alpacentaurus-alpha

2007-12-05T10:37:00.001-08:00

The Romanian national football team is the national football team of Romania and is controlled by the Romanian Football Federation.
Romania is one of only four national teams (the other three being Brazil, France, and Belgium) to participate in the first three World Cups. However, they then qualified only once between the 1950 and 1986 editions. Romania then had a solid run through the 1990s, advancing to the second round or better in three consecutive World Cups. The period was highlighted by the 1994 World Cup where Romania, led by Gheorghe Hagi, reached the quarterfinals and defeated Argentina 3-2 before losing to Sweden on penalty kicks. In Euro 2000 they drew 1-1 with Germany and defeated England 3-2 to advance to the quarterfinals before falling to eventual runners-up Italy.
The team has had less success since 2001, narrowly missing qualification for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups and also missing out on Euro 2004. Romania are drawn with the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Belarus, Luxembourg and Albania in Group G of Euro 2008 qualification.

World Cup record

1960 to 1980 - Did not qualify
1984 - Round 1
1988 to 1992 - Did not qualify
1996 - Round 1
2000 - Quarterfinals
2004 - Did not qualify
2008 - Did qualify European Championship record

History
Romania played their first international match on 8th June 1922, a 2-1 win over Yugoslavia in Belgrade, coached by Teofil Moraru.
Several temporary coaches were employed, before Moraru resumed control in August 1924, managing the side for nearly four years. Romania enjoyed some success during the 1930s; manager Costel Rădulescu took them to the first three FIFA World Cup tournaments, a feat matched only by Brazil and Belgium.

World Cups in the 1930s
Between 1938 and 1970 Romania failed to qualify for any major international tournaments.

International Wilderness
Participation in the World Cup was finally achieved once again in 1970 in Mexico, although qualification came on the back of a 3-0 thrashing by Portugal in Lisbon and two unconvincing draws against unfancied Greece. Angelo Niculescu's promising were given the toughest of draws, in Group 3 with holders England, giants Brazil and Czechoslovakia.
A Geoff Hurst goal gave England a narrow victory in Romania's first match at the Estadio Jalisco in Guadalajara. Chances were improved with a 2-1 win over the Czechs. Despite going behind early to a Ladislav Petráš goal, Romania turned it around after half-time with Alexandru Neagu and Florea Dumitrache scoring to give them two vital points. Even then, only a win over the excellent Brazilians would take them into the Quarter Finals.
There were rumours before the match that Brazil might prefer Romania to progress than World Champions England; Despite beating them 1-0 in their previous match in Guadalajara, the South American giants still viewed England as one of their biggest obstacles to tournament victory. But Brazil played some of the best football of the competition, with Pelé scoring twice and a Jairzinho goal in between. Romania battled bravely; Dumitrache pulled the score back to 2-1 before the break and a late Emerich Dembrowski goal made it 3-2, but they were out.

1970 World Cup
On 26th September 1973, under new coach Valentin Stanculescu, Romania suffered a significant defeat to East Germany in Leipzig. The East Germans won 2-0 to effectively seal their first ever qualification for the World Cup, which would be held over the border in West Germany. With East Germany scoring a predictable 4-1 win in Albania, Romania were out, despite a huge 9-0 win over Finland in Bucharest.
Romania continued to suffer poor form in the UEFA European Championship. In their qualifying group for the 1976 European Football Championship, they were out-qualified by Spain, despite an impressive 1-1 draw in the away match. Romania failed to win matches, drawing twice with Scotland and Spain and dropping points in Denmark with a dismal goalless draw.
Romania were again beat by Spain for a place in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Despite a 1-0 win in Bucharest, Romania lost a bizarre match at home to Yugoslavia 6-4 having led 3-2 at half time. Spain won 1-0 in Belgrade to seal passage to South America.

1970s
Romania's sole successful qualifying campaign was for the European Championships in 1984 in France. At the finals, Romania were drawn with regular rivals Spain, holders West Germany and dark horses Portugal. Under head coach Mircea Lucescu, an encouraging opening game in Saint-Étienne saw them draw with the Spanish. Francisco José Carrasco opened the scoring from the penalty spot but Romania equalized before half time with a goal from Laszlo Bölöni.
Against the Germans in Lens, Marcel Coras scored an equalizer in the first minute of the second half in response to Rudi Völler's opener, but Völler would score a winning goal. Their last match in Nantes was a must-win match, but Nené's late winner meant Portugal progressed with Spain, who netted a dramatic late winner against West Germany at the Parc des Princes in Paris.
Romania stuttered throughout the rest of the decade, but a stronger squad at the end of the decade saw them qualify for their fifth World Cup at Italia 90. A win over Denmark in their last match took took Emerich Jenei's side to the finals for the first time in twenty years.

1980s
Romania's squad was entirely domestic based, despite an increasing trend for the major sides in Italy and Spain buying up the best foreign talent. Midfielder Ilie Dumitrescu, striker Florin Răducioiu and genius playmaker Gheorghe Hagi, then of Steaua Bucharest, were in the squad, but it was forward Gavril Balint who would prove the hero in the first round.
With World Champions Argentina stunned by Cameroon in the tournament's opening match, Romania did their chances no harm with a convincing win over the USSR at the San Nicola in Bari, with Marius Lăcătuş scoring in either half. The result was all the more impressive given the absence of Hagi. There was controversy, however, as Lăcătus's second was a penalty given for a handball by Vagiz Khidiatulin that television replays clearly showed to be some way outside the penalty area.
Romania were the next victims of Cameroon in Bari. Cult hero Roger Milla, 38 years of age, came on as a substitute for Emmanuel Maboang Kessack and scored twice, before Balint pulled one back. Romania needed a point in their last match against improving Argentina at the San Paolo in Naples. Pedro Monzón gave Argentina the lead after an hour, but Balint quickly equalized and Romania held on to reach Round 2.
Against Jack Charlton's Ireland side in Genoa, Romania didn't have the quality to break down a defensive opposition. Daniel Timofte was the only player to miss in the penalty shoot-out - his kick saved by Packie Bonner - and Romania were out. In the process, Ireland became the smallest country ever to progress that far in a FIFA World Cup.

Italia 90
Romania missed out on Euro 92. Scotland qualified after Romania drew a must-win last match in Sofia against Bulgaria, with Nasko Sirakov's equalizer sealing their fate.
They were successful, though, in reaching another World Cup in the United States in 1994. Despite losing in Belgium and suffering a heavy 5-2 defeat in Czechoslovakia, Romania went into their last match at Cardiff Arms Park with Wales needing a win to pip them to a place in the finals. Goals from Gheorghe Hagi and Dean Saunders meant the game was finely balanced, before Wales were awarded a penalty. Paul Bodin of Swindon Town stepped up but hit the woodwork and Romania went on to win 2-1, Răducioiu's late goal proving unnecessary as Czechoslovakia dropped a point in Belgium and were knocked out.
At the finals, Romania were one of the most entertaining teams in the early stages with Hagi, Răducioiu and Dumitrescu on form. Romania beat Colombia - dark horses and Pelé's tip for the tournament - at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in Los Angeles 3-1. Răducioiu opened the scoring before Hagi scored a spectacular second from wide on the left touchline. Adolfo Valencia shredded their nerves with a headed goal just before half-time, but Romania held on and Răducioiu sealed the win with a late third.
In Detroit's Pontiac Silverdome, the temperature soared due to the greenhouse effect in the indoor arena. Switzerland, acclimatized after having already played the hosts there, outran Romania in the second half and turned a 1-1 half time score into a surprising 4-1 win. Romania responded by beating the hosts 1-0 in Pasadena with an early Dan Petrescu goal.
In Round 2 they faced Argentina, who were shorn of Diego Maradona who was thrown out of the tournament for taking drugs. Răducioiu, suspended, was hardly missed, as coach Anghel Iordănescu pushed Dumitrescu forward to play as a striker and the player responded by scoring twice in the first twenty minutes, one a superbly subtle left foot flick from a right-wing Hagi cross slotted between the Argentine defenders. In between, Gabriel Batistuta scored a penalty, but after half-time Romania netted a superb third on the counter attack, with Hagi beating goalkeeper Luis Islas. Abel Balbo pulled one back, but Romania held on for a shock win.
Romania would suffer penalty heartbreak again, in the Quarter Final against Sweden. With just thirteen minutes to go, a tight match opened up as Sweden's Thomas Brolin scored from a clever free-kick move, the ball passed outside the Romanian wall by Håkan Mild for Brolin to smash in. Iordănescu threw caution to the wind and the returning Răducioiu found a late equalizer, again from a free-kick move but this time down to a deflection and a failure of the Swedes to clear. In extra time Răducioiu scored again after a mistake by Patrik Andersson, but Sweden then scored their own late equalizer as giant striker Kennet Andersson climbed above goalkeeper Florin Prunea to head home a long ball. Prunea had come in after two matches to replace Bogdan Stelea, whose confidence was shattered by the 4-1 loss to the Swiss. In the shoot-out, Petrescu and Miodrag Belodedici had their kicks saved by Thomas Ravelli and Sweden went through.

Euro 92 and USA 94
In England, Romania arrived as a highly tought-of and popular team but had a nightmare. Iordănescu's side were based in the north east, with their first two games at St James' Park in Newcastle. Against France, they lost to a Christophe Dugarry header reminiscent of Kennet Andersson's two years earlier, beating the goalkeeper to a lofted through ball. A brilliant early solo goal by Hristo Stoichkov saw Bulgaria knock out their neighbours, although Romania claimed they should have had a goal awarded when the ball struck the bar and bounced behind the goal-line. They finally scored in their last game, Florin Răducioiu equalizing an early goal by Spain's Javier Manjarín. Spain had to win to qualify with France at the expence of Bulgaria and did so when Guillermo Amor stooped to head a late winner. Romania exited with no points and little to cheer.

Euro 96
Despite a dreadful Euro 96, Romania were seeded when they qualified for the 1998 World Cup with an impressive record in qualifying, finishing ten points clear of Ireland. Despite being drawn in a group with England, getting through it was perceived to be easy work with a waning Colombia and minnows Tunisia.
Adrian Ilie scored the only goal with a fine chip in their first match against Colombia at Lyon's Stade Gerland. In Toulouse, they met an England side starting with prodigal striker Michael Owen on the bench, with Teddy Sheringham preferred alongside Alan Shearer. A mistake by Tony Adams was punished by Viorel Moldovan, who played for Coventry City, before Owen came on to claim an equalizer. But Romania won with a wonderful late goal from Dan Petrescu, also playing in England with Chelsea, fighting off his club mate Graeme le Saux and nutmegging goalkeeper David Seaman.
Having already qualified, Romania bizarrely decided to bleach their hair before their last match against Tunisia. Despite England v Colombia being the more decisive game, the Stade de France in Paris was an 80,000 sell out and the crowd were nearly rewarded with a shock as Skander Souayeh scored an early penalty to give the north Africans the lead. Romania needed a point to win the group and, crucially, avoid Argentina in Round 2, and got it when Moldovan volleyed a late equalizer. It did them little good, however, as in the Round of 16 match at Bordeaux, Davor Šuker scored a twice-taken penalty in a poor match and Romania were out.

France 98
Romania were not expected to progress through a group containing Portugal, England and Germany. Hagi's powers were waning, Dumitrescu and Rǎducioiu were no longer on the scene and hopes were pinned on young Internazionale forward Adrian Mutu. Romania started brightly against the Germans in Liège, with Moldovan scoring from close range. A long-range Mehmet Scholl equalizer meant they had to be content with a point and their position looked shaky after Costinha headed a last minute winner for Portugal in their second match.
Emerich Jenei, back as coach, threw caution to the wind in the last match in Charleroi against England, a match which Romania had to win. Defender Cristian Chivu's cross went in off the post in the 22nd minute but, despite Romania dominating, England led at half-time through an Alan Shearer penalty and a late Michael Owen goal after he rounded Bogdan Stelea to score a tap-in, both in the last five minutes of the half. Romania attacked after the break and were quickly rewarded; Dorinel Munteanu punishing a poor punch from Nigel Martyn, a late replacement for the injured Seaman to equalize three minutes after the re-start. England cracked under the pressure. Unable to retain possession or pose an attacking threat, they fell deep and late on Phil Neville, playing out of position at left-back, conceded a penalty scored by Ioan Ganea in the 89th minute.
Romania's relief was tempered by tough opposition in the last eight, and Italy, who would end up seconds from being crowned European champions in an agonizing final, comfortably saw them off 2-0 in Brussels. Francesco Totti and Filippo Inzaghi scoring towards the end of the first half. After the break Hagi, in his final international tournament, hit the woodwork with goalkeeper Francesco Toldo stranded off his line and was magnanimously sent off for diving. Romania's tournament was over and Jenei, an ethnic Hungarian as were many of Romania's players of his generation, left his job as coach again.

Euro 2000
Romania failed to qualify for the next three major tournaments. They drew Slovenia, who had been surprise qualifiers for Euro 2000 in a playoff for a place in the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan. A narrow 2-1 deficit - having led through a Marius Niculae goal - after the first leg in Ljubljana was not irretrievable. With fans' hero Gheorghe Hagi now coaching the side they were confident of getting the win they needed in Bucharest against the Balkan upstarts, but Slovenia took the lead before the hour through Mladen Rudonja. Right wing-back Cosmin Contra quickly equalized but Romania could not find the goal they needed to force extra time and Slovenia, with maverick manager Srečko Katanec, were in a major tournament again.
Romania were confident of qualifying for Euro 2004 in Portugal, drawn in Group 2 with seeds Denmark, Norway, Bosnia-Herzegovina and minnows Luxembourg. Despite a good start - a 3-0 win away to Bosnia in Sarajevo, Romania stuttered. Steffen Iversen's late goal gave Norway a surprise win in Bucharest and they were stunned at home by the Danes, 5-2, with Thomas Gravesen scoring a spectacular goal from around fifty yards out, despite leading twice. They recovered slightly, completing a double over the Bosnians and getting a point in Oslo, but conceded a cutting injury time equalizer in Denmark to draw 2-2. It was decisive, as they now required Norway to fail to win at home to Luxembourg to stand any realistic chance of qualifying. Eventually, the Danes got a point in Bosnia to scrape through a tight group, with Norway going to a play-off with Spain.
Romania were put in a massive group for the qualifying tournament for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany. Holland and Czech Republic were favourite to qualify, then ranked first and second in Europe. Early wins over Finland and Macedonia were unconvincing, and they were some way behind the two leaders by the time they earned a good 2-0 home win over the Czechs. They finished third behind the Dutch and the Czechs and missed out on another major tournament.

2000s - Near Misses

Teofil Moraru 1922 - 1923
Costel Rădulescu 1923
Adrian Suciu 1923 - 1924
Teofil Moraru 1924 - 1928
Costel Rădulescu 1923 - 1934
Josef Uridil 1934
Alexandru Săvulescu 1934 - 1935
Costel Rădulescu 1935 - 1938
Alexandru Săvulescu 1938
Liviu Iuga 1938 - 1939
Virgil Economu 1939 - 1940
Liviu Iuga 1940
Virgil Economu 1941 - 1942
Jean Lăpuşneanu 1942 - 1943
Emerich Vogl 1942 - 1943
Coloman Braun-Bogdan 1945
Virgil Economu 1946
Colea Vâlcov 1947
Emerich Vogl 1947
Francisc Ronnay 1947
Emerich Vogl 1947
Colea Vâlcov 1948
Petre Steinbach 1948
Iuliu Baratky 1948
Emerich Vogl 1948
Colea Vâlcov 1949
Emerich Vogl 1949
Ion Mihăilescu 1949
Gheorghe Albu 1950
Volodea Vâlcov 1950
Emerich Vogl 1950 - 1951
Gheorghe Popescu I 1951 - 1957
Augustin Botescu 1958 - 1960
Gheorghe Popescu I 1961
Constantin Teaşcă 1962
Gheorghe Popescu I 1962
Silviu Ploeşteanu 1962 - 1964
Valentin Stănescu 1964
Silviu Ploeşteanu 1964
Ilie Oană 1965 - 1966
Valentin Stănescu 1967
Ilie Oană 1967
Angelo Niculescu 1967
Constantin Teaşcă 1967
Angelo Niculescu 1967 - 1970
Valentin Stănescu 1971
Angelo Niculescu 1971
Valentin Stănescu 1971
Angelo Niculescu 1971
Valentin Stănescu 1971
Angelo Niculescu 1971
Gheorghe Ola 1972
Angelo Niculescu 1972
Gheorghe Ola 1972
Angelo Niculescu 1972
Gheorghe Ola 1972
Valentin Stănescu 1973 - 1975
Cornel Drăguşin 1975
Stefan Kovacs 1976 - 1979
Florin Halagian 1979
Stefan Kovacs 1979
Constantin Cernăianu 1979
Stefan Kovacs 1980
Constantin Cernăianu 1980
Stefan Kovacs 1980
Valentin Stănescu 1980 - 1981
Mircea Lucescu 1981 - 1986
Emerich Jenei 1986 - 1990
Gheorghe Constantin 1990
Mircea Rădulescu 1990 - 1992
Cornel Dinu 1992 - 1993
Anghel Iordănescu 1993 - 1998
Victor Piţurcă 1998 - 1999
Emerich Jenei 2000
Ladislau Bölöni 2000 - 2001
Anghel Iordănescu 2002 - 2004
Victor Piţurcă 2005 - Past managers

Ioan Andone
Alexandru Apolzan
Iuliu Baratky
Silviu Bindea
Iuliu Bodola
Ilie Balaci
Miodrag Belodedici
László Bölöni
Rodion Cămătaru
Cristian Chivu (*)
Cosmin Contra (*)
Ştefan Dobay
Nicolae Dobrin
Cornel Dinu
Florea Dumitrache
Ion Dumitru
Ilie Dumitrescu
Emerich Dembrovschi
Ionel Ganea
Gheorghe Hagi
Adrian Ilie
Anghel Iordănescu
Michael Klein
Viorel Moldovan
Marius Lăcătuş
Bogdan Lobonţ (*)
Mircea Lucescu
Ioan Lupescu
Silviu Lung
Bazil Marian
Dorin Mateuţ
Dorinel Munteanu (*)
Adrian Mutu (*)
Titus Ozon
Dan Petrescu
Gheorghe Popescu
Iosif Petschovsky
Daniel Prodan
Marcel Răducanu
Necula Răducanu
Florin Răducioiu
Mircea Rednic
Ioan Ovidiu Sabău
Bogdan Stelea
Costică Ştefănescu
Nicolae Ungureanu
Ion Vladoiu
(*) - still active Famous players
The following players were named for the Euro 2008 qualifier against The Netherlands on 13 October 2007.
Caps and goals correct as of 12 September 2007, up to and including the match against Germany.

Current squad

Coaching staff
The following players played at least one UEFA Euro 2008 Qualifying match, but were not named for the qualifier against against Belarus on September 8 and the friendly against Germany on September 12.

Other important players of the squad
The following players were named for at least one UEFA Euro 2008 Qualifying match, but have not played in the qualifiers.
| Adrian Cristea || || Dinamo Bucuresti || Midfielder || 5 (2) ||

Other players
As of February 12, 2007, the ten players with the most caps for Romania are:

(*) - still active Top goalscorers

The Austrian Josef Uridil is the only foreign manager who coached Romania

2007-12-04T09:42:00.001-08:00

Lister Sheddon Sinclair, OC, MA, LL.D. (January 9, 1921 - October 16, 2006) was a Canadian broadcaster, playwright and polymath. Sinclair was born in Bombay, India to Scottish parents. His father, William Sheddon Sinclair, was a chemical engineer. He was sent to live with an aunt in London when he was 18 months old and did not see his parents again until he was seven.
He taught himself to read at the age of five and began his formal education at Colet Court. Though at the bottom of his class, he was gifted at mathematics and won a scholarship to St Paul's School in London. Assured by a travel agency that there would be no war, he visited North America with his mother in 1939 to attend the World's Fair in New York City. He was visiting Niagara Falls, Ontario when World War II broke out. Due to a back injury as a teenager, Sinclair walked with a limp and used a cane until well into his twenties and was unfit for military service. He and his mother found themselves stranded on the continent and settled in Vancouver where his mother had friends. He enrolled at the University of British Columbia where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in math and physics and began a lifelong friendship with classmate Pierre Berton. He also joined the Player's Club on campus. In 1942 he moved to Toronto to study towards a Master of Arts from the University of Toronto supporting himself by lecturing in mathematics to undergraduates.

