title: Audi A2

text: The A2 still uses a contemporary unibody construction, with significant elements of space frame principles, and it is tagged by Audi as an 'Audi Space Frame' design. The outer panels of the body have little or no structural function – similarities exist with the original Renault Espace – and the space frame bears the forces working on the car. The frame uses casts and extrusions which are laser welded together to make the space frame. Improvements in shell stability, durability and stiffness, lower weight, and more interior space are results of its construction. "The A2, on the other hand, was designed as an aluminum car and the spaceframe has been optimized by parts consolidation, using large, cost-effective castings instead of aluminum stampings".


title: Audi A2

text: Unfortunately, the cost of working with aluminium, particularly with small production runs, meant that the A2 was more expensive than other cars in its sector, competing with the A-class and losing. Much of the high production cost was due to so many parts not being "off the shelf" and being specifically optimized for the A2.


title: Audi A2

text: From Autobild in 2003: "The A2 is not one of the models with the highest return on investment". The same article quotes the sales figures for 2002 as being 20,000 in Germany against 80,000 for the A-Class and "...lots of money for a car that is only 3.8m long."


title: Audi A2

text: Audi was the first manufacturer to try to incorporate lightweight building concepts using aluminium and associated alloys into a "mass market" vehicle. Previous efforts at using the Audi Space Frame were limited to the rather more expensive Audi A8. As a guide to the mass involved, the entire shell weighs so little that two people can easily pick it up, and the side panel over the doors including the A- and D-pillars weighs approximately . A 2002 model A2 with standard equipment has a mass of .


title: Audi A2

text: The A2 can thus be considered a trailblazer for various newer aluminium-based vehicles, such as the second generation Audi A8, the Audi TT, and Jaguar's recent X350 Jaguar XJ and 2006 Jaguar XK.


title: Audi A2

text: Parts of the A2 which are still made of steel include the bulkhead behind the front bumper (the "slam panel"), the wiper arm, standard A2 suspension components (the 3l ones are frequently of aluminium alloy), the rear brake drums and the exhaust system.


title: Audi A2

text: The A2 has a large interior space for the exterior dimensions, including a boot with of space when the rear seats are in place. This is significantly larger than the luggage space of the next model in Audi's range, the Audi A3. Due to the "sandwich"-type construction, similar again to that of the Renault Espace or the Mercedes A-Class, the floorpan has an upper and a lower portion. The space in the middle is used to house various components, such as the fuel tank and the engine's electronics. The rear passengers also benefit, as their foot space reaches into this sandwich space, creating a comfortable seating position even for tall rear seat passengers. This is in direct contrast to the comfort available on the rear bench of an A-Class. To improve the weight distribution of the vehicle, its battery is located inside the boot, under the floor.


title: Audi A2

text: The A2's interior was very upmarket in comparison with other superminis. In both the UK and Europe, there were several choices of seat material and colour, comprising the standard Cirrus cloth, optional Matrix cloth, optional Alcantara/leather, or full pearl Nappa leather seat coverings. Sport models received sport seats with electrically adjustable lumbar support as standard in jacquard satin cloth. Seat materials were available in a choice of red, blue, beige ("jive" or "twist", code 4QC), pale grey ("platinum", code EC3), dark grey ("swing", 24S) or black ("soul", 6PS). Individual options were also available such as vivid yellow, red or blue seats, steering wheels, gear lever, handbrake lever and door armrests. The color.storm models introduced in 2003 brought bright colours to both the outside and inside of the A2, including "papaya" orange. Soft touch materials are used on the doors and contact areas in the centre console, though they have a tendency to wear over time, especially on the climate control keys.


title: Audi A2

text: Quattro GmbH – as Audi Exclusive – were prepared to customise the A2 in the same ways that they would any other Audi. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of "Individual" painted cars is extremely small; among the several thousand German A2 owners represented in the A2-freun.de forum, only two individual cars have ever been noted. The colours available corresponded to the extended Volkswagen Group palette at the time—including any Volkswagen Group colour and many others too—but the option was expensive, at around €2000. A set of 10 A2s is said to have been created in Almond beige with orange color.storm interiors as dealer demonstrators and at least two of these have been seen on the used market in the past. It is impossible to document the existence of these vehicles, not least due to the lack of co-operation from the German authorities in terms of freely available, reliable, colour information, and that used-car websites are not archived.


title: Audi A2

text: The A2 had many innovative ideas, such as the space floor storage system which was a box that slotted in the rear passenger foot well, a rear cup holder which unclipped, and a double (false) floor boot where items could be hidden from thieves or where the space saver spare wheel could be stored. The warning triangle and first aid kit are stowed directly to the left of the boot opening. The toolkit was stored, depending on equipment, next to the battery. If space was needed for the navigation system and/or the Bose subwoofer, it was moved to the sandwich compartment in front of the right-front seat (driver on UK cars, passenger on LHD ones). The headrests also do not need to be removed from the rear seats when they are folded, and a four-seater can have the rear seats removed in a matter of seconds. The rear seat belts have a clip in the upper section of the c-pillar, so that when the seats are folded and returned to their normal position, the belts do not get tangled.


title: Audi A2

text: More examples of energy saving can be found in the glovebox light that only turns on when the lights are on and the freewheel pulley on the alternator belt, meaning that the alternator is only used when necessary. The climate compressor is also turned off when the ambient temperature drops below 5 °C.


title: Audi A2

text: The ECON function of the climate control (where fitted) also turns off the auxiliary heating or the compressor, depending on temperature. This functionality is unaffected by the presence of fuel-powered or electrical auxiliary heating.


title: Audi A2

text: The front of the car included an unusual design feature called the "Serviceklappe" in German – this translates to "service hatch" or "service panel". On early cars, this was a glossy black panel at the lower edge of the bonnet (hood), where the radiator grille would normally be sited. Behind it are the filling points for oil and screen wash fluid and the dipstick. Thanks to these features, the bonnet does not need to be raised often.


title: Audi A2

text: The bonnet was widely rumoured to be sealed – "Car and Driver" wrote: "...feature of the A2 that may foretell the future: the sealed hood". Actually, the bonnet is easily removed, being held in place by two twist-lock catches. The bonnet, weighing 8 kg, then comes away from the car altogether, unlike the usual hinged flip-up arrangement on most other cars. Due to the service hatch, the bonnet does not need to be removed frequently for access to the engine.


title: Audi A2

text: The service hatch is the most obvious indicator of the age of any particular A2. It was changed to matte black for the "color.storm" colour schemes, and for model year 2004 it acquired fake grille slats. However it can be changed easily, so it should not be taken as a reliable age indicator.


title: Audi A2

text: Very little else was changed externally during the life of the car. Colours and wheels designs were changed mildly during the production run. The only other external indicator of the age of the car is the windscreen wiper. Very early models have a traditional blade, but starting in model year 2002, newer cars have a "flex" version ("Aerotwin" from Bosch, model 760).


title: Audi A2

text: Audi also has a version of the A2 in its Neckarsulm plant which has been converted into a pickup truck by trainees – the "A2 Caddy". This was on public show for the first time at the A2-Club of Germany's annual meeting in Amberg, Germany, in August 2005. Pictures of the event are available on the German A2-freun.de site linked below.


title: Audi A2

text: Audi also released an S-line version in Germany as of late 2002, with 17" 9-spoke "RS4" style wheels (standard were 15"), sports seats with large side bolsters and lumbar support, special half-leather seat coverings with Pearl Nappa leather and Sprint cloth, leather handbrake handle, perforated leather gearstick and 3-spoke steering wheel and 10 mm lowered sports suspension. Additionally, the interior roof lining, the dashboard and carpets were black, the instrument faces titanium-coloured and an S-line badge was added to the rear doors. The driver information system and illuminated vanity mirrors for driver and passenger completed the package.


title: Audi A2

text: In the UK, the last Audi A2s (from early 2005 to June 2005) were badged as special edition models featuring a reduced price tag, digital climate control and a 'Concert II' radio with CD player as standard. They were the only models available in the UK at this time and were available with either the 1.4 petrol or 1.4 TDI engines. This special edition gave the A2 a final sales boost in the UK.


title: Audi A2

text: In October 2010, an A2 converted to electric power by Lekker Energie and DBM Energy completed an early morning drive from Munich to Berlin on a single charge. Upon arrival, Rainer Bruederle, Germany's Economics Minister, called the test drive a "world record."


title: Audi A2

text: The car was said to still have 18% of its charge remaining on arrival in Berlin and the average speed was reported as being 90 km/h (56 mph). The "kolibri" batteries used in the design are so compact that the vehicle retains its four seats and boot space. A production version would be possible. "The technology could be implemented today. It is up to industry to use this potential," commented Mirko Hannemann, the head of DBM.


title: Audi A2

text: The number of remaining A2s is decreasing over time. The aluminium chassis is frequently written off by insurers due to the relative dearth of "aluminium specialists" – for example one in all of Scotland – and the training and experience required to repair the shell. Welding is frequently required and aluminium is more difficult to weld than steel due to the lack of colour change when heated which acts as guide to temperature when welding steel. It is also usually welded with TIG welding which is a higher skill process than MIG welding that is commonly used with steel.


title: Audi A2

text: Other repair specialisations are subject to denial on the part of Audi both in the UK and Germany, especially when dealing with Open Sky. Certain dealerships, such as the mentioned Autohaus Rinner in Bad Tölz in southern Germany, have specialised in roof repairs and replacements.


title: Audi A2

text: The KBA ("Kraftfahrtbundesamt") released numbers on request and after payment to the German A2 club which indicate that around 70,000 A2s are registered in Germany as of end November 2010. Of those, less than 5,000 are 1.6 FSIs. This information was released on condition that it was not for publication, so the full statistics are only available to members. Colour information is not recorded.


