Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) is a large language model by OpenAI and the second in their foundational series of GPT models. GPT-2 was pre-trained on BookCorpus, a dataset of over 7,000 self-published fiction books from various genres, and trained on a dataset of 8 million web pages. It was partially released in February 2019, followed by full release of the 1.5-billion-parameter model on November 5, 2019.

GPT-2 was created as a "direct scale-up" of GPT-1 with a ten-fold increase in both its parameter count and the size of its training dataset. It is a general-purpose learner and its ability to perform the various tasks was a consequence of its general ability to accurately predict the next item in a sequence, which enabled it to translate texts, answer questions about a topic from a text, summarize passages from a larger text, and generate text output on a level sometimes indistinguishable from that of humans, however it could become repetitive or nonsensical when generating long passages. It was superseded by GPT-3 and GPT-4 models, which are not open source anymore.

GPT-2 has, like its predecessor GPT-1 and its successors GPT-3 and GPT-4, a generative pre-trained transformer architecture, implementing a deep neural network, specifically a transformer model, which uses attention instead of older recurrence- and convolution-based architectures. Attention mechanisms allow the model to selectively focus on segments of input text it predicts to be the most relevant. This model allows for greatly increased parallelization, and outperforms previous benchmarks for RNN/CNN/LSTM-based models.

Training
Since the transformer architecture enabled massive parallelization, GPT models could be trained on larger corpora than previous NLP models. While the GPT-1 model demonstrated that the approach was viable, GPT-2 would further explore the emergent properties of networks trained on extremely large corpora. CommonCrawl, a large corpus produced by web crawling and previously used in training NLP systems, was considered due to its large size, but was rejected after further review revealed large amounts of unintelligible content. Instead, OpenAI developed a new corpus, known as WebText; rather than scraping content indiscriminately from the World Wide Web, WebText was generated by scraping only pages linked to by Reddit posts that had received at least three upvotes prior to December 2017. The corpus was subsequently cleaned; HTML documents were parsed into plain text, duplicate pages were eliminated, and Wikipedia pages were removed (since their presence in many other datasets could have induced overfitting).

While the cost of training GPT-2 is known to have been $256 per hour, the amount of hours it took to complete training is unknown; therefore, the overall training cost cannot be estimated accurately. However, comparable large language models using transformer architectures have had their costs documented in more detail; the training processes for BERT and XLNet consumed, respectively, $6,912 and $245,000 of resources.

Release
GPT-2 was first announced on 14 February 2019. A February 2019 article in The Verge by James Vincent said that, while "[the] writing it produces is usually easily identifiable as non-human", it remained "one of the most exciting examples yet" of language generation programs:
Give it a fake headline, and it'll write the rest of the article, complete with fake quotations and statistics. Feed it the first line of a short story, and it'll tell you what happens to your character next. It can even write fan fiction, given the right prompt.

The Guardian described this output as "plausible newspaper prose"; Kelsey Piper of Vox said "one of the coolest AI systems I've ever seen may also be the one that will kick me out of my job". GPT-2's flexibility was described as "impressive" by The Verge; specifically, its ability to translate text between languages, summarize long articles, and answer trivia questions were noted.

A study by the University of Amsterdam employing a modified Turing test found that at least in some scenarios, participants were unable to distinguish poems generated by GPT-2 from those written by humans.

Restrictions and partial release

While previous OpenAI models had been made immediately available to the public, OpenAI initially refused to make a public release of GPT-2's source code when announcing it in February, citing the risk of malicious use; limited access to the model (i.e. an interface that allowed input and provided output, not the source code itself) was allowed for selected press outlets on announcement. One commonly-cited justification was that, since generated text was usually completely novel, it could be used by spammers to evade automated filters; OpenAI demonstrated a version of GPT-2 fine-tuned to "generate infinite positive – or negative – reviews of products".

Another justification was that GPT-2 could be used to generate text that was obscene or racist. Researchers such as Jeremy Howard warned of "the technology to totally fill Twitter, email, and the web up with reasonable-sounding, context-appropriate prose, which would drown out all other speech and be impossible to filter". The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in response to GPT-2, announced a tool to detect "neural fake news".

However, opinion was divided. A February 2019 article in The Verge argued that the threat posed by GPT-2 had been exaggerated; Anima Anandkumar, a professor at Caltech and director of machine learning research at Nvidia, said that there was no evidence that GPT-2 had the capabilities to pose the threats described by OpenAI, and that what they did was the "opposite of open", characterizing their refusal to release the full model as "malicious BS". The Gradient published an open letter to OpenAI requesting that they release the model publicly, comparing the threat posed by text-generation AI to the threat posed by the printing press, and giving Photoshop as an example of "a technology that has (thankfully) not destroyed modern society despite its potential for chaos":
Thirty years later, society has emerged relatively unscathed despite Photoshop being simple enough for high school students to use and ubiquitous enough to commandeer its own verb. Why? Precisely because everyone knows about Photoshop.

774M release
While OpenAI did not release the fully-trained model or the corpora it was trained on, description of their methods in prior publications (and the free availability of underlying technology) made it possible for GPT-2 to be replicated by others as free software; one such replication, OpenGPT-2, was released in August 2019, in conjunction with a freely licensed version of WebText called OpenWebText. The cloud compute costs for OpenGPT-2 were given as approximately $50,000.

On August 20, 2019, OpenAI released a partial version of GPT-2, with 774 million parameters (roughly half the size of the full 1.5 billion parameter model).

Full 1.5B release
Initial concerns that GPT-2 would lend itself to widespread misuse did not come to pass; The Verge said that "there are reasons to be skeptical about claims that AI technology will usher in some sort of 'infopocalypse.' For a start, we already have programs that can generate plausible text at high volume for little cost: humans." By November 2019, OpenAI said that they had "seen no strong evidence of misuse so far", and the full version, with 1.5 billion parameters, was released on November 5, 2019.

Limitations

While GPT-2's ability to generate plausible passages of natural language text were generally remarked on positively, its shortcomings were noted as well, especially when generating texts longer than a couple paragraphs; Vox said "the prose is pretty rough, there's the occasional non-sequitur, and the articles get less coherent the longer they get". The Verge similarly noted that longer samples of GPT-2 writing tended to "stray off topic" and lack overall coherence; The Register opined that "a human reading it should, after a short while, realize something's up", and noted that "GPT-2 doesn't answer questions as well as other systems that rely on algorithms to extract and retrieve information."

GPT-2 deployment is resource-intensive; the full version of the model is larger than five gigabytes, making it difficult to embed locally into applications, and consumes large amounts of RAM. In addition, performing a single prediction "can occupy a CPU at 100% utilization for several minutes", and even with GPU processing, "a single prediction can take seconds". To alleviate these issues, the company Hugging Face created DistilGPT2, using knowledge distillation to produce a smaller model that "scores a few points lower on some quality benchmarks", but is "33% smaller and twice as fast".

Application and subsequent research
Even before the release of the full version, GPT-2 was used for a variety of applications and services, as well as for entertainment. In June 2019, a subreddit named r/SubSimulatorGPT2 was created in which a variety of GPT-2 instances trained on different subreddits made posts and replied to each other's comments, creating a situation where one could observe "an AI personification of r/Bitcoin argue with the machine learning-derived spirit of r/ShittyFoodPorn"; by July of that year, a GPT-2-based software program released to autocomplete lines of code in a variety of programming languages was described by users as a "game-changer".