Career
Needing to further supplement his income, Sinclair found employment as an actor with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation playing a German in the 1942 pro-Allied broadcast, Nazi Eyes on Canada, which starred Helen Hayes.
He was subsequently cast in the series Fighting Navy playing the captain of a German U-Boat (source: Ideas, Thank you, Mister Sinclair, part 1, October 16, 2006) and performed in various other radio plays. He began writing radio plays for the network in 1944 and would go on to write more than 400 plays, many of them for the radio series Stage ([1]).
In 1945, Sinclair wrote a radio speech that Ontario Co-operative Commonwealth Federation leader Ted Jolliffe delivered during the 1945 provincial election campaign. The speech accused Premier of Ontario George Drew of running a political gestapo unit out of the Ontario Provincial Police. The accusations were denied by Drew, and may have hurt the CCF's credibility with voters. However, the charge was proven true in the 1970s by archival documents uncovered by a researcher ([2]).
Sinclair's radio play, Hilda Morgan, broadcast on February 12, 1950, resulted in an uproar in the Canadian House of Commons over its then-taboo subject matter of a pregnant, unmarried woman considering abortion after her fiance is killed in an accident though the word abortion was never used. He was referred to as "easily the foremost in Canada's array of postwar playwrights" by critic Nathan Cohen. He began to appear on the new CBC Television service in 1955 appearing on programs such as Front Page Challenge and Assignment as well as the Wayne & Shuster comedy show.
After his appearances in wartime propaganda films, Sinclair would go on to spend over six decades with the CBC in various capacities. In addition to playwright he was a radio and then television personality, writer, actor, panelist, producer, lecturer, commentator and, for a brief period in the 1970s, network executive. Sinclair was a panelist on the show Court of Opinion for twenty-four years, hosted Man at the Centre and was the first host of The Nature of Things as well as a frequent contributor to Morningside when Don Harron was host but he was best known for presenting the CBC Radio program Ideas beginning in 1983. Sinclair retired from hosting Ideas in 1999 after presenting over 2,000 installments, including several hundred produced or written by himself. He continued to contribute to the programme until shortly before his death.
In 1972, CBC president Laurent Picard made Sinclair the CBC's executive vice-president of English-language services as part of an effort to bring creative people into administration. The experiment was unsuccessful and proved frustrating to both Sinclair and CBC administration in Ottawa. He was demoted to a more junior position as vice president of program policy and development in 1974 and returned to Toronto to his former role as a producer and writer in 1976.
Sinclair served as vice-president of the Canadian Conference of the Arts in the 1980s. He also helped form the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA).
He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1985.
In 2002, Lister Sinclair became a MasterWorks honouree for Hilda Morgan and his body of work by the ([3]) Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada.
He was hospitalized in September 2006 due to a pulmonary embolism ([4]) and died there on the morning of October 16, 2006, aged 85
Bernie Lucht, a longtime friend of Sinclair's, said of the broadcaster "My lasting memory is the enormous privilege it was to have been able to touch a compassionate genius."
"He was simply a remarkable man,"' said Lucht. "He was brilliant, compassionate, had a wide-ranging mind with an expertise in everything from poetry, to mathematics, to music, to literature, to culture.
"He felt that the job of humanity was to find out what it was about, what we were about and what our surroundings, the universe into which we had been born, were about."
Former governor general and CBC broadcaster Adrienne Clarkson, who shared an office with Sinclair when she joined the broadcaster in the 1960s, remembered him upon his death. "You were the beneficiary of Lister knowing a lot," she said. "He was not only a polymath; he was a prodigy" ([5]).
Lister Sinclair had a difficult family life. He was estranged from one of his sons for some years, and has said that he did not enjoy his family life terribly much, but that he would have liked to.

2007-12-03T08:53:00.000-08:00

Early years
When Civil War broke out, Buford returned to the East from his post in Utah. He was regarded as a man who drove himself too hard, which might have contributed to his success. He had relatives who fought for the South, and upon receiving an offer of a commission in the Confederate Army, legend has it he crumpled it up and threw it on the ground, declaring that he would "Live and die under the flag of the Union." In the Gettysburg Campaign, Buford, who had been promoted to command of the 1st Division, is credited with selecting the field of battle at Gettysburg. Buford's division was the first to arrive at Gettysburg and successfully held off Maj. Gen. Henry Heth's Confederate division so that Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds's I Corps could hold the high ground west of town. Afterwards, Buford's tired troopers were sent by Pleasonton to Emmitsburg, Maryland, to resupply and refit, an ill-advised decision that uncovered the Union left flank. They saw no more action at the eventual Gettysburg victory, of which Buford had been a key component.
Buford pursued the Confederates to Warrenton and was afterward engaged in many operations in central Virginia, rendering a particularly valuable service in covering Maj. Gen. George Meade's retrograde movement in the October 1863 Bristoe Campaign.
"The hero at Oak Ridge was John Buford... he not only showed the rarest tenacity, but his personal capacity made his cavalry accomplish marvels, and rival infantry in their steadfastness... Glorious John Buford!"

Civil War
Buford was stricken with typhoid fever (brought on by his wounds and exposure) and died in Maj. Gen. George Stoneman's home at Washington, D.C. He was promoted to major general on his deathbed, but effective July 1, 1863, the day he fought so effectively at Gettysburg.
In 1866, a military fort established on the Missouri-Yellowstone confluence in what is now North Dakota, was named Fort Buford after the general.
In 1895, a bronze statue of Buford designed by artist James E. Kelly was dedicated on the Gettysburg Battlefield.

In popular media

Bielakowski, Alexander M., "John Buford", Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, Heidler, David S., and Heidler, Jeanne T., eds., W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, ISBN 0-393-04758-X.
Eicher, John H., & Eicher, David J., Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3.
Longacre, Edward G., General John Buford: A Military Biography, Combined Publishing, 1995, ISBN 0-938289-46-2.
Petruzzi, J. David, "Buford's Boys" website
Petruzzi, J. David, "John Buford: By the Book," America's Civil War Magazine, July 2005.
Petruzzi, J. David, "Opening the Ball at Gettysburg: The Shot That Rang for Fifty Years," America's Civil War Magazine, July 2006.
Petruzzi, J. David, "The Fleeting Fame of Alfred Pleasonton," America's Civil War Magazine, March 2005.
Proceedings of the Buford Memorial Association (New York, 1895)
History of the Civil War in America (volume iii, p.545)
This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.

2007-12-02T09:06:00.001-08:00

The Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape is a World Heritage Site which includes select mining landscapes across Cornwall and west Devon in the south west of the United Kingdom. The Site was added to the World Heritage List during the 30th Session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Vilnius, July 2006. The landscapes of Cornwall and west Devon were radically reshaped during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by deep-lode mining for copper and tin. The underground mines, engine houses, foundries, new towns, smallholdings, ports, harbours, and ancillary industries together reflect prolific innovation which, in the early nineteenth century, enabled the region to produce two-thirds of the world's supply of copper. During the late 1800s, arsenic production came into ascendancy with mines in the east of Cornwall and west Devon supplying half the world's demand. The early nineteenth century also saw a revolution in steam technology which was to radically transform hard-rock mining fortunes. The high-pressure expansively operated beam pumping engine developed by the engineer Richard Trevithick enabled mining at much greater depths than had been possible hitherto. Cornish-design beam engines and other mining machinery was to be exported from major engineering foundries in Hayle, Perranarworthal, Tavistock and elsewhere to mining fields around the world throughout the century. Commencing in the early 1800s, significant numbers of mine workers migrated to live and work in mining communities based on Cornish traditions, this flow reaching its zenith at the end of the nineteenth century. Today numerous migrant-descended Cornish communities flourish around the world and distinctive Cornish-design engine houses can be seen in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, the British Virgin Islands, Spain, and in the mining fields of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man. A much reduced mining industry continued in Cornwall after the copper crash of the 1860s with production mainly focused on tin. Metalliferous mining finally ceased in Cornwall in 1998 with the closure of South Crofty Mine, Pool, the last tin mine to operate in Europe.

Areas

Stannary Courts and Parliaments
Mining in Cornwall
Revived Cornish Stannary Parliament
Wheel Wreck

2007-12-01T07:27:00.000-08:00

PGF (Progressive Graphics File) is a wavelet-based bitmapped image format that employs lossless and lossy data compression. PGF was created to improve upon and replace the JPEG format. It was developed at the same time as JPEG 2000 but with a different focus: speed over compression ratio.
PGF can operate at higher compression ratios without taking more encoding/decoding time and without generating the characteristic 'blocky and blurry' artifacts of the original DCT-based JPEG standard . It also allows more sophisticated progressive downloads.

Advantages
The aim of PGF is not only improved compression quality over JPEG but also adding (or improving) features such as scalability. In fact, PGF's improvement in compression performance relative to the original JPEG standard is actually rather modest and should not ordinarily be the primary consideration for evaluating the design. Moreover, very low and very high compression rates (including lossless compression) are also supported in PGF. In fact, the graceful ability of the design to handle a very large range of effective bit rates is one of the strengths of PGF. For example, to reduce the number of bits for a picture below a certain amount, the advisable thing to do with the first JPEG standard is to reduce the resolution of the input image before encoding it — something that is ordinarily not necessary for that purpose when using PGF because of its wavelet scalability properties.
The PGF process chain contains the following four steps:

Color space transform (in case of color images)
Discrete Wavelet Transform
Quantization (in case of lossy data compression)
Hierarchical bit-plane run-length encoding Technical discussion
Initially, images have to be transformed from the RGB color space to another color space, leading to three components that are handled separately. PGF uses a fully reversible modified YUV color transform. The transformation matrices are:
begin{bmatrix}
Y_r U_r V_r
end{bmatrix}
= begin{bmatrix}
frac{1}{4} & frac{1}{2} & frac{1}{4}
1 & -1 & 0
0 & -1 & 1
end{bmatrix}
begin{bmatrix}
R G B
end{bmatrix}; qquad qquad
begin{bmatrix}
R G B
end{bmatrix}
= begin{bmatrix}
1 & frac{3}{4} & -frac{1}{4}
1 & -frac{1}{4} & -frac{1}{4}
1 & -frac{1}{4} & frac{3}{4}
end{bmatrix}
begin{bmatrix}
Y_r U_r V_r
end{bmatrix}
" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/3/4/2/3424604da81ec38a4c769ab3e47e683b.png" />
The chrominance components can be, but do not necessarily have to be, down-scaled in resolution.

Color components transformation
The color components are then wavelet transformed to an arbitrary depth, in contrast to JPEG 1992 which uses an 8x8 block-size discrete cosine transform. PGF uses one reversible wavelet transform: a rounded version of the biorthogonal CDF 5/3 wavelet transform. This wavelet filter bank is exacetly the same as the reversible wavelet used in JPEG 2000. It uses only integer coefficients, so the output does not require rounding (quantization) and so it does not introduce any quantization noise.

Wavelet transform
After the wavelet transform, the coefficients are scalar-quantized to reduce the amount of bits to represent them, at the expense of a loss of quality. The output is a set of integer numbers which have to be encoded bit-by-bit. The parameter that can be changed to set the final quality is the quantization step: the greater the step, the greater is the compression and the loss of quality. With a quantization step that equals 1, no quantization is performed (it is used in lossless compression). In contrast to JPEG 2000 PGF uses only powers of two, therefore the parameter value i represents a quantization step of 2. Just using powers of two makes no need of integer multiplication and division operations.

Quantization
The result of the previous process is a collection of sub-bands which represent several approximation scales. A sub-band is a set of coefficients — integer numbers which represent aspects of the image associated with a certain frequency range as well as a spatial area of the image.
The quantized sub-bands are split further into blocks, rectangular regions in the wavelet domain. They are typically selected in a way that the coefficients within them across the sub-bands form approximately spatial blocks in the (reconstructed) image domain and collected in a fixed size macroblock.
The encoder has to encode the bits of all quantized coefficients of a macroblock, starting with the most significant bits and progressing to less significant bits. In this encoding process, each bit-plane of the macroblock gets encoded in two so-called coding passes, first encoding bits of significant coefficients, then refinement bits of significant coefficients. Clearly, in lossless mode all bit-planes have to be encoded, and no bit-planes can be dropped.
Only significant coefficients are compressed with an adaptive run-length/Rice (RLR) coder, because they contain long runs of zeros. The RLR coder with parameter k (logarithmic length of a run of zeros) is also known as the elementary Golomb code of order 2.

Coding

Comparison with other File Formats
The JPEG 2000 is slightly more space-efficient in the case of natural images. The PSNR for the same compression ratio is on average 3% better than the PSNR of PGF. Its small advantage in compression ratio is paid with a clearly higher encoding and decoding time.
The original PGF source code is open (not patented) and available under LGPL.

PNG

Comparison of graphics file formats
Related graphics file formats

JPEG 2000
JPEG
Image file formats
Image compression

2007-11-30T07:34:00.001-08:00

Millburn is an area in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. Millburn Academy is situated in the area. The area is also known, as the name suggests, for the Mill Burn which runs through the area. Millburn Road which runs parallel to the school is one of the main access roads into the centre of Inverness. The area is also famous for Millburn Whisky which used to be distilled in the area. The actual site of the distillery though has now been converted into a commmercial restaurant attached to a chain hotel. There is a comprehensive school called Millburn Academy.
The Aird · Ballifeary · Balloch · Balnafettack · Beechwood · Bught · Carse · Castle Heather · Clachnaharry · Cradlehall · Crown · Croy · Culcabock · Culduthel · Culloden · Dalneigh · Drakies · Drummond · Haugh · Hilton · Holm · Inshes · Kinmylies · Leachkin · Lochardil · Longman · Merkinch · Millburn · Milton · Milton of Leys · Muirtown · Ness Castle · Ness-Side · Raigmore · Scorguie · Seafield · Slackbuie · Smithton · South Kessock · Torvean · Westhill
Coordinates: 58°35′N, 4°02′W

2007-11-29T09:27:00.001-08:00

This is a list of islands in the world ordered by their highest point. It includes all islands with peaks higher than 2,000 m. Non-insular (continental) landmasses are included for comparison.
Countries listed are those containing the highest point; other countries on the same landmass are in parentheses.

Other notable island mountains
www.peaklist.org - majority of information about mountain heights comes from here. [1] - this site contains the highest mountain of each country in the world. [2] - this is a site about the highest mountains in the world (over 3,500 m). Times Atlas of the World and Merriam-Webster's Geographical Dictionary are important sources.

2007-11-28T11:09:00.001-08:00

In 1935, the new Director General of the Ordnance Survey, Major-General Malcolm MacLeod, started the retriangulation of Great Britain, an immense task which involved erecting concrete triangulation pillars (trig points) on prominent hilltops throughout Great Britain.
The aim was to replace the original triangulation of Britain, known as the Principal Triangulation, which had been performed between 1783 and 1853, with a more modern and accurate triangulation.
The effort was directed by the cartographer and mathematician Martin Hotine, head of the Trigonometrical and Levelling Division, who planned the operation in a manner similar to a military campaign. Every detail of the operation and measurements were carefully specified in advance to attempt to produce the most accurate measurements possible given the then-current technology.
Erecting new trig points and making measurements frequently required materials and instruments to be carried on foot, up hills and mountains and to isolated islands, in all weathers.
The network of trig points was built and measured between 1936 and 1962, starting with a set of several hundred primary trig points, most of which were placed on high hills so as to be able to link to one another across long distances. In addition, a larger set of roughly 6000 secondary trig points were added to allow the construction of a finer mesh which would extend the reference frame of the primary mesh over shorter distances.
The results of the retriangulation were then used to create the British national grid reference system which would be the basis of the Ordnance Survey's new maps.
The retriangulation generated a co-ordinate system which is still used today, and which allows accurate plotting of the entire country, varying in accuracy from 20 metres to up to 1 metre (depending on the scale of the map). It represented a triumph of the available technology at the time. However, the triangulation method of surveying has now been rendered obsolete by satellite-based GPS measurements, which can obtain a precision of 15 mm from end-to-end, with re-measurements taking hours rather than years. As a result of this, the trig point network is no longer actively maintained, except for a few trig points that have been reused as part of the Ordnance Survey's National GPS Network.

See also

Geodesy
OSGB36
Reference frame
Triangulation

2007-11-27T09:15:00.001-08:00

Pope Pius XII (Latin: Pius PP. XII), born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli (March 2, 1876 – October 9, 1958), reigned as the 260th pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City, from March 2, 1939 until his death.
Before election to the papacy, Pacelli served as secretary of the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, papal nuncio and cardinal secretary of state, in which roles he worked to conclude treaties with European nations, most notably the Reichskonkordat with Germany. His leadership of the Catholic Church during World War II and The Holocaust remains the subject of continued historical controversy. After World War II, he was a vocal supporter of lenient policies toward vanquished nations and a staunch opponent of communism.
Pius is one of few popes in recent history to invoke papal infallibility (as opposed to the more general infallibility of the Church) by issuing an apostolic constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, which defines ex cathedra the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. He also promulgated forty encyclicals, including Humani Generis, which is still relevant to the Church's position on evolution. He also decisively eliminated the Italian majority in the College of Cardinals with the Grand Consistory in 1946. Most sedevacantists regard Pope Pius XII as the last true Pope to occupy the Holy See. His ongoing canonization process progressed to the venerable stage on September 2, 2000 under Pope John Paul II.

Early life

Church career
He was ordained a priest on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1899 by Bishop Francesco Paolo Cassetta — the vice-regent of Rome and a family friend — and received his first assignment as a curate at Chiesa Nuova, where he had served as an altar boy.

Priest and Monsignor
Pope Benedict XV appointed Pacelli as papal nuncio to Bavaria on April 23, 1917, consecrating him as a titular Bishop of Sardis and immediately elevating him to be archbishop in the Sistine Chapel on May 13, 1917, before he left for Bavaria, where he would meet with King Ludwig III on May 28, and later with Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Archbishop and Papal nuncio
Pacelli was made a cardinal on 16 December 1929 by Pope Pius XI. Within a few months, on 7 February 1930, Pius XI appointed Pacelli Cardinal Secretary of State. In 1935, Cardinal Pacelli was named Camerlengo of the Roman Church.
As Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli signed concordats with many non-Communist states, including Baden (1932), Likewise the prepared encyclical Humani Generis Unitas, which was ready in September 1938 and contained an open and clear condemnation of all racism and anti-semitism, might have been prevented from release by Pacelli, who did not promulgate the encyclical as pope.

Cardinal Secretary of State and Camerlengo

Main article: Reichskonkordat Reichskonkordat

Papacy

Main article: Papal conclave, 1939 Election and coronation
Pope Pius XII accepted the Rhythm Method as a moral form of family planning, although only in limited circumstances, in two speeches on October 29, 1951, and November 26, 1951.

Theology
Pius exercised Papal Infallibility in defining dogma when he issued, on November 1, 1950 an apostolic constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, which defines ex cathedra the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. He consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1942, in accordance with the second "secret" of Our Lady of Fatima.
His other apostolic constitutions are Provida Mater Ecclesia (February 2, 1947), Bis Saeculari Die (September 27, 1948), Sponsa Christi (November 21, 1950), and Exsul Familia (August 1, 1952).

Encyclicals
During his reign, Pius XII canonized thirty-four saints, including Saint Margaret of Hungary, Gemma Galgani, Mother Cabrini, Catherine Labouré, John de Britto, Joseph Cafasso, Saint Louis de Montfort, Nicholas of Flue, Joan of France, Duchess of Berry, Maria Goretti, Dominic Savio, Pope Pius X, Peter Chanel, and Ignatius of Laconi. He beatified six people, including Justin de Jacobis. He named Saint Casimir the patron saint of all youth.

