Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 March 18

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Arnold Bax (1883–1953) was an English composer, poet, and author. Best known for his orchestral music, he also wrote songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and solo piano works. In addition to a series of symphonic poems, he wrote seven symphonies, and was for a time widely regarded as the leading British symphonist. Bax was born in Streatham to a prosperous family who encouraged his music career, and his private income enabled him to follow his own path as a composer without regard for fashion or orthodoxy. While still a student at the Royal Academy of Music, Bax became fascinated with Ireland and the Celtic Revival. In the years before the First World War he lived in Ireland and became a member of Dublin literary circles, writing fiction and verse under the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne. His best-known work is the symphonic poem Tintagel (1917). In 1942 Bax was appointed Master of the King's Music. (Full article...)

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Kuney in Penny Serenade, 1941

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In the news

Coronavirus pandemic

Reported cases of COVID-19 by country as of 18 March 2020

The World Health Organization recognises the coronavirus outbreak (map pictured) as a pandemic.
In cricket, the Women's T20 World Cup concludes with Australia defeating India in the final.
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara win the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

On this day

March 18: Feast day of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem (Christianity)

Bouvet capsizing after striking a mine during the Gallipoli campaign

1068 – An estimated 20,000 people died across the Near East when a violent earthquake struck the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba.
1834 – The Tolpuddle Martyrs were sentenced to transportation to Australia for swearing a secret oath as members of a friendly society in Dorset, England.
1915 – First World War: In one of the largest naval battles of the Gallipoli campaign, Ottoman forces sank three Allied battleships (French battleship Bouvet pictured) and severely damaged three others.
1970 – U.S. postal workers began an eight-day strike after Congress raised their wages by only 4 percent despite increasing its own pay by 41 percent.
1990 – Thieves stole thirteen works of art collectively valued at $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (d. 1781) · John Plankinton (b. 1820) · Edith Mayo (b. 1940)

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Today's featured picture

Alexei Leonov (1934–2019) was a Soviet cosmonaut, Air Force major general, writer, and artist. On 18 March 1965, he became the first human to conduct a spacewalk, exiting the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission for 12 minutes and 9 seconds. At the end of the spacewalk, his spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point that he had great difficulty re-entering the airlock, forcing him to open a valve to deflate his suit. His second trip into space took place ten years later, when he was commander of Soyuz 19, the Soviet half of the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, the first joint space mission between the Soviet Union and the United States. The crater Leonov on the far side of the Moon is named after him.

This picture shows Leonov photographed in 1974, wearing a lapel pin with a version of the emblem for the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, which was then in development.

Photograph credit: NASA; retouched by Coffeeandcrumbs

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