title: Audi A2

text: The Audi A2 1.2 TDI had the lowest drag coefficient of any car in the world at the time of its launch. It was also one of the most economical and least polluting, only emitting 81 g/km (German emission standard D4) to 86 g/km (D3 emission standard) emissions. The Audi A2 3L reuses the engine and special gearbox developed for the equally efficient Volkswagen Lupo 1.2 TDI 3L.


title: Audi A2

text: Two versions of the car were available in Germany during its production run. The D4 version, which used only , was "standard." It had no power steering, air conditioning or other extras, with the only optional extra being body coloured door handles and wing mirrors. There were no optional extras because optional equipment adds weight and therefore reduces economy. It had a fixed rear seat cushion. The tested fuel economy was 2.88 L/100 km.


title: Audi A2

text: The second version, which was at least available in Germany, was a D3 version which was still capable of 3.0 L/100 km. This version had options for air conditioning, a winter package, and a comfort package, but was not available in all markets. Ordering these packages ensured power steering or spot lamps as part of a package. The OSS system was not available at all on the 3L.


title: Audi A2

text: Both versions had thinner glass, lighter seats, and 14" magnesium alloy wheels. The standard tyre fitment was 145/80 R14 T76 Bridgestone Ecopias or Continental Winter Tyres using very flat wheel covers to minimize turbulence. The engine block was also made from a light alloy, so even though it was a diesel, it weighed just .


title: Audi A2

text: The rear spoiler was reshaped, moved and extended through wind tunnel testing, and additional underbody panels were added to minimize drag to achieve a 0.25 cd figure.


title: Audi A2

text: The car also had an ECO mode. When engaged it limited the power to (excluding kick down) and programmed the transmission to change up at the most economical point. ECO mode also activated the start/stop function, a feature that was new to European cars at the time.


title: Audi A2

text: In ECO mode, the clutch was disengaged when the accelerator pedal was released for maximum economy, so the car freewheels as much as possible, with the clutch re-engaging as soon as the accelerator pedal or brake pedal is touched.


title: Audi A2

text: The 3L also has only 4 wheel bolts and finned alloy brake drums at the rear, along with many aluminum suspension components. An internal presentation from Audi appears to indicate that the complete shell of a 3L A2 weighs around less than that of a "normal" A2. The 3L has been noted on the Autobahn under non-scientific conditions to be faster at top speed than the standard A2, mainly as a result of the extremely long 5th gear ratio and the excellent aerodynamics.


title: Audi A2

text: At the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 2011, Audi exhibited an entirely electric concept car, the "A2 concept", previewing an expected new A2 production model. The superstructure made largely from aluminium, additional parts in Carbon Fibre-Reinforced Polymer, and other construction techniques restrain the weight to only 1,150 kg.


title: Audi A2

text: A lithium-ion battery placed between the floor holds 24 kWh of usable charge. An electric motor is transversely mounted at the front of the vehicle, the electric motor delivers through the front wheels and uses a single-speed transmission. The vehicle will also incorporate shift-by-wire, brake-by-wire and steer-by-wire contactless technology, and LED matrix technology for the headlights and tail lights.


title: Audi A2

text: In June 2012, the UK's "Car Magazine" reported that Audi had put the electric A2 project on hold indefinitely, following disappointing European sales of other EVs, like the Nissan Leaf & Mitsubishi i-MiEV, and a projected retail price of over €40,000.


title: Audi A2

text: It was reported that, according to the director of e-mobility and sustainability strategy at Audi of America, the A2 electric concept was not a developmental prototype with a test program, but a one-off concept car to be shown at auto shows.


title: Audi A2

text: The production A2 has been announced to be built on the MQB platform, and will feature 1.4-litre and 1.8-litre petrol engines (120 bhp – 178 bhp), 1.6-litre and 2.0 litre diesels (the 1.6 aimed to have less than 100g/km), and an electric/hybrid version.


title: Joey Slotnick

text: Joseph Slotnick (born October 2, 1968) is an American film actor and voice actor. He is known for roles in "Twister" (1996), "Hollow Man" (2000), "Elevator" (2011), "The Single Guy" (1995–1997), and "Nip/Tuck" (2003-2006).


title: Joey Slotnick

text: Slotnick was born in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from Chaparral High School in Las Vegas, Nevada. His film roles include computer industry pioneer Steve Wozniak in the film "Pirates of Silicon Valley", and a part in the 1996 blockbuster "Twister". In 2011 he completed the suspense film "Elevator", in which he plays one of several people trapped in a New York elevator with an evil presence. Additionally, he was on the cast of the television shows "Boston Public" in 2000–2001, "The Single Guy" from 1995–1997, and "Nip/Tuck" from 2003–2006.


title: Joey Slotnick

text: In 2009, Slotnick played Groucho Marx's role of Captain Jeffrey Spaulding in The Goodman Theatre's production of "Animal Crackers". The performance was nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award for best actor.


title: Joey Slotnick

text: Slotnick has logged several guest appearances on a number of popular television shows. He also does commercial work, ads for the NBA, 21st Century Insurance, Staples and Verizon Fios.


title: Peter Holm

text: Peter Holm (born Peter Sjöholm; 16 June 1947) is a former pop singer and Swedish playboy who was married to actress Joan Collins between November 1985 and August 1987. He became her manager and co-produced two of her television mini-series with her, "Sins" and "Monte Carlo".


title: Peter Holm

text: Holm's pre-Collins singing career began with a psychedelic phase in the late 1960s before his high-pitched voice found its natural home doing Euro-pop. His best known song is "Monja" (aka "Monia" in the French version). Other songs included "Syster Jane" (a Swedish cover version of New World's "Sister Jane") and "You Will Be Mine."


title: Peter Holm

text: Holm married actress Joan Collins 6 November 1985. Collins sought an annulment in December 1986 and was granted a final divorce 24 August 1987.


title: Peter Holm

text: According to Collins, the marriage quickly degenerated into a string of "interminable arguments... and hearty crockery-throwing rows." She said Holm was a bully with a ferocious temper and "the most combative person I've ever met."


title: Peter Holm

text: In December 1986, Collins received a restraining order against Holm. Undaunted, he gave interviews blaming Collins's identification with her "Dynasty" character. "Joan is consumed by Alexis, that's why she's doing this. She really loves me and I love her and we'll get back together, I know it." He contested a pre-nuptial agreement, limiting him to 20 per cent of Collins's $5 million earnings during their 13 months together.


title: Peter Holm

text: Collins hired flamboyant divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson and the proceedings became a media circus. When Holm and his supporters picketed Collins' Beverly Hills house waving placards, he became a national punchline with jokes from David Letterman.


title: Peter Holm

text: At the trial, Mitchelson produced Holm's secret lover, an aspiring starlet called Romina Danielson, and grilled her so intensely she fainted on the stand.


title: Peter Holm

text: Holm lost his case, collecting only $80,000 as agreed in the pre-nup. A New York radio station hosted a fundraiser for him and he retreated to Switzerland. Soon after the divorce, Holm inherited money of his own.


title: Peter Holm

text: Collins gave her candid side of the break-up in "Second Act", her second volume of memoirs, and subsequently referred to him only as "The Swede."


title: Baseball in Japan

text: Baseball was introduced to Japan in 1872 and is Japan's most popular participatory and spectator sport. The first professional competitions emerged in the 1920s. The highest level of baseball in Japan is Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), which consists of two leagues, the Central League and the Pacific League, with six teams in each league. High school baseball enjoys a particularly strong public profile and fan base, much like college football and college basketball in the United States; the Japanese High School Baseball Championship ("Summer "Kōshien""), which takes place each August, is nationally televised and includes regional champions from each of Japan's 47 prefectures.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: In Japanese, baseball is commonly called (; yakyū), combining the characters for "field" and "ball". According to the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), the atmosphere of Japanese baseball games is less relaxed than in the United States, with fans regularly singing and dancing to team songs. In addition, as American writer Robert Whiting wrote in his 1977 book "The Chrysanthemum and the Bat", "the Japanese view of life, stressing group identity, cooperation, hard work, respect for age, seniority and 'face' has permeated almost every aspect of the sport. Americans who come to play in Japan quickly realize that Baseball Samurai Style is different."


title: Baseball in Japan

text: In Japan, Nippon Professional Baseball players such as Shohei Ohtani, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh are regarded as national stars, and their exceptional performances have boosted baseball's popularity in Japan. All of them received or were approached for the People's Honour Award (国民栄誉賞, "Kokumin Eiyoshō") for their achievements and popularity.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: Baseball was first introduced to Japan as a school sport in 1872 by American Horace Wilson, an English professor at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo. The first organized adult baseball team, called the Shimbashi Athletic Club, was established in 1878.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: The Japanese government appointed American "oyatoi" in order to start a state-inspired modernization process. This involved the education ministry, who made baseball accessible to children by integrating the sport into the physical education curriculum. Japanese students, who returned from studying in the United States captivated by the sport, took government positions. Clubs and private teams such as the Shinbashi Athletic Club, along with high school and college teams, commenced the baseball infrastructure.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: At a match played in Yokohama in 1896, a team from Tokyo's Ichikō high school convincingly defeated a team of resident foreigners from the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club. The contemporary Japanese language press lauded the team as national heroes and news of this match greatly contributed to the popularity of baseball as a school sport. Tsuneo Matsudaira in his "Sports and Physical Training in Modern Japan" address to The Japan Society of the UK in London in 1907 related that after the victory, "the game spread, like a fire in a dry field, in summer, all over the country, and some months afterwards, even in children in primary schools in the country far away from Tōkyō were to be seen playing with bats and balls."


title: Baseball in Japan

text: Professional baseball in Japan first started in the 1920s, but it was not until the Greater Japan Tokyo Baseball Club (大日本東京野球クラブ "Dai-nippon Tōkyō Yakyū Kurabu") a team of all-stars established in 1934 by media mogul Matsutarō Shōriki, that the modern professional game found continued success—especially after Shōriki's club matched up against an American All-Star team that included Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, and Charlie Gehringer. While prior Japanese all-star contingents had disbanded, Shōriki went pro with this group, playing in an independent league.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: The first Japanese professional league was formed in 1936, and by 1950 had grown big enough to divide into two leagues, the Central League and the Pacific League, together known as Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). It is called , meaning "professional baseball". The pro baseball season is eight months long, with games beginning in April. Teams play 144 games (as compared to the 162 games of the American major league teams), followed by a playoff system, culminating in a championship held in October, known as the Japan Series.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: Corporations with interests outside baseball own most of the teams. Historically, teams have been identified with their owners, not where the team is based. However, in recent years, many owners have chosen to include a place name in the names of their teams; the majority of the 12 Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) teams are currently named with both corporate and geographical place names.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: Much like Minor League Baseball in the United States, Japan has a farm system through two minor leagues, each affiliated with Nippon Professional Baseball. The Eastern League consists of seven teams and is owned by the Central League. The Western League consists of five teams and is owned by the Pacific League. Both minor leagues play 80-game seasons.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: The rules are essentially those of Major League Baseball (MLB), but technical elements are slightly different: The Nippon league uses a smaller baseball, strike zone, and playing field. Five Nippon league teams have fields whose small dimensions would violate the American Official Baseball Rules.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: Also unlike MLB, game length is limited and tie games are allowed. In the regular season, the limit is twelve innings, while in the playoffs, there is a fifteen-inning limit (games in Major League Baseball, by comparison, continue until there is a winner). Additionally, due to power limits imposed because of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the 2011 NPB regular season further limited game length by adding a restriction that no inning could begin more than three hours and thirty minutes after the first pitch.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: NPB teams have active rosters of 28 players, as opposed to 26 in MLB (27 on days of scheduled day-night doubleheaders). However, the game roster has a 25-player limit. Before each game, NPB teams must designate three players from the active oster who will not appear in that contest. A team cannot have more than four foreign players on a 25-man game roster, although there is no limit on the number of foreign players that it may sign. If there are four, they cannot all be pitchers nor all be position players. This limits the cost and competition for expensive players of other nationalities, and is similar to rules in many European sports leagues' roster limits on non-European players.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: In each of the two Nippon Professional Baseball leagues, teams with the best winning percentage go on to a stepladder-format playoff (3 vs. 2, winner vs. 1). Occasionally, a team with more total wins has been seeded below a team that had more ties and fewer losses and, therefore, had a better winning percentage. The winners of each league compete in the Japan Series.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: On 18 September 2004, professional baseball players went on a two-day strike, the first strike in the history of the league, to protest the proposed merger between the Orix BlueWave and the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes and the failure of the owners to agree to create a new team to fill the void resulting from the merger. The strike was settled on 23 September 2004, when the owners agreed to grant a new franchise in the Pacific League and to continue the two-league, 12-team system. The new team, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, began play in the 2005 season.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: In Japan, generally refers to the two annual baseball tournaments played by high schools nationwide culminating in a final showdown at Hanshin Kōshien Stadium in Nishinomiya. They are organized by the Japan High School Baseball Federation in association with Mainichi Shimbun for the National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament in the spring (also known as "Spring Kōshien") and Asahi Shimbun for the National High School Baseball Championship in the summer (also known as "Summer Kōshien").


title: Baseball in Japan

text: These nationwide tournaments enjoy widespread popularity, arguably equal to or greater than professional baseball. Qualifying tournaments are often televised locally and each game of the final stage at Kōshien is televised nationally on NHK. The tournaments have become a national tradition, and large numbers of students and parents travel from hometowns to cheer for their local team. The popularity of these tournaments has been compared to the popularity of March Madness in the United States.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: Amateur baseball leagues exist all over Japan, with many teams sponsored by companies. Amateur baseball is governed by the Japan Amateur Baseball Association (JABA). Players on these teams are employed by their sponsoring companies and do not receive salaries as baseball players but as company employees. The best teams in these circuits are determined via the intercity baseball tournament and the Industrial League national tournament.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: The level of play in these leagues is very competitive; Industrial League players are often selected to represent Japan in international tournaments and Major League Baseball players such as Hideo Nomo (Shin-Nitetsu Sakai), Junichi Tazawa (Nippon Oil) and Kosuke Fukudome (Nihon Seimei), have been discovered by professional clubs while playing industrial baseball.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: Japan has won the World Baseball Classic twice since the tournament was created. In the 2006 World Baseball Classic, they defeated Cuba in the finals and in 2009 World Baseball Classic Japan defeated South Korea in 10 innings to defend their title.


title: Baseball in Japan

text: The national team is consistently ranked one of the best in the world by the World Baseball Softball Confederation.


Sexual violence in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, has been committed by combatants and constitutes war crimes. The vast majority of allegations have been made against the Armed Forces of Russia, including rape of children. As of May 2022, about 82.4% of cases of sexual violence related to the conflict that were reported by the United Nations were alleged to have been perpetrated by Russian or Russian-aligned combatants, while about 9.25% were reported to have been committed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces or law enforcement. Examples of crimes in the UN report include rape, gang rape, and public sexual humiliation.


title: Sexual violence in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

text: In its report covering the initial period of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, from 24 February to 26 March 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) listed four types of risks of sexual violence. Increased military presence and activities in civilian areas, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, internal displacement, and high numbers of women and girls leaving Ukraine caused high risks of conflict-related sexual violence and human trafficking. OHCHR stated that reports to the "National hotline for the prevention of domestic violence, trafficking in human beings and gender discrimination" indicated a high risk of sexual violence, and that several factors made under-reporting likely.


text: According to the "Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict" data set, sexual violence by Russian forces has been reported in three of seven years of conflict since 2014 in eastern Ukraine. On 29 June, 2022, the OHCHR reported that it had received 108 allegations of conflict related sexual violence and it had verified 23 cases. Out of 108 allegations, there were 78 allegations of rape, including gang rape, 7 of attempted rape, 15 of forced public stripping, and 8 of other forms of sexual violence. The alleged perpetrators were Russian soldiers in 87 cases, pro-Russian separatists in 2 cases, and civilians or unidentified actors in territory controlled by Russian armed forces in 2 cases.


text: On 3 April, La Strada Ukraine, which runs a hotline for helping survivors of human trafficking, sexual assault and domestic violence, stated that rape is underreported and stigmatised in peacetime, and that the cases known to the organisation could be "the tip of the iceberg".


text: In late September 2022 a panel of investigators from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine released a statement which said that the commission has "documented cases in which children have been raped, tortured, and unlawfully confined." and labeled these as war crimes. The same report also referenced children being killed and injured by Russia's indiscriminate attacks as well as forced separation from family and kidnapping.


text: In late March, the Prosecutor General, Venediktova, started an investigation into a claim of Russian soldiers shooting a man and then raping his wife. "The Times" published an interview with the woman on 28 March. She stated that she was from a small village in Brovary Raion. According to her account, soldiers arrived at the couple's house, shot the couple's dog, shot the husband and said "You don’t have a husband anymore. I shot him with this gun. He was a fascist." They held a gun to the wife's head, and took turns to rape her while her son was in the boiler room of the house, crying. The two men took a 20 minute break, carried out a second round of rape, and later a third round of rape, by which time they were "so drunk they were barely standing". The wife escaped with her son, and testified to the police, and identified one of her alleged rapists from online social media profiles.


text: "Meduza" published an in-depth account of the same rape (and of another) in Bogdanivka and of surrounding events. Russian spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described the allegations as "a lie". Venediktova stated that an arrest warrant for a Russian soldier based on "suspicion of violation of the laws and customs of war" had been issued. The OHCHR verified the allegation and described the case in its June 2022 report on human rights in Ukraine during the Russian invasion.


text: Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on a 13 March beating and rape of a 31-year-old woman in the village of Mala Rohan in Kharkiv Raion, controlled at the time by the Russian Armed Forces. Around midnight on 13 March, a Russian soldier entered a school where the woman was sheltering with her family and other villagers. The soldier forced the woman to undress under gunpoint. He shot at the ceiling, and raped the woman. The soldier threatened the woman with a knife, raped her again, cut her neck, cheek and hair with his knife, hit her face and slapped her. Around 7 am on 14 March, the soldier released the woman and left the building. The woman and her family walked to Kharkiv and received medical assistance.


text: On 12 April 2022, "BBC News" interviewed a 50-year-old woman from a village 70 km west of Kyiv, who said that she was raped at gunpoint by a Chechen allied with the Russian Armed Forces. A 40-year-old woman was raped and killed by the same soldier, according to neighbours, leaving what "BBC News" described as a "disturbing crime scene". Police exhumed the 40-year-old's body the day after the visit by "BBC News". Police chief of Kyiv Oblast, Andrii Nebytov, stated that the police were investigating a case on 9 March when Russian soldiers shot a man, two of them repeatedly raped the man's wife, and then the soldiers burnt the house and shot the family's dogs. Police exhumed the man's body.


text: "The New York Times" described one woman "held as a sex slave, naked except for a fur coat and locked in a potato cellar before being executed", found after the late March 2022 liberation of the Kyiv region. Bucha mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk stated that at least 25 rapes had been reported during Bucha massacre.


