title: Ryu Jun-yeol

text: Ryu is an environmental activist. While filming in 2016, Ryu developed an interest in environmentalism and began to campaign for environmental protection. In December 2018, Ryu was reported to have donated ₩10 million to Greenpeace, a non-governmental environmental organisation. He has been making regular donations since 2016 for various campaigns, such as Save the Arctic. In 2020, Ryu made yet another donation to Greenpeace in response to Australian wildfires, and campaigned for animal protection and urgent action to tackle climate change on his Instagram account.


title: Ryu Jun-yeol

text: In 2021, Ryu participated in a video conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, speaking about environmental protection and bringing attention to the Greenpeace campaign to reduce plastic packaging. The two had previously visited the DMZ Peace Trail in 2019 to mark the first anniversary of the Panmunjom Declaration.


title: Ryu Jun-yeol

text: Ryu took a brief hiatus from acting and moved to the United States of America, living in Los Angeles for several months from mid-2019 to early 2020, going by his English name Anthony. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles for a study abroad programme. Apart from his studies, he did photography work and learned vlogging in his spare time. He established a mini vlog-series on YouTube, titled "‘Ryu Jun Yeol’s: Reportage’" (), which covered his life in Los Angeles. In November 2020, Ryu held his first photo exhibition in Seoul, titled ""Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood"", which showcased the photos he took while living abroad.


title: Ryu Jun-yeol

text: Ryu has been in a relationship with singer and actress Lee Hye-ri since late 2016, who he met while filming "Reply 1988" where he played as the second lead who fell in love with his childhood best friend.


title: Ryu Jun-yeol

text: Ryu is an avid football fan. He is best friends with Tottenham Hotspur player Son Heung-min, and has participated in promotional activities for the 2017 FIFA U-20 World Cup, which was held in South Korea. Ahead of the tournament, Ryu played against Argentine football players Diego Maradona and Pablo Aimar in a five-a-side match held before the official U-20 World Cup draw in Suwon.


title: Simone Weil

text: Simone Adolphine Weil ( , ; 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Over 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work, since 1995.


title: Simone Weil

text: After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism. Such work saw her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer, mostly in car factories, so she could better understand the working class.


title: Simone Weil

text: Taking a path that was unusual among 20th-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. Weil wrote throughout her life, although most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous in continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil was born in her parents' apartment in Paris on 3 February 1909, the daughter of Bernard Weil (1872–1955), a medical doctor from an agnostic Alsatian Jewish background, who moved to Paris after the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. Her mother, Salomea "Selma" Reinherz (1879–1965), was born into a Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don and raised in Belgium. According to Osmo Pekonen, "the family name Weil came to be when many Levis in the Napoleonic era changed their names this way, by anagram." Weil was a healthy baby for her first six months, but then suffered a severe attack of appendicitis; thereafter, she struggled with poor health throughout her life. She was the younger of her parents' two children: her brother was mathematician André Weil (1906–1998), with whom she would always enjoy a close relationship. Their parents were fairly affluent and raised their children in an attentive and supportive atmosphere.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil was distressed by her father having to leave home for several years after being drafted to serve in the First World War. Eva Fogelman, Robert Coles, and several other scholars believe that this experience may have contributed to the exceptionally strong altruism which Weil displayed throughout her life. From her childhood home, Weil acquired an obsession with cleanliness; in her later life she would sometimes speak of her "disgustingness" and think that others would see her this way, even though in her youth she had been considered highly attractive. Weil was generally highly affectionate, but she almost always avoided any form of physical contact, even with female friends.


title: Simone Weil

text: According to her friend and biographer, Simone Pétrement, Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities for love affairs in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged. From her late teenage years, Weil would generally disguise her "fragile beauty" by adopting a masculine appearance, hardly ever using makeup and often wearing men's clothes.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil was a precocious student, proficient in Ancient Greek by age 12. She later learned Sanskrit so that she could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. Like the Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola, her interests in other religions were universal and she attempted to understand each religious tradition as an expression of transcendent wisdom.


title: Simone Weil

text: As a teenager, Weil studied at the Lycée Henri IV under the tutelage of her admired teacher Émile Chartier, more commonly known as "Alain". Her first attempt at the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure in June 1927 ended in failure, due to her low marks in history. In 1928 she was successful in gaining admission. She finished first in the exam for the certificate of "General Philosophy and Logic"; Simone de Beauvoir finished second. During these years, Weil attracted much attention with her radical opinions. She was called the "Red virgin", and even "The Martian" by her admired mentor.


title: Simone Weil

text: At the École Normale Supérieure, she studied philosophy, earning her DES ("", roughly equivalent to an MA) in 1931 with a thesis under the title "Science et perfection dans Descartes" ("Science and Perfection in Descartes"). She received her "agrégation" that same year. Weil taught philosophy at a secondary school for girls in Le Puy and teaching was her primary employment during her short life.


title: Simone Weil

text: She often became involved in political action out of sympathy with the working class. In 1915, when she was only six years old, she refused sugar in solidarity with the troops entrenched along the Western Front. In 1919, at 10 years of age, she declared herself a Bolshevik. In her late teens, she became involved in the workers' movement. She wrote political tracts, marched in demonstrations, and advocated workers' rights. At this time, she was a Marxist, pacifist, and trade unionist. While teaching in Le Puy, she became involved in local political activity, supporting the unemployed and striking workers despite criticism. Weil had never formally joined the French Communist Party, and in her twenties she became increasingly critical of Marxism. According to Pétrement, she was one of the first to identify a new form of oppression not anticipated by Marx, where élite bureaucrats could make life just as miserable for ordinary people as did the most exploitative capitalists.


title: Simone Weil

text: In 1932, Weil visited Germany to help Marxist activists who were at the time considered to be the strongest and best organised communists in Western Europe, but Weil considered them no match for the then up-and-coming fascists. When she returned to France, her political friends in France dismissed her fears, thinking Germany would continue to be controlled by the centrists or those to the left. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, Weil spent much of her time trying to help German communists fleeing his regime. Weil would sometimes publish articles about social and economic issues, including "Oppression and Liberty" and numerous short articles for trade union journals. This work criticised popular Marxist thought and gave a pessimistic account of the limits of both capitalism and socialism. Leon Trotsky himself personally responded to several of her articles, attacking both her ideas and her as a person. However, according to Pétrement, he was influenced by some of Weil's ideas.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil participated in the French general strike of 1933, called to protest against unemployment and wage cuts. The following year, she took a 12-month leave of absence from her teaching position to work incognito as a labourer in two factories, one owned by Renault, believing that this experience would allow her to connect with the working class. In 1935, she resumed teaching and donated most of her income to political causes and charitable endeavours.


title: Simone Weil

text: In 1936, despite her professed pacifism, she travelled to the Spanish Civil War to join the Republican faction. She identified as an anarchist, and sought out the anti-fascist commander Julián Gorkin, asking to be sent on a mission as a covert agent, to rescue the prisoner Joaquín Maurín. Gorkin refused, saying she would almost certainly be sacrificing herself for nothing, as it would be most unlikely she could pass as a Spaniard. Weil replied that she had "every right" to sacrifice herself if she chose, but after arguing for more than an hour, she was unable to convince Gorkin to give her the assignment. Instead she joined the anarchist Durruti Column of the French-speaking Sébastien Faure Century, which specialised in high-risk "commando"-style engagements. As she was extremely short-sighted, Weil was a very poor shot, and her comrades tried to avoid taking her on missions, though she did sometimes insist. Her only direct participation in combat was to shoot with her rifle at a bomber during an air raid; in a second raid, she tried to man the group's heavy machine gun, but her comrades prevented her, as they thought it would be best for someone less clumsy and near-sighted to use the weapon. After being with the group for a few weeks, she burnt herself over a cooking fire. She was forced to leave the unit, and was met by her parents who had followed her to Spain. They helped her leave the country, to recuperate in Assisi. About a month after her departure, Weil's unit was nearly wiped out at an engagement in Perdiguera in October 1936, with every woman in the group being killed.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil was distressed by the Republican killings in eastern Spain, particularly when a fifteen-year old Falangist was executed after he had been taken prisoner and Durruti had spent an hour trying to get him to change his political position before giving him until the next day to decide.


title: Simone Weil

text: During her stay in the Aragon front, Weil sent some chronicles to the French publication "Le Libertaire", and on returning to Paris Weil continued to write essays on labour, on management, war and peace.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil was born into a secular household and raised in "complete agnosticism". As a teenager, she considered the existence of God for herself and decided nothing could be known either way. In her "Spiritual Autobiography" however, Weil records that she always had a Christian outlook, taking to heart from her earliest childhood the idea of loving one's neighbour. Weil became attracted to the Christian faith beginning in 1935, the first of three pivotal experiences for her being when she was moved by the beauty of villagers singing hymns in a procession she stumbled across while on holiday to Portugal (in Póvoa de Varzim). While in Assisi in the spring of 1937, Weil experienced a religious ecstasy in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli—the same church in which Saint Francis of Assisi had prayed. She was led to pray for the first time in her life as Lawrence A. Cunningham relates:


title: Simone Weil

text: Below the town is the beautiful church and convent of San Damiano where Saint Clare once lived. Near that spot is the place purported to be where Saint Francis composed the larger part of his "Canticle of Brother Sun". Below the town in the valley is the ugliest church in the entire environs: the massive baroque basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, finished in the seventeenth century and rebuilt in the nineteenth century, which houses a rare treasure: a tiny Romanesque chapel that stood in the days of Saint Francis—the "Little Portion" where he would gather his brethren. It was in that tiny chapel that the great mystic Simone Weil first felt compelled to kneel down and pray.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil had another, more powerful, revelation a year later while reciting George Herbert's poem "Love III", after which "Christ himself came down and took possession of me", and, from 1938 on, her writings became more mystical and spiritual, while retaining their focus on social and political issues. She was attracted to Catholicism, but declined to be baptized at that time, preferring to remain outside due to "the love of those things that are outside Christianity". During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving spiritual direction from Joseph-Marie Perrin, a Dominican Friar. Around this time, she met the French Catholic author Gustave Thibon, who later edited some of her work.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil did not limit her curiosity to Christianity. She was interested in other religious traditions—especially the Greek and Egyptian mysteries; Hinduism (especially the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita); and Mahayana Buddhism. She believed that all these and other traditions contained elements of genuine revelation, writing:


title: Simone Weil

text: Greece, Egypt, ancient India, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflection of this beauty in art and science...these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive. I think I might even say more.


