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Ryoya Kurihara

In baseball, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks defeat the Yomiuri Giants to win their fourth-straight Japan Series (MVP Ryoya Kurihara pictured).
Ingrida ?imonyt? takes office as Prime Minister of Lithuania.
Argentine footballer Diego Maradona dies at the age of 60.
Douglas Stuart's debut novel Shuggie Bain wins the Booker Prize.

Today in History

December 3

1800 – War of the Second Coalition: French forces defeated Austrian and Bavarian troops at Hohenlinden, eventually resulting in the Austrians signing the Treaty of Lunéville.
1904 – Himalia, Jupiter's largest irregular moon, was discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine at the Lick Observatory in California.
1927 – Putting Pants on Philip, the first official film featuring the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, was released.
1967 – Cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard (pictured) performed the first successful human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.
1982 – The United States Environmental Protection Agency tested soil from Times Beach, Missouri, which revealed high concentrations of dioxin and led to the abandonment of the town.

Octavia Hill (b. 1838)
Sheng Shicai (b. 1895)
Julianne Moore (b. 1960)

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Did You Know?

Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg

... that actress Norma Shearer posed for a glamor photoshoot to convince her producer-husband Irving Thalberg (both pictured) that her sexual allure would translate to film for the lead role in The Divorcee?
... that the goldenrod crab spider can change colors between white and yellow depending on the color of the flowers on which it lives?
... that Hermann Wiedemann, who sang the role of Beckmesser in Toscanini's recording of Die Meistersinger, appeared as Faninal in Der Rosenkavalier at the Vienna State Opera 196 times?
... that the lehenga was the traditional dress of women belonging to the Bettiah Christian ethnoreligious community of India?
... that James M. Canty became the first Superintendent of Mechanical Industries at West Virginia State University following a recommendation from Booker T. Washington?
... that at least 90 percent of intermarried spouses in Nazi Germany and Austria refused to divorce Jewish partners despite intimidation by the Gestapo?
... that Japan National Route 281 served as an evacuation route for the city of Kuji following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami?
... that music critic Greg Kot described "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang" as "despicable misogyny", but listed it among his guilty pleasures because the "rawwwk doesn't get much rawer"?

Today's Featured Article

The Princesse de Broglie is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Completed between 1851 and 1853, it shows Pauline de Broglie, who adopted the courtesy title princesse, and married Albert de Broglie, the 28th prime minister of France. She was aged 28 at the time of its completion. Although highly intelligent and widely known for her beauty, Pauline suffered from profound shyness, and the painting captures her melancholia. She contracted tuberculosis and died in 1860 aged 35. The painting is considered one of the artist's finest later-period female portraits, along with those of Comtesse d'Haussonville, of Baronne de Rothschild and of Madame Moitessier. As with many of Ingres's female portraits, details of costume and setting are rendered with a chilly precision while her body seems to lack a solid bone structure. The portrait is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Full article...)

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Today's Featured Picture

The mantled guereza (Colobus guereza) is a species of Old World monkey native to much of western central and eastern Africa. Although its colouring is somewhat variable across its range, it has a distinctive pelage which is mostly black, with a white facial disc and long white fringes of silky hair along the sides of its body. The tail is long and ends in a white tuft of variable length. It is a diurnal, mostly arboreal monkey, with groups moving through the canopy feeding mainly on leaves, with some fruits and other food items. This male of the subspecies C. g. guereza, also known as the Omo River guereza or the Abyssinian black-and-white colobus, was photographed in Amora Gedel Park in Awasa, Ethiopia.

Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp