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PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCESCO LASTRUCCI
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A Michelangelo, just restored: More than 560 years ago, the Renaissance master walked away from his second Pietà. However, after years of restoration, a Florence museum has unveiled The Deposition or the Bandini Pietà. Michelangelo worked on the sculpture (pictured above) between 1547 and 1555, 50 years after his first Pietà, which is in the Vatican. Restorers encountered “numerous microfractures” in the marble, an issue that forced Michelangelo to halt work on it before it was finished, the Italian news agency ANSA reports.
Justice for earliest atomic victims: Thousands of people, many of them not warned, were within 40 miles of the world’s first atomic detonation, in New Mexico in 1945. Nor were they evacuated afterward, even as radioactive fallout dropped for days. For more than three decades, Washington has compensated nuclear workers and people who lived downwind of later nuclear tests. Last week, Nat Geo reports, a resolution was introduced in Congress to include these “downwinders” from the first test, codenamed Trinity.
The obscure law being used against Haitians: When a public health law was enacted in 1944, it was about preventing people with transmissible diseases from entering the United States—not a whole nationality of asylum-seekers. That’s what Erin Blakemore found in uncovering the U.S. argument for forcibly repatriating thousands of Haitians who had gathered in Del Rio, Texas. The policy—and the harm faced by Haitians returning to the dangerous, unstable nation—prompted the U.S. special envoy to Haiti to quit in protest on Wednesday.
A pyramid from the ashes of a volcano: If the eruption of the giant Ilopango volcano hastened the fall of the Maya empire, it wasn’t immediately evident in a town just 25 miles away. For that town, the massive eruption 1,500 years ago hastened construction of a huge Maya pyramid and ceremonial center, a new study shows. “Ancient people were more resilient, flexible, and innovative,” study author Akjira Ichikawa tells Nat Geo.
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