text: On 29 June, the OHCHR reported that out of 108 allegations of conflict-related sexual violence the alleged perpetrators were Ukrainian armed forces in 9 cases, Ukrainian law enforcement in 1 case, and civilians and unidentified actors in Government-controlled territory in 7 cases. Out of 23 verified cases, 5 cases were committed by Ukrainian armed forces and policemen and 5 cases by civilians and unidentified actors in Government-controlled territory. The verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence consisted in forced public stripping of alleged looters and threats of sexual violence.


text: There have been at least two separate cases of women and children refugees who were allegedly taken advantage of while they were fleeing the violence in Ukraine. A man was arrested in Poland in mid-March for the alleged rape of a 19-year-old refugee who reportedly had sought shelter and aid from the man and two men reportedly assaulted a Ukrainian teenage refugee who was staying in German accommodations for refugees. Prior to the launch of the United Kingdom Governments housing scheme for refugees, one woman reported a man who attempted to have her stay with him and promised free accommodation, food, expenses and a monthly allowance in return for sex. The woman reportedly tried to rebuff the man, who only stopped after she informed him she was traveling with her mother.


text: Following the late March liberation of the Kyiv region and reports of gang rape, gunpoint sexual assaults, and rapes in front of children, "The Guardian" asserted that Ukrainian women were facing a threat of rape as a weapon of war. Lyudmyla Denisova, Ombudsman in Ukraine for human rights, "speculated" that sexual violence was being used as a weapon of war by Russian forces. Denisova was fired from her position in the end of May, 2022. She later admitted to making "“exaggerated” reports of sexual crimes by Russian soldiers in order to get Ukraine more weaponry.


text: Canadian and UK Foreign Ministers Mélanie Joly and Liz Truss stated in late April 2022 that sexual violence was used in the invasion by Russian forces as a weapon of war. They described rape as a weapon of war to be "a systematic weapon to exert control and exercise power over women ... as destructive in conflict as chemical weapons or landmines, which are both banned by international conventions, but yet to be treated as seriously."


text: In October 2022, a UN official stated that Russia was using rape as part of its "military strategy", and that the actual number of victims was likely far higher than the official statistics.


text: Women held protests at Russian embassies against rape by Russian soldiers in the invasion. The women protested with bags over their heads, their hands tied behind their backs, and their bare legs covered in red liquid, symbolising blood, with four women protesting on 16 April 2022 in Dublin, Ireland, and 80 women protesting on the same day in Vilnius, Lithuania. On 20 April, a similar protest, by 130 women took place in front of the Russian embassy in Riga, Latvia, and another was held by a dozen women in front of the Russian consulate in Gdańsk, Poland.


text: Ukraine's legislation in the field of (sexual) violence against women and domestic violence had been relatively weak at the start of the 21st century, and the penalties low. In 2011, the Ukrainian government (under president Yanukovych) was one of the authors and first signers of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention), but tough parliamentary opposition prevented its implementation in subsequent years, including a parliamentary majority voting against ratification in 2016. Meanwhile, the risk of women to become victims of gender-based violence significantly increased in eastern Ukraine ever since the Russo-Ukrainian War began in 2014. Throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, several Ukrainian organisations campaigned for better protection of human rights, pushing for ratification of the Convention as a means of achieving that goal. On 6 December 2017, the Ukrainian parliament and government (under president Poroshenko) adopted several amendments to its Criminal Code, including consent-based definitions of sexual violence, in order to implement the Istanbul Convention. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in a surge of reports of domestic and sexual violence committed against civilians, particularly in the Russian-occupied territories, coupled with the Ukrainian government's desire to join the European Union and gain European support against the invasion, were compelling reasons for eventually ratifying the treaty in its entirety. On 18 June 2022, president Zelenskyy registered in Parliament a bill on the ratification of the Istanbul Convention. On 20 June 2022, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine supported the ratification of the Istanbul Convention by 259 votes against 8. Ukraine submitted its instrument of ratification on 18 July 2022, meaning the Convention will enter into force in Ukraine on 1 November 2022.


title: Argument of a function

text: In mathematics, an argument of a function is a value provided to obtain the function's result. It is also called an independent variable.


title: Argument of a function

text: For example, the binary function formula_1 has two arguments, formula_2 and formula_3, in an ordered pair formula_4. The hypergeometric function is an example of a four-argument function. The number of arguments that a function takes is called the "arity" of the function. A function that takes a single argument as input, such as formula_5, is called a unary function. A function of two or more variables is considered to have a domain consisting of ordered pairs or tuples of argument values. The argument of a circular function is an angle. The argument of a hyperbolic function is a hyperbolic angle.


title: Argument of a function

text: A mathematical function has one or more arguments in the form of independent variables designated in the definition, which can also contain parameters. The independent variables are mentioned in the list of arguments that the function takes, whereas the parameters are not. For example, in the logarithmic function formula_6 the base formula_7 is considered a parameter.


title: Argument of a function

text: Sometimes, subscripts can be used to denote arguments. For example, we can use subscripts to denote the arguments with respect to which partial derivatives are taken.


title: Argument of a function

text: The use of the term "argument" in this sense developed from astronomy, which historically used tables to determine the spatial positions of planets from their positions in the sky (ephemerides). These tables were organized according to measured angles called arguments, literally "that which elucidates something else."


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: Tanis is a site of paleontological interest in southwestern North Dakota, United States. Tanis is part of the heavily studied Hell Creek Formation, a group of rocks spanning four states in North America renowned for many significant fossil discoveries from the Upper Cretaceous and lower Paleocene. Tanis is a significant site because it appears to record the events from the first minutes until a few hours after the impact of the giant Chicxulub asteroid in extreme detail. This impact, which struck the Gulf of Mexico 66.043 million years ago, wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species (the so-called "K-Pg" or "K-T" extinction). The extinction event caused by this impact began the Cenozoic, in which mammals - including humans - would eventually come to dominate life on Earth.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The site was originally discovered in 2008 by University of North Georgia Professor Steve Nicklas and field paleontologist Rob Sula. Their team successfully removed fossil field jackets that contained articulated sturgeons, paddlefish, and bowfins. These fossils were delivered for research to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Recognizing the unique nature of the site, Nicklas and Sula brought in Robert DePalma, a University of Kansas graduate student, to perform additional excavations. The site was systematically excavated by Robert DePalma over several years beginning in 2012, working in near total secrecy. Key findings were presented in two conference papers in October 2017. The full paper introducing Tanis was widely covered in worldwide media on 29 March 2019, in advance of its official publication three days later. The co-authors included Walter Alvarez and Jan Smit, both renowned experts on the K-Pg impact and extinction. Other papers describing the site and its fossils are in progress.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: At Tanis, unlike any other known Lagerstätte site, it appears freak circumstances allowed for the preservation of exquisite, moment-by-moment details caused by the impact event. These include many rare and unique finds, which allow unprecedented examination of the direct effects of the impact on plants and animals alive at the time of the large impact some distant. The events at Tanis occurred far too soon after impact to be caused by the megatsunamis expected from any large impact near large bodies of water. Instead, much faster seismic waves from the earthquakes probably reached the Hell Creek area as soon as ten minutes after the impact, creating seiche waves between high in the Western Interior Seaway. The site formed part of a bend in an ancient river on the westward shore of the seaway, and was flooded with great force by these waves, which carried sea, land, freshwater animals and plants, and other debris several miles inland. The seiche waves exposed and covered the site twice, as millions of tiny microtektite droplets and debris from the impact were arriving on ballistic trajectories from their source in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The hundreds of fish remains are distributed by size, and generally show evidence of tetany (a body posture related to suffocation in fish), suggesting strongly that they were all killed indiscriminately by a common suffocating cause that affected the entire population. Fragile remains spanning the layers of debris show that the site was laid down in a single event over a short timespan. A "Triceratops" or other ceratopsian ilium (hip bone) was found at the high water mark, in circumstances hinting that the dinosaur might speculatively have been a floating carcass and possibly alive at or just before impact, but the paper describing such remains was still in progress as of 2019 – the initial papers only include a photograph and its location within Tanis. In 2022, a partial mummified "Thescelosaurus" was unearthed here with its skin still intact.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The exceptional nature of the findings and conclusions have led some scientists to await further scrutiny by the scientific community before agreeing that the discoveries at Tanis have been correctly understood. The site continues to be explored.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The Cretaceous–Paleogene ("K-Pg" or "K-T") extinction event around 66 million years ago wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. Proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez, it is now widely accepted that the extinction was caused by a huge asteroid or bolide that impacted Earth in the shallow seas of the Gulf of Mexico, leaving behind the Chicxulub crater. The impactor tore through the earth's crust, creating huge earthquakes, giant waves, and a crater 180 kilometers (112 mi) wide, and blasted aloft trillions of tons of dust, debris, and climate-changing sulfates from the gypsum seabed, and it may have created firestorms worldwide. With the exception of some ectothermic species such as the ancestors of the modern leatherback sea turtle and crocodiles, no tetrapods weighing more than survived. It marked the end of the Cretaceous period and the Mesozoic Era, opening the Cenozoic Era that continues today.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: However, because it is rare in any case for animals and plants to be fossilized, the fossil record leaves some major questions unanswered. One of these is whether dinosaurs were already declining at the time of the event due to ongoing volcanic climate change. Also, there is little evidence on the detailed effects of the event on Earth and its biosphere. No fossil beds were yet known that could clearly show the details that might resolve these questions. There is considerable detail for times greater than hundreds of thousands of years either side of the event, and for certain kinds of change on either side of the K-Pg boundary layer. But relatively little fossil evidence is available from times nearer the crucial event, a difficulty known as the "Three metre problem".