Canonizations and beatifications
Only twice in his pontificate did Pius XII hold a consistory to create new cardinals, in contrast to Pius XI, who had done so seventeen times in seventeen years. Pius XII chose not to name new cardinals during World War II, and the number of cardinals shrank to 38, with Cardinal Denis Dougherty being the only living U.S. cardinal. The first occasion on February 18, 1946 — which has become known as the "Grand Consistory" — yielded the elevation of a record thirty-two new cardinals (previously Leo X's elevation of thirty-one cardinals in 1517 had held this title). John Paul II would later surpass this number on February 21, 2001, elevating forty-four cardinals. Together with the first post-war consistory in 1953—where Msgr. Tardini and Msgr. Montini were notably not elevated
Earlier, in 1945, Pius XII had dispensed with the complicated papal conclave procedures which attempted to ensure secrecy while preventing Cardinals from voting for themselves, compensating for this change by raising the requisite majority from two-thirds to two thirds plus one.

Grand Consistory
Pius XII's pontificate began on the eve of World War II. During the war, the Pope followed a policy of neutrality mirroring that of Pope Benedict XV during World War I.
In April 1939, after the submission of Charles Maurras and the intervention of the Carmel of Lisieux, Pius XII ended his predecessor's ban on Action Française, an organization described by some authors as virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Communist.

World War II
Pius engineered an agreement — formally approved on June 23, 1939 — with Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas to issue 3,000 visas to "non-Aryan Catholics". However, over the next eighteen months Brazil's Conselho de Imigração e Colonização (CIC) continued to tighten the restrictions on their issuance — including requiring a baptismal certificate dated before 1933, a substantial monetary transfer to the Banco do Brasil, and approval by the Brazilian Propaganda Office in Berlin — culminating in the cancellation of the program fourteen months later, after fewer than 1,000 visas had been issued, amid suspicions of "improper conduct" (i.e. continuing to practice Judaism) among those who had received visas.

The Holocaust
Pius's anti-Communist activities became more potent following the war. In 1948, Pius declared that any Italian Catholic who supported Communist candidates in the parliamentary elections of that year would be excommunicated and also encouraged Azione Cattolica to support the Christian Democratic Party. In 1949, he authorized the Holy Office to excommunicate any Catholic who joined or collaborated with the Communist Party. He also publicly condemned the Soviet crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Post-World War II
In 2005, Corriere della Sera published a document dated 20 November 1946 on the subject of Jewish children baptized in war-time France. The document ordered that baptized children, if orphaned, should be kept in Catholic custody and stated that the decision "has been approved by the Holy Father". Nuncio Angelo Roncalli (who would become Pope John XXIII) ignored this directive.

Jewish orphans controversy
Pius was dogged with ill health later in life, largely due to a charlatan, Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi, whom Pius made an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Pius suffered from gastritis brought on by kidney dysfunctions. Galeazzi-Lisi, with the aid of a Swiss colleague, prescribed injections made from the glands of fetal lambs that gave Pius chronic hiccups and rotting teeth.
Pope Pius XII's cause of canonization was opened on November 18, 1965 by Pope Paul VI. On September 2, 2000, during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, Pius XII was given the title of Venerable. Rome's Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff also began promoting the cause of Pius to receive such posthumous recognition from Yad Vashem as a "righteous gentile". The Boy Scouts of America's highest Catholic emblem is named after him.

Later life, death, and legacy

Views, interpretations, and scholarship
During the war, the pope was widely praised. For example, Time Magazine credited Pius XII and the Catholic Church for "fighting totalitarianism more knowingly, devoutly, and authoritatively, and for a longer time, than any other organized power".

Contemporary

Main article: The Deputy The Deputy

Main article: Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale Actes

Main article: Hitler's Pope ICJHC

Cornwell, John. (1999). Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Viking. ISBN 0-670-87620-8. Also see Amazon Online Reader.
Richard Cushing (cardinal)|Cushing, Richard. (1959). Pope Pius XII. Paulist Press.
Dalin, Rabbi David G. (2005). The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis. Regnery. ISBN 0-89526-034-4.
Falconi, Carlo. (1970, translated from the 1965 Italian edition). The Silence of Pius XII. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. ISBN 0-571-09147-4
Feldkamp, Michael F. Pius XII. und Deutschland. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ISBN 3-525-34026-5.
Friedländer, Saul. (1966). Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation. New York: Alfred A Knopf. ISBN 0-374-92930-0
Gallo, Patrick J., ed. (2006). Pius XII, The Holocaust and the Revisionists. London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. ISBN 0-7864-2374-9
Goldhagen, Daniel (2002)."A Moral Reckoning - The role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair". Little, Brown ISBN 0 316 724467
Gutman, Israel, ed. (1990). Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 3. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. ISBN 0-02-864529-4
Halecki, Oskar.(1954). Pius XII: Eugenio Pacelli: Pope of peace. Farrar, Straus and Young. OCLC 775305
Alden Hatch and Seamus Walshe. (1958). Crown of Glory, The Life of Pope Pius XII. New York: Hawthorne Books.
ICJHC. (2000). The Vatican and the Holocaust: A Preliminary Report.
Kent, Peter. (2002). The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII : The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943-1950. Ithaca : McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-2326-X
Lapide, Pinchas (1980). The Last Three Popes and the Jews. London:Souvenir Press.
Levillain, Philippe. (2002). The Papacy: An Encyclopedia. Routledge (UK). ISBN 0-415-92228-3
Lewy, Guenter. (1964). The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-306-80931-1
Marchione, Sr. Margherita. (2000). Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace. Paulist Press. ISBN 0-8091-3912-X
Marchione, Sr. Margherita. (2002). Consensus and Controversy: Defending Pope Pius XII. Paulist Press. ISBN 0-8091-4083-7
Marchione, Sr. Margherita. (2002). Shepherd of Souls: A Pictorial Life of Pope Pius XII. Paulist Press. ISBN 0-8091-4181-7
Marchione, Sr. Margherita. (2004). Man of Peace: An Abridged Life of Pope Pius XII. Paulist Press. ISBN 0-8091-4245-7
McDermott, Thomas. (1946). Keeper of the Keys -A Life of Pope Pius XII. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company.
McInerney, Ralph. (2001). The Defamation of Pius XII. St Augustine's Press. ISBN 1-890318-66-3
Murphy, Paul I. and Arlington, R. Rene. (1983) La Popessa: The Controversial Biography of Sister Pasqualina, the Most Powerful Woman in Vatican History. New York: Warner Books Inc. ISBN 0-446-51258-3
(Italian) Padellaro, Nazareno. (1949). Portrait of Pius XII. Dutton; 1st American ed edition (1957). OCLC 981254
Paul, Leon. (1957). The Vatican Picture Book - A Picture Pilgrimage. New York: Greystone Press.
Phayer, Michael. (2000). The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-33725-9.
Pollard, John F. (2005). Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950. Cambridge University Press.
Pfister, Pierre. (1955). PIUS XII - The Life and Work of a Great Pope. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
Ritner, Carol and Roth, John K., eds. (2002). Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. New York: Leicester University Press. ISBN 0-7185-0275-2
Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Myron C. Taylor, ed. Wartime Correspondence Between President Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII. Prefaces by Pius XII and Harry Truman. Kessinger Publishing (1947, reprinted, 2005). ISBN 1-4191-6654-9
Rychlak, Ronald J. (2000). Hitler, the War, and the Pope. Our Sunday Visitor. ISBN 0-87973-217-2. Also see Amazon Online Reader
Sánchez, José M. (2002). Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. ISBN 0-8132-1081-X
Scholder, Klaus. (1987). The Churches and the Third Reich. London.
Volk, Ludwig. (1972) Das Reichskonkordat vom 20. Juli 1933. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag. ISBN 3-7867-0383-3.
Zolli, Israel. (1997). Before the Dawn. Roman Catholic Books (Reprint edition). ISBN 0-912141-46-8. Also see Amazon Online Reader
Zuccotti, Susan. (2000). Under his very Windows, The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08487-0

2007-11-26T09:28:00.001-08:00

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states, one federal district, and fourteen territories. The country is situated almost entirely in the western hemisphere: its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie in central North America between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south; the state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent with Canada to its east, and the state of Hawaii is in the mid-Pacific. U.S. territories, or insular areas, are scattered around the Caribbean and Pacific.
At 3.7 million square miles (9.6 million km²) and with 300 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and third largest by land area and population. Several American athletes have become world famous, in particular baseball player Babe Ruth, boxer Muhammad Ali, and basketball player Michael Jordan.

Main article: List of United States-related topics

2007-11-25T08:28:00.001-08:00

The term Viking commonly denotes the ship-borne warriors, pirates and traders of Norsemen (literally, men from the north) who originated in Scandinavia and raided the coasts of Britain, Ireland and mainland Europe as far east as the Volga River in Russia (referred to as Varangians by the Russian Primary Chronicle) The pre-Christian Scandinavian population is also referred to as Norse, although that term is properly applied to the whole civilization of Old-Norse speaking people.

Mountains
Peninsula
Viking Age
Varangian
Viking
Thing (assembly)
Christianization
Kalmar Union
Denmark–Norway
Sweden–Finland
Sweden–Norway
Scandinavia
Denmark
Finland
Norway
Sweden
Iceland
Scandinavism
Monetary Union
Defence union
Royal League
SAS Etymology
See main article Viking Age.
The period from the earliest recorded raids in the 790s until the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 is commonly called the "Viking Age." The Normans, however, were descended from Norwegians (in Norwegian they are still to date refered to as jeg er en Normann), Orkney, Hiberno-Norse, and Danelaw Vikings who were given feudal overlordship of areas of northern France — the Duchy of Normandy — in the 8th century. In that respect, the Vikings continued to have an influence in northern Europe. Likewise, King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England who was killed during the Norman invasion in 1066, was descended from Danish Vikings. Many of the medieval kings of Norway and Denmark were married to English and Scottish royalty and Viking forces were often a factor in dynastic disputes pre-1066.
Geographically, a "Viking Age" may be assigned not only to the Scandinavian lands (modern Denmark, Norway and Sweden), but also to territories under North Germanic dominance, mainly the Danelaw, which replaced the powerful English kingdom of Northumbria and the Isle of Man. Contemporary with the European Viking Age, the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia, heir to the Eastern Roman Empire, experienced the greatest period of stability (circa 800–1071) it would enjoy after the initial wave of Arab conquerors in the 7th century.
Viking navigators also opened the road to new lands to the north, to the west and to the east resulting in the foundation of independent kingdoms in the Shetland, Orkney, and Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and L'Anse aux Meadows, a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland, circa 1000 A.D. Many of these lands, specifically Greenland and Iceland, were likely discovered by sailors blown off course. Greenland was later abandoned because its few "green" spots disappeared due to climate change. Vikings also seized and destroyed many villages and territories in Slavic-dominated areas of Eastern Europe.
During three centuries, Vikings appeared along the coasts and rivers of Europe, as traders generally, but also as raiders when opportunity allowed, and even like Turgesius, as settlers. From 839, Varangian mercenaries in Byzantine service, notably Harald Hardrada, campaigned in North Africa, Jerusalem, and other places in the Middle East. Important trading ports during the period include Birka, Hedeby, Kaupang, Jorvik, Staraya Ladoga, Novgorod and Kiev. Generally speaking, the Norwegians expanded to the north and west to places such as Iceland and Greenland, the Danes to England and France, settling in the Danelaw (NE England) and Normandy, and the Swedes to the east. These nations, although distinct, were similar in culture, especially language. The names of Scandinavian kings are known only for the later part of the Viking Age, and only after the end of the Viking Age did the separate kingdoms acquire a distinct identity as nations, which went hand in hand with their Roman Catholicization. Thus the end of the Viking Age (9th–11th century) for the Scandinavians also marks the start of their relatively brief Middle Ages.
There is archaeological evidence (coins) that the Vikings reached the city of Baghdad, the centre of the Islamic Empire and their considerable intellectual endeavours. In 921, Ibn Fadlan was sent as emissary on behalf of the Caliph of Baghdad to the iltäbär (vassal-king under the Khazars) of the Volga Bulgaria, Almış. The Bolgar King had petitioned to the Caliph to establish relations. He had asked to have someone come to teach him Arabic and the Qu'ran and pledge allegiance to Hanafi rite of the Sunni Muslims. The Caliph promised to send money to build a fort on the Volga, but the transaction never occurred. The Norse regularly plied the Volga with their trade goods: furs, tusks, seal fat to seal boats and slaves (notably female slaves; this was the one time in the history of the slave-trade when females were priced higher than males). However, they were far less successful in establishing settlements in the Middle East, due to the more centralized Islamic power, namely of the Umayyad and, later, Abbasid empires.

The Viking Age
After trade and settlement, cultural impulses flowed from the rest of Europe. Christianity had had an early and growing presence in Scandinavia, and with the rise of centralized authority along with a stiffening of coastal defense in the areas the Vikings preyed upon, the Viking raids became more risky and less profitable. With the rise of kings and great nobles and a quasi-feudal system in Scandinavia, they ceased entirely – in the 11th century the Scandinavians are frequently chronicled as combating the Vikings from the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea , which would eventually lead to Danish and Swedish participation in the Baltic crusades (end of 12th and early 13th century) and contributed to the development of the Hanseatic League.
The east Baltic world was transformed by military conquest: First the Livs, Letts and Estonians, then the Prussians and the Finns underwent defeat, baptism, military occupation and sometimes extermination by groups of Germans, Danes and Swedes.

Decline
Traditionally the earliest date given for a Viking raid is 787 when, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a group of men from Norway sailed to Portland, in Dorset. There, they were mistaken for merchants by a royal official, and they murdered him when he tried to get them to accompany him to the king's manor to pay a trading tax on their goods. The next recorded attack, dated June 8, 793, was on the monastery at Lindisfarne on the east coast of England. For the next 200 years, European history is filled with tales of Vikings and their plundering; the majority of chronicles comes from western witnesses or their descendants, a lesser quantity of chronicles comes from eastern mentions from the Nestor chronicles, Novgorod chronicles, Ibn Fadlan chronicles, Ibn Ruslan chronicles, and many brief mentions of the Fosio bishop from the first big attack to the Byzantine empire.
The vikings had little influence throughout the coastal areas of Ireland and Scotland but they conquered and colonised large parts of England (see Danelaw), and conquered large coastal territories in the Baltic Sea and a large part of inland Russian territories across the rivers settled in Staraya Ladoga, Novgorod and along major waterways to the Byzantine empire. Wales also saw some Viking settlements on its coast; the modern day city of Swansea takes its name from Sweyne Forkbeard who was shipwrecked at modern day Swansea Bay; neighbouring Gower Peninsula has many place names of Norse origin (such as Worms Head; worm is the Norse word for dragon, as the Vikings believed that the serpent-shaped island was a sleeping dragon). Twenty miles west of Cardiff on the Vale of Glamorgan coast is the semi-flooded island of Tusker Rock, which takes its name from Tuska, the Viking whose people semi-colonised the fertile lands of the Vale of Glamorgan.
The Britons of Cornwall allied with Danish Vikings in 722 to defeat the Saxons of Wessex at "Hehil", possibly somewhere near modern day Padstow; this battle is recorded in the Analies Cambria and kept Cornwall free of Anglo-Saxon control for at least 100 years. The Danes tactically helped their Cornish allies by making devastating pillaging raids on Wessex which weakened the authority of the Saxons, and in 1013 Wessex was conquered by the Danes under the leadership of the Viking King of Denmark Sweyn Forkbeard.
Vikings travelled up the rivers of France and Spain, and gained control of areas in Russia and along the Baltic coast. Stories tell of raids in the Mediterranean and as far east as the Caspian Sea.
In select cases, the Celtic nations of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany in 865 and in 722 Cornwall, during their battles against the Anglo-Saxons, decided to ally with the Vikings against the Saxons.
Adam of Bremen records in his book Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, (volume four):
"There is much gold here (in Zealand), accumulated by piracy. These pirates, which are called wichingi by their own people, and Ascomanni by our own people, pay tribute to the Danish king."
Egil Skallagrimsson writes; Björn var farmaður mikill, var stundum í víking, en stundum í kaupferðum, in English: "Björn was a great traveller; sometimes as Viking, sometimes as tradesman".

Aurum ibi plurimum, quod raptu congeritur piratico. Ipsi enim piratae, 'quos illi Wichingos as appellant, nostri Ascomannos regi Danico tributum solvunt. Historical records
Norse mythology, Norse sagas and Old Norse literature tell us about their religion through tales of heroic and mythological heroes. However, the transmission of this information was primarily oral, and we are reliant upon the writings of (later) Christian scholars, such as the Icelanders Snorri Sturluson and Sæmundur fróði, for much of this. Many of these sagas were written in Iceland, and most of them, even if they had no Icelandic provenance, were preserved there after the Middle Ages due to the Icelanders' continued interest in Norse literature and law codes.
Vikings in those sagas are described as if they often struck at accessible and poorly defended targets, usually with impunity. The sagas state that the Vikings built settlements and were skilled craftsmen and traders.
The writer Snorri Sturlason wrote about the Norwegian kings, and is famous for his Sagas(Kongesagaene/King's Saga) about the Norwegian kings until his present day. Like Snorri Sturlason, Icelanders at that time were Norwegian in both language and culture,because of the Norwegian rule, but evolved more and more into their own liking because of the isolation from the mainland.

Icelandic sagas

Viking expansion

Britain
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, after Lindisfarne was raided in 793, Vikings continued on small-scale raids across England. Viking raiders struck England in 793 and raided a Christian monastery that held Saint Cuthbert's relics. The raiders killed the monks and captured the valuables. This raid was called the beginning of the "Viking Age of Invasion", made possible by the Viking longship. There was great violence during the last decade of the 8th century on England's northern and western shores. While the initial raiding groups were small, it is believed that a great amount of planning was involved.
During the winter between 840 and 841, the Norwegians raided during the winter instead of the usual summer. They waited on an island off Ireland. In 865 a large army of Danish Vikings, supposedly led by Ivar, Halfdan and Guthrum arrived in East Anglia. They proceeded to cross England into Northumbria and captured York (Jorvik), where some settled as farmers. Most of the English kingdoms, being in turmoil, could not stand against the Vikings, but Alfred of Wessex managed to keep the Vikings out of his country. Alfred and his successors continued to drive back the Viking frontier and take York.
A new wave of Vikings appeared in England in 947 when Erik Bloodaxe captured York. The Viking presence continued through the reign of Canute the Great (1016-1035), after which a series of inheritance arguments weakened the family reign. The Viking presence dwindled until 1066, when the Norwegians lost their final battle with the English. See also Danelaw.
The Vikings did not get everything their way. In one instance in England, a small Viking fleet attacked a rich monastery at Jarrow. The Vikings were met with stronger resistance than they expected: their leaders were killed, the raiders escaped, only to have their ships beached at Tynemouth and the crews killed by locals. This was one of the last raids on England for about 40 years. The Vikings instead focused on Ireland and Scotland. There was a good deal of intermarriage between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons.

England
While there are few records from the earliest period, it is believed to be clear that a Scandinavian presence in Scotland increased in the 830s. In 836, a large Viking force believed to be Norwegian invaded the Earn valley and Tay valley which were central to the Pictish kingdom. They slaughtered Eoganan, king of the Picts, and his brother, the vassal king of the Scots. They also killed many members of the Pictish aristocracy. The sophisticated kingdom that had been built fell apart, as did the Pictish leadership. The foundation of Scotland under Kenneth MacAlpin is traditionally attributed to the aftermath of this event.
The isles to the north and west of Scotland were heavily colonized by Norwegian Vikings. Shetland, Orkney, the Western Isles, Caithness and Sutherland were under Norse control, sometimes as fiefs under the King of Norway and other times as separate entities. Shetland and Orkney were the last of these to be incorporated into Scotland in as late as 1468. The Vikings almost never settled on the Scottish main land but some did settle on Orkney and Shetland..

Scotland
Wales was not colonized by the Vikings as heavily as eastern England and Ireland. The Vikings did, however, settle in the south around St. David's, Haverfordwest, and Gower, among other places. Place names such as Skokholm, Skomer, and Swansea remain as evidence of the Norse settlement., and ultimately, the Saxons were unable to conquer Wales, partly as in 1013 the Saxons were themselves conquered by the Vikings and annexed to a Danish empire controlled by King Canute.

Wales
In 722 the Cornish allied with Danish Vikings in order to hold Wessex from expanding into Cornwall. A Wessex Saxon army led by King Ine was comprehensively destroyed by an alliance of Cornish and Vikings near the Camel estuary. This battle, as well as the Vikings continually attacking Wessex, enabled Cornwall to stay autonomous from Wessex, and Wessex itself would eventually be conquered by the Danish Vikings in 1013 by the Viking King of Denmark Sweyn Forkbeard.

