Gaetano Leonard "Tom" Vincitorio (September 11, 1921 - November 26, 2007) was an American historian, author, and educator who specialized in Modern European History, particularly the British politician Edmund Burke.

Life and career
Born on September 11, 1921, in Brooklyn, New York, Vincitorio attended St. John's University, where he graduated summa cum laude (B.S., 1942), and was also inducted into the Skull and Circle Honor Society. He then attended Fordham University in Bronx, New York, where he received an M.A. (1943), and Ph.D. (1950) in History. He also took classes at Columbia University in 1946. Vincitorio's doctoral dissertation ("Edmund Burke's International Politics") was prepared under Professor Ross J. S. Hoffman.

After receiving his master's degree, Vincitorio taught history in New York City high schools before being hired to teach history and social sciences at Pace College from 1946 to 1948. He then joined the History faculty at St. John's University in 1948, where he was initially hired to replace the extremely popular Professor George "Doc" Murray, who had unexpectedly died in late 1947. Vicitorio taught at St. John's for forty years and achieved the rank of Full Professor in 1957. He became chair of the history department in 1977.

After publishing two articles on Edmund Burke in 1953 and 1957, Vincitorio then collaborated with his mentor, Ross J. S. Hoffman, and Morrison V. Swift on a textbook, Man and His History: World History and Western Civilization (Doubleday, 1958; revised ed., 1963). He also wrote companion testing volumes for that textbook as well as three others, all of which were published by Doubleday during 1958-1959. After editing a volume of essays by St. John's history faculty, Studies in Modern History (St. John's University Press, 1968), Vincitorio was the editor-in-chief of a Festschrift for Hoffman: Crisis in the "Great Republic":  Essays Presented to Ross J. S. Hoffman (Fordham University Press, 1969), to which he contributed a chapter on "Edmund Burke and the First Partition of Poland: Britain and the Crisis of 1772 in the 'Great Republic.'"

Vincitorio then worked to continue James Truslow Adams' The March of Democracy: A History of the United States, which had originally been published in 1932-1933. The publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, had begun to issue supplements chronicling events in American history since the original set was published, and Vincitorio co-edited Volume 8 (Challenge and Conflict), and then edited Volumes 9 (The Record of 1970-71), 10 (The Record of 1972-73), and 11 (The Record of 1974). He also contributed articles to the Catholic Encyclopedia for School and Home (McGraw-Hill, 1965), The New Catholic Encyclopedia (McGraw-Hill, 1967), and The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia (Garland Publishing, 2000), as well as to the journals Long Island Forum, New York Irish History, and Long Island Historical Journal. He served for many years on the editorial board of Review of National Literatures, which was founded and edited by Anne Paolucci.

Vincitorio was a member of the American Historical Association, the American Catholic Historical Association, the Conference on British Studies, the Modern Language Association of America, the Executive Board of the U.S. Catholic Historical Society, the Historical Association (England), and the Long Island British Studies Group. He was listed as a member of the Society for the Christian Commonwealth's "Christian Commentary Lecture Bureau," which was advertised in Triumph magazine, all of which were founded by L. Brent Bozell Jr. He contributed book reviews to the Catholic Historical Review. Among the doctoral students he supervised at St. John's were Anthony M. Brescia, who taught at Nassau Community College, and Catherine Papadakos.

References

Further reading
Swift, Hoffman, Vincitorio, Man and His History, New York: Doubleday, 1963, http://worldcat.org/oclc/991537199.
"Gaetano L(eonard) Vincitorio," Contemporary Authors Online, Detroit: Gale, 2002, Biography in Context, Web. 13 Dec. 2014.

External links
Dr Gaetano Leonard "Tom" Vincitorio at Find a Grave
George Francis Murray at Find a Grave

1921 births
2007 deaths
20th-century American historians
American male non-fiction writers
Writers from Brooklyn
St. John's University (New York City) alumni
Fordham University alumni
St. John's University (New York City) faculty
Pace University faculty
American textbook writers
Historians from New York (state)
20th-century American male writers

Gaetano L. Vincitorio


Daniel Crawford (7 December 1869 – 3 June 1926), also known as 'Konga Vantu', was a Scottish missionary of the Plymouth Brethren in central-southern Africa.

He was born in Gourock, son of a Clyde boat captain. He was influenced to go to Africa by meeting Frederick Arnot in 1888, a missionary who had just returned from two years at Bunkeya, capital of the Garenganze King, Msiri, where he had founded the Plymouth Brethren's Garenganze Evangelical Mission.

Crawford arrived at Bunkeya in 1890 to join two Plymouth Brethren already at the mission. He was therefore a junior observer rather than a player in the dramatic events of late 1891 when British and Belgian expeditions competed to take Msiri's kingdom into their respective colonies, and Msiri was killed by Lieutenant Bodson of the Belgian expedition,

In the aftermath of the killing and a massacre of Msiri's men, the 10,000-strong population of Bunkeya fled into the bush, and Crawford moved to the western shore of Lake Mweru and established a mission there. The Congo Free State's agents took over Katanga with a brutality which caused many refugees to come to Crawford's mission, which was the origin of his nickname 'Konga Vantu' which means 'gatherer of the people'. Crawford also persuaded many chiefs to give up their slaves whom he took into his mission. Soon he had to move to a better site which could support more people at the Luanza River near where it flows into Lake Mweru.

Crawford was an individualist who did not work well for long in the company of his seniors or colleagues, but he did much to travel around the Luapula valley founding and encouraging other outposts of the Garenganze Evangelical Mission. He studied African languages and sought to understand African customs and traditional rule, and was a frequent visitor to chiefs such as Mwata Kazembe. When the latter rebelled against and was defeated by the British, Crawford and his mission colleagues had a role in persuading the chief to accept the inevitable and to achieve a working relationship with the colonial authorities. He wrote two influential books, of which one, Thinking Black was recommended reading for those Europeans who wanted to work in partnership with, rather than over, Africans.

Crawford also encouraged other Protestant missions to come to Luapula, such as the London Missionary Society, and he was invited to open their Mbereshi Mission in 1900.

Despite once believing that a missionary should not marry, Crawford married Grace Tilsley and continued to be based at Luanza until his death in 1926. He only returned to Britain once, although he did visit the US and Australia to recruit missionaries and obtain funding.

One of Dan Crawford's grandchildren is Mairi Hedderwick, author and illustrator of the Katie Morag series of children's picture books.

References

External links

Scottish Protestant missionaries
Scottish evangelicals
Protestant missionaries in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Scottish Plymouth Brethren
1869 births
1926 deaths
British expatriates in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Dan Crawford


The Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM) is an x86 assembler that uses the Intel syntax for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Beginning with MASM 8.0, there are two versions of the assembler: One for 16-bit & 32-bit assembly sources, and another (ML64) for 64-bit sources only.

MASM is maintained by Microsoft, but since version 6.12 it has not been sold as a separate product. It is instead supplied with various Microsoft SDKs and C compilers. Recent versions of MASM are included with Microsoft Visual Studio.

Notable applications compiled using MASM are RollerCoaster Tycoon which was 99% written in assembly and built with MASM.

History
The earliest versions of MASM date back to 1981. They were sold either as the generic "Microsoft Macro Assembler" for all x86 machines or as the OEM version specifically for IBM PCs. By Version 4.0, the IBM release was dropped. Up to Version 3.0, MASM was also bundled with a smaller companion assembler, ASM.EXE. This was intended for PCs with only 64k of memory and lacked some features of the full MASM, such as the ability to use code macros.

MS-DOS versions up to 4.x included Microsoft's LINK utility, which was designed to convert intermediate OBJ files generated by MASM and other compilers; however, as users who did not program had no use of the utility, it was moved to their compiler packages.

Version 4.0, released October 1985, added support for 286 instructions.

Version 5.0, released August 1987, supported 386 instructions, and also shorthand mnemonics for segment descriptors (.code, .data, etc.), but it could still only generate real mode executables.

Through version 5.0, MASM was available as an MS-DOS application only. Versions 5.1 and 6.0 were available as both MS-DOS and OS/2 applications.

Version 6.0, released in 1991, added parameter passing with "invoke" and some other high level-like constructs, in addition to the already existing high level-like records, among other things. Both 6.0 and 6.0B were able to be run on an 8086 processor but could generate flat 32 bit 386 code.  In 1992, 6.1 was released, which added support for the COFF object format used by Windows NT, and removed support for OS/2.  6.1 was built as a bi-modal binary before the Win32 API was finalized, and is incompatible with running on Windows NT due to missing exports.

In 1993 full support for protected mode 32-bit applications and the Pentium instruction set was added. The 6.11 MASM binary at that time (1993) was shipped as a "bi-modal" (win32, ie PE) DOS-extended binary (using the Phar Lap TNT DOS extender). However, the setup.exe is an MZ executable so won't run under 64-bit versions of Windows, and the bi-modal ml.exe is compressed, and the decomp.exe is an NE executable, so also won't run under 64-bit versions of Windows (if you were hoping to manually extract the required ml.exe and ml.err), so you effectively need access to 32-bit Windows (or MSDOS) in order to install it. Version 6.11 is the last version of MASM that will run under MS-DOS. There were a series of patches available, up to 6.11d, that need 32-bit Windows to run, but the patched ml.exe still has the Phar Lap dos extender so can still be run under MSDOS.

Versions 6.12 to 6.14 were implemented as patches for version 6.11. These patches were self-extracting PK executables (ie MSDOS), so won't run under 64-bit Windows. Even if you extract them by other means, the patch.exe is an NE executable so won't be able to run on 64-bit Windows to update ml.exe either. If you do run on a 32-bit Windows (or earlier), patch will strip the Phar Lap dos extender from ml.exe so it can no longer be run on MSDOS. The stripping of Phar Lap makes the MZ portion of the executable smaller, so that the "PE" signature is more easily visible, unlike the situation with 6.11 where the PE signature was a long way into the file.

By the end of 1997, MASM fully supported Windows 95 and included some AMD-specific instructions.

In 1999, Intel released macros for SIMD and MMX instructions, which were shortly thereafter supported natively by MASM. With the 6.15 release in 2000, Microsoft discontinued support for MASM as a separate product, instead subsuming it into the Visual Studio toolset. Though it was still compatible with Windows 98, current versions of Visual Studio were not. Support for 64-bit processors was not added until the release of Visual Studio 2005, with MASM 8.0.