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The Hell Creek Formation is a well-known and much-studied fossil-bearing formation (geological region) of mostly Upper Cretaceous and some lower Paleocene rock, that stretches across portions of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming in North America. The formation is named for early studies at Hell Creek, located near Jordan, Montana, and it was designated as a National Natural Landmark in 1966.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The formation contains a series of fresh and brackish-water clays, mudstones, and sandstones deposited during the Maastrichtian and Danian (respectively, the end of the Cretaceous and the beginning of the Paleogene periods) by fluvial activity in fluctuating river channels and deltas and very occasional peaty swamp deposits along the low-lying eastern continental margin fronting the late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway. The iridium-enriched Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, which separates the Cretaceous from the Cenozoic, is distinctly visible as a discontinuous thin marker above and occasionally within the formation. Numerous famous fossils of plants and animals, including many types of dinosaur fossils, have been discovered there.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: At the time of the Chicxulub impact, the present-day North American continent was still forming. Most of central North America had recently been a large shallow seaway, called the Western Interior Seaway (also known as the North American Sea or the Western Interior Sea), and parts were still submerged. This had initially been a seaway between separate continents, but it had narrowed in the late Cretaceous to become, in effect, a large inland extension to the Gulf of Mexico. The Hell Creek Formation was at this time very low-lying or partly submerged land at the northern end of the seaway, and the Chicxulub impact occurred in the shallow seas at the southern end, approximately from the site.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: Although Tanis and Chicxulub were connected by the remaining Interior Seaway, the massive water waves from the impact area were probably "not" responsible for the deposits at Tanis. Any water-borne waves would have arrived between later, long after the microtektites had already fallen back to earth, and far too late to leave the geological record found at the site. It is not even clear whether the massive waves were able to traverse the entire Interior Seaway. Instead, the initial papers on Tanis conclude that much faster earthquake waves, the primary waves travelling through rock at about , probably reached Hell Creek within six minutes, and quickly caused massive water surges known as seiches in the shallow waters close to Tanis. Seiche waves often occur shortly after significant earthquakes, even thousands of miles away, and can be sudden and violent. Some recent examples include the 1964 Alaskan earthquake (seiches in Puerto Rico), the 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake (India/China) (seiches in England and Norway), the 2010 Chile earthquake (seiches in Louisiana). Notably, the powerful Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, slower secondary waves traveled over in less than 30 minutes to cause seiches around high in Norway.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The Chicxulub impact is believed to have triggered earthquakes estimated at magnitude , releasing up to 4000 times the energy of the Tohoku quake. Co-author Mark Richards, a professor of earth sciences focusing on dynamic earth crust processes suggests that the resulting seiche waves would have been approximately high in the Western Interior Seaway near Tanis and credibly, could have created the high water movements evidenced inland at the site; the time taken by the seismic waves to reach the region and cause earthquakes almost exactly matched the flight time of the microtektites found at the site. This would resolve conflicting evidence that huge water movements had occurred in the Hell Creek region near Tanis much less than an hour after impact, although the first megatsunamis from the impact zone could not have arrived at the site for almost a full day.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: Robert DePalma is a researcher who holds the lease to the Tanis site and controls access to it. He is a paleontologist with an M.A. in geology, the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, and a doctoral student in paleontology at the University of Kansas. He has published several discoveries, including a 2010 paper presenting the first known amber-trapped insect fossils from Hell Creek, and a 2013 paper presenting a tyrannosaur tooth embedded in a hadrosaur tail, most likely belonging to "Tyrannosaurus" and "Edmontosaurus annectens" respectively, showing that tyrannosaurs were indeed hunters rather than pure scavengers – a controversy at the time. On the other hand, a published paper was criticized in 2015 and corrected in 2016, after other scientists noticed that in his reconstruction of a new species he called "Dakotaraptor", he had included turtle entoplastron (armor) fragments in error, taking them to be part of the fossilized furculum. As a result, some paleontologists felt that he might be prone to "over-interpret".


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: Co-author Professor Phillip Manning, a specialist in fossil soft tissues, described DePalma's working techniques at Tanis as "meticulous" and "borderline archaeological in his excavation approach". Following suspicions of manipulating data, a complained was lodged against DePalma with the University of Manchester.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: In 2004, DePalma was studying a small site in the well-known Hell Creek Formation, containing numerous layers of thin sediment, creating a geological record of great detail. His advisor suggested seeking a similar site, closer to the K-Pg boundary layer. The original discoverers of the site (Rob Sula and Steve Nicklas), who worked the site for several years, recognized its scientific importance and offered it to DePalma as he had some previous experience with working on fish sites. The site lacked the fine sediment layers he was initially looking for. Instead, the layers had never fully solidified, the fossils at the site were fragile, and everything appeared to have been laid down in a single large flood.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: DePalma began excavating systematically in 2012 and quickly found the site to contain very unusual and promising features. Everything he found had been covered so quickly that details were exceptionally well preserved, and the fossils as a whole formed a very unusual collection – fish fins and complete fish, tree trunks with amber, fossils in upright rather than squashed flat positions, hundreds or thousands of cartilaginous fully articulated freshwater paddlefish, sturgeon and even saltwater mosasaurs which had ended up on the same mudbank miles inland (only about four fossilized fish were previously known from the entire Hell Creek formation), fragile body parts such as complete and intact tails, ripped from the seafish's bodies and preserved inland in a manner that suggested they were covered almost immediately after death, and – everywhere – millions of tiny spheres of glassy material known as microtektites, the result of tiny splatters of molten material reaching the ground. The microtektites were present and concentrated in the gills of about 50% of the fossilized fish, in amber, and buried in the small pits in the mud which they had made when they contemporaneously impacted. The fish were not bottom feeders. They had breathed in early debris that fell into water, in the seconds or minutes before death. The sediment appeared to have liquefied and covered the deposited biota, then quickly solidified, preserving much of the contents in three dimensions.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: Later discoveries included large primitive feathers 30–40 cm long with 3.5 mm quills believed to come from large dinosaurs; broken remains from almost all known Hell Creek dinosaur groups, including some incredibly rare hatchling and intact egg with embryo fossils; fossil pterosaurs for which no other fossils exist at that time; drowned ant nests with ants inside and chambers filled with asteroid debris; and burrows of small mammals living at the site immediately after the impact. Analysis of early samples showed that the microtektites at Tanis were almost identical to those found at the Mexican impact site, and were likely to be primary deposits (directly from the impact) and not reworked (moved from their original location by later geological processes).


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: DePalma quickly began to suspect that he had stumbled upon a monumentally important and unique site – not just "near" the K-Pg boundary, but a unique killing field that precisely captured the first minutes and hours after impact, when the K-Pg boundary was created, along with an unprecedented fossil record of creatures and plants that died on that day, as well as material directly from the impact itself, in circumstances that allowed exceptional preservation.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: By 2013, he was still studying the site, which he named "Tanis" after the ancient Egyptian city of the same name, and had told only three close colleagues about it. Secrecy about Tanis was maintained until disclosed by DePalma and co-author Jan Smit in two short summary papers presented in October 2017, which remained the only public information before widespread media coverage of the full prepublication paper on 29 March 2019.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The site was originally a point bar - a gently sloped crescent-shaped area of deposit that accumulates on the inside bend of streams and rivers below the slip-off slope. Point bars are common in mature or meandering streams. DePalma gave the name Tanis to both the site and the river. From the size of the deposits beneath the flood debris, the Tanis River was a "deep and large" river with a point bar that was towards the larger size found in Hell's Creek, suggesting a river tens or hundreds of meters wide. The river flowed Eastward (other than impact driven waves), with inland being to the West; Tanis itself was therefore in an ancient river valley close to the Westward shore of the Interior Seaway. Although other flooding is evidenced in Hells Creek, the Tanis deposit does not appear to relate to any other Marine transgression (inland shoreline movement) known to have taken place. The original paper describes the river in technical detail:


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The deposit itself is about 1.3m thick, sharply overlaying the point bar, in a drape-like manner. It comprises two layers with sand and silt grading (coarse sands at the bottom, finer silt/clay particles at the top). It can be divided into two layers, a bottom layer about 0.5m thick ("unit 1"), and a top layer about 0.8m thick (unit 2), capped by a 1 – 2 cm layer of impactite tonstein that is indistinguishable from other dual layered KPg impact ejection materials found in Hells Creek, and finally a layer around 6 cm thick of plant remains. The excavated pointbar and event deposits show that the point bar had been exposed to the air for a considerable time, with evidence of habitation and filled burrows, before an abrupt, turbulent, high energy event filled these burrows and laid down the deposits. The event included waves with at least 10 meters run-up height (the vertical distance a wave travels after it reaches land).