title: Simone Weil

text: Nevertheless, Weil was opposed to religious syncretism, claiming that it effaced the particularity of the individual traditions:


title: Simone Weil

text: Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else ... A "synthesis" of religion implies a lower quality of attention.


title: Simone Weil

text: In 1942, Weil travelled to the United States with her family. She had been reluctant to leave France, but agreed to do so as she wanted to see her parents to safety and knew they would not leave without her. She was also encouraged by the fact that it would be relatively easy for her to reach Britain from the United States, where she could join the French Resistance. She had hopes of being sent back to France as a covert agent.


title: Simone Weil

text: Older biographies suggest Weil made no further progress in achieving her desire to return to France as an agent—she was limited to desk work in London, although this did give her time to write one of her largest and best known works: "The Need for Roots". Yet there is now evidence that Weil was recruited by the Special Operations Executive, with a view to sending her back to France as a clandestine wireless operator. In May 1943, plans were underway to send her to Thame Park in Oxfordshire for training, but were cancelled soon after, as her failing health became known.


title: Simone Weil

text: The rigorous work routine she assumed soon took a heavy toll. In 1943, Weil was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and eat well. However, she refused special treatment because of her long-standing political idealism and her detachment from material things. Instead, she limited her food intake to what she believed residents of German-occupied France ate. She most likely ate even less, as she refused food on most occasions. It is probable that she was baptized during this period. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent.


title: Simone Weil

text: After a lifetime of battling illness and frailty, Weil died in August 1943 from cardiac failure at the age of 34. The coroner's report said that "the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed".


title: Simone Weil

text: The exact cause of her death remains a subject of debate. Some claim that her refusal to eat came from her desire to express some form of solidarity toward the victims of the war. Others think that Weil's self-starvation occurred after her study of Arthur Schopenhauer. In his chapters on Christian saintly asceticism and salvation, Schopenhauer had described self-starvation as a preferred method of self-denial. However, Simone Pétrement, one of Weil's first and most significant biographers, regards the coroner's report as simply mistaken. Basing her opinion on letters written by the personnel of the sanatorium at which Simone Weil was treated, Pétrement affirms that Weil asked for food on different occasions while she was hospitalized and even ate a little bit a few days before her death; according to her, it is in fact Weil's poor health condition that eventually made her unable to eat.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil's first English biographer, Richard Rees, offers several possible explanations for her death, citing her compassion for the suffering of her countrymen in occupied France and her love for and close imitation of Christ. Rees sums up by saying: "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love."


title: Simone Weil

text: Absence is the key image for her metaphysics, cosmology, cosmogony, and theodicy. She believed that God created by an act of self-delimitation—in other words, she argued that because God is conceived as utter fullness, a perfect being, no creature can exist except where God is not. Thus, creation occurred only when God withdrew in part. This idea mirrors tzimtzum, a central notion in the Jewish Kabbalah creation narrative.


title: Simone Weil

text: This is, for Weil, an original "kenosis" ("emptiness") preceding the corrective "kenosis" of Christ's incarnation. Thus, according to her, humans are born in a damned position, not because of original sin, but because to be created at all they must be what God is not; in other words, they must be inherently "unholy" in some sense. This idea fits more broadly into apophatic theology.


title: Simone Weil

text: This notion of creation is a cornerstone of her theodicy, for if creation is conceived this wayas necessarily entailing evilthen there is no problem of the entrance of evil into a perfect world. Nor does the presence of evil constitute a limitation of God's omnipotence under Weil's notion; according to her, evil is present not because God could not create a perfect world, but because the act of "creation" in its very essence implies the impossibility of perfection.


title: Simone Weil

text: However, this explanation of the essentiality of evil does not imply that humans are simply, originally, and continually doomed; on the contrary, Weil claims that "evil is the form which God's mercy takes in this world". Weil believed that evil, and its consequent affliction, serve the role of driving humans towards God, writing, "The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it."


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil's concept of "affliction" () goes beyond simple suffering, though it certainly includes it. According to her, only some souls are capable of experiencing the full depth of afflictionthe same souls that are also most able to experience spiritual joy. Weil's notion of affliction is a sort of suffering "plus" which transcends both body and mind, a physical and mental anguish that scourges the very soul.


title: Simone Weil

text: War and oppression were the most intense cases of affliction within her reach; to experience it, she turned to the life of a factory worker, while to understand it she turned to Homer's "Iliad". (Her essay "The Iliad or the Poem of Force", first translated by Mary McCarthy, is a piece of Homeric literary criticism.) Affliction was associated both with necessity and with chance—it was fraught with necessity because it was hard-wired into existence itself, and thus imposed itself upon the sufferer with the full force of the inescapable, but it was also subject to chance inasmuch as chance, too, is an inescapable part of the nature of existence. The element of chance was essential to the unjust character of affliction; in other words, my affliction should not usually—let alone always—follow from my sin, as per traditional Christian theodicy, but should be visited upon me for no special reason.


title: Simone Weil

text: The concept of "metaxu", which Weil borrowed from Plato, is that which both separates and connects (e.g., as a wall separates two prisoners but can be used to tap messages). This idea of connecting distance was of the first importance for Weil's understanding of the created realm. The world as a whole, along with any of its components, including our physical bodies, is to be regarded as serving the same function for us in relation to God that a blind man's stick serves for him in relation to the world about him. They do not afford direct insight, but can be used experimentally to bring the mind into practical contact with reality. This metaphor allows any absence to be interpreted as a presence, and is a further component in Weil's theodicy.


title: Simone Weil

text: For Weil, "The beautiful is the experiential proof that the incarnation is possible". The beauty which is inherent in the form of the world (this inherency is proven, for her, in geometry, and expressed in all good art) is the proof that the world points to something beyond itself; it establishes the essentially telic character of all that exists. Her concept of beauty extends throughout the universe: "[W]e must have faith that the universe is beautiful on all levels...and that it has a fullness of beauty in relation to the bodily and psychic structure of each of the thinking beings that actually do exist and of all those that are possible. It is this very agreement of an infinity of perfect beauties that gives a transcendent character to the beauty of the world...He (Christ) is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe". She also wrote that "The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter".


title: Simone Weil

text: Beauty also served a soteriological function for Weil: "Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul." It constitutes, then, another way in which the divine reality behind the world invades our lives. Where affliction conquers us with brute force, beauty sneaks in and topples the empire of the self from within.


title: Simone Weil

text: As Simone Weil explains in her book "Waiting for God", attention consists of suspending or emptying one's thought, such that one is ready to receive—to be penetrated by—the object to which one turns one's gaze, be that object one's neighbor, or ultimately, God. As Weil explains, one can love God by praying to God, and attention is the very “substance of prayer”: when one prays, one empties oneself, fixes one's whole gaze towards God, and becomes ready to receive God. Similarly, for Weil, people can love their neighbors by emptying themselves, becoming ready to receive their neighbor in all his or her naked truth, asking their neighbor: “What are you going through?”


title: Simone Weil

text: In "Waiting for God", Simone Weil explains that the three forms of implicit love of God are (1) love of neighbor (2) love of the beauty of the world and (3) love of religious ceremonies. As Weil writes, by loving these three objects (neighbor, world's beauty, and religious ceremonies), one indirectly loves God before “God comes in person to take the hand of his future bride,” since prior to God's arrival, one's soul cannot yet "directly" love God as the object. Love of neighbor occurs (i) when the strong treat the weak "as equals," (ii) when people give personal attention to those that otherwise seem invisible, anonymous, or non-existent, and (iii) when we look at and listen to the afflicted "as they are", without explicitly thinking about God—i.e., Weil writes, when “God in us” loves the afflicted, "rather" than we loving them in God. Second, Weil explains, love of the world's beauty occurs when humans imitate God's love for the cosmos: just as God creatively renounced his command over the world—letting it be ruled by human autonomy and matter's “blind necessity”—humans give up their imaginary command over the world, seeing the world "no longer" as if they were the world's center. Finally, Weil explains, love of religious ceremonies occurs as an implicit love of God, when religious practices are pure. Weil writes that purity in religion is seen when “faith and love do not fail,” and most absolutely, in the Eucharist.


