title: The Trials of Apollo

text: At the trogs' encampment underground, it is revealed that the trogs are very quick runners and diggers. Soon enough, they decide that Will, Nico, and Rachel will go with the trogs to disable the vats, and then alert Camp Half-Blood, while Meg and Apollo surrender themselves, to get closer to Nero's fasces, the source of his power and immortality, to destroy it and kill Nero. But it turned out that Nero already knew of their plan. Luguselwa's hands are cut off, and she and Apollo are thrown in prison, while Meg is forced by Nero to go to her old room in the Imperial Residences inside the Tower of Nero.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: Lester, after just managing to revive Luguselwa, decides to find out more about who is guarding the fasces. It turned out to be a leontocephaline, the Persian god Mithras' creation. He guards immortality, so he requires a sacrifice of it in return to granting access to the fasces. Lu and Lester escape prison. Lu decides to give her immortality up to get the fasces, while Lester goes to save Meg.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: Upstairs, he realizes that the entire lower floor area has become a battleground. Camp Half-Blood heroes have come in. Kayla and Austin help Lester to reach Meg. On the way, Lester enters the wrong room, the one with the buttons to burn up Manhattan. The button is pressed, but nothing happens, as the vats have been disabled. Nico also shows up.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: After some searching, Lester runs past a laptop. Nero video calls that laptop and tells him that he has a "plan B": to release Sassanid gas, a very poisonous gas, and kill everyone in the building. Lester has to come to the throne room in fifteen minutes, or else everyone will die. Lester tells the trogs about the gas trap, who run to disable it.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: Meanwhile, Lester reaches the throne room, where all the adopted children of Nero are present, including Meg. Nero orders the dryads there to kill Lester or be killed by the Imperial children. However, Meg stops them and chooses to stand by Apollo. Suddenly, Nico shows up with the Tauri Silvestri, who has become a pawn of Nico. Nico orders it to kill Nero. The bull fails, but it ends up creating a lot of chaos. Nero desperately tries to search the remote with the button to release Sassanid gas. In the middle of the chaos, one of the Imperial demigods manages to stab Lester, but he survives.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: After the chaos ends, Nero finally finds the correct remote and presses the button. He laughs, but suddenly, Will, Rachel, and Lu show up, along with the trog leader and the emperor's fasces. To Nero's disbelief, the troglodytes had been successful in disabling the gas trap as well. Nero is forced to reveal the truth – he is not that powerful, and instead, he is being controlled as a pawn by Python. If he is killed, then Python would be near impossible to kill, as the entire Triumvirate’s power will go to Python. He is given a choice, fight and die a hopeless battle, or live for some more years in a large prison. He chooses the first one, but soon gets entangled in a tug of war with Lester over the fasces, which Lester was trying to break. Lester manages to project his godly powers, using which he revokes Nero's divinity and immortality, and breaks the fasces, killing him.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: Camp Half-Blood stays at the Tower to help the Imperial children rehabilitate after years of abuse, but Lester has to go, as he has to quickly defeat Python. Using the Labyrinth, he manages to reach Delphi, halfway across the world, in a matter of minutes.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: Lester faces off against Python for the final time. Python starts calling him Apollo, a big achievement for Lester. But Lester is quickly overpowered by the giant snake, who utters a prophecy, saying Apollo will fall, and loses his bow. The arrow of Dodona sacrifices itself to defeat Python and finishes Python’s prophecy, saying that Apollo will fall, but Apollo must rise again. Apollo manages to blind Python and make him loosen his hold on him by hitting him in the eyes with the arrow of Dodona and his elbow. Then he drags Python into Tartarus with him, fulfilling Python's recent prophecy, but in a more literal sense.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: The two almost fall down into Chaos but are saved by a ledge. Apollo, who is in no mood to fight, is attacked by Python, but manages to throw him off the ledge into Chaos, destroying him forever and freeing the Oracles from his power. Apollo himself is left dangling off the edge, when the goddess of the Styx, who had followed him all along since he broke his vows on the Styx in the first book, congratulates him on learning his lesson which he realizes is to always uphold a promise that you make. Apollo becomes a god again, and, two weeks later, reappears in Olympus, where he is welcomed as an Olympian.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: Apollo, now a god again, goes to meet his friends. He splits himself into multiple Apollos and goes to find them in no particular order. He visits Camp Half-Blood, where Nico and Will tell him that Nico suspects that a voice he's been hearing from Tartarus lately is his old friend the Titan Iapetus, also known as Bob, who supposedly died helping Percy and Annabeth to escape. With the help of the trogs, Nico and Will intend to travel to Tartarus to find out for sure and rescue Bob if they can. As if on cue, Rachel delivers a prophecy, which Will notes to sound bad. Apollo also visits Camp Jupiter, where Frank and Hazel are doing a great job at being praetors. Hazel gets rid of the curse on her jewels, and now they can be spent. Frank is having fun turning his cape into a sweater wrap, while Percy and Annabeth have finally reached university there. Percy studies marine biology and Annabeth architecture, respectively. Apollo gives Percy his mom's cookies, and Percy retracts 'almost' all of the things he has said about Apollo. He visits the Union Station at Indianapolis, where Georgina is being taught by Jo how to forge blades. Reyna, who is there with the other Hunters of Artemis, tells Leo to be more mature when approaching Calypso, who is currently studying in high school and had gone to a summer camp as a counselor. The Hunters are there to hunt down the Teumessian Fox. Apollo visits Piper McLean in Oklahoma, where she has started a new life with her Dad and Shel, her new girlfriend. Apollo also visits Meg McCaffrey, who is living in Palm Springs with the dryads there, Lu, and the Imperial children, whom she is teaching gardening. The Meliais are acting as security guards. Apollo gifts Meg a unicorn, and promises her that he will come back.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: A companion book titled " Camp Half-Blood Confidential" was released on May 2, 2017. It is based on background facts of Camp Half-Blood.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: The book explores the story of one of the side characters, Claudia the daughter of Cardea and legacy of Mercury, through the perspective of her personal diary.


title: The Trials of Apollo

text: Rick Riordan is collaborating with writer Mark Oshiro for a new novel in the "Camp Half-Blood Chronicles", set to follow Nico and Will travelling together to Tartarus to rescue the Titan Bob. The book was announced to bear the title "The Sun and the Star" on September 23, 2022, with its release set for May 2, 2023.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP; in , "Rossiyskaya sotsial-demokraticheskaya rabochaya partiya (RSDRP)"), also known as the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party or the Russian Social Democratic Party, was a socialist political party founded in 1898 in Minsk (then in Northwestern Krai of the Russian Empire, present-day Belarus).


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: Formed to unite the various revolutionary organizations of the Russian Empire into one party, the RSDLP split in 1903 into Bolsheviks ("majority") and Mensheviks ("minority") factions, with the Bolshevik faction eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: The RSDLP was not the first Russian Marxist group; the Emancipation of Labour group had been formed in 1883. The RSDLP was created to oppose the revolutionary populism of the Narodniks, which was later represented by the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). The RSLDP was formed at an underground conference in Minsk in March 1898. There were nine delegates: from the Jewish Labour Bund, and from the "Robochaya Gazeta" ("Workers' Newspaper") in Kiev, both formed a year earlier in 1897; and the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in Saint Petersburg. Some additional social democrats from Moscow and Yekaterinburg also attended. The RSDLP program was based strictly on the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Specifically, that despite Russia's agrarian nature at the time, the true revolutionary potential lay with the industrial working class. At this time, there were three million Russian industrial workers, just 3% of the population. The RSDLP was illegal for most of its existence. Within a month after the Congress, five of the nine delegates were arrested by the "Okhrana" (imperial secret police).


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: Before the 2nd Party Congress in 1903, a young intellectual named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (better known by his pseudonym, Vladimir Lenin) joined the party. In 1902, he had published "What Is To Be Done?", outlining his view of the party's proper task and methodology: to form "the vanguard of the proletariat". He advocated a disciplined, centralized party of committed activists who would fuse the underground struggle for political freedom with the class struggle of the proletariat.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: In 1903, the 2nd Party Congress met in exile in Brussels to attempt to create a united force. However, after unprecedented attention from the Belgian authorities the Congress moved to London, meeting on 11 August in a chapel in Tottenham Court Road. At the Congress, the party split into two irreconcilable factions on 17 November: the Bolsheviks (derived from "bolshinstvo"—Russian for "majority"), headed by Lenin; and the Mensheviks (from "menshinstvo"—Russian for "minority"), headed by Julius Martov. Confusingly, the Mensheviks were actually the larger faction, but the names Menshevik and Bolshevik were taken from a vote held at the 1903 Party Congress for the editorial board of the party newspaper, "Iskra" ("Spark"), with the Bolsheviks being the majority and the Mensheviks being the minority. These were the names used by the factions for the rest of the party Congress and these are the names retained after the split at the 1903 Congress. Lenin's faction later ended up in the minority and remained smaller than the Mensheviks until the Russian Revolution.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: A central issue at the Congress was the question of the definition of party membership. Martov proposed the following formulation: "A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts the Party's programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations". On the other hand, Lenin proposed a more strict definition: "A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organizations". Martov's big tent definition of party membership initially won the vote 28-23. However, his majority was short-lived, given the exit from the party, for separate reasons, of its Bundist and Economist members who had supported his definition. That left in the majority those in favour of Lenin's definition of party members as, in effect, professional revolutionaries- centrally directed, tightly disciplined, and therefore capable of operating effectively in the tsarist police state. From this was derived the faction names: "Majority" ("Bolshevik") and "Minority" ("Menshevik").


