title: Ovipositor

text: Female bitterlings in the genus "Rhodeus" have an ovipositor in the form of a tubular extension of the genital orifice. During breeding season, they use it when depositing eggs in the mantle cavity of freshwater mussels, where their eggs develop in reasonable security. Seahorses have an ovipositor for introducing eggs into the brood pouch of the male, who carries them until it is time to release the fry into a suitable situation in the open water.


title: Ovipositor

text: The marbled newt, or "Triturus marmoratus," females participate in parental investment by ovipositing their eggs. They carefully wrap them in aquatic leaves as a form of protection, scattering them throughout a pond to avoid predation. Females are not able to breath during the oviposition process; therefore the benefit to wrapping the eggs outweigh the cost of holding their breath.


title: Shona people

text: The Shona people () are part of the Bantu ethnic group native to Southern Africa, primarily living in Zimbabwe where they form the majority of the population, as well as Mozambique, South Africa, and a worldwide diaspora including global celebrities such as Thandiwe Newton. There are five major Shona language/dialect clusters : Karanga, Zezuru, Korekore, Manyika and Ndau.


title: Shona people

text: The Shona people are grouped according to the dialect of the language they speak. Their estimated population is 16.6 million:


title: Shona people

text: During the 11th century, the Karanga people formed kingdoms on the Zimbabwe plateau. Construction, then, began on Great Zimbabwe; the capital of the kingdom of Zimbabwe. The Torwa dynasty ruled the kingdom of Butua, and the kingdom of Mutapa preceded the Rozvi Empire (which lasted into the 19th century).


title: Shona people

text: Brother succeeded brother in the dynasties, leading to civil wars which were exploited by the Portuguese during the 16th century. The kings ruled a number of chiefs, sub-chiefs and headmen.


title: Shona people

text: The kingdoms were replaced by new groups who moved onto the plateau. The Ndebele destroyed the weakened Rozvi Empire during the 1830s; the Portuguese gradually encroached on the kingdom of Mutapa, which extended to the Mozambique coast after it provided valued exports (particularly gold) for Swahili, Arab and East Asian traders. The Pioneer Column of the British South Africa Company established the colony of Rhodesia, sparking the First Matabele War which led to the complete annexation of Mashonaland; the Portuguese colonial government in Mozambique fought the remnants of the kingdom of Mutapa until 1902. The Shona people were also a part of the Bantu migration where they are one of the largest Bantu ethnic groups in sub Saharan Africa.


title: Shona people

text: The dialect groups of Shona developed among dispersed tribes over a long period of time, and further groups of immigrants have contributed to this diversity. Although "standard" Shona is spoken throughout Zimbabwe, dialects help identify a speaker's town or village. Each Shona dialect is specific to a sub-group.


title: Shona people

text: In 1931, during his attempt to reconcile the dialects into a single standard Shona language, Clement Doke identified five groups and subdivisions:


title: Shona people

text: The Shona have traditionally practiced subsistence agriculture. They grew sorghum, beans, African groundnuts, and after the Columbian Exchange, pumpkins; sorghum was also largely replaced by maize after the crop's introduction. The Shona also keep cattle and goats, since livestock are an important food reserve during droughts.


title: Shona people

text: Precolonial Shona states derived substantial revenue from the export of mining products, particularly gold and copper.


title: Shona people

text: Traditional clothing were usually animal skins that covered the front and the back, and were called '"mhapa'" and "'shashiko".' These later evolved when the Shona people started trading for cloth with other groups, such as the Tsonga, and native cloths began to be manufactured.


title: Shona people

text: Shona traditional music's most important instruments are ngoma drums and the mbira. The drums vary in size and shape, depending on the type of music they are accompanying. How they are played also depends on drum size and music type. Large drums are typically played with sticks, and smaller drums with an open palm; the small drum used for the '"amabhiza"' dance is played with a hand and a stick. The stick rubs, or scratches, the drum to produce a screeching sound.


title: Shona people

text: The mbira has become a national instrument of sorts in Zimbabwe. It has a number of variants, including the nhare, mbira dzavadzimu, the Mbira Nyunga Nyunga, njari mbira, and matepe. The mbira is played at religious and secular gatherings, and different mbiras have different purposes. The 22–24-key mbira dzavadzimu is used to summon spirits, and the 15-key Mbira Nyunga Nyunga is taught from primary school to university. Shona music also uses percussion instruments such as the marimba (similar to a xylophone), shakers ("'hosho"'), leg rattles, wooden clappers ('"makwa'"), and the "'chikorodzi",' a notched stick played with another stick.


title: Shona people

text: Both historically and in contemporary art, the Shona are known for their work in stone sculpture, which re-emerged during the 1940s. Shona sculpture developed during the eleventh century and peaked in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, before beginning a slow decline until their mid-20th-century rediscovery. Most of the sculptures are made from sedimentary-stone (such as soapstone) and depict birds or humans; though some are made with harder stone such as serpentinite. During the 1950s, Zimbabwean artists began carving stone sculptures for sale to European art collectors; these sculptures quickly became popular and were bought and exhibited at art museums around the world. Many of the sculptures depict the transformation of spirits into animals or vice versa, and some are more abstract. Many Zimbabwean artists carve wood and stone to sell to tourists.


title: Shona people

text: Pottery is also a traditionally practiced craft, with the storage and serving pots being the most decorative, contrasted with those used for cooking. In Shona clay earthenware pots are known as "hari".


title: Shona people

text: Traditional Shona housing ('"musha')" are round huts arranged around a cleared yard ('"ruvanze"'). Each hut has a specific function, such as acting as a kitchen or a lounge.


title: Shona people

text: Sorghum and maize are used to prepare the staple dish, a thickened porridge ("'sadza')", and the traditional beer known as "hwahwa".


title: Shona people

text: The traditional religion of Shona people is centred on "Mwari" (God), also known as "Musikavanhu" (Creator of man/people) or "Nyadenga" (one who lives high up). God communicates with his people on earth directly or through "chosen holy people". At times God uses natural phenomena and the environment to communicate with his people. Some of the chosen people have powers to prophecy, heal and bless. People can also communicate with God directly through prayer. Deaths are not losses but a promotion to the stage where they can represent the living through the clan spirits. When someone dies, according to Shona religion, they join the spiritual world. In the spiritual world, they can enjoy their afterlife or become bad spirits. No one wants to be a bad spirit, so during life, people are guided by a culture of "unhu" so that when they die, they enjoy their afterlife. The Bira ceremony, which often lasts all night, summons spirits for guidance and intercession. Shona religion teaches that the only ones who can communicate with both the living and God are the ancestral spirits, or "dzavadzimu". Historically, colonialists and anthropologists wanted to undermine the Shona religion in favour of Christianity. Initially, they stated that Shona did not have a God. They denigrated the way the Shona had communicated with their God "Mwari", the Shona way of worship, and "chosen people" among the Shona. The chosen people were treated as unholy and Shona prayer was labelled as pagan. When compared with Christianity, the Shona religious perspective of afterlife, holiness, worship and rules of life ("unhu") are similar.


title: Shona people

text: Although sixty to eighty percent of the Shona people follow Christianity, Shona traditional religious beliefs are still present across the country. A small number of the population practice the Muslim faith, often brought about by immigrants from predominantly Malawi who practice Islam. There is also a small population of Jews.


title: Shona people

text: In Zimbabwe the "Mutupo" (plural "Mitupo") (wrongly called totems by colonial missionaries and anthropologists) are a system of identifying clans and sub-clans, which are named after and signified by emblems, commonly indigenous animals. Mitupo have been used by the Shona people since their culture developed. They have provided a function in avoiding incest, and also build solidarity and identity. It could be compared to heraldry in European culture. There are more than 25 "mitupo" in Zimbabwe. In marriage, "mitupo" help create a strong identity for children but it serves another function of ensuring that people marry someone they know. In Shona this is explained by the proverb "rooranai vematongo" which means 'marry or have a relationship with someone that you know'. However, as a result of colonisation, urban areas and migration resulted in people mixing and others having relationships of convenience with people they do not know. This results in unwanted pregnancies and also unwanted babies some of whom are dumped or abandoned. This may end up with children without "mutupo". This phenomenon has resulted in numerous challenges for communities but also for the children who lack part of their identity. It is, however, possible for a child to be adopted and receive "mutupo".


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: "Valerie" is a song by English indie rock band the Zutons from their second studio album, "Tired of Hanging Around" (2006). The song was later covered by Mark Ronson, with lead vocals provided by Amy Winehouse, reaching number two on the UK Singles Chart in 2007.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: In an interview with "The Scotsman" in May 2008, lead singer Dave McCabe described the writing process of the song: "I could tell you I was inspired by gazing out across the Mersey or walking past Macca's old house, but the truth is I got the idea in a cab on the way to my mum's. The whole song was written before I got there, so 20 minutes, max."


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: The song's title and theme refer to an American friend of McCabe's who was in trouble for driving under the influence. The band's drummer, Sean Payne, called it a "musical postcard to her, saying he is having a hard time and can she come over and see him." In an interview with "Vice" magazine in June 2019, the subject of the song was revealed to be celebrity makeup artist Valerie Star. She explained that she met McCabe and how she got arrested for driving on a suspended license.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: The song was used by ITV during the 2006 FIFA World Cup, alongside Primal Scream's "Country Girl" and Kasabian's cover of David Bowie's 1977 song "Heroes".