title: Simone Weil

text: According to Lissa McCullough, Weil would likely have been "intensely displeased" by the attention paid to her life rather than her works. She believed it was her writings that embodied the best of her, not her actions and definitely not her personality. Weil had similar views about others, saying that if one looks at the lives of great figures in separation from their works, it "necessarily ends up revealing their pettiness above all", as it's in their works that they have put the best of themselves.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil's book "The Need for Roots" was written in early 1943, immediately before her death later that year. She was in London working for the French Resistance and trying to convince its leader, Charles de Gaulle, to form a contingent of nurses who would serve at the front lines.


title: Simone Weil

text: "The Need for Roots" has an ambitious plan. It sets out to address the past and to set out a road map for the future of France after World War II. She painstakingly analyzes the spiritual and ethical milieu that led to France's defeat by the German army, and then addresses these issues with the prospect of eventual French victory.


title: Simone Weil

text: While "Gravity and Grace" () is one of the books most associated with Simone Weil, the work was not intended to be a book at all. Rather, the work consists of various passages selected from Weil's notebooks and arranged topically by her friend Gustave Thibon. Weil had given Thibon some of her notebooks written before May 1942, but not with any intent to publish them. Hence, the resulting selections, organization and editing of "Gravity and Grace" were much influenced by Thibon, a devout Catholic (see Thibon's introduction to "Gravity and Grace" (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952) for more details).


title: Simone Weil

text: During her lifetime, Weil was only known to relatively narrow circles and even in France her essays were mostly read only by those interested in radical politics. During the first decade after her death, Weil rapidly became famous, attracting attention throughout the West. For the third quarter of the 20th century, she was widely regarded as the most influential person in the world on new work concerning religious and spiritual matters. Her philosophical, social and political thought also became popular, although not to the same degree as her religious work.


title: Simone Weil

text: As well as influencing fields of study, Weil deeply affected the personal lives of numerous individuals. Pope Paul VI said that Weil was one of his three greatest influences. Weil's popularity began to decline in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, more of her work was gradually published, leading to many thousands of new secondary works by Weil scholars, some of whom focused on achieving a deeper understanding of her religious, philosophical and political work. Others broadened the scope of Weil scholarship to investigate her applicability to fields like classical studies, cultural studies, education and even technical fields like ergonomics.


title: Simone Weil

text: Many commentators who have assessed Weil as a person were highly positive; many described her as a saint, some even as the greatest saint of the twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler, and Robert Coles. After they met at age 18, Simone de Beauvoir wroteː "I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world." Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range." Maurice Schumann said that since her death there was "hardly a day when the thought of her life did not positively influence his own and serve as a moral guide." In 1951, Albert Camus wrote that she was "the only great spirit of our times." Foolish though she may have appeared at times—dropping a suitcase full of French resistance papers all over the sidewalk and scrambling to gather them up—her deep engagement with both the theory and practice of caritas, in all its myriad forms, functions as the unifying force of her life and thought. Gustave Thibon, the French philosopher and close friend, recounts their last meeting, not long before her death: "I will only say that I had the impression of being in the presence of an absolutely transparent soul which was ready to be reabsorbed into original light."


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil has however been criticised even by those who otherwise deeply admired her, such as Eliot, for being excessively prone to divide the world into good and evil, and for her sometimes intemperate judgments. Weil was a harsh critic of the influence of Judaism on Western civilisation. However, her niece Sylvie Weil and biographer Thomas R. Nevin argued that Weil did not reject Judaism and was heavily influenced by its precepts. Weil was an even harsher critic of the Roman Empire, in which she refused to see any value at all. On the other hand, according to Eliot, she held up the Cathars as exemplars of goodness, despite there being in his view little concrete evidence on which to base such an assessment. According to Pétrement she idolised Lawrence of Arabia, considering him to be a Saint. A few critics have taken an overall negative view. Several Jewish writers, including Susan Sontag, accused her of antisemitism, although this was far from a universal shared perspective. A small minority of commentators have judged her to be psychologically unbalanced or sexually obsessed. General Charles de Gaulle, her ultimate boss while she worked for the "French Resistance", considered her "insane", although even he was influenced by her and repeated some of her sayings for years after her death.


title: Simone Weil

text: A meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 new scholarly works had been published about her.


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil was the subject of a 2010 documentary by Julia Haslett, "An encounter with Simone Weil". Haslett noted that Weil had become "a little-known figure, practically forgotten in her native France, and rarely taught in universities or secondary schools".


title: Simone Weil

text: Weil was also the subject of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's "La Passion de Simone" (2008), written with librettist Amin Maalouf. Of the piece, music critic Olivia Giovetti wrote:


title: Simone Weil

text: "Framing her soprano soloist as Simone’s imaginary sister (Literal? Metaphorical? Does it matter?), the narrative arc becomes a struggle to understand the dichotomy of Simone. Wrapped in this dramatic mystery, Saariaho’s musical textures, haunting and moribund, create a meditative state. To go back to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, if that work, written for his time, serves to reinforce the (then-revolutionary) system of the Protestant church, then “La Passion de Simone,” written for our time, questions the mystery of faith to reinforce the inexplicable experience of being human."


title: Income tax

text: An income tax is a tax imposed on individuals or entities (taxpayers) in respect of the income or profits earned by them (commonly called taxable income). Income tax generally is computed as the product of a tax rate times the taxable income. Taxation rates may vary by type or characteristics of the taxpayer and the type of income.


title: Income tax

text: The tax rate may increase as taxable income increases (referred to as graduated or progressive tax rates). The tax imposed on companies is usually known as corporate tax and is commonly levied at a flat rate. Individual income is often taxed at progressive rates where the tax rate applied to each additional unit of income increases (e.g., the first $10,000 of income taxed at 0%, the next $10,000 taxed at 1%, etc.). Most jurisdictions exempt local charitable organizations from tax. Income from investments may be taxed at different (generally lower) rates than other types of income. Credits of various sorts may be allowed that reduce tax. Some jurisdictions impose the higher of an income tax or a tax on an alternative base or measure of income.


title: Income tax

text: Taxable income of taxpayers resident in the jurisdiction is generally total income less income producing expenses and other deductions. Generally, only net gain from the sale of property, including goods held for sale, is included in income. The income of a corporation's shareholders usually includes distributions of profits from the corporation. Deductions typically include all income-producing or business expenses including an allowance for recovery of costs of business assets. Many jurisdictions allow notional deductions for individuals and may allow deduction of some personal expenses. Most jurisdictions either do not tax income earned outside the jurisdiction or allow a credit for taxes paid to other jurisdictions on such income. Nonresidents are taxed only on certain types of income from sources within the jurisdictions, with few exceptions.


title: Income tax

text: Most jurisdictions require self-assessment of the tax and require payers of some types of income to withhold tax from those payments. Advance payments of tax by taxpayers may be required. Taxpayers not timely paying tax owed are generally subject to significant penalties, which may include jail for individuals.


title: Income tax

text: The concept of taxing income is a modern innovation and presupposes several things: a money economy, reasonably accurate accounts, a common understanding of receipts, expenses and profits, and an orderly society with reliable records.


title: Income tax

text: For most of the history of civilization, these preconditions did not exist, and taxes were based on other factors. Taxes on wealth, social position, and ownership of the means of production (typically land and slaves) were all common. Practices such as tithing, or an offering of first fruits, existed from ancient times, and can be regarded as a precursor of the income tax, but they lacked precision and certainly were not based on a concept of net increase.


title: Income tax

text: In the early days of the Roman Republic, public taxes consisted of modest assessments on owned wealth and property. The tax rate under normal circumstances was 1% and sometimes would climb as high as 3% in situations such as war. These modest taxes were levied against land, homes and other real estate, slaves, animals, personal items and monetary wealth. The more a person had in property, the more tax they paid. Taxes were collected from individuals.


title: Income tax

text: In the year 10 AD, Emperor Wang Mang of the Xin Dynasty instituted an unprecedented income tax, at the rate of 10 percent of profits, for professionals and skilled labor. He was overthrown 13 years later in 23 AD and earlier policies were restored during the reestablished Han Dynasty which followed.


title: Income tax

text: One of the first recorded taxes on income was the Saladin tithe introduced by Henry II in 1188 to raise money for the Third Crusade. The tithe demanded that each layperson in England and Wales be taxed one tenth of their personal income and moveable property.


title: Income tax

text: The inception date of the modern income tax is typically accepted as 1799, at the suggestion of Henry Beeke, the future Dean of Bristol.


title: Income tax

text: This income tax was introduced into Great Britain by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger in his budget of December 1798, to pay for weapons and equipment for the French Revolutionary War. Pitt's new graduated (progressive) income tax began at a levy of 2 old pence in the pound () on incomes over £60 (equivalent to £ in ), and increased up to a maximum of 2 shillings in the pound (10%) on incomes of over £200. Pitt hoped that the new income tax would raise £10 million a year, but actual receipts for 1799 totalled only a little over £6 million.


title: Income tax

text: Pitt's income tax was levied from 1799 to 1802, when it was abolished by Henry Addington during the Peace of Amiens. Addington had taken over as prime minister in 1801, after Pitt's resignation over Catholic Emancipation. The income tax was reintroduced by Addington in 1803 when hostilities with France recommenced, but it was again abolished in 1816, one year after the Battle of Waterloo. Opponents of the tax, who thought it should only be used to finance wars, wanted all records of the tax destroyed along with its repeal. Records were publicly burned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but copies were retained in the basement of the tax court.