After 25 June 2015, there are at least three different MASMs with the version number 14.00.23026. In Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise Edition, there is one "amd64_x86" ml and two ml64s, "x86_amd64" and "amd64". They run on different platforms targeting different platforms:
 amd64_x86: generates 64-bit code, runs in a Windows 32-bit environment
 x86_amd64: generates 32-bit code, runs in a Windows 64-bit environment
 amd64:     generates 64-bit code, runs in a Windows 64-bit environment

Object module formats supported by MASM
Early versions of MASM generated object modules using the OMF format, which was used to create binaries for MS-DOS or OS/2.

Since version 6.1, MASM is able to produce object modules in the Portable Executable (PE/COFF) format. PE/COFF is compatible with recent Microsoft C compilers, and object modules produced by either MASM or the C compiler can be routinely intermixed and linked into Win32 and Win64 binaries.

Assemblers compatible with MASM
Some other assemblers can assemble most code written for MASM, with the exception of more complex macros.

 Turbo Assembler (TASM) developed by Borland, later owned by Embarcadero, last updated in 2002, but still supplied with C++Builder and RAD Studio.
 JWasm Macro Assembler, licensed under the Sybase Open Watcom EULA. Last updated in 2014.
 Pelle's Macro Assembler, a component of the Pelles C  development environment.
 UASM is a free MASM-compatible assembler based on JWasm.
 ASMC is a free MASM-compatible assembler based on JWasm.

Mixed language programming support
Documentation for 1987's version 5.1 included support for "Microsoft BASIC, C, FORTRAN, Pascal."

See also
 Microsoft MACRO-80
 Assembly language
 High-level assembler
 Comparison of assemblers

References

External links

 Intro to MASM Win32
 Masm32 project

1981 software
Assemblers
Macro Assembler
DOS software
Programming tools for Windows

Microsoft Macro Assembler


The League of the Macedonians (, Koinòn tōn Makedónōn) was a confederationally-organized commonwealth institution (i.e., an ancient Greek regional state or koinon) consisting of all Macedonian communities united around a monarch. It can be paralleled from the koinon of the Molossians, but it seems that the Macedonian koinon had far less power than that of the Molossians. The capital, or headquarters, of the Macedonian koinon was the city of Beroia.

History
Both numismatic and inscriptional evidence attest to the existence of the Macedonian koinon before and after the Roman conquest of Macedon. Coinage in the name of the "Macedonians" (i.e., ΜΑΚΕΔΟΝΩΝ) was in continuous production from the reigns of Philip V (r. 238–179 BC) and Perseus (r. 212–166 BC) well into the Roman period. It was reorganized under the early Roman Empire and transformed into an institution related to the imperial cult as happened to all the koina of the period.

The koinon, administered by local elite members, organized and financed games and festivals and were awarded Roman citizenship. Using traditional ethnic symbols depicted on its coins, such as the Macedonian shield and the winged thunderbolt, the koinon preserved a sense of Greek/Macedonian civic identity within the province until the end of the 2nd century AD. The last attestation of a person "ethnically" identified as Macedonian is dated to the beginning of the 4th century AD.

References

Citations

Sources

Government of Macedonia (ancient kingdom)
Antigonid Macedonia
Government of Roman Macedonia
Macedonian

League of the Macedonians


Piracy is an EC Comics title published in the mid 1950s. The bi-monthly comic book, published by Bill Gaines and edited by Al Feldstein, began with an issue cover-dated October–November 1954. It ran for seven issues, ending with the October–November 1955 issue.

Front covers were by Wally Wood, Reed Crandall, Bernard Krigstein and George Evans. The stories of adventure on the high seas were illustrated by Wood, Crandall, Krigstein, Jack Davis, Al Williamson, Graham Ingels and Angelo Torres.

Piracy was reprinted (in black and white) as part of publisher Russ Cochran's The Complete EC Library.  Between March and September 1998, Cochran (in association with Gemstone Publishing) reprinted all seven individual issues.  This complete run was later rebound, with covers included, in a pair of softcover EC Annuals. Dark Horse reprinted Piracy as part of the EC Archives series in 2019.

Issue guide

See also
List of Entertaining Comics publications

External links
Comics book DB page

EC Comics publications
Comics by Carl Wessler
Pirate comics

Piracy (comics)


Albania's transition from a socialist centrally planned economy to a capitalist mixed economy has been largely successful. "Formal non-agricultural employment in the private sector more than doubled between 1999 and 2013," notes the World Bank, with much of this expansion powered by foreign investment.

For further information on the types of business entities in this country and their abbreviations, see Business entities in Albania.

Notable companies
This list includes notable companies with primary headquarters located in the country. The industry and sector follow the Industry Classification Benchmark taxonomy. Organizations which have ceased operations are included and noted as defunct.

See also
 :Category:Albanian brands
 List of airlines of Albania
 List of banks in Albania
 List of supermarket chains in Albania

References

Albania

List of companies of Albania


Cold shrink tubing is an open ended rubber sleeve, made primarily from rubber elastomers with high-performance physical properties, that has been factory expanded or pre-stretched, and assembled onto a supporting removable plastic core. Cold shrink tubing shrinks upon removal of the supporting core during the installation process and the electrician slides the tube over the cable to be jointed, terminated or abandoned and unwinds the core, causing the tube to collapse down, or contract, in place. The following video demonstrates the installation process of using Cold Shrink to abandon power cables.

Cold shrink tubing is used to insulate wires, connections, joints and terminals in electrical work. It can also be used to repair wires, bundle wires together, and to protect wires or small parts from minor abrasion.
It needs storage in controlled environments with temperatures not exceeding 43 degrees Celsius.

See also
Heat-shrink tubing
Electrical wiring

References

Electronics work tools
Plastics applications

Cold shrink tubing


The Central Square Historic District is a historic district encompassing an area in Weymouth, Massachusetts, which was historically significant in the pre-factory period of shoe manufacturing.  It is centered at the intersection of Middle and Broad Streets, extending on Middle Street from Maple to Charles Streets, and on Broad from just west of the main junction to Putnam Street.  Most of the houses built in this area between 1850 and 1870 were built for workers in relatively small shoemaking operations, one of which still stands at the main intersection.  Later additions to the district include the Jefferson School, a Masonic temple, and the Clapp Memorial Building, which originally housed a boys' club.

The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.

See also
National Register of Historic Places listings in Norfolk County, Massachusetts

References

Historic districts in Norfolk County, Massachusetts
Weymouth, Massachusetts
National Register of Historic Places in Norfolk County, Massachusetts
Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts

Central Square Historic District (Weymouth, Massachusetts)


Dalmatia is a region of the Balkan Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea. It mostly belongs to Croatia. It goes from the island of Pag in the northwest to the Bay of Kotor (in Montenegro) in the southeast.

Related pages
Dalmatian Italians
Istrian-Dalmatian exodus
Italian language in Croatia
Italian cultural and historic presence in Dalmatia
List of Italian place names in Dalmatia
Venice and Dalmatia

References

Dalmatia


Otto Katz (27 May 1895 – 3 December 1952), also known as André Simone amongst other aliases, was a Czech agent. He was one of the most influential agents of the Soviet Union under Stalin in Western intellectual and artistic circles during the 1930s and 1940s. He was hanged after he was convicted in the Slánský trial.

Known for his many pseudonyms, his seductiveness, his cynicism and versatility, from Paris to Hollywood from Mexico City to London, he participated in all the major Comintern disinformation campaigns in the 1930s, under the leadership of Willi Münzenberg who he eventually usurped after spying on him for the NKVD, if the rumours were to be believed.

He became an international spy unconditionally faithful to Stalin, and unlike some of the communist Jewish intellectuals who ran the Comintern at the time, he accepted the German-Soviet Pact and was entrusted with the implementation of secret policies by Stalin's politburo. He was strongly suspected, without conclusive evidence, of involvement as Ramon Mercader's handler in the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and in the supposed murder of Willi Münzenberg who was found hanged in a French forest. Various purges, liquidations and murders required by Stalin during the Spanish Civil War are also attributed to him.

Early life and studies
The German-speaking Jewish family of Edmund Katz, a successful manufacturer, the father of the young Otto, was part of the thriving Jewish community in Jistebnice. Leopold Katz, an uncle of Otto's, was a historian and lawyer famous for having discovered the Jistebnice Hymnal, a collection of Hussite psalms calling for reform. "Leopold became a patron of the Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences and prominent leader of the Czech Jewish movement.". The mother of Otto, Františka Piskerová, died prematurely in 1900 after giving birth to three sons (Leopold, named after his uncle, in 1891, Robert in 1893 and Otto) and their father Edmund subsequently married a German, Otilie Schulhof. The family moved to Prague where the family business continued to thrive and then moved to, the industrial centre, Pilsen.

After classical studies in Prague, where Otto revealed a gift for languages (he fluently spoke five: German, Czech, English, French and Russian), he joined the prestigious Imperial Export Academy, which prepared young men for top jobs in international trade, in 1913 where he became fascinated with the Redl case. He did not finish his studies and was sent by his father for military training. During World War I, he refused to become an officer because of socialist sympathies developed in Vienna. Mobilized, injured on Christmas night in 1914, he deserted twice and spent several months under fortress-arrest.

Demobilized in January 1919, Otto was employed at Pössneck in Thuringia before joining the "Meva", a metallurgical company in Prague.

Bohemian life
The young Otto's marked preference was for literature, theatre, pretty actresses and all the cultural life of Prague which was very active at that time. He frequented fashionable cafés such as the Arco and the Continental, where he rubbed shoulders with the young intelligentsia who spoke only of social or artistic revolution. Helped by a regularly paid allowance by his father, Otto frequented the avant-garde (Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel) and led a life of pleasure in 1922 while adhering to the German Communist Party. Thanks to his allowance, he published some poems privately. Rudolf Fuchs, a German Jewish writer, encouraged him to become a writer. He was also close to Egon Kisch with whom he shared communist political views.

He met a leftist actress Sonya Bogsová, whom he married but their communist activities monitored by the Prague authorities encouraged them to settle in Berlin in 1921. Despite the birth of a daughter Petra, the marriage was strained by the frenzy of the German capital in the 1920s.

Agitprop with Willi Münzenberg
Through a meeting in 1924 with Babette Gross, the sister of Margarete Buber-Neumann, Otto Katz met Willi Münzenberg, Babette's husband. Münzenberg saw Otto Katz's potential and included within his group the young dandy eager to serve the cause of the Soviet Union.

Death
He was tried under the name André Simone in the Slánský trial, convicted and eventually hanged in the Ruzyně Prison at 3am on 3 December 1952. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered beside a small road near Prague.

References

External links

1895 births
1952 deaths
Comintern
Czech Jews
Czechoslovak communists
Jewish socialists
Soviet spies
People from Tábor District
People executed by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by hanging

Otto Katz


Radio jamming is the deliberate blocking of or interference with wireless communications. In some cases, jammers work by the transmission of radio signals that disrupt telecommunications by decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio.

The concept can be used in wireless data networks to disrupt information flow. It is a common form of censorship in totalitarian countries, in order to prevent foreign radio stations in border areas from reaching the country.

Jamming is usually distinguished from interference that can occur due to device malfunctions or other accidental circumstances. Devices that simply cause interference are regulated differently. Unintentional "jamming" occurs when an operator transmits on a busy frequency without first checking whether it is in use, or without being able to hear stations using the frequency. Another form of unintentional jamming occurs when equipment accidentally radiates a signal, such as a cable television plant that accidentally emits on an aircraft emergency frequency.

Distinction between "jamming" and "interference"
Originally the terms were used interchangeably but nowadays most radio users use the term "jamming" to describe the deliberate use of radio noise or signals in an attempt to disrupt communications (or prevent listening to broadcasts) whereas the term "interference" is used to describe unintentional forms of disruption (which are far more common). However, the distinction is still not universally applied. For inadvertent disruptions, see electromagnetic compatibility.

Method
Intentional communications jamming is usually aimed at radio signals to disrupt control of a battle. A transmitter, tuned to the same frequency as the opponents' receiving equipment and with the same type of modulation, can, with enough power, override any signal at the receiver. Digital wireless jamming for signals such as Bluetooth and WiFi is possible with very low power.

The most common types of this form of signal jamming are random noise, random pulse, stepped tones, warbler, random keyed modulated CW, tone, rotary, pulse, spark, recorded sounds, gulls, and sweep-through. These can be divided into two groups: obvious and subtle.

Obvious jamming is easy to detect because it can be heard on the receiving equipment. It is usually some type of noise, such as stepped tones (bagpipes), random-keyed code, pulses, music (often distorted), erratically warbling tones, highly distorted speech, random noise (hiss), and recorded sounds. Various combinations of these methods may be used, often accompanied by regular Morse identification signals to enable individual transmitters to be identified in order to assess their effectiveness. For example, China, which did and does use jamming extensively, plays a loop of traditional Chinese music while it is jamming channels (cf. Attempted jamming of numbers stations).

The purpose of this type of jamming is to block reception of transmitted signals and to cause a nuisance to the receiving operator. One early Soviet attempt at jamming Western broadcasters used the noise from the diesel generator that was powering the jamming transmitter.

Subtle jamming is jamming during which no sound is heard on the receiving equipment. The radio does not receive incoming signals; yet everything seems superficially normal to the operator. These are often technical attacks on modern equipment, such as "squelch capture". Thanks to the FM capture effect, frequency modulated broadcasts may be jammed, unnoticed, by a simple unmodulated carrier. The receiver locks on to the larger carrier signal, and hence will ignore the FM signal that carries the information.

Digital signals use complex modulation techniques, such as QPSK. These signals are very robust in the presence of interfering signals.  But the signal relies on hand shaking between the transmitter and receiver to identify and determine security settings and method of high-level transmission. If the jamming device sends initiation data packets, the receiver will begin its state machine to establish two-way data transmission. A jammer will loop back to the beginning instead of completing the handshake. This method jams the receiver in an infinite loop where it keeps trying to initiate a connection but never completes it, which effectively blocks all legitimate communication.

Bluetooth and other consumer radio protocols such as WiFi have built-in detectors, so that they  transmit only when the channel is free. Simple continuous transmission on a given channel will continuously stop a transmitter transmitting, hence jamming the receiver from ever hearing from its intended transmitter. Other jammers work by analysing the packet headers and, depending on the source or destination, selectively transmitting over the end of the message, corrupting the packet.

Types of jammers
 Portable jammers are phone-sized and low-powered devices. They can block data delivery at a distance up to 15 meters without barriers.
 Stationary jammers are more expensive and powerful. They usually have a larger jamming radius and wider frequency band. Strong jammers can require additional cooling as they can overheat. Stationary jammers usually have a range of 100 meters and require a power supply of 230 V.
 Self-made jammers are low-power devices that work over short ranges. However, the coverage can be extended using broadband amplifiers.

History
During World War II, ground radio operators would attempt to mislead pilots by false instructions in their own language, in what was more precisely a spoofing attack than jamming. Radar jamming is also important to disrupt use of radar used to guide an enemy's missiles or aircraft. Modern secure communication techniques use such methods as spread spectrum modulation to resist the deleterious effects of jamming.

Jamming of foreign radio broadcast stations has often been used in wartime (and during periods of tense international relations) to prevent or deter citizens from listening to broadcasts from enemy countries. However, such jamming is usually of limited effectiveness because the affected stations usually change frequencies, put on additional frequencies and/or increase transmission power.

Jamming has also occasionally been used by the governments of Germany (during World War II),  Israel, Cuba, Iraq, Iran (during the Iran-Iraq War), China, North and South Korea and several Latin American countries, as well as by Ireland against pirate radio stations such as Radio Nova. The United Kingdom government used two coordinated, separately located transmitters to jam the offshore radio ship, Radio North Sea International off the coast of Britain in 1970.

World War II

In occupied Europe the Nazis attempted to jam broadcasts to the continent from the BBC and other allied stations. Along with increasing transmitter power and adding extra frequencies, attempts were made to counteract the jamming by dropping leaflets over cities instructing listeners to construct a directional loop aerial that would enable them to hear the stations through the jamming. In the Netherlands such aerials were nicknamed "moffenzeef" (English: "kraut sieve").

During the Continuation War, after discovering the fact that the mines that the retreating Soviet forces had scattered throughout the city of Viipuri were radio-triggered rather than timer- or pressure-triggered, the Finnish forces played Vesterinen's recording of Säkkijärven Polkka without any pauses from September 4, 1941 to February 2, 1942, as they, to demine the city, needed to block the Soviets from activating the mines through the correct radio wave. The Soviets tried to trigger the mines by changing frequency; the mines had been set up to be able to be triggered by three different frequencies. The Finns countered this by playing Säkkijärven Polkka on all frequencies.

Cold War era

Since the Soviet Union started jamming Western radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union in 1948 the primary targets have been the BBC External Broadcasting Services, Voice of America (VOA) and especially RFE/RL. Western nations had allowed jamming prior to World War II , but in the post-War era the Western view has been that jamming violates the freedom of information while the Soviet view has been that under the international law principle of national sovereignty jamming is an acceptable response to foreign radio broadcasts.

During much of the Cold War, Soviet (and Eastern Bloc) jamming of some Western broadcasters led to a "power race" in which broadcasters and jammers alike repeatedly increased their transmission power, utilised highly directional antennas and added extra frequencies (known as "barrage" or "frequency diversity" broadcasting) to the already heavily overcrowded shortwave bands to such an extent that many broadcasters not directly targeted by the jammers (including pro-Soviet stations) suffered from the rising levels of noise and interference.

There were also periods when China and the Soviet Union jammed each other's programmes. The Soviet Union also jammed Albanian programmes at times.

Some parts of the world were more impacted by these broadcasting practices than others
 Eurasia (worst affected, including mediumwave frequencies particularly 720 kHz used by RFE)
 North Asia, Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa (partly affected)
 Australasia, South America (rarely affected)

Meanwhile, some listeners in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc devised ingenious methods (such as homemade directional loop antennas) to hear the Western stations through the noise. Because radio propagation on shortwave can be difficult to predict reliably, listeners sometimes found that there were days/times when the jamming was particularly ineffective because radio fading (due to atmospheric conditions) was affecting the jamming signals but favouring the broadcasts (a phenomenon sometimes dubbed "twilight immunity"). On other days of course the reverse was the case. There were also times when jamming transmitters were (temporarily) off air due to breakdowns or maintenance. The Soviets (and most of their Eastern bloc allies) used two types of jamming transmitter. Skywave jamming covered a large area but for the reasons described was of limited effectiveness. Groundwave jamming was more effective but only over a small area and was thus used only in/near major cities throughout the Eastern Bloc. Both types of jamming were less effective on higher shortwave frequencies (above 15 MHz); however, many radios in the Soviet Union didn't cover the higher bands. Skywave jamming was usually accompanied by morse signals in order to enable (coded) identification of the jamming station in order that Soviet monitoring posts could assess the effectiveness of each station.

In 1987 after decades of generally refusing to acknowledge that such jamming was even taking place the Soviets finally stopped jamming western broadcasts with the exception of RFE/RL which continued to be jammed for several months into 1988. Previously there had been periods when some individual Eastern bloc countries refrained from jamming Western broadcasts but this varied widely by time and country. In general outside of the Soviet Union itself Bulgaria was one of the most prolific operators of jamming transmitters in the Eastern bloc with East Germany the least.

While western governments may have occasionally considered jamming broadcasts from Eastern Bloc stations, it was generally accepted that doing so would be a pointless exercise. Ownership of shortwave radios was less common in western countries than in the Soviet Union where, due to the vast physical size of the country, many domestic stations were relayed on shortwave as it was the only practical way to cover remote areas. Additionally, western governments were generally less afraid of intellectual competition from the Eastern Bloc.

In Francoist Spain the dictatorship jammed for decades Radio España Independiente, the radio station of the Communist Party of Spain which broadcast from Moscow (1941–1955) and Bucharest (1955–1977). It was the most important clandestine broadcaster in Spain and the regime considered it a threat, since it allowed its citizens to skip the censorship of the local media.

However, in Latin America there were instances of communist radio stations such as Radio Venceremos being jammed, allegedly by the CIA, while there were short lived instances where Britain jammed some Egyptian (during the Suez Crisis), Greek (prior to Cyprus gaining independence) and Rhodesian stations.

Post Cold War (1989–present)

China

In 2002, China acquired  standard short-wave  radio-broadcasting equipment designed for  general public  radio-broadcasting and technical support from Thales Broadcast Multimedia, a former subsidiary of the French state-owned company Thales Group.
 Thales jamming technology operates only at power levels below 500 kW (for its shortwave jamming products).
 Adele Milna (BSEE) of Continental Electronics (in an audio file held at shortwave.org) claims that China has duplicated his company's 100 kW, 250 kW shortwave transmitters. It is unclear if these products were indeed duplicated or if broadcast jamming (as opposed to future product sales) were a reason for the duplication.

Iran

Debates have been raised in Iran regarding the possible health hazards of satellite jamming. Iranian officials including the health minister have claimed that jamming has no health risk for humans. However, the minister of communication has recently admitted that satellite jamming has 'serious effects' and has called for identification of jamming stations so they can put a stop to this practice. The government has generally denied any involvement in jamming and claimed they are sent from unknown sources. According to some sources, IRGC is the organization behind satellite jamming in Iran.

Russia
The Russian Armed Forces have, since the summer of 2015, begun using a multi-functional EW weapon system in Ukraine, known as Borisoglebsk 2. It is postulated that this system has defeated communications in parts of that country, including mobile telephony and GPS systems.

Other countries

 Since the early 1960s, the practice of radio jamming has been very common in Cuba, blocking not only American government funded radio stations (such as Voice of America) but also Ham radio signals, and stations owned and/or operated by (or selling airtime to) Cuban exile groups transmitting from Miami, such as La Cubanisima, Radio Mambi, WWFE La Poderosa and Cadena Azul. The same practice has been applied to Radio y Televisión Martí, operated by the U.S. Information Agency since 1985.
 North Korea and South Korea still regularly jam some of each other's radio (and sometimes television) stations.
 Several Middle Eastern countries (particularly Iran) jam shortwave broadcasts (and even occasionally attempt to jam satellite TV signals) targeted at their countries.
 Pakistan has contemplated jamming pirate radio stations operated by the Taliban in all jails across Pakistan. This decision has led to an outcry from Pakistani cellular operators, who state that most of the jails lie in urban areas with a resultant impact on the cellular service of all operators in the adjacent area of jails.
 Ethiopia has jammed the DW  and VOA  transmissions as well as ESAT Ethiopian Satellite Television and Eritrean radio stations.
 Vietnam jams the Vietnamese service of Radio Free Asia, Radio Đáp Lời Song Núi, some FEBC programs, mostly in Vietnamese Minority languages as well as Radio Sweden with a "siren" jammer and "bubble" jammer on FM Frequencies.
 In Nigeria, the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission has claimed jamming signal of Radio Biafra.
 In South Africa, the use of wireless signal jammers is illegal. There is a single exception to this rule. South Africa's State Security Cluster may, in certain instances, employ signal jammers.
 In Singapore, a local Indonesian Batam Hang FM 106.0 MHz based Islamic radio station of Indonesia radio stations has jammed  . Somewhat it transmits up to Singapore and Johor Bahru of Malaysia at 10 kW transmission power. Hang FM 106.0 MHz was accused by Singapore authorities for spreading extremists and terrorism propaganda, there were 4 Singaporeans detained by police under the Internal Security Act (ISA) when they attempted to move to Syria and join ISIS terrorist group. Radio Hang FM has denied this accusation. Station Manager of Hang FM Radio, Abu Yusuf, firmly rejects Hang FM Radio being linked as a media that triggers radicalism. According to him, the broadcast material is also in accordance with the understanding of Ahlussunnah wal Jamaah, which apart from rejecting radicalism, terrorism, especially ISIS, also rejects other ideas or actions that are contrary to the basic principles of the peace-loving Islamic religion. Meanwhile, Deputy Chair of the Riau Islands Regional Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPID), Suyono, said that while under KPID supervision, in its broadcasts Radio Hang FM actually rejected radicalism and terrorism.  Hang FM must decrease its transmission power from 10 kW to 2 kW as its service area is only in Batam. In the future, after radio frequency jamming, Singapore may ban Hang FM website, this will cause listeners cannot access Hang FM via online, even mobile app in Singapore.

In fiction
Radio jamming (or "comm jamming") is a common plot element in the Star Wars franchise. In Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi, when the Rebel fleet approaches the Galactic Empire's force, believing themselves to be launching a surprise attack, General Lando Calrissian realizes the Empire is jamming their signals, and therefore know they are approaching.

In the film Star Trek II, after receiving a distress call from the space station Regula I, Captain Kirk attempts to establish communications, but the Enterprise's comm officer Lt. Uhura reports that further transmissions are "jammed at the source".

See also

 Radar jamming and deception
 Association of Old Crows
 Culture jamming
 Electronic warfare
 Eastern Bloc information dissemination
 Mobile phone jammer
 Microphone blocker
 Radio jamming in China
 Radio jamming in Korea

References

External links
 extensive site on radio jamming
 Article on recent jammers with audio samples
 Audio sample of jamming (c1982) at start of BBC World service (Russian) programme includes jamming station morse ID
 Ethiopia jams VOA (2010)
 Ultra Fast Folloow Jammer Description (2007)
 R. Pleikys, D. Vildžiūnas. Empire of Noise (video).
 Aadu Jogiaas: Disturbing soviet transmissions in August 1991.
 Portable jammer is illegal.
 Words: Matt Bolton, Photographs: Matt Munro  The Tallinn Cables, A Glimpse Into Tallainn's Secret History of Espionage Lonely Planet Magazine, December 2011

Electronic countermeasures
Radio technology
Denial-of-service attacks
Censorship of broadcasting

Radio jamming


B2 is a group to allow athletes with different vision to compete against each other in sports.

Definition

B2 is a group to allow athletes with different vision to compete against each other in sports. The International Blind Sports Association (IBSA) says B2 athletes are: "From ability to recognise the shape of a hand to a visual acuity of 2/60 and/or visual field of less than 5 degrees." The Canadian Paralympic Committee says B2 athletes havve "Up to approximately 3-5% functional vision." B2 is used in other sports than sports run by the IBSA.  Other sports using B2 are blind golf. Blind golf rules say B2 golfers include "From ability to recognise the shape of a hand up to visual acuity of 2/60 or visual field of less than 5 degrees".

B2 is equal to other disability classifications for other sports. In adaptive rowing, the similar B2 class is LTA-B2. In horse riding, Grade 4 is the similar group to B2. For swimming, the similar disability group for B2 is S12.

History
B2 has its history in the early history of blind sports.  When blind people first started competing, people believed people who had better vision could unfairly compete against people with worse vision.  Different groups around vision problem were developed by the IBSA to make playing sport more fair for people with different levels of blindness.

The IBSA B2 is mostly the same since it was created, even as the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) changed methods to allow people to fairly compete against each other based on functional ability.

Equipment
Equipment used by B2 sportspeople may include sighted guides, guide rails, beeping balls and clap sticks. The use of a sighted guide by B2 athletes depends on the sport. For blind archery, B2 sportspeople use a sighting device based on the sense of touch and must not be able to see well enough to use a bowsight.

References

B2 (classification)


Bryan's shearwater (Puffinus bryani) is a species of shearwater that may occur around the Hawaiian Islands. It is the smallest species of shearwater and is black and white with a bluish gray beak and blue tarsi. First collected in 1963 and thought to be a little shearwater (Puffinus assimilis) it was determined using DNA analysis to be distinct in 2011. It is rare and possibly threatened and there is little information on its breeding or non-breeding ranges. The species is named after Edwin Horace Bryan Jr. a former curator of the B. P. Bishop Museum at Honolulu.

On February 7, 2012, DNA tests on six specimens found in Ogasawara alive and dead between 1997 and 2011 determined that they were Bryan's shearwaters. It is assumed that Bryan's shearwaters still survive on some of the uninhabited Bonin Islands.

In 2015 a small breeding colony of Bryan's shearwaters was found on the island of Higashijima in Japan.

References

External links
 Press release

Puffinus
Endemic birds of Hawaii
Critically endangered fauna of Hawaii
Birds described in 2011
Critically endangered fauna of the United States

Bryan's shearwater


USS Philadelphia (SSN-690), a  attack submarine, was the sixth ship of the United States Navy to be named for the city of Philadelphia.

History
The contract to build her was awarded to the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corporation in Groton, Connecticut on 8 January 1971 and her keel was laid down on 12 August 1972. She was launched on 19 October 1974 sponsored by Mrs. Marian Huntington Scott (née Chase), wife of Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and commissioned on 25 June 1977, with Commander Robert B. Osborne USN in command.

In June 1980 Philadelphia departed her homeport of Groton, Connecticut, and headed on a world cruise that would take it to the Indian Ocean/Persian Gulf, as well as the Pacific. Under the command of Commander Edward S. Little USN, the cruise included at visit to Western Australia, when Philadelphia made her only visit to HMAS Stirling in Rockingham on 23 December 1980. The crew enjoyed Christmas in Australia and some R&R before departing on 29 December 1980. The Philadelphia arrived home in late January 1981.

In 1988, Philadelphia became the first submarine to receive TLAM-D capability.

In 1994, Philadelphia completed the first refueling overhaul of a Los Angeles-class submarine. This was completed at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine.

In 1998, Philadelphia was modified to carry a Dry Deck Shelter, a platform capable of carrying Special Operations Forces. In addition, she was fitted to provide Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) mother ship support.

On 5 September 2005 Philadelphia was in the Persian Gulf about  northeast of Bahrain when she collided with a Turkish merchant ship, . No injuries were reported on either vessel. Damage to the submarine was described as "superficial."  Philadelphia's Commanding Officer, CDR Steven M. Oxholm, was relieved following the incident.
The Turkish ship, which suffered minor damage to her hull just above the water line, was inspected by the United States Coast Guard and found still seaworthy.

In 2006, Philadelphia completed the first-ever Pre-Inactivation Restricted Availability (PIRA) conducted at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine.

On 20 July 2009 the Navy announced that the submarine would be inactivated on 10 June 2010 and subsequently decommissioned. Philadelphia was decommissioned on 25 June 2010, the thirty-third anniversary of her commissioning.

Deployments

Philadelphia performed many patrols and deployments during her career. She was deployed to the Mediterranean Sea in 1979, 1982, 1986, 1991 (where she later went on to support Operation Desert Storm), 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, the last three of which also involved operations in support of CENTCOM. She performed a single Western Pacific deployment in 1980. She also spent a fair amount of time in the Atlantic Ocean, including deployments to the Northern part of the Ocean in 1983, 1992, 1996, 1997, and 1999, and one Eastern Atlantic deployment in 1989.

Awards
Over the course of her career, the Philadelphia received many awards. Among the ribbons and medals her crew earned were the Navy Unit Commendation in 1983; the Meritorious Unit Commendation in 1987, 1989, 1991, 1999, 2003 and 2004; the Battle Efficiency "E" Ribbon in 1983, 1990, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2003, and 2007; The Navy Expeditionary Medal in 2005; and the Southwest Asia Service Medal in 1991.

In terms of other awards given to the ship in terms of excellence from her crew in individual departments, she was awarded the Ney Memorial Award for Outstanding Food Service in 1983, an award for which she was also a finalist in 1996; the "A" Award for Outstanding Anti-Submarine Warfare in 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1991; the Communications Green "C" in 1998, 1999, 2005, and 2007; the Tactical White "T" in 1999 and 2000; the Damage Control Red "DC" in 1999 and 2005; the Deck "D" in 2000' the Engineering Excellence "E" in 2001 and 2006; the Supply Blue "E" in 2001 and 2006; and the Medical Yellow "M" in 2005.

Furthermore, the Philadelphia was awarded the COMSUBLANT Battenberg Cup Nominee for Best All Around Unit in 1996, the CINCLANTFLT Golden Anchor Award in 1990, and the CINCLANTFLT Silver Anchor Award in 1997 and 1998.

In popular culture
The USS Philadelphia was seen in the NCIS episode "Sub Rosa" as the submarine where Agents Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) and Caitlin Todd (Sasha Alexander) were deployed in order to stop the release of a deadly sarin gas into the submarine's air conditioning system.

References

External links

 navsource.org: USS Philadelphia (SSN-690)
 Commander Submarine Group Two: USS Philadelphia (SSN-690)
 Navy NewsStand: USS Philadelphia Returns From Historic Deployment (2003)
 Navy NewsStand: USS Philadelphia Returns After Highly Successful Deployment (2007)

5 September 2005 Collision
 Navy NewsStand: No Injuries as U.S. Submarine and Merchant Vessel Collide
 Navy Times: Discipline, praise meted out to Philadelphia crew
 The Stupid Shall Be Punished:   USS Philadelphia Homeward Bound (photos)
 The Stupid Shall Be Punished:   USS Philadelphia Returns Home

Los Angeles-class submarines
Cold War submarines of the United States
Nuclear submarines of the United States Navy
Ships built in Groton, Connecticut
1974 ships

USS Philadelphia (SSN-690)


Edme-Joachim Bourdois de La Motte (14 September 1754 – 7 December 1835) was a  French doctor.

Biography

Edme-Joachim Bourdois de La Motte was born at Joigny, Burgundy, the son of a famous doctor. He studies at the College of Auxerre then goes to Paris in order to do his medical education. He defends his thesis in 1777-1778 and becomes doctor at the age of 24. He begins his career in 1778 at the hospital of Charity. The next year, he becomes doctor of the Count of Provence.

Suspected in 1793, he is jailed but soon released thanks to his wife and to his friend the surgeon Dubois. In 1794, he is chief medical officer of the army of the Alps where he has to face an epidemic of Typhus. When he returns to Paris, he narrowly misses to be arrested by the Directory. This time, he owes his freedom to Talleyrand.

He meets Napoleon Bonaparte during this period and the two men become friends. But their relation falls back when Bourdois refuses to participate in the Campaign of Italy. They will not meet again before 1811.

During these years, Bourdois faces some epidemics and goes on an academic career.

In 1811, Napoleon gives him the charge of the first physician to King of Rome, with the recommendation of Corvisart, an old friend of Bourdois from medical school. Soon after, in 1812, Bourdois is made baron.

In 1820, he becomes an early member of the Royal Academy of Medecine, which he chairs in 1822, 1823 and 1829.

Bourdois died on 7 December 1835 at the age of 81, just after having completed a report on Corvisart and his titles for the Academy.

External links
Biography of Edme Joachim Bourdois de La Motte on the Napoleon & Empire website

References

1754 births
1835 deaths
People from Joigny
Barons of the First French Empire
19th-century French physicians
18th-century French physicians
Knights of the Legion of Honour

Edme Joachim Bourdois de La Motte


Saint Praxedis is an oil painting by Johannes Vermeer. This attribution has often been questioned. In 2014 the auction house Christie's announced the results of new investigations which in their opinion demonstrated it conclusively to be a Vermeer. In the 2023 Vermeer exhibition held by the Rijksmuseum, the museum conducted an investigation and concluded it is painted by Vermeer. The painting is a copy of a work by Felice Ficherelli, and depicts the early Roman martyr, Saint Praxedis or Praxedes. It is one of Vermeer's earliest surviving works, dating from 1655.

Description and date
The painting shows the saint squeezing a martyr's blood from a sponge into an ornate vessel. It is closely related to a work by Ficherelli from 1640 to 1645, now in the Collection Fergnani in Ferrara, and is generally assumed to be a copy of it (though see below for an alternative interpretation).  The most obvious difference between the two is that there is no crucifix in the Ferrara work. It is Vermeer's only known close copy of another work.

This is one of only four dated Vermeer paintings, the others being The Procuress (1656), The Astronomer (1668) and The Geographer (1669).  Vermeer's two early history paintings, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary and Diana and Her Companions, are dated by almost all art historians to 1654–6, although opinions differ as to which is earlier.

Provenance and 2014 sale
The painting's provenance before the mid-twentieth century is unknown. The collector Jacob Reder bought it at a minor auction house in New York in 1943. It first received significant attention as a possible Vermeer when being shown as a part of an exhibition of Florentine Baroque art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1969. The exhibition catalogue drew attention to the signature "Meer 1655" and Michael Kitson, reviewing the exhibition, suggested it could be a genuine Vermeer on the basis of stylistic similarities to Diana and Her Companions. Following Reder's death (also in 1969) it was bought by the art dealer Spencer A. Samuels, who also believed it to be a Vermeer. The Barbara Piasecka Johnson Collection Foundation bought it from Spencer in 1987. The leading Vermeer scholar Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. subsequently argued the case for the attribution to Vermeer in an article devoted to it in 1986.

The painting was not included in the exhibition "The Young Vermeer" held in The Hague, Dresden and Edinburgh in 2010–11. However it was included in an exhibition of Vermeer's work held in Rome in 2012–13, curated by Wheelock, Liedtke and Sandrina Bandera.

It was sold at Christie's in London on 8 July 2014 on behalf of the Barbara Piasecka Johnson Collection Foundation.  It sold to an unknown buyer for £6,242,500 (US$10,687,160), at the lower end of the estimated price range of £6-£8 million.  Some art market commentators speculated that doubt about the attribution to Vermeer may have contributed to the relatively low price.  From March 2015 it has been on display in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, labelled as "attributed to Johannes Vermeer". This appears to be a long-term loan to the museum from a private collector.

In 2023, the Rijksmuseum has been revealed that Kufi Company, Inc. has since owns the painting since 2014 in the publication of its exhibition catalogue.

Debates over attribution

The painting may have two signatures. The more obvious of the two reads "Meer 1655", while the second appears as "Meer N R o o".  It is possible that this second signature originally read "Meer naar Riposo", or "Vermeer after Riposo": Riposo was Ficherelli's nickname. The Doerner Institute's examination of the signatures concluded that both signatures were original and composed of pigments typical of the painting. Wheelock's examination also led him to conclude that both signatures were original, and recent technical examination has demonstrated that the clearer signature is likely to have been added at, or close to, the date the painting was created. However these new investigations agreed with the earlier opinion of the conservator Jørgen Wadum that the possible second signature is too indistinct to be deciphered.

Analysis of the lead white, performed by the Rijksmuseum in 2014, in association with the Free University,used in the painting demonstrates a Dutch or Flemish origin, with a strong possibility that the pigment came from the same batch used for Vermeer's Diana and Her Companions.  The use of a chalk ground is also typically Dutch, and there is an unusually extensive use of ultramarine, typical of Vermeer's later work, though not of Diana and Her Companions or Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. Wheelock identifies stylistic similarities with two history paintings which are universally attributed to Vermeer. He also notes similarities between the depiction of the saint's face and the figure in Vermeer's A Girl Asleep and argues that the painter's conversion to Catholicism would have given him an interest in the subject matter. Although it is thought unlikely that the Ferrara painting ever left Italy, or that Vermeer visited Italy, Wheelock points out that he had a reputation as an authority on Italian art. It is possible that another version or copy of the Ferrara painting was the model for Vermeer's work.

In 1998, Wadum argued that the painting was not a copy of the work in Ferrara, or indeed of any other work, because the background elements were painted before the foreground, as is typical of an original work rather than a copy. In 2014 Christie's put forward the argument that this could be explained as experimentation by Vermeer, the young artist trying to recreate and adapt the technique used to create the original.

In 2023, the Rijksmuseum conducted a new technical analysis and confirmed it to be a work of Vermeer.

See also
 List of paintings by Johannes Vermeer

Notes

Further reading

External links
 Essential Vermeer: St Praxedis
 Jørgen Wadum: Contours of Vermeer
 Jon Boone: St Praxedis, Missing the Mark

1650s paintings
Religious paintings by Johannes Vermeer

Saint Praxedis (painting)


In computer science, Bellman-Ford is an algorithm used to compute the shortest distances and paths from a single node within a graph to all other nodes.

Usage
It is more robust than Dijkstra's algorithm because it is able to handle graphs containing negative edge weights. It may be improved by noting that, if an iteration of the main loop of the algorithm completes without making any changes, the algorithm can be immediately completed, as future iterations will not make any changes. Its runtime is  time, where  and  are the number of nodes and edges respectively.

Psuedocode

 function BellmanFord(list nodes, list edges, node source) is

     distance := list
     predecessor := list              // Predecessor holds shortest paths

     // Step 1: initialize
     for each node n in nodes do
         distance[n] := inf           // Initialize the distance to all nodes to infinity
         predecessor[n] := null       // And having a null predecessor
          distance[source] := 0            // The distance from the source to itself is zero

     // Step 2: relax edges repeatedly     repeat |nodes|−1 times:
         for each edge (u, v) with weight w in edges do
             if distance[u] + w < distance[v] then
                 distance[v] := distance[u] + w
                 predecessor[v] := u

     // Step 3: check for negative-weight cycles''
     for each edge (u, v) with weight w in edges do
         if distance[u] + w < distance[v] then
             error "Graph contains a negative-weight cycle"

     return distance, predecessor

Algorithms

Bellman–Ford algorithm


François Anatole Laurent de Rillé (24 November 1828 – 26 August 1915), was a French composer, writer and musical theorist.

De Rillé composed a number of operettas and sacred music works, but his name is more frequently associated with the so-called "Orphéonist" movement, which had also Hector Berlioz and Charles Gounod among its members, which sought to increase the knowledge of music among popular classes by way of setting up male choir associations. The name comes from the first of these associations, founded in Paris, who named itself "Orphéon" (from Orpheus).

Thanks to the efforts of De Rillé, who not only wrote many music pieces for male choir and arranged pieces of widely known composers such as Verdi, Donizetti and Rossini but also books on how to organise a choir and train its members, the popularity of "orphéoniste" societies spread throughout France between the late 1800s and early 1900s, and as well in the United Kingdom, where A.J. Foxwell wrote English lyrics for many of his pieces.