In 2019, AI Dungeon was launched, which used GPT-2 to generate dynamic text adventures based on user input. AI Dungeon now offers access to the largest release of GPT-3 API as an optional paid upgrade, the free version of the site uses the 2nd largest release of GPT-3. Latitude, the company formed around AI Dungeon, raised $3.3 million in seed funding in 2021. Several websites host interactive demonstrations of different instances of GPT-2 and other transformer models.

In February 2021, a crisis center for troubled teens announced that they would begin using a GPT-2-derived chatbot to help train counselors by allowing them to have conversations with simulated teens (this use was purely for internal purposes, and did not involve having GPT-2 communicate with the teens themselves).

On May 9, 2023, OpenAI released a mapped version of GPT-2. OpenAI used successor model, GPT-4, to map each neuron of GPT-2 to determine their functions.

Performance and evaluation

GPT-2 became capable of performing a variety of tasks beyond simple text production due to the breadth of its dataset and technique: answering questions, summarizing, and even translating between languages in a variety of specific domains, without being instructed in anything beyond how to predict the next word in a sequence.

One example of generalized learning is GPT-2's ability to perform machine translation between French and English, for which task GPT-2's performance was assessed using WMT-14 translation tasks. GPT-2's training corpus included virtually no French text; non-English text was deliberately removed while cleaning the dataset prior to training, and as a consequence, only 10MB of French of the remaining 40,000MB was available for the model to learn from (mostly from foreign-language quotations in English posts and articles).

Despite this, GPT-2 achieved 5 BLEU on the WMT-14 English-to-French test set (slightly below the score of a translation via word-for-word substitution). It was also able to outperform several contemporary (2017) unsupervised machine translation baselines on the French-to-English test set, where GPT-2 achieved 11.5 BLEU. This remained below the highest-performing contemporary unsupervised approach (2019), which had achieved 33.5 BLEU. However, other models used large amounts of French text to achieve these results; GPT-2 was estimated to have used a monolingual French corpus approximately 1/500 the size of comparable approaches.

GPT-2 was to be followed by the 175-billion-parameter GPT-3, revealed to the public in 2020 (whose source code has never been made available). Access to GPT-3 is provided exclusively through APIs offered by OpenAI and Microsoft. That was then later followed by GPT-4.

References

Large language models
Generative pre-trained transformers
Software using the MIT license
OpenAI

GPT-2


Traditional Māori religion, a pre-European belief system of the Māori, was little modified from the religion of the tropical Eastern Polynesian homeland (Hawaiki Nui). Both religions conceive of everything, including natural elements, all living things, and that all are connected by common descent through whakapapa or genealogy. Accordingly, all things were thought of as possessing a life force or mauri. Illustrating this concept of connectedness through genealogy are the major personifications of pre-contact times: Tangaroa was the personification of the ocean and the ancestor or origin of all fish; Tāne was the personification of the forest and the origin of all birds; and Rongo was the personification of peaceful activities and agriculture and the ancestor of cultivated plants. (According to some, the supreme personification of the Māori was Io; however this idea is controversial).

Maori

Māori religion


Gilbert de Umfraville (died 1245) was a 13th-century English baron. Gilbert was the eldest son of Richard de Umfraville, Lord of Redesdale. He succeeded his father as Lord of Redesdale and Baron Prudhoe from November 1226 at his seat of Prudhoe Castle. He also had lands at Otterburn.

Life
In November 1226, Gilbert de Umfraville succeeded his father Richard de Umbraville as Lord of Redesdale and Baron Prudhoe following the latter's death.

In 1228, he was summoned by Henry III to help with the Welsh 'Kerry' campaign. He and other barons were ordered to muster at Shrewsbury in preparation for aiding the English garrison at Montgomery Castle after they were attacked by forces led by Llywelyn ab Iorwerth.

Marriage and issue

 He married firstly Theophania de Balliol, daughter of Eustace de Balliol and Agnes de Percy.
 He married secondly Matilda of Angus, daughter of Máel Coluim, Earl of Angus and Mary de Berkeley and had issue:
Gilbert, married Elizabeth Comyn, daughter of Alexander Comyn, Earl of Buchan, had issue; died in 1308.

See also

 Umfraville

Sources

 Burke, Sir Bernard, A Genealogical History of the Extinct Peerages of the British Empire (London 1883)
 Paul, Sir James Balfour, The Scots Peerage, (Edinburgh, 1904), vol. i, Angus.

References

1245 deaths
People from Prudhoe
Gilbert
Year of birth unknown
13th-century English people
Earls of Angus
Peers jure uxoris
13th-century mormaers

Gilbert de Umfraville (died 1245)


The Pioneer Courthouse is a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, United States. Built beginning in 1869, the structure is the oldest federal building in the Pacific Northwest, and the second-oldest west of the Mississippi River. Along with Pioneer Courthouse Square, it serves as the center of downtown Portland. It is also known as the Pioneer Post Office because a popular downtown Portland post office was, until 2005, located inside.  The courthouse is one of four primary locations where the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit hears oral arguments.  It also houses the chambers of the Portland-based judges on the Ninth Circuit.

History
Built in stages between 1869 and 1903, it was first occupied in 1875 by judge Matthew Deady. At that time the building was named the United States Building. Pioneer Courthouse has survived several attempts to demolish it, while continuing to function as a federal facility. On March 20, 1973, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1977.

In March 1933, city engineer Olaf Laurgaard proposed tearing down the building to open a parking garage. John C. Ainsworth asked Oregon representative Charles Martin and Charles L. McNary to see if President Franklin D. Roosevelt would consider giving the structure and property to the city of Portland. Portland would then renovate the structure for the Oregon Historical Society and The Colonial Dames of America to use. Martin immediately replied that the timing was bad since Oregon was asking for funding of the Bonneville Dam, and it was likely illegal to donate a post office to a city. Ainsworth quickly came up with a new scheme: demolish the Pioneer Courthouse and build an office building for the Historical Society, the Boy Scouts, a theater, and a museum. A. E. Doyle, his architectural firm, the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Colonial Dames, and The Oregon Journal sharply opposed destroying the building.

In 2003, plans for renovating the courthouse sparked an unusual conflict between Portland Democratic congressmen Earl Blumenauer and David Wu. Wu, whose district contains the courthouse, supported a plan that included removing the post office from the courthouse, and adding five parking spaces in its basement. Wu's plan was ultimately adopted, and the $23.4 million renovation of the building was completed in December 2005.  The work included the addition of base isolators to protect the historic structure from earthquakes, the secure judges' parking area under the building, and the renovation of the lobby where the post office had been.

Notable trials
The trials of the Oregon land fraud scandal were held in the courthouse, beginning in 1904. These trials were documented at length in Stephen A. Douglas Puter's book Looters of the Public Domain.

See also
Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse
Pioneer Courthouse Square
Old Courthouse (St. Louis)
List of the oldest buildings in the United States

References

External links

General Services Administration page on the Pioneer Courthouse

1869 establishments in Oregon
Alfred B. Mullett buildings
Articles containing video clips
Courthouses in Oregon
Courthouses on the National Register of Historic Places in Oregon
Federal courthouses in the United States
Government buildings completed in 1875
Government buildings in Portland, Oregon
National Historic Landmarks in Oregon
National Register of Historic Places in Portland, Oregon
Portland Historic Landmarks
Southwest Portland, Oregon
Tourist attractions in Portland, Oregon
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Pioneer Courthouse


Philip Au (, 3 April 1916 – 27 October 1993) was a Hong Kong businessman and politician. He was an elected member of the Urban Council of Hong Kong from 1953 to 1959.

Early life and education
on 3 April 1916, Au was born in Hong Kong. At age 10, Au's father died. Au and his sister, Norma, were home-schooled by his mother. By age 12, his mother also died.