title: Income tax

text: In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, income tax was reintroduced by Sir Robert Peel by the Income Tax Act 1842. Peel, as a Conservative, had opposed income tax in the 1841 general election, but a growing budget deficit required a new source of funds. The new income tax, based on Addington's model, was imposed on incomes above £150 (equivalent to £ in ). Although this measure was initially intended to be temporary, it soon became a fixture of the British taxation system.


title: Income tax

text: A committee was formed in 1851 under Joseph Hume to investigate the matter, but failed to reach a clear recommendation. Despite the vociferous objection, William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1852, kept the progressive income tax, and extended it to cover the costs of the Crimean War. By the 1860s, the progressive tax had become a grudgingly accepted element of the United Kingdom fiscal system.


title: Income tax

text: The US federal government imposed the first personal income tax on August 5, 1861, to help pay for its war effort in the American Civil War (3% of all incomes over US$800) (equivalent to $ in ). This tax was repealed and replaced by another income tax in 1862. It was only in 1894 that the first peacetime income tax was passed through the Wilson-Gorman tariff. The rate was 2% on income over $4000 (equivalent to $ in ), which meant fewer than 10% of households would pay any. The purpose of the income tax was to make up for revenue that would be lost by tariff reductions. The US Supreme Court ruled the income tax unconstitutional, the 10th amendment forbidding any powers not expressed in the US Constitution, and there being no power to impose any other than a direct tax by apportionment.


title: Income tax

text: In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution made the income tax a permanent fixture in the U.S. tax system. In fiscal year 1918, annual internal revenue collections for the first time passed the billion-dollar mark, rising to $5.4 billion by 1920. The amount of income collected via income tax has varied dramatically, from 1% in the early days of US income tax to taxation rates of over 90% during World War II.


title: Income tax

text: While tax rules vary widely, there are certain basic principles common to most income tax systems. Tax systems in Canada, China, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others, follow most of the principles outlined below. Some tax systems, such as India, may have significant differences from the principles outlined below. Most references below are examples; see specific articles by jurisdiction ("e.g.", Income tax in Australia).


title: Income tax

text: Individuals are often taxed at different rates than corporations. Individuals include only human beings. Tax systems in countries other than the USA treat an entity as a corporation only if it is legally organized as a corporation. Estates and trusts are usually subject to special tax provisions. Other taxable entities are generally treated as partnerships. In the US, many kinds of entities may elect to be treated as a corporation or a partnership. Partners of partnerships are treated as having income, deductions, and credits equal to their shares of such partnership items.


title: Income tax

text: Separate taxes are assessed against each taxpayer meeting certain minimum criteria. Many systems allow married individuals to request joint assessment. Many systems allow controlled groups of locally organized corporations to be jointly assessed.


title: Income tax

text: Tax rates vary widely. Some systems impose higher rates on higher amounts of income. Example: Elbonia taxes income below E.10,000 at 20% and other income at 30%. Joe has E.15,000 of income. His tax is E.3,500. Tax rates schedules may vary for individuals based on marital status. In India on the other hand there is a slab rate system, where for income below INR 2.5 lakhs per annum the tax is zero percent, for those with their income in the slab rate of INR 2,50,001 to INR 5,00,000 the tax rate is 5%. In this way the rate goes up with each slab, reaching to 30% tax rate for those with income above INR 15,00,000.


title: Income tax

text: Residents are generally taxed differently from non-residents. Few jurisdictions tax non-residents other than on specific types of income earned within the jurisdiction. See, "e.g.", the discussion of taxation by the United States of foreign persons. Residents, however, are generally subject to income tax on all worldwide income. A handful of jurisdictions (notably Singapore and Hong Kong) tax residents only on income earned in or remitted to the jurisdiction. There may arise a situation where the tax payer has to pay tax in one jurisdiction he or she is tax resident and also pay tax to other country where he or she is non-resident. This creates the situation of Double taxation which needs assessment of Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement entered by the jurisdictions where the tax payer is assessed as resident and non-resident for the same transaction.


title: Income tax

text: Residence is often defined for individuals as presence in the jurisdiction for more than 183 days. Most jurisdictions base residence of entities on either place of organization or place of management and control.


title: Income tax

text: Most systems define income subject to tax broadly for residents, but tax nonresidents only on specific types of income. What is included in income for individuals may differ from what is included for entities. The timing of recognizing income may differ by type of taxpayer or type of income.


title: Income tax

text: Income generally includes most types of receipts that enrich the taxpayer, including compensation for services, gain from sale of goods or other property, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, annuities, pensions, and all manner of other items. Many systems exclude from income part or all of superannuation or other national retirement plan payments. Most tax systems exclude from income health care benefits provided by employers or under national insurance systems.


title: Income tax

text: Nearly all income tax systems permit residents to reduce gross income by business and some other types of deductions. By contrast, nonresidents are generally subject to income tax on the gross amount of income of most types plus the net business income earned within the jurisdiction.


title: Income tax

text: Expenses incurred in a trading, business, rental, or other income producing activity are generally deductible, though there may be limitations on some types of expenses or activities. Business expenses include all manner of costs for the benefit of the activity. An allowance (as a capital allowance or depreciation deduction) is nearly always allowed for recovery of costs of assets used in the activity. Rules on capital allowances vary widely, and often permit recovery of costs more quickly than ratably over the life of the asset.


title: Income tax

text: Most systems allow individuals some sort of notional deductions or an amount subject to zero tax. In addition, many systems allow deduction of some types of personal expenses, such as home mortgage interest or medical expenses.


title: Income tax

text: Only net income from business activities, whether conducted by individuals or entities is taxable, with few exceptions. Many countries require business enterprises to prepare financial statements which must be audited. Tax systems in those countries often define taxable income as income per those financial statements with few, if any, adjustments. A few jurisdictions compute net income as a fixed percentage of gross revenues for some types of businesses, particularly branches of nonresidents.


title: Income tax

text: Nearly all systems permit residents a credit for income taxes paid to other jurisdictions of the same sort. Thus, a credit is allowed at the national level for income taxes paid to other countries. Many income tax systems permit other credits of various sorts, and such credits are often unique to the jurisdiction.


title: Income tax

text: Some jurisdictions, particularly the United States and many of its states and Switzerland, impose the higher of regular income tax or an alternative tax. Switzerland and U.S. states generally impose such tax only on corporations and base it on capital or a similar measure.


title: Income tax

text: Income tax is generally collected in one of two ways: through withholding of tax at source and/or through payments directly by taxpayers. Nearly all jurisdictions require those paying employees or nonresidents to withhold income tax from such payments. The amount to be withheld is a fixed percentage where the tax itself is at a fixed rate. Alternatively, the amount to be withheld may be determined by the tax administration of the country or by the payer using formulas provided by the tax administration. Payees are generally required to provide to the payer or the government the information needed to make the determinations. Withholding for employees is often referred to as "pay as you earn" (PAYE) or "pay as you go."


title: Income tax

text: Income taxes of workers are often collected by employers under a withholding or pay-as-you-earn tax system. Such collections are not necessarily final amounts of tax, as the worker may be required to aggregate wage income with other income and/or deductions to determine actual tax. Calculation of the tax to be withheld may be done by the government or by employers based on withholding allowances or formulas.


title: Income tax

text: Nearly all systems require those whose proper tax is not fully settled through withholding to self-assess tax and make payments prior to or with final determination of the tax. Self-assessment means the taxpayer must make a computation of tax and submit it to the government. Some countries provide a pre-computed estimate to taxpayers, which the taxpayer can correct as necessary.


title: Income tax

text: The proportion of people who pay their income taxes in full, on time, and voluntarily (that is, without being fined or ordered to pay more by the government) is called the voluntary compliance rate. The voluntary compliance rate is higher in the US than in countries like Germany or Italy. In countries with a sizeable black market, the voluntary compliance rate is very low and may be impossible to properly calculate.


title: Income tax

text: Income taxes are separately imposed by sub-national jurisdictions in several countries with federal systems. These include Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, where provinces, cantons, or states impose separate taxes. In a few countries, cities also impose income taxes. The system may be integrated (as in Germany) with taxes collected at the federal level. In Quebec and the United States, federal and state systems are independently administered and have differences in determination of taxable income.


title: Income tax

text: Retirement oriented taxes, such as Social Security or national insurance, also are a type of income tax, though not generally referred to as such. In the US, these taxes generally are imposed at a fixed rate on wages or self-employment earnings up to a maximum amount per year. The tax may be imposed on the employer, the employee, or both, at the same or different rates.


title: Income tax

text: Some jurisdictions also impose a tax collected from employers, to fund unemployment insurance, health care, or similar government outlays.


title: Income tax

text: Multiple conflicting theories have been proposed regarding the economic impact of income taxes. Income taxes are widely viewed as a progressive tax (the incidence of tax increases as income increases).


title: Income tax

text: Some studies have suggested that an income tax doesn't have much effect on the numbers of hours worked.


title: Income tax

text: Tax avoidance strategies and loopholes tend to emerge within income tax codes. They get created when taxpayers find legal methods to avoid paying taxes. Lawmakers then attempt to close the loopholes with additional legislation. That leads to a vicious cycle of ever more complex avoidance strategies and legislation. The vicious cycle tends to benefit large corporations and wealthy individuals that can afford the professional fees that come with ever more sophisticated tax planning, thus challenging the notion that even a marginal income tax system can be properly called progressive.


title: Income tax

text: The higher costs to labour and capital imposed by income tax causes dead weight loss in an economy, being the loss of economic activity from people deciding not to invest capital or use time productively because of the burden that tax would impose on those activities. There is also a loss from individuals and professional advisors devoting time to tax-avoiding behaviour instead of economically productive activities.


