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George Floyd Jr. (born 1960) is an American former professional football player who was a defensive back for two seasons with the New York Jets in the National Football League. Floyd played college football for the Eastern Kentucky University Colonels, where he won the 1979 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I-AA football championship and set several school records, including for the most career interceptions (22), and the most career interception return yards (328). Floyd appeared in ten games during the 1982 New York Jets season, including three playoff games. He missed the entire 1983 season and appeared in eight games during the 1984 season before retiring after his third knee injury. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1999. After the murder of George Floyd, an unrelated black American man, in June 2020, his photograph was erroneously included in a montage at the funeral. As of 2023, Floyd is a defensive backs coach for Conner High School in Kentucky. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Rock-cut niches of Teniky in southern Madagascar

... that an enigmatic ancient site deep in Madagascar (pictured) may have been built by Zoroastrians?
... that Jacques Lewis, a 105-year-old French veteran of D-Day, insisted that he participate in a ceremony commemorating the invasion's 80th anniversary?
... that a memorial in Suffolk, England, marks the deaths of six members of a scout troop in a 1914 boating accident and that of the sole survivor two years later in the Battle of the Somme?
... that, according to his family, Ye Yanlan was compelled to leave government service after speaking Cantonese in front of the emperor of China?
... that the suppression of the Diaspora Revolt of 115–117 CE led to the near-total annihilation and displacement of Jewish communities in Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and much of Egypt?
... that 50 Lan occupied the number-one spot in Taiwan's bubble tea market for most of 2023?
... that the world's oldest timepiece with an anchor escapement is in the collection of the Irish Museum of Time?
... that editors often line up in rival camps during contentious disputes on Wikipedia and the winning side typically cites encyclopedic policies to favor their viewpoint?
... that although Hugh O'Neill publicly assisted the English Crown in thwarting Irish rebels during the Nine Years' War, he was secretly the leader of the Irish confederacy?

In the news

Donald Trump

Donald Trump (pictured) wins the United States presidential election.
Maia Sandu is re-elected President of Moldova.
In baseball, the Yokohama DeNA BayStars defeat the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks to win the Japan Series.
A canopy collapse at Serbia's Novi Sad railway station kills fourteen people.
The ruins of a Maya city, dubbed Valeriana, are discovered in Campeche, Mexico.

On this day

November 9

People walking through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin

1888 – Mary Jane Kelly, widely believed to be the fifth and final victim of the notorious unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper, was murdered in London.
1914 – World War I: Off the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, the Australian light cruiser Sydney sank Emden, the last active German warship in the Indian Ocean, at the Battle of Cocos.
1939 – World War II: A covert Sicherheitsdienst operation captured two British agents of the Secret Intelligence Service near Venlo in the Netherlands.
1989 – East German official Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced the immediate opening of the inner German border, resulting in the fall of the Berlin Wall that night (border crossing pictured).
2019 – Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan inaugurated the Kartarpur Corridor, a visa-free border crossing connecting the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib to the India–Pakistan border.

Domenico Lorenzo Ponziani (b. 1719)
Lenore Romney (b. 1908)
Harry Trott (d. 1917)
Nadezhda Alliluyeva (d. 1932)

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Today's featured picture

Pyromorphite is a mineral species composed of lead chlorophosphate: Pb₅(PO₄)₃Cl, sometimes occurring in sufficient abundance to be mined as an ore of lead. First distinguished chemically by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1784, it was named pyromorphite by Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann in 1813. It is usually green, yellow or brown in color, with a resinous lustre. Crystals are common and have the form of a hexagonal prism terminated by the basal planes, sometimes combined with narrow faces of a hexagonal pyramid. Other forms include crystals with a barrel-like curvature and globular or reniform masses. Pyromorphite is part of the apatite group of minerals and bears a close resemblance physically and chemically with two other minerals, mimetite and vanadinite. This focus-stacked photograph, merged from 26 separate images, shows a sample of pyromorphite extracted from the Resuperferolitica Mine in Santa Eufemia, in the Spanish province of Córdoba. The sample measures 3.5 cm × 3.0 cm × 1.5 cm (1.38 in × 1.18 in × 0.59 in).

Photograph credit: David Ifar

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