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Today’s featured article…

Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin, directors of Doom

Doom is a first-person shooter video game and a reboot of the Doom franchise released on May 13, 2016. Players take the role of an unnamed space marine who battles demonic forces within an energy-mining facility on Mars and in Hell. The game also has an online multiplayer mode and a level editor. Developer id Software and co-developers took eight years to make the game. Their project "Doom 4" was fully overhauled in 2011 to better replicate the tone of the original Doom of 1993. Bethesda Softworks published the 2016 Doom as the first major series installment following Doom 3 in 2004. Its single-player campaign, graphics, soundtrack, and gameplay received considerable praise, while its multiplayer mode drew significant criticism. Doom became a best-seller, with more than two million PC copies sold by the next year. Multiple industry outlets named Doom among 2016's best video games. It received a sequel four years later. (Full article...)

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On this day…

May 13: Yom HaZikaron in Israel (2024)

Aftermath of the Enschede explosion

1909 – The inaugural edition of the Giro d'Italia, a long-distance multiple-stage bicycle race, began in Milan; the Italian cyclist Luigi Ganna was the eventual winner.
1958 – US vice president Richard Nixon's motorcade was attacked by a mob in Caracas, Venezuela.
2000 – An explosion (aftermath pictured) at a fireworks factory in Enschede, Netherlands, resulted in 23 deaths and approximately €450 million in damage.
2008 – Nine bombs placed by the Indian Mujahideen, then an unknown terrorist group, exploded in a 15-minute period in Jaipur, India, killing 80 people and injuring more than 200 others.

Maria Theresa (b. 1717)
John Littlejohn (d. 1836)
Alicja Iwańska (b. 1918)
Gary Cooper (d. 1961)

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In the news…

Aurora australis seen from Melbourne, Australia

A series of solar storms impact Earth, creating aurorae (pictured) seen further from the poles than usual.
Former prime minister of Fiji Frank Bainimarama is sentenced to one year in prison for attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Mahamat Déby is declared the winner of the Chadian presidential election.
Flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, leaves more than 110 people dead and at least 140 others missing.
Kyren Wilson wins the World Snooker Championship.

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From Wikipedia's newest articles:

...that the Roman de Fergus is the earliest piece of non-Celtic vernacular literature to have survived from Scotland?
...that the Philharmonia Hungarica made the first complete recording of Haydn's symphonies, was an orchestra founded by Hungarian exiles and funded by the West German government during the Cold War?
...that the dachas of the Russian poets Boris Pasternak, Korney Chukovsky, and Bulat Okudzhava in the village of Peredelkino near Moscow are open to the public as memorial houses?
...that an aerosani is a type of air-powered, armoured snowmobile, which was used for transport, reconnaissance, and raiding by the Red Army in the Winter War and the Second World War?
...that a push–pull converter is a type of DC-to-DC converter that uses a transformer to step the voltage of a DC power supply?
...that the Chicana artist Yolanda Lopez became famous with the painting "Virgen de Guadalupe", which represents Lopez's personal investigation into Virgen de Guadalupe's status in Mexican society?

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