title: Income tax

text: Whether this is the earnings a firm receives, or an individual receives, it is subject to tax in many countries in the world. This tax subjection sometimes hinders the process of venturing into entrepreneurship. While this is not surprising since one of the “unconstituted constituted” rules of thumb for entrepreneurship is that there needs to be self-financing especially at the early stages of the new business. This tax burden on the income of a potential entrepreneur contributes to the lack of drive since there is a self-dependency with financing the business idea. In other cases, it can lead to withdrawal of pursuing that idea since someone else might have been able to overtake them and execute their idea in the project as time passes by Haufler et al. (2014, 28). Another way tax affects entrepreneurial entry through income rises from the fact that there is no guarantee of how well the business does. So, if the entrepreneurs are being taxed both for their business and their personal pay off from the business, they might end up making less or not enough to even re-invest in the business.


title: Income tax

text: Additionally, if entrepreneurs are able to jump through the scales of starting and running a business the next phase is typically employing people to work for their business. To be able to employ people, they have to be able to afford to pay them and this is normally hard for entrepreneurs especially at the early stages of the business. Djankov et al. (2010) explained that when the income tax is imposed on businesses it discourages entrepreneurs from hiring workers. And this cycle is detrimental to the economy of that region because the reason they might have encouraged innovative entrepreneurs to locate might have been to create jobs in their area which interprets to economic growth. But if they are unable to create jobs and hire workers to join the business, it ultimately counters the initial goal that was meant to be attained by the policymakers of the area.


title: Income tax

text: Additionally, Campodonico, Bonfatti and Pisan (2016) suggest that entrepreneurs should be discouraged from incurring debt by borrowing money. Ironically this aforementioned seems to be a source of financing most start-up entrepreneurs go through. Most entrepreneurs turn to debt financing since it is largely available, attainable, and highly recommended by their counterparts Henrekson and Sanandaji (2011, 10). When entrepreneurs are forced to incur debt financing it might be sustainable for a while but on a larger scale, if more entrepreneurs take this up, it leads to increased systemic risk and makes the economy more precarious to crash Henrekson et al. (2010, 9). This logically makes sense because it is something that has occurred before in the United States, i.e., the financial crisis in the United States.


title: Income tax

text: Apart from the income tax affecting the number of entrepreneurs entering the market, Hedlund (2019) argues that it also affects the quality of ideas of the entrepreneurs entering the market. Hedlund expressed how there are entrepreneurs who partake in innovation to contribute to the social impact rather than just for monetary gain. Therefore, when there are suppressants in the entry policies specifically tax policies it causes a 9.4% - 12.5% reduction in the quality of innovation.


title: Income tax

text: Tax credits are part of the incentives that business owners get from the government as a form of subsidy to help curb the costs associated with starting and running a business. Tax credits are simply the upgrade from getting a tax deduction or the better deal given in place of a tax deduction. They are typically granted to businesses rather than individuals except in special situations. A general example of how tax credits work is, if I received a tax credit of $1000 on my $5000 salary, I would not be taxed anymore, thereby saving $1000. While if I earned $5000 and received a tax deduction of $1000, my net income becomes $4000 and I am still taxed on that $4000 compared to $5000 which would have been more expensive. The explanation above describes how beneficial this tax credit could be if it is granted to entrepreneurs. The possible outcomes will benefit both the entrepreneurs in attaining their goals, as well as the policyholders in increasing economic growth. Evidence from Fazio et al. (2020) contributes to this conclusion by expressing that these tax credits not only positively influence the innovators at the beginning of their businesses but in the long run too.


title: Income tax

text: Furthermore, there is an argument that when tax credits are given to bigger firms, there is an in-balance in the business ecosystem, which often leads to a crowding-out effect rather than a spillover effect Fazio et al. (2020). Some might dispute the argument by suggesting that when tax credits are granted to firms in general, there should be a higher amount given to smaller start-up firms compared to the bigger or incumbent firms to level the playing field.


title: Income tax

text: These few reasons explained above are why taxes on income should be imminently reduced or completely dissolved to encourage people to participate in entrepreneurial activity within regions. Evidence from the research done has shown the effectiveness of reducing income taxes and how it played a role in the entrepreneurial growth of the region and on a larger scale, how it helped with the economic growth of that region. The persistence of high-income tax both for the entrepreneur prior to starting a business and the workers employed after the business starts seems to be a major issue to the hindrance of entrepreneurial activity in a location. A possible solution to this problem will be to cut the marginal taxes on the income as suggested by Carrol et al. (2000). Although this is a potential solution it should be carried out with a grain of salt to ensure that there is an even playing field for both entrepreneurs and incumbent innovative businesses.


title: Income tax

text: Income taxes are used in most countries around the world. The tax systems vary greatly and can be progressive, proportional, or regressive, depending on the type of tax. Comparison of tax rates around the world is a difficult and somewhat subjective enterprise. Tax laws in most countries are extremely complex, and tax burden falls differently on different groups in each country and sub-national unit. Of course, services provided by governments in return for taxation also vary, making comparisons all the more difficult.


title: Income tax

text: Countries that tax income generally use one of two systems: territorial or residential. In the territorial system, only local income – income from a source inside the country – is taxed. In the residential system, residents of the country are taxed on their worldwide (local and foreign) income, while nonresidents are taxed only on their local income. In addition, a very small number of countries, notably the United States, also tax their nonresident citizens on worldwide income.


title: Income tax

text: Countries with a residential system of taxation usually allow deductions or credits for the tax that residents already pay to other countries on their foreign income. Many countries also sign tax treaties with each other to eliminate or reduce double taxation.


title: Income tax

text: Countries do not necessarily use the same system of taxation for individuals and corporations. For example, France uses a residential system for individuals but a territorial system for corporations, while Singapore does the opposite, and Brunei taxes corporate but not personal income.


