title: Eifel

text: By the Old Stone Age, the Eifel was inhabited by people: Neanderthals and modern humans. This is evinced by the Buchenloch and Magdalena Caves near Gerolstein. The artifacts from the Magdalena Cave also show that the Eifel was visited by humans even during the height of the last ice age.


title: Eifel

text: Excavations show that iron was already being worked by the Iron Age "Hunsrück-Eifel culture" to which the Eifel gives its name. The first smelting hut north of the Alps was built during the La Tène period in the 5th century BC in Hillesheim. Near Bitburg there is an iron smelting site in which metal was smelted and worked in an almost industrial manner during the Roman period. In Roman times, the Eifel was an important economic region. Its mineral resources (lead, zinc spar, iron, limestone and stones for construction) were mined, and trade benefited from long-distance Roman communication routes such as the Roman road from Trier to Cologne, which crossed the Eifel.


title: Eifel

text: In the late Middle Ages, the Eifel was a border area between the Archbishoprics of Electoral Cologne and Electoral Trier, the County of Luxembourg and the Duchy of Jülich. This explains the large number of castles, now lying in ruins, which had been built mainly for the purpose of guarding the border. Through skillful politics, several smaller principalities and abbey estates were able to acquire their independence, for example the House of Manderscheid-Blankenheim, the County of Salm-Reifferscheid and Prüm Abbey.


title: Eifel

text: The mining and smelting works, with their demand for pit props and charcoal for smelting, the great demand for construction timber and firewood and the shipbuilding industry which was widespread until the 19th century, led to an almost complete deforestation of the woods. In fact, around 1800, the Eifel must be imagined as a landscape of meadows and heathland, where animals, especially flocks of sheep, grazed. At the same time, the population was becoming increasingly impoverished because the poor arable land did not yield rich harvests. Even after the decline of mining and smelting operations after the mid-19th century, the situation of the population did not improve. In addition, the Eifel was a marching route for French troops to all kinds of theatres of war. They demanded "forage money" from the local population, which just caused further impoverishment, as the records of Kottenheim show.


title: Eifel

text: Prussian rule began in 1815, but little changed in terms of social conditions: The Eifel, as a poor peripheral region of the empire ("Prussian Siberia"), was only of interest for military reasons. For Prussian officials and officers, mainly Protestants, a posting to the purely Catholic Eifel region was like a punishment sentence. However, the landscape changed as Prussia carried out systematic reforestation, albeit with coniferous trees that were not typical of the region.


title: Eifel

text: In the 19th century, the Eifel region suffered severe famines, especially in the years 1816/17, 1847 and 1879/80, and an 1853 memorandum records that ""Many Eifel inhabitants know no food other than potatoes and bread that consists of a mixture of oatmeal and potato. It can be said without exaggeration that two thirds of the entire population only enjoy meat once a year."" The consequences of the terrible food situation were only too obvious: ""In 1852, only 10% of all those liable to enlistment were fit for military service."".“


title: Eifel

text: Due to its barren soils and the harsh climate, which led time and again to poor harvests, many farmers were in debt. According to reports of the winter of starvation in 1879/80, however, there was a wave of solidarity in the Reich, and in 1883 the "Eifel Fund" was established, through which, within 18 years, 5.5  millions Reichsmarks were raised for land improvement, for the afforestation of barren land and for land consolidation.".


title: Eifel

text: For a long time, economic development was hampered by the poor condition of roads and tracks. However, due to its border location between the German Empire, Belgium and Luxembourg (as march routes to France), many railway lines were built since the foundation of the German Empire, which served military-strategic purposes. This improvement of the transport routes also boosted tourism. The construction of the Nürburgring also served the purpose of economic development in the 1920s.