Au was educated at the Ching Hua College.

Career
In 1936, at age 21, Au left Hong Kong and went to Shanghai, China. Au studied business. His career started as a bank clerk at Mercantile Bank of India. His assignments advanced and he eventually became the head of the bank's currency arbitrage section.
Due to Japanese occupation in China, it resulted in replacement of many bank personnel, including Au. Au and Mickey Markarov started a bicycle assembly venture. Eventually his business expanded into a tricycle taxi service.
In February 1949, Au and his family subsequently returned to Hong Kong. Due to China on becoming a communist country, Au had no opportunity to liquidate or bring along any asset.
In Hong Kong, Au started Dalen Export Company and his wife was his secretary.
He then gradually started his own trading business, King Merritt & Co., in Hong Kong.

In the 1940s to 1950s, refugees arrived from the mainland China into Hong Kong, causing population growth and the local government struggled to accommodate these new immigrants. With Au's interest in helping refugees, one of his greatest achievements was his central role via Reform Club of Hong Kong in initiating government sponsored construction of multi-storied buildings for refugees. He was an active member of the Reform Club of Hong Kong and ran in the 1953 Urban Council election. He also held various honorary positions in the Colony.
By the mid 1950s, as a leader in Urban Council, Au led the planning of the North Point Estate, the first housing project undertaken by the Hong Kong Housing Authority (HKHA). In 1958, as a Senior Selected Councillor of Urban Council, Au showed Prince Philip the housing units of North Point Estate.
He was also vice-chairman of the United Nations Association of Hong Kong in 1957. He held his seat on the Urban Council until retired in 1959.
In 1959, Au gave up his successful export business and political career in Hong Kong and he and his family immigrated to the United States.

Personal
In 1944, Au married Mary Huang in Shanghai, China. Mary's father was Vladimir Golikoff, a Russian tea merchant. In 1945, Au's son Patrick Au was born in China.
In 1959, Au and his family immigrated to the United States. In December 1964, Au was naturalized in the U.S. He resided in California.
On 27 October 1993, Au died in California, U.S. He is buried in Albany, California, U.S.
After Au's death, his son, Patrick Au, donated most of his personal records, business records, documents and press cuttings related to the Hong Kong Reform Club and photos to the University of Hong Kong Libraries.

References

External links
 Philip Dalen Au biography from Derekau.net

1916 births
1993 deaths
Members of the Urban Council of Hong Kong
Businesspeople from British Hong Kong
Emigrants from British Hong Kong
Immigrants to the United States
Reform Club of Hong Kong politicians

Philip Au


Almere City Football Club is a Dutch professional football club based in Almere, Flevoland. Founded in 2001, they play in the Eredivisie, the top tier of Dutch football. They host their home matches at the Yanmar Stadion.

The club builds on former clubs from Amsterdam and is a result of ambitions of the Almere city council to play an active role in top sports. To that end, the sports club Omniworld was formed, which consists of a volleyball branch, a basketball branch and a football branch. Prior to the 2010–11 season, the club was renamed to Almere City FC.

History

Early history
Almere City can trace its history back to 1976, with the merger of DWS, Volewijckers and Blauw-Wit into FC Amsterdam. Disgruntled DWS supporters founded their own club, De Zwarte Schapen, named after their nickname, which translates as "Black Sheep". The club quickly rose through the ranks of Dutch amateur football, eventually reaching the Hoofdklasse. After several violent incidents on the pitch and a six-month suspension by the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB), the club moved from Amsterdam to nearby Almere and changed its name to Sporting Flevoland.

FC Omniworld

That name was changed to FC Omniworld in 2001 as a result of the efforts of a consortium (in which the city of Almere was a participant) to bring professional sports to Almere. These plans included a basketball club (BC Omniworld, now defunct), a volleyball club (VC Omniworld, now defunct) and the football club (FC Omniworld). However, when the Leefbaar Almere party became the largest party in the city council in 2002, the community withdrew from the project. This caused the club to fail the criteria for admission to the professional league in 2004.

Private investors were found, and the club managed to meet the first two criteria for admission (among which is a balanced budget) in late 2004 and early 2005. After FC Omniworld's stadium (the 3,000 seater Yanmar Stadion) and pitch were approved by the KNVB as well, the club met all criteria for admission, and joined the 19 clubs already in the Eerste Divisie. The club's first official match would have been held on 12 August 2005 against BV Veendam. However, the referee postponed the match shortly before the kick-off because heavy rain had made the artificial turf pitch unplayable. The club's professional debut came a week later, in an away match against FC Eindhoven, a 2–0 defeat. FC Omniworld registered its first official goal a few days later, in a 2–3 home defeat against FC Den Bosch, as Juan Viedma Schenkhuizen scored to make the score 1–2 in the 37th minute. Omniworld's first league point was achieved a week later, on 29 August against Go Ahead Eagles (2–2). The club's first victory came on 16 September, when Fortuna Sittard were defeated 3–2. In its first season, Omniworld finished in 19th place with 29 points from 38 matches. Forward Sjoerd Ars ended in fifth place in the top goalscorer ranking, with 17 goals.

Ars was transferred to Go Ahead Eagles for the 2006–07 season, but the results for Omniworld improved. The club achieved 41 points from 38 matches, finishing the season in 16th place. The 2–7 home match defeat FC Zwolle on 16 March 2007 resulted in the then-worst defeat in the club's short history.

Almere City

Early struggles (2010–16)
In March 2010, the club was renamed AFC Almere City before being changed again a few weeks later to Almere City FC, as the "AFC" prefix was deemed to be too reminiscent of the club's partners AFC Ajax. In their second match of the 2010–11 season, they were defeated 12–1 by Sparta Rotterdam, who equalled Ajax's Dutch league record win, with Johan Voskamp scoring a Jupiler League record eight goals on his debut.

Almere City finished dead last in the Eerste Divisie during their initial 2010–11 season, but were heeded from relegation due to the bankruptcy of RBC Roosendaal. In the following years, the team struggled to maintain consistency, and even suffered a relegation scare during the 2013–14 season.

Five-Year Plan and promotion (2016–present)
Under the guidance of manager Jack de Gier, the team underwent a revival, finishing in the top-10 for three consecutive seasons from 2016 to 2019. In 2016, This culminated in their highest-ever league finish of 7th place in the 2018–19 season under head coach Ole Tobiasen. The same year, CEO John Bes in consultation with the club's supervisory board implemented a "five-year plan" which aimed to transform the club into a sustainable and professional football organisation, with an ultime goal of reaching the Eredivisie.

In August 2019, the club announced plans of building a new grandstand and a club office building. The grandstand was completed during the 2020 winter break and increased the capacity of the stadium from around 3,000 to 4,501 spectators.

During the 2020–21 season, Almere City marked the conclusion of its prestigious five-year plan with a record-breaking season. The team achieved an impressive 75 points and scored a record-breaking 75 goals, securing a fourth-place finish in the final standings, which was considered a historic achievement for the club. However, the club's pursuit of promotion was unsuccessful as they were knocked out in the first round of the playoffs by NEC with a 4–0 defeat, during interim management under Jeroen Rijsdijk. During this period, the club's striker, Thomas Verheydt, set a new club record by becoming the first player in the club's history to score 20 goals in a single season, surpassing the previous record held by club legend Vincent Janssen. Despite the initial success, the club's good form was short-lived as they struggled in the 2021–22 season and could only manage a disappointing 14th-place finish.

