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Today's featured article

Royal Opera House, where Flight Pattern premiered

Flight Pattern is a contemporary ballet choreographed by Crystal Pite, set to the first movement of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3. It premiered at the Royal Opera House (pictured) in London on 16 March 2017, making Pite the first woman to choreograph for the Royal Ballet's main stage in 18 years. The ballet won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production in 2018. Flight Pattern examines the plight of refugees, drawing inspiration from 20th and 21st-century events, particularly the refugee crisis caused by the Syrian civil war. The ballet starts with 36 dancers performing on stage and transitions to a series of duets and solos originated by the dancers Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally. The piece was mostly positively reviewed by critics, with many praising the performance of the two soloists and the choreography of the ensemble. In 2022, Pite expanded the ballet into Light of Passage, with Flight Pattern becoming the first part of the ballet. (Full article...)

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Selected anniversaries

March 16: Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires

Cap badge of the Royal Welch Fusiliers

934 – Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period: Chinese general Meng Zhixiang proclaimed himself emperor and established Later Shu as a new state independent of Later Tang.
1689 – The Royal Welch Fusiliers (cap badge pictured), one of the oldest line-infantry regiments of the British Army, was founded.
1819 – The Bank for Savings in the City of New-York, the first savings bank in New York City, was incorporated.
1984 – William Buckley, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Beirut, Lebanon, was kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists.
1988 – Michael Stone, an Ulster loyalist, attacked the funeral of three Provisional IRA members, killing three attendees and injuring at least sixty others.

Alaric Alexander Watts (b. 1797)
Don Blasingame (b. 1932)
Douglas Ahlstedt (b. 1945)
Virginia Randolph (d. 1958)

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In the news

Mark Carney

Mark Carney (pictured) succeeds Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada after winning the Liberal Party leadership election.
Martin Pfister is elected to the Swiss Federal Council.
In Pakistan, a train hijacking by the Balochistan Liberation Army leaves at least 71 people dead.
Former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte is arrested on the basis of an International Criminal Court warrant charging him with crimes against humanity.

Did you know...

Bersey Electric Cab

... that the crash of a Bersey Electric Cab (pictured) in London in 1897 led to the first-ever charge of drunk driving?
... that Domingo Chalá worked as a gravedigger for much of his life before releasing his debut album?
... that the Louafi Bouguera Olympic Bridge was named after the first Franco-Algerian athlete to win an Olympic gold medal?
... that brass casting, which later became a hallmark of Benin art, was first introduced to Igodomigodo during Uwa's reign?
... that Benevacantism is the belief that Francis is not truly the pope, because his predecessor did not validly resign?
... that Wes Carlson used a different last name than his father because of a schoolteacher's mistake?
... that Sedum palmeri is common on windowsills in the Mediterranean because it is easy to share with other people?
... that the runway show for Scanners by Alexander McQueen concluded with a mostly nude model struggling through an artificial snowstorm in a wind tunnel?
... that the lord of Bitchū Matsuyama Castle is a cat?

Today's featured picture

Picture of the day

Side A
Side B

The Phaistos Disc is a disc of fired clay from the Greek island of Crete, dating possibly from the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age (second millennium BC). It bears a text on both sides in an unknown script and language, and its purpose and original place of manufacture remain disputed. Discovered in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier, the disc is made of fine-grained clay, intentionally and properly fired, and is approximately cylindrical with a diameter of around 16 centimetres (6.3 inches) and a thickness of almost 2 centimetres (0.79 inches), with rounded edges. The disc is an early example of movable-type printing, with the embossed signs that comprise its inscription resulting from separate stamps that were pressed into the soft clay before firing. It has captured the imagination of amateur and professional palaeographers, and many attempts have been made to decipher the text, which comprises 241 occurrences of 45 distinct signs. The Phaistos Disc is now on display at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete.Artefact credit: unknown; photographed by C messier; edited by Bammesk

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