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Scene from the play's opening run

The Importance of Being Earnestis adrawing-room comedybyOscar Wilde.Premiered on 14 February 1895 in London, it depicts the affairs of two youngmen about townwho lead double lives to evade unwanted social obligations, both assuming the name Ernest to woo two young women. Other characters include the formidable Lady Bracknell, the fussygovernessMiss Prism and the benign and scholarlyCanonChasuble. The play, celebrated for its wit and repartee, parodies contemporary dramatic norms and comically satirises late-Victorianmanners. The triumphant opening night was followed within weeks by Wilde's downfall and imprisonment for homosexual acts and the closure of the production, and Wilde wrote no more comic or dramatic works. From the early 20th century onwards, the play has been revived frequently and adapted for radio, television, film, operas and musicals. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Charles J. M. Gwinn

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TheInternational Criminal Courtissues arrest warrants for Israeli prime ministerBenjamin Netanyahu,former Israeli defense ministerYoav Gallant(pictured),and Hamas leaderMohammed Deifin itsinvestigation of war crimes in Palestine.
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On this day

November 24:Feast dayof theVietnamese Martyrs(Catholicism)

Hibiscus Rising

1542–Anglo-Scottish Wars:English forces captured about 1,200 Scots at theBattle of Solway Moss.
1859– British naturalistCharles Darwin'sOn the Origin of Specieswas first published, and sold out its initial print run on the first day.
1976– A magnitude-7.3 earthquakestruck eastern Turkey,destroying 80 per cent of buildings in the region and causing at least 4,000 casualties.
2009– TheAvdhela Project,anAromaniandigital library and cultural initiative, was launched inBucharest,Romania.
2023–Hibiscus Rising(pictured),a sculpture commemorating the life ofDavid Oluwale,was unveiled in Leeds.

Zachary Taylor(b.1784)
Eileen Barton(b.1924)
Tarō Yamamoto(b.1974)
Goo Hara(d.2019)

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Today's featured picture

TheDouble Asteroid Redirection Test(DART) was aNASAspace mission aimed at testing a method ofplanetary defenseagainstnear-Earth objects.The target object,Dimorphos,is a 160-meter-long (525-foot)minor-planet moonof the asteroidDidymos.DART was launched on 24 November 2021 and successfully collided with Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 while about 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth. The collision shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 32 minutes and was mostly achieved by themomentum transferassociated with the recoil of the ejected debris, which was larger than the impact. This video is a timelapse of DART's final five and a half minutes before impacting Dimorphos, and was compiled from photographs captured by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), the spacecraft's 20-centimeter-aperture(7.9-inch) camera, and transmitted to Earth in real time. The replay is ten times faster than reality, except for the last six images, which are shown at the same rate at which the spacecraft returned them. Both Didymos and Dimorphos are visible at the start of the video, and the final frame shows a patch of Dimorphos's surface 16 meters (51 feet) across. DART's impact occurred during transmission of the final image, resulting in a partial frame.

Video credit:NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

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