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: Despite a number of attempts at reunification, the split proved permanent. As time passed, ideological differences emerged in addition to the original organizational differences. The main difference that emerged in the years after 1903 was that the Bolsheviks believed that only the workers, backed up by the peasantry, could carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks in Russia, which would then provide incentive to socialist revolution in Germany, France and Britain, while the Mensheviks believed that the workers and peasants must seek out enlightened people from the liberal bourgeoisie to carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks in Russia. The two warring factions both agreed that the coming revolution would be "bourgeois-democratic" within Russia, but while the Mensheviks viewed the liberals as the main ally in this task, the Bolsheviks opted for an alliance with the peasantry as the only way to carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks while defending the interests of the working class. Essentially, the difference was that the Bolsheviks considered that in Russia the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution would have to be carried out without the participation of the bourgeoisie. The 3rd Party Congress was held separately by the Bolsheviks.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: The 4th Party Congress was held in Stockholm, Sweden and saw a formal reunification of the two factions (with the Mensheviks in the majority), but the discrepancies between Bolshevik and Menshevik views became particularly clear during the proceedings.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: The 5th Party Congress was held in London, England, in 1907. It consolidated the supremacy of the Bolshevik faction and debated strategy for communist revolution in Russia. Joseph Stalin never later referred to his stay in London.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: The Social Democrats (SDs) boycotted elections to the First Duma (April–July 1906), but they were represented in the Second Duma (February–June 1907). With the SRs, they held 83 seats. The Second Duma was dissolved on the pretext of the discovery of an SD conspiracy to subvert the army. Under new electoral laws, the SD presence in the Third Duma (1907–1912) was reduced to 19. From the Fourth Duma (1912–1917), the SDs were finally and fully split. The Mensheviks had seven members in the Duma and the Bolsheviks had six, including Roman Malinovsky, who was later uncovered as an Okhrana agent.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: In the years of Tsarist repression that followed the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution, both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions faced splits, causing further splits in the RSDLP, which manifested themselves from late 1908 and the years immediately following. The Mensheviks split into the "Pro-Party Mensheviks" led by Georgi Plekhanov, who wished to maintain illegal underground work as well as legal work; and the "Liquidators", whose most prominent advocates were Pavel Axelrod, Fyodor Dan, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov and Nikolay Chkheidze, who wished to pursue purely legal activities and who now repudiated illegal and underground work.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: The Bolsheviks split threeways into the Proletary group led by Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who waged a fierce struggle against the liquidators, ultimatists and recallists; the Ultimatist group led by Grigory Aleksinsky, who wished to issue ultimatums to the RSDLP Duma deputies to follow the party line or to resign immediately; and the Recallist group led by Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky and supported by Maxim Gorky, who called for the immediate recall of all RSDLP Duma deputies and a boycott of all legal work by the RSDLP, in favour of increased radical underground and illegal work.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: There was also a non-faction group led by Leon Trotsky, who denounced all the "factionalism" in the RSDLP, pushed for "unity" in the party and focused more strongly on the problems of Russian workers and peasants on the ground. The Menshevik Julius Martov was formally considered a liquidator partly because most of his closest political friends were liquidators.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: In January 1912, Lenin's Proletary Bolshevik group called a conference in Prague and expelled the liquidators, ultimatists and recallists from the RSDLP, which officially led to the creation of a separate party, known as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), while the Mensheviks continued their activities establishing the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Mensheviks). In August 1912, Trotsky's group tried to reunite all the RSDLP factions into the same party at a conference in Vienna, but he was largely rebuffed by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks seized power during the October Revolution in 1917 when all political power was transferred to the soviets and in 1918 changed their name to the All-Russian Communist Party. They banned the Mensheviks after the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: The "Interdistrictites", known as the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Internationalists), emerged in 1913 as another faction emerging from the RSDLP.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: In 1902, the Tallinn organization of the RSDLP was founded, which in 1904 was converted into the Tallinn Committee of the party. In November, a parallel (that is, also directly under the CC of RSDLP) Narva Committee was created. Amongst other radicals, the Estonian RSDLP cadres were active in the 1905 Revolution. At the conference of the Estonian RSDLP organizations in Terijoki, Finland in March 1907, the Bolshevik supporters came into serious conflict with the Mensheviks.


title: Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

text: At the 4th (Unity) Congress of the RSDLP in 1906, the Latvian Social Democratic Workers Party entered the RSDLP as a territorial organisation. After the Congress, its name was changed Social-Democracy of the Latvian Territory.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: The Bangladesh Air Force (BAF) () is the aerial warfare branch of the Bangladesh Armed Forces. The Air Force is primarily responsible for air defence of Bangladesh's sovereign territory as well as providing air support to the Bangladesh Army and Bangladesh Navy. Furthermore, the BAF has a territorial role in providing tactical and strategic air transport and logistics capability for the country.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Since its establishment on 28 September 1971, the Air Force has been involved in various combat and humanitarian operations, from the Bangladesh Liberation War in which it was born, to supporting international efforts including United Nations peacekeeping missions. Operation Kilo Flight was a famous operation conducted by the Bangladesh Air Force during the Bangladesh Liberation War.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: The Bangladesh Air Force was officially formed on 28 September 1971 consisting of the revolting Bengali officers and airmen of the Pakistan Air Force at Dimapur Airport in the Indian state of Nagaland and it was launched formally by flying three repaired vintage aircraft on 8 October 1971. BAF's initial personnel were around a 1000 Bengali members of the Pakistan Air Force who were stationed in East Pakistan at the outbreak of the war and who deserted to the Bangladeshi side. At that time, the embryo of Bangladesh Air Force BAF was formed with less than a hundred officers and around 900 airmen and warrant officers. These numbers were gradually strengthened by the slow but steady defection from among the around 3000 Bengali officers and airmen stationed and grounded in West Pakistan. By the first week of December a total of 700 Bengali officers and airmen had defected from the Western border. A significant number of BAF personnel participated in the Ground Warfare roles in the Bangladesh War of Independence. During the independence war, initially, officers of the BAF attached to the then Bangladesh Government were Chief Representative to Chakulia Guerrilla Training Camp Squadron Leader M. Hamidullah Khan, Group Captain A. K. Khandekar, DCOS Army(Liaison) later Sub-Sector Commander and as Commander - Sector 11, Flight Lieutenant Liaqat as Battalion Adjutant, Flying Officer Rouf, Flying Officer Ashraf and Flight Sergeant Shafiqullah as company commanders. Squadron Leader Sadruddin Hossain, Squadron Leader Wahidur Rahim, Squadron Leader Nurul Qader, Squadron Leader Shamsur Rahman and Squadron Leader Ataur Rahman as sub sector company commanders. Squadron Leader Khademul Bashar participated in the war as Commander-Sector 6.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Indian civilian authorities and the IAF donated 1 DC-3 Dakota (gifted by the Maharaja of Jodhpor), 1 Twin Otter plane, and 1 Alouette III helicopter for the newborn Bangladesh Air Force. The Bengali rank and file fixed up the World War II vintage runway at Dimapur Airport, then began rigging the aircraft for combat duty. The Dakota was modified to carry 500 pound bombs, but for technical reasons it was only used to ferry Bangladesh government personnel. The Alouette III helicopter was rigged to fire 14 rockets from pylons attached to its side and had .303 Browning machine guns installed, in addition to having 1-inch (25 mm) steel plate welded to its floor for extra protection. The Twin Otter boasted 7 rockets under each of its wings and could deliver ten 25 pound bombs, which were rolled out of the aircraft by hand through a makeshift door. This tiny force was dubbed Kilo Flight, the first fighting formation of the nascent Bangladesh Air force. Squadron Leader Sultan Mahmud was appointed as the commander of the 'Kilo Flight'.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Bangladesh Air Force first went in action on 3 December 1971 and attacked the Chattogram-based Oil tank depot and oil tank depot was totally destroyed by that air attack. The Air attack was conducted by Capt. Akram Ahmed. The second Bangladesh Air Force attack was on 6 December 1971 at Moulvibazar Pakistani Army barracks under the command of Squadron Leader Sultan Mahmud, where Captain Shahabuddin Ahmed was co-pilot.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: After the surrender of Pakistan, all personnel reported to Bangladesh Forces commander-in-chief, Col. M. A. G. Osmani. On 7 April 1972, the post of the chief of air staff went into effect by order of the President of Bangladesh. The combined command of Bangladesh Forces had been abolished with effect from 7 April 1972 and replaced by three separate commands for the three services with acting chiefs of staff. The Bangladesh air force gradually began to reoccupy the reform all the airbase structures throughout the country, HQ administrative buildings, fuel and weapons depots.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: After independence, in November–December 1972 the BAF received a significant donation from the former USSR. Among the aircraft delivered were ten single-seat Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21MFs, two twin-seat Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21UMs, and twelve Mil Mi-8 utility helicopters. Later China also supplied some equipment.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Apart from the aircraft of Kilo Flight which were donated by India, most Pakistan Air Force aircraft grounded in Dhaka due to runway cratering by the Indian Air Force during the liberation war, were sabotaged before surrender. Of these, four Canadair Sabres were also returned to service by Bangladeshi ground technicians in 1972. The Pakistan Air Force prior to 1971 had many Bengali pilots, air traffic controllers, technicians and administrative officers and the general Bengali representation in the Pakistan Air Force was around 15% (and 18% in the officer corps) of the 25,000 odd manpower of the Pakistan Air Force in 1971, which although lower than their share in the population (50%) was much higher than the 6% numbers in the Army. Many of them distinguished themselves during the Bangladesh Liberation War, they provided the nascent Bangladesh Air Force with a good number of trained personnel. It had grown with the repatriation of the around 2000 Air Force personnel from Pakistan in 1973 after the Simla Agreement. In 1977 some personnel of Bangladesh Air Force staged a mutiny.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Defence co-operation improved with Pakistan considerably under the military regimes of Ziaur Rahman and Hossain Mohammad Ershad in Bangladesh, which had grown more distant from its war ally, India. Common concerns over India's regional power have influenced strategic co-operation leading to a gift of several squadrons of refurbished Shenyang F-6 fighter aircraft from Pakistan to the Bangladesh Air Force in the late 1980s. Bangladesh bought 8 Mig-29 from Russia in 1999 under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Bangladesh Air Force Academy (BAFA) received "National colours" in 2003 by the then Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. The Recruits' Training School (RTS) has been awarded with "BAF Colours" by ex-Chief of Air Staff (AVM Fakhrul Azam) in 2004. In 2017 Bangladesh Air Force was awarded the Independence Day Award.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Bangladesh Air Force was very active during COVID-19 pandemic . BAF provided emergency Medivac for many critical COVID-19 patients by their helicopters. BAF also evacuated immigrants, migrants workers and airlifted tons of relief materials for home and abroad by their C-130B and C-130J cargo aircraft.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: The Bangladesh Air Force has an ambitious modernisation plan to be implemented in upcoming years under Forces Goal 2030. As per the goal, air force is to be a strong deterrent force to well protect the sky of Bangladesh. Plans are made to strengthen both air power and land based air defence capabilities. Since the formulation of the forces goal 2030, the BAF has developed in many folds.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: The Air Force has set up an advanced training unit named "105 Advance Jet Training Unit" which is a dedicated fighter pilot training unit of BAF. The unit consists of three training squadrons which will provide advanced training to the pilots selected for operating the fighter jets.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Since 2010, BAF has taken the delivery of sixteen Chengdu F-7BGI fighter aircraft, sixteen Yakovlev Yak-130 advanced jet trainers, two C-130J transport aircraft, nine K-8W jet trainer aircraft, three Let L-410 Turbolet transport trainer aircraft and twenty three PT-6 basic trainers. Process is going on for the procurement of sixteen multirole combat aircraft.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: BAF has also taken the delivery of 21 Mi-171Sh combat transport helicopters, four AgustaWestland AW139 maritime SAR helicopters and two AW 119KX training helicopters since 2010. Procurement process of eight attack helicopters is going on.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: BAF earned the Surface to Air Missile capability by introducing FM-90 short range air defence missile in 2011. Till date, BAF Has taken the delivery of two regiments of FM-90 systems. Bangladesh air force received an Italian origin long range Selex RAT-31DL air defence radar in 2019.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: Bangladesh has signed a government to government contract with the United Kingdom for the supply of two off-the-shelf C-130J aircraft currently in service with the Royal Air Force. In June 2019, another contract was signed for the procurement of additional three off-the-shelf C-130J aircraft from UK. As of September 2020, three of the aircraft have been delivered.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: On 20 June 2018, the Bangladesh Air Force signed a contract with China National Aero-Technology Import & Export Corporation (CATIC) for the procurement of seven K-8 jet training aircraft.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: More than 600+ BAF personnel, including officers and airmen, 10 BAF helicopters and are currently deployed to various UN Missions. Another C-130 transport aircraft is providing support to UN Mission in Africa. With the deployment of C-130 aircraft and its personnel, Bangladesh became the largest troops contributing country in UN peacekeeping missions.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: On 25 November 2020, 64 female recruits completed airmens recruit training in Recruits Training School, Shamshernagar; this was the first time that the air force took females as airwomen. As officers, women can join since the early 2000s but women were not allowed to become pilots till 2014, in 2014 two females received pilots training. Now female pilots of BAF have flown Mi-17s, Bell-206s, L-410s and recently C-130Js.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: According to the Constitution of Bangladesh, President of Bangladesh act as the civilian commander-in-chief, and Chief of Air Staff (COAS), by statute a four-star air officer (air chief marshal), commands the Air Force. The Bangladesh Air Force is currently commanded by Air Marshal Shaikh Abdul Hannan.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: The Bangladesh Air Force (BAF) has its headquarters at Dhaka Cantonment. HQ has 4 branches, Operations & Training (Ops. & Trng.), Administration (Admin.), Maintenance (Mte.) and Plannings (Plans). Each branch is headed by officers who are considered as principal staff officer (PSO) and known as assistant chief of air staff, e.g. ACAS (Ops & Trng). Under each PSO there are various directorates headed by directors of air commodore rank. Under each director there are deputy directors (DD) headed by group captain and staff officers (SO) with the rank of wing commander and below.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: See also: "List of active Bangladesh military aircraft" & "List of historic Bangladesh Air Force aircraft"