Though most of the music composed by De Rillé is almost forgotten nowadays, his choral works, and particularly "Les Ruines de Gaza (The Destruction of Gaza)" and "Les Martyres aux Arènes" (Martyrs of the Arena), are still among the favorites of male choir societies.

1828 births
1915 deaths
French composers
French male composers
People from Orléans
French male writers
Writers from Orléans
Musicians from Orléans

François Anatole Laurent de Rillé


The Great Mall of the Bay Area (often simply called The Great Mall) is a large indoor outlet shopping mall in Milpitas, California built by Ford Motor Land Development and Petrie Dierman Kughn in 1994. It was acquired by Mills Corporation in 2003, and by the Simon Property Group in April 2007. The mall contains approximately 1.4 million square feet of gross leaseable area. The anchor stores are Century Theatres, Kohl's, Dick's Sporting Goods, Home Interiors Furniture, Q, Saks Off 5th, Marshalls, Burlington, Dave & Buster's and the Legoland Discovery Center.

History
The Mall was formerly the Ford Motor Company's San Jose Assembly Plant that was built in 1955. The plant closed down in 1983 in part due to increasing competition with Japanese auto manufacturers. In the early 1990s, developers resized the former plant and converted it into a mall. Today, an oak tree with a plaque commemorating Great Mall's history stands in the southwest section of its parking lot.

The Great Mall of the Bay Area, which opened on September 22, 1994, was developed as a joint venture between Ford Motor Land Development Corporation of Dearborn, Michigan and Petrie Dierman Kughn of McLean, Virginia.

In 2016, it was announced that the mall would be undergoing renovation in the spring.

Location
The Great Mall of the Bay Area sits at the intersection of Great Mall Parkway (which becomes Capitol Avenue when it crosses Montague Expressway) and Montague Expressway. The Parc Metropolitan apartments lie to the north of the mall. A few inns are also located at the south entrance of the mall.

Layout
Great Mall, unlike many other malls (but like most Mills malls), is a "flat" mall with only one story and an oval racetrack layout with six neighborhoods. The mall is currently laid out in this fashion because the existing main structure was a Ford automobile assembly plant and was not designed to serve as a shopping center.

Based on gross leasable area, the Great Mall of the Bay Area is the largest outlet mall and the 8th largest mall in California. It was once the largest mall in Northern California, but has now been surpassed by others. Like other malls, Great Mall also has a food court, which can be accessed through Entrance 4.

Public transit

The Great Mall of the Bay Area is close to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority's Great Mall/Main station. Many VTA bus routes and also one by AC Transit stop at this transit center.  The light rail station is elevated in the median of Great Mall Parkway. Bay Area Rapid Transit opened service to Milpitas station on June 13, 2020, providing access to the Great Mall and connections with VTA and AC Transit.

References

External links

Outlet malls in the United States
Simon Property Group
Shopping malls established in 1994
Shopping malls in Santa Clara County, California
Buildings and structures in Milpitas, California
1994 establishments in California

Great Mall of the Bay Area


Historic desertification is the study of the desert-forming process from a historic perspective. It was presumed in the past that the main causes of desertification lay in overuse of the land resulting in impoverishment of the soil, reduced vegetation cover, increased risk of drought and the resulting wind erosion. However recent projects to regreen deserts have not met with the success envisaged, and cast doubts on this theory. Research suggests that it is extreme events rather than drought caused by low annual precipitation, that do the most damage. Heavy downpours resulting in flash floods wash away sediment and there seems to have been an increased number of extreme events in the Levant at the end of the Byzantine period. The decline of settlements in the desert belt at this time may have been caused by these extreme events rather than a reduction in annual precipitation.

Causes of desertification
The Mediterranean and its transition zones to the deserts are characterized by impressive Roman and Byzantine ruins, which are subject of discussion as to how these cities came to be deserted. It was assumed that population growth or conquest by nomadic tribes led to over-exploitation of the land, leading to soil erosion and irreversible degradation. Reduced soil and vegetation cover led to reduced precipitation and advancing deserts.

However, failure of development aid projects raised doubts about the validity of the historic desertification issue. For example, a project aiming to reduce sedimentation and erosion at the King-Talal-dam close to Jerash in Jordan could not achieve its goals, which became clear when a heavy rainstorm led to massive sedimentation into the dam despite the newly constructed soil conservation devices. As well, the expected positive effects of the reforestation could not be observed. On the contrary, a high fire risk emerged since pine trees are easily flammable, and the grazing pressure was moved towards more sensitive areas in the desert belt. The evergreen trees also reduced groundwater recharge.

Research
A number of running research projects in Jordan found that the erosion of the main agricultural soil, the Terra Rossa, took place at the end of the last ice age and during the Younger Dryas. It seems therefore that erosion of the today's intensively used soils was limited during historical periods, and not connected with desertification.

The discussion about the impact of climate change on desertification focuses on drought. While some authors argue that periods of decline in the Levant were synchronous with reduced rainfall, others point to the non-linear development of settlement. However, a focus on annual precipitation allows only for limited conclusions about the productivity of agriculture. In this context, soils and colluvia point to an increased frequency of extreme rainfall events in the Levant at the end of the Byzantine period. As far as such events could be observed today, their associated damage was always enormous and could have had much more serious consequences than drought. The decline of settlement in the desert belt at the end of antiquity could be connected with an increase of extreme events.

References

Further reading
Beaumont, P., 1985. "Man-induced erosion in northern Jordan." Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 2, 291-296.
Cordova, C., Foley, C., Nowell, A., Bisson, M., 2005, "Landforms, sediments, soil development and prehistoric site settings in the Madaba-Dhiban Plateau, Jordan", Geoarchaeology, Vol. 20 No. 1, 29-56.
Dracup, J., 1987, "Climatic Change, Hydrology, and Water Management in Arid Lands"", in: Berkofsky, L., Wurtele, G. (Hg.), 1987, Progress in Desert Research, Totowa, 217-228.
Dregne, H., 1983, "Desertification of Arid Lands", Advances in Desert and Arid Land Technology and Development, Vol. 3, London.
Field, J., Banning, E, 1998, "Hillslope processes and archaeology in Wadi Ziqlab, Jordan", Geoarchaeology, Vol. 13, No. 6, 595-616.
Hazan, N., Stein, M., Agnon, A., Marco, S., Nadel, D., Negendank, J., Schwab, M., Neev, D., 2005, "The late Quaternary limnological history of Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), Israel", Quaternary Research 63, 60-77.
Lamb, H., 1982, Climate, History and the Modern World, London.
Maher, L., 2005, The Epipaleolithic in context: paleolandscapes and prehistoric occupation in Wadi Ziqlab, Northern Jordan, Dissertation, University of Toronto.
Migowski, C., Stein, M., Prasad, S., Negendank, J., Agnon, A., 2006, "Holocene climate variability and cultural evolution in the Near East from the Dead Sea sedimentary record", Quaternary Research 66 (3), 421-431.
Müller, J., Bolte, A., Beck, W., Anders, S., 1998, "Bodenvegetation und Wasserhaushalt von Kiefernforstökosystemenen (Pinus sylvestris L.)", Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Ökologie 28, 407-414.
Rosen, A., 2007, Civilizing Climate. Social Responses to Climate Change in the Ancient Near East. New York City.

Desertification
Deserts

Historic desertification


Multipurpose Ansor Front, better known as Banser (abbreviation of Barisan Ansor Serbaguna), is an Islamic militia organization based in Indonesia. It is a paramilitary wing of the youth organization Ansor Youth Movement (GP Ansor) affiliated with Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the largest Islamic mass organization in the world. Banser operates as a semi-autonomous body of GP Ansor and mainly serves for the security and humanitarian operations. Combined personnel of Banser doubles the number for the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI), making Banser (and its parent organization GP Ansor) a political heavyweight which holds the key to the national stability. Throughout the history, Banser had played major roles especially in issues related to religion, from the active participation in Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 against the perceived members of Indonesian Communist Party, to the more recent development of standoff against Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia. In terms of political orientation, Banser, along with GP Ansor, is characterized by traditionalist Islam, populism and nationalism.

History
On April 24, 1934, the precursor of GP Ansor, Ansor Nahdlatul Oelama (ANO) was formally established as the youth wing of NU, and subsequently, the scouting organization Ansor Nahdlatul Ulama Front (Banoe) was formed by ANO Malang chapter. In 1937, during the 2nd ANO Congress, Banoe was formalized under the leadership of the commander Syamsoel Islam who was also the chairman of ANO Malang chapter. Banoe Malang was then under the advisory of the Indonesian Army commander Major Hamid Roesdi, and these two are considered the founding figures of Banser.

Organization

Banser is supervised by GP Ansor through the coordination channel of the chairman of GP Ansor who has the authority towards the implementation of the military operations on all levels. Banser commanders have the communication channel toward the chairman of GP Ansor albeit limited to consultation. This organizational pattern is creating a semi-autonomous status of Banser, which is given by the chairman of GP Ansor and characterized by the higher autonomy on inter-organizational issues and higher dependency on GP Ansor on external interests of Banser.

References

Islamic youth organizations
Paramilitary organizations based in Indonesia
Nahdlatul Ulama
Islamic organizations established in 1937
Youth organizations based in Indonesia
Youth organizations established in 1937
1937 establishments in the Dutch East Indies

Banser


Theta Chi () is an international college fraternity. It was founded on April 10, 1856, at Norwich University then-located in Norwich, Vermont, and has initiated more than 200,000 members and currently has over 8,700 collegiate members across North America.

History

Founding and early years at Norwich

Theta Chi was founded on April 10, 1856, at Norwich University in Norwich, Vermont, by two military cadets, Frederick Norton Freeman and Arthur Chase. A third man, Egbert Phelps, is considered to be the "assistant founder" for lending his help and advice to Freeman and Chase after transferring to Union College in 1854 (he was a member of the Chi Psi fraternity). The first initiates after the founders were Edward Bancroft Williston and Lorenzo Potter, both initiated on .

Theta Chi's early history is closely connected to the history of Norwich University. In 1866, a massive fire devastated the university, completely destroying the Old South Barracks, where the Fraternity had been founded. This disaster prompted the university to move from Norwich, Vermont to its present location in Northfield, Vermont. In 1873 the university nearly closed due to financial reasons, however brother Charles Dole, then serving as a professor at the university, met all of the university's financial obligations from his own pocket, saving the institution. In the fall of 1881, Norwich University was reduced to only 12 students and Theta Chi's membership was reduced to one collegiate member, James M. Holland (1883). In November of that year, Phil S. Randall and Henry B. Hersey approached Holland and insisted that they be allowed to join Theta Chi; Holland agreed, which saved the fraternity from extinction.