During the 2022–23 season, Alex Pastoor's first full season in charge of the team, Almere City secured their highest league finish to date by finishing third in the Eerste Divisie. In June 2023, after a thrilling play-off run, the club gained promotion to the Eredivisie for the first time in their history by defeating Emmen, who was the first 16th place team to reach the playoff final under the new format, 4–1 on aggregate in the final.

Results

Club name
FC Omniworld (2001–2010)
AFC Almere City (2010)
Almere City FC (2010–present)

Current squad

Out on loan

Club officials

References

External links

Football clubs in Flevoland
Association football clubs established in 2001
Multi-sport clubs in the Netherlands
Football in Almere
Sports clubs and teams in Almere
Articles which contain graphical timelines

Almere City FC


Persian has been the official language of Pakistan until modern times.  The modern region of Pakistan has been part of many Iranian and Persian empires since its discovery and many varieties of Persian including Dari had been the language of communication between the different ethnicities.  In Pakistan, Persian has now become a minority language and had been replaced by Urdu by the British. Islamabad and Tehran maintain an active archival library in F-8. The library is named after a local poet and Pir Shah Ghareeb Nawaz and is the largest archive of Persian literature this side of the Indus.

References

Languages of Pakistan

Persian language in Pakistan


An outstation, homeland or homeland community is a very small, often remote, permanent community of Aboriginal Australian people connected by kinship, on land that often, but not always, has social, cultural or economic significance to them, as traditional land. The outstation movement or homeland movement refers to the voluntary relocation of Aboriginal people from towns to these locations.

Within the Australian Indigenous context, outstation refers to remote and small groups of First Nations people who relocated for resistance, in the face of assimilation. This occurred predominantly in the 1970s – 1980s and was aimed at providing autonomy for Indigenous people opposing conformance. Oftentimes, these relocations were supported by government and overall wellbeing improvements for those who had relocated were able to be seen, demonstrating the importance of self-autonomy and a cultural connection to country. What started as a few small breakaway groups lead into much larger outstation settlements. Many of these communities are now thriving as responsibility of the land and community has returned to traditional owners and cultural connections have improved. Outstations have also been referred to as homelands.

The outstation movement
A movement arose in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s which saw the creation of very small, remote settlements of Aboriginal people who relocated themselves from the towns and settlements where they had been settled by the government's policy of assimilation. It was "a move towards reclaiming autonomy and self-sufficiency". Also known as "homelands", the term "outstation" was adopted as it "suggests a dependent relationship between the outstation and the main homestead, but with a degree of separation". Outstations were created by Aboriginal people who "sought... autonomy in deciding the meaning of their life independently of projects promoted by the state and market", and could be seen as a sign of remote Aboriginal Australians' attempt at self-determination. The underlying similarity among outstations is that the residents are living there by choice, sometimes because they wish to protect sacred sites and to retain connections to ancestral lands and ancestors, or because they wish to live off the land, or to escape social dysfunction prevalent in larger towns and communities (as later described in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991).

Government support for outstations has ebbed and flowed over time. During the 1970s and 1980s several groups moved from towns, missions and former Aboriginal reserves to smaller settlements on their traditional lands. Governments were supportive of the moves, seeing benefits in health and well-being, maintenance of culture and the preservation of connection to country, known to be of great significance to Aboriginal people. The policy of decentralisation came with moves towards self-determination and land rights, after it was realised that the earlier policies of assimilation had failed. For about 30 years, the Commonwealth government assumed responsibility for the outstations, despite a lack of underlying policy, and they grew in number, particularly in the Northern Territory.

There is a large diversity among the outstations: most comprise small family groups; a few have more than 100 people. Some are only seasonally or rarely occupied, and in most there is much movement of people between the outstations and larger centres. Some have or had thriving local economies based on arts centres, employment as Indigenous rangers, and harvesting plants and animals from nature, while others are dependent on welfare income.

Terminology
Terminology has varied over time and by region. In a 2009 policy statement on homelands by the Northern Territory Government, it said:
NT continues to use the term Homeland Learning Centres for a particular type of educational facility provided to the small communities.

1987 report
In 1987 an inquiry into "[t]he social and economic circumstances of Aboriginal people living in homeland centres or outstations, and the development of policies and programs to meet their future needs" was undertaken by  the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs, chaired by Allen Blanchard.

On 14 May 1987 the Committee tabled its report (the "Blanchard Report"), entitled Return to country: the Aboriginal homelands movement in Australia. It defined homelands as "small decentralised communities of close kin established by the movement of Aboriginal people to land of social, cultural and economic significance to them". It said that the definition of homelands should include:

acknowledgement of the significance of Aboriginal peoples moving back to traditional country
a clear distinction between homelands and settlements, missions or reserves;
an acknowledgement of the traditional connection to the land and the ancestral spirits; and
a description of the permanency of homelands as traditional home territory.

The Blanchard report gave formal recognition of the importance of outstations, giving 58 recommendations aimed at "improving the economic security and viability of outstations and increasing the level of services available to outstation residents". At this time the good effects of outstations on residents' quality of life and aspirations were recognised.

1990s–2000s
Funding the outstations proved extremely expensive, and as government ideologies changed, they were seen as wasteful of resources. Adequate health services were not provided and training and employment opportunities were not funded. By the 1990s the difficulties emerged with the decentralisation process: some services were extremely expensive to deliver to multiple tiny communities in remote places with few possibilities for economic self-sufficiency. From 1990, the outstations were largely funded via the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which was established in 1990. Services were provided to outstations by small organisations based in a parent community known as an Outstation Resource Centre (ORA).

A review was commissioned by ATSIC in 1997, at which time there were about 12,000 Indigenous Australians living at about 1,000 outstations. It was intended to provide data that would reduce waste and improve efficiency, while supported by the commissioners who allocated funding. By this time, there had been a lot of criticism by politicians, and there were indeed many examples of waste, new houses built in uninhabited places, and suchlike. However, there were also thriving and well-run communities, and it was intended to review the funding of the ORAs, increase accountability and implement management techniques which would keep the elements of outstations which improved the lives of their residents. By this time, however, the costs associated with running the outstations were very high, and political will had dwindled.
Recommendations were made on the assumption that ATSIC, or something similar, would continue.

From 2004 there was a major shift in both policy at both state and federal level with regard to funding outstations. John Howard abolished ATSIC in 2005, after saying a year earlier that "the experiment in elected representation for Indigenous people has been a failure". In September 2007, during the Northern Territory National Emergency Response ("The Intervention"), the Howard government gave responsibility for outstations back to the Territory. By this act, the chronic underfunding was continued. The NT developed a new policy, contained in a framework called "Working Future", published in May 2009. The policy targeted delivery of support and services to 20 larger Aboriginal communities in the NT, to be called "Territory Growth Towns", which would benefit from federal funding. This ended the 20-year commitment to support homelands following the Blanchard review in 1987.

By 2009, there were 560 small communities, mostly inhabited by fewer than 100 people scattered across the NT. They are nearly all located on Aboriginal-owned land, which covers about .

In May 2009, the Northern Territory Government issued a policy statement on outstations/homelands, in which it stated that it: "values the contribution of outstations and homelands to the economic social and cultural life of the Territory...". The policy outlined new service delivery processes, and "introduce[d] a new disbursement model based on a more realistic framework for the allocation of limited government resources... consistent with [federal] Government policy on remote service delivery". It said that it would continue to support current outstations, where residents reside for a minimum of 8-9 months a year, and where there was an adequate supply of fresh drinking water, but residents must "commit to increasing self-sufficiency". While it was not opposed to Aboriginal people creating new remote communities, they would have to be self-funded. It would continue to support Homeland Learning Centres and schools.

The Australian Human Rights Commission's Social Justice Report for 2009, submitted by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma, devoted a chapter to "Sustaining Aboriginal homeland communities". After outlining the definitions of and criteria for successful homelands and the history of the homelands movement, it criticised the government's withdrawal of funding, saying that "if government policies fail to support the ongoing development of homelands it will lead to social and economic problems in rural townships that could further entrench Indigenous disadvantage and poverty". In 2009. about 81% of Northern Territory's Indigenous people lived in remote or very remote communities.

The report recommended:

2010s
According to NT politician Alison Anderson in 2013, there were 10,000 people living on 520 homelands, representing about 25 per cent of the remote Indigenous population of the NT, in about 2,400 dwellings. She spoke of the benefits of the homelands, "in health and wellbeing and social harmony". She said that her government reaffirmed the integral role of the homelands in the Territory, and were committed to providing homelands residents with the same services as other residents of the NT, "within reason".

In December 2014, the Government of Western Australia under Colin Barnett announced that it would cease funding 150 remote communities because it lacked the funds.

, there were about 1,200 outstations in Australia, and seen as significant for the maintenance of culture, language and relationships, thus contributing to health and well-being.

Present and future
Individual small communities continue to exist, although not described as outstations because they are not part of a federal or other program that advocates "the homeland ideal"; "settlements" is the more usual term these days. They survive on one-off grants for such things as Indigenous business enterprise or environmental protection (Indigenous Protected Areas), private contributions by their residents, or royalties from mineral exploration on their land.

 there were around 500 homelands in the Northern Territory, which include 2,400 residences housing about 10,000 people. The Northern Territory Government delivers services via its Homelands Program by funding service providers who provide housing maintenance, municipal and essential services, and housing maintenance. However, there was concern that many remote schools and other services were under-funded, and a review of the policy, previously revised in 2015, had not been completed by November 2020. While the NT government remains committed to supporting the homelands, which had been shown to enhance educational outcomes for Aboriginal people, the funding source for the future remained unclear. In 2015, the then Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, Adam Giles, agreed that his government would take "full responsibility" for delivering services to homeland, in exchange for  paid out as a once-only payment.

In October 2021, the NT Government asked the federal government to speed up its program of home construction and upgrades, as housing in some homelands such as Emu Point was so derelict and overcrowded that residents were living in tents.

Examples
Outstations mentioned in the Blanchard report include:

Northern Territory
Most outstations were/are in the Northern Territory.
Docker River, Northern Territory
Hermannsburg, Northern Territory
Maningrida, Northern Territory
 Utopia, Northern Territory

Queensland
Various communities, near Aurukun, Weipa, Doomadgee and on Mornington Island

South Australia
Pipalyatjara, South Australia
Mimili, South Australia
Fregon, South Australia (now Kaltjiti)
Ernabella, South Australia (now Pukatja)

Western Australia
Turkey Creek, Western Australia (now Warmun)
Balgo, Western Australia
Halls Creek, Western Australia
Warakurna
Wanarn

See also
 Animal Management in Rural and Remote Indigenous Communities (AMMRIC)
Homeland Learning Centre
Homeland Movement, 1989 studio album by Yothu Yindi
 Native title in Australia

References

Morice RD, (1976), Woman dancing dreaming: Psychosocial benefits of the aboriginal outstation movement, Medical Journal of Australia, Dec 18-25 2(25-26):939-42

Further reading

 AIATSIS summary

 Text

 "Native title holders are driving upgrades to Marralum outstation near the Western Australian border using funds generated from a major prawn farm project."

History of Indigenous Australians
Native title in Australia
Intentional communities in Australia

Outstation (Aboriginal community)


Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Remaining Sunlight is a trade paperback collecting comic stories based on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series.

Story description

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #1
Comic title: Wu-tang Fang

Buffy Summers and her friends come face to face with some kung fu vampires on their way from the Bronze and are threatened by a figure in a straw hat. They soon discover that the black belts of Sunnydale are being eaten.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #2
Comic title: Halloween

Willow runs away from home when her parents want her to stop seeing her boyfriend, Oz. Walking after sunset, she is grabbed by vampires for a Halloween snack. Buffy comes to the rescue.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #3
Comic title: Cold Turkey

Buffy Summers' holidays continue with Thanksgiving approaching. The day soon gathers pace whilst there are some bizarre things happening around Buffy's house. Buffy wants answers: What happened a vampire-opponent who survived the fateful Halloween massacre? Why is someone searching through her garbage? Why do so many people go grocery shopping at the last minute?

DHP Annual 1998

Comic title: MacGuffins

Buffy Summers gets a present from Giles – a test in the shape of two troublemaking green critters. How to get rid of them?

The story was printed black and white in DHP Annual 1998 and colored for this reprint.

Continuity
Supposed to be set in Buffy season 3.

Canonical issues
Buffy comics such as this one are not usually considered by fans as canonical. However, unlike fan fiction, overviews summarizing their story, written early in the writing process, were approved by both Fox and Joss Whedon (or his office), and the books were therefore later published as officially Buffy merchandise.

Collected editions
Trade paperback collections include:

Remaining Sunlight (88 pages, April 2002, Titan Books, , Dark Horse, )
 Omnibus Volume 3 ()

Notes

Comics based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Remaining Sunlight


John Stith Pemberton (July 8, 1831 – August 16, 1888) was an American pharmacist and Confederate States Army veteran who is best known as the inventor of Coca-Cola. In May 1886, he developed an early version of a beverage that would later become Coca-Cola, but sold his rights to the drink shortly before his death.

He suffered from a sabre wound sustained in April 1865, during the Battle of Columbus. His efforts to control his chronic pain led to morphine addiction. He began to experiment with various painkillers and toxins. In the end, after development of an earlier beverage blending alcohol and cocaine, this led to the recipe that later was adapted to make Coca-Cola.

References

1831 births
1888 deaths
Coca-Cola

John Pemberton


A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works  like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.

A bibliographic database may cover a wide range of topics or one academic field like computer science. A significant number of bibliographic databases are marketed under a trade name by licensing agreement from vendors, or directly from their makers: the indexing and abstracting services.

Many bibliographic databases have evolved into digital libraries, providing the full text of the organised contents:for instance CORE also organises and mirrors scholarly articles and Our Research develops a search engine for open access content in Unpaywall. Others merge with non-bibliographic and scholarly databases to create more complete disciplinary search engine systems, such as Chemical Abstracts or Entrez.

History
Prior to the mid-20th century, individuals searching for published literature had to rely on printed bibliographic indexes, generated manually from index cards. "During the early 1960s computers were used to digitize text for the first time; the purpose was to reduce the cost and time required to publish two American abstracting journals, the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine and the Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). By the late 1960s such bodies of digitized alphanumeric information, known as bibliographic and numeric databases, constituted a new type of information resource. Online interactive retrieval became commercially viable in the early 1970s over private telecommunications networks. The first services offered a few databases of indexes and abstracts of scholarly literature. These databases contained bibliographic descriptions of journal articles that were searchable by keywords in author and title, and sometimes by journal name or subject heading. The user interfaces were crude, the access was expensive, and searching was done by librarians on behalf of 'end users'.

See also
 Citation index
 Document-oriented database
 Full-text database
 List of academic databases and search engines
 Institutional repository
 Online public access catalog (OPAC; library catalog)
 ISBNdb.com

References

Information science

Library 2.0

Bibliographic database


Janka Kupała Park is a park in Minsk, Belarus located along Śvisłač river. This park is named after Janka Kupała, one of the classics of Belarusian literature of early 20th century.

Before World War II at this place there was the house of poet Janka Kupała. In 1959 the Janka Kupała's museum near the park was constructed that has at its disposal a big collection of autographs, photos, documents and poet's personal belongings. In 1972 a monument to Janka Kupała was built. In the park there is also a fountain called 'Vianok' (wreath).

References

Parks in Minsk

Yanka Kupala Park


This page is a list of saints, blesseds, venerables, and Servants of God from Asia, as recognized by the Catholic Church. These people were born, died, or lived their religious life in any of the states or territories of Asia.

Since Christianity began in Asia, the first Christians were Asians, and Biblical figures of the Old Testament considered to be saints also spent all or most of their lives in the Holy Land. While Catholicism has waxed and waned in various parts of the continent, it has had a continuous presence there into the twenty-first century.

Saints in early times

Due to the rise of Islam and the schisms leading to the establishment of Nestorian, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox churches, the Asian saints of times before the modern era are largely concentrated in the area of the Holy Land and the time of the Roman Empire. Christianity reached as far as China and India. The following is a very partial list of those Asian-connected saints traditionally recognized by Rome.

Popes

Nine of the early popes are said to have been Asian.  Three of these (Popes Constantine, John V, and John VI) have not been traditionally considered saints.  The other five are:

 Peter (r. 30–67)
 Evaristus (r. 99–107)
 Anicetus (r. 157–168)
 Theodore I (r. 642–649)
 Gregory III (r. 731–741)

In addition, Pope Sergius I was born to Syrian immigrants living in Sicily.

One pope died in Asia:  Pope Agapetus I (r. 535–536).

Apostles

All the apostles were Asians, and many of them lived and died in Asia.
 Andrew preached the Gospel in Asia Minor.
 Phillip preached in Phrygia, where he suffered martyrdom.
 Bartholomew did missionary activity in the region near Bombay in India. He suffered and died in Armenia.
 James, son of Zebedee was beheaded in Jerusalem
 James, son of Alpheus was the first Bishop of Jerusalem, where he was martyred.
 Thomas the Apostle evangelized parts of Persia and India, where he was martyred.
 Simon preached in Persia, where he was martyred.
 Jude Thaddeus preached in Armenia and Persia, where he was martyred.
 Matthias preached and was martyred in Asia.

Doctors

Seven of the thirty-five Doctors of the Church were from Asia, all of them from this time period.  They are:

 John Chrysostom (Antioch; in modern-day Turkey was Ancient Greece)
 Basil the Great (Caesarea, Cappadocia; in modern-day Turkey, was Ancient Greece)
 Gregory of Nazianzus (Arianzum, Cappadocia; in modern-day Turkey, was Ancient Greece)
 Cyril of Jerusalem (Caesarea Maritima, Syria Palaestina; in modern-day Israel)
 John of Damascus (Damascus, Bilad al-Sham; in modern-day Syria)
 Ephrem the Syrian (Nisibis; in modern-day Turkey)

Writers and theologians

Many of the early writers and theologians had connections with Asia.  A partial list would include:

 Matthew
 Luke
 John
 Paul
 Polycarp
 Ignatius of Antioch

Others

In addition to the categories above, these first centuries gave the Church many other saints, among them:

 George (Cappadocia; in modern-day Turkey,  was Ancient Greece)
 John Maron (Sirmaniyah or Sarmin; in modern-day Syria)
 Maron (Syria Prima; in modern-day Syria)
 Maximus the Confessor (Haspin, Golan Heights; in modern-day Syria)
 Sabbas the Sanctified (Caesarea, Cappadocia; in modern-day Turkey, was Ancient Greece)
 Pantaenus (lived in India)
 Severus of Vienne (said to be Indian by birth)
 Petroc (lived in India)

Modern times

After the canonization of saints came to be reserved to the Papacy around AD 1000, and especially after the establishment of the Congregation of Rites in 1588, the list of official saints with Asian connections is more clear.

List of saints

The following is the list of saints, including the year in which they were canonized and the country or countries with which they are associated.

 The Four Martyrs of Thane (d. 1321) (India)
 Francis Xavier, Jesuit priest (1622, China, India, and Japan)
 The 26 Sainted Martyrs of Japan (1862, Japan and India)
 John de Brito, Jesuit priest (1947, India)
 Nikola Tavelić and three companions, Franciscan priests and martyrs (1970, Israel)
 Charbel Makhluf, Maronite priest (1977, Lebanon)
 Maximilian Kolbe, (1982, China, Japan, India)
 The 103 Sainted Korean Martyrs (1984, North Korea and South Korea)
 Lorenzo Ruiz and fifteen companions, martyrs (1987, Japan and Philippines)
 The 117 Vietnamese Martyrs (1988, Vietnam)
 John Gabriel Perboyre, priest of the Congregation of the Mission and martyr (1996, China)
 The 120 Martyr Saints of China (2000, China)
 Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès, Maronite nun (2001, Lebanon)
 Joseph Freinademetz, priest of the Society of the Divine Word (2003, China)
 Nimatullah Kassab, Maronite monk (2004, Lebanon)
 Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, Franciscan sister (2008, India)
 Pedro Calungsod, lay catechist (2012, Guam/Philippines)
 Kuriakose Elias Chavara, Carmelite priest (2014, India)
 Euphrasia Eluvathingal, Carmelite sister (2014, India)
 Joseph Vaz, Oratorian priest (2015, India and Sri Lanka)
 Mariam Baouardy, Discalced Carmelite (2015, Israel, India)
 Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghattas, Sister of the Dominican Sisters of the Most Holy Rosary of Jerusalem (2015, Israel)
 Mother Teresa, missionary of charity (2016, India)
 Maria Theresa Chiramel, nun (2019, India)
 Mark Ji Tianxing, martyr during the Boxer Rebellion (1900, China)
Raimundus Li Quanzhen, martyr during the Boxer Rebellion (1900, China)
Peter Lieou, Layperson (1834, China)
Anna Wang, martyr during the Boxer Rebellion (1900, China)

List of blesseds

 Denis of the Nativity (Pierre Berthelot) and Redemptus of the Cross (India, Indonesia)
 The 205 Blessed Martyrs of Japan (Japan, Korea, India)
 The Blessed Martyrs of Cuncolim (India)
 The Blessed Martyrs of Songkhon (Thailand and Laos)
 Gabriele Allegra, Franciscan priest (China)
 Andrew of Phú Yên, layman and martyr (Vietnam)
 Vladimir Ghika, priest and martyr (Turkey)
 Khalil al-Haddad, Capuchin priest (Lebanon)
 John Gaspard Cratz, Emmanuel d'Abreu, Bartholomew Alvarez and Vincent da Cunha (Portuguese Empire, Vietnam)
 Thevarparampil Kunjachan, priest (India)
 Nicholas Bunkerd Kitbamrung, priest and martyr (Thailand)
 Isidore Ngei Ko Lat, layman and martyr (Myanmar)
 Salvatore Lilli, Franciscan priest and martyr, and seven companions, laymen and martyrs (Turkey)
 Ignatius Maloyan, archbishop and martyr (Turkey)
 Mary of the Passion, Franciscan Missionary of Mary (India)
 Stephen Nehmé, Maronite monk (Lebanon)
 Maria Assunta Pallotta, Franciscan missionary of Mary (China)
 Paul Yun Ji-chung and 123 companions of the Korean Martyrs (South Korea and China)
 Devasahayam Pillai, layman and martyr (India)
 Manuel Ruiz Lopez and ten companions, Franciscan priests, brothers and laymen, martyrs (Syria)
 Maurice Tornay, Augustinian priest and martyr (China)
 Mario Vergara, PIME priest and martyr (Myanmar)
 Clement Vismara, PIME priest (Myanmar)
 Diego Luis de San Vitores, Jesuit priest and martyr (Philippines, Guam)
 Eugenio Sanz-Orozco Mortera, Capuchin Priest and Martyr (Philippines)
 Iustus Takayama Ukon, Layperson (Philippines, Japan)
 Sister Rani Maria (Mariam Vattalil), Professed Religious and Martyr (India)
 Joseph Outhay Phongphumi, layperson of the apostolic vicariate of Savannakhet; catechist (Thailand)