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: Eighteen months before publication of the peer-reviewed PNAS paper in 2019 DePalma and his colleagues presented two conference papers on fossil finds at Tanis on 23 October 2017 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. Jan Smit first presented a paper describing the Tanis site, its association with the K-Pg boundary event and associated fossil discoveries, including the presence of glass spherules from the Chicxulub impact clustered in the gill rakers of acipenciform fishes and also found in amber. DePalma then presented a paper describing excavation of a burrow created by a small mammal that had been made "immediately following the K-Pg impact" at Tanis.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: A paper documenting Tanis was released as a prepublication on 1 April 2019. Simultaneous media disclosure had been intended via the "New Yorker", but the magazine learned that a rival newspaper had heard about the story, and asked permission to publish early to avoid being scooped by waiting until the paper was published. The discovery received widespread media coverage from 29 March 2019.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: DePalma's co-authors include Jan Smit (retired paleontologist and world authority on the K-Pg impact and its tektites) and Walter Alvarez (professor, recipient of numerous prestigious awards, and co-developer with his Nobel Laureate father of the K-Pg impact theory, sometimes called the Alvarez hypothesis). Other authors are his advisor David Burnham, Klaudia Kuiper (professor of geochronology focusing on chronology of the late Cretaceous ), Phillip Manning (professor of natural sciences, specialist in soft tissue scanning ), Anton Oleinik (associate professor geosciences, specializing in Cenozoic periods of change and stratigraphy ), Peter Larson (paleontologist and fossil collector), Florentin Maurrasse (professor specializing in stratigraphy and biostratigraphy, and the K-Pg boundary in the Caribbean ), Johan Vellekoop (postdoctoral researcher, published on microfossil record of the Chicxulub impactor), Mark Richards (professor earth and planetary sciences, focus on earth crust tectonic and dynamic processes), and Loren Gurche (a colleague at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History). A wide range of other people are credited with analysis, specific studies, and other contributions.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: As of April 2019, several other papers were stated to be in preparation, with further papers anticipated by DePalma and co-authors, and some by visiting researchers.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: Three papers were published in 2021. The first two were conference papers presented in January of that year. The last was published in December in Scientific Reports.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: The first documents a turtle fossil found at Tanis, killed by impalement by a tree branch, and found in the upper of two units of surge deposit, bracketed by ejecta. This further evidences the violent nature of the event. The second draws on ""patterns of growth history, including periodicity of ẟO and ẟC and growth band morphology, plus corroborating data from fish ontogeny and seasonal insect behavior"" to show that ""the impact occurred during boreal Spring/Summer, shortly after the spawning season for fish and most continental taxa"".


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: Of the Scientific Reports paper, published December 2021, the publisher indicated in December 2022 that "the reliability of data presented in this manuscript [...] currently in question" following statements that the data in December 2021 Scientific Reports paper may have been fabricated. The paper that the Chicxulub impact occurred in late Spring or early Summer, based on analysis of fish bone growth rings and insect development in specimens recovered at the Tanis site.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: A further paper was also published in "Nature" February 2022 (but submitted before the Scientific Reports paper was submitted), by a separate team. It studied the fish skeletons found at Tanis, and identified annual cyclical changes, which corroborated the conclusion in the 2021 paper, that the impact had occurred in spring, a timing which affected the surviving species.


title: Tanis (fossil site)

text: This section is drawn from the original 2019 paper and its supplementary materials, which describe the site in detail. Page numbers in this section refer to those papers.


title: Blog del Narco

text: Blog del Narco ("Narco's Blog") is a blog that attempted to document the violent incidents and characters involved in the Mexican Drug War that never made it to government reports or the mainstream media.


title: Blog del Narco

text: An anonymous person created the website because the Government of Mexico was not reporting the violence and was trying to pretend that "nothing [was] happening", the media was "intimidated" and the "government had apparently been bought."


title: Blog del Narco

text: The author would initially spend four hours every day working on the website. To deal with the increased workload, he asked a friend, also anonymous, to help him. They decided to broadcast their content without alteration or modifications of convenience—and help Mexicans take all necessary precautions to protect their own well-being. They chose YouTube to upload videos to the web and comment as @narcoblogger on Twitter. During the early days of Blog del Narco, the general population of Mexico submitted only a small number of reports to them, but as the website built trust with time, more reports were submitted. The creators and current editors of the blog "have not received any threats yet."


title: Blog del Narco

text: In 2011, a video posted on the blog outlined a prison warden's system of letting prisoners free at night so they could commit murders for drug cartels. As a result of the video, the prison warden was arrested.


title: Blog del Narco

text: In May 2013, it was revealed that one of the authors of the blog was a woman in her early 20s who goes by the pseudonym "Lucy." In early May, Lucy fled Mexico for the United States (Texas), then Spain. The site had not been active since May 2013.


title: Blog del Narco

text: In Mexico, many traditional journalistic outlets have been threatened and harassed due to stories about the drug trafficking industry they dared publish, so anonymous blogs like Blog del Narco have taken the role of reporting on events related to the drug war. The author uses computer security techniques to obscure his identity. His anonymity has been maintained. When he conducted an interview with the Associated Press, he used a disguised telephone number. The author of the blog said that he is doing a service by publishing sensitive details about the Mexican Drug War that journalist organizations in Mexico are hesitant to publish for fear of retaliation. The blogger said, "for the scanty details that they (mass media) put on television, they get grenades thrown at them and their reporters kidnapped. We publish everything. Imagine what they could do to us."


title: Blog del Narco

text: As of September 2010, the blog had three million unique monthly views. By 2011, it became one of the most visited websites in Mexico. Members of police and drug cartel groups directly read the blog.


title: Blog del Narco

text: "MSNBC" described Blog del Narco as "Mexico's go-to Web site on information on the country's drug war." Additionally, "The Houston Chronicle" said that Blog del Narco is "a gritty, front-row seat to Mexico's drug war."


title: Blog del Narco

text: "The Guardian" and "Los Angeles Times" noted that Blog del Narco is a response to Mexico's "narco-censorship," a term used when reporters and editors of the Mexican Drug War, out of fear or caution, are forced to either write what the drug lords demand, or remain silent by not writing anything at all. If they do not comply with what the drug cartels demand, the journalists may be kidnapped, intimidated, or even killed.


title: Blog del Narco

text: Spencer Ackerman of "Wired" said, "even if you don’t read Spanish (like me), the images on Blog Del Narco tell the gruesome story. Old, wealthy men held hostage and humiliated. Paramilitary cops in ski masks taking dudes into custody. People walking the streets in body armor, automatic weapons out. Then there’s all the dead bodies and shot-up cars."


title: Blog del Narco

text: Jo Tuckman of "Dawn" said that the website's contents are "a catalogue of horror absent even from the national press, which still covers the violence from the relative safety of its headquarters in the capital."


title: Blog del Narco

text: Duncan Robinson of the "New Statesman" said "To say that the blog's coverage is raw is an understatement. It is visceral and undigested. This is news unprocessed, unadulterated and uncensored. Where a news editor would cut away, Blog del Narco's footage lingers. Decapitations are not described, they are pictured. It's unapologetically violent. The blog's "raison d'être" is simple: to reflect what is happening."


title: Blog del Narco

text: Nate Freeman of "The Observer" said "his facelessness allowed him get away with stories that would endanger known journalists[...]"


title: Martin Luther (diplomat)

text: An early member of the Nazi Party, he served as an advisor to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, first in the "Dienststelle Ribbentrop" ('Ribbentrop Bureau'), and later in the "Auswärtiges Amt" ('Foreign Office') as a diplomat when von Ribbentrop replaced Konstantin von Neurath. He participated in the Wannsee Conference, at which the Final Solution was planned; it was the 1947 discovery of his copy of the minutes that first made the Allied powers aware that the conference had taken place and what its purpose was.


title: Martin Luther (diplomat)

text: Luther ran a furniture removal and interior decorating business. He joined the Nazi Party and SA on 1 March 1933. He helped Ribbentrop to obtain a low party membership number, and when Ribbentrop was sent to London as Ambassador in 1936, he hired Luther to move his furniture from Berlin and do the interior decorating of the new German Embassy in London.


title: Martin Luther (diplomat)

text: Ribbentrop later offered him a position in his own foreign policy organisation, the Ribbentrop Bureau. Luther accepted, and henceforward became one of Ribbentrop's favourite hatchet men. Two years later he took over the "Deutschland" department and moved it to its own building.


title: Martin Luther (diplomat)

text: Luther was extremely loyal to Heinrich Himmler. In May 1940, he was appointed to the position of Foreign Ministry liaison to the SS. By July 1941 he had advanced to the position of "Ministerialdirektor" with the rank of "Unterstaatssekretär"; his effective power exceeded that suggested by his title and rank, since he was the liaison between the party and the ministry. In addition he had become an SA "Brigadeführer".


title: Martin Luther (diplomat)

text: Luther attended the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 as the representative of the Foreign Ministry, and after that his principal task was to persuade or pressure German satellites and allies to hand over their Jewish populations for deportation to the death camps. During this period, he also continued to work as an interior decorator for Ribbentrop's wife, helping her with the design of her various houses as well as her clothes. He resented this, stating that she treated him like one of her household servants. She found him boorish, and Ribbentrop was dissatisfied with his not advancing the Foreign Office's interests in the internecine struggle with Himmler and the SS and tired of his mismanagement of office funds. Ribbentrop had also received complaints that Luther was blackmailing people.


title: Martin Luther (diplomat)

text: In 1943, with the aid of Franz Rademacher, he tried to supplant von Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister but was thwarted and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944; Hitler had wanted him hanged, but Himmler ensured that he merely had to work in the camp herb garden. After suicide attempts he was freed by Soviet troops in spring 1945, but died shortly after of heart failure.


title: Martin Luther (diplomat)

text: The copy of the Wannsee minutes sent to Luther by Reinhard Heydrich was discovered in the Foreign Ministry archives in 1947 and has played an important role in documenting the conference, although Luther was among those who already knew that policy with regard to the "Jewish question" had changed.