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: Both the original and Mark Ronson version featured in British soap opera "Emmerdale" during the wedding of Eric and Val Pollard in 2008.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: The music video was directed by Scott Lyon. It is set in a prison and shows the Zutons trying to escape.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: English musicians Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse covered "Valerie" for Ronson's second studio album "Version" (2007). Released as the album's third single on 15 October 2007, the track was first performed by Winehouse on Jo Whiley's "Live Lounge" show on BBC Radio 1. Singer and director Jordan Galland plays the electric piano on this single. "Rolling Stone" called the cover Winehouse's only "notable recording" after "Back to Black". Winehouse had previously recorded a slower-tempo version of the song, which appeared as a bonus track on the deluxe edition of "Back to Black". The song has been featured in "27 Dresses" and "Amy" (2015), a documentary film biography of Winehouse, a U.S. advertisement for Amazon Echo, and the demonstration launch video for the Google Nest Audio.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: After "Valerie" became a success in the summer of 2006, it found an unlikely fan in Amy Winehouse, who was invited to contribute to a new project with Mark Ronson. He claimed Winehouse did not listen to anything written after 1967 and that she was struggling to come up with something that would fit the sessions for Ronson's upcoming album "Version". After Ronson explained that the album would consist of soul covers of guitar records, Winehouse told him that she might try "Valerie", but Ronson strained to hear her voice singing that song in his head. "I wasn't sure how it would work, but she went into the studio and tried it. I loved it," he said.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: Ronson's production of the cover is based around the beat from the Jam's 1982 song "Town Called Malice". Winehouse also recorded a jazzier, acoustic version for Radio 1's "Live Lounge", which was issued at the same time as the Ronson collaboration and a success in its own right, possibly due to download confusion, though it was the Ronson version that got airplay.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: The single peaked at number 2 on the UK Singles Chart, where it spent 19 consecutive weeks inside the top 20. With sales of 329,490, it became the UK's ninth biggest-selling single of 2007. The single spent 36 consecutive weeks on the UK Singles Chart between September 2007 and May 2008. It re-entered the chart in late June 2008 to take its total to 39 weeks.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: The song was released in early 2008 in the Netherlands, quickly gaining airplay and sales. It is Winehouse's most successful song in that country, peaking at Number 1 for four consecutive weeks.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: As of January 2015, Ronson and Winehouse's version of "Valerie" had sold 658,353 copies in the United Kingdom, according to the Official Charts Company.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: The song has become something of a mixed blessing for McCabe. He said, "I certainly have to try hard sometimes to not think about 'Valerie'. The days it's in my head are when I have to put down the guitar and just forget about writing."


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: The single's music video, directed by Robert Hales, was filmed in London on 28 August 2007. It shows Ronson and a group of jazz musicians inviting a woman from the audience onto their stage to "sing" the song (after they notice that Winehouse is not present), followed by (presumably) the woman's friends, in the style of group karaoke—although the women essentially mime to Winehouse's voice. The women doing the lip sync performance have Amy's famous beehive hairstyle, possibly to come across as impersonators.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: It was covered in a parody on Today FM's "Gift Grub", prior to Munster's appearance in the 2008 Heineken Cup final, as "Flannery", after Munster hooker, Jerry Flannery.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: "Glee" covered Winehouse's version of the song in the episode "Special Education", as one of the two songs for the season 2 Sectionals, with Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) singing the lead and Brittany Pierce (Heather Morris) and Mike Chang (Harry Shum Jr.) performing a choreographed dance duet. During the 100th episode of the series they redo the song as a duet with Santana and Brittany singing, backed up by the dancing of Mike and new New Directions member Jake Puckerman (Jacob Artist).


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: Singer Bruno Mars paid tribute to Winehouse by performing her version of the song at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: Louis Tomlinson of boy band One Direction covered the song during a concert of their 2011 Up All Night Tour.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: Dionne Bromfield (Winehouse's goddaughter), Aura Dione, Ivy Quainoo, Caro Emerald and Ina Müller performed the song as a tribute to Winehouse at the 2012 Echo Awards Presentation in Germany.


title: Valerie (Zutons song)

text: American bluegrass band the Brothers Comatose covered the song for their 2016 album "City Painted Gold".


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Daniel Camargo Barbosa (22 January 1930 – 13 November 1994) was a Colombian serial killer. He was also known as The Sadist of El Charquito (). He is one of the most prolific serial killers in history. It is believed that he raped and murdered up to 180 young girls in Colombia and Ecuador during the 1970s and 1980s.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Camargo's mother died before he had even reached the age of one and his father was overbearing and emotionally distant. Afterwards his father married another woman, Dioselina Fernandez, who had infertility problems. This caused his new stepmother to become abusive to Daniel, humiliating him in various ways. She dressed him up as a girl and then forced him to go to school dressed that way; his peers and classmates made fun of him. Despite this humiliation, Daniel stood out as a great student at the León XIII school in Bogotá with a reported IQ of 116. However, his desire to continue studying was hampered when he was forced to drop out of school to help his family financially.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Camargo had a de facto union with a woman named Alcira and had two children with her. He fell in love with another woman, Esperanza (age 28), whom he planned to marry, but then found out that she was not a virgin. This became the root of Camargo's fixations. He and Esperanza formed an agreement that he would stay with her if she aided him in finding other virgin girls to have sex with. This began a period of their partnership in crime. Esperanza was Camargo's accomplice, luring young girls to an apartment under false pretenses and then drugging them with sodium seconal sleeping pills so that Camargo could rape them. Camargo committed five rapes in this way, but did not kill any of the girls. The fifth child that they abused in this way reported the crime, and both Camargo and Esperanza were arrested and taken to separate prisons. Camargo was convicted of sexual assault in Colombia on 10 April 1964.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: A judge sentenced Camargo to three years in prison, and Camargo was initially grateful for the perceived leniency of the judge, swearing to repent and mend his ways. However, a new judge was given precedence over the case and Camargo was sentenced to eight years in prison. This provoked Camargo to rebellious anger. He served his full sentence, and was then released.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: In 1973 he was arrested in Brazil for being undocumented. Due to a delay in sending Camargo's criminal records from Colombia, he was deported and released with his false identity. When he returned to Colombia, he took up a job as a street vendor in Barranquilla selling television monitors. One day when passing by a school, he kidnapped a 9-year-old girl, after raping her, he murdered her so that she could not inform the police as his previous victim had done. This was his first assault involving murder.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Camargo was arrested on 3 May 1974 in Barranquilla, Colombia, when he returned to the scene of the crime to recover the television screens that he had left beside the victim. Even though it is believed that he raped and killed more than 80 girls in Colombia, Camargo was imprisoned in Colombia after being convicted of raping and killing a 9-year-old girl. He was initially sentenced to 30 years in prison, but this sentence was reduced to 25 years, and he was interned in the prison on Gorgona Island on 24 December 1977.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: In November 1984 Camargo escaped from Gorgona prison (known as the Colombian Alcatraz) in a primitive boat after having carefully studied the ocean currents. The authorities assumed that he died at sea and the press reported that he had been eaten by sharks. He eventually arrived in Quito, Ecuador. He then traveled by bus to Guayaquil on 5 or 6 December 1984. On 18 December he abducted a 9-year-old girl from the city of Quevedo, in the province of Los Ríos, Ecuador. The next day a 10-year-old girl also disappeared.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: From 1984 to 1986 Camargo committed a series of at least 54 rapes and murders in Guayaquil. The police at first believed that all the deaths were the work of a gang, not understanding that one man could have killed so many. Camargo slept on the streets, and lived off the money he gained by reselling ballpoint pens in the streets. Occasionally he supplemented his income by selling clothing or small valuables belonging to his victims.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Camargo selected helpless, young, lower-class girls in search of work and approached them, pretending to be a foreigner who needed to find a Protestant pastor in a church on the outskirts of town. He explained that he had to deliver a large sum of money, which he showed them as proof, and he offered them a reward if they would accompany him to show him the way. He pretended that he was a stranger to the area, and hinted at the possibility of the girls getting a job at the factory. No one was suspicious of an older man accompanying a girl or young woman who could be his granddaughter. Camargo would then enter into the woods, claiming to be looking for a shortcut in order to avoid arousing suspicion in his victims. If the girls did grow suspicious and drew back, he did not prevent them from leaving. Camargo raped his victims before strangling them, sometimes stabbing them when they resisted. After his victims were dead, he left their bodies in the forest.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Camargo was arrested by two policemen in Quito on 25 February 1986, only a few minutes after he had murdered a 9-year-old girl named Elizabeth. The policemen were on patrol and approached him at the height of the avenue Los Granados, thinking that he was acting suspiciously. They found that he was carrying with him a bag containing the bloody clothes and clitoris of his latest victim, and a copy of "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky. He was taken into custody and later moved to Guayaquil for identification. When he was arrested he gave a false name, Manuel Bulgarin Solis, but he was later identified by María Alexandra Vélez who was one of his rape victims that had escaped.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Daniel Camargo calmly confessed to killing 72 girls in Ecuador since escaping from the Colombian prison. He led authorities to the dumping grounds of those victims whose bodies had not yet been recovered. The bodies had been dismembered. While he told the Ecuadorian authorities of the locations of the bodies and how the sadistic crimes were committed, he showed no feelings of remorse. After raping his victims, he had hacked, slashed and crushed the girls with a machete. He gave a cynical explanation for choosing children. He wanted virgins "because they cried"; this apparently gave him greater satisfaction. According to Camargo, he killed because he wanted revenge on women's unfaithfulness. He hated them for not being what he believed women were supposed to be.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: In June 1986 Francisco Febres Cordero, a journalist for the newspaper "Hoy" (Today), managed to arrange an interview with Camargo. It was difficult to get the interview due to the police blocking all access to Camargo, and the fact that Camargo himself demanded a large fee before he would let himself be interviewed. The journalist pretended to be part of a group of psychologists that were allowed access to the prisoner, allowing him to ask Camargo searching questions without arousing his suspicion.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Camargo was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to 16 years in prison, the maximum sentence available in Ecuador at the time. While serving his sentence in the Garcia Moreno de Quito jail, he claimed to have converted to Christianity. In this penitentiary he was imprisoned with


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: Pedro Alonso López (also dubbed "the Monster of the Andes"), who is believed to have raped and killed as many as 300 girls in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.


title: Daniel Camargo Barbosa

text: On 13 November 1994, Camargo was stabbed to death in prison by Geovanny Noguera, who was a nephew of one of his victims. He was 64 years old at the time of his death.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or a service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often also offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract, a cryptocurrency transaction (see "bitcoin transaction" image), identification or legally signing a 'document' (see "application form" image).


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: A cryptocurrency wallet works by a theoretical or random number being generated and used with a length that depends on the algorithm size of the cryptocurrency's technology requirements. The number is then converted to a private key using the specific requirements of the cryptocurrency cryptography algorithm requirement. A public key is then generated from the private key using whichever cryptographic algorithm requirements are required. The private key is utilised by the owner to access and send cryptocurrency and is private to the owner, whereas the public key is to be shared to any third party to receive cryptocurrency.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: Up to this stage no computer or electronic device is required and all key pairs can be mathematically derived and written down by hand. The private key and public key pair (known as an address) are not known by the blockchain or anyone else. The blockchain will only record the transaction of the public address when cryptocurrency is sent to it, thus recording in the blockchain ledger the transaction of the public address.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: Collision (two or more wallets having the same private key) is theoretically possible, since keys can be generated without being used for transactions, and are therefore offline until recorded in the blockchain ledger. However, this possibility is negated because the theoretical probability of two or more private keys being the same is extremely low. The number of possible wallets and thus private keys is extremely high, so duplicating or hacking a certain key would be inconceivable.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: In modern convention a seed phrase is now utilised which is a random 12 to 24 (or even greater) list of dictionary words which is an unencrypted form of the private key. (Words are easier to memorize than numerals.) When online, exchange and hardware wallets are generated using random numbers, and a seed phrase is asked to be recorded by the user, hence when access to the wallet becomes misplaced, damaged or compromised, the seed phrase can be used to re-access the wallet and associated keys and cryptocurrency in toto.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: A number of technologies known as wallets exist that store the key value pair of private and public key known as wallets. A wallet hosts the details of the key pair making transacting cryptocurrency possible. Multiple methods exist for storing keys or seeds in a wallet.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: Dapp browsers are specialized software that supports decentralized applications. Dapp browsers are considered to be the browsers of Web3 and are the gateway to access the decentralized applications which are working based on blockchain technology. That means all dapp browsers must have a unique code system to unify all the different codes of the dapps.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: While crypto wallets are focused on the exchange, purchase, sale of digital assets and support narrowly targeted applications, the browsers support different kinds of applications of various formats, including exchange, games, NFTs marketplaces, etc.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: In addition to the basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet may also have one or more of the following characteristics.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: A simple cryptocurrency wallet contains pairs of public and private cryptographic keys. The keys can be used to track ownership, receive or spend cryptocurrencies. A public key allows others to make payments to the address derived from it, whereas a private key enables the spending of cryptocurrency from that address.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: The cryptocurrency itself is not in the wallet. In the case of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies derived from it, the cryptocurrency is decentrally stored and maintained in a publicly available distributed ledger called the "blockchain".


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: Some wallets are specifically designed to be compatible with a framework. The European Union is creating an eIDAS compatible European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (ESSIF) which runs on the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). The EBSI wallet is designed to (securely) provide information, an eID and to sign 'transactions'.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: In contrast to simple cryptocurrency wallets requiring just one party to sign a transaction, multisignature wallets require multiple parties to sign a transaction. Multisignature wallets are designed for increased security. Usually, a multisignature algorithm produces a joint signature that is more compact than a collection of distinct signatures from all users.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: In the cryptocurrency space, smart contracts are digitally signed in the same way a cryptocurrency transaction is signed. The signing keys are held in a cryptocurrency wallet.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: A sequential deterministic wallet utilizes a simple method of generating addresses from a known starting string or "seed". This would utilize a cryptographic hash function, e.g. SHA-256 (seed + n), where n is an ASCII-coded number that starts from 1 and increments as additional keys are needed.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: The hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet was publicly described in BIP32. As a deterministic wallet, it also derives keys from a single master root seed, but instead of having a single "chain" of keypairs, an HD wallet supports multiple key pair chains.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: This allows a single key string to be used to generate an entire tree of key pairs with a stratified structure. The single master string serves as the root of the tree, and the hierarchy scheme allows the private keys generated from a master private key to be themselves master private keys, which can in turn be treated as deterministic wallets in their own right.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: BIP39 proposed the use of a set of human-readable words to derive the master private key of a wallet. This mnemonic phrase allows for easier wallet backup and recovery, due to all the keys of a wallet being derivable from a single plaintext string.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: Bitcoin Armory, an open source, Python-based, wallet-management application for the Bitcoin network, utilized its own implementation the hierarchical deterministic scheme and served as inspiration for the BIP32 standard.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: In a non-deterministic wallet, each key is randomly generated on its own accord, and they are not seeded from a common key. Therefore, any backups of the wallet must store each and every single private key used as an address, as well as a buffer of 100 or so future keys that may have already been given out as addresses but not received payments yet.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: When choosing a wallet, the owner must keep in mind who is supposed to have access to (a copy of) the private keys and thus potentially has signing capabilities. In case of cryptocurrency the user needs to trust the provider to keep the cryptocurrency safe, just like with a bank. Trust was misplaced in the case of the Mt. Gox exchange, which 'lost' most of their clients' bitcoins. Downloading a cryptocurrency wallet from a wallet provider to a computer or phone does not automatically mean that the owner is the only one who has a copy of the private keys. For example, with Coinbase, it is possible to install a wallet on a phone and to also have access to the same wallet through their website.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: A wallet can also have known or unknown vulnerabilities. A supply chain attack or side-channel attack are ways of a vulnerability introduction. In extreme cases even a computer which is not connected to any network can be hacked.


title: Cryptocurrency wallet

text: When using a software wallet for receiving cryptocurrency, access to the receiving wallet is not needed—the sending party only need know the destination address, thus anyone can send cryptocurrency to an address. Only the one who has the private key of the corresponding (public key) address otherwise has access.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Henry Cavendish ( ; 10 October 1731 – 24 February 1810) was an English natural philosopher and scientist who was an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of hydrogen, which he termed "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper, "On Factitious Airs". Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: A shy man, Cavendish was distinguished for great accuracy and precision in his researches into the composition of atmospheric air, the properties of different gases, the synthesis of water, the law governing electrical attraction and repulsion, a mechanical theory of heat, and calculations of the density (and hence the mass) of the Earth. His experiment to measure the density of the Earth (which, in turn, allows the gravitational constant to be calculated) has come to be known as the Cavendish experiment.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Henry Cavendish was born on 10 October 1731 in Nice, where his family was living at the time. His mother was Lady Anne de Grey, fourth daughter of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent, and his father was Lord Charles Cavendish, the third son of William Cavendish, 2nd Duke of Devonshire. The family traced its lineage across eight centuries to Norman times, and was closely connected to many aristocratic families of Great Britain. Henry's mother died in 1733, three months after the birth of her second son, Frederick, and shortly before Henry's second birthday, leaving Lord Charles Cavendish to bring up his two sons. Henry Cavendish was styled as "The Honourable Henry Cavendish".


title: Henry Cavendish

text: From the age of 11 Henry attended Newcome's School, a private school near London. At the age of 18 (on 24 November 1748) he entered the University of Cambridge in St Peter's College, now known as Peterhouse, but left three years later on 23 February 1751 without taking a degree (at the time, a common practice). He then lived with his father in London, where he soon had his own laboratory.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Lord Charles Cavendish spent his life firstly in politics and then increasingly in science, especially in the Royal Society of London. In 1758, he took Henry to meetings of the Royal Society and also to dinners of the Royal Society Club. In 1760, Henry Cavendish was elected to both these groups, and he was assiduous in his attendance after that. He took virtually no part in politics, but followed his father into science, through his researches and his participation in scientific organisations. He was active in the Council of the Royal Society of London (to which he was elected in 1765).


