Napalm is an organic compound used to thicken gasoline for use as an incendiary in flamethrowers and firebombs. The thickened mixture burns more slowly and can be propelled more accurately and farther than gasoline. When it comes in contact with surfaces, including the human body, it sticks and continues to burn. It was developed and first used by the US in World War II. Its use in the Vietnam War became highly controversial. "Napalm" is a combination of what two words?
The Old Believers were Russian dissenters who were excommunicated in 1667, after refusing to accept liturgical reforms imposed on the Russian Orthodox Church by Patriarch Nikon. Numbering in the millions in the 17th century, they endured persecution until 1905, when Czar Nicholas II signed an act of religious freedom. In 1971, the council of the Russian Orthodox Church revoked the anathemas imposed upon the Old Believers. What were some of the changes included in Nikon's reforms?
Agnon was an Israeli writer who is widely regarded as one of the greatest modern Hebrew novelists and short-story writers. Born into a Polish Galician family in what is now Ukraine, Agnon settled in Palestine in 1907. His fiction explores Jewish life from the late 18th century to the post-WWI period. The Day Before Yesterday, perhaps his greatest novel, examines the problems faced by the westernized Jewish immigrant to Israel. In 1966, Agnon shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with whom?