Cornwall
The Vikings conducted extensive raids in Ireland and founded many towns, including, Athlone, Dublin, Limerick, Mullingar, Wexford, and Waterford. At some points, they seemingly came close to taking over the whole isle; however, the Scandinavians settled down and intermixed with the Irish. Literature, crafts, and decorative styles in Ireland and the British Isles reflected Scandinavian culture. Vikings traded at Irish markets in Dublin. Excavations found imported fabrics from England, Byzantium, Persia, and central Asia. Dublin became so crowded by the 11th century that houses were constructed outside the town walls.
The Vikings pillaged monasteries on Ireland's west coast in 795, and then spread out to cover the rest of the coastline. The north and east of the island were most affected. During the first 40 years, the raids were conducted by small, mobile Viking groups. From 830 on, the groups consisted of large fleets of Viking ships. From 840, the Vikings began establishing permanent bases at the coasts. Dublin was the most significant settlement in the long term. The Irish became accustomed to the Viking presence & culture. In some cases they became allies and also intermarried throughout all of Ireland.
In 832, a Viking fleet of about 120 ships under Turgesius invaded kingdoms on Ireland's northern and eastern coasts. Some believe that the increased number of invaders coincided with Scandinavian leaders' desires to control the profitable raids on the western shores of Ireland. During the mid-830s, raids began to push deeper into Ireland. Navigable waterways made this deeper penetration possible. After 840, the Vikings had several bases in strategic locations throughout Ireland.
In 838, a small Viking fleet entered the River Liffey in eastern Ireland. The Vikings set up a base, which the Irish called longphorts. This longphort would eventually become Dublin. After this interaction, the Irish experienced Viking forces for about 40 years. The Vikings also established longphorts in Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Wexford. The Vikings were driven out of Ireland for a short period around 900, but returned to Waterford in 914 to found what would become Ireland's first city. The other longphorts were soon re-occupied and developed into cities and towns.
The last major battle involving Vikings was the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, in which a large force from the pan-Viking world and their Irish allies opposed Brian Boru, then the High King of Ireland and his forces, a small contingent of which were Viking defectors. The battle was fought in what is the now Dublin suburb of Clontarf on Good Friday of that year. Boru, the Irish High King had gracefully allowed the Viking King of Dublin; Sigtrygg Silkbeard, one year to prepare for his coming assault. Silkbeard responded by offering the bed of his mother to several Viking lords from Scandinavia and the British Isles. The savage melee between the heavily mailed Norse and the unarmored, yet undaunted Gaels ended in a rout of the Vikings and their Irish allies. Careful accounts were taken by both sides during the battle, and thus many famous warriors sought each other out for personal combat and glory. High King Brian, who was near verging upon eighty, did not personally engage in the battle but retired to his tent where he spent the day in quiet prayer. History records that the Viking Earl Brodir of Man chanced upon Brian's tent as he fled the field. He and a few followers seized the opportunity, and surprised the High King, killing the aged Brian before being captured. Brian's foster son Wolf the Quarrelsome later tracked down and dispatched Brodir by disembowelment; Wolf watching as Brodir marched and wound his own innards around the trunk of a large tree. The battle was fairly matched for most of the day and each side had great respect for the prowess of the other, however in the end the Irish forced the Norse to return to the sea. Many of the fleeing Vikings were drowned in the surf by their heavy mail coats as they struggled for the safety of their longships; others were pursued and slain further inland. After the battle, Viking power was broken in Ireland forever, though many settled Norse remained in the cities and prospered greatly with the Irish through trade. With Brian dead, Ireland returned to the fractured kingdom it had once been, but was now cleared of further Viking predation.

Ireland
West Francia suffered more severely than East Francia during the Viking raids of the ninth century, which destroyed the Carolingian Empire, though it suffered less severely than the Low Countries. The reign of Charles the Bald, whose military record was one of consistent failure, coincided with some of the worst of these raids, though he did take action by the Edict of Pistres of 864 to secure a standing army of cavalry under royal control to be called upon at all times when necessary to fend off the invaders. He also ordered the building of fortified bridges to prevent inland raids.
Nonetheless, the Bretons allied with the Vikings and Robert, the margrave of Neustria, (a march created for defence against the Vikings sailing up the Loire), and Ranulf of Aquitaine died in the Battle of Brissarthe in 865. The Vikings also took advantage of the civil wars which ravaged the Duchy of Aquitaine in the early years of Charles' reign. In the 840s, Pepin II called in the Vikings to aid him against Charles and they settled at the mouth of the Garonne. Two dukes of Gascony, Seguin II and William I, died defending Bordeaux from Viking assaults. A later duke, Sancho Mitarra, even settled some at the mouth of the Ardour in an act presaging that of Charles the Simple and the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte by which the Vikings were settled in Rouen, creating Normandy as a bulwark against other Vikings.

West Francia
By the mid 9th century, though apparently not before (Fletcher 1984, ch. 1, note 51), there were Viking attacks on the coastal Kingdom of Asturias in the far northwest of the peninsula, though historical sources are too meagre to assess how frequent or how early raiding occurred. By the reign of Alfonso III Vikings were stifling the already weak threads of sea communications that tied Galicia (a province of the Kingdom) to the rest of Europe. Richard Fletcher attests raids on the Galician coast in 844 and 858: "Alfonso III was sufficiently worried by the threat of Viking attack to establish fortified strong points near his coastline, as other rulers were doing elsewhere." In 861, a group of Vikings ransomed the king of Pamplona, whom they had captured the previous year, for 60,000 gold pieces.
Raiding continued for the next two centuries. In 968 Bishop Sisnando of Compostela was killed, the monastery of Curtis was sacked, and measures were ordered for the defence of the inland town of Lugo. After Tui was sacked early in the 11th century, its bishopric remained vacant for the next half-century. Ransom was a motive for abductions: Fletcher instances Amarelo Mestáliz, who was forced to raise money on the security of his land in order to ransom his daughters who had been captured by the Vikings in 1015. Bishop Cresconio of Compostela (ca. 1036–66) repulsed a Viking foray and built the fortress at Torres del Oeste (Council of Catoira) to protect Compostela from the Atlantic approaches. The city of Póvoa de Varzim in Northern Portugal, then a town, was settled by Vikings around the 9th century and its influence kept strong until very recently, mostly due to the practice of endogamy in the community.
In the Islamic south, the first navy of the Emirate was built after the humiliating Viking ascent of the Guadalquivir in 844. Nevertheless, in 859, Danish pirates sailed through Gibraltar and raided the little Moroccan state of Nakur. The king's harem had to be ransomed back by the emir of Cordoba. These and other raids prompted a ship-building program at the dockyards of Seville. The Andalusian navy was thenceforth employed to patrol the Iberian coastline under the caliphs Abd al-Rahman III (912–61) and Al-Hakam II (961–76). By the next century, piracy from North Africans superseded Viking raids.

Iberia
Some exploration and expansion occurred still further west, in modern-day Greenland and Newfoundland, with exploration led by Eric the Red and his son, Leif Erikson from Iceland. Permanent settlements were established, L'anse Aux Meadows being excavated in modern times. The Icelanders were insufficient in numbers and technological superiority to overwhelm or overawe the local Native Americans (called Skraelings) which means in old-Norse, weaklings. Colonization efforts were strictly limited to opportunistic families who could not obtain good land elsewhere, the best lands of Iceland having been taken years earlier and Greenland proving a harsh environment. The Icelandic Vikings never did try to invade "Vinland," or as we know it today as Newfoundland. Although there were some skirmishes, such activity was an attempt to colonize.
In 1931 a railroad brakeman named James Edward Dodd found a broken sword and fragments of an axe and shield near Beardmore Ontario east of Lake Nippigon. Upon extensive examination European Norse experts agreed that the relics were authentic Norse weapons. [1] Similarly an artifact called the Kensington Runestone was unearthed in 1898 by a Norwegian-American farmer in West-Central Minnesota. Now residing in a Minnesota Museum, the stone carries and inscription that depicts an attack on a party of Goths and Norwegians that took place in 1362. The authenticity of this artifact is in dispute. [2]

North America
Two areas along Greenland's southwest coast were colonized by Norse settlers ca. 986 AD. The land was marginal at best. The settlers arrived during a warm phase, when short-season crops such as rye and barley could be grown. Sheep and hardy cattle were also raised for food, wool, and hides. Their main export was walrus ivory, which was traded for iron and other goods which could not be produced locally. Greenland became a dependency of the king of Norway in 1261. During the 13th century, the population may have reached as high as 5,000, divided between the two main settlements of Austrbygd and Vestrbygd. Greenland had several churches and a cathedral at Gardar. The Catholic diocese of Greenland was subject to the archdiocese of Nidaros. However, many bishops chose to exercise this office from afar. As the years wore on, the climate shifted (qv. little ice age) and elephant ivory from Africa became increasingly available. Crops failed and trade declined. The Greenland colony gradually faded away. By 1450 it had lost contact with Norway and simply disappeared from all but a few Scandinavian legends.

Greenland
The Vikings prolific expansion is still exhibited in modern genetics. Relatively high frequencies of Haplogroup R1a1 are found in Northern Europe, the largest being 23% in Iceland, and it is believed to have been spread across Europe by the Indo-Europeans and later migrations of Vikings, which accounts for the existence of it in, among other places, the British Isles.[3]

Genetics
Why the Viking expansion took place is a much debated topic in Nordic history, and there are no clear answers.
One common theory is that the Viking homelands were overpopulated. A growing population or a lack of ability of agriculture to support the existing population could have caused a lack of land. For people living near the coast in possession of good naval technologies, it makes sense to expand overseas in the course of a typical youth bulge effect. One problem with this explanation is that, as a result of the lack of sources, no such rise in population or decline in agricultural production has been proven. This theory is widely accepted as part of the solution, since it is hard to imagine why a people would colonise new territories if there was not a lack of land at home. However, it does little to explain the plundering raids and trading expeditions, or why the expansion went to overseas countries and not into the big, uncultivated forest areas of the Viking homelands on the Scandinavian peninsula.
Another explanation is that the Vikings used temporary weakness in the regions they travelled to. For instance, the Danish Vikings were aware of the internal division of the empire of Charlemagne that began in the 830s and resulted in the splitting up of the empire. The Danish expeditions in England also profited from the disunity of the different English kingdoms.
The decline of old trade routes could also be a part of the explanation. The trade between western Europe and the rest of the Eurasian continent had suffered from a severe decline as a result of the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century and the expansion of Islam in the 7th century. At the time of the Viking, the trade on the Mediterranean Sea was at its lowest level. By, for instance, trading furs and slaves against silver and spices with the Arabs, and then trading the silver and spices for weapons with the Franks, the Vikings profited from international trade, picking up the role the declining Mediterranean trade had previously filled.
Another important factor when it comes to trade is that the destruction of the Frisian fleet by the Franks. This gave the Vikings the opportunity to take over its old markets. However, both the explanation underlining disunity and the one underlining trade explains how the expansion was possible, more than why it occurred. This is why we can consider that in addition to the economic factor, there is also another reason of first Vikings' raids, they could also originate in resistance to forced Christianisation, in particular Charlemagne's persecutions against all the Pagan people: who have to accept "conversion or the massacre".
Snorri Sturluson in the saga of St Olafr chapter 73, describes the brutal process of Christianisation in Norway : " those who did not give up paganism were banished, with others he (St Olafr) cut off their hands or their feet or extirpated their eyes, others he ordered hanged or decapitated, but did not leave unpunished any of those who did not want to serve God (...) he afflicted them with great punishments (...) He gave them clerks and instituted some in the districts". Clerical pressure by violence since Charlemagne can explain partly the Vikings' strandhögg targeting of Christian buildings.

Explanations of the expansion

Archaeology

Main article: Rune stone Rune stones
There are numerous burial sites associated with Vikings. Some examples include:

Gettlinge gravfält, Öland, Sweden, ship outline
Jelling, Denmark, a World Heritage Site
Oseberg, Norway.
Gokstad, Norway.
Tuna, Sweden.
Hulterstad gravfält, near the villages of Alby and Hulterstad, Öland, Sweden, ship outline of standing stones Burial sites
There were two distinct classes of Viking ships: the longship (sometimes erroneously called "drakkar", a corruption of "dragon" in Norse) and the knarr. The longship, intended for warfare and exploration, was designed for speed and agility, and were equipped with oars to complement the sail as well as making it able to navigate independently of the wind. The longship had a long and narrow hull, as well as a shallow draft, in order to facilitate landings and troop deployments in shallow water. The knarr, on the other hand, was a slower merchant vessel with a greater cargo capacity than the longship. It was designed with a short and broad hull, and a deep draft. It also lacked the oars of the longship.
Longships were used extensively by the Leidang, the Scandinavian defense fleets. The term "Viking ships" has entered common usage, however, possibly because of its romantic associations (discussed below).
In Roskilde are the well-preserved remains of five ships, excavated from nearby Roskilde Fjord in the late 1960s. The ships were scuttled there in the 11th century to block a navigation channel, thus protecting the city, which was then the Danish capital, from seaborne assault. These five ships represent the two distinct classes of the Viking Ships, the longship and the knarr.
Longships are not to be confused with longboats.

Ships
Early modern publications, dealing with what we now call Viking culture, appeared in the 16th century, e.g. Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Olaus Magnus, 1555), and the first edition of the 13th century Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus in 1514. The pace of publication increased during the 17th century with Latin translations of the Edda (notably Peder Resen's Edda Islandorum of 1665).
See also 19th century Viking revival.

Modern revivals
The word Viking was popularized, with positive connotations, by Erik Gustaf Geijer in the poem, The Viking, written at the beginning of the 19th century. The word was taken to refer to romanticized, idealized naval warriors, who had very little to do with the historical Viking culture. This renewed interest of Romanticism in the Old North had political implications. A myth about a glorious and brave past was needed to give the Swedes the courage to retake Finland, which had been lost in 1809 during the war between Sweden and Russia. The Geatish Society, of which Geijer was a member, popularized this myth to a great extent. Another Swedish author who had great influence on the perception of the Vikings was Esaias Tegnér, member of the Geatish Society, who wrote a modern version of Friðþjófs saga ins frœkna, which became widely popular in the Nordic countries, the United Kingdom and Germany.
A focus for early British enthusiasts was George Hicke, who published a Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesaurus in 1703–05. During the 18th century, British interest and enthusiasm for Iceland and Nordic culture grew dramatically, expressed in English translations as well as original poems, extolling Viking virtues and increased interest in anything Runic that could be found in the Danelaw, rising to a peak during Victorian times.

Romanticism

Main article: Nazi mysticism Living history

Main article: Germanic neopaganism Neopaganism

Popular culture

Popular misconceptions
Legend had it that the Vikings were very tall and large men. Ibn Fadlan and various European sources mention that the Vikings were of great stature. A number of modern studies have been conducted which show Vikings to have been on average between 168.4 cm (66.3in) and 176 cm (69.3in) tall. There is variation, and higher ranking Vikings tended to be taller (likely due to better nutrition), but the Vikings were, compared to people of today, not unusually tall. However, when compared to the people that lived during the Viking era, Vikings were indeed taller (which is highly attributable to genetic factors).

Height

Main article: Horned helmet Horned helmets
Despite images of Viking marauders who live for plunder and warfare, the heart of Viking society was reciprocity, on both a personal, social level and on a broader political level. The Vikings lived in a time when numerous societies were engaged in many violent acts, and the doings of the Vikings put into context are not as savage as they seem. Others of the time period were much more savage than the Vikings, such as the Frankish king, Charlemagne, who cut off the heads of 4,500 Saxons (Bloody Verdict of Verden) in one day, partly because they would not accept the Christian faith. Most Vikings were traders, although some did plunder, often monasteries around Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, as they had a lot of valuables in gold and silver. As monasteries were centers of learning & writing, their experiences were much more likely to enter the historical record. However, considerable literature in the monasteries would have been destroyed during the plunderings.
One of the Vikings' largest profit-centres was the slave trade; any group that acts as slave-takers is likely to be viewed with disdain by their victims. During the period of the Vikings, slavery was common throughout Northern Europe, and the fact that many slaves were captured persons was irrelevant in law. A person from Poland could be captured and later sold in England, for example. Slavery was common amongst the Scandinavians themselves, as well.
In the 300-year period where Vikings were most active, there were only approximately 347 attacks that spread from the British Isles to Morocco, Portugal, and Turkey. In Ireland, where the Vikings are most famous for attacking monasteries, there were only 430 known attacks during this 300-year period.

Savage marauders

Main article: Skull cups Skull cups
The image of wild-haired, dirty savages sometimes associated with the Vikings in popular culture is a distorted picture of reality. Non-Scandinavian Christians are responsible for most surviving accounts of the Vikings and, consequently, a strong possibility for bias exists. This attitude is likely attributed to Christian misunderstandings regarding paganism. Viking tendencies were often misreported and the work of Adam of Bremen, among others, told largely disputable tales of Viking savagery and uncleanliness.
However, it is now known that the Vikings used a variety of tools for personal grooming such as combs, tweezers, razors or specialized "ear spoons". In particular, combs are among the most frequent artifacts from Viking Age excavations. The Vikings also made soap, which they used to bleach their hair as well as for cleaning, as blonde hair was ideal in the Viking culture.
The Vikings in England even had a particular reputation for excessive cleanliness, due to their custom of bathing once a week, on Saturdays (unlike the local Anglo-Saxons). To this day, Saturday is referred to as laugardagur/laurdag/lørdag/lördag, "washing day" in the Scandinavian languages, though the original meaning is lost in modern speech in most of the Scandinavian languages ("laug" still means "bath" or "pool" in Icelandic).
As for the Rus', who had later acquired a subjected Varangian component, Ibn Rustah explicitly notes their cleanliness, while Ibn Fadlan is disgusted by all of the men sharing the same, used vessel to wash their faces and blow their noses in the morning. Ibn Fadlan's disgust is probably motivated by his ideas of personal hygiene particular to the Muslim world, such as running water and clean vessels. While the example intended to convey his disgust about the customs of the Rus', at the same time it recorded that they did wash every morning.

Fiction

Olaf Tryggvason. Forced thousands to convert to Christianity. Once burned London Bridge down out of anger of people disobeying his orders (hence the childrens' rhyme "London Bridge is Falling Down").
Sweyn Forkbeard, king of Denmark, England, Norway and founder of Swansea ("Sweyn's island")
Magnus Barelegs, King of Norway
Askold and Dir, legendary Varangian conquerors of Kiev
Helgi or Oleg, ruler of Kiev
Björn Ironside, son of Ragnar Lodbrok, pillaged in Italy
Brodir, Danish Viking who killed the High King of Ireland, Brian Boru
Egill Skallagrímsson, Icelandic warrior and skald (see also Egils saga)
Erik the Red, discoverer of Greenland
Leif Ericsson, discoverer of Vínland, son of Erik the Red
Freydís Eiríksdóttir, a Viking woman who sailed to Vínland
Canute the Great, the most successful Danish Viking King. Son of Sweyn Forkbeard, grandson of Harold Bluetooth and great great uncle to William the Conqueror. This connection was one of the key justifications for William's claim to the English throne.
Harald Hardrada, Norwegian king who unsuccessfully tried to conquer England in 1066
Gardar Svavarsson, discoverer of Iceland. Originally from Sweden.
Guthrum, colonised England (Danelaw).
Ingvar the Far-Travelled, the leader of the last great Swedish Viking expedition, which pillaged the shores of the Caspian Sea
Ivar the Boneless, disabled son of Ragnar Lodbrok who, despite having to be carried on a shield, conquered York
Ingólfur Arnarson, colonised Iceland
Oleg of Kiev, conquered Kiev, founded Kievan Rus' and attacked Constantinople
Ragnar Lodbrok, captured Paris
Rollo of Normandy, founder of Normandy
Rurik, founder of the Rus' rule in Eastern Europe

2007-11-24T07:53:00.001-08:00

The Chief Justice in many countries is the name for the presiding member of a Supreme Court in Commonwealth or other countries with an Anglo-Saxon justice system based on English common law, such as the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Court of Canada, the Supreme Court of India, the Supreme Court of Ireland, the Supreme Court of New Zealand, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (Mexico), or provincial or state supreme courts. In England and Wales and Northern Ireland, the equivalent position is the Lord Chief Justice and in Scotland the equivalent is the Lord President of the Court of Session.
There can also be a chief justice in the highest court of a constitutive state or even a territory, as it was formerly in Dakota, New Mexico and Oregon in the U.S.
The Chief Justice can be appointed to the post in a variety of different ways, but in many nations the presiding position is commonly given to the senior-most justice in the court, while in the United States it is often the President's most important political nomination, subject to approval by the United States Senate; the title of this top American jurist, often incorrectly said to be "Chief Justice of the Supreme Court", is actually Chief Justice of the United States, by statute.
In some states the Chief Justice has another title, e.g. president of the Supreme Court. In other cases the title of Chief Justice is used, but the court has another name, e.g. the Supreme Court of Judicature in colonial (British) Ceylon, the Court of Appeals in Maryland.