title: Henry Cavendish

text: His interest and expertise in the use of scientific instruments led him to head a committee to review the Royal Society's meteorological instruments and to help assess the instruments of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. His first paper, "Factitious Airs", appeared in 1766. Other committees on which he served included the committee of papers, which chose the papers for publication in the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society", and the committees for the transit of Venus (1769), for the gravitational attraction of mountains (1774), and for the scientific instructions for Constantine Phipps's expedition (1773) in search of the North Pole and the Northwest Passage. In 1773, Henry joined his father as an elected trustee of the British Museum, to which he devoted a good deal of time and effort. Soon after the Royal Institution of Great Britain was established, Cavendish became a manager (1800) and took an active interest, especially in the laboratory, where he observed and helped in Humphry Davy's chemical experiments.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: About the time of his father's death, Cavendish began to work closely with Charles Blagden, an association that helped Blagden enter fully into London's scientific society. In return, Blagden helped to keep the world at a distance from Cavendish. Cavendish published no books and few papers, but he achieved much. Several areas of research, including mechanics, optics, and magnetism, feature extensively in his manuscripts, but they scarcely feature in his published work. Cavendish is considered to be one of the so-called pneumatic chemists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with, for example, Joseph Priestley, Joseph Black, and Daniel Rutherford. Cavendish found that a definite, peculiar, and highly inflammable gas, which he referred to as "Inflammable Air", was produced by the action of certain acids on certain metals. This gas was hydrogen, which Cavendish correctly guessed was proportioned two to one in water.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Although others, such as Robert Boyle, had prepared hydrogen gas earlier, Cavendish is usually given the credit for recognising its elemental nature. In 1777, Cavendish discovered that air exhaled by mammals is converted to "fixed air" (carbon dioxide), not "phlogisticated air" as predicted by Joseph Priestley. Also, by dissolving alkalis in acids, Cavendish produced carbon dioxide, which he collected, along with other gases, in bottles inverted over water or mercury. He then measured their solubility in water and their specific gravity, and noted their combustibility. He concluded in his 1778 paper "General Considerations on Acids" that respirable air constitutes acidity. Cavendish was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal for this paper. Gas chemistry was of increasing importance in the latter half of the 18th century, and became crucial for Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's reform of chemistry, generally known as the chemical revolution.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: In 1783, Cavendish published a paper on eudiometry (the measurement of the goodness of gases for breathing). He described a new eudiometer of his invention, with which he achieved the best results to date, using what in other hands had been the inexact method of measuring gases by weighing them. Then, after a repetition of a 1781 experiment performed by Priestley, Cavendish published a paper on the production of pure water by burning hydrogen in "dephlogisticated air" (air in the process of combustion, now known to be oxygen).


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Cavendish concluded that rather than being synthesised, the burning of hydrogen caused water to be condensed from the air. Some physicists interpreted hydrogen as pure phlogiston. Cavendish reported his findings to Priestley no later than March 1783, but did not publish them until the following year. The Scottish inventor James Watt published a paper on the composition of water in 1783; controversy about who made the discovery first ensued.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: In 1785, Cavendish investigated the composition of common (i.e. atmospheric) air, obtaining impressively accurate results. He conducted experiments in which hydrogen and ordinary air were combined in known ratios and then exploded with a spark of electricity. Furthermore, he also described an experiment in which he was able to remove, in modern terminology, both the oxygen and nitrogen gases from a sample of atmospheric air until only a small bubble of unreacted gas was left in the original sample. Using his observations, Cavendish observed that, when he had determined the amounts of phlogisticated air (nitrogen) and dephlogisticated air (oxygen), there remained a volume of gas amounting to 1/120 of the original volume of nitrogen.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: By careful measurements he was led to conclude that "common air consists of one part of dephlogisticated air [oxygen], mixed with four of phlogisticated [nitrogen]".


title: Henry Cavendish

text: In the 1890s (around 100 years later) two British physicists, William Ramsay and Lord Rayleigh, realised that their newly discovered inert gas, argon, was responsible for Cavendish's problematic residue; he had not made an error. What he had done was perform rigorous quantitative experiments, using standardised instruments and methods, aimed at reproducible results; taken the mean of the result of several experiments; and identified and allowed for sources of error. The balance that he used, made by a craftsman named Harrison, was the first of the precision balances of the 18th century, and as accurate as Lavoisier's (which has been estimated to measure one part in 400,000). Cavendish worked with his instrument makers, generally improving existing instruments rather than inventing wholly new ones.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Cavendish, as indicated above, used the language of the old phlogiston theory in chemistry. In 1787, he became one of the earliest outside France to convert to the new antiphlogistic theory of Lavoisier, though he remained sceptical about the nomenclature of the new theory. He also objected to Lavoisier's identification of heat as having a material or elementary basis. Working within the framework of Newtonian mechanism, Cavendish had tackled the problem of the nature of heat in the 1760s, explaining heat as the result of the motion of matter.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: In 1783, he published a paper on the temperature at which mercury freezes and in that paper made use of the idea of latent heat, although he did not use the term because he believed that it implied acceptance of a material theory of heat. He made his objections explicit in his 1784 paper on air. He went on to develop a general theory of heat, and the manuscript of that theory has been persuasively dated to the late 1780s. His theory was at once mathematical and mechanical: it contained the principle of the conservation of heat (later understood as an instance of conservation of energy) and even included the concept (although not the label) of the mechanical equivalent of heat.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Following his father's death, Henry bought another house in town and also a house in Clapham Common (built by Thomas Cubitt), at that time to the south of London. The London house contained the bulk of his library, while he kept most of his instruments at Clapham Common, where he carried out most of his experiments. The most famous of those experiments, published in 1798, was to determine the density of the Earth and became known as the Cavendish experiment. The apparatus Cavendish used for weighing the Earth was a modification of the torsion balance built by Englishman and geologist John Michell, who died before he could begin the experiment. The apparatus was sent in crates to Cavendish, who completed the experiment in 1797–1798 and published the results.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: The experimental apparatus consisted of a torsion balance with a pair of 2-inch 1.61-pound lead spheres suspended from the arm of a torsion balance and two much larger stationary lead balls (350 pounds). Cavendish intended to measure the force of gravitational attraction between the two. He noticed that Michell's apparatus would be sensitive to temperature differences and induced air currents, so he made modifications by isolating the apparatus in a separate room with external controls and telescopes for making observations.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Using this equipment, Cavendish calculated the attraction between the balls from the period of oscillation of the torsion balance, and then he used this value to calculate the density of the Earth. Cavendish found that the Earth's average density is 5.48 times greater than that of water. John Henry Poynting later noted that the data should have led to a value of 5.448, and indeed that is the average value of the twenty-nine determinations Cavendish included in his paper. The published number was due to a simple arithmetic error on his part. What was extraordinary about Cavendish's experiment was its elimination of every source of error and every factor that could disturb the experiment, and its precision in measuring an astonishingly small attraction, a mere 1/50,000,000 of the weight of the lead balls. The result that Cavendish obtained for the density of the Earth is within 1 percent of the currently accepted figure.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Cavendish's work led others to accurate values for the gravitational constant ("G") and Earth's mass. Based on his results, one can calculate a value for G of 6.754 × 10N-m/kg, which compares favourably with the modern value of 6.67428 × 10N-m/kg.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Books often describe Cavendish's work as a measurement of either "G" or the Earth's mass. Since these are related to the Earth's density by a trivial web of algebraic relations, none of these sources are wrong, but they do not match the exact word choice of Cavendish, and this mistake has been pointed out by several authors. Cavendish's stated goal was to measure the Earth's density.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: The first time that the constant got this name was in 1873, almost 100 years after the Cavendish experiment. Cavendish's results also give the Earth's mass.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Cavendish's electrical and chemical experiments, like those on heat, had begun while he lived with his father in a laboratory in their London house. Lord Charles Cavendish died in 1783, leaving almost all of his very substantial estate to Henry. Like his theory of heat, Cavendish's comprehensive theory of electricity was mathematical in form and was based on precise quantitative experiments. Working with his colleague, Timothy Lane, he created an artificial torpedo fish that could dispense electric shocks to show that the source of shock from these fish was electricity. He published an early version of his theory of electricity in 1771, based on an expansive electrical fluid that exerted pressure. He demonstrated that if the intensity of electric force were inversely proportional to distance, then the electric fluid more than that needed for electrical neutrality would lie on the outer surface of an electrified sphere; then he confirmed this experimentally. Cavendish continued to work on electricity after this initial paper, but he published no more on the subject.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Cavendish wrote papers on electrical topics for the Royal Society but the bulk of his electrical experiments did not become known until they were collected and published by James Clerk Maxwell a century later, in 1879, long after other scientists had been credited with the same results. Cavendish's electrical papers from the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London" have been reprinted, together with most of his electrical manuscripts, in "The Scientific Papers of the Honourable Henry Cavendish, F.R.S." (1921). According to the 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, among Cavendish's discoveries were the concept of electric potential (which he called the "degree of electrification"), an early unit of capacitance (that of a sphere one inch in diameter), the formula for the capacitance of a plate capacitor, the concept of the dielectric constant of a material, the relationship between electric potential and current (now called Ohm's Law) (1781), laws for the division of current in parallel circuits (now attributed to Charles Wheatstone), and the inverse square law of variation of electric force with distance, now called Coulomb's Law.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Cavendish died at Clapham on 24 February 1810 (as one of the wealthiest men in Britain) and was buried, along with many of his ancestors, in the church that is now Derby Cathedral. The road he used to live on in Derby has been named after him. The University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory was endowed by one of Cavendish's later relatives, William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire (Chancellor of the University from 1861 to 1891).


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Cavendish inherited two fortunes that were so large that Jean Baptiste Biot called him "the richest of all the savants and the most knowledgeable of the rich". At his death, Cavendish was the largest depositor in the Bank of England. He was a shy man who was uncomfortable in society and avoided it when he could. He could speak to only one person at a time, and only if the person were known to him and male. He conversed little, always dressed in an old-fashioned suit, and developed no known deep personal attachments outside his family. Cavendish was taciturn and solitary and regarded by many as eccentric. He communicated with his female servants only by notes. By one account, Cavendish had a back staircase added to his house to avoid encountering his housekeeper, because he was especially shy of women. The contemporary accounts of his personality have led some modern commentators, such as Oliver Sacks, to speculate that he had Asperger syndrome, a form of autism.


title: Henry Cavendish

text: His only social outlet was the Royal Society Club, whose members dined together before weekly meetings. Cavendish seldom missed these meetings, and was profoundly respected by his contemporaries. However, his shyness made those who "sought his views... speak as if into vacancy. If their remarks were...worthy, they might receive a mumbled reply, but more often than not they would hear a peeved squeak (his voice appears to have been high-pitched) and turn to find an actual vacancy and the sight of Cavendish fleeing to find a more peaceful corner". Cavendish's religious views were also considered eccentric for his time. He was considered to be agnostic. As his biographer, George Wilson, comments, "As to Cavendish's religion, he was nothing at all."


title: Henry Cavendish

text: The arrangement of his residence reserved only a fraction of space for personal comfort as his library was detached, the upper rooms and lawn were for astronomical observation and his drawingroom was a laboratory with a forge in an adjoining room. He also enjoyed collecting fine furniture, exemplified by his purchase of a set of "ten inlaid satinwood chairs with matching cabriole legged sofa".


title: Henry Cavendish

text: Because of his asocial and secretive behaviour, Cavendish often avoided publishing his work, and much of his findings were not told even to his fellow scientists. In the late nineteenth century, long after his death, James Clerk Maxwell looked through Cavendish's papers and found observations and results for which others had been given credit. Examples of what was included in Cavendish's discoveries or anticipations were Richter's law of reciprocal proportions, Ohm's law, Dalton's law of partial pressures, principles of electrical conductivity (including Coulomb's law), and Charles's Law of gases. A manuscript "Heat", tentatively dated between 1783 and 1790, describes a "mechanical theory of heat". Hitherto unknown, the manuscript was analysed in the early 21st century. Historian of science Russell McCormmach proposed that "Heat" is the only 18th-century work prefiguring thermodynamics. Theoretical physicist Dietrich Belitz concluded that in this work Cavendish "got the nature of heat essentially right".


title: Henry Cavendish

text: As Cavendish performed his famous density of the Earth experiment in an outbuilding in the garden of his Clapham Common estate, his neighbours would point out the building and tell their children that it was where the world was weighed. In honour of Henry Cavendish's achievements and due to an endowment granted by Henry's relative William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire, the University of Cambridge's physics laboratory was named the Cavendish Laboratory by Maxwell, the first Cavendish Professor of Physics and an admirer of Cavendish's work.


title: Belarusian involvement in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

text: Belarus, a close ally of Russia, has supported its eastern neighbour in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Before the start of the offensive, Belarus allowed the Russian Armed Forces to perform weeks-long military drills on its territory; however, the Russian troops did not exit the country after they were supposed to finish. Belarus allowed Russia to stage part of the invasion from its territory, giving Russia the shortest possible land route to Ukraine's capital, Kyiv.


text: Belarus initially denied involvement with the conflict, but has since admitted to allowing Russian missile launchers stationed on its territory to shoot at Ukrainian targets. Several reports emerged among the Belarusian opposition and Ukrainian military that Belarusian troops were in Ukraine fighting together with Russians, but Belarus's leader Aleksander Lukashenko dismissed them and said that the Belarusian Armed Forces would not participate directly in the conflict.


text: The involvement of Belarus was condemned in Western countries, with the European Union, the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan imposing sanctions against Belarus. According to Chatham House, Belarus's participation in the military conflict is unpopular among the general population; protests were held on 27 February, the day of the constitutional referendum which asked to revoke Belarus's non-nuclear country status, but were quickly dispersed. Several hackers affiliated with the Belarusian opposition, the Ukrainian military or with Anonymous have targeted Belarusian government agencies as well as the country's critical infrastructure, with the aim of disrupting the Russian war effort in Belarus.


text: Belarus is located to the north of Ukraine, with which it shares a -long border. Its proximity to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv is considered to be of major strategic value. Both modern states were created in the aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917 in the form of the Belarusian Democratic Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic, which following Soviet conquest of these territories were reestablished as the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs in 1919 before unifying with Soviet Russia to form the Soviet Union in 1922. The current borders were established after World War II when the Soviet Union acquired western parts of Belarus and Ukraine from interwar Poland and Hungary and have remained the same since, even once the two republics became independent countries in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.


text: In January and February 2022, Russian troops came into Belarus to participate in military drills. On 16 February, Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Makei claimed that Russian soldiers would leave Belarus after training ended, a statement later rejected by the Ministry of Defense, who claimed that they would remain "for an unknown period of time". The number of Russian troops that would remain in Belarus was estimated to be at around 30,000. It was also speculated that Belarus could host Russian nuclear weaponry.


text: The former version of the Constitution of Belarus stipulated the country was neutral. However, Belarus held a constitutional referendum on 27 February, which was declared to have passed with 65% support. As one of the changes, Belarus revoked its neutral and non-nuclear status. Lukashenko later clarified that he would request Russia to bring nuclear weapons if NATO moved to bring them to Poland or Lithuania, the country's western neighbours.


text: In the initial stages of the military conflict, Belarus lent its territory to Russian soldiers to attack Ukraine, but did not appear to have sent its own soldiers into the conflict. On the day of invasion, the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine reported about Russian troops trying to break through the Belarus-Ukraine border at the Vilcha border crossing, and a helicopter without identification marks attacking a bridge near Slavutych. CNN published a video showing tanks entering Ukraine through the Senkivka border crossing, on the tripoint with Russia. Also on that day, Chernobyl, together with the nearby former nuclear power plant, was seized after Russian troops entered Ukraine from Belarus via the unpopulated Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.


text: Belarus also allowed Russia full access to its military airbases for Russian military aircraft to launch aircraft and its army installations to shoot artillery and missiles from its territory towards its southern neighbour, or to cross its border southbound. Already on 24 February, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief reported that four ballistic missiles were launched from Belarus towards the southwest Ukraine. Two days later, Maxar Technologies published satellite images with 150 helicopters and hundreds of ground vehicles stationed near Khoyniki, some from the Ukrainian border, with 90 helicopters using a local straight road as a temporary airbase. Belarusian media and Telegram channels also circulated numerous videos and photos showing movement of Russian armored vehicles and helicopters in southern Belarus. Three days later, the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communication reported that Zhytomyr Airport was bombed by the missiles launched from the territory of Belarus. On 8 March, ImageSat International published satellite images of three missile launchers (possibly Russian 9K720 Iskander) in the field near Kalinkavichy (southeastern Belarus), and new planes (Russian A-50 or A-100) and Mi-26 heavy helicopters at Baranavichy air base.


text: Eventually, reports of Belarusian troops in Ukraine started to appear. On 28 February, Belarusian opposition media outlet "Charter 97" claimed that some Belarusian soldiers were among the wounded and killed invasion troops in Ukraine, citing anonymous Belarusian and Ukrainian sources. On 1 March, a Ukrainian senior military official said to the public broadcaster Suspilne that Belarusian soldiers had been spotted on the ground in Chernihiv Oblast since 27 February and that they were moving from Horodnia towards Chernihiv, the capital of the northernmost region of Ukraine; however, the Office of the President could not confirm the reports. On 6 March, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, said that the Belarusian army had not taken part in the invasion thus far, stating that earlier claims of Belarusian involvement were based on Russian attempts to project the image of Belarusian aggression. There was no independent confirmation.


text: Russian troops wounded in Ukraine were reportedly treated by Belarusian and Russian doctors at hospitals in Homiel and in other cities of Homiel Region. Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine were reported to be placed in morgues in the Homiel Region. On 13 March, Ukrainian media reported that treatment of wounded Russian soldiers in Belarusian hospitals led to the exhaustion of all blood reserves made for soldiers, and doctors started to use reserves for the civil population of Belarus. It was also reported that Belarusians were encouraged to donate blood.


text: According to the "Charter 97" news channel, reporting on 5 and 6 March 2022, most low-ranked Belarusian soldiers were opposed to participating in the invasion of Ukraine. "Charter 97" and its chief editor, Natalya Radina, also stated that Belarusian officers reported to their seniors that they would risk mutiny or mass surrender if they took their units into Ukraine.


text: On 10 March, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov claimed that the invasion from Belarus was a "backstab", unlike other directions of Russian invasion which were foreseen.


text: On 10 March, two Belarusian truck drivers were killed in Korosten in northern Ukraine during an aerial bombardment. The planes were presumably based in Belarus. On the same day, an unidentified Russian plane crashed near Luninets Air Base in Belarus (the pilots ejected successfully). The Ukrainian media outlet Obozrevatel claimed that the plane was shot over Ukraine and failed to reach the airbase in Belarus.


text: On 11 March, Ukrainian officials accused Russia of conducting airstrikes on Belarusian settlements from Ukrainian airspace in an attempt to force Belarus more directly into the hostilities. NATO intelligence also indicated that Russian jets have taken off from Belarus, presumably from Belarusian airbases, to subsequently enter Ukraine from Belarusian airspace; CNN described this as Belarus being used as a "springboard" for air attacks into northern Ukraine.


text: On 17 March, the open-source investigators MotolkoHelp reported that more Russian Iskander missiles were deployed at the Machulishchy air base and air-defense systems were seen on the territory of Belarus, such as Pantsir-S1 in the Minsk region and near the town of Mazyr and S-400 at Baranavichy. According to MotolkoHelp, Belarusian soldiers were ordered to do the "dirty job" for the Russian forces, such as repairing damaged hardware and cleaning vehicles of dirt and human remains.


text: On multiple occasions, NATO, US, and/or Ukrainian officials/authorities have issued warnings that Belarus may imminently enter the war to assist Russia, including after the 11 March accusations of a Russian-initiated false flag attack on Belarusian border settlements. On 22 March, a 'senior NATO intelligence official' stated that Belarus is "preparing the environment to justify a Belarusian offensive against Ukraine," though the decision to join the war had not been made yet.


