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Lemmy, lead singer of Motörhead

The new wave of British heavy metal began in the late 1970s and achieved international attention by the early 1980s. Encompassing diverse mainstream and underground styles, the music often infused 1970s heavy metal music with the intensity of punk rock to produce fast and aggressive songs. The do-it-yourself ethic of the new metal bands led to the spread of raw-sounding, self-produced recordings and a proliferation of independent record labels. Song lyrics were usually about escapist themes from mythology, fantasy, horror or the rock lifestyle. The movement involved mostly young, white, male musicians and fans of the heavy metal subculture, whose behavioural and visual codes were quickly adopted by metal fans worldwide after the spread of the music globally. The movement spawned perhaps a thousand bands, but only a few survived the rise of MTV and glam metal. Among them, Motörhead (singer pictured) and Saxon had considerable success, and Iron Maiden and Def Leppard became international stars. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Violet Wong

... that ten-year-old Violet Wong (pictured) received a gold watch after performing for General Chiang Kai-shek?
... that Alabama and Clemson played each other in the championship game of the second and third College Football Playoffs?
... that an irreverent photograph of Czechoslovak president Klement Gottwald brought a ten-year sentence for the photojournalist Jindřich Marco, who had to serve seven years in uranium mines?
... that despite having built a cathedral, Bishop Joseph Crétin said that his diocese did not have one?
... that Jerónimo Muñoz's mastery of Hebrew purportedly caused Jews to assert that Muñoz was himself a Jew?
... that an Oregon radio station stayed on the air through a major windstorm even though a tree fell into its studios?
... that Lee Kuan Yew stated that "there would have been no clean and green Singapore without Lee Ek Tieng"?
... that the 1827 novel A Voyage to the Moon contains the first use of anti-gravity for space travel in science fiction?
... that a wardrobe malfunction at the Eurovision Song Contest 1985 was staged because the host wanted the audience "to wake up a little"?

In the news

Grand Kartal Hotel in 2007

A fire at a ski resort hotel (pictured) in Kartalkaya, Turkey, leaves at least 78 people dead and 51 others injured.
A series of attacks by the National Liberation Army in the Catatumbo region of Colombia leaves more than 80 people dead.
A ceasefire agreement suspends the Israel–Hamas war, involving the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
Two Supreme Court judges are assassinated in a shooting at the Supreme Court of Iran in Tehran.

On this day

January 25: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (Eastern Christianity) and Dwynwen (Wales); Tatiana Day (Russia)

Nellie Bly

1515 – Francis I, a great-great-grandson of Charles V, was crowned king of France in the Reims Cathedral.
1725 – Privateer Amaro Pargo was declared a hidalgo, a member of the Spanish nobility.
1765 – Port Egmont, the first British colony in the Falkland Islands, was founded.
1890 – American journalist Nellie Bly (pictured) completed a circumnavigation of the globe by land and sea in a then-record-breaking 72 days.
1998 – The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam detonated a truck bomb at the sacred Buddhist Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, killing 17 people.

Mihrimah Sultan (d. 1578)
Anna Gardner (b. 1816)
Jane Bathori (d. 1970)
Seunghee (b. 1996)

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Today's featured picture

The Monarch of the Glen is an oil-on-canvas painting of a red deer stag completed in 1851 by the English painter Sir Edwin Landseer. It was commissioned as part of a series of three panels to hang in the Palace of Westminster in London. As one of the most popular paintings throughout the 19th century, it sold widely in reproductions in steel engraving, and was finally bought by companies to use in advertising. The painting had become something of a cliché by the mid–20th century, as the "ultimate biscuit tin image of Scotland: a bulky stag set against the violet hills and watery skies of an isolated wilderness", according to the Sunday Herald. The work is now in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.

Painting credit: Edwin Landseer

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