featured picture

An albino Bennett's Wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus rufogriseus), one of a number of albino individuals on Bruny Island, off the coast of Tasmania, Australia. Albinism is characterized by a partial or total absence of melanin pigment in the eyes, skin and hair, resulting from inheritance of recessive alleles. The condition is known to affect mammals (including humans), fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians. Albinism is sometimes confused with leucism, in which all integumental pigment is at least partially absent due to chromatophore defects.

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Today's featured article

The Lucy poems are a series of five poems composed by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth between 1798 and 1801. All but one were first published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, a collaboration between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that was both Wordsworth’s first major publication and a milestone in the early English Romantic movement. In the series, Wordsworth sought to write unaffected English verse infused with abstract ideals of beauty, nature, love, longing and death. Although they individually deal with a variety of themes, as a series they focus on the poet's longing for the company of his friend Coleridge, who had stayed in England, and on his increasing impatience with his sister Dorothy, who had travelled with him abroad. Wordsworth channeled his frustrations into an examination of unrequited love for the idealised character of Lucy, an English girl who has died young. The idea of her death weighs heavily on the poet throughout the series, imbuing it with a melancholic, elegiac tone. Whether Lucy was based on a real woman or was a figment of the poet's imagination has long been a matter of debate among scholars. The "Lucy poems" consist of "Strange fits of passion have I known", "She dwelt among the untrodden ways", "I travelled among unknown men", "Three years she grew in sun and shower", and "A slumber did my spirit seal". (more...)

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In the news

Traian Băsescu (pictured) is re-elected President of Romania.
At least 113 people are killed and 160 others injured following a fire at a nightclub in Perm, Russia.
Hifikepunye Pohamba is re-elected President of Namibia and the SWAPO Party wins a majority of seats in the National Assembly.
A suicide attack kills at least 37 people and injures more than 80 others during Friday prayers at a mosque in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is re-elected President of Equatorial Guinea, amid allegations of electoral fraud.
A suicide bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia, kills four ministers of the Transitional Federal Government and twenty others.
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Did you know...

From Wikipedia's newest articles:

... that Herne Bay Museum and Gallery contains the prototype Highball bouncing bomb (pictured), precursor of the Upkeep bouncing bomb used in the 1943 Dambuster raids?
... that William Edward White may have been the first African-American to play Major League Baseball when he appeared in one game for the 1879 Providence Grays?
... that playwright Marisa Wegrzyn dealt with poor reviews by "being sulky and brooding and riding the subway a lot"?
... that the Swiss Alpine Museum has the world's largest collection of raised-relief maps?
... that the Koshare Indian Dancers are a Boy Scouts of America Scout troop that travels the United States promoting the appreciation of American Indian culture through Indian dances?
... that in the capture of Ormuz (1507), Afonso de Albuquerque subdued Hormuz Island and established a fort?
... that a new Chard Junction signal box was built in 1982 despite the station and junction being closed in the 1960s?
... that in 2004 Kenyan runner Florence Barsosio won the Florence Marathon in Florence, Italy?

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On this day...

December 8: Constitution Day in Romania (1991); Feast of the Immaculate Conception in Roman Catholicism

1609 – Milan's Biblioteca Ambrosiana opened its reading room to the public, becoming the second public library in Europe.
1854 – In his Apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogmatic definition of Immaculate Conception, which holds that the Virgin Mary was born free of original sin.
1941 – The Holocaust: The Chelmno extermination camp in occupied Poland, the first such Nazi camp to kill the Jews of the Ghetto Litzmannstadt and the Warthegau by poison gas, began operating.
1980 – Former Beatle John Lennon (pictured) was fatally shot in the entrance hallway of the Dakota apartments in New York City.
1991 – Leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed the Belavezha Accords, agreeing to dissolve the Soviet Union and establish the Commonwealth of Independent States.
2004 – Twelve South American countries signed the Cusco Declaration, announcing the foundation of what is now the Union of South American Nations, an intergovernmental union modelled after the European Union.

More anniversaries: December 7 – December 8 – December 9

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