text: Russian soldiers who returned to Belarus tried to sell the goods looted in Ukraine or send them to Russia. On 2 April 2022, Ukrainian intelligence reported that Russian soldiers made a "bazaar" in Naroulia to sell the goods (washing machines, refrigerators, cars, bicycles, dishes, carpets, works of art, jewelry, toys, cosmetics, etc.). On 4 April, Belarusian journalists published a 3-hour footage of Russian soldiers drawing up documents to send large amount of goods in a postal service in Mazyr (one of them had the badge of the 56th Guards Air Assault Brigade). Russian soldiers also tried to sell goods to Belarusians via the Internet.


text: On 10 October, Lukashenko ordered Belarusian troops to join Russian troops near Ukraine, claiming Kyiv posed a clear threat to Belarus, and stated "if they touch one metre of our territory then the Crimean Bridge will seem to them like a walk in the park."


text: Legal scholars have written that by aiding the Russian invasion, Belarus is complicit in the invasion by violating the international prohibition against "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state" of the UN Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2(4). And it is guilty of aggression according to the United Nations' definition, by "allowing its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State for perpetrating an act of aggression".


text: But as Belarusian forces have not directly participated, the state is not a party to the international armed conflict, and not liable for violations of international human-rights law by Russian forces.


text: According to Chatham House, 79% of Belarusians think that the death of Belarusian soldiers during the war between Russia and Ukraine is unacceptable, and more than 50% thought that Belarus should remain neutral. Participants of the survey, among other questions, were asked "What should Belarus have done after the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine?". 33% expressed their support for Russian actions (including 3% being in favor of Belarus taking part in the conflict on the side of Russia and 30% against), 25% supported complete neutrality and expulsion of all foreign troops from Belarusian territory, 21% were unsure and 20% supported Ukraine (including 1% being in favor of Belarus taking part in the conflict on the side of Ukraine and 19% against). Thus, at least 74% of Belarusians, regardless of their political stances, had a negative attitude towards any Belarusian involvement in the war.


text: It is believed that “a deployment of Belarusian soldiers in a fully-fledged war would represent a radical break with Lukashenka's cornerstone ideology of peace and stability [and raise] the question of Lukashenka's support from a critical part of Belarusian society that thus far had been hesitant to openly oppose the regime.”


text: According to Rosemary Thomas (former British Ambassador in Minsk between 2009 and 2012) "Belarusian territory had (the) highest level of slaughter during WW2. They know what's it's about. Ordinary Belarusians see Ukraine as (a) brother nation. They don't want war at all but ESPECIALLY not with Ukraine."


text: According to Julie D. Fisher, U.S. Special Envoy for Belarus, Ambassador since 2020, it is obvious that “Belarusians do not want their soldiers to fight, Russian troops to invade Ukraine from Belarus, Russian soldiers to stay in Belarus. The Belarusian people do not want decisions to be made for them from abroad".


text: Belarusian exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya condemned Lukashenko for participating in the invasion and expressed her belief that “Ukraine will win this war”. She also suggested that Lukashenko is no longer in control of the Belarusian military. Tsikhanouskaya supports Volodymyr Zelenskyy's calls to close the skies over Ukraine. Tsikhanouskaya declared that any orders of Belarusian military commanders to join the war on the Russian side would be criminal and such commanders would be prosecuted by military tribunals; she urged Belarusian soldiers to disobey such illegal orders.


text: Another opposition leader, Pavel Latushka called for similar sanctions and restrictions to be introduced against Lukashenko as against Putin: “Rockets were also fired at Ukraine from the territory of Belarus, and Lukashenko is the same aggressor as Putin”. He also called for recognising Belarus as a territory temporarily occupied by Russia because the Belarusian regime had lost its independence in decision making and had no control over the territory of Belarus anymore.


text: Invonka Survilla, President of the Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic sent a public letter to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which she expressed support for the Ukrainian people in their struggle for democracy, independence and European future. She also asked Zelenskyy not to identify Belarusians with the illegitimate regime of Lukashenko and to request Ukrainian officials and media “to cease the unjustified harassment and insults of Belarusians, direct association of the Belarusian people with the dictator and disparaging of the efforts of Belarusians in their long struggle against Lukashenko's regime" because “there can be no collective responsibility and collective guilt in [the current political] situation [in Belarus]”.


text: On 18 April 2022, Survilla addressed Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine and confirmed that they were also fighting for the independence of Belarus.


text: Belarusian opposition journalists claimed that the actions of the Belarusian government could be treated as aggression according to article 3 (section "f") of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 ("The action of a State in allowing its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State for perpetration an act of aggression against a third State <...> ...qualify as an act of aggression").


text: Belarusian Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich called Lukashenka's actions over Ukraine a 'crime'. She added that if Belarusian troops are sent to Ukraine by Lukashenka to assist Russia to fight against Ukrainian forces "heroism for them will be not to shoot." She also said that Russia's war against Ukraine is a worse evil than World War II and that Ukrainians and Belarusians fighting against Putin in this war for freedom are heroes.


text: Another Belarusian writer, Alhierd Baharevich declared that “we have the same enemy: the Belarusians, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, and even the Russians. And this enemy is Putin's empire, Putinism, Putin's fascism!”


text: More than 80 representatives of the Belarusian film industry publicly condemned Russia's military aggression against Ukraine.


text: Belarusian tennis star Victoria Azarenka “declare[d] her dismay and great sadness at the events” in Ukraine.


text: Former Belarusian Olympic swimmer Aliaksandra Herasimenia also stated her opposition to the Belarusian government’s involvement in the war: “Ukraine has never been our enemy, it is our fraternal people.”


text: Despite very tight security measures imposed by Lukashenka's regime, protests against the invasion were held in cities across Belarus on 27 February, the day of voting on the changes to the Belarusian constitution, during which 800 people were detained, according to Ministry of Internal Affairs of Belarus.


text: Belarusian activists disrupted work of the Belarusian Railway (transports Russian military trains) destroying two control points of semaphore signals and railroad switches, organizing a short circuit of the signaling system near Mahilioŭ. Ministry of internal affairs of Belarus called these acts "terrorist attacks" and accused opposition figures Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Pavel Latushko of inspiring them. On 2 March, hacktivists damaged network infrastructure of the Belarusian Railway. On 3 March The Jerusalem Post reported that the General prosecutor had opened an investigation on sabotage. There have been numerous acts of sabotage.


text: By 9 March 2022, at least eight people were arrested on suspicion of disrupting the movement of Russian military trains in Belarus. The acts of sabotage prompted the Belarusian authorities to instruct a special military division to patrol the railways in plain clothes.


text: On 30 March 2022, the police wounded three men aged 27 and 28 years from Babrujsk while detaining them for having allegedly damaged railways equipment near Asipovichy.


text: By 13 April 2022, seven criminal cases were instituted for the dissemination of the information on movement of Russian military equipment in Homiel region.


text: Based on data from the Belarusian Interior Ministry. Most common form of damage is setting fire to the signalling equipment. This disrupts the lights on the railway system, reducing the train speed down to 20-15 km/h. A married couple has also set fire to the logs of military equipment kept by the railways. Other act of sabotage have involved the railways workers themselves, as well as hackers attacking the computer system. Deputy Belarus Interior Minister has threatened to kill such individuals, in a statement in early March. Shots were fired at people attempting to set fire to the signal box, in late March.


text: According to Oleksiy Arestovich, adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine on strategic communications in the field of national security and defence, “Belarusian partisans managed to damage the Belarusian railways... Seriously damaged, and made life difficult for the Russian troops.”


text: On 21 April 2022, eleven people accused of acts of sabotage were recognized political prisoners by the human rights community of Belarus.


text: On 23 April 2022, "The Washington Post" wrote about a clandestine Belarusian network of railway workers and dissidents who helped to stop Russia’s assault on Kyiv.


text: In Ukraine, Belarusians have created a separate battalion named after Kastuś Kalinoŭski to defend Kyiv.


text: It is reported that more than 200 Belarusian citizens have joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine to defend Ukraine from the Russian invasion, with another 300 volunteers from Belarus came through Poland.


text: Pavel Shurmei, a former Belarusian Olympic rower and world record holder, declared his intention to fight for Ukraine as a volunteer.


text: Another Belarusian volunteer battalion fighting for Ukraine, apart of the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Battalion, is known as the Pahonia Regiment. Several other Belarusian military units are fighting for Ukraine as well.


text: On 4 March 2022, it was reported that Illia "Licvin" was the first Belarusian volunteer to be killed in action, during heavy fighting near the Ukrainian city of Bucha.


text: On 13 March 2022 it was reported that a member of Kastuś Kalinoŭski Battalion nicknamed “Tur” (real name Aliaksiej Skoblia) was killed in action near Kyiv when his unit was ambushed. On 13 April 2022, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy posthumously awarded Skoblia the title of "Hero of Ukraine" - "for personal courage and heroism in defending the state sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, loyalty to the military oath."


text: Dzmitryj Rubašeŭski (“Hans”) became the fourth Belarusian who died defending Ukraine. He came to fight for Ukraine in 2015, in 2019 he was seriously wounded and lost his eye.


text: In the end of April 2022 Kanstancin Dziubajla ("Dranik") was killed while fighting for Ukraine in Donetsk Oblast.