title: Martin Luther (diplomat)

text: Luther's copy of the minutes is the only record of the conference that survived the war, and its discovery was the first time the Allies became aware of the meeting and a follow up meeting on 6 March 1942. At the conference, he voiced concern about the large-scale "resettlement" required throughout occupied Europe, which seemed to indicate that he did not fully understand what was being planned. In addition, he had a memorandum prepared for his use at the conference, which speaks only of expulsions; it has been used by Holocaust deniers to argue that the conference did not present a policy of genocide, but is consistent with a change in policy.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: A bolt is a form of threaded fastener with an external male thread requiring a matching pre-formed female thread such as a nut. Bolts are very closely related to screws.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: The distinction between a bolt and a screw is poorly-defined. The academic distinction, per "Machinery's Handbook", is in their intended design: bolts are designed to pass through an unthreaded hole in a component and be fastened with the aid of a nut, although such a fastener can be used without a nut to tighten into a threaded component such as a nut-plate or tapped housing. Screws in contrast are used in components which contain their own thread, or to cut its own internal thread into them. This definition allows ambiguity in the description of a fastener depending on the application it is actually used for, and the terms screw and bolt are widely used by different people or in different countries to apply to the same or varying fastener.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: Bolts are often used to make a bolted joint. This is a combination of the nut applying an axial clamping force and also the shank of the bolt acting as a dowel, pinning the joint against sideways shear forces. For this reason, many bolts have a plain unthreaded shank (called the ) as this makes for a better, stronger dowel. The presence of the unthreaded shank has often been given as characteristic of bolts vs. screws, but this is incidental to its use, rather than defining.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: Where a fastener forms its own thread in the component being fastened, it is called a screw. This is most obviously so when the thread is tapered (i.e. traditional wood screws), precluding the use of a nut, or when a sheet metal screw or other thread-forming screw is used. A screw must always be turned to assemble the joint. Many bolts are held fixed in place during assembly, either by a tool or by a design of non-rotating bolt, such as a carriage bolt, and only the corresponding nut is turned.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: Bolts use a wide variety of head designs, as do screws. These are designed to engage with the tool used to tighten them. Some bolt heads instead lock the bolt in place, so that it does not move and a tool is only needed for the nut end.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: The first bolts had square heads, formed by forging. These are still found, although much more common today is the hexagonal head. These are held and turned by a spanner or socket, of which there are many forms. Most are held from the side, some from in-line with the bolt. Other bolts have T-heads and slotted heads.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: Many bolts use a screwdriver head fitting, rather than an external wrench. Screwdrivers are applied in-line with the fastener, rather than from the side. These are smaller than most wrench heads and cannot usually apply the same amount of torque. It is sometimes assumed that screwdriver heads imply a screw and wrenches imply a bolt, although this is incorrect. Coach screws are large square-headed screws with a tapered wood screw thread, used for attaching ironwork to timber. Head designs that overlap both bolts and screws are the Allen or Torx heads; hexagonal or splined sockets. These modern designs span a large range of sizes and can carry a considerable torque. Threaded fasteners with screwdriver-style heads are often referred to as machine screws whether they are being used with a nut or not.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: Depending on required strength and circumstances, there are several material types can be used for fasteners.


title: Bolt (fastener)

text: The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) 13th Edition Steel Design Manual section 16.1 chapter J-3 specifies the requirements for bolted structural connections. Structural bolts replaced rivets due to the decreasing cost and increasing strength of structural bolts in the 20th century. Connections are formed with two types of joints: slip-critical connections and bearing connections. In slip-critical connections, movement of the connected parts is a serviceability condition and bolts are tightened to a minimum required pre-tension. Slip is prevented through friction of the "faying" surface, that is the plane of shear for the bolt and where two members make contact. Because friction is proportional to the normal force, connections must be sized with bolts numerous and large enough to provide the required load capacity. However, this greatly decreases the shear capacity of each bolt in the connection. The second (and more common type) of connection is a bearing connection. In this type of connection, the bolts carry the load through shear and are only tightened to a "snug-fit". These connections require fewer bolts than slip-critical connections and therefore are a less expensive alternative. Slip-critical connections are more common on flange plates for beam and column splices and moment critical connections. Bearing type connections are used in lightweight structures and in member connections where slip is not important and prevention of structural failure is the design constraint. Common bearing type connections include: shear tabs, beam supports, gusset plates in trusses.


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: "Boyz" is the debut solo single by British singer Jesy Nelson featuring Nicki Minaj. It was released on 8 October 2021, through Polydor Records, becoming her only release through that label due to her recording contract being terminated shortly after. It is Nelson's first single to be released since leaving the girl group Little Mix in 2020 and heavily interpolates American rapper Diddy's 2001 song "Bad Boy for Life". Lyrically "Boys", speaks of Nelson's infatuation with rebellious men.


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: The song debuted at number four on the UK Singles Chart and at number sixteen in Ireland, but failed to sustain its success in subsequent weeks. It was also poorly received by music critics. The music video sparked controversy due to allegations of blatant blackfishing and cultural appropriation, and a performance of the song at the 2021 Jingle Bell Ball was widely mocked by viewers and yielded numerous internet memes that were circulated across social media. Further controversy was caused when guest artist Minaj, whilst on a shared livestream with Nelson, issued a series of highly vulgar insults at Nelson's former bandmate Leigh-Anne Pinnock in response to unfounded rumours of jealousy, with Nelson failing to intervene and stand up for Pinnock.


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: In December 2020, Nelson announced she was leaving Little Mix for mental health reasons. A few months later, she signed a record deal with Polydor Records. Nelson teased a comeback in August 2021, saying: "For me, this is the music that I've always wanted to make. I don't think that anyone is gonna expect this."


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: On 28 September 2021, Nelson confirmed that her first solo single, "Boyz", was being released soon. Nelson said that a "horrible breakup" inspired the single. In an interview with "Noctis Magazine," Nelson described the song as "in your face", adding: "I wrote it when I was going through a break-up and it's me all over. I just love a bad boy. I say it to people all the time... it's not healthy!"


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: "Boyz" has elements of R&B and hip hop, and includes a rap verse written and performed by Nicki Minaj. The track was written by Nelson, Minaj, Oladayo Olatunji, Hanni Ibrahim, Abby Keen, Amanda Atoui, and Avital and produced by the duo Loose Change (Patrick Jordan-Patrikios and Sunny) "Boyz" has been variously described as either sampling or interpolating Diddy's 2001 song "Bad Boy for Life".


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: "Boyz" debuted at number four on the UK Singles (OCC) chart, making it Nelson's first top-10 single as a solo artist and Minaj's 13th. It dropped to number eighteen the following week, and spent seven weeks in the chart.


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: It debuted at number thirteen on the US Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles ("Billboard") chart, and number thirty-nine on the US Mainstream Top 40 ("Billboard") chart. In New Zealand, "Boyz" debuted at number four on the New Zealand Hot Singles (RMNZ) chart, the ranking of songs out of the top 40. In Ireland the song debuted at number sixteen on the Ireland (IRMA) chart, The song entered the Hungary (Single Top 40) chart at number fifteen. Globally, "Boyz" debuted and peaked at number 86 on the "Billboard" Global 200.


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: "The Guardian" writer Laura Snapes gave it two-out-of-five stars, finding the song derivative and dated, concluding: "The long-awaited debut is a farrago of incomprehensible lyrics and queasy tropes that undermines her [Nelson's] self-help journey". Roisin O'Connor of "The Independent" wrote that "Boyz" is "a terrible song on which a barely comprehensible Nelson sings like Britney Spears doing TLC karaoke, lisping and gasping her way around a sample of Diddy's 'Bad Boy For Life'. Where Diddy's original was gritty, sharp and visceral, Nelson's has been polished and autotuned to death". She considered Nelson's solo career debut "one of the most disastrous in recent memory." "Rolling Stone India" listed it among the worst songs of 2021, saying that it's "probably the dumbest debut single by any boy or girl group member to depart their respective band". "Insider" also included the song in their list of the worst songs of 2021, saying that it is "a reductive and stale take on a hip-hop classic".


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: The music video was released on 8 October 2021, the same day as the song's release. The video was inspired by the original "Bad Boy For Life" music video, with Diddy himself appearing in a cameo playing the role Ben Stiller played in the original video. In the video, Nelson wears grills on her teeth, braids, bandanas, and sings about liking men who are "so hood". The video has reached 20 million views on YouTube. Critics noted the video has scenes "mimicking classic 2000s hip-hop videos".


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: On the day of the release of the music video, Nelson faced accusations of both cultural appropriation and blackfishing for her appearance in the music video. Raven Smith of "Vogue" noted that Nelson's skin tone looked "unnaturally, un-genetically tanned" and that she was "parroting the aesthetics of Blackness". "The Guardian" writer Mikki Kendall said that Nelson "will dispose of her Black costume when it no longer serves her" and that she "exemplifies the exact attitude that makes this type of racist cosplay so desirable. She's able to make jabs at the person whose appearance she's seemingly jealous of and insists she's not racist, too." "The Independent" writer Roisin O'Connor called it "a grotesque caricature of what Nelson perceives Black culture to be".


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: In response, Nelson said, "I take all those comments made seriously. I would never intentionally do anything to make myself look racially ambiguous, so that's why I was initially shocked that the term was directed at me." In an Instagram Live, Nelson said furthermore that her "intention was never ever to offend people of color with the video" and that she instead wanted to "celebrate 90's R&B because that era of music is what I love." She shared, "It actually does really hurt me that it may have offended people." Minaj defended Nelson from the accusations. British TV presenter Charlene White, of Jamaican descent, called Nelson and Minaj's explanation of the video "embarrassing".


title: Boyz (Jesy Nelson song)

text: Nelson's debut solo performance of "Boyz" took place on "The Graham Norton Show" on 29 October 2021. Nelson further performed "Boyz" at the 2021 Jingle Bell Ball on 11 December 2021. The performances resulted in a number of memes being spread on various social media platforms.


title: Chaman Bahaar

text: Chaman Bahaar is a 2020 Indian Hindi-language drama film written and directed by Apurva Dhar Badgaiyann. The film is produced by Yoodlee Films, a production venture of Saregama India. It stars Jitendra Kumar and Ritika Badiani. The movie revolves around a small town panwalla who falls in love with a schoolgirl who lives opposite his shop before even meeting her. "Chaman Bahaar" released on Netflix on 19 June 2020


title: Chaman Bahaar

text: The film's music was composed by with Anshuman Mukherjee and Anuj Garg with lyrics written by Apurva Dhar Badgaiyan and Amit Prathan.


