Main Page

Operation Flavius was a military operation in which three members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) were killed by the British Special Air Service (SAS) in Gibraltar on 6 March 1988. The three were believed to be mounting a car bomb attack on British military personnel, but they proved to be unarmed and no bomb was discovered. This event started a violent spree in which mourners were killed at the funeral of the IRA members, then two British soldiers were killed after they accidentally drove into a funeral procession for one of the mourners. A documentary, "Death on the Rock", was televised on 24 April 1988 and presented the possibility that the three IRA members had been unlawfully killed. An inquest ruled that the SAS had acted lawfully, but the European Court of Human Rights held that the planning and control of the operation was so flawed as to make the use of lethal force almost inevitable, a breach of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. (Full article...)

The year 1951 saw extensive exploration of space by the United States and the Soviet Union using suborbital rockets. The Soviet Union launched their first series of biomedical tests to the Kármán line, the 100-kilometre (62 mi) boundary of space. Several American agencies launched more than a dozen scientific sounding rocket flights between them. In August 1951, the United States Navy launched Viking 7 (pictured), the seventh in the Viking series of sounding rockets since 1949, this time reaching a record-breaking altitude of 136 miles (219 km). Development also continued by both superpowers on rockets more powerful than the World War II–era German V-2 that had inaugurated the age of spaceflight. (Full list...)

Tirumala limniace, also known as the blue tiger, is a butterfly found in South Asia, and Southeast Asia, which belongs to the brush-footed butterfly family, Nymphalidae. It is a large butterfly with a wingspan of 90 to 100 millimeters, with the males being smaller than the females. The upper side of the wing is dark brown to black and patterned with bluish-white, semi-transparent spots and lines. This male blue tiger, of the subspecies T. l. exoticus, was photographed in Kumarakom, in the Indian state of Kerala.

Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects:

This Wikipedia is written in English. Many other Wikipedias are available; some of the largest are listed below.

Petrol station where two of the IRA members were shot, pictured in 2014

The Raising of Lazarus

Bola Tinubu

Muhammad Ali

Viking 7