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The Maya civilization was a Mesoamerican civilization developed by the Maya peoples in an area that encompasses southeastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. The earliest villages developed before 2000 BC. The first Maya cities developed around 750 BC, and by 500 BC these cities possessed monumental architecture. Two hundred years later, the Maya were using Hieroglyphic writing, the most advanced script in the pre-Columbian Americas. Only three of their books of history and ritual knowledge are known for certain to remain. Beginning in the mid third century, the Classic period saw the Maya civilization develop a large number of city-states linked by a complex trade network. In the 9th century, there was a widespread political collapse in the central Maya region. In the 16th century, the Spanish Empire colonised the region; the last Maya city fell in 1697. The Maya developed highly sophisticated artforms, complex calendars, and mathematics that included one of the earliest instances of the explicit zero in the world. Maya architecture included palaces, pyramid-temples, and ceremonial ballcourts. (Full article...)

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Fleet Street c. 1890
Fleet Street c. 1890

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Satellite image of the U.S. winter storm on January 23
U.S. winter storm on January 23

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January 27: International Holocaust Remembrance Day; Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom and various commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz (1945)

Brisbane River flooded
Brisbane River flooded

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The Holocaust

During The Holocaust, approximately six million Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and its collaborators. Other victims of Nazi crimes included Romanis, ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled.

This photograph shows fewer than half of the bodies of the several hundred inmates who died of starvation or were shot by the Gestapo in the yard of the Boelcke Barracks, a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora Nazi concentration camp located in the south-east of the town of Nordhausen. Numbers at the camp, which was used for sick and dying inmates from January 1945, rose from a few hundred to more than six thousand by the end of the war; up to a hundred inmates died every day.

Photograph: James E. Myers

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