title: Income tax

text: Public disclosure of personal income tax filings occurs in Finland, Norway and Sweden (as of the late-2000s and early 2010s). In Sweden this information have been published in the annual directory "Taxeringskalendern" since 1905.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Baudouin (; 7 September 1930 – 31 July 1993), Dutch name Boudewijn, was King of the Belgians from 17 July 1951 until his death in 1993. He was the last Belgian king to be sovereign of the Congo.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Baudouin was the elder son of King Leopold III (1901–1983) and his first wife, Princess Astrid of Sweden (1905–1935). Because he and his wife, Queen Fabiola, had no children, at Baudouin's death the crown passed to his younger brother, King Albert II.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Prince Baudouin was born on 7 September 1930 in the Château du Stuyvenberg, near Laeken, Brussels, the elder son and second child of Prince Leopold, then Duke of Brabant, and his first wife, Princess Astrid of Sweden. In 1934, Baudouin's grandfather King Albert I of Belgium was killed in a rock climbing accident; Leopold became king and the three-year-old Baudouin became Duke of Brabant as heir apparent to the throne. Baudouin's mother died in 1935 in an automobile accident, when Baudouin was nearly five. Later, in 1941, his father remarried to Mary Lilian Baels (later became Princess of Réthy). This marriage produced three more children: Prince Alexandre, Princess Marie-Christine (who is also Baudouin's goddaughter) and Princess Marie-Esméralda. Baudouin and his siblings had a close relationship with their stepmother and they called her "Mother". His education began at the age of seven, his tutors taught him half his lessons in French and half in Dutch. He frequently accompanied his father to parades and ceremonies and became well known to the public.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Despite maintaining strict neutrality during the opening months of the Second World War, on 10 May 1940, Belgium was invaded by Nazi Germany. Baudouin, his elder sister Princess Josephine-Charlotte and his younger brother Prince Albert, were immediately sent to France for safety and then to Spain. The Belgian Army, assisted by the French and British, conducted a defensive campaign lasting 18 days, but Leopold, who had taken personal command, surrendered unconditionally on 28 May. Although the Belgian government escaped to form a Belgian government in exile, Leopold elected to remain in Belgium, and was placed under house arrest at the Palace of Laeken, from where he attempted to reach an understanding with the Germans, especially in respect of Belgian prisoners of war who were being held in Germany. The children returned to Laeken from Spain on 6 August.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Leopold had established a royal Scout group at the palace for his sons, whose members were drawn from the various Belgian Scout associations. In April 1943, the wearing of uniforms was banned by the occupation forces and although Leopold was told that the royal group was exempt, insisted that the ban should apply to them too. However, Baudouin was about to be invested as a Scout and persuaded his father to delay the ban for one day so that the ceremony could take place.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Immediately following the Normandy landings in June 1944, the king, his new wife Princess Lilian, and the royal children, were deported to Hirschstein in Germany and then to Strobl in Austria from where they were liberated in May 1945 by the United States Army. However, the royal family were prevented from returning to Belgium by the "Royal Question" over whether Leopold had collaborated with the Nazis; the surrender in 1940, his refusal to join the government-in-exile, his fruitless visit to Adolf Hitler at the Berghof in November 1940 and his unconstitutional marriage to Lilian whose father was believed to be pro-Nazi. Until a political solution could be found, the king's brother, Prince Charles became regent and the royal family lived at the in Pregny-Chambésy, Switzerland. Baudouin continued his education at a secondary school in Geneva and visited the United States in 1948. In a referendum in March 1950, the public narrowly voted for the king to return and he was recalled on 4 June 1950. However, parliamentary dissent and public protests forced Leopold to delegate his powers to Baudouin on 11 August 1950, and finally to abdicate in favour of Baudouin, who took the oath of office as King of the Belgians on 17 July 1951.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: On 15 December 1960, Baudouin was married in Brussels to Doña Fabiola de Mora y Aragón. Fabiola was a Spanish noblewoman who was working as a nurse. The couple announced their engagement on 16 September 1960 at the Castle of Laeken.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Fabiola began undertaking official engagements immediately, accompanying the king to lay a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Brussels on 26 September 1960, and remained an active Queen Consort and Queen Dowager for the rest of her life, involved in social causes particularly those related to mental health, children's issues and women's issues.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: During Baudouin's reign the colony of Belgian Congo became independent. During the parade following the last ceremonial inspection of the Force Publique, the royal sabre of the king was momentarily stolen by Ambroise Boimbo. The photograph, taken by Robert Lebeck, was widely published in world newspapers, with some seeing the act as a humiliation for the king. The next day the king attended the official reception; he gave a speech that received a blistering response by Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: As the head of state of Belgium, Baudouin, along with French President Charles de Gaulle, were the two prominent world leaders at the state funerals of two American presidents, John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and his predecessor General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower in March 1969. At JFK's, Baudouin was accompanied by Paul-Henri Spaak, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and former three-time Prime Minister of Belgium. At Ike's, his next visit to the United States, he was accompanied by Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: In 1976, on the 25th anniversary of Baudouin's accession, the King Baudouin Foundation was formed, with the aim of improving the living conditions of the Belgian people.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: He was the 1,176th Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece in Spain, which was bestowed upon him in 1960, the 930th Knight of the Order of the Garter and also the last living knight of the Papal Supreme Order of Christ.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Baudouin was a devout Roman Catholic. Through the influence of Leo Cardinal Suenens, Baudouin participated in the growing Renewal Movement and regularly went on pilgrimages to the French shrine of Paray-le-Monial.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: In 1990, when a law submitted by Roger Lallemand and Lucienne Herman-Michielsens that liberalized Belgium's abortion laws was approved by Parliament, he refused to give Royal Assent to the bill. This was unprecedented; although Baudouin was "de jure" Belgium's chief executive, Royal Assent has long been a formality (as is the case in most constitutional and popular monarchies). However, due to his religious convictions—the Catholic Church opposes all forms of abortion—Baudouin asked the Government to declare him temporarily unable to reign so that he could avoid signing the measure into law. The Government under Wilfried Martens complied with his request on 4 April 1990. According to the provisions of the Belgian Constitution, in the event the king is temporarily unable to reign, the Government as a whole assumes the role of head of state. All members of the Government signed the bill, and the next day (5 April 1990) the Government declared that Baudouin was capable of reigning again.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: In 1960, Baudouin declared the Belgian colony of Congo independent. During the declaration of independence, Baudouin delivered a highly contested speech in which he celebrated the acts of the first Belgian owner of the Congo, King Leopold II, whom he described as "a genius". In the same event on the day of that independent status, the first democratically elected prime minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, responded in a speech that was hypercritical of the Belgian regime. Lumumba cited the killings of many Congolese, as well as the insults, humiliation and the slavery they experienced.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Lumumba's speech infuriated Baudouin and generated extreme conflicts between the two men. After the independence of Congo, the natural resource-rich Katanga Province orchestrated a secession that received substantial military and financial support from the Belgian government, as well as from Belgian companies with business interests in Katanga. King Baudouin strengthened his relationships with the Katangese politician Moise Tshombé, whom he made a Knight in the Belgian Order of Leopold. In the meantime, Belgium's government, as well as the CIA, supported or organized plots to assassinate Lumumba.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: In early December 1960, Lumumba and two colleagues, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, political colleagues who had planned to assist him in setting up a new government, were imprisoned in military barracks located about from Leopoldville. They were underfed and mistreated, per Mobutu's orders. Lumumba registered his objections, writing directly to Indian and U.N. diplomat Rajeshwar Dayal, "in a word, we are living amid absolutely impossible conditions; moreover, they are against the law". Dayal later headed the United Nations Operation in the Congo, which aimed to deescalate the hostilities in that country. Lumumba and his associates were released in mid-January 1961. Within hours, they were again captured, transported, beaten, then executed and buried in a shallow grave by Congolese soldiers under Belgian command. Belgian police officer Gerard Soete quickly exhumed, dismembered Lumumba's body, and dissolved the corpse in acid. Dayal would later become India's foreign secretary. Lumumba's assassination shocked Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who called it "an international crime of the first magnitude."


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: In 2001, a parliamentary investigation set up by the Belgian government concluded that King Baudouin, amongst others, was informed of the assassination scheme developed by the subsequent dictator Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko and the Katangese rebel Moise Tshombé. Both men had conspired with a Belgian colonel, Guy Weber, to "neutralize Lumumba, if possible physically." The king was informed of the plot, but did nothing to oppose the murder. His lack of intervention was described as "incriminating" by the parliamentary investigation, although there was no conclusory evidence found that the king ordered the specifics of the plans.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Baudouin reigned for 42 years. He died of heart failure on 31 July 1993 in the Villa Astrida in Motril, in the south of Spain. Although in March 1992 the king had been operated on for a mitral valve prolapse in Paris, his death still came unexpectedly, and sent much of Belgium into a period of deep mourning. His death notably stopped the 1993 24 Hours of Spa sportscar race, which had reached the 15-hour mark when the news broke.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: Within hours the Royal Palace gates and enclosure were covered with flowers that people brought spontaneously. A viewing of the body was held at the Royal Palace in central Brussels; 500,000 people (5% of the population) came to pay their respects. Many waited in line up to 14 hours in sweltering heat to see their King one last time. All European monarchs attended the funeral service, including Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms (the only foreign state funeral ever attended by her in person as monarch), as did Emperor Akihito of Japan. Non-royal guests at the funeral included more than 20 presidents and leaders, such as UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, European Commission President Jacques Delors, French President François Mitterrand, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, German President Richard von Weizsacker, Polish President Lech Walesa, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Canadian Governor General Ray Hnatyshyn and former American President Gerald Ford.


title: Baudouin of Belgium

text: King Baudouin was interred in the royal vault at the Church of Our Lady of Laeken, Brussels, Belgium. He was succeeded by his younger brother, who became King Albert II.


title: Graz

text: Graz (; ) is the capital city of the Austrian state of Styria and second-largest city in Austria after Vienna. As of 1 January 2021, it had a population of 331,562 (294,236 of whom had principal-residence status). In 2018, the population of the Graz larger urban zone (LUZ) stood at 652,654, based on principal-residence status. Graz is known as a college and university city, with four colleges and four universities. Combined, the city is home to more than 60,000 students. Its historic centre ("Altstadt") is one of the best-preserved city centres in Central Europe.


title: Graz

text: In 1999, the city's historic centre was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites and in 2010 the designation was expanded to include Eggenberg Palace () on the western edge of the city. Graz was designated the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2003 and became a City of Culinary Delights in 2008.


title: Graz

text: The name of the city, Graz, formerly spelled Gratz, most likely stems from the Slavic "gradec", which means "small castle". Some archaeological finds point to the erection of a small castle by Alpine Slavic people, which over time became a heavily defended fortification. In literary Slovene, "gradec" still means "small castle", forming a hypocoristic derivative of Proto-West-South Slavic *gradьcъ, which descends via liquid metathesis from Common Slavic *gardьcъ and via the Slavic third palatalisation from Proto-Slavic *gardiku, originally denoting "small town, settlement". The name thus follows the common South Slavic pattern for naming settlements as "grad". The German name 'Graz' first appears in records in 1128. Related to the Czech "Hradec" (e.g. Hradec Králové) of the same meaning.


title: Graz

text: Graz is situated on both sides of the Mur river in southeast Austria. It is about southwest of Vienna ("Wien"). The nearest larger urban centre is Maribor ("Marburg") in Slovenia, which is about to the south. Graz is the state capital and largest city in Styria, a green and heavily forested region on the eastern edge of the Alps. It is located in the Graz Basin and surrounded by mountains and hills to the north, east and west. The city center sits at an elevation of , the highest point is Plabutsch mountain with at the western border. The mountain Schöckl is just a few kilometers to the north and surmounts the city by .


title: Graz

text: The oldest settlement on the ground of the modern city of Graz dates back to the Copper Age. However, no historical continuity exists of a settlement before the Middle Ages.


title: Graz

text: During the 12th century, dukes under Babenberg rule made the town into an important commercial center. Later, Graz came under the rule of the Habsburgs and, in 1281, gained special privileges from King Rudolph I.


title: Graz

text: In the 14th century, Graz became the city of residence of the Inner Austrian line of the Habsburgs. The royalty lived in the Schlossberg castle and from there ruled Styria, Carinthia, most of today's Slovenia, and parts of Italy (Carniola, Gorizia and Gradisca, Trieste).


title: Graz

text: In the 16th century, the city's design and planning were primarily controlled by Italian Renaissance architects and artists. One of the most famous buildings representative of this style is the Landhaus, designed by Domenico dell'Allio, and used by the local rulers as a governmental headquarters.


title: Graz

text: The University of Graz was founded by Archduke Karl II in 1585, it's the city's oldest university. For most of its existence, it was controlled by the Catholic church, and was closed in 1782 by Joseph II in an attempt to gain state control over educational institutions. Joseph II transformed it into a lyceum where civil servants and medical personnel were trained. In 1827 it was re-established as a university by Emperor Franz I, and was named 'Karl-Franzens Universität' or 'Charles-Francis University' in English. More than 30,000 students are currently enrolled at this university.