text: On 16 May 2022, Paval “Volat”, the commander of a detachment of Kastuś Kalinoŭski Battalion was mortally wounded during a fight for a Ukrainian village and died on the way to hospital.


text: Belarusians living outside Belarus and Ukraine express their solidarity with the Ukrainian people by attending anti-war rallies, helping organisations dealing with Ukrainian refugees, collecting and delivering financial and humanitarian aid as well as helping Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine. Several organisations in the UK established the Belarusians in Britain for Ukraine, an umbrella initiative to co-ordinate their response.


text: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko initially denied involvement of the Belarusian military in the conflict at the time, and the Belarusian Ministry of Defense did not comment on the reports of missiles launched from Belarus hitting any Ukrainian targets. On 27 February, however, Alexander Lukashenko acknowledged that projectiles were launched by Russia from Belarus against Ukraine, but commented this was a "forced step". Lukashenko also announced that he would not order Belarusian troops to join the Russians fighting in Ukraine, despite reports they already were in Ukraine, nevertheless he decided to move more forces to the Ukrainian border on 1 March.


text: Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya condemned Lukashenko for participating in the invasion. Belarusian opposition journalists claimed that the actions of the Belarusian government could be treated as aggression according to article 3 (section "f") of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 (""The action of a State in allowing its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State for perpetration an act of aggression against a third State [...]... qualify as an act of aggression""). Protests against the invasion were held in cities across Belarus on 27 February, the day of voting on the changes to the Belarusian constitution, during which 800 people were detained, according to Ministry of Internal Affairs of Belarus.


text: Belarusian activists disrupted work of the Belarusian Railway (transports Russian military trains) destroying two control points of semaphore signals and railroad switches, organizing a short circuit of the signaling system near Mahilioŭ. Ministry of internal affairs of Belarus called these acts "terrorist attacks" and accused opposition figures Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Pavel Latushko of inspiring them. On 2 March, hacktivists damaged network infrastructure of the Belarusian Railway. On 3 March "The Jerusalem Post" reported that the General prosecutor had opened an investigation on sabotage.


text: The clampdown of the 2020–2021 protests severely reduced the Christian communities' ability to express their position independently of the government. By 2022, the pro-democratic public activity of Belarusian Christians had concentrated around the Christian Vision group most members of which were based abroad. On the day of the invasion, the group issued a statement condemning the aggression and the use of the Belarusian territory by the Russian army, expressing solidarity with Ukraine and calling on Belarusian soldiers to not participate in the war.


text: Initially, the leadership of all main Belarusian Christian denomination avoided referring to those events as an invasion or war. The head of the Belarusian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan , did not condemn the invasion but called the sides "to make steps to each other". An Orthodox theologian, Natallia Vasilevich, criticised his stance. Other Orthodox bishops remained silent.


text: The initial announcement of the Conference of the Catholic Bishops in Belarus, published on 26 February, referred to the "conflict in Ukraine". In response to the laity's strong criticism, the episcopal conference gathered for an extraordinary meeting on 3 March. In its statement, the bishops expressed a concern about the political conflict becoming a war and called not to allow Belarus to take part in it. On 9 March, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church thanked Belarusian bishops for their "fraternal solidarity".


text: On 2 March, four bishops of Evangelical denominations called on their believers for a three-day fasting and prayer for stopping the war in Ukraine. They mentioned that Belarus was also involved in it.


text: On 9 March, the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations petitioned Belarusian religious leaders "to use their authority to prevent the involvement of the Belarusian army in the war against Ukraine".


text: Prayers for Ukraine and peace in Ukraine took place is some Catholic parishes and convents. Several Eastern Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant priests and pastors publicly protested against the war. An Orthodox priest, Mikhail Maruha, was detained during a rally against the Russian invasion of Ukraine near the Minsk railway station on 28 February and sentenced to a 13-day arrest.


text: On 3 March, the Mothers’ Union called mothers of soldiers to come to the Belarusian Orthodox cathedral in Minsk to pray for an end to Russia's aggression and Belarus abstaining from taking part. Nearly 100 mothers joined the action, at least four women and two journalists were detained.


text: On 27 February, a Greek Catholic parish in London addressed Ukrainian brethren expressing solidarity with the people of Ukraine and the wish for their victory to inspire Belarusians to end the Russian occupation of their country.


text: On 26 February, the head of State Border Guard Service of Ukraine Serhii Deyneko wrote an official letter to chief of the State Border Committee of Belarus Anatoly Lappo, accusing his organization of helping Russia to invade Ukraine from the north. Some MPs of Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, have called to break diplomatic ties with its northerly neighbour.


text: A large number of internet hackers, in particular connected to a decentralised collective called Anonymous and the Ukrainian IT Army, launched numerous cyberattacks against Belarusian government agencies and the state railway. In response to the invasion, Anonymous leaked some 200 gigabytes of correspondence of Belarusian private defence contractor Tetraedr.


text: Belarus's assistance of Russia's invasion drew condemnation from Western powers. On the day of invasion, the US Treasury issued sanctions against Belarus for its involvement in the Russian invasion. Several military industrial companies and generals were sanctioned. On 26 February, Japan considered issuing similar sanctions, which it introduced two days later.


text: The European Union issued the first set of sanctions against Belarus - the first was introduced on 27 February, which banned certain categories of Belarusian items in the EU, including timber, steel, mineral fuels and tobacco. After the Lithuanian prime minister proposed disconnecting Belarus from SWIFT, the European Union, which does not recognise Lukashenko as the legitimate President of Belarus, started to plan an extension of the sanctions already issued against Russian entities and top officials to its ally.


text: On 2 March 2022, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to reprimand Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and demanded that Moscow stop fighting and withdraw its military forces, an action that aims to diplomatically isolate Russia at the world body. 141 of the Assembly's 193 members voted for the resolution, 35 including China abstained and 5 countries including Russia and Belarus voted against the document. The paragraph 10 of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution of 2 March 2022 confirmed the involvement of Belarus in unlawful use of force against Ukraine.


title: Date of Easter

text: As a moveable feast, the date of Easter is determined in each year through a calculation known as (). Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is the first full moon on or after 21 March (a fixed approximation of the March equinox). Determining this date in advance requires a correlation between the lunar months and the solar year, while also accounting for the month, date, and weekday of the Julian or Gregorian calendar. The complexity of the algorithm arises because of the desire to associate the date of Easter with the date of the Jewish feast of Passover which, Christians believe, is when Jesus was crucified.


title: Date of Easter

text: It was originally feasible for the entire Christian Church to receive the date of Easter each year through an annual announcement by the Pope. By the early third century, however, communications in the Roman Empire had deteriorated to the point that the church put great value in a system that would allow the clergy to determine the date for themselves, independently yet consistently. Additionally, the church wished to eliminate dependencies on the Hebrew calendar, by deriving the date for Easter directly from the March equinox.


title: Date of Easter

text: In "The Reckoning of Time" (725), Bede uses as a general term for any sort of calculation, although he refers to the Easter cycles of Theophilus as a "Paschal ." By the end of the 8th century, came to refer specifically to the calculation of time.


title: Date of Easter

text: The calculations produce different results depending on whether the Julian calendar or the Gregorian calendar is used. For this reason, the Catholic Church and Protestant churches (which follow the Gregorian calendar) celebrate Easter on a different date from that of the Eastern Orthodox Churches (which follow the Julian calendar). It was the drift of 21 March from the observed equinox that led to the Gregorian reform of the calendar, to bring them back into line.


title: Date of Easter

text: Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus, which is believed to have occurred on the third day (inclusive) after Passover. In the Hebrew calendar, Passover occurs on the 14th day of Nisan. Nisan is the first month of spring in the northern hemisphere, with the 14th corresponding to a full moon. Additionally, by the 2nd century, many Christians had chosen to observe Easter only on a Sunday. The Hebrew calendar is a lunisolar one and does not have a simple relationship with the Christian calendars: it resynchronizes with the solar year by intercalating a leap month every two or three years, before the lunar new year on 1 Nisan. Later the Jews adopted the Metonic cycle to predict future intercalations.


title: Date of Easter

text: A possible consequence of this intercalation is that 14 Nisan may occur before the equinox, which some third-century Christians considered unacceptable, although this cannot happen in the fixed calendar currently in use. Consequently, they decided to separate the dating of Easter from the Hebrew calendar. To do so, it was necessary to identify the first full moon following the March equinox. By the time of the First Council of Nicaea, the Church of Alexandria had designated 21 March as an ecclesiastical date for the equinox, irrespective of actual astronomical observation. In 395, Theophilus published a table of future dates for Easter, validating the Alexandrian criteria. Thereafter, the would be the procedure of determining the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon falling on or after 21 March.


title: Date of Easter

text: The earliest known Roman tables were devised in 222 by Hippolytus of Rome based on eight-year cycles. Then 84-year tables were introduced in Rome by Augustalis near the end of the 3rd century.


title: Date of Easter

text: Although a process based on the 19-year Metonic cycle was first proposed by Bishop Anatolius of Laodicea around 277, the concept did not fully take hold until the Alexandrian method became authoritative in the late 4th century.


title: Date of Easter

text: The Alexandrian was converted from the Alexandrian calendar into the Julian calendar in Alexandria around 440, which resulted in a Paschal table (attributed to pope Cyril of Alexandria) covering the years 437 to 531. This Paschal table was the source which inspired Dionysius Exiguus, who worked in Rome from about 500 to about 540, to construct a continuation of it in the form of his famous Paschal table covering the years 532 to 616. Dionysius introduced the Christian Era (counting years from the Incarnation of Christ) by publishing this new Easter table in 525.


