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From today's featured article

Copper fals citing al-Muti' as overlord

Al-Muti' was the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad from 946 to 974, ruling under the tutelage of the Buyid emirs. Al-Muti's reign represented the nadir of the Abbasid Caliphate's power and authority. In previous decades, the secular authority of the caliphs had shrunk to Iraq, and even there had been curtailed by powerful warlords; with the Buyid conquest of Baghdad, it was now abolished entirely. Al-Muti' was raised to the throne by the Buyids and was effectively reduced to a rubber-stamp figurehead, albeit with some vestiges of authority over judicial and religious appointments in Iraq. The very fact of his subordination and powerlessness helped restore some stability to the caliphal institution: in stark contrast to his short-lived and violently deposed predecessors, al-Muti' enjoyed a long and relatively unchallenged tenure, and was able to hand over the throne to his son al-Ta'i'. Al-Muti's prestige as the nominal leader of the Muslim world sharply declined during his tenure. (Full article...)

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The Birth of the Milky Way

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... that political strategist Morris Katz stated that any Democrat "who's scared to congratulate" Zohran Mamdani "is very unlikely to be the nominee for president in 2028"?
... that the painting The Death of Khan Jahan Lodi features six severed heads, and another in the midst of decapitation?

In the news

Brigitte Bardot

A fire at a bar during New Year's Eve celebrations in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, kills at least 40 people.
French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot (pictured) dies at the age of 91.
Thirteen people are killed when a train derails in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Israel becomes the first country to officially recognise Somaliland as an independent state.
Nasry Asfura is elected president of Honduras, after one month of controversy surrounding the vote counting process.

On this day

January 1: Independence Day in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (1993); Public Domain Day; Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (Roman Rite Catholicism)

Lehms, c. 1715

1726 – J. S. Bach led the first performance of Herr Gott, dich loben wir, BWV 16, his church cantata for New Year's Day to a libretto by Georg Christian Lehms (pictured).
1776 – American Revolutionary War: The town of Norfolk, Virginia, was burned and destroyed by the combined actions of British and Whig forces.
1785 – The Times began publication in London as The Daily Universal Register.
1926 – Ireland's first broadcaster, 2RN, began broadcasting.
2011 – A suicide bombing took place outside a Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria, Egypt, following a New Year service, killing 23 people.

Wilhelm Canaris (b. 1887)
Maria Frisé (b. 1926)
Eiichiro Oda (b. 1975)
Shou Zi Chew (b. 1983)

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Today's featured picture

The World Clock, located in Alexanderplatz in Berlin, Germany, is a large world clock displaying the local time in 148 locations across the world. It consists of a 24-sided column, each side of which represents a time zone on Earth and is engraved with the names of various cities. A row of numbers, from 1 to 24, revolve around the outside of the clock during the day, indicating the local time in each time zone. Once per minute, an artistic sculptural rendering of the Solar System made of steel rings and spheres rotates above the clock. Including the sculpture, the World Clock is 10 metres (33 feet) high. It was erected in 1969 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, and was designed by Erich John, a lecturer at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. In July 2015, the German federal government declared the clock to be a historically and culturally significant monument. This long-exposure photograph shows the World Clock at night.

Photograph credit: Diego Delso

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