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: The BAF has an ongoing modernisation programme under "Forces Goal 2030". To perform its increasing duties and responsibilities, the air force is being divided into two separate commands: Southern air command and Northern air command. A new air base is being set up under southern command at Barishal with an emphasis on maritime security. Another air base is under construction at Sylhet.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: On 29 October 2019, Italian company Leonardo announced that it has secured a contract to supply "Kronos Land" 3D AESA radar systems to the Bangladesh Air Force to provide air surveillance and detect and track targets in tactical environments. The number of radars ordered were not disclosed.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: In the third Bangladesh-UK strategic dialogue held in May 2019, the two countries desired to further strengthen the defence ties between them. The United Kingdom expressed its readiness to support Bangladesh with procurement of high calibre multi-role combat aircraft alongside other modernisation programmes.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: In October 2019, US officials said Bangladesh had proposed to the United States to purchase advanced military equipment including multi-role combat fighters, attack helicopters and surface-to-air missile systems. They offered Bangladesh Air Force two types of attack helicopters and the BAF opted for the AH-64 Apache helicopters. In January 2020, Boeing confirmed that the AH-64E attack helicopter has been down-selected by the BAF after a competitive bidding process. Any purchase of AH-64 Apache helicopters depends on Bangladesh and the United States signing Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) and "General Security of Military Information Agreement" (GSOMIA) agreements. However, in late December 2021, it was reported that Bangladesh is now finalizing a government-to-government (G2G) deal with Russia to buy 8 Mi-28NEs with necessary equipment, along with operation and maintenance training. As of September 2022, the Bangladesh government has not signed the deal yet.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: In January 2020, the minister responsible for defence affairs in the parliament, Mr. Anisul Huq told the parliament that process is going on to procure 16 multirole combat aircraft, eight attack helicopters, three VVIP helicopters, two air defence radar units, 24 primary trainer aircraft, two light aircraft, one K-8W simulator, four MRAP vehicles, one AW-119 simulator, 2 counter drone surveillance radar system and one mobile ATC tower and life extension and upgrade of Mig-29 aircraft.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: In 2021, Bangladesh Air Force requested Bangladesh Government to earmark around 25,200-crores taka (2.5 billion euro) for 16 western-origin multirole fighter jet. In order to sign the agreement and for the first installment council, Bangladesh Air Force has requested for allocation of 6,300-crores taka from the 2021-22 financial year. In 2021, Eurofighter World Magazine stated Bangladesh as a potential customer for the Eurofighter Typhoon. France also offered the Dassault Rafale to the Bangladesh Air Force. Plans and procedures for the procurement of 16 western-origin multirole fighter jet were established after cancellation of the older tender for 8 to 12 Russian made MRCA. As of September 2022, the Bangladesh government has not signed any deal for the multirole fighter jets.


title: Bangladesh Air Force

text: In June 2021, Bangladesh Air Force revealed the order of 24 Grob G 120TP trainer aircraft. According to Masihuzzaman Serniabat, previous COAS, Bangladesh Air Force has ordered 24 trainer aircraft from Grob. Under the deal, Grob Aircraft will also install a composite material (fiberglass reinforced plastic and carbon fibre composites) repair workshop and a propeller repair workshop in Bangladesh.


title: Abdication

text: Abdication is the act of formally relinquishing monarchical authority. Abdications have played various roles in the succession procedures of monarchies. While some cultures have viewed abdication as an extreme abandonment of duty, in other societies (such as pre-Meiji Restoration Japan), abdication was a regular event and helped maintain stability during political succession.


title: Abdication

text: Historically, abdications have occurred both by force (where the regnant was forced to abdicate on pain of death or other severe consequences) and voluntarily. Some rulers are deemed to have abdicated "in absentia", vacating the physical throne and thus their position of power, although these judgements were generally pronounced by successors with vested interests in seeing the throne abdicated, and often without or despite the direct input of the abdicating monarch.


title: Abdication

text: Recently, due to the largely ceremonial nature of the regnant in many constitutional monarchies, many monarchs have abdicated due to old age, such as the monarchs of Spain, Cambodia, the Netherlands and Japan.


title: Abdication

text: The word "abdication" is derived from the Latin "abdicatio" meaning to disown or renounce ("ab", away from, and "dicare", to proclaim). In its broadest sense "abdication" is the act of renouncing and resigning from any formal office, but it is applied especially to the supreme office of state. In Roman law the term was also applied to the disowning of a family member, such as disinheriting a son. Today the term commonly applies to monarchs. An elected or appointed official is said to resign rather than to abdicate. A notable exception is the voluntary relinquishing of the office of Bishop of Rome (and thus sovereign of the Vatican City State) by the pope, called papal resignation or papal renunciation.


title: Abdication

text: In certain cultures, the abdication of a monarch was seen as a profound and shocking abandonment of royal duty. As a result, abdications usually only occurred in the most extreme circumstances of political turmoil or violence. For other cultures, abdication was a much more routine element of succession.


title: Abdication

text: Among the most notable abdications of antiquity are those of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman dictator, in 458 and 439 BCE; Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the Roman dictator, in 79 BC; Emperor Diocletian in AD 305; and Emperor Romulus Augustulus in AD 476.


title: Abdication

text: Due to the complex nature of the office of pope (head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church and sovereign of the Papal States from 754 to 1870 and of Vatican City since 1929), a papal abdication involves both the spiritual and the secular sphere. Technically, the correct term for a reigning pope voluntarily stepping down as Bishop of Rome is renunciation or resignation, as regulated in Canon 332 §2 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.


title: Abdication

text: The debate is open about some disputed resignations in the early middle ages: the last three popes to resign were Celestine V in 1294, Gregory XII in 1415, to end the Western Schism, and Benedict XVI in 2013, who was succeeded by the current pope, Francis. Benedict's resignation, which occurred 598 years after the last time a pope did so, and 719 years after the last one who renounced entirely on his own volition, was an event unheard of for more than half a millennium, and was met with a great deal of surprise worldwide.


title: Abdication

text: One of the most notable abdications in recent history is that of King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom and the Dominions. In 1936 Edward abdicated to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson, over the objections of the British establishment, the governments of the Commonwealth, the royal family and the Church of England. It was the first time in history that the British or English crown was surrendered entirely voluntarily. Richard II of England, for example, was forced to abdicate after power was seized by his paternal first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, while Richard was abroad.


title: Abdication

text: During the Glorious Revolution in 1688, James II of England and VII of Scotland fled to France, dropping the Great Seal of the Realm into the Thames, and the question was discussed in Parliament whether he had forfeited the throne or had abdicated. The latter designation was agreed upon in spite of James's protest, and in a full assembly of the Lords and Commons it was resolved "that King James II having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of the kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king and people, and, by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of this kingdom, has abdicated the government, and that the throne is thereby vacant." The Scottish Parliament pronounced a decree of and deposition.


title: Abdication

text: In Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to abdicate in favour of her one-year-old son, James VI.


title: Abdication

text: Today, because the title to the Crown depends upon statute, particularly the Act of Settlement 1701, a royal abdication can be effected only by an act of Parliament; under the terms of the Statute of Westminster 1931, such an act must be agreed by the parliaments of all extant signatories of the Statute. To give legal effect to the abdication of King Edward VIII, His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936 was passed.