List of Chief Justice positions

Associate justice
Puisne judge

2007-11-23T09:31:00.001-08:00

George Brown Petty IV (27 April 1894 – 21 July 1975) was an American pin-up artist. His pin-up art appeared primarily in Esquire and Fawcett Publications's True but was also in calendars marketed by Esquire, True and Ridgid Tool Company. Petty's Esquire gatefolds originated and popularized the magazine device of centerfold spreads. Reproductions of his work were widely rendered by military artists as nose art decorating warplanes during the Second World War, including the Memphis Belle, known as "Petty Girls".

Education and early career
George Petty never discussed in detail those artists that influenced him other than J. C. Leyendecker (an artist for The Saturday Evening Post during George's high school days) for his interpretation of men, Coles Phillips for his technique, and Maxfield Parrish for his use of light. However, it can be inferred from his later work that other influences included those artists who were extremely popular in Paris at the time, such as Alfons Mucha, George Barbier and, in particular, the watercolor technique of England's Russell Flint.

"The Petty Girl"
Reid Stewart Austin (The Best of Gil Elvgren) examined the life and art of George Petty in the 192-page Petty: The Classic Pin-Up Art of George Petty. Published by Gramercy in 1997, the lavish volume features a foreword by Hugh Hefner and an introductory essay by Petty's daughter, Marjorie Petty, who was his main model. In The New York Times Book Review famed designer George Lois praised this collection of Petty's creamy creations, commenting:
Just as the cool, unapproachable Gibson Girl was the feminine ideal of young men at the turn of the century, the voluptuous Petty Girl became the ideal of their wide-eyed sons. I'm going on the record to swear that George Brown Petty IV consistently created better-designed women than God, and now I've got a big beautiful book to prove it.
Robert Cummings portrayed George Petty in the biographical musical comedy The Petty Girl (Columbia, 1950), directed by Henry Levin and featuring the film debut of Tippi Hedren as one of the Petty Girls. Nat Perrin's screenplay was based on a story by Mary McCarthy. The film is also notable for several lilting, lighthearted songs composed by Harold Arlen (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics), including "Fancy Free" and "I Loves Ya". The large production number at the finale is "The Petty Girl" by Arlen and Mercer, performed by Joan Caulfield (dubbed by Carole Richards), the Petty Girls and a male quartet.

2007-11-22T08:01:00.001-08:00

Name
Carlisle has a compact, historic centre, including a castle, museum, cathedral, and semi-intact city walls. The former law courts or citadel towers which now serve as offices for Cumbria County Council are also of architectural interest.

History

Main article: Luguvalium Roman Carlisle
Because Carlisle was sometimes the last English town before the Scottish border, and sometimes the last Scottish town before the English border, in the days when the two countries were separate kingdoms, it developed importance as a military stronghold, and Carlisle Castle is still relatively intact. Built in 1092 by William Rufus, and having once served as a prison for Mary, Queen of Scots.
In December 1745 Prince Charles Edward Stuart captured Carlisle in the Siege of Carlisle. During the retreat of Charles Edward Stuart's Jacobites in 1746 he ordered that the Manchester Regiment be left to garrison Carlisle so that he "continued to hold at least one town in England". The Hanoverian army under Cumberland then besieged and took Carlisle. See: Sieges of Carlisle.
The Tullie House Museum, an award-winning museum, tells the story of the Border country, including much material on Hadrian's Wall, the Roman defensive structure the course of which runs through the Stanwix area of the city, and many items of Roman architecture. It also features an exhibit explaining the history of the Border Reivers. Tullie House used to house an excellent lending and reference library, but that has now been placed on the upper level of The Lanes. [1](The Lanes are Carlisle's main shopping area in the centre of the city). Carlisle Cathedral has the largest east window of any cathedral in Europe, but the western end of the cathedral was demolished by Oliver Cromwell to shore up the castle. Carlisle also has a first-class racetrack, located to the south of the city centre.
In 1916, during World War I, the government took over all the pubs and breweries in the city because of endemic drunkenness among construction and munitions workers from the nearby munitions factory at Gretna. This experiment in nationalised brewing known first as the Carlisle Board of Control then after the war the Carlisle & District State Management Scheme lasted until 1971.

Later history
Carlisle is an ancient city, and the seat of the diocese to which it gives name. It is situated on a slight rise, in the Cumberland Ward, at the confluence of the rivers Eden, Caldew, and Petteril.
An important centre for trade, it is located 90 km west of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 115 km north of Lancaster, 145 km south of Glasgow, 150 km south-west of Edinburgh, 190 km north-west of York, and 490 km north-north-west of London, at 54°52'N, 2°50'W. Nearby towns and villages include Longtown (North), Penrith (South) Brampton (East), Wigton (West), Haggbeck, Harker, Carwinley, Blackford, Houghton, Aglionby and Rockcliffe.
In January 2005 Carlisle was hit by strong gales and heavy rain, and on Saturday 8 January 2005 all roads into the city were closed owing to severe flooding, the worst since 1822, which caused three deaths.

Geography
The city is linked to the rest of England via the M6 motorway towards the South, and to Scotland via the M74/A74 towards Glasgow and the North. The famous Scottish Indie Rock Outfit "102 Miles" take their name from the distance from Glasgow Central railway station to Carlisle. As well as these routes, many important trunk roads either begin or terminate in Carlisle, including the A6 to Penrith (historically the main road south), the A595 to western Cumbria, the A69 to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the A7 to Edinburgh. Carlisle thus bears the distinction of being the only city in Great Britain other than London and Edinburgh with more than one single numbered 'A' road - A6 and A7 (although at one time the A5 and A6 met in St Albans). In addition, Carlisle is a principal railway station on the West Coast main railway line. Other railway lines go to Newcastle, Leeds and Glasgow via Dumfries and west Cumbria.
Traffic in the Carlisle area, especially at rush hour, has become a significant problem. A proposed bypass road will take traffic heading to and from west Cumbria off the M6, as opposed to its current path through the centre of Carlisle.
Local bus services are run by Stagecoach Group and Arriva. Following the disastrous flooding of Carlisle Bus Depot (and a lot of the city) on 8th January 2005 and the amazing variety of buses seen in Carlisle afterwards, Stagecoach announced the purchase of a fleet of brand new low-floor buses for Carlisle city routes. These were officially launched on 30th June, complete with "Carlisle Citi" branding, and with most of the buses carrying route branding for individual routes both internally and externally.

Transport
Carlisle became an industrial city in the 19th and early 20th centuries with many textile mills, engineering works and food manufacturers opening up mostly in the Denton Holme, Caldewgate and Wapping areas which lie in the Caldew Valley area of the city. (One such manufacturer located in the Denton Holme area was Ferguson Printers, a large textile printing factory that had stood for many years before its unfortunate closure in the early 1990's). In the early 19th century a canal was dug connecting Caldewgate with the sea at Port Carlisle. The canal was later filled in and became a railway line.
Famous firms that were founded or had factories in Carlisle included Carr's of Carlisle (now part of United Biscuits), Kangol, Metal Box (now part of Crown Cork and Seal). The Carr's and Metal Box factories are still going. The construction firm of John Laing and the hauliers Eddie Stobart Ltd. were also founded in the city.
Until 2004, Carlisle's biggest employer was Cavaghan & Gray, part of Northern Foods which operated from two sites in the Harraby area of Carlisle producing chilled foods for major supermarket chains. As of January 2005, the London Road site was closed with the loss of almost 700 jobs as production was transferred to the nearby Eastern Way site or other factories around the UK.
Carlisle also became a major railway centre with at one time 7 different companies using Carlisle Citadel railway station the city also used to have the largest railway marshaling yard in Europe at Kingmoor, now closed.
There are various light industrial estates and business parks located on the fringes of the city and on former industrial sites close to the city centre.
On March 28, 2005, Carlisle was granted Fairtrade City status.

Trade and industry

Sport
The city of Carlisle is represented in the English Coca-Cola Football League One by Carlisle United F.C. [2], after promotion from the Coca-Cola Football League Two at the end of season 2005/06 as champions of the division, this followed their promotion from the Nationwide Conference at the end of the 2004/05 season. Carlisle United Football Club play at Brunton Park Stadium, in the centre of the city. The team has resided in all four divisions of English football, once going top of Division One (now named the Premiership) for a very brief moment back in the 1974/75 season, although they were eventually relegated back to the old Division Two.

Football
Carlisle was at one time home to a rugby league team, Carlisle RLFC who would later merge with Barrow and leave Carlisle.
Carlisle also has a well established rugby union club, CRUFC, situated adjacent to the football grounds.

Rugby
Former British, Commonwealth and IBO world super featherweight champion Charles Shepherd lived in the area and won his world title in the nearby Sports Centre.

Boxing
England cricketer Paul Nixon was born in Carlisle on 21st October 1970.

Cricket
Speedway racing took place at a track in the Kingmoor area in 1937. Brothers Maurice and Roland Stobbart secured the site and built the track. The opening night crowd was about 500 and it is not known to have staged any further meetings.
Contemporary newspaper items suggested a track may have been built at Harraby in 1928 but no additional information has come to light.

Speedway
St Martin's College has a campus in Carlisle on Fusehill Street. It provides a wide range of degree courses in subjects such as Psychology, Business, Teacher Education and Social Work.
Carlisle also is host for all three campuses of the Cumbria Institute of the Arts, with the main building in close vicinity to the River Eden. Also based in the city is an outpost of the University of Central Lancashire. Both offer primarily higher education programmes, the former in art and media and affected disciplines, the latter in business, computing and law.
Plans have now been approved to create a University of Cumbria, due to open in August 2007. This will be created from an amalgamation of St Martin's College and Cumbria Institute of the Arts.
The secondary schools within the city of Carlisle are: St Aidan's County High School and Specialist Sports and Science College, Austin Friars St Monicas (Roman Catholic Private School), Trinity - Centre of Excellence for Languages, Newman (Roman Catholic School), Morton School and the North Cumbria Technology College (NCTC, fomerly Harraby School). Others are also in the Carlisle district: Caldew School, (Dalston), William Howard School (Brampton), The Nelson Thomlinson School (Wigton) and Lochinvar School (Longtown).

Education
Carlisle has been a city since the Middle Ages and has been a borough constituency or parliamentary borough for centuries at one time returning two MPs. In 1835 it became a municipal borough which was promoted to county borough status in 1914. The city's boundaries have changed at various times since 1835 the final time being in 1974 when under the Local Government Act 1972 the city and county borough merged with the Border Rural District to become the new City of Carlisle district.
The borough originally had several civil parishes or parts of parishes within it but these were all merged into a single civil parish of Carlisle in 1904. The present day urban area is now classed as an unparished area except for the fringes which are in Stanwix Rural, Kingmoor and St Cuthbert Without parishes.
Carlisle unsuccessfully applied to become a Lord Mayoralty in 2002.
The city council is based in a 1960s building known as the Civic Centre in Rickergate. Owing to structural problems the building will soon be demolished and the surrounding area regenerated.

Administration
The Curse of Carlisle is a 16th century curse that was first invoked by Archbishop Dunbar of Glasgow in 1525 against cross-border families, known as the Border Reivers, who lived by stealing cattle, rape and pillage. The curse was not directly aimed at Carlisle or its people. For the millennium celebrations, the local council commissioned a 14-tonne granite artwork inscribed with all 1,069 words of the curse.
In 1998 some Christians, among other projects, began campaigning to prevent the City of Carlisle from installing the stone.

Famous residents
The Carlisle dialect is a diasystem of the Cumbrian dialect which can be found across much of north-east Cumberland.

2007-11-20T07:12:00.001-08:00

The Day of Reconciliation is a public holiday in South Africa held annually on 16 December. The intention is to foster reconciliation between different racial groups. The holiday came into effect in 1994 after the end of Apartheid.
Before 1994, 16 December was commemorated as the Day of the Vow, also known as Day of the Covenant or Dingaan Day. The Day of the Vow was a religious holiday commemorating the Afrikaner victory over the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838.
On the other side of the political spectrum, 16 December is also the anniversary of the 1961 founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress.

2007-11-19T07:16:00.001-08:00

Tom Køhlert (born April 30, 1947) is a Danish former football player at, and current coach of, Brøndby IF in the Danish Superliga.

2007-11-18T07:28:00.001-08:00

Solar energy is energy from the sun. It supports life on Earth and drives the Earth's weather. Solar energy predominantly arrives in the form of infrared, visible and ultraviolet light, and is either returned back to space or is absorbed. Nearly all of the absorbed energy is converted directly to heat, with a small but important fraction converted to chemical energy, such as in ozone production, photosynthesis or photovoltaic energy production.
Solar energy also broadly describes technologies that utilize sunlight. These technologies are diverse and date back millennia. The Greeks, Native Americans and Chinese warmed their buildings by orienting them toward the sun. In Europe, farmers used elaborate field orientation and thermal mass to increase crop yields during the Little Ice Age. Modern solar technologies continue to harness the sun to provide water heating, daylighting and even flight.
The utilization of solar energy and solar power spans from traditional technologies that provide food, heat and light to electricity which is uniquely modern. Solar energy is used in a wide variety of applications, including:

Biofuels
Biomass
Geothermal power
Hydro power
Solar power
Tidal power
Wave power
Wind power
Heat (hot water, building heat, cooking, process heat)
Lighting (daylighting, hybrid lighting, daylight savings time)
Electricity generation (photovoltaics, heat engines)
Transportation (solar car, solar plane, solar boat)
Desalination
Biomass (wood, biofuel)
Clothes drying Energy from the Sun
Many technologies use solar energy. Some classifications of solar technology are active, passive, direct and indirect.

Active solar systems use electrical and mechanical components such as tracking mechanisms, pumps and fans to process sunlight into usable outputs such as heating, lighting or electricity.
Passive solar systems use non-mechanical techniques of controlling, converting and distributing sunlight into usable outputs such as heating, lighting, cooling or ventilation. These techniques include selecting materials with favorable thermal properties, designing spaces that naturally circulate air, and referencing the position of a building to the sun.
Direct solar generally refers to technologies or effects that involve a single conversion of sunlight which results in a usable form of energy.
Indirect solar generally refers to technologies or effects that involves multiple transformations of sunlight which result in a usable form of energy. Types of technologies

Main article: Passive solar building design Architecture and Urban planning

Main articles: Daylighting and Light tube Lighting

Main articles: Solar hot water, Solar combisystem, and Solar pond Water heating

Main articles: Solar heating, Thermal mass, Trombe wall, and Solar chimney Heating, cooling and ventilation

Main article: Photovoltaics Photovoltaics

Main articles: Solar thermal energy, Parabolic trough, Solar power tower, Photovoltaic power stations, Solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, and List of solar thermal power stations Cooking
Solar chemical processes convert solar energy into chemical energy. These processes use both light (photochemical) and heat (endothermic) to drive chemical, thermochemical or thermoelectric reactions. Solar chemical reactions can be used to store solar energy or replace energy that would otherwise be required from an alternate source.
Electrochemical cells, commonly known as batteries, convert electrical energy into chemical energy. Solar energy can indirectly be converted into chemical energy in a system involving a photovoltaic to electrochemical cell exchange. A more direct approach involves the use of photoelectrochemical cells which use light to produce hydrogen in a process similar to the electrolysis of water. A third approach involves the use of thermoelectic devices which convert a temperature difference between dissimilar metals into an electric current between those metals. This current can be use to produce hydrogen and oxygen through the electrolysis of water. The solar pioneer Mochout envisioned using the thermoelectric effect to store solar energy for later use during darkness; however, his experiments toward this end never progressed beyond primitive devices. Solar chemical

Main articles: Helios Prototype, Electric boat, and Solar balloon Solar vehicles

Main articles: desalination, Solar still, and Solar water disinfection Desalination and disinfection

Main articles: Thermal mass, Thermal energy storage, Phase change material, Rechargeable battery, and Grid energy storage Energy storage
See the articles for individual countries listed at Category:Solar power by country

Solar power by country

Main article: Deployment of solar power to energy grids Development, deployment and economics

ISES: International Solar Energy Society International NGO supporting renewable and sustainable technologies.
ASES: American Solar Energy Association US organization supporting solar energy, efficiency and sustainable technologies.
SEIA: Solar Energy Industries Association US trade association of solar energy manufacturers, dealers, distributors, contractors
Canadian Solar industry Association
ESTIF - European Solar Thermal Industry Federation
See also: Photovoltiac Industry Associations Solar energy research institutes

1973 energy crisis
Absorption (electromagnetic radiation)
COMES, French Solar Energy Authority
Deployment of solar power to energy grids
Energy crisis
Energy development
Energy storage
Energy: world resources and consumption
European Union Climate Change Programme
Future energy development
Green electricity
Global dimming
insolation
List of conservation topics
Microgeneration
Photoelectric effect
Photovoltaics
Renewable energy
Solar air conditioning
Solar balloon
Solar car
Solar cell
insolation)
Solar heating
Solar gain
Solar ponds
Solar power plants in the Mojave Desert
Solar power satellite
Solar power tower
Solar radiation
Solar thermal energy
Solar tracker
Solar updraft tower
Sustainable design
Timeline of solar energy
Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC)

2007-11-17T10:06:00.000-08:00

The Star-Ledger is the leading newspaper in New Jersey and is based in Newark. It is a sister paper to the Jersey Journal of Jersey City, The Times of Trenton and the Staten Island Advance, all of which are owned by Advance Publications.
The Star-Ledger's daily circulation is larger than the next two largest New Jersey newspapers combined and its Sunday circulation is larger than the next three papers combined.

History

Management

Amzi Armstrong (1832-?)
William Burnet Kinney (?-1851)
Thomas T. Kinney (1851-1895)
James Smith, Jr. (1895-1915)
Paul Block (1915-1939)
Samuel Irving Newhouse, Sr. (1939-1979)
Donald Newhouse (1979-?)
Mark Newhouse (?-Incumbent) Presidents

Amzi Armstrong (1832-?)
Mort Pye (1963-1994)
Jim Willse (1994-Incumbent)

2007-11-16T09:02:00.001-08:00

Robert Ardrey (b. October 16, 1908, Chicago, Illinois—d. January 14, 1980, South Africa) was an American playwright and screenwriter in the 1950s.
African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, Robert Ardrey's most widely read works, as well as Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape (1967), were key elements in the public discourse of the 1960s which challenged earlier anthropological assumptions.

Paleoanthropology
Some of the scientists whose research particularly informed Robert Ardrey's scientific investigations, and with several of whom Ardrey consulted at length while developing his four major works in Africa from the 1940s through the 1970s, include:

W.C. Allee
C.K. Brain
Robert Broom
C.R. Carpenter
Raymond Dart
Eliot Howard
James Kitching
L.S.B. Leakey
Eugene Marais
Kenneth Oakley Researchers

World's Beginning (1944) (Cited in Everett F. Bleiler's The Checklist of Fantastic Literature, 1948.)
The Brotherhood of Fear (1952)
African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (1961)
The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966)
The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder (1970)
The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man (1976)
(with L.S.B. Leakey) Aggression and Violence in Man: A Dialogue Between Dr Louis Leakey and Mr Robert Ardrey. (1971) ISBN 0-03649-184-6. Books

Star Spangled (1936)
Casey Jones (1938)
God and Texas (1938)
How To Get Tough About It (1938)
Thunder Rock (1939) (filmed in 1943)
Jeb (1946)
Sing Me No Lullaby (1954)
Shadow Of Heroes (1958) (produced in London as Stone and Star) Honours
Robert Ardrey was the son of Robert Leslie Ardrey, an editor and publisher, and the former Marie Haswell. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago, where his mentor was Thornton Wilder. Ardrey was married to Helen Johnson, whom he met at the University, from 1938 until they divorced in 1960. They had two sons, Ross and Daniel. Ardrey married the South African stage actress Berdine Grunewald, who later illustrated his books, in 1960.