title: Date of Easter

text: A modified 84-year cycle was adopted in Rome during the first half of the 4th century. Victorius of Aquitaine tried to adapt the Alexandrian method to Roman rules in 457 in the form of a 532-year table, but he introduced serious errors. These Victorian tables were used in Gaul (now France) and Spain until they were displaced by Dionysian tables at the end of the 8th century.


title: Date of Easter

text: The tables of Dionysius and Victorius conflicted with those traditionally used in the British Isles. The British tables used an 84-year cycle, but an error made the full moons fall progressively too early. The discrepancy led to a report that Queen Eanflæd, on the Dionysian system fasted on her Palm Sunday while her husband Oswiu, king of Northumbria, feasted on his Easter Sunday.


title: Date of Easter

text: As a result of the Irish Synod of Magh-Lene in 630, the southern Irish began to use the Dionysian tables, and the northern English followed suit after the Synod of Whitby in 664.


title: Date of Easter

text: The Dionysian reckoning was fully described by Bede in 725. It may have been adopted by Charlemagne for the Frankish Church as early as 782 from Alcuin, a follower of Bede. The Dionysian/Bedan remained in use in western Europe until the Gregorian calendar reform, and remains in use in most Eastern Churches, including the vast majority of Eastern Orthodox Churches and Non-Chalcedonian Churches. The only Eastern Orthodox church which does not follow the system is the Finnish Orthodox Church, which uses the Gregorian.


title: Date of Easter

text: Having deviated from the Alexandrians during the 6th century, churches beyond the eastern frontier of the former Byzantine Empire, including the Assyrian Church of the East, now celebrate Easter on different dates from Eastern Orthodox Churches four times every 532 years.


title: Date of Easter

text: Apart from these churches on the eastern fringes of the Roman empire, by the tenth century all had adopted the Alexandrian Easter, which still placed the vernal equinox on 21 March, although Bede had already noted its drift in 725 it had drifted even further by the 16th century. Worse, the reckoned Moon that was used to compute Easter was fixed to the Julian year by the 19-year cycle. That approximation built up an error of one day every 310 years, so by the 16th century the lunar calendar was out of phase with the real Moon by four days. The Gregorian Easter has been used since 1583 by the Roman Catholic Church and was adopted by most Protestant churches between 1753 and 1845.


title: Date of Easter

text: German Protestant states used an astronomical Easter between 1700 and 1776, based on the "Rudolphine Tables" of Johannes Kepler, which were in turn based on astronomical positions of the Sun and Moon observed by Tycho Brahe at his Uraniborg observatory on the island of Ven, while Sweden used it from 1739 to 1844. This astronomical Easter was the Sunday after the full moon instant that was after the vernal equinox instant using Uraniborg time . However, it was delayed one week if that Sunday was the Jewish date Nisan15, the first day of Passover week, calculated according to modern Jewish methods. This Nisan15 rule affected two Swedish years, 1778 and 1798, that instead of being one week before the Gregorian Easter were delayed one week so they were on the same Sunday as the Gregorian Easter. Germany's astronomical Easter was one week before the Gregorian Easter in 1724 and 1744. Sweden's astronomical Easter was one week before the Gregorian Easter in 1744, but one week after it in 1805, 1811, 1818, 1825, and 1829.


title: Date of Easter

text: Two modern astronomical Easters were proposed but never used by any Church. The first was proposed as part of the Revised Julian calendar at a Synod in Constantinople in 1923 and the second was proposed by a 1997 World Council of Churches Consultation in Aleppo in 1997. Both used the same rule as the German and Swedish versions but used modern astronomical calculations and Jerusalem time without the Nisan15 rule. The 1923 version would have placed the astronomical Easter one month before the Gregorian Easter in 1924, 1943, and 1962, but one week after it in 1927, 1954, and 1967. The 1997 version would have placed the astronomical Easter on the same Sunday as the Gregorian Easter for 2000–2025 except for 2019, when it would have been one month earlier.


title: Date of Easter

text: The Easter cycle groups days into lunar months, which are either 29 or 30 days long. There is an exception. The month ending in March normally has thirty days, but if 29 February of a leap year falls within it, it contains 31. As these groups are based on the lunar cycle, over the long term the average month in the lunar calendar is a very good approximation of the synodic month, which is days long. There are 12 synodic months in a lunar year, totaling either 354 or 355 days. The lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the calendar year, which is either 365 or 366 days long. These days by which the solar year exceeds the lunar year are called epacts (). It is necessary to add them to the day of the solar year to obtain the correct day in the lunar year. Whenever the epact reaches or exceeds 30, an extra intercalary month (or embolismic month) of 30 days must be inserted into the lunar calendar: then 30 must be subtracted from the epact. Charles Wheatly provides the detail:


title: Date of Easter

text: Thus the lunar month took the name of the Julian month in which it ended. The nineteen-year Metonic cycle assumes that 19 tropical years are as long as 235 synodic months. So after 19 years the lunations should fall the same way in the solar years, and the epacts should repeat. However, over 19 years the epact increases by , not ; that is, 209 divided by 30 leaves a remainder of 29 instead of being a multiple of 30, and this is a problem if compensation is only done by adding months of 30 days. So after 19 years, the epact must be corrected by one day for the cycle to repeat. This is the so-called ("leap of the moon"). The Julian calendar handles it by reducing the length of the lunar month that begins on 1 July in the last year of the cycle to 29 days. This makes three successive 29-day months. The and the seven extra 30-day months were largely hidden by being located at the points where the Julian and lunar months begin at about the same time. The extra months commenced on 1 January (year 3), 2 September (year 5), 6 March (year 8), 3 January (year 11), 31 December (year 13), 1 September (year 16), and 5 March (year 19). The sequence number of the year in the 19-year cycle is called the "golden number", and is given by the formula


title: Date of Easter

text: That is, the year number "Y" in the Christian era is divided by 19, and the remainder plus 1 is the golden number, so a remainder of 0 indicating the golden number of 19.


title: Date of Easter

text: Cycles of 19 years are not all the same length, because they may have either four or five leap years. But a period of four cycles, 76 years, has a length of days (if it does not cross a century division). There are lunar months in this period, so the average length is 27759/940 or about 29.530851 days. (There are usual nominal 30-day lunar months and the same number of usual nominal 29-day months, but with 19 of these lengthened by a day on leap days, plus 24 intercalated months of 30 days and four intercalated months of 29 days.) Since this is longer than the true length of a synodic month, about 29.53059 days, the calculated Paschal full moon gets later and later compared to the astronomical full moon, unless a correction is made as in the Gregorian system (see below).


title: Date of Easter

text: The paschal or Easter-month is the first one in the year to have its fourteenth day (its formal full moon) on or after 21 March. Easter is the Sunday after its 14th day (or, saying the same thing, the Sunday within its third week). The paschal lunar month always begins on a date in the 29-day period from 8 March to 5 April inclusive. Its fourteenth day, therefore, always falls on a date between 21 March and 18 April inclusive, and the following Sunday then necessarily falls on a date in the range 22 March to 25 April inclusive. This is true of both the Western system (in the Gregorian calendar) and of the Eastern system (in the Julian calendar). In the solar calendar Easter is called a moveable feast since its date varies within a 35-day range. But in the lunar calendar, Easter is always the third Sunday in the paschal lunar month, and is no more "moveable" than any holiday that is fixed to a particular day of the week and week within a month, such as Thanksgiving.


title: Date of Easter

text: As reforming the was the primary motivation for the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, a corresponding methodology was introduced alongside the new calendar. The general method of working was given by Clavius in the Six Canons (1582), and a full explanation followed in his (1603).


title: Date of Easter

text: Easter Sunday is the Sunday following the paschal full moon date. The paschal full moon date is the ecclesiastical full moon date on or after 21 March. The Gregorian method derives paschal full moon dates by determining the epact for each year. The epact can have a value from * (0 or 30) to 29 days. It is the age of the moon in days (i.e. the lunar date) on 1 January reduced by one day. In his book "The Easter and the origins of the Christian era" Alden A Mosshammer incorrectly states "Theoretically, the epact 30 = 0 represents the new moon at its conjunction with the sun. The epact of 1 represents the theoretical first visibility of the first crescent of the moon. It is from that point as day one that the fourteenth day of the moon is counted." The fourteenth day of the lunar month is considered the day of the full moon. It is the day of the lunar month on which the moment of opposition ("full moon") is most likely to fall. The "new moon" is most likely to become visible (as a slender crescent in the western sky after sunset) on the first day of the lunar month. The conjunction of sun and moon ("new moon") is most likely to fall on the preceding day, which is day 29 of a "hollow" (29-day) month and day 30 of a "full" (30-day) month.


title: Date of Easter

text: Historically the paschal full moon date for a year was found from its sequence number in the Metonic cycle, called the golden number, which cycle repeats the lunar phase on January 1 every 19 years. This method was modified in the Gregorian reform because the tabular dates go out of sync with reality after about two centuries, but from the epact method, a simplified table can be constructed that has a validity of one to three centuries.


title: Date of Easter

text: As one can see, the date of the Paschal full moon in a particular year is either 11 days earlier than in the previous year or 19 days later, except that in year 1 of the cycle the date is only 18 days later (April 14 rather than April 15). In the Eastern system (see below), the Paschal full moon is usually four days later, but is 34 days later in five of the 19 years, and 5 days later in years 6 and 17 because in those years the Gregorian system puts the Paschal full moon a day earlier than it would normally be in order to keep Easter before April 26, as explained below. In AD2100 the difference will increase by a day.