Growth
With the help of brother Charles Dole, who was serving in the Vermont State Legislature, Theta Chi was formally incorporated under the laws of Vermont on , and acquired its first chapter house in 1890. There were early efforts to expand Theta Chi to both Dartmouth College and Union College, but the anti-expansion sentiment among members of the Alpha chapter and unstable conditions at the university forced it to remain a single entity for 46 years. However, on , the Beta chapter was installed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after brother P.V. Perkins transferred there from Norwich and petitioned Alpha chapter for a charter. A Grand Chapter was organized in 1908 to direct the fraternity and promote its growth.

 On , Theta Chi's chapters merged with Beta Kappa with the exception of the chapter at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, which chose to become a chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha. The merger brought 16 new collegiate chapters and over 6,000 collegiate and alumnus members into the ranks. Unlike other Fraternity mergers, Beta Kappa was completely absorbed into Theta Chi with no changes to the name or ritual. The foundation chapter was established in 1953 as a charity to provide educational scholarships and assistance. In 1965, the Zeta Gamma chapter was installed at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, making Theta Chi an international fraternity.

Ideals, traditions, and symbols

The Greek motto of Theta Chi is Θηρόποσα Χείρ, which is translated as "An Assisting Hand." Theta Chi's motto was secret from the founding in 1856 until the 1930s, at which time it was made public and incorporated into the fraternity's coat of arms.

When Freeman and Chase founded Theta Chi in 1856 they very clearly spelled out the purpose of the Fraternity in the original Constitution. Article I stated that the objects of Theta Chi were to "bind by closer bonds the members to each other and the mutual assistance of each of its members;" "the advancement and carrying out of any measures at the institution in which it shall be established which shall be of importance to its members," and "the mutual benefit and improvement of all its members." The fraternity continues to guard certain secrets about membership.

The Fraternity's colors are military red and white. Its flower is the red carnation. The national alumni publication is The Rattle, named for the rattlesnake that appears on the Fraternity's coat of arms and badge. It has become a Theta Chi tradition to celebrate Founders Day on April 10, usually as an alumni gathering.

Maxim
The Fraternity's maxim is "Alma Mater First and Theta Chi for Alma Mater," and refers to one of the founding ideals of the Fraternity: loyalty to one's college or university over the course of one's lifetime.

Badge
The badge of Theta Chi consists of a rattlesnake in the shape of the Greek letter "theta" and two swords which form the letter "chi." All badges are gold with the eye of the rattlesnake containing a ruby. Egbert Phelps, Theta Chi's "assistant founder", designed the original badge sometime before the founding date. Freeman ordered the first badges from a Boston jeweler on April 12, 1856, and they were first worn on June 9, 1856.

Coat of arms
The coat of arms official description in heraldic phraseology goes as the following: "Or, on a bend gules, a nowed serpent between two swords, points downwards, palewise all the first. On an esquire's helmet the Crest, an eagle displayed or." The true meaning of the coat of arms is known only to brothers of the fraternity.

According to The Manual of Theta Chi, the original design for the coat of arms was suggested by Freeman, and members of Alpha chapter used his ideas to develop an official image. The coat of arms has undergone over a dozen modifications since, with the current design being approved in 1939.

Creed

Frank Schrenk (Kappa/Pennsylvania 1915) wrote the Creed of Theta Chi. It is both an affirmation of the founding principles of Theta Chi and a mission statement for the Fraternity:

The Creed is traditionally recited by members at chapter meetings, and is often discussed in new member education programs to teach the values and ideals of the Fraternity.

Monument

On August 29, 1931, the day of Theta Chi's 75th Anniversary Convention, a stone monument was dedicated at Norwich, Vermont. The Monument of Theta Chi is a remembrance of the founding of Theta Chi Fraternity. The inscription appears as follows:

Theta Chi today
Theta Chi currently has 157 active chapters and three colonies across the United States and Canada and has initiated over 200,000 members since its founding.

Theta Chi Fraternity's collegiate members are involved on their respective campuses with a multitude of leadership organizations, including Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK), the Order of Omega, Student Government Association (SGA), Phi Beta Kappa, Florida Blue Key, and NCAA athletics.

Theta Chi's preferred philanthropies are the United Service Organizations (USO), Wounded Warrior Project, the Children's Miracle Network, the American Red Cross, Relay for Life, The Kyle Charvat Foundation, and Habitat for Humanity. Theta Chi is one of the largest donating organizations to the United Service Organizations (USO).

Local chapter or member misconduct
In 1997, Binaya Oja died participating in a drinking pledging ritual at Clarkson University. Pledges were to drink until they vomited. His family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the fraternity.

In 2008, Harrison Kowiak suffered a fatal injury while playing a capture-the-flag-like game as part of initiation at Lenoir–Rhyne University. In his family's wrongful death lawsuit filed against the fraternity, it was reported Kowiak's head struck the concrete when he was tackled.

In 2012, Philip Dhanens died due to alcohol poisoning after drinking 37 shots of hard liquor with his fellow pledge brothers at Fresno State University. Three Theta Chi members were arrested and charged for his death following the incident, and as of 2020 the chapter is still inactive.

In 2018, a Theta Chi member and student died due to alcohol poisoning at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The organization was disbanded from the university.

In 2018, a Theta Chi pledge at Drake University sued the fraternity on the local and national levels after a hazing drinking incident left him near death.

In 2019, a Theta Chi member at the University of Arizona sued for medical expenses and severe loss of eye sight after a hazing incident on April 12, 2019. In the claim the pledge cited being beaten and forced to exercise on broken glass while members played loud Nazi music and beat the pledges. During this period a glass of habanero sauce was thrown into the pledge's eyes where he suffered chemical burns, chemosis, and a corneal abrasion.

In February 2021, a petition with over 10,000 signatures to suspend the Theta Chi chapter at the University of Massachusetts Amherst emerged after the fraternity hosted several large parties, which were allegedly the cause of higher numbers of COVID cases on the UMass campus.  The chapter was put on an interim suspension, but no other punishments were given out.

In October 2021, the Theta Chi chapter at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was the center of a student protest after claims that a female student was drugged and raped at a party circulated on various social media platforms.  A protest that attracted a crowd of over 300 students turned violent when car windows were broken and a resident of the Theta Chi house was hit with a bottle.  Another petition that had over 30,000 signatures pushed administration to suspend the chapter, but the chancellor at the time, Kumble Subbaswamy, said without an official complaint or report, there was no way for them to properly investigate the incidents.

In December 2022, the Theta Chi chapter and school at Rutgers University–New Brunswick was sued by a freshman who was allegedly forced into drinking life-threatening amounts of alcohol as part of a pledge fell down several flights of stairs and was hospitalized for severe injuries. Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, the letters on the housing for the Theta Chi chapter were taken down.

Chapters

Notable alumni

References

External links

Student organizations established in 1856
International student societies
North American Interfraternity Conference
Fraternities and sororities in the United States
Carmel, Indiana
Non-profit organizations based in Indiana
1856 establishments in Vermont

Theta Chi


The Battle of Staffarda took place on 18 August 1690 during the Nine Years' War in Piedmont, Northern Italy.  The engagement was the first major battle of the Nine Years' War in Italy since Victor Amadeus II of Savoy joined the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV of France earlier that year.

A French force of around 12,000 under Nicolas Catinat defeated a Savoyard army of 18,000 led by Victor Amadeus and the Imperial general Prince Eugène of Savoy. Victory allowed Catinat to over-run most of Piedmont but he was unable to take the capital of Turin due to sickness, lack of men and supply problems.

Background
By 1690, the Nine Years' War was in its third year, with both France and the Allies focusing their main effort in the Spanish Netherlands. Neither side was able to gain a decisive advantage in this theatre, or along the Rhine, leaving Northern Italy as the one area where the Allies could "open a door...into France".

The Savoyard state was split into several distinct areas: the County of Nice and the Duchy of Savoy, both of which are now within modern France, along with the Duchy of Aosta, and Principality of Piedmont. Like his predecessors, Louis XIV of France viewed Savoy as a French dependency, an outlook bolstered by control of two key fortresses in Piedmont. These were Pinerolo in the west, annexed by France in 1631, and Casale in the east, acquired in 1681 from Ferdinand Charles, Duke of Mantua and Montferrat.

Prelude

At the beginning of 1690, Victor Amadeus had yet to openly join the war; although his small army totalled only 8,000 men,  Louis XIV understood that he had to retain Savoy in the French orbit. Ignoring Amadeus's own sovereign interests, the French sought guarantees and made their demands on the Duke: Amadeus was either to send 2,000 infantry and three dragoon regiments to assist French forces in the Spanish Netherlands – nearly half his army – or, he was to unite them with Nicolas Catinat's forces for an attack on the Spanish-ruled Duchy of Milan; he was also to hand over to Catinat the citadel of Turin and, further down the Po River, Verrua. If he did not do so he would, in Louvois' words, "be punished in such a manner that he remembers it for the rest of his life."

French demands were nothing less than an attack on Savoyard independence, and the intimidation ultimately proved counter-productive. In the early summer of 1690 Amadeus realised he had to stand up to France and he began to look towards the Grand Alliance. But he had conditions. Amadeus reiterated his family claim to the Duchy of Montferrat, over which the House of Savoy was in perennial dispute with the Duke of Mantua, stipulating the razing of Casale as the minimum he would accept in this region; he also demanded the reacquisition of Pinerolo as the sine qua non of Savoyard entry into the war on the Allied side, and sought to take over at least one French place in Dauphiné. Amadeus's hectic preparations for war and his negotiations for financial assistance from England and Spain, were followed by a declaration of war against France on 4 June.

Battle

In July Catinat took command of French forces in Piedmont, totalling some 12,000 men, while Victor Amadeus received 10,000 Spanish reinforcements from Milan, and was also promised 5,000 Imperial troops led by his cousin, Prince Eugene of Savoy. Additionally, Amadeus's Protestant community, the Vaudois, who had previously suffered religious persecution from Louis XIV and Amadeus alike, had since become reconciled with their Duke, and took up arms in defence of their valleys. Little quarter was asked or given when fighting the French.

Determined to punish Amadeus, Louis XIV had ordered Catinat to use his force to burn and tax (put under contribution) large tracts of  parts of Savoy and the Plain of Piedmont – attempts by local peasants to retaliate were met by hanging anyone who was found carrying arms. However, the Marquis de Feuquieres, sent by Catinat with 1,200 troops to Luserna, suffered a major setback and was forced to abandon the town with the loss of some 600 men.

