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Excavated remains of Richard III

The remains of Richard III, the last English king killed in battle and last king of the House of York, were discovered within the site of the former Greyfriars Friary in Leicester, England, in September 2012. Richard III, the final ruler of the Plantagenet dynasty, was killed on 22 August 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth Field. His body was taken to Greyfriars, where it was buried in a crude grave in the friary church. Following the friary's dissolution in 1538 and subsequent demolition, Richard's tomb was lost. A search for Richard's body began in August 2012 and that September an archaeological excavation took place at the site of the friary. A skeleton (pictured) was discovered of a man with a spinal deformity and severe head injuries. Following extensive anthropological and genetic testing, the remains were identified as those of Richard. Leicester Cathedral was chosen as the site of Richard's reburial. His reinterment took place on 26 March 2015, during a televised memorial service. (Full article...)

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In the news

Luke Littler

Luke Littler (pictured) wins the PDC World Darts Championship.
The United States strikes targets in Venezuela and captures President Nicolás Maduro.
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Bulgaria adopts the euro, becoming the 21st member of the eurozone.
Former prime minister of Bangladesh Khaleda Zia dies at a hospital in Dhaka.

On this day

January 4: Colonial Repression Martyrs' Day in Angola (1961)

Rose Heilbron

1798 – After his appointment as Prince of Wallachia, Constantine Hangerli arrived in Bucharest to assume the throne.
1909 – British explorer Aeneas Mackintosh, a member of the Nimrod Expedition, escaped death by fleeing across ice floes.
1951 – Korean War: Chinese and North Korean troops captured Seoul from United Nations forces.
1972 – Rose Heilbron (pictured) became the first female judge to sit at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.
2019 – A fire in an escape room in Koszalin, Poland, killed five teenagers.

Johanna Westerdijk (b. 1883)
Arthur Rose Eldred (d. 1951)
Erwin Schrödinger (d. 1961)
David Berman (b. 1967)

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Today's featured picture

The Larsen Ice Shelf is a long ice shelf in the Weddell Sea, extending along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is named after Norwegian explorer Carl Anton Larsen, who sailed along the ice front in 1893. Composed of a series of shelves along the coast, named with letters from A to G, since the mid-1990s the Larsen Ice Shelf has been disintegrating, with the collapse of Larsen B in 2002 being particularly dramatic. A large section of the Larsen C shelf broke away in July 2017 to form an iceberg known as A-68. The area of the whole Larsen Ice Shelf was formerly 33,000 square miles (85,000 km²), but today is only 26,000 square miles (67,000 km²). This late-2016 photograph shows the rift in Larsen C from the vantage point of NASA's DC-8 research aircraft, months before A-68 broke away.

Photograph credit: NASA/John Sonntag

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