title: David Holmes (actor)

text: Holmes was the stunt double for Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in the first six films of the "Harry Potter" film series. He played a Slytherin beater in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", but an error in the film's credits lists him as playing the character Adrian Pucey instead; that role was actually played by Scott Fern.


title: David Holmes (actor)

text: While test filming for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" in January 2009, Holmes injured his spine in an accident during one of the stunts. Although he initially hoped to return to work, Holmes is now paralysed and uses a wheelchair. He is credited in the finished film as a stunt performer.


title: David Holmes (actor)

text: After becoming disabled, he took up automobile racing, driving a car with hand controls which he could operate. With two friends – also paralysed – Holmes started Ripple Productions, which in 2020 launched a podcast with Daniel Radcliffe, called "Cunning Stunts", interviewing other stunt actors to raise awareness about the risks they face.


title: Head teacher

text: A head master, head instructor, bureaucrat, headmistress, head, chancellor, principal or school director (sometimes another title is used) is the staff member of a school with the greatest responsibility for the management of the school. In some English-speaking countries, the title for this role is "principal."


title: Head teacher

text: School principals are stewards of learning and managing supervisors of their schools. They aim to provide vision and leadership to all stakeholders in the school and create a safe and peaceful environment to achieve the mission of learning and educating at the highest level. They guide the day to day school business and oversee all activities conducted by the school. They bear the responsibility of all decision making and are accountable for their efforts to elevate the school to the best level of learning achievements for the students, best teaching skills for the teachers and best work environment for support staff.


title: Head teacher

text: While some head teachers still do some teaching themselves, in most larger schools, most of their duties are managerial and pastoral. They are often used to discipline misbehaving students, help organize school sponsored activities and teachers report to them.


title: Head teacher

text: In Australia, the head teacher is sometimes in charge of one (in the case of a major subject) or multiple (often in smaller schools) specific departments, such as English, history, maths, science, writing, technology, etc., but maintains full teaching duties and status. They are considered part of the school executive, and often a head teacher position is a stepping-stone into administration.


title: Head teacher

text: In larger schools, the principal is assisted by one or more "vice-principals", "assistant principals", "associate principals", or "deputy principals". Their position is secondary to the principal with regard to school governance. Assistant principals generally perform specific duties such as handling student discipline, curriculum, student council or student activities whereas the principal has the ultimate responsibility for the school as a whole (including faculty and staff, physical plant, etc.).


title: Head teacher

text: In many Australian and New Zealand schools, a headmaster/principal is the head administrator of a school who has been appointed to her/his position by the school board, superintendent, or other body. The principal, often in conjunction with the school board, makes the executive decisions that govern the school, as well as having the authority over the employment (and in some cases firing) of teachers. The principal is often the chief disciplinarian of the students.


title: Head teacher

text: While there has been considerable anecdotal discussion about the importance of school principals, there has been very little systematic research into their impact on student outcomes. Recent analysis in the United States has examined how the gains in student achievement at a school change after the principal changes. This outcome-based approach to measuring effectiveness of principals is very similar to the value-added modeling that has been applied to the evaluation of teachers. Such research in the state of Texas found that principals have a very large impact on student achievement. Effective school principals have been shown to significantly improve the performance of all students at the school, at least in part through their impacts on selection and retention of good teachers. Ineffective principals have a similarly large negative effect on school performance, suggesting that issues of evaluation are as important for school administrators as they are for teachers. The impact of principals has also been measured in non-traditional ways. Some principals have focused their efforts on creating more inclusive schools for students with disabilities.


The 2022 European Figure Skating Championships were held from 10 to 16 January 2022 in Tallinn, Estonia. Medals were awarded in the disciplines of men's singles, women's singles, pairs, and ice dance. The competition determined the entry quotas for each federation at the 2023 European Championships. Russia swept the titles for a second consecutive European Championships and for the eighth time in history (after 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2020).


title: 2022 European Figure Skating Championships

text: The competition was open to skaters from all European member nations of the International Skating Union. The corresponding competition for non-European skaters was the 2022 Four Continents Championships.


text: Skaters were eligible for the 2022 European Championships if they turned 15 years of age before 1 July 2021 and met the minimum technical elements score requirements. The ISU accepted scores if they were obtained at senior-level ISU-recognized international competitions during the ongoing season at least 21 days before the first official practice day of the championships or during the two preceding seasons (adjusted from the traditional one due to the pandemic).


text: Normally, the number of entries would be based on the results of the preceding Europeans. However, as the 2021 European Championships were cancelled, the results of the 2020 European Championships were used instead.


text: Member nations began announcing their selections in December 2021. The International Skating Union published a complete list of entries on 21 December 2021.


text: Small medals awarded to the skaters who achieve the highest short program or rhythm dance placements in each discipline:


text: Small medals awarded to the skaters who achieve the highest free skating or free dance placements in each discipline:


text: Poland's Anastasia Polibina / Pavel Golovishnikov withdrew prior to the rhythm dance due to testing positive for COVID-19.


title: Forage

text: Forage is a plant material (mainly plant leaves and stems) eaten by grazing livestock. Historically, the term "forage" has meant only plants eaten by the animals directly as pasture, crop residue, or immature cereal crops, but it is also used more loosely to include similar plants cut for fodder and carried to the animals, especially as hay or silage.


title: Forage

text: While the term "forage" has a broad definition, the term forage crop is used to define crops, annual or biennial, which are grown to be utilized by grazing or harvesting as a whole crop.


title: Lee Kerslake

text: Lee Gary Kerslake (16 April 1947– 19 September 2020) was an English musician, best known as the longtime drummer and backing vocalist for the rock band Uriah Heep and for his work with Ozzy Osbourne in the early 1980s.


title: Lee Kerslake

text: Kerslake was born in Bournemouth, Hampshire (now Dorset). At age 11, he began playing drums and got his first professional gig with The Gods in 1969, going on to record three albums with the band. He later played with Toe Fat and National Head Band before linking up with Uriah Heep in November 1971.


title: Lee Kerslake

text: Kerslake first appeared with Uriah Heep on their 1972 album "Demons and Wizards" and went on to record nine studio records, as well as a live album, with the band before departing in 1978 after the Fallen Angels tour. He also played on David Byron's and Ken Hensley's solo albums, among other efforts during this period. On the "Firefly" album he was credited as Lee "The Bear" Kerslake, the nickname being a reference to his beard growth and overall solid physical build.


title: Lee Kerslake

text: After achieving extreme commercial success with Ozzy Osbourne in the early 1980s, Kerslake rejoined Uriah Heep in time for their "Abominog" album, regarded as a comeback album for the band by many critics. He would remain with the band until January 2007, appearing on an additional six studio albums, bringing his total contribution to Uriah Heep's output to 17 studio albums, along with several live albums.


title: Lee Kerslake

text: In 1980, Kerslake met ex-Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne by chance in an elevator at the Kings Cross Hotel in Australia. "He was in one corner with his bodyguard and his manager, and I was in the other corner with mine. Rather funny". They would soon form the band Blizzard of Ozz with bassist Bob Daisley and guitarist Randy Rhoads, though the band would soon become an Ozzy Osbourne solo project due to a management decision. Kerslake's work can be heard on Osbourne's first two solo albums, "Blizzard of Ozz" and "Diary of a Madman", as well as the 1980 "Live EP" and parts of the 1987 "Tribute" live album.


title: Lee Kerslake

text: Kerslake left Osbourne's band in early 1981 to care for his mother, who had fallen ill. On the "Diary of a Madman" notes, Kerslake and bassist Bob Daisley were not credited, with drummer Tommy Aldridge and bassist Rudy Sarzo instead receiving credit. Aldridge has stated of the "Diary of a Madman" album, "I think it's pretty obvious that it's not my drumming on that album. I have never taken credit for that recording and have always given Lee Kerslake, whenever asked or interviewed, the credit he rightly deserves."


title: Lee Kerslake

text: In 1998, Kerslake and Daisley filed a joint lawsuit against Osbourne and his wife/manager Sharon, seeking royalties and songwriting credits for their contributions to the "Blizzard of Ozz" and "Diary of a Madman" albums. The Osbourne camp responded by removing Kerslake and Daisley's performances from the 2002 reissues of both albums and having them re-recorded by bassist Robert Trujillo and drummer Mike Bordin. Due to fan objection, the original bass and drum tracks were restored when the albums were again reissued in 2011.


title: Lee Kerslake

text: Kerslake was unsure why the Osbourne camp had treated him so negatively: "The only thing I could ever recall was once Ozzy had asked me to speak to her (Sharon) on his behalf regarding the two shows in New York in one night as Ozzy said 'I can't do two shows in one night - not with my voice!' He told me to tell her. I did as he said. I would have died for Ozzy as we were a band and I loved him as such. Because I broke the news to her, she's hated my guts", he recalled in 2011. Entertainment attorney Steven Machat, who was involved in the deal Osbourne signed with Jet Records, said in his 2011 book "Gods, Gangsters and Honour: A Rock 'n' Roll Odyssey" that Sharon was not happy with the level of creative input that Daisley and Kerslake had in the band and wanted Ozzy to have full control. He surmises this led to the split and any ill-will she has since harboured for the drummer. Album producer Max Norman, who produced both albums, concurs that Daisley and Kerslake made considerable songwriting contributions during their time in the band, while also noting that the Osbourne camp "might want to dispute that now."


title: Lee Kerslake

text: In 2003, Kerslake became involved in 'super group' Living Loud, a hard rock project also featuring bassist Bob Daisley, guitarist Steve Morse and singer Jimmy Barnes. Keyboardist Don Airey made a guest appearance. The group released a debut self-titled CD, featuring covers of several Daisley/Kerslake penned Ozzy Osbourne tracks.