2007-11-15T09:28:00.001-08:00

Medieval 16th century - 17th century 18th century -19th century 20th century - Contemporary
Chronological list Writers by category Novelists - Playwrights Poets - Essayists Short story writers
Jean-François Marmontel (July 11, 1723 – December 31, 1799) was a French historian and writer, a member of the Encyclopediste movement.

Biography
He was born of poor parents at Bort-les-Orgues, in Corrèze. After studying with the Jesuits at Mauriac, Cantal, he taught in their colleges at Clermont and Toulouse; and in 1745, acting on the advice of Voltaire, he set out for Paris to try for literary success. From 1748 to 1753 he wrote a succession of tragedies (Denys le Tyran (1748); Aristomene (1749); Cleopâtre (1750); Heraclides (1752); Egyptus (1753)), which, though only moderately successful on the stage, secured Marmontel's introduction into literary and fashionable circles.
He wrote a series of articles for the Encyclopédie evincing considerable critical power and insight, which in their collected form, under the title Eléments de Littérature, still rank among the French classics. He also wrote several comic operas, the two best of which probably are Sylvain (1770) and Zémire et Azore (1771). In the Gluck–Piccinni controversy he was an eager partisan of Piccinni with whom he collaborated in Didon (1783) and Penelope (1785).
In 1758 he gained the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, who obtained for him a place as a civil servant, and the management of the official journal Le Mercure, in which he had already begun the famous series of Contes moraux. The merit of these tales lies partly in the delicate finish of the style, but mainly in the graphic and charming pictures of French society under King Louis XV. The author was elected to the Académie française in 1763. In 1767 he published a romance, Bélisaire, now remarkable only on account of a chapter on religious toleration which incurred the censure of the Sorbonne and the archbishop of Paris. Marmontel retorted in Les Incas (1778) by tracing the cruelties in Spanish America to the religious fanaticism of the invaders.
He was appointed historiographer of France (1771), secretary to the Academy (1783), and professor of history in the Lycée (1786). As a historiographer, Marmontel wrote a history of the regency (1788) which is of little value. Reduced to poverty by the French Revolution, Marmontel retired during the Reign of Terror to Evreux, and soon afterwards to a cottage at Abloville in the département of Eure. There he wrote Memoires d'un pere (4 vols., 1804), including a picturesque review of his life, a literary history of two important reigns, a great gallery of portraits extending from the venerable Jean Baptiste Massillon, whom more than half a century previously he had seen at Clermont, to Honoré Mirabeau. The book was nominally written for the instruction of his children. It contains an exquisitely picture of his own childhood in the Limousin; its value for the literary historian is great.
Marmontel lived for some time under the roof of Mme Geoffrin, and was present at her famous dinners given to artists; he was welcomed into most of the houses where the encyclopaedists met. He thus had at his command the best material for his portraits, and made good use of his opportunities. After a short stay in Paris when elected in 1797 to the Conseil des Anciens, he died at Abloville. See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, iv.; Morellet, Eloge (1805).

2007-11-14T10:04:00.001-08:00

Angkor is a name conventionally applied to the region of Cambodia serving as the seat of the Khmer empire that flourished from approximately the 9th century to the 15th century A.D. (The word "Angkor" itself is derived from the Sanskrit "nagara," meaning "city.") More precisely, the Angkorian period may be defined as the period from 802 A.D., when the Khmer Hindu monarch Jayavarman II declared himself the "universal monarch" and "god-king" of Cambodia, until 1431 A.D., when Thai invaders sacked the Khmer capital, causing its population to migrate south to the area of Phnom Penh.
The ruins of Angkor are located amid forests and farmland to the north of the Great Lake (Tonle Sap) and south of the Kulen Hills, near modern day Siem Reap (13°24'N, 103°51'E), and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The temples of the Angkor area number over one thousand, ranging in scale from nondescript piles of brick rubble scattered through rice fields to the magnificent Angkor Wat, said to be the world's largest single religious monument. Many of the temples at Angkor have been restored, and together they comprise the most significant site of Khmer architecture. Visitor numbers approach one million annually.

Historical Overview
The Angkorian period may be said to have begun shortly after 800 A.D., when the Khmer King Jayavarman II announced the independence of Kambujadesa (Cambodia) from Java and established his capital of Hariharalaya (now known as "Roluos") at the northern end of Tonle Sap. Through a program of military campaigns, alliances, marriages and land grants, he achieved a unification of the country bordered by China (to the north), Champa (to the east), the ocean (to the south) and a place identified by a stone inscription as "the land of cardamoms and mangoes" (to the west). In 802 Jayavarman articulated his new status by declaring himself "universal monarch" (chakravartin), and, in a move that was to be imitated by his successors and that linked him to the cult of Siva, taking on the epithet of "god-king" (devaraja)
Over the next 300 years, between 900 and 1200 AD, the Khmer empire produced some of the world's most magnificent architectural masterpieces in the area known as Angkor. Most are concentrated in an area approximately 15 miles east to west and 5 miles north to south, although the Angkor Archaeological Park which administers the area includes sites as far away as Kbal Spean, about 30 miles to the north. Some 72 major temples or other buildings dot the area.

Origin of Angkor as the Seat of the Khmer Empire
The principal temple of the Angkorian region, Angkor Wat, was built between 1113 and 1150 by King Suryavarman II. Suryavarman ascended to the throne after prevailing in a battle with a rival prince. An inscription says that in the course of combat, Suryavarman lept onto his rival's war elephant and killed him, just as the mythical bird-man Garuda slays a serpent. Suryavarman had the walls of the temple decorated with bas reliefs depicting not only scenes from mythology, but also from the life of his own imperial court. In one of the scenes, the king himself is portrayed as larger in size than his subjects, sitting cross legged on an elevated throne and holding court, while a bevy of attendants make him comfortable with the aid of parasols and fans.

Suryvarman II and the Construction of Angkor Wat
Following the death of Suryvarman around 1150 A.D., the kingdom fell into a period of internal strife. Its neighbors to the east, the Cham of what is now southern Vietnam, took advantage of the situation in 1177 to launch a seaborne invasion up the Mekong River and across Tonle Sap. The Cham forces were successful in sacking the Khmer capital of Yasodharapura and in killing the reigning king. However, a Khmer prince who was to become King Jayavarman VII rallied his people and defeated the Cham in battles on the lake and on the land. In 1181, Jayavarman assumed the throne. He was to be the greatest of the Angkorian kings.

Jayavarman VII, the Greatest of the Angkorian Kings
The year 1296 marked the arrival at Angkor of the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan. Zhou's one-year sojourn in the Khmer capital during the reign of King Indravarman III is historically significant, because he penned a still surviving account of approximately 40 pages detailing his observations of Khmer society. Some of the topics he addressed in the account were those of religion, justice, kingship, agriculture, slavery, birds, vegetables, bathing, clothing, tools, draft animals, and commerce. In one passage, he described a royal procession consisting of soldiers, numerous servant women and concubines, ministers and princes, and finally "the sovereign, standing on an elephant, holding his sacred sword in his hand." Together with the inscriptions that have been found on Angkorian stelas, temples and other monuments, and together with the bas-reliefs at the Bayon and Angkor Wat, Zhou's journal is our most significant source of information about everyday life at Angkor. Filled as it is with vivid anecdotes and sometimes incredulous observations of a civilization that struck Zhou as colorful and exotic, it is an entertaining travel memoire as well.

End of the Angkorian Period
It is widely believed that the abandonment of Angkor occurred as a result of the Thai invasions. Ongoing wars with the Thai were already sapping the strength of Angkor at the time of Zhou Daguan toward the end of the 13th century. In his memoirs, Zhou reported that the country had been completely devastated by such a war, in which the entire population had been obligated to participate. After the sack of Angkor in 1431, many persons, texts and institutions migrated to the Thai metropolis of Ayutthaya in the west, while others departed for the new center of Cambodian society at Phnom Penh in the south.

War with the Thai
Some scholars have connected the decline of Angkor with the conversion of Cambodia to Theravada Buddhism following the reign of Jayavarman VII, arguing that this religious transition eroded the Hindu conception of kingship that undergirded the Angkorian civilization.

Erosion of the state religion
According to George Coedès, the weakening of Angkor's royal government by ongoing war and the erosion of the cult of the devaraja undermined the government's ability to engage in important public works, such as the construction and maintenance of the waterways essential for irrigation of the rice fields upon which Angkor's large population depended for its sustenance. As a result, Angkorian civilization suffered from a reduced economic base, and the population was forced to scatter.

Neglect of public works
Other scholars attempting to account for the rapid decline and abandonment of Angkor have hypothesized natural disasters such as earthquakes, inundations, or drastic climate changes as the relevant agents of destruction.

Natural disaster
The great city and temples remained largely cloaked by the forest until the late 19th century when French archaeologists began a long restoration process. From 1907 to 1970 restoration of Angkor was under the direction of the École française d'Extrême-Orient, which worked to clear away the forest, repair foundations, and install drains to protect the buildings from water damage. In addition, scholars associated with the school initiated a program of historical scholarship and interpretation that is fundamental to the current understanding of Angkor. George Coedès, Maurice Glaize, Paul Mus, Philippe Stern and others made important contributions.
After the end of the Cambodia civil war, work began again, and since 1993 it has been jointly co-ordinated by the French, Japanese and UNESCO through the International Co-ordinating Committee on the Safeguarding and Development of the Historic Site of Angkor (ICC), while Cambodian work is carried out by the Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap (APSARA), created in 1995. Some temples have been carefully taken apart stone by stone and reassembled on concrete foundations. Since the end of the civil war, international tourism to Angkor has increased, posing additional conservation problems but also financial assistance to the restoration projects. Visitor numbers reached 900,000 in 2006.

Restoration and Preservation of Angkor
Historical Angkor was more than a site for religious art and architecture. It was the site of vast cities that responded to all the needs of a people, not only to specifically religious needs. Aside from a few old bridges, however, all of the remaining monuments are religious edifices. In Angkorian times, all non-religious buildings, including the residence of the king himself, were constructed of perishable materials, such as wood, "because only the gods had a right to residences made of stone." As a result, it is easier to write the history of Angkorian state religion than it is to write that of just about any other aspect of Angkorian society.
Several religious movements contributed to the historical developement of religion at Angkor:

Indigenous religious cults, including those centered on worship of the ancestors and of the lingam;
A royal personality cult, identifying the king with the deity, characteristic not only of Angkor, but of other Indic civilizations in southeast Asia, such as Champa and Java.
Hinduism, especially Shaivism, the form of Hinduism focussed on the worship of Shiva and the lingam as the symbol of Shiva, but also Vaishnavism, the form of Hinduism focussed on the worship of Vishnu;
Buddhism, in both its Mahayana and Theravada varieties. Religious History of Angkor
The religion of pre-Angkorian Cambodia, known to the Chinese as Chenla (550-800 A.D.), included elements of both Hinduism and indigenous ancestor cults.

Pre-Angkorian religion in Chenla
The Khmer king Jayavarman II, whose assumption of power around 800 A.D. marks the beginning of the Angkorian period, established his capital at a place called Hariharalaya (today known as Roluos), at the northern end of the great lake, Tonle Sap.

Shiva and the Lingam in Angkorian state religion
In the early days of Angkor, the worship of Vishnu was secondary to that of Shiva. The relationship seems to have changed with the construction of Angkor Wat by King Suryavarman II as his personal mausoluem at the beginning of the 12th century A.D. The central religious image of Angkor Wat was an image of Vishnu, and an inscription identifies Suryavarman as "Paramavishnuloka," or "he who enters the heavenly world of Vishnu." Suryavarman proclaimed his identity with Vishnu, just as his predecessors had claimed consubstantiality with Shiva.

Vaishnavism in the dedication of Angkor Wat
In the last quarter of the 12th century, King Jayavarman VII departed radically from the tradition of his predecessors when he adopted Mahayana Buddhism as his personal faith. Jayavarman also made Buddhism the state religion of his kingdom when he constructed the Buddhist temple known as the Bayon at the heart of his new capital city of Angkor Thom. In the famous face towers of the Bayon, the king represented himself as the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara moved by compassion for his subjects.

Mahayana Buddhism under Jayavarman VII
The Hindu restoration began around 1243 A.D., with the death of Jayavarman VII's successor Indravarman II. The next king Jayavarman VIII was a Shaivite iconoclast who specialized in destroying Buddhist images and in reestablishing the Hindu shrines that his illustrious predecessor had converted to Buddhism. During the restoration, the Bayon was made a temple to Shiva, and its image of the Buddha was cast to the bottom of a well. Everywhere, cultic statues of the Buddha were replaced by lingams.

The Hindu Restoration
When Zhou Daguan came to Angkor in A.D. 1296, he found what he took to be three separate religious groups. The dominant religion was that of Theravada Buddhism. Zhou observed that the monks had shaven heads and wore yellow robes.

Religious Pluralism in the era of Zhou Daguan
In the course of the 13th century, Theravada Buddhism coming from Siam (Thailand) made its appearance at Angkor. Gradually it became the dominant religion of Cambodia, displacing both Mahayana Buddhism and Shaivism. The practice of Theravada Buddhism at Angkor continues until this day.

The triumph of Theravada Buddhism
The area of Angkor has many significant archaeological sites, including the following: Angkor Thom, Angkor Wat, Baksei Chamkrong, Banteay Kdei, Banteay Samré, Banteay Srei, Baphuon, the Bayon, Chau Say Tevoda, East Baray, East Mebon, Kbal Spean, the Khleangs, Krol Ko, Lolei, Neak Pean, Phimeanakas, Phnom Bakheng, Phnom Krom, Prasat Ak Yum, Prasat Kravan, Preah Khan, Preah Ko, Preah Palilay, Preah Pithu, Pre Rup, Spean Thma, Srah Srang, Ta Nei, Ta Prohm, Ta Som, Ta Keo, Terrace of the Elephants, Terrace of the Leper King, Thommanon, West Baray, West Mebon.

Archaeological Sites

Angkor is a Khmer term meaning "city." It comes from the Sanskrit nagara.
Banteay is a Khmer term meaning "citadel" or "fortress," which is also applied to walled temples.
Baray means "reservoir."
Esvara or Isvara is a suffix referring to the god Siva.
Gopura is a Sanskrit term meaning "entrance pavilion" or "gateway."
Jaya is a prefix meaning "victory."
Phnom is a Khmer term meaning "hill."
Prasat is a Khmer term meaning "tower." It comes from the Sanskrit prasada.
Preah is a Khmer term meaning "sacred" or "holy." (Preah Khan means "sacred sword.")
Srei is a Khmer term meaning "woman." (Banteay Srei means "citadel of women.")
Ta is a Khmer term meaning "ancestor" or "grandfather." (Ta Prohm means "Ancestor Brahma." Neak ta means "ancestors" or "ancestral spirits.")
Thom is a Khmer term meaning "big." (Angkor Thom means "big city.")
Varman is a suffix meaning "shield" or "protector." (Suryavarman means "protected by Surya, the sun-god.")
Wat is a Khmer term meaning (Buddhist) "temple." (Angkor Wat means "temple city.") See also
Books and Articles
News Reports

Audric, John (1972). Angkor and the Khmer Empire. London: R. Hale. ISBN 0-7091-2945-9.
Chandler, David (1992). A History of Cambodia. Boulder: Westview Press.
Coedès, George (1943). Pour mieux comprendre Angkor. Hanoi: Imprimerie d'Extrême Orient.
Freeman, Michael; and Claude Jacques (1999). Ancient Angkor. Trumbull, Conn.: Weatherhill. ISBN 0-8348-0426-3.
Higham, Charles (2001). The Civilization of Angkor. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stern, Philippe (1934). "Le temple-montagne khmèr, le culte du linga et le Devaraja," Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient 34, pp. 611-616.
National Review: In Pol Pot Land: Ruins of varying types Sept 29, 2003.
UNESCO: International Programme for the Preservation of Angkor Accessed 17 May 2005.
"Climate change killed ancient city", The Australian, 2007-03-14. Retrieved on 2007-03-16.
"Tourist invasion threatens to ruin glories of Angkor", The Observer, 2007-02-25.

2007-11-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

Eucharistic adoration is a practice in the Roman Catholic and in Anglican Churches, in which the Blessed Sacrament is exposed to and adored by the faithful. When this exposure and adoration is constant (that is, twenty-four hours a day), it is called perpetual adoration. In a parish, this is usually done by volunteer parishioners; in a monastery or convent, it is done by the resident monks or nuns.

Purpose of adoration

Main article: Eucharist (Catholic Church) Roman Catholic belief
Opinions on the nature of the Eucharist and thus on the propriety of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament vary in the Anglican tradition (see Anglican Eucharistic theology), but many Anglo Catholics practice adoration in the manner of the Roman Catholic Church. Others celebrate Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which is not unlike Eucharistic adoration.

Anglican belief
Lutheran Eucharistic adoration is almost always limited in duration to the communion service because Lutheran tradition does not include reservation of the Sacrament. However, at this time, in North America, the Evangelical Community Church-Lutheran and some other small Churches in the Lutheran Evangelical Catholic Tradition (High Church Lutheran), do reserve the Sacrament, and strongly encourage Eucharistic adoration without requiring it.
Historically in Lutheranism there have been two parties regarding Eucharistic adoration: Gnesio-Lutherans, who followed Martin Luther's view in favor of adoration and Philippists who followed Philipp Melanchthon's view against it. Although Luther did not approve of the Feast of Corpus Christi .

The practice of adoration
Many Christians throughout history have criticized Eucharistic adoration, some considering it a form of idolatry. Adoration may be seen as the abrogation of the command to adore God alone, as commanded in Leviticus. They see the adoration of any other objects, including the sacred instruments of His Grace, such as the Body and Blood as idolatry.
Critics draw a distinction between the irreducible risen physical Jesus, and the reducible elements of his body. They point as an example to the third day after the Crucifixion. Although Christ's Precious Blood still drenched the cross and the tomb clothes, scripture makes clear that they are not themselves the Person Christ. "He is not here, for He has risen..." Matthew 28:6. Similarly the Eucharistic Blood and Body are elements proceeding from Christ, not the irreducible Person Himself. Roman Catholics draw much the same distinction between the irreducible personhood of a man, and the parts of his body. Destruction of a body part (e.g., amputation) is not destruction of the person himself. Similarly, blood used in a blood transfusion derives from its donor, but is not the donor himself.
Perhaps the most common criticism of the practice of Eucharistic adoration is that it isolates the Eucharist from its intended purpose, namely, communion. The Eucharist is thus removed from its proper context as the communion of the Church with Christ and places him at a distance, objectifying the Eucharist in a manner not intended by the rites during which it is consecrated.
As reported by Roman Catholic priest, Father Al Kimel in his blog Pontifications, historian and writer Michael McGuckian discusses this problem in his book "The Eucharist in the West." "During the first millenium of the Church, East and West shared a common understanding of eucharistic devotion. "During this period," McGuckian notes, "the Eucharist was understood dynamically and, in common with all the other sacraments, the focus was on its effect in the sanctification of the people." But in the eleventh century we see a change of attitude within the Western Church. Devotion began to be focused on the eucharistic gifts as the objective presence of the risen Christ. The Host began to be elevated during the liturgy for the purpose of adoration. In the thirteenth century the Feast of Corpus Christi was instituted. From this point devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, both within and outside the Mass, became central in the piety of Latin Christians. Seeing Christ rather than feeding upon Christ became the norm. Adoration replaced communion.
"McGuckian rehearses a number of criticisms of Western liturgy and spirituality common in contemporary Catholic circles, criticisms that energized the liturgical reform of the 60s and 70s. He is certainly correct that the end of Holy Eucharist is union with the risen Christ and sanctification in his Body. God gives us the Body and Blood of his risen Son to eat and drink and thus be deified. When communion is replaced by or subordinated to the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, an unbalance in the liturgical life of the Church is created. Pope Pius X initiated the correction of this unbalance in the early 20th century, with his summons to frequent communion, and this correction was confirmed in the Church's consciousness by the publication of the apostolic constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium."

