Wikipedia:Main Page history/2016 August 23

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From today's featured article

George Frideric Handel

Of the four operas written by the youthful composer George Frideric Handel (pictured) between 1703 and 1706 when he lived and worked in Hamburg, only the first, Almira, has survived complete. The music for the others is lost apart from a few orchestral fragments. Handel learned the rudiments of opera composition while employed as a violinist at the Oper am Gänsemarkt, Hamburg's famous opera house, and was able to get Almira and a second opera, Nero, performed there during the temporary absence of the theatre's director, Reinhard Keiser. Almira was successful, Nero less so. Handel's last two Hamburg operas, Florindo and Daphne, were not produced at the Gänsemarkt before Handel left Hamburg. No music that can be definitively traced to Nero has been identified, although scholars have speculated that some of it may have been used in later works, particularly Agrippina, which has a similar plot and characters. Fragments of music from Florindo and Daphne have been preserved, although without the vocal parts, and some of these elements have been incorporated into an orchestral suite first recorded in 2012. (Full article...)

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In the news

Summer Olympics closing ceremony

The Summer Olympics conclude (ceremony pictured) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
At least 54 people are killed when a wedding is attacked by a suicide bomber in Gaziantep, southern Turkey.
The Airlander 10 hybrid airship – the largest aircraft flying today – completes its maiden civilian voyage.
A wildfire in the U.S. state of California displaces more than 82,000 residents, burns more than 30,000 acres (120 sq. km) and threatens at least 34,500 structures.
The China National Space Administration successfully launches Quantum Experiments at Space Scale, the first spacecraft capable of quantum key distribution.

On this day...

August 23: Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism/Black Ribbon Day in Canada, the European Union and the United States; Day of the National Flag in Ukraine

Cesar Chavez

1514 – Ottoman forces defeated the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, gaining control of eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq.
1896 – Andrés Bonifacio and his Katipunan comrades in modern-day Quezon City rose up in revolt against Spanish rule, marking the beginning of the Philippine Revolution.
1929 – Palestine riots: Arabs began attacking Jews in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, killing over sixty people in two days.
1970 – The United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez (pictured), began the Salad Bowl strike, the largest farmworker strike in U.S. history.
2006 – Natascha Kampusch, who had been abducted at the age of 10 in Vienna, escaped from her captor Wolfgang Přiklopil after eight years in captivity.

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Today's featured picture

The interior of Coventry Cathedral, an Anglican church located in Coventry, West Midlands, England. This Modernist structure was designed by Basil Spence and built between 1956 and 1962 to replace a 14th-century Gothic church which had been destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. This cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of Coventry and the Diocese of Coventry.

Photograph: David Iliff

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