List of venerables
 Mother Ignacia del Espiritu Santo, foundress of the Religious of the Virgin Mary (Philippines)
 Romano Bottegal, Trappist priest (Lebanon)
 Vincent Cimatti, Salesian priest (Japan)
 Istifan al-Duwayhi, Patriarch of Antioch of the Maronites (Lebanon)
 Anastasius Hartmann, Capuchin priest (India)
 Mathew Kadalikkattil, priest (India)
 Satoko Kitahara, laywoman (Japan)
 Thomas Kurialachery, Eparch of Changanacherry of the Syro-Malabarese (India)
 Sophia Leeves, Discalced Carmelite (Turkey)
 Matteo Ricci, priest of the Society of Jesus (China)
 Béchara Abou Mrad, Basilian Salvatorian priest (Lebanon)
 Fernanda Riva, Canossian sister (India)
 Agnelo de Souza, priest of the Missionary Society of Saint Francis Xavier of Pilar (India)
 Simon Srugi, Salesian brother (Palestine)
 Ladislao Bukowinski, Secular priest (Kazakhstan)
 Mary Jane Wilson, religious of the Franciscan Sisters of Our Lady of Victory (India)
 Zacarias of Saint Teresa, Carmelite priest (India)
 Mario Borzaga and 16 companions, laymen and martyrs (Laos)
 Joseph Vithayathil, priest (India)
 Francesco Convertini, Salesian priest (India)
 Stefano Ferrando,  Salesian priest and bishop (India)
 Isabel Larrañaga Ramírez, (Philippines)
 Joaquina Maria Mercedes Barcelo Pages, (Philippines)
 Aloysius Schwartz, (Philippines)
 Alfredo Obviar, bishop of Lucena, founder (Philippines)
 María Beatriz del Rosario Arroyo, foundress of the Dominican Sisters of the Most Holy Rosary of the Philippines (Philippines)
 Teofilo Camomot, coadjutor archbishop of Cagayan de Oro, founder of the Daughters of Saint Teresa (Philippines)

List of Servants of God
 Akash Bashir, security guard, martyr (Pakistan)
 Jerónima Yañez de la Fuente, professed religious of the Poor Clare Nuns (Philippines)
 Xu Guangqi, scholar-official, scientist (China)
 Flavian LaPlante, priest of the Congregation of the Holy Cross (Bangladesh)
 Thomas Cooray, cardinal, archbishop of Colombo (Sri Lanka)
 Marcel Nguyễn Tân Văn, Redemptorist lay brother (Vietnam)
 Carlo Braga, professed priest of the Salesians of Don Bosco (Philippines)
 François-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, bishop, cardinal, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (Vietnam)
 Theotonius Amal Ganguly, archbishop of Dhaka (Bangladesh)
 Francesco Palliola, Jesuit priest (Philippines)
 Alfredo Verzosa, bishop of Lipa, titular bishop of Capsa, founder (Philippines)
 Darwin Ramos, layman (Philippines)
 Nicolaas Kluiters, Jesuit priest (Lebanon)
 Fathi Baladi, young layperson of the Archeparchy of Beirut and Byblos of the Melkites; martyr (Lebanon)
 Giovanni Battista Adami, professed priest of the Jesuits; martyr (Japan)
 Giovanni Battista Sidotti, priest of the Archdiocese of Palermo; Apostolic Vicar of Japan and Chōsuke and Haru, laypersons of the Archdiocese of Tokyo; martyrs (Japan)
 Ibrahim Addai Scher and 27 companion martyrs of the Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac Genocide, archeparchs, eparchs, priests, catechumens, and laypersons of the Archeparchy of Urmia; priests of the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians); Mmartyrs (Iraq-Iran)
 Cecilia Moshe Hanna, professed religious of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Chaldeans); martyr (Iraq)
 Ragheed Aziz Ganni, Basman Yousef Daud Al-Yousef, Wahid Hanna Isho, and Gassan Isam Bidawed, priest and subdeacons of the Archeparchy of Mosul of the Chaldeans; martyrs (Iraq)
 Isabelle Abdullah El-Khoury, founder and renovator of the Antonine Sisters (Lebanon)
 Richard Michael Fernando (Richie), professed cleric of the Jesuits; martyr (Philippines-Cambodia)
 Helena Perera [Charithaya], layperson of the Diocese of Chilaw (Sri Lanka)
 Clement Shahbaz Bhatti, married layperson of the Archdiocese of Islamabad-Rawalpindi; martyr (Pakistan)
 Thayr Saidālla Abdāl and 44 companions, priests and layfaithful of the Archeparchy of Baghdad and Beirut of the Syrians; martyrs (Iraq)
 Joseph Chhmar Salas (1937–1977) and 34 companions (d. 1971–78), Bishop of Phnom Penh; priests of the Paris Foreign Mission Society and of the Dioceses from Cambodia along with lay companions from various Apostolic Vicariates (Vietnam, Cambodia)
 Pietro Manghisi (1889–1953), priest of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions; Martyr (Myanmar)
 Ioannes Baptista Yi Byeok and 132 companions (d. 1785–1879), laypeople from the Apostolic Vicariate of South Korea; martyrs (S. Korea-N. Korea)
 Henri (Benoit Thuân) Denis (1880–1933), professed priest of the Cistercians (Holy Family Congregation) (Vietnam)
 Carlo Della Torre (1900-1982), professed priest, Salesians of Don Bosco (Thailand)
 Pierre Lambert De La Motte (1624-1679), founder, Paris Foreign Missions Society, titular bishop of Berytus, apostolic vicar of Cochin (Thailand)

Other open causes

Others have been proposed for beatification, and may have active groups supporting their causes. These include:

 Paul Xakan Keobunkuang, seminarian of the archdiocese of Thare-Nongseng (Thailand)
 Émile Levrel, priest of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Thailand)
 Louis Heimo, priest of the Society of the Auxiliaries of the Missions (Thailand)
 Gerard A. Donovan, Maryknoll priest and martyr (China)
 Richardus Kardis Sandjaja, priest and martyr (Indonesia)

See also
Roman Catholicism in Asia
List of American saints and beatified people
List of Filipino Saints, Blesseds, and Servants of God
Catholic Church in India
List of Saints from India

References

 "Hagiography Circle"

Catholic Church in Asia
Saints
Lists of saints by place

+
Lists of Asian people

List of saints from Asia


Marie Antoinette, the Love of a King () is a 1922 German silent historical drama film directed by Rudolf Meinert and starring Diana Karenne, Maria Reisenhofer and Gustav May. The film depicts the life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, during the years leading up to and during the French Revolution in which she was executed.

Cast
Diana Karenne as Marie Antoinette
Maria Reisenhofer as Maria Theresa
Gustav May as Joseph II
Ludwig Hartau as Louis XV.
Viktor Schwanneke as Louis XVI
Ernst Hofmann as Artois
Uschi Elleot as Lamballe
Lia Eibenschütz as Countess Polignac
Olga Limburg as de la Motte
Eugen Burg as Count de la Motte
Erich Kaiser-Titz as Cardinal Rohan
Heinrich Schroth as Count Orleans
Georg H. Schnell as Lafayette
Hermann Vallentin as Mirabeau
Georg John as Robespierre
Max Grünberg as Marat
Ernst Pia as Dr. Guillotin
William Dieterle as Drouet
Henry Bender as Finance Minister
Edmund Löwe as Hue
Rudolf Klein-Rhoden as Böhmer
Emil Stammer as Abt Vermont
Hans Oberg as Simon

Bibliography
Vacche, Angela Dalle. Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema. University of Texas Press, 2008.

