Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 February 20

Evelyn Mase (1922–2004) was a South African nurse who was the first wife of the anti-apartheid activist and later president Nelson Mandela, to whom she was married from 1944 to 1958. Born in Engcobo, Transkei, Mase moved to Johannesburg to train as a nurse, and there met and married Mandela. Living together in Soweto, they raised four children; three of them—Thembekile, Makgatho, and Makaziwe—survived into adulthood. In the 1950s, her relationship with Mandela became strained; they separated in 1956 and divorced in 1958. Mase moved to Cofimvaba with the children and opened a grocery store. She spoke to reporters in 1990, when Mandela was released from prison after 27 years, and in 1994, when he was elected as South Africa's first Black president. In 1998 she married a businessman, Simon Rakeepile. Her 2004 funeral attracted international media attention and was attended by Mandela, his second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and his third wife, Graça Machel. (Full article...)

• ... that access to
  Martin's Beach
  (pictured) has been the subject of a contentious battle between a Silicon Valley billionaire and the State of California?
• ... that 50 books from a total of more than 150 authored by Pakistani historian
  Abul Kalam Azad
  ?
• ... that the owner of
  2001 Football League Second Division play-off Final
  as the greatest day in the club's history?
• ... that after finishing his term as Indonesia's minister of agriculture, Sjarifuddin Baharsjah was immediately succeeded by his wife?
• ... that Canada's
  National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls called for the abolition of birth alerts
  ?
• ... that philanthropist Sidney Hill began a new life in England as a gentleman farmer, adding stables to the estate, a dairy and Langford Bullock Palaces for his prized shorthorn cattle?
• ... that the whaleback barge 115 became the last Great Lakes shipwreck of the 1800s?
• ... that when women's champion Dotty Fothergill sued in 1970 for being denied the right to compete in men's tournaments, the Professional Bowlers Association countersued for "disastrous ridicule"?

• Porfirije (pictured) is enthroned as the 46th Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
• NASA's
  Ingenuity helicopter, successfully lands on Mars
  .
• A winter storm in North America leaves at least 49 people dead and several million others without clean water or power.
• Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala becomes the first woman and the first African to be appointed Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

February 20

• 1685 – The French colonization of Texas began with colonists led by Robert de La Salle landing near Matagorda Bay.
• 1846 – Polish insurgents in the Free City of Kraków led an uprising to incite a fight for national independence, which was put down by the Austrian Empire nine days later.
• 1943 – A fissure opened in a cornfield in the Mexican state of Michoacán and continued to erupt for nine years, forming the cinder cone Parícutin (pictured).
• 1988 – The Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast voted to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, triggering the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.
• 2009 – The Tamil Tigers attempted to crash two aircraft loaded with C-4 in suicide attacks on Colombo, Sri Lanka, but the planes were shot down before they reached their targets.