title: Graz

text: Astronomer Johannes Kepler lived in Graz for a short period. He worked as a math teacher and was a professor of mathematics at the University of Graz, but still found time to study astronomy. He left Graz for Prague when Lutherans were banned from the city.


title: Graz

text: Ludwig Boltzmann was Professor for Mathematical Physics from 1869 to 1890. During that time, Nikola Tesla studied electrical engineering at the Polytechnic in 1875.


title: Graz

text: Nobel Laureate Otto Loewi taught at the University of Graz from 1909 until 1938. Ivo Andrić, the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate obtained his doctorate at the University of Graz. Erwin Schrödinger was briefly chancellor of the University of Graz in 1936.


title: Graz

text: Graz is centrally located within today's "Bundesland" (state) of Styria, or "Steiermark" in German. "Mark" is an old German word indicating a large area of land used as a defensive border, in which the peasantry is taught how to organize and fight in the case of an invasion. With a strategic location at the head of the open and fertile Mur valley, Graz was historically a target of invaders, such as the Hungarians under Matthias Corvinus in 1481, and the Ottoman Turks in 1529 and 1532. Apart from the Riegersburg Castle, the Schlossberg was the only fortification in the region that never fell to the Ottoman Turks. Graz is home to the region's provincial armory, which is the world's largest historical collection of late medieval and Renaissance weaponry. It has been preserved since 1551, and displays over 30,000 items.


title: Graz

text: From the earlier part of the 15th century, Graz was the residence of the younger branch of the Habsburgs, which succeeded to the imperial throne in 1619 in the person of Emperor Ferdinand II, who moved the capital to Vienna. New fortifications were built on the Schlossberg at the end of the 16th century. Napoleon's army occupied Graz in 1797. In 1809, the city withstood another assault by the French army. During this attack, the commanding officer in the fortress was ordered to defend it with about 900 men against Napoleon's army of about 3,000. He successfully defended the Schlossberg against eight attacks, but they were forced to give up after the Grande Armée occupied Vienna and the Emperor ordered to surrender. Following the defeat of Austria by Napoleonic forces at the Battle of Wagram in 1809, the fortifications were demolished using explosives, as stipulated in the Peace of Schönbrunn of the same year. The belltower (Glockenturm) and the civic clock tower ("Uhrturm"), which is a leading tourist attraction and serves as a symbol for Graz, were spared after the citizens of Graz paid a ransom for their preservation.


title: Graz

text: Archduke Karl II of Inner Austria had 20,000 Protestant books burned in the square of what is now a mental hospital, and succeeded in returning Styria to the authority of the Holy See. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was born in Graz in what is now the Stadtmuseum (city museum).


title: Graz

text: On April 2, 1945, while the heaviest Allied bomb raid of Graz occurred, the Gestapo and Waffen-SS committed a massacre against resistance fighters, Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers, and POWs at the SS barracks at Graz-Wetzelsdorf.


title: Graz

text: The more recent population figures do not give the whole picture as only people with principal-residence status are counted and people with secondary residence status are not. Most of the people with secondary residence status in Graz are students. At the end of 2016 there were 33,473 people with secondary residence status in Graz.


title: Graz

text: Oceanic climate is the type found in the city, but due to the 0 °C isotherm, the same occurs in a humid continental climate with based in Köppen system (Cfb/Dfb borderline). Wladimir Köppen himself was in town and conducted studies to see how the climate of the past influenced the Continental Drift theory. Due to its position southeast of the Alps, Graz is shielded from the prevailing westerly winds that bring weather fronts in from the North Atlantic to northwestern and central Europe. The weather in Graz is thus influenced by the Mediterranean, and it has more hours of sunshine per year than Vienna or Salzburg and also less wind or rain. Graz lies in a basin that is only open to the south, causing the climate to be warmer than would be expected at that latitude. Plants are found in Graz that normally grow much further south.


title: Graz

text: Politically, culturally, scientifically and religiously, Graz was an important centre for all Slovenes, especially from the establishment of the University of Graz in 1586 until the establishment of University of Ljubljana in 1919. In 1574, the was published in Graz, and in 1592, Hieronymus Megiser published in Graz the book "Dictionarium quatuor linguarum", the first multilingual dictionary of Slovene.


title: Graz

text: The student associations in Graz were a crucible of the Slovene identity, and the Slovene students in Graz were more nationally aware than some others. This led to fierce anti-Slovene efforts of German-speaking nationalists in Graz before and during World War II.


title: Graz

text: Many Slovenian Styrians study there. Slovenes are among the professors at the Institute for Jazz in Graz. Numerous Slovenes have found employment there, while being formerly unemployed in Slovenia. For the Slovene culture, Graz remains permanently important due to its university and the Universalmuseum Joanneum archives containing numerous documents from the Slovenian Styria.


title: Graz

text: A symposium on the relation of Graz and the Slovenes was held in Graz in 2010, at the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the establishment of the first and oldest chair of Slovene. It was established at the Lyzeum of Graz in July 1811 on the initiative of . A collection of lectures on the topic was published. The Slovenian Post commemorated the anniversary with a stamp.


title: Graz

text: For the year that Graz was Cultural Capital of Europe, new structures were erected. The Graz Museum of Contemporary Art (German: Kunsthaus) was designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier and is situated next to the Mur river. The Island in the Mur is a floating platform made of steel. It was designed by American architect Vito Acconci and contains a café, an open-air theatre and a playground.


title: Graz

text: The historic centre was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 due to the harmonious co-existence of typical buildings from different epochs and in different architectural styles. Situated in a cultural borderland between Central Europe, Italy and the Balkan States, Graz absorbed various influences from the neighbouring regions and thus received its exceptional townscape. Today the historic centre consists of over 1,000 buildings, their age ranging from Gothic to contemporary.


title: Graz

text: For much of its post-war history Graz was a stronghold of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), but since the late 1990s the party has lost most of its support on a local level. It was overtaken by the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) in 2003, which remained the largest party in the city council ("Gemeinderat") until 2021. With the decline of the SPÖ, the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) has become highly popular in Graz, despite its negligible presence on a national level. The party placed third with 20.8% of votes in the 2003 local election, which has been attributed to the popularity of local leader Ernest Kaltenegger. It fell to 11.2% in 2008, but recovered under new leader Elke Kahr, becoming the second most popular party in Graz with 19.9% in 2012 and 20.3% in 2017. The KPÖ's popularity in Graz allowed them to enter to the Styrian state parliament in the 2005 election, marking their first appearance in a state parliament in 35 years; they have retained their seats in the subsequent 2010, 2015, and 2019 elections. The 2021 municipal election saw a collapse in the ÖVP's popularity, allowing the KPÖ, once again led by Elke Kahr, to become the largest party with 29% of votes. She was subsequently elected mayor in November, leading a coalition with the Greens and SPÖ.


title: Graz

text: The most recent city council election was held on 26 September 2021, and the results were as follows:


title: Graz

text: During 2003 Graz held the title of "European Capital of Culture" and was one of the UNESCO "Cities of Design" in 2011.


title: Graz

text: The Old Town and the adjacent districts are characterized by the historic residential buildings and churches found there. In the outer districts buildings are predominantly of the architectural styles from the second half of the 20th century.


title: Graz

text: In 1965 the "Grazer Schule" (School of Graz) was founded. Several buildings around the universities are of this style, for example the green houses by Volker Giencke and the "RESOWI" center by Günther Domenig.


title: Graz

text: Before Graz became the European Capital of Culture in 2003, several new projects were realized, such as the "Stadthalle", the "Kindermuseum" (museum for children), the "Helmut-List-Halle", the "Kunsthaus" and the "Murinsel".


title: Graz

text: SK Sturm Graz is the main football club of the city, with three Austrian championships, 5 Austrian Cup wins and 3 participations in the Champions League (where they were 1st in the first group stage in 2000/01 and therefore got promoted to the round of 16 as the first Austrian club ever). Grazer AK also won an Austrian championship, but went into administration in 2007 and was excluded from the professional league system.


title: Graz

text: In ice hockey, ATSE Graz was the Austrian Hockey League champion in 1975 and 1978. EC Graz was runner-up in 1991–92, 1992–93 and 1993–94. Graz 99ers has played in the first division since 2000.


title: Graz

text: The city bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics in 1995, but lost the election to Salt Lake City. Nowadays there is a plan to bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics with some venues in Bavaria, Germany to cut costs using existing venues around national borders. It's still facing a referendum, meaning usually the end for many former Olympic bids in Europe and North America since 1970.


title: Graz

text: Graz hosts the annual festival of classical music Styriarte, founded in 1985 to tie conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt closer to his hometown. Events have been held at different venues in Graz and in the surrounding region.


title: Graz

text: Referred to as "Steirisch" by locals, Graz belongs to the Austro-Bavarian region of dialects, more specifically a mix of Central Bavarian in the western part of Styria and Southern Bavarian in the eastern part. The Grazer ORF, the Graz subsidiary of Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, launched an initiative in 2008 called "Scho wieda Steirisch g'redt" in order to highlight the numerous dialects of Graz and Styria in general and to cultivate the pride many Styrians hold for their local culture. Two reasons for a melding of these dialects with Standard German: the influence of television and radio bringing Standard German into the home and the industrialization causing the disappearance of the single farmer since the farming communities are seen as the true keepers of dialect speaking.


