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Today's featured article

Look 44 from the collection

What a Merry-Go-Round is the eighteenth collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, made for the Autumn/Winter 2001 season of his eponymous fashion house. The collection drew on imagery of clowns and carnivals, inspired by McQueen's feelings about childhood and his experiences in the fashion industry. The designs were influenced by military chic, cinema such as Nosferatu (1922) and Cabaret (1972), 1920s flapper fashion and the French Revolution. The palette comprised dark colours complemented with neutrals and muted greens. The collection's runway show was staged in February 2001 in a dark room with a carousel at the centre, with 62 looks (one pictured) presented. It was McQueen's final show in London. Critical response to the collection was generally positive, and it has attracted some academic analysis for the theme and messaging. It served as a critique of the fashion industry, which McQueen sometimes described as toxic and suffocating. (Full article...)

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Selected anniversaries

April 7: National Beer Day in the United States

Artist's conception of 2001 Mars Odyssey

1655 – After a conclave lasting eighty days, the College of Cardinals elected Fabio Chigi as Pope Alexander VII.
1945 – World War II: U.S. forces sank the Japanese battleship Yamato during Operation Kikusui I in the East China Sea.
1994 – Rwandan Civil War: The Rwandan genocide began a few hours after the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana, with hundreds of thousands killed in the following 100 days.
1995 – First Chechen War: Russian paramilitary troops began a massacre of hundreds of civilians in Samashki, Chechnya.
2001 – NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey (artist's conception pictured), the longest-surviving continually active spacecraft in orbit around a planet other than Earth, launched from Cape Canaveral.

Berengar I of Italy (d. 924)
Martha Ray (d. 1779)
Joseph Lyons (d. 1939)
Dave Arneson (d. 2009)

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In the news

Yoon Suk Yeol

South Korea's Constitutional Court removes Yoon Suk Yeol (pictured) as the president of South Korea, following his earlier declaration of martial law.
US president Donald Trump announces trade tariffs on most countries.
Marine Le Pen, the runner-up in the 2017 and 2022 French presidential elections, is convicted of embezzlement and banned from standing in elections for five years.
A magnitude-7.7 earthquake leaves more than 4,900 people dead in Myanmar and Thailand.

Did you know...

Sekijin (Important Cultural Property)

... that the stone men, horses, &c. (example pictured) of Japan's kofun may have been inspired by the spirit paths of China?
... that people traveled from as far away as Australia and the Netherlands to stay at a house in Ohio?
... that urbanists have used hive cities from the science-fiction universe of Warhammer 40,000 as an example of how vertical cities could become dystopian?
... that the Philippine embassy in Pretoria responded to a South African newspaper's denunciation of horse fighting in the Philippines by saying that the practice was already illegal?
... that artisan baker Jules Rabin was inspired to bake bread after a 1971 visit to a commune in France where "they didn't speak of bread as holy, but they treated it as a holy object"?
... that Tout est lumière, a setting by Maurice Ravel for soprano, choir and orchestra of a poem by Victor Hugo, earned Ravel a place in the second round of the 1901 Prix de Rome?
... that Tommy Cronin played both basketball and football in high school, in college, and professionally?
... that the grave of a Dutch officer and his dog who were killed in the Battle of Nanggulon is a designated cultural object in Indonesia?
... that Cowboy Wheeler was a Reimer Wiener?

Today's featured picture

Picture of the day

The buff-tailed coronet (Boissonneaua flavescens) is a species of hummingbird in the "brilliants", members of the tribe Heliantheini in the subfamily Lesbiinae. Found in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, the buff-tailed coronet is 11 to 12 centimetres (4.3 to 4.7 inches) long and weighs 7.3 to 8.8 grams (0.26 to 0.31 ounces). Both sexes have a short, straight, black bill and a small white spot behind the eye. Males of the nominate subspecies, B. f. flavescens, are mostly shining green, with a buff belly spotted with green. The buff-tailed coronet is highly territorial, though it may share feeding at a flowering tree with other hummingbirds. It typically forages in the mid-story but also feeds in the canopy. Breeding behavior has been recorded between November and March, and it has a song consisting of "a continuous series of single high-pitched 'tsit' notes". This buff-tailed coronet of the subspecies B. f. flavescens was photographed in the Reserva Ecologica Rio Blanco, near Manizales, Colombia.Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp

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