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His Majesty's Theatre is a West End theatre situated in the Haymarket in the City of Westminster, London. It stands on the site of the Queen's Theatre (1705) designed by John Vanbrugh, where more than 25 operas by George Frideric Handel premiered. The present building, designed by Charles J. Phipps, was constructed in 1897 for the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who established the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) there. In the early 20th century, the theatre hosted spectacular productions of Shakespeare and other classical works, and premieres by such playwrights as Bernard Shaw and Noël Coward. The theatre's capacity is 1,216 seats, and it was Grade II* listed by English Heritage in 1970. LW Theatres has owned the building since 2000. The land beneath it is on a long-term lease from the Crown Estate. Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera has run at His Majesty's since 1986. It was known as "Her Majesty's Theatre" during the reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth II. (Full article...)

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Peace dollar from the Binion Hoard

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... that Scholastic requested Maggie Tokuda-Hall remove the phrase "virulent racism" from the Author's Note in Love in the Library, a children's book about Japanese-American internment camps?
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... that American Tanner Brown went from being a walk-on to a semifinalist for the Lou Groza Award as the best college placekicker in the nation?
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... that butterfly collector Ian Heslop was once required to supervise an execution?

In the news

Ali Bongo Ondimba

In Johannesburg, South Africa, a residential fire kills 74 people.
In Gabon, President Ali Bongo Ondimba (pictured) is deposed by a military coup shortly after his re-election.
A business jet crashes in Tver Oblast, Russia, killing Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and nine others.
Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 lands near the lunar south pole, carrying the Pragyan rover.

On this day

September 2: National Day in Vietnam (1945)

Principality of Sealand

1789 – The United States Department of the Treasury was founded following financial concerns in the new nation.
1792 – French Revolution: Due to an overwhelming fear that foreign armies would attack Paris and prisoners would revolt, revolutionaries began the summary execution of more than a thousand prisoners.
1946 – The interim government of India, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, was formed to assist the transition of India from British rule to independence.
1957 – South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm began an official visit to Australia, the first by a foreign incumbent head of state to the country.
1967 – Paddy Roy Bates proclaimed HM Fort Roughs, a former World War II Maunsell Sea Fort in the North Sea off the coast of Suffolk, England, as an independent sovereign state: the Principality of Sealand (pictured).

Constantius III (d. 421)
Liliʻuokalani (b. 1838)
Horace Silver (b. 1928)
Barbara McClintock (d. 1992)

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Jasmund National Park is a nature reserve on the Jasmund peninsula, in the northeast of Rügen island in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. It features the largest chalk cliffs in Germany, the highest of which is Königsstuhl, rising to 161 m (528 ft) above the Baltic Sea. At 30 km² (12 sq mi), Jasmund is the smallest national park in Germany. It was founded in 1990 by the last government of East Germany (GDR) prior to the German reunification. The park's beech forest was named as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011, as an extension of the primeval beech forests of Europe site, due to being largely undisturbed since the last Ice Age.

Photograph credit: Moahim

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