The Cricket World Cup is the premier international championship of men's One-day International cricket. The event is organised by the sport's governing body, the International Cricket Council, with preliminary qualification rounds leading up to a finals tournament which is held every four years. The tournament is one of the world's largest and most viewed sporting events. The first Cricket World Cup contest was organised in England in 1975. The finals of the Cricket World Cup are contested by all ten Test-playing and ODI-playing nations, together with other national teams that qualify through the ICC Trophy competition. Australia has been the most successful of the five teams to have won the tournament, taking three titles. The West Indies have won twice, while India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have each won once.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_World_Cup

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1781: William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, thinking it was a comet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus)

1881: Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated in a Nihilist plot by Ignacy Hryniewiecki. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_II_of_Russia)

1921: Mongolia, under the Black Baron, proclaimed its independence from China. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Ungern_von_Sternberg)

1954: Viet Minh forces under Vo Nguyen Giap unleashed a massive artillery barrage on the French military to begin the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the final battle in the First Indochina War. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dien_Bien_Phu)

1996: Dunblane massacre: A spree killer in Dunblane, Scotland shot 16 children and a teacher at a primary school to their death and then committed suicide. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane... something sacred shows itself to us ... something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world. -- Mircea Eliade (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mircea_Eliade)