title: Abdication

text: After mass protests against King Farouk began on 23 July 1952, the military forced Farouk I to abdicate in favour of his infant son Fuad II during the Egyptian revolution of 1952. Farouk was exiled to Italy.


title: Abdication

text: The chaos of Germany's defeat in the First World War forced German Emperor ("Kaiser") Wilhelm II to abdicate his throne as German Emperor and consequentially, his throne as King of Prussia. The following Treaty of Versailles resulted in the abolition of the monarchy, leading to the other German kings, dukes, princes and other nobility to abdicate and renounce their royalty titles.


title: Abdication

text: In Japanese history, abdication was used very often, and in fact occurred more often than death on the throne. In those days, most executive authority resided in the hands of regents (see Sesshō and Kampaku), and the emperor's chief task was priestly, containing so many repetitive rituals that it was deemed the incumbent emperor deserved pampered retirement as an honoured retired emperor after a service of around ten years. A tradition developed that an emperor should accede to the throne relatively young. The high-priestly duties were deemed possible for a walking child; and a dynast who had passed his toddler years was regarded as suitable and old enough; reaching the age of legal majority was not a requirement. Thus, many Japanese emperors have acceded as children, some only 6 or 8 years old. Childhood apparently helped the monarch to endure tedious duties and to tolerate subjugation to political power brokers, as well as sometimes to cloak the truly powerful members of the imperial dynasty. Almost all Japanese empresses and dozens of emperors abdicated and lived the rest of their lives in pampered retirement, wielding influence behind the scenes, often with more power than they had had while on the throne (see Cloistered rule). Several emperors abdicated while still in their teens. These traditions show in Japanese folklore, theatre, literature and other forms of culture, where the emperor is usually described or depicted as an adolescent.


title: Abdication

text: Before the Meiji Restoration, Japan had eleven reigning empresses. Over half of Japanese empresses abdicated once a suitable male descendant was considered to be old enough to rule. There is also no provision for abdication in the Imperial Household Law, the Meiji Constitution, or the current 1947 Constitution of Japan.


title: Abdication

text: After the defeat of Japan in World War II, many members of the Imperial Family, such as Princes Chichibu, Takamatsu and Higashikuni, pressured then-Emperor Hirohito to abdicate so that one of the princes could serve as regent until Crown Prince Akihito came of age. On February 27, 1946, the Emperor's youngest brother, Prince Mikasa (Takahito), even stood up in the privy council and indirectly urged the Emperor to step down and accept responsibility for Japan's defeat. U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur insisted that Emperor Hirohito remain on the throne. MacArthur saw the emperor as a symbol of the continuity and cohesion of the Japanese people.


title: Abdication

text: On 13 July 2016, national broadcaster NHK reported that Emperor Akihito intended to abdicate in favour of his eldest son Crown Prince Naruhito within a few years, citing his age; an abdication within the Imperial Family had not occurred since Emperor Kōkaku abdicated in 1817. However, senior officials within the Imperial Household Agency denied that there was any official plan for the monarch to abdicate. A potential abdication by the Emperor required an amendment to the Imperial Household Law, which at that time had no provisions for such a move. On 8 August 2016, the Emperor gave a rare televised address, where he emphasized his advanced age and declining health; this address was interpreted as an implication of his intention to abdicate. On 1 December 2017, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that Emperor Akihito would step down on 30 April 2019. The announcement came after a meeting of the Imperial Household Council.


title: Abdication

text: On 19 May 2017, the bill that would allow Akihito to abdicate was issued by the Japanese government's cabinet. On 8 June 2017, the National Diet passed a one-off bill allowing Akihito to abdicate, and for the government to begin arranging the process of handing over the position to Crown Prince Naruhito. The abdication officially occurred at the end of 30 April 2019.


title: Abdication

text: According to Jain sources written almost 800 years after his reign, Chandragupta, the first emperor of the Mauryan Dynasty abdicated and became a Jain monk in the last years of his life.


title: Abdication

text: In recent decades, the monarchs or leaders of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Qatar, Cambodia, Bhutan and Japan have abdicated as a result of old age. In the Netherlands, the last three monarchs Wilhelmina, Juliana, and Beatrix have all abdicated. In all three instances, this was done to pass the throne to the heir sooner.


title: Abdication

text: In June 2014, King Juan Carlos of Spain announced his intent to abdicate in favour of his son, Felipe. Felipe took the throne as King Felipe VI on June 19.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Aquarius is an equatorial constellation of the zodiac, between Capricornus and Pisces. Its name is Latin for "water-carrier" or "cup-carrier", and its old astronomical symbol is (♒), a representation of water. Aquarius is one of the oldest of the recognized constellations along the zodiac (the Sun's apparent path). It was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations. It is found in a region often called the Sea due to its profusion of constellations with watery associations such as Cetus the whale, Pisces the fish, and Eridanus the river.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Aquarius is identified as "The Great One" in the Babylonian star catalogues and represents the god Ea himself, who is commonly depicted holding an overflowing vase. The Babylonian star-figure appears on entitlement stones and cylinder seals from the second millennium. It contained the winter solstice in the Early Bronze Age. In Old Babylonian astronomy, Ea was the ruler of the southernmost quarter of the Sun's path, the "Way of Ea", corresponding to the period of 45 days on either side of winter solstice. Aquarius was also associated with the destructive floods that the Babylonians regularly experienced, and thus was negatively connoted. In Ancient Egypt astronomy, Aquarius was associated with the annual flood of the Nile; the banks were said to flood when Aquarius put his jar into the river, beginning spring.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: In the Greek tradition, the constellation came to be represented simply as a single vase from which a stream poured down to Piscis Austrinus. The name in the Hindu zodiac is likewise "kumbha" "water-pitcher".


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: In Greek mythology, Aquarius is sometimes associated with Deucalion, the son of Prometheus who built a ship with his wife Pyrrha to survive an imminent flood. They sailed for nine days before washing ashore on Mount Parnassus. Aquarius is also sometimes identified with beautiful Ganymede, a youth in Greek mythology and the son of Trojan king Tros, who was taken to Mount Olympus by Zeus to act as cup-carrier to the gods. Neighboring Aquila represents the eagle, under Zeus' command, that snatched the young boy; some versions of the myth indicate that the eagle was in fact Zeus transformed. An alternative version of the tale recounts Ganymede's kidnapping by the goddess of the dawn, Eos, motivated by her affection for young men; Zeus then stole him from Eos and employed him as cup-bearer. Yet another figure associated with the water bearer is Cecrops I, a king of Athens who sacrificed water instead of wine to the gods.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: In the first century, Ptolemy's "Almagest" established the common Western depiction of Aquarius. His water jar, an asterism itself, consists of Gamma, Pi, Eta, and Zeta Aquarii; it pours water in a stream of more than 20 stars terminating with Fomalhaut, now assigned solely to Piscis Austrinus. The water bearer's head is represented by 5th magnitude 25 Aquarii while his left shoulder is Beta Aquarii; his right shoulder and forearm are represented by Alpha and Gamma Aquarii respectively.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: In Chinese astronomy, the stream of water flowing from the Water Jar was depicted as the "Army of Yu-Lin" ("Yu-lim-kiun" or "Yulinjun", Hanzi: 羽林君). The name "Yu-lin" means "feathers and forests", referring to the numerous light-footed soldiers from the northern reaches of the empire represented by these faint stars. The constellation's stars were the most numerous of any Chinese constellation, numbering 45, the majority of which were located in modern Aquarius. The celestial army was protected by the wall "Leibizhen" (垒壁阵), which counted Iota, Lambda, Phi, and Sigma Aquarii among its 12 stars. 88, 89, and 98 Aquarii represent "Fou-youe", the axes used as weapons and for hostage executions. Also in Aquarius is "Loui-pi-tchin", the ramparts that stretch from 29 and 27 Piscium and 33 and 30 Aquarii through Phi, Lambda, Sigma, and Iota Aquarii to Delta, Gamma, Kappa, and Epsilon Capricorni.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Near the border with Cetus, the axe "Fuyue" was represented by three stars; its position is disputed and may have instead been located in Sculptor. "Tienliecheng" also has a disputed position; the 13-star castle replete with ramparts may have possessed Nu and Xi Aquarii but may instead have been located south in Piscis Austrinus. The Water Jar asterism was seen to the ancient Chinese as the tomb, "Fenmu". Nearby, the emperors' mausoleum "Xiuliang" stood, demarcated by Kappa Aquarii and three other collinear stars. "Ku" ("crying") and "Qi" ("weeping"), each composed of two stars, were located in the same region.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Three of the Chinese lunar mansions shared their name with constellations. "Nu", also the name for the 10th lunar mansion, was a handmaiden represented by Epsilon, Mu, 3, and 4 Aquarii. The 11th lunar mansion shared its name with the constellation "Xu" ("emptiness"), formed by Beta Aquarii and Alpha Equulei; it represented a bleak place associated with death and funerals. "Wei", the rooftop and 12th lunar mansion, was a V-shaped constellation formed by Alpha Aquarii, Theta Pegasi, and Epsilon Pegasi; it shared its name with two other Chinese constellations, in modern-day Scorpius and Aries.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Despite both its prominent position on the zodiac and its large size, Aquarius has no particularly bright stars, its four brightest stars being less than magnitude 2. However, recent research has shown that there are several stars lying within its borders that possess planetary systems.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: The two brightest stars, Alpha and Beta Aquarii, are luminous yellow supergiants, of spectral types G0Ib and G2Ib respectively, that were once hot blue-white B-class main sequence stars 5 to 9 times as massive as the Sun. The two are also moving through space perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way. Just shading Alpha, Beta Aquarii is the brightest star in Aquarius with an apparent magnitude of 2.91. It also has the proper name of Sadalsuud. Having cooled and swollen to around 50 times the Sun's diameter, it is around 2200 times as luminous as the Sun. It is around 6.4 times as massive as the Sun and around 56 million years old. Sadalsuud is 540 ± 20 light-years from Earth. Alpha Aquarii, also known as Sadalmelik, has an apparent magnitude of 2.94. It is 520 ± 20 light-years distant from Earth, and is around 6.5 times as massive as the Sun and 3000 times as luminous. It is 53 million years old.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: γ Aquarii, also called Sadachbia, is a white main sequence star of spectral type star of spectral type A0V that is between 158 and 315 million years old and is around two and a half times the Sun's mass, and double its radius. Of magnitude 3.85, it is 164 ± 9 light years away. It has a luminosity of . The name Sadachbia comes from the Arabic for "lucky stars of the tents", "sa'd al-akhbiya".