External links

Films about Marie Antoinette
German historical drama films
German silent feature films
Films of the Weimar Republic
Films directed by Rudolf Meinert
1920s historical drama films
German black-and-white films
1922 drama films
Silent historical drama films
1920s German films
1920s German-language films

Marie Antoinette, the Love of a King


Salvador Vilar Braamcamp Sobral (; born 28 December 1989) is a Portuguese singer, who won the Eurovision Song Contest 2017 for  with the song "", written and composed by his sister, Luísa Sobral. In doing so, he gave  its first ever win in the contest since its debut in , ending the longest winless run by a country in Eurovision history (53 years). Sobral and his entry hold the Eurovision record for the highest-scoring winner, having earned a total of 758 points under the current voting system, after winning both the jury vote and televote.

Early life
Sobral was born in Lisbon and has lived there most of his life. He was born into a formerly noble family, the son of Salvador Luís Cabral Braamcamp Sobral and Luísa Maria Cabral Posser Vilar. His paternal grandparents are Salvador José de Almeida Braamcamp Sobral and Maria Elisa Perestrelo de Matos de Figueiredo Cabral. His maternal grandparents are João Luís Posser de Andrade Vilar and Luísa Maria de Melo Breyner Freire Cabral. The politician Hermano José Braamcamp de Almeida Castelo Branco is his great-great-great-great-grandfather.

At the age of ten, he participated in the TV programme Bravo Bravíssimo, and at 20 he was one of the ten finalists of Ídolos, the Portuguese version of the Idols franchise. As a finalist, he sang music by Stevie Wonder, Leonard Cohen and Rui Veloso.

He studied psychology at the , in Lisbon, which he abandoned to pursue a degree in music. He spent time in Mallorca at the University of the Balearic Islands as an Erasmus student, where he sang in bars.

Career

2009–2010: Ídolos

In 2009, he competed on season three of Ídolos, Portugal's version of the Idols franchise. He finished seventh in the competition. His sister, Luísa Sobral, is also a singer who previously placed third on season one of Ídolos.

2011–2014: Barcelona and first concerts

After he left the Psychology program, he applied to the Taller de Músics, a music school in Barcelona, where he finished his studies in 2014. In 2015, he participated in the Vodafone Mexefest and EDP Cool Jazz festivals. During this time, Sobral traveled through several cities in Spain and among them, Tenerife, where he performed at a private party of a wealthy couple.

2016–2018: Excuse Me, Eurovision Song Contest and health issues

On 2 August 2016, Sobral released his debut single "Excuse Me" as the lead single from his debut studio album. On the same day he released his debut studio album Excuse Me. The album peaked at number 10 on the Portuguese Album Chart. "Nem Eu" was released as the second single from the album on 27 October 2016. In 2017, Sobral was confirmed to be taking part in Festival da Canção 2017, with the song "". He went on to win the competition on 5 March 2017, and represented Portugal in the Eurovision Song Contest 2017.

Sobral could not perform in the first rehearsals because of a heart condition and an operation that forced him to rest ahead of the performance in the semi. His sister took over the role of singer during the first rehearsals. He won the final with 758 points, which under the current voting system represents the highest scoring winner in the history of the contest.

In July 2017, he participated in the Super Bock Super Rock festival in Lisbon, fronting rock group Alexander Search, a project he shares with pianist Júlio Resende and other musicians – the band plays music inspired by the work by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

In 23 April 2018 he received – along with his sister, Luísa Sobral – the Portuguese Order of Merit, both receiving the medals of Commanders (ComM). This honorific award was given by the Portuguese president himself, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.

In May 2018, Sobral performed "Mano a mano" and his Eurovision winning song "Amar pelos dois" in the final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2018, held in Lisbon, alongside Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso.

2019–present: Paris, Lisboa and BPM
On 29 March 2019, his second studio album Paris, Lisboa (Paris, Lisbon) was released in 13 countries; he sings in 4 languages on it.

In 2020, Sobral made a brief appearance in the Netflix film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, performing "Amar pelos dois" as a busker in Edinburgh. The song plays during a montage of the movie's main characters arriving in Edinburgh.

On 28 May 2021, Sobral released his third solo album BPM. The album was later nominated for Best Engineered Album at the 22nd Latin Grammy Awards.

Personal life
Salvador Sobral is a fan of Chet Baker and Música popular brasileira singers including Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque. He speaks six languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English, Catalan, French and some Italian. In 2019, he started to learn Swedish, as he is a fan of Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman.

Sobral married Belgian actress Jenna Thiam in a small ceremony in Lisbon on 29 December 2018.

Health
On 5 September 2017, Sobral announced that he would go on a temporary hiatus due to health concerns, following a last concert on 8 September, in the gardens of Casino Estoril, in Cascais. "It is not a secret that I have a fragile health; I have a problem. It is, unfortunately, time to hand over my body to science and to abandon my life of concerts and music; time to leave for a while from this civilian world and go to another where, certainly, my problem will be fixed. Unfortunately, I do not know how long this will take." On 8 December 2017, Sobral underwent a successful heart transplant. He left hospital in January 2018, with doctors telling him to "take life quietly" and "keep away from crowds."

In October 2020, Sobral was diagnosed with COVID-19 after attending one of his sister's concerts but, by his own account, made an easy recovery having self-isolated for 20 days.

Activism

Sobral drew attention to the European migrant crisis by attending the first semi-final winners' press conference in an 'S.O.S. Refugees' shirt. "If I'm here and I have European exposure, the least thing I can do is a humanitarian message," he said. "People come to Europe in plastic boats and are being asked to show their birth certificates in order to enter a country. These people are not immigrants, they're refugees running from death. Make no mistake. There is so much bureaucratic stuff happening in the refugee camps in Greece, Turkey and Italy and we should help create legal and safe pathways from these countries to their destiny countries," he added, earning a round of applause.

The EBU banned him from wearing the shirt for the remainder of the contest. The EBU argued that Sobral's shirt was being used as a "political message," violating the rules of the contest. Sobral argued at his winners' press conference, however, that it held a humanitarian message, not a political one.

During a concert in Ourém, Sobral announced on 19 June 2017 that he would donate all the profits from the sales of his CDs sold to the people of Pedrógão Grande and the relief efforts in the town after it was severely damaged by wildfires the previous day.

Discography

Studio albums
 Excuse Me (2016)
 Paris, Lisboa (2019)
 BPM (2021)
 Timbre (2023)
Live albums
 Excuse Me (Ao Vivo) (2017)
EPs
 SAL (2022)

Orders
 Commander of the Order of Merit (23 April 2018).

References

Notes

Sources

External links

1989 births
Living people
Eurovision Song Contest entrants for Portugal
Eurovision Song Contest entrants of 2017
Singers from Lisbon
21st-century Portuguese male singers
Idols (franchise) participants
Portuguese nobility
Heart transplant recipients
Eurovision Song Contest winners
Portuguese people of Dutch descent
Portuguese people of Italian descent
Portuguese people of French descent
Portuguese people of German descent
Commanders of the Order of Merit (Portugal)
Golden Globes (Portugal) winners

Salvador Sobral