title: Graz

text: An extensive public transport network makes Graz an easy city to navigate without a car. The city has a comprehensive bus network, complementing the Graz tram network consisting of eight lines. Four lines pass through the underground tram stop at the central railway station (Hauptbahnhof) and on to the city centre before branching out. Furthermore, there are seven night-time bus routes, although these run only at weekends and on evenings preceding public holidays.


title: Graz

text: The Schlossbergbahn, a funicular railway, and the Schlossberg lift, a vertical lift, link the city centre to the Schlossberg.


title: Graz

text: From the central railway station (Hauptbahnhof), regional trains link to most of Styria. Direct trains run to most major cities nearby including Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Maribor and Ljubljana in Slovenia, Zagreb in Croatia, Budapest in Hungary, Prague and Brno in the Czech Republic, Zürich in Switzerland, as well as Munich, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, and Frankfurt in Germany. Trains for Vienna leave every hour. In recent years many railway stations within the city limits and in the suburbs have been rebuilt or modernised and are now part of the "S-Bahn Graz", a commuter train service connecting the city with its suburban area and towns nearby.


title: Graz

text: Graz Airport is located about south of the city centre and is accessible by bus, railway, taxi (taxianbieter )and car. Direct destinations include Amsterdam, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart, Istanbul, Vienna and Zurich. In 2021 a two-line metro system was proposed for Graz, which would make Graz the second Austrian city with a rapid transit system after Vienna.


title: Graz

text: In Graz there are seven hospitals, several private hospitals and sanatoriums, as well as 44 pharmacies.


title: Graz

text: The "University Hospital Graz" (LKH-Universitäts-Klinikum Graz) is located in eastern Graz and has 1,556 beds and 7,190 employees. The "Regional Hospital Graz II" (LKH Graz II) has two sites in Graz. The western site (LKH Graz II Standort West) is located in Eggenberg and has 280 beds and about 500 employees, the southern site (LKH Graz II Standort Süd) specializes in neurology and psychiatry and is located in Straßgang with 880 beds and 1,100 employees. The "AUVA Accident Hospital" (Unfallkrankenhaus der AUVA) is in Eggenberg and has 180 beds and a total of 444 employees.


title: Graz

text: The Albert Schweitzer Clinic in the western part of the city is a geriatric hospital with 304 beds, the Hospital of St. John of God (Krankenhaus der Barmherzigen Brüder) has two sites in Graz, one in Lend with 225 beds and one in Eggenberg with 260 beds. The Hospital of the Order of Saint Elizabeth (Krankenhaus der Elisabethinen) in Gries has 182 beds.


title: Graz

text: There are several private clinics as well: the Privatklinik Kastanienhof, the Privatklinik Leech, the Privatklinik der Kreuzschwestern, the Sanatorium St. Leonhard, the Sanatorium Hansa and the Privatklinik Graz-Ragnitz.


title: Graz

text: EMS in Graz is provided solely by the Austrian Red Cross. Perpetually two emergency doctor's cars ("NEF – Notarzteinsatzfahrzeug"), two NAWs ("Notarztwagen" – ambulances staffed with a physician in addition to regular personnel) and about 30 RTWs ("Rettungswagen" – regular ambulances) are on standby. Furthermore, several non-emergency ambulances ("KTW – Krankentransportwagen") and a Mobile Intensive Care Unit (MICU) are operated by the Red Cross to transport non-emergency patients to and between hospitals. In addition to the Red Cross, the Labourers'-Samaritan-Alliance (Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund Österreichs), the Austrian organisation of the Order of Malta Ambulance Corps (Malteser Hospitaldienst Austria) and the Green Cross ("Grünes Kreuz") operate ambulances ("KTW") for non-emergency patient transport. In addition to the cars, there's also the C12 air ambulance helicopter stationed at Graz airport, staffed with an emergency physician in addition to regular personnel.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer ( Puening; August 8, 1910 – October 27, 1972) was a German American biologist, botanist, and a member of the Communist Party of America. She is best known as the common-law wife of activist Joe Dallet, and then the wife of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: Katherine "Kitty" Vissering Puening was born in Recklinghausen, Westphalia, Prussia, Germany, on August 8, 1910, the only child of Franz Puening and his wife Käthe Vissering. Although she claimed that her father was a prince and that her mother was related to Queen Victoria, this was untrue. Her mother was a cousin of Wilhelm Keitel, who later became a field marshal in the German Army during World War II, and was hanged in 1946.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: Puening arrived in the United States on May 14, 1913, aboard the SS "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse". Her father, a metallurgical engineer, had invented a new kind of blast furnace, and had gained employment with a steel company in Pittsburgh, and the family settled in the suburb of Aspinwall, Pennsylvania. Although her first language was German, she soon became fluent in English, speaking both languages without accent. Her parents regularly took her with them on summer visits to Germany.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: After graduating from Aspinwall High School in June 1928, Puening enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. She lived at home and attended freshman classes in mathematics, biology and chemistry. Her father now worked for Koppers, and held patents for the design of blast furnaces. Puening convinced her parents that it would be a good idea for her to study in Germany, and she sailed for Europe in March 1930. It is doubtful that she took any classes, but she did meet Frank Ramseyer, an American studying music in Paris under Nadia Boulanger, before sailing for home on 19 May.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: Puening completed the first year of her degree, but married Ramseyer before a Justice of the Peace in Pittsburgh on 24 December 1932. The couple moved to an apartment near Harvard University, where Ramseyer hoped to pursue a master's degree in music. She re-enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh in January 1933, and returned to her parents' house in Aspinwall. In June 1933 she sailed to Europe again, with her husband. When she returned, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, although there is no record of her ever completing any classes. She obtained an annulment of her marriage from the Superior Court of Wisconsin on 20 December 1933. She later told friends that she had discovered evidence that Ramseyer was a homosexual and a drug addict. She also had an abortion.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: At a New Year's Eve party later that year, Puening met Joseph Dallet, Jr., the son of a wealthy Long Island businessman who had attended Dartmouth College. He had been radicalized by the 1927 executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and had joined the Communist Party of America in 1929. He had been involved in the International Unemployment Day protest in Chicago on 6 March 1930 that had been brutally repressed by the authorities, and was currently working as a union organizer with the steel workers in Youngstown, Ohio. At one point he ran for mayor of Youngstown on the Communist Party ticket, but was not elected.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: Puening's parents had moved to Claygate, southwest of London, where her father represented a Chicago-based firm. On returning to the United States on 3 August 1934 after visiting family in Europe, she moved in with Dallet, becoming his common-law wife. They shared a room in a dilapidated boarding house that cost $5 per month. Gus Hall and John Gates had a room down the hall. They lived on the dole, $12.50 per month each. As the wife of a party member, Puening was allowed to join the Communist Party, but only after proving her loyalty by hawking copies of the "Daily Worker" on the streets. Her party dues were 10c a week.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: They separated in June 1936, and Puening went to live with her parents in Claygate, where she worked as a German-to-English translator. Months went by without any word from Dallet, until Puening discovered that her mother had been hiding his letters to her. "Her mother," her friend Anne Wilson recalled, "was a real dragon, a very repressive woman. She disappeared one day over the side of a transatlantic ship, and nobody missed her. That says it all."


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: The last letter from Dallet said that he was heading to Spain on the to join the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Puening met up with Dallet and his best friend Steve Nelson in Cherbourg, and they travelled to Paris together. After a few days there, she returned to London, and they headed south, crossing into Spain where he joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, a unit composed of American and Canadian volunteers.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: Puening wanted to join Dallet in Spain, and finally secured permission to do so. Her trip to Spain was delayed by hospitalization for an operation on 26 August 1937 for what was initially thought to be appendicitis, but which was determined to be ovarian cysts, which were removed by the German doctors. Puening returned to England to recuperate. Before she could depart for Spain, the news arrived that Dallet had been killed in action on 17 October 1937. His letters to her were published as "Letters from Spain by Joe Dallet, American Volunteer, to his Wife" (1938).


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: Puening went to see Nelson, who was in Paris, having been wounded in August, and they returned to New York, where she stayed with Nelson and his wife Margaret at their home in Brooklyn for two months. She then headed for Philadelphia to see her friend Zelma Baker, who worked at the Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Puening enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. There she met Richard Stewart Harrison, a medical doctor with degrees from Oxford University, who was completing his internship in the US. They were married on 23 November 1938.


title: Katherine Oppenheimer

text: Soon after, Harrison left for Pasadena, California, for his residency at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), while she remained in Philadelphia to complete her bachelor's degree in botany at the University of Pennsylvania, and was offered a postgraduate research fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles. At Caltech, she worked with physicist Charles Lauritsen. The X-ray laboratory at Caltech used for physics research was also used for experimental cancer therapy research. It was at a garden party thrown by Lauritsen and his wife Sigrid in August 1939 that she met Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist who taught at Caltech for part of each year. Soon after, she began an affair with Oppenheimer. They were frequently seen about town in his Chrysler coupe. Oppenheimer had dated several women since his break up with long-time girlfriend Jean Tatlock, some of them married, like Kitty Harrison. At Christmas time she went up to Berkeley without her husband, to spend time with Oppenheimer. His friend Haakon Chevalier met Kitty at a holiday dinner party thrown by the pianist Estelle Caen, one of Oppenheimer's ex-girlfriends.