2007-11-12T10:07:00.001-08:00

The U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, or Agriculture Committee (often referred to as simply "Agriculture", as in "He's on Agriculture") is a Congressional committee of the United States House of Representatives. The House Committee on Agriculture has general jurisdiction over federal agriculture policy and oversight of some federal agencies, and it can recommend funding appropriations for various governmental agencies, programs, and activities, as defined by House rules. As of 2007, the committee is chaired by Representative Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.).

Role of the Agriculture Committee
As prescribed by House Rules, the Committee on Agriculture's jurisdiction includes the following:

1) Adulteration of seeds, insect pests, and protection of birds and animals in forest reserves.
2) Agriculture generally.
3) Agricultural and industrial chemistry.
4) Agricultural colleges and experiment stations.
5) Agricultural economics and research.
6) Agricultural education extension services
7) Agricultural production, marketing and stabilization of prices of agricultural products, and commodities (excluding foreign distribution).
8) Animal industry and diseases of animals.
9) Commodity exchanges.
10) Crop insurance and soil conservation.
11) Dairy industry.
12) Entomology and plant quarantine.
13) Extension of farm credit and farm security.
14) Inspection of livestock, poultry, meat products, and seafood and seafood products.
15) Forestry in general and forest reserves other than those created from the public domain.
16) Human nutrition and home economics.
17) Plant industry, soils, and agricultural engineering.
18) Rural electrification.
19) Rural development
20) Water conservation related to activities of the Department of Agriculture. Jurisdiction

Collin C. Peterson, Chairman, Minnesota
Tim Holden, Vice Chair, Pennsylvania
Mike McIntyre, North Carolina
Bob Etheridge, North Carolina
Leonard Boswell, Iowa
Joe Baca, California
Dennis Cardoza, California
David Scott, Georgia
Jim Marshall, Georgia
Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, South Dakota
Henry Cuellar, Texas
Jim Costa, California
John Salazar, Colorado
Brad Ellsworth, Indiana
Nancy Boyda, Kansas
Zack Space, Ohio
Tim Walz, Minnesota
Kirsten Gillibrand, New York
Steve Kagen, Wisconsin
Earl Pomeroy, North Dakota
Lincoln Davis, Tennessee
John Barrow, Georgia
Nick Lampson, Texas
Joe Donnelly, Indiana
Tim Mahoney, Florida
Robert W. Goodlatte, Ranking Member, Virginia
Terry Everett, Alabama
Frank Lucas, Oklahoma
Jerry Moran, Kansas
Robin Hayes, North Carolina
Timothy V. Johnson, Illinois
Sam Graves, Missouri
Jo Bonner, Alabama
Mike D. Rogers, Alabama
Steve King, Iowa
Marilyn Musgrave, Colorado
Randy Neugebauer, Texas
Charles Boustany, Louisiana
Randy Kuhl, New York
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina
Mike Conaway, Texas
Jeff Fortenberry, Nebraska
Jean Schmidt, Ohio
Adrian M. Smith, Nebraska
Kevin McCarthy, California
Tim Walberg, Michigan Subcommittees

House Agriculture Committee Homepage

2007-11-11T08:58:00.001-08:00

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a non-profit public policy organization founded in 1984 by Fred Smith. CEI's stated belief is that consumers are best helped not by government regulation of commercial interests, but by consumers being allowed to make their own choices in a free marketplace. CEI states that it promotes classical liberal ideals through analysis, education, coalition-building, advocacy, and regulation.
CEI is a think tank funded by donations from individuals, foundations and corporations, including the Scaife Foundations, the Ford Motor Company Fund, Pfizer, and the Earhart Foundation. (More details below.) CEI cites its major issues of concern as Environmental Policy, Regulation and Economic Liberty, Legal and Constitutional, and Health and Safety. Among the methods used to implement the organization's agenda are various press releases and policy papers, testifying at governmental hearings, suits against various governmental agencies, paid advertising, editorial and op-ed pieces, open letters, books, and NGO operations.

Policy areas
According to CEI, the Wall Street Journal has called it "the best environmental think tank in the country." CEI says it promotes "free market environmentalism" and says market institutions are more effective in protecting the environment than is government.
Among other things, CEI has been an outspoken opponent of government action on global warming that would require limits on greenhouse gas emissions. In March 1992, CEI's founder Fred Smith said of global warming: "Most of the indications right now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we're moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture". [1]
One of CEI's projects was the now defunct Cooler Heads Coalition, which operated the website globalwarming.org. Myron Ebell was the chairman of CHC, and is the Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the CEI.
In December of 2005 CEI participated in the UNFCCC negotiations in Montreal as an NGO, sending back several dispatches summarizing events of the conference [2].
In a 2006 letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury (after the Archbishop urged Christians to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), the CEI said that reducing these levels, even in "baby steps," would "result in the deaths of more people in the U.S. than global warming would worldwide". [3]

Regulation
CEI is also active in the legal aspects of antitrust and government regulation. The Project on Technology & Innovation is extending CEI's efforts into new areas, including antitrust in high tech and network industries, privacy, e-commerce, intellectual property, and telecommunications.
CEI opposes a range of regulatory intervention into commercial activities including bans on alcohol advertising, fuel economy mandates and proposals to mitigate global warming. CEI supports constitutional checks over government's power over corporations.

Legal and constitutional
CEI criticises health and safety regulation and argues through its Death by Regulation project that overregulation itself can be deadly. For example, they have claimed that automotive downsizing due to federal fuel economy standards may increase road accident deaths, and have criticised the delayed availability of new medical therapies due to Food and Drug Administration rules.

Health and safety
CEI lists its Adjunct Scholars and twenty-five full-time staff members, their titles, and major area of responsibility on its website.[4]. Some notable staff members include:

Fred Smith (director) - Founder and president
Michael Greve (director) - American Enterprise Institute
Leonard Liggio (director since 1994) - Atlas Economic Research Foundation
Myron Ebell (since 1999) - specializes in climate change
Steven Milloy - editor of Junkscience.com and foxnews.com columnist CEI Staff
In May 2006, CEI released a controversial ad campaign with two television commercials [5] arguing that global warming is not a problem. The commercials used the tagline "Carbon Dioxide - They call it pollution; We call it life." One ad stated that the world's glaciers are "growing, not melting... getting thicker, not thinner."
Individuals associated with CEI have also been criticised. Steven Milloy has written extensively on global warming and other topics while receiving undisclosed funding from ExxonMobil. Following this disclosure, Milloy's name was removed from the list of adjunct scholars at the Cato Institute. He was subsequently appointed as an adjunct scholar at CEI.
Recently, President of American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) Michael T. Eckhart sent Marlo Lewis, senior fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) threatening letter vowing to "destroy" his career: (excerpt) "It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar," Mr. Eckhart wrote. "If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on."[7]

Criticism
In its IRS Form 990 for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2004, CEI reported revenues totalling $2,919,537, including donations from individuals, foundations and corporations. Its net assets were $1,670,808. Salaries and benefits to its top employees were reported as:
According to page nine of a report from the CEI contained on the University of California, San Francisco's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), the following companies and foundations were among those listed as supporting CEI's work with annual contributions of at least $10,000, currently the CEI's "Entrepreneurs" level:
Aequus Institute, Amoco Foundation, Inc., Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Coca-Cola Company, E.L. Craig Foundation, CSX Corporation, Earhart Foundation, Fieldstead and Co., FMC Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, Gilder Foundation, Koch Family Foundations (including the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation), Philip M. McKenna Foundation, Inc., Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, Philip Morris Companies, Inc., Pfizer Inc., Precision Valve Corporation, Prince Foundation, Rodney Fund, Sheldon Rose, Scaife Foundations (Carthage Foundation and Sarah Scaife Foundation), and Texaco, Inc. (Texaco Foundation).
The listing on the Philip Morris Glossary of Names: C at the LTDL gives the note "Received public policy grant from Philip Morris (1995); Pro-market public interest group dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government."
ExxonMobil Corporation was a major donor to CEI, with over $2 million in contributions between 1998 and 2005. [8] In 2002 the company gave $405,000;[9] in 2004 it gave CEI $180,000 that was earmarked for "global climate change and global climate change outreach." In 2006, the company announced that they had ended their funding for the group.[10]

Fred L. Smith, President, $175,000
Marlo Lewis, Senior Fellow, $100,000
Sam Kazman, General Counsel, $98,000 Governance

2007-11-10T09:53:00.001-08:00

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Protestantism encompasses the forms of Christian faith and practice that originated with the doctrines of the Reformation. The term is derived from the Protestatio delivered by a minority of delegates against the (1529) Diet of Speyer, which passed legislation opposed by the Lutherans. Since that time, the term has been used in many different senses, but not as the official title of any church until it was assumed in 1783 by the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, the American branch of the Anglican Communion. Most broadly, Protestantism is Western Christianity that is not subject to papal authority.

Major Groupings
The Reformation came about through a number of factors, both political and theological. The Holy Roman Empire was by the 1500s, made up of approximately 300 states and imperial cities, each to some degree self-governing, most under a feudal lord - a prince, duke, margrave, etc. The 1521 Edict of Worms originally forbade Lutheran teachings, the status of which within the Catholic Church was still unclear, within the Holy Roman Empire. However, the 1526 session of the Diet, the imperial parliament, gave each ruler within the empire the power to decide the religion of his subjects according to the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio, allowing a local lord to forbid Lutheranism and enforce Catholicism, or forbid Catholicism and enforce Lutheranism.
In 1529, Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Speyer revised this policy again and declared that until there was clarification of the Catholic Church's position from another council all further new religious developments in the empire would remain forbidden:
"Those that until now have followed the Edict of Worms should continue to do so [ i.e., where Lutheranism has been forbidden, it remains forbidden]. In the areas where this has been deviated from, there shall be no further new developments and no-one shall be refused Mass [i.e., where Lutheranism has been permitted, Catholicism must be at least permitted]. Finally, the sects which contradict the sacrament of the true body and blood, shall absolutely not be tolerated, no more than the Anabaptists [i.e., anything beyond Lutheranism or Catholicism is outlawed everywhere]."
The name protestant is derived from the Latin protestatio meaning declaration which Martin Luther made when he and his supporters dissented "from the decision of the Diet of Spires (1529), which reaffirmed the edict of the Diet of Worms against the Reformation (in contrast to Reformed churches), while the common historical designation (evangelical) for all churches originating from the Reformation is a term that, in the United States, is used to refer to specifically conservative Protestant churches. Some Western, non-Catholic, groups are labelled as Protestant (such as the Religious Society of Friends), despite the reality that they recognize no historical connection to Luther, Calvin, or the Catholic Church.
In England, before the Oxford movement of the 19th century,the word "Protestant" later came to be used to refer to the established Church of England. Protestants who were not members of the Church of England are further delineated as non-conformists.

Origins

Main article: Five solas Basic theological tenets of the Reformation

Main articles: Real Presence and Lord's Supper Real Presence in the Lord's Supper
Contrary to how the Protestant reformers were often characterized, the concept of a catholic, or universal, Church was not brushed aside during the Protestant Reformation. To the contrary, the visible unity of the catholic Church was an important and essential doctrine of the Reformation. The Magisterial Reformers, such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli, believed that they were reforming a corrupt and heretical Catholic Church. Each of them took very seriously the charges of schism and innovation, denying these charges and maintaining that it was the medieval Roman Catholic Church that had left them. Because of this the fundamental Unity of the Catholic Church remained a very important doctrine in the churches of the Reformation. Dr. James Walker wrote in "The Theology of Theologians of Scotland":
The visible church, in the idea of the Scottish theologians, is catholic. You have not an indefinite number of Parochial, or Congregational, or National churches, constituting, as it were, so many ecclesiastical individualities, but one great spiritual republic, of which these various organizations form a part. The visible church is not a genus, so to speak, with so many species under it. It is thus you may think of the State, but the visible church is a totum integrale, it is an empire. The churches of the various nationalities constitute the provinces of this empire; and though they are so far independent of each other, yet they are so one, that membership in one is membership in all, and separation from one is separation from all... This conception of the church, of which, in at least some aspects, we have practically so much lost sight, had a firm hold of the Scottish theologians of the seventeenth century.

Catholicism
Unlike mainstream Evangelical (Lutheran), Reformed (Zwinglian and Calvinist) Protestant movements, the Radical Reformation, which had no state sponsorship, generally abandoned the idea of the "Church Visible" as distinct from the "Church Invisible." For them, the Church only consisted of the tiny community of believers, who accepted Jesus Christ by adult baptism, called "believer's baptism". Others believed that the Church could not be defined as anything more than a single congregation meeting together for worship at one time in a single place. The Radical Reformation thus did not believe that the Magisterial Reformation had gone far enough. For example, radical reformer Andreas von Bodenstein Karlstadt referred to the Lutheran theologians at Wittenberg as the 'new papists.' It was exactly because the Reformation still strongly defended the visible unity of the Catholic Church that they were criticized by the Radical Reformers and vice versa.

Radical Reformation
See the articles Lay, Ordained and Priesthood of all believers
Whereas Catholics look to the Church for authority, Protestants look to the Bible for authority.

Authority
Many Protestant churches practice similar rituals to Catholicism—chiefly baptism, communion, and matrimony—frequently varying or de-formalizing the rites (although this is not the case in some Lutheran and Anglican parishes).

Within the Church
Radical - Anabaptist and peace churches

Lutheran - doctrine of the two kingdoms
Reformed
Anglican Secular authority
Protestants can be differentiated according to how they have been influenced by important movements since the magisterial Reformation and the Puritan Reformation in England. Some of these movements have a common lineage, sometimes directly spawning later movements in the same groups.

Later development

Main articles: Pietism and Methodism Pietism and Methodist movement

Main article: Evangelicalism Evangelicalism

Main article: Pentecostalism Pentecostalism

Main article: Liberal Christianity Modernism

Main article: Christian fundamentalism Fundamentalism

Main article: Neo-orthodoxy Neo-orthodoxy

Main article: Neo-evangelicalism Neo-evangelicalism

Main article: Paleo-orthodoxy Paleo-Orthodoxy

Main article: Christian ecumenism Ecumenism
Protestants often refer to specific Protestant churches and groups as denominations to imply that they are differently named parts of the whole church. This "invisible unity" is assumed to be imperfectly displayed, visibly: some denominations are less accepting of others, and the basic orthodoxy of some is questioned by most of the others. Individual denominations also have formed over very subtle theological differences. Other denominations are simply regional or ethnic expressions of the same beliefs. The actual number of distinct denominations is hard to calculate, but has been estimated to be over thirty thousand. Various ecumenical movements have attempted cooperation or reorganization of Protestant churches, according to various models of union, but divisions continue to outpace unions. Most denominations share common beliefs in the major aspects of the Christian faith, while differing in many secondary doctrines. There are "over 33,000 denominations in 238 countries" and every year there is a net increase of around 270 to 300 denominations. According to David Barrett's study (1970), there are 8,196 denominations within Protestantism.

Denominations
Only general families are listed here (due to the above-stated mulititude of denominations); some of these groups do not consider themselves as part of the Protestant movement, but are generally viewed as such by scholars and the public at large:

Anabaptist
Anglican / Episcopalian
African Methodist Episcopal
Baptist
Christian and Missionary Alliance
Evangelicalism
Lutheran
Methodist / Wesleyan and the Holiness movement
Pentecostal and Charismatic
Quakerism
Reformed/Congregational /Presbyterian
Restoration movement
Adventists
Non-denominational
Waldensians Families of denominations

Main article: Protestants by country Notable Protestant religious figures

Jan Hus, Czech reformist/dissident; burned to death by Roman Catholic Church authorities for unrepentant and persistent heresy. Fifteenth century

Jacobus Arminius, Dutch theologian, founder of school of thought known as Arminianism
Heinrich Bullinger, successor of Zwingli, leading reformed theologian
John Calvin, French theologian, Reformer and resident of Geneva, Switzerland, he founded the school of theology known as Calvinism
Elizabeth I, English Queen known for reforming the national religion of England
Abraomas Kulvietis, jurist and a professor at Königsberg Albertina University, as well as a Reformer of the Lithuanian church.
John Knox, Scottish Calvinist reformer,
Martin Luther, German religious reformer, theologian, founder of the Lutheran church in Germany, founder of Lutheranism
Philipp Melanchthon, early Lutheran leader
Menno Simons, founder of Mennonitism
Huldrych Zwingli, founder of Swiss reformed tradition
John Smyth, founder of the Baptist denomination
Martynas Mažvydas was the author and the editor of the first printed book in the Lithuanian language. First Lithuanian Protestant Archdeacon of Ragainė. Sixteenth century

Jacob Albright, founder of the Evangelical Church
Jacob Amman, founder of the Amish church
Francis Asbury, early bishop of American Methodism
Jonathan Edwards, American Puritan theologian, Great Awakening reformist preacher, Calvinist
George Fox, Founder of the Religious Society of Friends
William Penn, Founder of Pennsylvania
Friedrich Schleiermacher, German theologian considered founder of Liberal Christianity
Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher considered the "Father of Existentialism" and influenced Karl Barth and neo-orthodoxy theology.
Philipp Jakob Spener, "father" of the Pietist movement
Charles Wesley, Anglican priest, Methodist leader, poet, & hymn writer
John Wesley, Anglican priest, founder of the Methodist movement
George Whitefield, Great Awakening reformist preacher
William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, renowned for his treatise In Darkest England and the Way Out
Edward Irving, Scottish clergyman, generally (but wrongly) regarded as the founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church
Ellen G. White, James White, Joseph Bates, Uriah Smith, Dr. John Kellogg Pioneers of Seventh-day Adventism
Charles Taze Russel, Judge Rutherford founders of the Watch Tower Bible and tract society, more commonly known as Jehovah's Witnesses.
Mme. Henriette Feller, missionary to Quebec and founder of Feller College.
Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf, Founder and Bishop of the Moravians
August Gottlieb Spangenberg, Leader of American Moravian missions, Bishop, German theologian
Charles P. Chiniquy, Catholic Priest converted to Presbyterian Preacher, Quebec and Illinois
Gustav II Adolf, King of Sweden during the Thirty Years War Seventeenth - nineteenth centuries

Karl Barth, Swiss theologian along with Emil Brunner known for Neo-orthodox theology also known as "Dialectical theology" and "Crisis theology"
Cornelius Van Til, American theologian known for his development of pre-suppositional apologetics
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian, involved in the resistance against Nazism and executed shortly before the end of World War II
Jerry Falwell, American evangelist and political activist
Austin Farrer, Anglican theologian, preacher, and philosopher
Billy Graham, American evangelist
John Stott, Anglican Minister, preacher and author
Nicky Gumbel, Anglican British evangelist
Martin Luther King, Jr.,American Minister, peace and civil rights activist
C. S. Lewis, Anglican novelist, literary scholar, and lay theologian
Aimee Semple McPherson American founder of the Foursquare Church
Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian and ethicist
H. Richard Niebuhr, American theologian and ethicist
Pat Robertson, American charismatic/evangelical leader
Francis A. Schaeffer, Christian apologist
Billy Sunday, American Evangelist
Paul Tillich, Lutheran existentialist theologian
John Howard Yoder, Mennonite theologian and ethicist
James Dobson, American psychologist and conservative activist, founder of Focus on the Family Ministry
Charles Swindoll, American theologian, author, pastor, founder of Insight for Living Twentieth century

Marcus Borg, American Episcopal theologian (Lutheran background)
John B. Cobb, theologian, involved in Process Theology
Franklin Graham, American evangelist (son of Billy Graham)
Stanley Hauerwas, American Christian theologian and ethicist
Ian Paisley, Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster also a senior politician in Northern Ireland, UK
John Shelby Spong, Retired (Episcopal) Bishop of Newark, New Jersey
N.T. Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham and New Testament scholar
Thomas C. Oden, United Methodist presbyter and theologian
Brian McLaren, "emergent church" guru
William Willimon, United Methodist Bishop and theologian
Edir Macedo, founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God theology of the prosperity.
T. D. Jakes, American televangelist. The Potter's House. Twenty first century

Supporting

Catholic websites on sola scriptura
"Protestantism" from the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia
"Why Only Catholicism Can Make Protestantism Work" by Mark Brumley

2007-11-09T07:42:00.001-08:00

George Edward Pelham Box, born 18 October 1919 in Gravesend, Kent, England, was one of the most influential statisticians of the 20th century and a pioneer in the areas of quality control, time series analysis, design of experiments and Bayesian inference. Box was originally trained as a chemist, and he worked on biochemical experiments on the effect of poison gases on small animals for the British Army during World War II. He needed statistical advice to analyze the results of his experiments, but could not find a statistician who could give him guidance so he taught himself statistics from available texts. After the war, he enrolled at University College London and obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1953.
From 1948 to 1956, Box worked as a statistician for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). While at ICI, he took a leave of absence for a year and served as a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later went to Princeton University where he served as Director of the Statistical Research Group.
In 1960, Box moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create the Department of Statistics. He served as President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1979, was appointed Vilas Research Professor of Statistics (the highest honor accorded to any faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) in 1980, and became Emeritus Professor in 1992 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Box was named a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979 to honor his years of distinguished accomplishment in statistical theory and methods.
George Box and Bill Hunter co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984.
Throughout his career, George Box has written numerous research papers and published many books. One of his most important contributions to the field of experimental design was his book, Statistics for Experimenters. In time series analysis his most important contributions was the 1970 book Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control with Gwilym Jenkins. In Bayesian theory his most important contributions were in the 1973 book with George C. Tiao Bayesian Inference in Statistical Analysis. Today, his name is associated with important results in statistics such as Box-Jenkins models, Box-Cox transformations, Box-Behnken designs and numerous others.
Box married Joan Fisher, second of Ronald Fisher's five daughters. In 1978 Joan Fisher Box published a very well-received biography of her father, R. A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist Preface

2007-11-08T08:32:00.001-08:00

Objectives
In 1974, the Government of India set out to create an autonomous coast guard to protect the nation's long coast line. This coast guard was modelled on the lines of the British (HMCG) and American (USCG) coast guards. Like many coast guards around the world, the Indian Coast Guard has borrowed the white paint scheme and "racing stripe" from the U.S. service. The dress uniforms are similar to their American counterpart.
An interim Indian Coast Guard was set up on February 1, 1977 equipped with modern weaponry and quick sea craft with the help of the Indian Navy. The duties and functions of the service were formally defined in the Coast Guard Act, which was passed on 18 August 1978, and came into effect the next day.
The Indian Coast Guard conducts exercises with the other coast guards of the world. In 2006, the Indian Coast Guard conducted exercises with Japanese and Korean counterparts. In May 2005, the Indian Coast Guard agreed to set up liaison links with Pakistan Coast Guard.