title: Eifel

text: The border region of the Eifel was also not spared by the Second World War. The construction of the Siegfried Line was followed, from September 1944 to January 1945, by violent battles and the Ardennes Offensive, especially in the northern Eifel, which still bears witness to the legacy of the war: ruins of old bunkers and parts of tank barriers. Especially in the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, where the battle with the highest losses was fought in the west, military cemeteries - such as in Vossenack - bear witness to the brutal events of the war.


title: Eifel

text: Much of the Eifel has limited infrastructure and there are almost no large industrial areas. Only in the Pellenz in the Neuwied Basin is there a stronger industrial presence. Agriculture is restricted to certain valleys and the lower levels (particularly in parts of the southern Eifel, the Pre-Eifel and the Maifeld). A large number of farms have been converted into stabling facilities, some of which offer overnight accommodation and horse care for trail riders.


title: Eifel

text: Wine-growing is a major activity along the Rhine, Moselle and Ahr valleys and in the Wittlich Basin. In the Wittlich Basin, tobacco is also grown. At Holsthum in the Prüm valley, in the lee of the Ferschweiler Plateau, hops are grown for the Bitburger Brewery. However, at high altitudes in the Eifel, only forestry and dairy farming are generally possible.


title: Eifel

text: Mining is still carried out in the Eifel region. In Mayen the firm of Rathscheck Schiefer mines roofing slates in the Moselle slate mines of Katzenberg and Margareta, and gypsum in Ralingen on the River Sauer near the border with Luxembourg. In the South Eifel, especially in the Wehrer Bowl, volcanic carbonic acid is extracted.


title: Eifel

text: In many places in the Eifel region, the mining of pumice, basalt and other rocks and minerals has a long tradition. For example, between Daun, Gerolstein and Hillesheim - i.e. in the heart of the Volcanic Eifel - there are 17 active pits over an area of 11 by12 kilometres. Residents and local authorities affected by the planned expansion (as of July 2012) have practically no influence over it because it is based on the old mining law.


title: Eifel

text: There is evidence that iron was being processed in the Eifel by the Iron Age. The first smelting works north of the Alps was built during the La Tène period in the 5th century BC in Hillesheim. Near Bitburg there is an iron smeltery where, during the Roman period, the metal was being smelted and worked almost in an industrial way. So by then the Eifel was already an important economic area. Its mineral resources (lead, zinc spar, iron, lime and rocks for construction) were mined and trade benefited from Roman roads such as the Roman road from Trier to Cologne, which crossed the Eifel.


title: Eifel

text: The abundance of timber, which was needed for smelting, and of watercourses, which were indispensable for the preparation and operation of hammer mills and bellows, made it possible for the Eifel to be an important supra-regional economic area even in the late Middle Ages. About 10% of the iron produced in Europe originated from the Eifel. It was traded at the markets in Trier and Cologne.


title: Eifel

text: Well known are the many mineral springs, which occur frequently here because of the region's volcanic past. The largest bottlers are Gerolsteiner Brunnen and Apollinaris. One of the largest German breweries, Bitburger, has its headquarters and production facilities in Bitburg in the Eifel.


title: Eifel

text: The economic importance of tourism has increased since the Second World War; and it was further encouraged, for example, by the Eifel's designation as a national park (the Eifel National Park) on 1 January 2004, as well as the natural history infrastructure in the Volcanic Eifel. Furthermore, the Eifel Park and several maars and lakes are popular tourist destinations. In winter, in some of the highlands, there are opportunities for winter sports, e.g. at the Schwarzer Mann near Prüm, the Weißer Stein near Hellenthal or in Rohren near Monschau. A well known destination for motorsport fans is the Nürburgring with its famous Nordschleife. Another touristic and geological destination is the German Volcano Road, which links the attractions of the Vulkanland Eifel Geopark. There are also numerous mountains and hills with good viewing points as well as several holiday routes. Hiking tourism is also of considerable economic importance, as is reflected in the increasing number of overnight stays for hiking guests and the progressive expansion of the network of trails. In addition to the Eifelsteig trail, which was opened in 2009 and runs from Aachen to Trier across the Eifel, there is a wide network of themed and circular walks.