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: δ Aquarii, also known as Skat or Scheat is a blue-white A2 spectral type star of apparent magnitude 3.27 and luminosity of .


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: ε Aquarii, also known as Albali, is a blue-white A1 spectral type star with an apparent magnitude of 3.77, an absolute magnitude of 1.2, and a luminosity of .


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: ζ Aquarii is an F2 spectral type double star; both stars are white. Overall, it appears to be of magnitude 3.6 and luminosity of . The primary has a magnitude of 4.53 and the secondary a magnitude of 4.31, but both have an absolute magnitude of 0.6. Its orbital period is 760 years; the two components are currently moving farther apart.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: θ Aquarii, sometimes called Ancha, is a G8 spectral type star with an apparent magnitude of 4.16 and an absolute magnitude of 1.4.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: λ Aquarii, also called Hudoor or Ekchusis, is an M2 spectral type star of magnitude 3.74 and luminosity of .


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: ξ Aquarii, also called Bunda, is an A7 spectral type star with an apparent magnitude of 4.69 and an absolute magnitude of 2.4.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: π Aquarii, also called Seat, is a B0 spectral type star with an apparent magnitude of 4.66 and an absolute magnitude of −4.1.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Twelve exoplanet systems have been found in Aquarius as of 2013. Gliese 876, one of the nearest stars to Earth at a distance of 15 light-years, was the first red dwarf star to be found to possess a planetary system. It is orbited by four planets, including one terrestrial planet 6.6 times the mass of Earth. The planets vary in orbital period from 2 days to 124 days. 91 Aquarii is an orange giant star orbited by one planet, 91 Aquarii b. The planet's mass is 2.9 times the mass of Jupiter, and its orbital period is 182 days. Gliese 849 is a red dwarf star orbited by the first known long-period Jupiter-like planet, Gliese 849 b. The planet's mass is 0.99 times that of Jupiter and its orbital period is 1,852 days.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: There are also less-prominent systems in Aquarius. WASP-6, a type G8 star of magnitude 12.4, is host to one exoplanet, WASP-6 b. The star is 307 parsecs from Earth and has a mass of 0.888 solar masses and a radius of 0.87 solar radii. WASP-6 b was discovered in 2008 by the transit method. It orbits its parent star every 3.36 days at a distance of 0.042 astronomical units (AU). It is 0.503 Jupiter masses but has a proportionally larger radius of 1.224 Jupiter radii. HD 206610, a K0 star located 194 parsecs from Earth, is host to one planet, HD 206610 b. The host star is larger than the Sun; more massive at 1.56 solar masses and larger at 6.1 solar radii. The planet was discovered by the radial velocity method in 2010 and has a mass of 2.2 Jupiter masses. It orbits every 610 days at a distance of 1.68 AU. Much closer to its sun is WASP-47 b, which orbits every 4.15 days only 0.052 AU from its sun, yellow dwarf (G9V) WASP-47. WASP-47 is close in size to the Sun, having a radius of 1.15 solar radii and a mass even closer at 1.08 solar masses. WASP-47 b was discovered in 2011 by the transit method, like WASP-6 b. It is slightly larger than Jupiter with a mass of 1.14 Jupiter masses and a radius of 1.15 Jupiter masses.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: There are several more single-planet systems in Aquarius. HD 210277, a magnitude 6.63 yellow star located 21.29 parsecs from Earth, is host to one known planet: HD 210277 b. The 1.23 Jupiter mass planet orbits at nearly the same distance as Earth orbits the Sun1.1 AU, though its orbital period is significantly longer at around 442 days. HD 210277 b was discovered earlier than most of the other planets in Aquarius, detected by the radial velocity method in 1998. The star it orbits resembles the Sun beyond their similar spectral class; it has a radius of 1.1 solar radii and a mass of 1.09 solar masses. HD 212771 b, a larger planet at 2.3 Jupiter masses, orbits host star HD 212771 at a distance of 1.22 AU. The star itself, barely below the threshold of naked-eye visibility at magnitude 7.6, is a G8IV (yellow subgiant) star located 131 parsecs from Earth. Though it has a similar mass to the Sun1.15 solar massesit is significantly less dense with its radius of 5 solar radii. Its lone planet was discovered in 2010 by the radial velocity method, like several other exoplanets in the constellation.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: As of 2013, there were only two known multiple-planet systems within the bounds of Aquarius: the Gliese 876 and HD 215152 systems. The former is quite prominent; the latter has only two planets and has a host star farther away at 21.5 parsecs. The HD 215152 system consists of the planets HD 215152 b and HD 215152 c orbiting their K0-type, magnitude 8.13 sun. Both discovered in 2011 by the radial velocity method, the two tiny planets orbit very close to their host star. HD 215152 c is the larger at 0.0097 Jupiter masses (still significantly larger than the Earth, which weighs in at 0.00315 Jupiter masses); its smaller sibling is barely smaller at 0.0087 Jupiter masses. The error in the mass measurements (0.0032 and respectively) is large enough to make this discrepancy statistically insignificant. HD 215152 c also orbits further from the star than HD 215152 b, 0.0852 AU compared to 0.0652.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: On 23 February 2017, NASA announced that ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 in Aquarius has seven Earth-like rocky planets. Of these, as many as four may lie within the system's habitable zone, and may have liquid water on their surfaces. The discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system is seen by astronomers as a significant step toward finding life beyond Earth.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Because of its position away from the galactic plane, the majority of deep-sky objects in Aquarius are galaxies, globular clusters, and planetary nebulae. Aquarius contains three deep sky objects that are in the Messier catalog: the globular clusters Messier 2, Messier 72, and the asterism Messier 73. While M73 was originally catalogued as a sparsely populated open cluster, modern analysis indicates the 6 main stars are not close enough together to fit this definition, reclassifying M73 as an asterism. Two well-known planetary nebulae are also located in Aquarius: the Saturn Nebula (NGC 7009), to the southeast of μ Aquarii; and the famous Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), southwest of δ Aquarii.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: M2, also catalogued as NGC 7089, is a rich globular cluster located approximately 37,000 light-years from Earth. At magnitude 6.5, it is viewable in small-aperture instruments, but a 100 mm aperture telescope is needed to resolve any stars. M72, also catalogued as NGC 6981, is a small 9th magnitude globular cluster located approximately 56,000 light-years from Earth. M73, also catalogued as NGC 6994, is an open cluster with highly disputed status.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Aquarius is also home to several planetary nebulae. NGC 7009, also known as the Saturn Nebula, is an 8th magnitude planetary nebula located 3,000 light-years from Earth. It was given its moniker by the 19th century astronomer Lord Rosse for its resemblance to the planet Saturn in a telescope; it has faint protrusions on either side that resemble Saturn's rings. It appears blue-green in a telescope and has a central star of magnitude 11.3. Compared to the Helix Nebula, another planetary nebula in Aquarius, it is quite small. NGC 7293, also known as the Helix Nebula, is the closest planetary nebula to Earth at a distance of 650 light-years. It covers 0.25 square degrees, making it also the largest planetary nebula as seen from Earth. However, because it is so large, it is only viewable as a very faint object, though it has a fairly high integrated magnitude of 6.0.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: One of the visible galaxies in Aquarius is NGC 7727, of particular interest for amateur astronomers who wish to discover or observe supernovae. A spiral galaxy (type S), it has an integrated magnitude of 10.7 and is 3 by 3 arcseconds. NGC 7252 is a tangle of stars resulting from the collision of two large galaxies and is known as the Atoms-for-Peace galaxy because of its resemblance to a cartoon atom.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: There are three major meteor showers with radiants in Aquarius: the Eta Aquariids, the Delta Aquariids, and the Iota Aquariids.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: The Eta Aquariids are the strongest meteor shower radiating from Aquarius. It peaks between 5 and 6 May with a rate of approximately 35 meteors per hour. Originally discovered by Chinese astronomers in 401, Eta Aquariids can be seen coming from the Water Jar beginning on 21 April and as late as 12 May. The parent body of the shower is Halley's Comet, a periodic comet. Fireballs are common shortly after the peak, approximately between 9 May and 11 May. The normal meteors appear to have yellow trails.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: The Delta Aquariids is a double radiant meteor shower that peaks first on 29 July and second on 6 August. The first radiant is located in the south of the constellation, while the second radiant is located in the northern circlet of Pisces asterism. The southern radiant's peak rate is about 20 meteors per hour, while the northern radiant's peak rate is about 10 meteors per hour.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: The Iota Aquariids is a fairly weak meteor shower that peaks on 6 August, with a rate of approximately 8 meteors per hour.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: , the Sun appears in the constellation Aquarius from 16 February to 12 March. In tropical astrology, the Sun is considered to be in the sign Aquarius from 20 January to 19 February, and in sidereal astrology, from 15 February to 14 March.


title: Aquarius (constellation)

text: Aquarius is also associated with the Age of Aquarius, a concept popular in 1960s counterculture. Despite this prominence, the Age of Aquarius will not dawn until the year 2597, as an astrological age does not begin until the Sun is in a particular constellation on the vernal equinox.


title: Cardinality

text: In mathematics, the cardinality of a set is a measure of the number of elements of the set. For example, the set formula_1 contains 3 elements, and therefore formula_2 has a cardinality of 3. Beginning in the late 19th century, this concept was generalized to infinite sets, which allows one to distinguish between different types of infinity, and to perform arithmetic on them. There are two approaches to cardinality: one which compares sets directly using bijections and injections, and another which uses cardinal numbers.


title: Cardinality

text: The cardinality of a set is also called its size, when no confusion with other notions of size is possible.


title: Cardinality

text: The cardinality of a set formula_2 is usually denoted formula_4, with a vertical bar on each side; this is the same notation as absolute value, and the meaning depends on context. The cardinality of a set formula_2 may alternatively be denoted by formula_6, formula_2, formula_8, or formula_9.