History
The Coast Guard is headed by a Director General with a rank equivalent to a Vice Admiral. The force has a strength of 5440, including 633 officers. Its headquarters is based in the capital, New Delhi. It has:

three Regional Headquarters at Mumbai, Chennai, and Port Blair
one District headquarters in each of the nine coastal states and 2 in the Union territories of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep Islands.
Twenty nine Coast Guard stations at places like Vadinar, Haldia, Kakinada, Okha, Tuticorin and Mandapam.
two air bases, in Daman and Chennai
Air enclaves at Goa, Kolkata and Port Blair.
A new station has been recently commissioned in Pondicherry Bases
The Coast Guard began with two old frigates handed to it by the Navy and five small patrol vessels. It has since grown to a sizeable fleet of 75 ships and watercraft and 44 aircraft and helicopters. The coast guard relies on a variety of seafaring vessels equipped with modern detection facilities. They include patrol boats of various speeds and capabilities, defence boats, air cushion vehicles and interceptor craft. The air arm of the coast guard boasts has Dornier Do 228 airplanes and Chetak and Dhruv helicopters. The Indian Coast Guard has plans to induct 2 Advanced offshore patrol vessels, 3 Offshore patrol vessels, 3 Patrol crafts, 11 Interceptor boats, 21 patrol vessels, 4 Fast patrol vessels, aircrafts and helicoptes into service.
Advanced Offshore Patrol Vessels (AOPV's)
Sankalp class (AOPV's) (2 being built)
Samar class (AOPV's) (4 in service)
Vikram class Offshore Patrol Vessels (9 in service)
Fast Patrol Vessels (8 in service)
Extra Fast Patrol Vessels (7 in service)
Inshore Patrol Vessels (13 in service)
Seaward Defence Boats (2 in service)
Interceptor Boats (12 in service)
Inshore Patrol Crafts (5 in service)
Interceptor Crafts (8 in service)
Hovercrafts (6 in service)
Pollution control vessels (3 on order)

Vessels

See also

2007-11-07T09:46:00.001-08:00

For other use, see Tabari (name)
Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari (c. 838–c. 870 CE) was a Persian scholar physician (a hakim), who produced the first encyclopedia of medicine. His famous pupil, Zakariya al-Razi ("Razi"), has eclipsed his stature.
Ali came from a well-known Jewish family of Merv in Tabaristan (hence al-Tabari – "from Tabaristan") but became an Islamic convert under the Abbassid caliph Al-Mu'tasim (833-842), who took him into the service of the court, in which he continued under Al-Mutawakkil (847-861). His father Sahl ibn Bishr was a famous Astrologer.
Ali ibn Sahl was fluent in Syriac and Greek, the two sources for the medical tradition of antiquity, which was lost to medieval Europe, and versed in fine calligraphy.

Sources

Muslim scholar
List of Iranian scientists

2007-11-06T09:34:00.001-08:00

For the rap group, see Chutzpah (group). Chutzpah! is also a book by Alan Dershowitz.
Chutzpah is the quality of audacity, for good or for bad. The word derives from the Hebrew word ḥuṣpâ (חֻצְפָּה), meaning "insolence," "audacity," and "impertinence"; though the modern English usage of the word has taken on a wider spectrum of meaning, having been popularized through vernacular use, film, literature, and television.
Chutzpah is also similar in meaning to the term "bravura" in music, and the former may be a better term to describe certain forms of musical audacity. This is especially the case as dance, jazz, and jazz dance in particular foster a competitive spirit that no longer exists in classical music to the extent that it once did. Chutzpah could describe a banality in which classical music is disrupted or turned into a competition or duel, while on the other hand a stubborn classical temperament could be viewed as equally audacious, as well as difficult and risky.
In Hebrew, chutzpah is used indignantly, to describe someone who has over-stepped the boundaries of accepted behavior with no shame. But in Yiddish and English, chutzpah has developed ambivalent and even positive connotations. Chutzpah can be used to express admiration for non-conformist but gutsy audacity. One common English adaptation of "chutzpah" is "hoodspa," which has a mostly positive connotation. Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts,' presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to." In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and a grudging admiration.
One example given of the ultimate of chutzpah is: "A boy, having just been convicted of murdering his parents, begs the judge for leniency because he is an orphan."

In the News

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said on July 5, 2007 "I don't know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but this is a gigantic case of it" of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Clintons had recently criticized President Bush's decision to commute the prison sentence of former Vice Presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Snow pointed to the fact that Clinton pardoned 140 people in the closing hours of his presidency including his half-brother, who had been convicted of cocaine distribution and fugitive financier Marc Rich.

2007-11-05T07:43:00.001-08:00

Roadrunner Records (Roadrunner Music Group B.V.) is a record label that concentrates on rock and metal bands.

Signed bands and previous artists

2007-11-04T09:49:00.001-08:00

Names

Main article: History of Vilnius History
Vilnius is situated in southeastern Lithuania (54°41′N, 25°17′E) at the confluence of the Vilnia and Neris Rivers. It is believed that Vilnius, like many other cities, was named after a crossing river, Vilnia.
Lying close to Vilnius is a site some claim to be the Geographical Centre of Europe.
Vilnius' non-central location can be attributed to the changing shape of the nation's borders through the centuries; Vilnius was once not only culturally but also geographically at the center of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Vilnius lies 312 kilometres (194 mi) from the Baltic Sea and Klaipėda, the chief Lithuanian seaport. Vilnius is connected by highways to other major Lithuanian cities, such as Kaunas (102 km/63 mi away), Šiauliai (214 km/133 mi away) and Panevėžys (135 km/84 mi away).
The current area of Vilnius is 402 square kilometres (155 sq mi). Buildings cover 20.2% of the city and in the remaining areas, greenery (43.9%) and waters (2.1%) prevail.
The climate of Vilnius is transitional between continental and maritime. The average annual temperature is +6.1°C (43°F); in January the average temperature is −4.9°C (23°F), in July it is +17.0°C (62.6°F). The average precipitation is about 661 millimetres (26.0 in) per year.
Summers can be hot, with temperatures above thirty degrees Celsius throughout the day. Nightlife in Vilnius is in full swing at this time of year, and outdoor bars and cafés become very popular during the daytime.
Winters can be very cold, with temperatures rarely reaching above freezing - temperatures below negative 25 degrees Celsius (-13°F) are not unheard-of in January and February. Vilnius's rivers freeze over in particularly cold winters, and the lakes surrounding the city are almost always permanently frozen during this time of year. A popular pastime is ice-fishing, whereby fishermen drill holes in the ice and fish with baited hooks.

Geography and climate
According to the 2001 census by the Vilnius Regional Statistical Office, there were 542,287 inhabitants in the Vilnius city municipality, of which 57.8% were Lithuanians, 18.7% Poles, 14% Russians, 4.0% Belarusians, 1.3% Ukrainians and 0.5% Jews; the remainder indicated other nationalities or refused to answer.

Demographics
Vilnius is a cosmopolitan city with diverse architecture. There are more than 40 churches in Vilnius. Restaurants, hotels and museums have sprouted since Lithuania declared independence, and young Vilnius residents are building the city's reputation for being the most hospitable in the world, as evidenced by an active participation in the Hospitality Club.
Like most medieval towns, Vilnius was developed around its Town Hall. The main artery, Pilies Street, links the governor's palace and the Town Hall. Other streets meander through the palaces of feudal lords and landlords, churches, shops and craftsmen's workrooms. Narrow, curved streets and intimate courtyards developed in the radial layout of medieval Vilnius.
The Old Town, the historical centre of Vilnius, is one of the largest in Europe (3.6 km²). The most valuable historic and cultural sites are concentrated here. The buildings in the old town — there are nearly 1,500 — were built over several centuries, creating a splendid blend of many different architectural styles. Although Vilnius is known as a Baroque city, there are examples of Gothic (e.g. St Anne's Church), Renaissance, and other styles. The main sights of the city are Gediminas Castle and Cathedral Square, symbols of the capital. Their combination is also a gateway to the historic centre of the capital. Owing to its uniqueness, the Old Town of Vilnius was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994. In 1995, the first bronze cast of Frank Zappa in the world was installed near the center of Vilnius with the permission of the government.

Tourism
Vilnius is the major economic centre of Lithuania and one of the largest financial centres of the Baltic states. Even though it is home to only 15% of Lithuania's population, it generates approximately 35% of Lithuania's GDP [2]. Based on these indicators, its estimated GDP per capita, based on purchasing power parity, in 2005 is approximately $33,100, above the European Union average.
Vilnius contributed over 4.6 billion litas to the national budget in 2004. That makes about 37% of the budget. Kaunas, the second largest city, contributed only 1.5 billion. Vilnius received a return of 360 million litas in the budget, which is only 7.7% of its contribution. This disparity caused some conflicts with the central government because of Vilnius' demand for a greater share of the funds it generated.

Economy
For ecclesiastical history, see Archdiocese of Vilnius
Vilnius is as multireligious as it is multicultural.
Vilnius is the Roman Catholic center of the country, with the main church institutions and Archdiocesan Cathedral located here. There are quite a number of active and open churches in the city, along with small enclosed monasteries and religion schools. Church architecture spans Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical styles, with important examples of each found in the Old Town. Vilnius is considered one of the main centers of the Polish Baroque movement in ecclesiastical architecture. Additionally, Eastern Rite Catholicism has been in Vilnius since the Union of Brest. The famous Basilian Gate is part of an Eastern Rite monastery.
Also, Vilnius has been home to an Eastern Orthodox Christian presence since the thirteenth century. A famous Russian Orthodox monastery, named for the Holy Spirit, is located near the Gate of Dawn. St. Paraskeva's Orthodox Church in the Old Town is the site of the baptism of Hannibal, the great-grandfather of Pushkin, by Tsar Peter the Great in 1705.
Many Old Believers, who split from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1667, settled in Lithuania in their flight from oppression. Today a Supreme Council of the Old Believers is based in Vilnius.
A number of Protestant and other Christian groups are represented in Vilnius, most notably the Lutheran Evangelicals and the Baptists.
Once widely known as Yerushalayim De Lita (translated as "Jerusalem of Lithuania"), Vilnius once was comparable only to Jerusalem, Israel, as a world center for the study of the Torah, and for its large Jewish population. That is why one part of Vilnius was named Jeruzalė. At the end of the 19th century, the number of synagogues in Vilnius exceeded one hundred. A major scholar of Judaism and Kabbalah centered in Vilnius was the famous Rabbi Eliyahu Kremer, also known as the Vilna Gaon. His students have significant influence among Orthodox Jews in Israel and around the globe. This Jewish life in Vilnius was destroyed during the Holocaust of the Second World War. There is a memorial stone dedicated to victims of Nazi genocide located in the center of former Jewish Ghetto - now Mėsinių Street.
The Karaim are a Jewish sect who migrated to Lithuania from the Crimea to serve as a military elite unit in the thirteenth century. Although their numbers are very small, the Karaim are experiencing a renaissance in Vilnius since Lithuanian independence, and have restored their kenesa (synagogue).
Islam came to Lithuania in the 14th century from Crimea and Kazan, through the Tatars. Some Tatars of Lithuania have maintained their ethnic identity as well as their religion. Currently, about 3,000 Tatar Muslims live in Lithuania. The Lukiškės mosque of the Lithuanian Tatars was a prominent 19th century feature of suburban Vilnius, but was destroyed during the Soviet era.
The pre-Christian pagan religion of Lithuania, centered around the forces of nature as personified by deities such as Perkūnas (the Thunder God), is experiencing some increased interest, especially among people seeking to identify with Lithuania's ancient cultural and spiritual heritage.

Religion
Vilnius is the starting point of the Vilnius-Kaunas-Klaipėda motorway that runs across Lithuania and connects the three major cities. The Vilnius-Panevėžys motorway is a branch of Via-Baltica. Though the river Neris may be navigable, no regular water routes exist. Vilnius International Airport serves most Lithuanian international flights to many major European destinations. The Vilnius railway station is an important hub as well.
Vilnius has a well-developed public transportation system. There are over 60 bus and 19 trolleybus routes, the trolleybus network is one of the biggest in Europe. Over 250 buses and 260 trolleybuses transport about 500,000 passengers every workday. Students, elderly, and the disabled receive large discounts (up to 80%) on the tickets. A single ride ticket costs up to 1.40 litas (0,41 EUR) while monthly tickets cost 50-60 litas (14,50-17,40 EUR). The first regular bus routes were established in 1926, and the first trolleybus was launched in 1956.
The public transportation system is dominated by the brand new low-floor Volvo and Mercedes-Benz buses as well as Solaris trolleybuses. The new Solaris vehicles (built in Poland) are 15m long three-axle vehicles, and their extreme length is commented on by a cartoon on the front of a long dachshund dog (called "Zemagrindis" in Lithuanian and so labelled. There are also plenty of the traditional Skoda vehicles built in Czech Republic still in service, and many of these have been extensively refurbished internally. All is a result of major improvements that started in 2003 when the first brand-new Mercedes-Benz buses were bought. In 2004, a contract was signed with Volvo Buses to buy 90 brand-new 7700 buses over the next 3 years. Along with the official public transportation, there are also a number of private bus companies. They charge about the same as the municipal buses and sometimes follow the same routes. There are also a number of different routes, for example from various neighborhoods to the Gariūnai market. In addition there are about 400 share taxis that are usually faster but less comfortable and more expensive (3litas - 0.87 EUR) than regular buses.
Services out into the country are more traditional of Eastern Europe nowadays, often using secondhand coaches bought from Western Europe (many are from France) which are still operated with their formers owners paint scheme and names written on the side. Most smaller towns outside Vilnius have a large but spartan bus station dating back to Soviet times, but which nowadays is no longer the busy hub it used to be. Virtually no vehicles remain on the road in Lithuania from Soviet times (apart from the Skoda trolleybuses), but a few such diesel buses operating through from Belarus can be seen in Vilnius.
There are plans to build a light rail system, construction due to begin in 2008. The first line should be opened in 2009, followed by the construction of the second line. Light rail will connect the residential districts with city centre, bus and train stations and Vilnius International Airport.

http://www.vilniustransport.lt/en/ Transport
Vilnius has 14 sister cities. In addition, agreements on cooperation have been signed with 16 other cities.

Akhisar, Turkey
Aalborg, Denmark
Budapest, Hungary
Chicago, United States
Duisburg, Germany
Erfurt, Germany
Joensuu, Finland
Kiev, Ukraine
St.Petersburg, Russia
Kraków, Poland
Madison, United States
Oslo, Norway
Pavia, Italy
Piraeus, Greece
Salzburg, Austria
Taipei, Taiwan
Warsaw, Poland Sister cities
The city of Vilnius is made up of 21 elderates that are based on neighbourhoods:

Verkiai — includes Baltupiai, Jeruzalė, Santariškės, Balsiai, Visoriai
Antakalnis — includes Valakupiai, Turniškės, Dvarčionys
Pašilaičiai — includes Tarandė
Fabijoniškės — includes Bajorai
Pilaitė
Justiniškės
Viršuliškės
Šeškinė
Šnipiškės
Žirmūnai — includes Šiaurės miestelis
Karoliniškės
Žvėrynas
Grigiškės — a separate town included in the Vilnius city municipality
Lazdynai
Vilkpėdė — includes Vingis park
Naujamiestis — includes bus and train stations
Senamiestis (Old Town) — includes Užupis
Naujoji Vilnia — includes Pavilnys, Pūčkoriai
Paneriai — includes Trakų Vokė, Gariūnai
Naujininkai — includes Kirtimai, Salininkai, Vilnius International Airport
Rasos — includes Belmontas, Markučiai Trivia

Archdiocese of Vilnius
Cathedral Square in Vilnius
Coat of arms of Vilnius
Gediminas Castle
Elektrit
Kaziuko fair in Vilnius
Pilies Street
Vilnius Cathedral
Vilnius University
List of Vilnians
Vilna Gaon
Vilna Ghetto
Wilno Uprising

2007-11-03T10:10:00.001-07:00

Worth is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The population was 11,047 at the 2000 census.

Demographics
The Village of Worth operates under a President-Trustee form of Government with a Village President (Mayor) and a Village Board composed of six Village Trustees (Councilmen / Aldermen) elected at large.
There are two political parties in Worth Government - The Integrity Party (IP) and the Voices of Worth Party (VOW).
The Elected Officials are:
Village President Edward S. Guzdziol (IP) (2001, 2005) Current term expires in April 2009
Village Clerk Bonnie M. Price (VOW) (2001, 2005) Current term expires in April 2009
Trustee Barbara Klutchins-Adamski (IP) (2001, 2005) Current term expires in April 2009
Trustee Becky Alcala (IP) (2005) Current term expires in April 2009
Trustee Pete Kats (VOW) (2007) Current term expires in April 2011
Trustee Randy Keller (VOW) (2003, 2007) Current term expires in April 2011
Trustee Mary Rhien (VOW)** (2001,2003,2007) Current term expires in April 2011
Trustee Kevin Werner (IND) (2001,2005) Current term expires in April 2009
All six trustees are elected at large with three being elected at the same time as the President and three being elected two years later.

Trustee Mary Rhien was appointed by President Guzdziol in April 2001 to fill out the remaining two years of his term on the Board of Trustees when he was elected President. She was re-elected in 2003 and again in 2007. Village Government
Worth is divided between two congressional districts. Most of the village is in Illinois' 3rd congressional district; the area south of 115th Street and east of Harlem Avenue, and also between 114th Place and 115th Street from Harlem to Oak Park Avenue, is in the Illinois' 1st congressional district.
Worth is located within 2 State Representative Districts, the 35th and 36th and 1 State Senate District, the 18th.

Trivia

Holy Sepulchre Cemetery