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From today's featured article

Jesus and Nicodemus (seen here in a seventeenth-century painting), a theme from the work

O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad (O holy bath of Spirit and water), BWV 165, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed it in Weimar for Trinity Sunday and led the first performance on 16 June 1715. It was one in a series of cantatas he had been writing since his promotion to concertmaster at the Weimar court in the ducal palace, one cantata each month over the previous year. The libretto by the court poet Salomo Franck is based on the day's prescribed gospel reading about the meeting of Jesus and Nicodemus (pictured in a contemporary painting). Close in content to the gospel, the text connects the concept of the Trinity to baptism. The music is structured in six movements, alternating arias and recitatives, and scored for a small ensemble of four vocal parts, strings and continuo. The closing chorale is the fifth stanza of a hymn by Ludwig Helmbold which mentions scripture, baptism and the Eucharist. The text, full of Baroque imagery, reads like a sermon set to music, especially in the two recitatives for the bass voice, which are rich in musical contrasts. Bach probably led a second performance on the Trinity Sunday concluding his first year as Cantor at St. Thomas in Leipzig on 4 June 1724. (Full article...)

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In the news

Two separate criminal probes result in the arrest of seven FIFA officials and the raid of its headquarters (pictured) by Swiss police.
Cable telecommunications company Charter agrees to buy Time Warner Cable in a deal worth US$55.1 billion.
Opposition candidate Andrzej Duda is elected President of Poland.
A heat wave in India kills at least 1,800 people.
In motorsport, Nico Rosberg wins the Monaco Grand Prix.
In cricket, Mumbai Indians win the Indian Premier League after defeating Chennai Super Kings in the final.
Måns Zelmerlöw, representing Sweden with the song "Heroes", wins the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria.

On this day...

May 31: World No Tobacco Day; Pentecost (Eastern Christianity, 2015); Feast of the Visitation (Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism); Mother's Day in Algeria, France, Morocco and Sweden (2015)

1223 – Mongol invasions: Mongol forces defeated a combined army of Kiev, Galich, and the Cumans at the Kalchik River in present-day Ukraine.
1669 – Citing poor eyesight, English naval administrator and Member of Parliament Samuel Pepys recorded his last entry in his diary, one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period.
1935 – A 7.7 M_w earthquake struck Balochistan in the British Raj, now part of Pakistan, killing anywhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people.
1981 – An organized mob of police and government-sponsored paramilitias began burning the public library in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, destroying over 97,000 items in one of the most violent examples of ethnic biblioclasm of the 20th century.
2005 – An article in the magazine Vanity Fair revealed that the secret informant known as "Deep Throat", who provided information about the Watergate scandal, was former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt (pictured).

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Today's featured picture

Compound eyes on a blue bottle fly. Unlike simple eyes, which have a single concave photoreceptive surface, compound eyes consist of a number of individual lenses (called ommatidia) laid out on a convex surface; this means that they point in slightly different directions. Compound eyes provide a wide field of view and can detect fast movement, but have low resolution.

Photograph: JJ Harrison

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