title: Cardinality

text: A crude sense of cardinality, an awareness that groups of things or events compare with other groups by containing more, fewer, or the same number of instances, is observed in a variety of present-day animal species, suggesting an origin millions of years ago. Human expression of cardinality is seen as early as years ago, with equating the size of a group with a group of recorded notches, or a representative collection of other things, such as sticks and shells. The abstraction of cardinality as a number is evident by 3000 BCE, in Sumerian mathematics and the manipulation of numbers without reference to a specific group of things or events.


title: Cardinality

text: From the 6th century BCE, the writings of Greek philosophers show the first hints of the cardinality of infinite sets. While they considered the notion of infinity as an endless series of actions, such as adding 1 to a number repeatedly, they did not consider the size of an infinite set of numbers to be a thing. The ancient Greek notion of infinity also considered the division of things into parts repeated without limit. In Euclid's "Elements", commensurability was described as the ability to compare the length of two line segments, "a" and "b", as a ratio, as long as there were a third segment, no matter how small, that could be laid end-to-end a whole number of times into both "a" and "b". But with the discovery of irrational numbers, it was seen that even the infinite set of all rational numbers was not enough to describe the length of every possible line segment. Still, there was no concept of infinite sets as something that had cardinality.


title: Cardinality

text: To better understand infinite sets, a notion of cardinality was formulated circa 1880 by Georg Cantor, the originator of set theory. He examined the process of equating two sets with bijection, a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of two sets based on a unique relationship. In 1891, with the publication of Cantor's diagonal argument, he demonstrated that there are sets of numbers that cannot be placed in one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers, i.e. uncountable sets that contain more elements than there are in the infinite set of natural numbers.


title: Cardinality

text: While the cardinality of a finite set is just the number of its elements, extending the notion to infinite sets usually starts with defining the notion of comparison of arbitrary sets (some of which are possibly infinite).


title: Cardinality

text: If ≤ and ≤ , then = (a fact known as Schröder–Bernstein theorem). The axiom of choice is equivalent to the statement that ≤ or ≤ for every "A", "B".


title: Cardinality

text: In the above section, "cardinality" of a set was defined functionally. In other words, it was not defined as a specific object itself. However, such an object can be defined as follows.


title: Cardinality

text: The relation of having the same cardinality is called equinumerosity, and this is an equivalence relation on the class of all sets. The equivalence class of a set "A" under this relation, then, consists of all those sets which have the same cardinality as "A". There are two ways to define the "cardinality of a set":


title: Cardinality

text: The cardinality of the natural numbers is denoted aleph-null (formula_14), while the cardinality of the real numbers is denoted by "formula_15" (a lowercase fraktur script "c"), and is also referred to as the cardinality of the continuum. Cantor showed, using the diagonal argument, that formula_16. We can show that formula_17, this also being the cardinality of the set of all subsets of the natural numbers.


title: Cardinality

text: The continuum hypothesis says that formula_18, i.e. formula_19 is the smallest cardinal number bigger than formula_14, i.e. there is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and that of the real numbers. The continuum hypothesis is independent of ZFC, a standard axiomatization of set theory; that is, it is impossible to prove the continuum hypothesis or its negation from ZFC—provided that ZFC is consistent. For more detail, see § Cardinality of the continuum below.


title: Cardinality

text: If the axiom of choice holds, the law of trichotomy holds for cardinality. Thus we can make the following definitions:


title: Cardinality

text: Our intuition gained from finite sets breaks down when dealing with infinite sets. In the late nineteenth century Georg Cantor, Gottlob Frege, Richard Dedekind and others rejected the view that the whole cannot be the same size as the part. One example of this is Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel.


title: Cardinality

text: Indeed, Dedekind defined an infinite set as one that can be placed into a one-to-one correspondence with a strict subset (that is, having the same size in Cantor's sense); this notion of infinity is called Dedekind infinite. Cantor introduced the cardinal numbers, and showed—according to his bijection-based definition of size—that some infinite sets are greater than others. The smallest infinite cardinality is that of the natural numbers (formula_14).


title: Cardinality

text: One of Cantor's most important results was that the cardinality of the continuum (formula_24) is greater than that of the natural numbers (formula_14); that is, there are more real numbers R than natural numbers N. Namely, Cantor showed that formula_26 (see Beth one) satisfies:


title: Cardinality

text: The continuum hypothesis states that there is no cardinal number between the cardinality of the reals and the cardinality of the natural numbers, that is,


title: Cardinality

text: However, this hypothesis can neither be proved nor disproved within the widely accepted ZFC axiomatic set theory, if ZFC is consistent.


title: Cardinality

text: Cardinal arithmetic can be used to show not only that the number of points in a real number line is equal to the number of points in any segment of that line, but that this is equal to the number of points on a plane and, indeed, in any finite-dimensional space. These results are highly counterintuitive, because they imply that there exist proper subsets and proper supersets of an infinite set "S" that have the same size as "S", although "S" contains elements that do not belong to its subsets, and the supersets of "S" contain elements that are not included in it.


title: Cardinality

text: The first of these results is apparent by considering, for instance, the tangent function, which provides a one-to-one correspondence between the interval (−½π, ½π) and R (see also Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel).


title: Cardinality

text: The second result was first demonstrated by Cantor in 1878, but it became more apparent in 1890, when Giuseppe Peano introduced the space-filling curves, curved lines that twist and turn enough to fill the whole of any square, or cube, or hypercube, or finite-dimensional space. These curves are not a direct proof that a line has the same number of points as a finite-dimensional space, but they can be used to obtain such a proof.


title: Cardinality

text: Cantor also showed that sets with cardinality strictly greater than formula_15 exist (see his generalized diagonal argument and theorem). They include, for instance:


title: Cardinality

text: The cardinal equalities formula_31 formula_32 and formula_33 can be demonstrated using cardinal arithmetic:


title: Cardinality

text: From this, one can show that in general, the cardinalities of unions and intersections are related by the following equation:


title: Spotted dick

text: Spotted dick (also known as "spotted dog" or "railway cake") is a traditional British steamed pudding, historically made with suet and dried fruit (usually currants or raisins) and often served with custard.


title: Spotted dick

text: Non-traditional variants include recipes that replace suet with other fats (such as butter), or that include eggs to make something similar to a sponge pudding or cake.


title: Spotted dick

text: "Spotted" is a reference to the dried fruit in the pudding (which resemble spots). "Dick" and "dog" were dialectal terms widely used for pudding, from the same etymology as "dough" (i.e., the modern equivalent name would be "spotted pudding"). In late 19th century Huddersfield, for instance, a glossary of local terms described: ""Dick", plain pudding. If with treacle sauce, treacle dick."


title: Spotted dick

text: The dish is first attested in Alexis Soyer's "The modern Housewife or ménagère", published in 1849, in which he described a recipe for "Plum Bolster, or Spotted DickRoll out two pounds of paste ... have some Smyrna raisins well washed".


title: Spotted dick

text: The name "spotted dog" first appeared in 1855, in C.M. Smith's "Working-men's Way in the World" where it was described as a "very marly species of plum-pudding". This name, along with "railway cake", is most common in Ireland where it is made more similar to a soda bread loaf with the addition of currants.


title: Spotted dick

text: The "Pall Mall Gazette" reported in 1892 that "the Kilburn Sisters ... daily satisfied hundreds of dockers with soup and Spotted Dick".


title: Spotted dick

text: The name has long been a source of amusement and double entendres; reportedly restaurant staff in the Houses of Parliament decided to rename it "Spotted Richard" so it was “less likely to cause a stir”.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Ray Washington Traylor Jr. (May 2, 1963 – September 22, 2004) was an American professional wrestler best known for his appearances with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) under the ring name Big Boss Man, as well as for his appearances with World Championship Wrestling (WCW) as The Boss, The Man, The Guardian Angel, and Big Bubba Rogers. During his appearances with the WWF, Big Boss Man held the WWF World Tag Team Championship once and the WWF Hardcore Championship four times.


title: Big Boss Man

text: On March 7, 2016, Traylor was confirmed to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame Class of 2016. He was inducted in the WWE Hall of Fame 2016 by Slick, and the award was accepted by his wife Angela and his daughters Lacy and Megan.


title: Big Boss Man

text: A former corrections officer in Cobb County, Georgia, Traylor debuted in 1985. He then began working as a jobber for Jim Crockett Promotions, under his real name. During this time, he faced the likes of Tully Blanchard, The Barbarian, Ivan Koloff, The Midnight Express, The Road Warriors, and Wahoo McDaniel. Seeing his potential, head booker Dusty Rhodes pulled Traylor from TV for 12 weeks, in order to repackage him as "Big Bubba Rogers" with Traylor debuting as Rogers on the May 31 edition of WorldWide. As Big Bubba, Traylor was a silent bodyguard for Jim Cornette, who, along with the Midnight Express, was feuding with the James Boys (Dusty Rhodes and Magnum T. A., under masks). He got a solid push as a seemingly unstoppable heel and feuded with Rhodes (the top face at the time) in a series of Bunkhouse Stampede matches in 1986. He and Rhodes were tied for wins in this series, leading to a tiebreaking cage match, which Rhodes won on February 27. Traylor also defeated Ron Garvin in a Louisville Street Fight at Starrcade 1986.


title: Big Boss Man

text: In 1987, Traylor joined the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF) after it was purchased by Jim Crockett. On April 19, Traylor challenged and won the UWF Heavyweight Championship from One Man Gang, who was leaving the UWF for the World Wrestling Federation. Following his title win, he aligned himself with General Skandor Akbar and his Devastation Inc. stable. Traylor would hold the championship for nearly 3 months defending it against Steve Cox, Barry Windham, and Michael Hayes before losing the title to "Dr. Death" Steve Williams on July 11, 1987 in Oklahoma City during the Great American Bash 1987 tour.


title: Big Boss Man

text: In the second WarGames match on July 30, 1987, The Road Warriors, Nikita Koloff, Dusty Rhodes, and Paul Ellering defeated The Four Horsemen and Traylor as The War Machine at 19:38 when Road Warrior Animal forced the War Machine to submit by gouging his eyes with a spiked armband.


title: Big Boss Man

text: After losing the heavyweight championship, Traylor began pursuing the UWF Tag Team Championship which were held by The Lightning Express as he teamed with The Angel of Death, The Terminator, and Black Bart but was never able to win the titles.