While Catinat's army manoeuvred on the Piedmontese plain Marquis de Saint-Ruth took most of the exposed Duchy of Savoy, routing the Savoyard forces; only the great fortress of Montmélian, less than 60 km north of Grenoble, remained in ducal hands. Although Savoy was far less important than Piedmont, its loss was a major setback for the Grand Alliance, making an invasion of France now much less likely. In a desperate attempt to halt the destruction and intimidation Amadeus – against the advice of Eugene – insisted on engaging the French with his own and Spanish troops. Believing that Feuquieres was lost, and anxious to catch the French whilst they were weak, Amadeus left his camp at Villafranca with the intention of attacking and surrounding Catinat.

Catinat left his camp at Cavour and marched south with the intention of taking Saluzzo; when Amadeus moved to stop him, the result was the engagement at the abbey of Staffarda on 18 August. Marshes and hedges impeded movement on the battlefield and sheltered the Savoyard line, but French troops eventually broke the Savoyard army. Only Prince Eugene's command of the Savoyard cavalry and his conduct in retreat saved the Allied army from disaster. Amadeus suffered 2,800 casualties and 1,200 prisoners; he also lost 11 of his 12 cannon. Catinat's casualties amount to between 1,000 and 2,000 troops.

Aftermath
Catinat subsequently took Saluzzo, Savigliano and Fossano,  levying supplies and taxes from the occupied areas; towns that refused to pay, like Ceresole and Autrive were looted. When Imperial troops finally arrived in Piedmont little could be achieved, allegedly due to Spanish reluctance to support Victor Amadeus, their long-time rival for dominance in Northern Italy, with Prince Eugene claiming "they want to do absolutely nothing." Instead, he confined himself to small raids carried out by his cavalry, many of whom were used to the brutality of the Turkish wars; during one such episode in September 1690, they reportedly castrated 200 French prisoners before killing them.

Catinat proceeded to Susa, a vital fortress controlling communications with Briançon in the Dauphiné, opening trenches there on 11 November. The stronghold capitulated two days later, but hopes of taking Turin then capturing the Asti region and south-east Piedmont in order to link up with Casale had to be scaled back due to supply and communication problems, manning shortages, and sickness within the army. Unable to live off the resources of a devastated Piedmont, the French took up winter quarters in Savoy, the Dauphiné, and Provence. The Imperial troops based themselves in Montferrat, much to the consternation of its pro-French ruler, the Duke of Mantua.

References

Sources

McKay, Derek & Scott, H. M (1984). The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815. Longman.

Battles involving Savoy
1690 in Italy
1690 in France
Battles of the Nine Years' War
Battles involving France
Battles involving Spain
Battles involving Austria
Conflicts in 1690
History of Piedmont

Battle of Staffarda


Castizo (ca-STEE-tzo) is a Spanish term for a person who is around 3/4 Caucasian and 1/4 Indigenous ancestry.

Castizos are mostly found in the Southern cone region of Latin America (especially Chile, Argentina and Brazil), Costa Rica, as well as parts of Northern and Western Mexico, many of the Canadian Metis (those of mixed French-Canadian and First Nations ancestry) and Mixed-Blood Americans (those who mixed of Anglo-American and Native Americans from the United States) are Castizos.

Castizos usually have more Caucasian traits, but many can have light features, but with heavy Native American features, while many can have a dark Native American-like pigmentation, but totally Caucasian features.

Famous Castizos include Johnny Depp, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Enrique Peña Nieto, it's unknown whether they are genetically Castizo, but based on their phenotype, they appear to be.

Native Americans

Ethnic groupsTHE MOST FAMOUS CASTIZO AND CALIFORNIA DIPLOMAT,
FOUNDED MONTEREY BAY,FIRST EUROPEAN FO STEP FOOT ON San Fancusco Bay.
SCOUT FOR DEPORTOLA EXPEDITION,ALCALDE,AND COMANDANTE, FOUNDER OF MODER.DAY 101 US CALI FREEWAY
ATTORBEY,LINGUIST,PATRIARCH OF CHUMASH PEOPLE,3rd richest man in the World  creater of Old Spanush Days Sant Barbara Only Spanish Land Grant in SB County recognized Land Act 1850
CASTIZO BORN 1836 SPANISH OLD MEXICO Celaya Guanajuato
JOSE Maria Francisco Ortega True Californio
My 7 time Great Geandfather
CASTIZO

Castizo


Swami Anand (1887 – 25 January 1976) was a monk, a Gandhian activist and a Gujarati writer from India. He was the manager of Gandhi's publications such as Navajivan and Young India and  inspired Gandhi to write his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He wrote sketches, memoir, biographies, philosophy, travelogues and translated some works.

Biography

Early life
Swami Anand was born Himmatlal on 8 September 1887 at Shiyani village near Wadhwan to Ramchandra Dave (Dwivedi) and Parvati in Audichya Brahmin family. His father was a teacher. He was among seven siblings. He was brought up and educated in Bombay. At the age of ten, he left home in opposition to marriage and due to an offer by a monk to show him God. He wandered for three years with several different monks. He took a vow of renunciation while still in his teens, took on the name Swami Anand and became a monk with the Ramakrishna Mission. He also lived at the Advaita Ashram where he studied.

Anand's entry into the Indian independence movement was through his association with the revolutionaries of Bengal in 1905. Later, he worked in the Kesari, the Marathi newspaper founded by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in 1907. He was also involved in independence activities in rural regions. He also edited the Gujarati edition of Marathi daily Rashtramat during the same period. When it was closed down, he travelled the Himalayas in 1909. In 1912, he taught at the Hill Boys School in Almoda which was founded by Annie Besant.

Gandhi's associate
Mahatma Gandhi first met Anand in Bombay on 10 January 1915, the day after he had returned from South Africa. Gandhi launched his weekly, the Navjeevan from Ahmedabad four years later. Its inaugural issue came out in September 1919 and soon the workload increased. It was at this juncture that Gandhi sent for Anand to become the manager of the publication. Swami Anand took over its management in late 1919. He proved to be a good editor and manager and when the Young India was launched, he moved the publication to larger premises and with printing equipment donated by Mohammed Ali Jouhar, its publication began. In 18 March 1922, he was jailed for one and half years as a publisher for an article published in Young India.

Gandhi's autobiography was serialised in the Navjeevan from 1925 to 1928. It was written by Gandhi at Swami Anand's insistence and an English translation of these chapters appeared in installments in the Young India as well. Later, The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi was published based on the talks Gandhi gave at the Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad in 1926.  Swami Anand played a role in inspiring Gandhi to write this work as well.

He was Vallabhai Patel's secretary during the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928. In 1930, he was again jailed for three years for participating in Salt Satyagraha at Vile Parle in Bombay. When he was released in 1933, he focused on the upliftment of the tribals and the underprivileged. He also founded the Ashrams in Bordi in Gujarat in 1931 followed by in Thane, Kausani and Kosbad. He had also participated in relief work of the 1934 earthquake in north India and in the 1942 Quit India movement. Following Partition in 1947, he worked amongst the refugees from Sialkot and Hardwar.

Later life
After Independence, Swami Anand took an interest in agriculture and agrarian issues. He was concerned about agricultural productivity and livelihoods, but had deep respect for the practical wisdom of small farmers. He was inspired by George Washington Carver and Robert Oppenheimer, whose biography he wrote. From 1957 to 1976, he made the Kosbad Agricultural Institute at Dahanu, near Bombay, his home. He died on 25 January 1976 at 2:15 am in Bombay following heart attack.

Literary career
Swami Anand was a polyglot, proficient in Gujarati, Marathi, Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and English. He was acquainted with the classical and folk traditions of the Gujarati, Marathi and Sanskrit languages and was influenced by the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Max Muller, Walt Whitman, Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda. Besides fiction, Swami Anand also wrote on issues of science, religion and society. He had written memoirs, biographies, philosophies, travelogues and translations. Many of his works were published posthumously.

He has written several character sketches, biographical reflections and biographies of his friends and associates including Gandhijina Sansmarano (1963), Bhagwan Buddha (1964, co-written), Kulkathao (1966), Dharatinu Lun (1969), Motne Hamfavnara (1969), Santona Anuj (1971), Naghrol (1975), Santono Falo (1978). Kulkathao, a series of pen portraits of people from the Bhatia caste, won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1969, but, he refused to accept the award due to his vow not to accept any monetary benefits for his writings. Gujarati writer and translator Mulshankar Bhatt has collected his best of the character sketches and published as Dharati Ni Arati (1977). In it, he has sketched the character of those people who had created a deep impression in his life. Some of the popular characters from it are Dhanima, Mahadev Desai, Vamandada and Dr. Mayadas.

His philosophical essay collections include Isunu Balidan (1922), Ishopnishad, Ishubhagwat (1977), Lokgeeta, Navla Darshan Ane Bija Lekho (1968), Manavtana Veri  (1966), Anant Kala (1967), Atamna Mool (1967), Sarvoday Vicharana (co-written). His Anant Kala is a meditation on nature and spirituality, while his writing also covers the Upanishads and the Sarvodaya Movement extensively. These essays share views on religion and society based on the concept of  Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava which he had embraced.

He also produced travelogues based on his travels in the Himalayas which were published in Prasthan magazine between 1954 and 1960 and posthumously published in Uttarapathni Yatra and Baraf Raste Badrinath (1980). His translation of Sven Hedin's travel writing as Asiana Bhraman Ane Sanshodhan in Gujarati, was also published posthumously in 1979.

Bachpanna Bar Varsh (1982) is his incomplete autobiographical work. Juni Moodi (1980) is a collection of proverbs and idioms.

Some of his other works include Ambavadiyun and Amaratvel and a compilation of correspondence between him and Gandhi's colleagues are contained in the Ugamani Dishano Ujas and Dhodhamar, all edited by Dinkar Joshi.

A biography of Swami Anand was written by Chandrakant Sheth and he is the central character in Sujata Bhatt's poem, "Point No Point".

See also
 List of Gujarati-language writers

References

Bibliography

Gandhians
1887 births
1976 deaths
Writers from Mumbai
Monks of the Ramakrishna Mission
Indian magazine editors
Gujarati-language writers
Recipients of the Sahitya Akademi Award in Gujarati
Indian Hindu monks
People from Surendranagar district
Journalists from Gujarat
20th-century Indian journalists
Indian biographers
Indian autobiographers
Indian travel writers
20th-century Indian philosophers
Indian translators
Indian independence activists from Gujarat
20th-century Indian translators
Missionary linguists

Swami Anand