Main Page

Akhtar Hameed Khan (1914–1999) was a development activist and social scientist credited for pioneering microcredit and microfinance initiatives, farmers' cooperatives, and rural training programmes in the developing world. He promoted participatory rural development in Pakistan, Bangladesh and other developing countries, and widely advocated community participation in development. His particular contribution was the establishment of a comprehensive project for rural development, the Comilla Model (1959). It earned him the Magsaysay Award from the Philippines and an honorary Doctorate of Law from Michigan State University. In the 1980s he started a bottom up community development initiative of Orangi Pilot Project, based in the outskirts of Karachi, which became a model of participatory development initiatives. He also directed many programmes, from microcredit to self-finance and from housing provision to family planning, for rural communities and urban slums. It earned him international recognition and high honours in Pakistan. Khan was fluent in at least seven languages and dialects. Apart from many scholarly books and articles, he also published a collection of poems and travelogues in Urdu. (more...)

From Wikipedia's newest articles:

• ... that British activist Emmeline Pankhurst (pictured) once slapped a police officer so she would get arrested to raise awareness about the need for women's suffrage?
• ... that the website Techmeme, created by Gabe Rivera, searches for the most popular technology-related news on the Internet and orders them based on an algorithm that determines popularity?
• ... that a 1989 Samsung commercial began the late South Korean actress Choi Jin-sil's path to stardom?
• ... that the Canadian province of Nova Scotia has 11 universities, including the University of King's College, the oldest university in British North America?
• ... that at Henry Parkyns Hoppner's court martial, he received "no blame whatever" for his actions while commanding the HMS Fury, ice-damaged and left on Somerset Island in 1825?
• ... that according to Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson's poem "Hay and Hell and Booligal", the town of Booligal, New South Wales is regarded as being worse than Hell?
• ... that former American Idol winner Carrie Underwood holds the record for the biggest-selling American Idol album?
• ... that the Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV. in England and the Finall Recouerye of His Kingdomes from Henry VI. A.D. M.CCCC.LXXI is considered the most reliable source for those events?
  
  
  Archive – Start a new article – Nominate an article for DYK

• The British Government announces details of a financial rescue package aimed at restoring confidence and creating stability in the banking sector.
• Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien are announced as winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP).
• The meteoroid 2008 TC₃ hits Earth, becoming the first such object to be discovered prior to impact.
• Yoichiro Nambu (pictured), who discovered the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking in subatomic physics, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, who discovered the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature, are announced as winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who discovered the human immunodeficiency virus, and Harald zur Hausen, who discovered that human papilloma viruses can cause cervical cancer in women, are announced as winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
  Wikinews – Recent deaths – More current events...

October 9: Yom Kippur ends at sunset (Judaism, 2008); Independence Day in Uganda; Hangul Day in South Korea; Leif Erikson Day in the United States

• 1831 – Ioannis Kapodistrias, the Greek head of state, was assassinated in Nafplion.
• 1874 – The Universal Postal Union, then known as the General Postal Union, was established with the signing of the Treaty of Bern to unify disparate postal services and regulations so that international mail could be exchanged freely.
• 1888 – The Washington Monument (pictured) in Washington, D.C., at the time the world's tallest building, officially opened to the general public.
• 1942 – World War II: American forces defeated the Japanese at the Third Battle of the Matanikau in Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, avenging the Japanese victory at the Second Battle of the Matanikau a couple of weeks earlier.
• 1963 – A landslide displaced large amounts of water from the Vajont Dam in northern Italy, causing waves and floods that quickly swept away several villages and killed almost 2,000 people.