title: Big Boss Man

text: In June 1988, Traylor joined the WWF as "Big Boss Man", a character inspired by his previous career as a corrections officer. Wrestling as a heel and managed by Slick, Boss Man's post-match routine often included handcuffing his defeated opponents to the ring ropes and beating them with a nightstick or ball and chain.


title: Big Boss Man

text: After defeating Koko B. Ware at the inaugural SummerSlam, Boss Man began his first major WWF angle by attacking Hulk Hogan on "The Brother Love Show". During this feud, he also challenged Randy Savage for the WWF Championship, and formed a team with Akeem (formerly billed as One Man Gang, his UWF opponent) to form The Twin Towers. They feuded with Hogan and Savage (who had formed The Mega Powers), and were a key part in the top storyline of Savage turning on Hogan, leading to the WrestleMania V main event; in the later part of a tag match between the four on "The Main Event II", Hogan abandoned Savage to attend to the hurt Miss Elizabeth and went backstage. After being double-teamed for a while, Savage eventually rallied until Hogan returned to the match. After Savage tagged Hogan in, he slapped Hogan and left him to defeat The Twin Towers on his own, which led to The Mega Powers' demise as Savage beat Hulk in the backstage medical room where fellow wrestlers, managers and staff had to break them up.


title: Big Boss Man

text: At WrestleMania V, The Twin Towers defeated The Rockers (Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty) and then, for most of spring and early summer 1989, feuded with Demolition (Ax and Smash) over the Tag Team Championship. Meanwhile, Boss Man concluded his feud with Hogan in a series of Steel Cage matches; one of the most memorable aired on the May 27 "Saturday Night's Main Event XXI", with Hogan's WWF Championship on the line. During the match, Hogan superplexed Boss Man off the top of the cage.


title: Big Boss Man

text: The Big Boss Man turned face on the February 24, 1990 episode of "Superstars", when Ted DiBiase had paid Slick to have Boss Man retrieve the Million Dollar Championship belt from Jake Roberts, who had stolen it. Boss Man retrieved a bag containing both the belt and Roberts' pet python, Damien. On "The Brother Love Show", he refused to accept DiBiase's money for the bag, and returned it to Roberts.


title: Big Boss Man

text: As a face, Boss Man adopted a new entrance theme called "Hard Times" that was performed by the lead singer of Survivor, Jimi Jamison. Boss Man then feuded with former partner Akeem, defeating him in less than two minutes at WrestleMania VI. As part of his face turn, he later stopped handcuffing and beating jobbers after matches. He made peace with Hogan, appearing in his corner in his match against Earthquake at Summerslam 1990, and teaming with him at the 1990 Survivor Series, along with "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan and Tugboat, to defeat Earthquake's team.


title: Big Boss Man

text: In the fall of 1990, Boss Man began feuding with Bobby Heenan and Heenan Family after Heenan continually insulted Boss Man's mother. He won a series of matches against Heenan Family members in 1991, including The Barbarian at the Royal Rumble and Mr. Perfect (via disqualification) at WrestleMania VII in an Intercontinental Championship match, which featured the return of André the Giant. At SummerSlam, he defeated The Mountie, who he feuded with to see who the real officer of the WWF was in a Jailhouse Match, a match in which the loser must spend a night in jail; this was the only such match ever held by the promotion.


title: Big Boss Man

text: In 1992, Boss Man began feuding with Nailz, an ex-convict character who, in a series of promos aired before his debut, claimed Boss Man had been his abusive Officer in prison, and warned he was seeking revenge. On the May 30 episode of "WWF Superstars", Nailz – clad in an orange prison jumpsuit – ran into the ring and attacked Boss Man, handcuffing him to the top rope and repeatedly choking and beating him with the nightstick. Boss Man took time off TV to sell his (kayfabe) injuries, eventually returning and having a series of matches with Nailz in the latter half of 1992. The feud culminated at Survivor Series, when Boss Man defeated Nailz in a Nightstick on a Pole match. The Big Boss Man's last pay-per-view match came at the 1993 Royal Rumble, where he suffered his first clean loss on a pay-per-view to Bam Bam Bigelow; he left the company shortly after.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Traylor returned to the United States to debut for World Championship Wrestling (WCW), as "The Boss", on the December 18, 1993 episode of "WCW Saturday Night", pinning the International World Champion, Rick Rude, in a non-title match. A face, he received a title match against Rude at Starrcade '93: 10th Anniversary, but lost. In light of legal complaints from the WWF regarding the similarity of "The Boss" to "Big Boss Man", Traylor was renamed "The Guardian Angel", and wore similar attire to those in the organization he was named after. In early 1995, he turned heel, and became again known as "Big Bubba Rogers". He defeated Sting at Uncensored in 1995.


title: Big Boss Man

text: In 1996, Rogers joined Dungeon of Doom, and feuded with former Dungeon of Doom member John Tenta, along with newcomer Glacier. By the end of the year, he had turned on the Dungeon of Doom and joined the nWo. His stay in the nWo was brief, with Traylor knocked out by an unknown assailant at the start of the February 17, 1997 edition of Nitro, with Traylor later explaining Eric Bischoff fired him from the nWo while he was temporarily paralyzed. Traylor returned on September 1, now using his real name and vowing to rip Bischoff's head off, feuding with the nWo. He formed an alliance with The Steiner Brothers, who also sought Ted DiBiase as their manager. The union abruptly ended when Scott Steiner turned on them to join the nWo in February 1998. After losing his final WCW Nitro match to Bill Goldberg on the March 30 episode of "Nitro", Traylor won his final match defeating Bret Hammer on the following "Saturday Night"; after that, he was sent home and WCW let his contract expire.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Traylor rejoined the WWF shortly after his WCW release and once again became "Big Boss Man". On October 12, 1998, he returned to television with a new look, abandoning his blue police shirt for an all-black SWAT-style uniform, including a tactical vest and gloves. He served as Vince McMahon's bodyguard during his feud with Stone Cold Steve Austin and his later feud with D-Generation X, briefly wearing a mask before his identity was revealed.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Boss Man was one of the first members of McMahon's heel stable, The Corporation, and served as a bodyguard for other members, such as Vince's son Shane. While in The Corporation, Boss Man won the Tag Team Championship with Ken Shamrock and won the Hardcore Championship four times overall. On the November 30, 1998 episode of "Raw", Boss Man defeated Mankind to win the WWF Hardcore Championship. A few weeks later, Boss Man and Shamrock were initially defeated by the Tag Team Champions the New Age Outlaws at the December 1998 pay-per-view ; however, on the following day's "Raw" broadcast, Boss Man and Shamrock defeated the New Age Outlaws in a rematch to win the Tag Team titles. As a result, Boss Man was the holder of two championships in WWF, although Boss Man lost the Hardcore title to New Age Outlaws member Road Dogg nearly two weeks later. Boss Man entered the 1999 Royal Rumble match as the 22nd entrant, and he eliminated both X-Pac and D'Lo Brown before being eliminated by Stone Cold Steve Austin. At the same Royal Rumble event, Boss Man defeated New Age Outlaws member Road Dogg in a non-title match while Boss Man's partner Shamrock defeated the other New Age Outlaws member Billy Gunn in a separate singles match. Boss Man and Shamrock eventually lost the Tag Team titles to the team of Owen Hart and Jeff Jarrett on the January 25, 1999 episode of "Raw". At WrestleMania XV, Boss Man and The Undertaker faced each other in a Hell in a Cell, which The Undertaker won. After the match, The Undertaker hanged him from the roof of the cage (an illusion made possible by a body harness concealed under Boss Man's outfit).


title: Big Boss Man

text: In the WWF's hardcore division, Boss Man's major feud was with Al Snow, a feud that eventually involved Snow's pet chihuahua, Pepper. Boss Man had first won the WWF Hardcore Championship from Snow at the July Fully Loaded pay-per-view. One month later at SummerSlam, the two had a Falls Count Anywhere match that spilled into the backstage area, the street and, finally, into a nearby bar. Just prior to the match, Snow had set Pepper's pet carrier near the entranceway; minutes into the match, Boss Man picked it up, taunted Pepper, struck Snow with the carrier, and carelessly tossed it behind him. Commentator Jim Ross then immediately apologized to viewers for the act, and stated that Pepper had been removed from the box before the match. Snow ended up as the winner of the match, thus regaining the WWF Hardcore title.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Snow's reign was short-lived as Boss Man regained the Hardcore title on the subsequent episode of "SmackDown!". Two weeks later, Boss Man kidnapped and ransomed Pepper, arranging a meeting in which he fed Snow a meat dish supposedly made from Pepper's remains. On the same night, Boss Man lost the WWF Hardcore title to the returning British Bulldog, in which Bulldog then gifted the title to Snow. Boss Man and Snow settled their feud in a Kennel from Hell match at Unforgiven, in which a blue solid steel cage surrounded the ring itself and also the ringside was surrounded by a chain-link fenced "cell". The object of the match was to escape from the cage and the cell while avoiding "attack dogs" (which turned out to be disappointingly docile) positioned outside the ring. Snow won the match and retained the Hardcore title. Boss Man would later win back the Hardcore title in a triple threat match involving Snow and the Big Show nearly two weeks later. Boss Man held the championship for slightly over three months, although he only defended it sparingly, which included the likes of Al Snow, Faarooq, Kane, and The Godfather.


title: Big Boss Man

text: While as Hardcore Champion, Boss Man feuded with the Big Show over the WWF Championship; during the feud, Boss Man showed up at Big Show's father's funeral, made some disrespectful remarks, then chained the casket to the back of his car and drove off. The Big Show attempted to save the coffin by jumping on it, riding it for a few yards before losing his grip and tumbling off. Boss Man became the #1 contender for the WWF Championship by defeating The Rock on the November 15, 1999 episode of "Raw". At Armageddon, The Big Show defeated him to retain the title. On the following episode of "Raw", The Big Show defeated Boss Man and Prince Albert in a handicap match to retain his title, marking the end of the feud.


title: Big Boss Man

text: On the December 30, 1999 episode of "SmackDown!", Boss Man and Prince Albert defeated Test in a handicap match as part of the McMahon-Helmsley Regime's vendetta against Test. On the January 3, 2000 episode of "Raw", Boss Man and Prince Albert defeated Test and The Fabulous Moolah and Mae Young (both elderly women) in another handicap match. The alliance between Boss Man and Prince Albert ended on the January 13, 2000 episode of "SmackDown" after they lost to the Hardy Boyz. Over the following weeks, Boss Man feuded with both Prince Albert and Test, with Test winning the WWF Hardcore Championship from Boss Man on the January 17, 2000 episode of "Raw".


title: Big Boss Man

text: Boss Man entered the 2000 Royal Rumble match, where he eliminated Rikishi, Chyna and Faarooq, before being eliminated by The Rock.


title: Big Boss Man

text: On the March 19 episode of "Sunday Night Heat", he introduced Bull Buchanan as his protégé. They teamed to defeat The Godfather and D'Lo Brown at WrestleMania 2000, and the Acolytes Protection Agency the next month at Backlash. On the June 5 "Raw is War", after losing to The Hardy Boyz and subsequently arguing, Boss Man knocked Buchanan out with his nightstick when his back was turned and the team split up.


title: Big Boss Man

text: In the summer of 2000, Boss Man disappeared from the WWF's primary television shows, wrestling mainly on "Jakked" and "Heat", where he had a minor feud with Crash Holly until suffering a legit injury in April 2001, keeping him out of The Invasion storyline, which featured invading WCW and ECW wrestlers, for much of the year. When he returned on the December 20, 2001 of "SmackDown!", he formed a team with Booker T, after Vince McMahon ordered him to be Booker's enforcer. On the December 27 episode of "SmackDown!", Boss Man and Booker T defeated Stone Cold Steve Austin in a handicap match. On the January 7, 2002 episode of "Raw", Boss Man and Booker T were defeated by Austin and The Rock. On the January 17 episode of "SmackDown!", Boss Man lost to Diamond Dallas Page.


title: Big Boss Man

text: On the January 24 episode of "SmackDown!", Boss Man lost to Rikishi. The team quietly split in late January 2002, and Boss Man returned to "Jakked/Metal" and "Heat". In April, he formed a short-lived tag team with Mr. Perfect after both were drafted to the Raw brand. On the April 1 episode of "Raw", Boss Man and Mr. Perfect lost to The Hardy Boyz. On the May 26 episode of "Heat", he lost his final WWE match to Tommy Dreamer. Once again, he was taken off the main roster after an injury from a motorcycle accident.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Traylor was assigned to train developmental wrestlers in Ohio Valley Wrestling. He wrestled one match for OVW when he teamed with John Cena, and Charlie Haas defeating Lance Cade, Rene Dupree and Sean O'Haire on November 6, 2002. He was released from WWE in 2003.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Traylor's final matches were in the International Wrestling Association of Japan, where he competed in a tournament for the vacant IWA World Heavyweight Championship. He made it to the final by defeating Freddie Krueger before losing to Jim Duggan.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Traylor had two daughters, Lacy Abilene Traylor and Megan Chyanne Traylor, and was married to Angela, his childhood sweetheart.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Traylor suffered a motorcycle accident on his Harley-Davidson in May 2002 after he hit a deer, and was badly injured. He spent a year recovering from his injuries, and he was badly affected by close friend Curt Hennig's death in 2003.


title: Big Boss Man

text: In July 2004, Traylor ran for Commission chairman for Paulding County, Georgia. He was the owner of a Dallas, Georgia storage company called RWT Enterprises.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Traylor died of a heart attack on September 22, 2004 at his home in Dallas, Georgia. According to "The Wrestling Observer", Traylor and his family were visiting with his sister at his home, and while his two daughters went upstairs to play, his wife Angela briefly left the room at about 10:00p.m., and returned to find him dead on the sofa. He was 41 years old. Traylor was posthumously inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2016, with his wife and daughters accepting the award on his behalf.


title: Big Boss Man

text: Big Boss Man appears in video games including "WWF Superstars", "WWF WrestleMania Challenge", "WWF WrestleFest", "WWF Rage in the Cage", "WWF Attitude", "WWF WrestleMania 2000", "WWF SmackDown!", "" and "WWF No Mercy". He further appears posthumously in "WWE Legends of WrestleMania", "WWE All Stars", "WWE '13", "WWE 2K16", "WWE 2K17", "WWE 2K18", "WWE 2K19", "WWE 2K20", and "WWE 2K22".


title: Sinti

text: The Sinti (also "Sinta" or "Sinte"; masc. sing. "Sinto"; fem. sing. "Sintesa") are a subgroup of Romani people mostly found in Germany and Central Europe that number around 200,000 people. They were traditionally itinerant, but today only a small percentage of Sinti remain unsettled. In earlier times, they frequently lived on the outskirts of communities. The Sinti of Central Europe (mostly Germany) are closely related to the group known as Manouche in France. They speak the Sinti-Manouche variety of Romani, which exhibits strong German influence. The origin of the Sinti people, as with the broader Romani people, lies generally in the Indian subcontinent; while people from the western Indian subcontinent's region of Sindh were mentioned in 1100 by the Arab chronicler Meidani, it is unclear if the Sindhi people are the ancestors of modern-day Sinti, though what is clear is that the Sinti, as with other Romani people, generally originate in the northern Indian subcontinent.


title: Sinti

text: The origin of the name is disputed. Scholar Jan Kochanowski, and many Sinti themselves, believed it derives from "Sindhi", the name of a people of Sindh in medieval India (a region now in southeast Pakistan). Scholar Yaron Matras argued that "Sinti" is a later term in use by the Sinti from only the 18th century on, and is likely a European loanword. Romani linguist Ronald Lee stated that the name's origin probably lies in the German word 'Reisende' ('travellers').


title: Sinti

text: A recent study by Estonian and Indian researchers found genetic similarities between European Romani men and Indian men in their sample. Linguist N.B.G. Kazi stated that all Romani people are from Sindh.


title: Sinti

text: The Sinti are a subgroup of Romani people mostly found in Germany. They arrived in Austria and Germany in the Late Middle Ages as part of the Romani emigration from the Indian Subcontinent, eventually splitting into two groups: "Eftavagarja" ("the Seven Caravans") and "Estraxarja" ("from Austria"). They arrived in Germany before 1540. The two groups expanded, the Eftavagarja into France, Portugal and Brazil, where they are called "Manouches", and the Estraxarja into Italy and Central Europe, mainly what are now Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, eventually adopting various regional names.


title: Sinti

text: The Sinti migrated to Germany in the early 15th century. Despite their long presence, they were still generally regarded as beggars and thieves, and, by 1899, the police kept a central register on Sinti, Roma, and Yenish peoples. The Nazi Germany considered them racially inferior (see Nazism and race), and persecuted them throughout Germany during the Nazi periodthe Nuremberg Laws of 1935 often being interpreted to apply to them as well as the Jews.


title: Sinti

text: Adolf Eichmann recommended that Nazi Germany solve the "Gypsy Question" simultaneously with the Jewish Question, resulting in the deportation of the Sinti to clear room to build homes for ethnic Germans. Some were sent to Poland, or elsewhere (including some deported to Yugoslavia by the Hamburg Police in 1939) others were confined to designated areas, and many were eventually murdered in gas chambers. Many Sinti and Roma were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were put in a special section, called the "gypsy camp". Josef Mengele often performed some of his infamous experiments on Sinti and Roma. On 2 August 1944 the "gypsy camp" was closed, and approximately 4,000 Sinti and Roma were gassed during the night of 2–3 August and burnt in the crematoria. 2 August is commemorated as Roma and Sinti Holocaust Remembrance Day.


title: Sinti

text: In the concentration camps, the Sinti were forced to wear either a black triangle, indicating their classification as "asocial", or a brown triangle, specifically reserved for Sinti, Roma, and Yenish peoples.


title: Arvind Krishna

text: Arvind Krishna is an Indian-American business executive serving as the Chairman and CEO of IBM. He has been the CEO of IBM since April 2020 and took on the role of Chairman in January 2021. Krishna began his career at IBM in 1990, at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and was promoted to Senior Vice President in 2015, managing IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software and IBM Research divisions. He was a principal architect of the acquisition of Red Hat, the largest acquisition in the company’s history.


title: Arvind Krishna

text: Krishna was born into a Telugu-speaking family in West Godavari District in the Coastal Andhra region of Andhra Pradesh, India. His father, Major General Vinod Krishna, was an army officer who worked for the Indian Army and his mother, Aarathi Krishna, worked for the welfare of Army widows.


title: Arvind Krishna

text: He did his schooling at Stanes Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School, Coonoor, Tamil Nadu and at St Joseph's Academy, Dehradun before receiving a BTech degree in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1985. He subsequently moved to the United States to earn a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1991. He is the recipient of distinguished alumni awards from both IIT Kanpur and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.


title: Arvind Krishna

text: Krishna joined IBM in 1990, at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and continued in Watson Research for 18 years till 2009. Next he held General Manager role in Information management software and systems and technology group of IBM. In 2015, he was promoted to senior vice president of IBM Research. He later became senior vice president of IBM's cloud, and cognitive software division.


title: Arvind Krishna

text: He also led the building and expansion of new markets for IBM in artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing, and blockchain technology. He was a driving force behind IBM's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed in July 2019.


title: Arvind Krishna

text: He was appointed IBM's CEO in January 2020, effective April 6, 2020, succeeding Ginni Rometty, who had served as CEO since 2012. He joined Satya Nadella, Shantanu Narayen, and Sundar Pichai as an Indian-American CEO of a major United States technology company. In 2021, he was named by CRN as the year's "Most Influential Executive".


title: Arvind Krishna

text: He has co-authored dozens of patents, has been the editor of IEEE and ACM journals, and has published extensively in technical journals.


title: Plantation of Ulster

text: The Plantation of Ulster (; Ulster-Scots: "Plantin o Ulstèr") was the organised colonisation ("plantation") of Ulstera province of Irelandby people from Great Britain during the reign of King James I. Most of the settlers (or "planters") came from southern Scotland and northern England; their culture differed from that of the native Irish. Small privately funded plantations by wealthy landowners began in 1606, while the official plantation began in 1609. Most of the colonised land had been confiscated from the native Gaelic chiefs, several of whom had fled Ireland for mainland Europe in 1607 following the Nine Years' War against English rule. The official plantation comprised an estimated half a million acres (2,000 km) of arable land in counties Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Donegal, and Londonderry. Land in counties Antrim, Down, and Monaghan was privately colonised with the king's support.