title: Eifel

text: As a traditionally isolated land, in which the population kept a quiet and simple way of life, the Eifel offered fertile soil for lively folk poetry. The sagas, legends and fairy tales, which were told on long winter evenings in the farmhouse parlours, often reflect a longing for a better world, which stood in contrast to the found reality of life. The Eifel also repeatedly offered material for numerous literary and regional studies works - from the Eifel and about the Eifel.


title: Eifel

text: Eifel mentality and humour were reflected in numerous anecdotes and jokes. Figures of fun and Eifel characters are brought to life in these stories. The "Dahnener Sprünge" have become famous beyond the region. A love of jokes and ridicule of one's neighbours may have formed motives for these popular stories of Eifel fools. In addition, there are countless horror stories of witches, undead, headless riders, revenants and werewolves, which - like those in the neighbouring Ardennes region - survived into the 20th century.


title: Eifel

text: Folk poetry of the Eifel was collected early on. Inspired by Romanticism, in which folklore was seen as a rich source of unadulterated motifs and forms, collections of stories and adaptations of Eifel folk tales emerged. Among the most illuminating collections is the poetic guide through the Eifel region by chaplain, Johann Heydinger. Prominent authors such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Guido Görres, Karl Simrock, Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Schlegel rank amongst the early Eifel authors.


title: Eifel

text: During the 1920s scientific interest in folk culture also gave impetus to the collection of folk poetry. The most prominent collector was Bonn professor of folklore, Matthias Zender, who was born in Zendscheid and who, as a student between 1929 and 1936, collected about 10,000 stories, folk tales and jokes from the Eifel/Ardennes region, of which 2,000 were published.


title: Eifel

text: Scary stories from the Eifel region were collected and partly published by headmaster, Heinrich Hoffmann, from Düren in 1900 and also by Zender in the 1930s. Peter Kremer published a collection of such stories with a commentary in 2003 in a Düren publication.


title: Eifel

text: Well-known historical works of the Eifel are the "Eiflia illustrata oder geographische und historische Beschreibung der Eifel" by Johann Friedrich Schannat, published in the 17th century, translated, supplemented and re-edited in 1824 by Georg Bärsch; and the "Eiflia sacra", also edited by Schannat and re-edited in 1888 by Carl Schorn.


title: Eifel

text: The first recognised Eifel poet was Peter Zirbes, a wandering stoneware trader from Niederkail. He was the author of simple poems in the Eifel dialect, which he published in 1852. In 2010, Ute Bales wrote a novel about his life, which was awarded the special prize by the jury in the Rhineland-Palatinate Book of the Year competition ("Buch des Jahres Rheinland-Pfalz"). Many contemporary poets who live in the Eifel or come from the Eifel have captured the Eifel poetically and made it known beyond its borders to readers of poetry in the German-speaking world. These include Jochen Arlt (who has also contributed to regional literature as the editor of several Eifel anthologies), Theo Breuer, Ursula Krechel and Norbert Scheuer. Jochen Arlt's poem "Einkaufn gehen in Münstereifel" may be read in the most important German poetry collection, "The Great Conrady. The book of German poems. From its Beginnings to the Present".


title: Eifel

text: One great narrator and native of Trier, who chose the Eifel as the setting for her novels and stories, was Clara Viebig. The best-selling author of the subsequent naturalism movement, wrote two great literary monuments about the Eifel with her novels, "Kreuz im Venn" and "Weiberdorf". The reception of Clara Viebig's work was interrupted during the Nazi era because of her marriage to a Jewish publisher. Since the end of the 1980s, the author's works have experience a deserved renaissance - even in the Eifel region. Perhaps the most important literary work about the Eifel region and its people is the novel "Winterspelt" by Alfred Andersch, which is set in the final phase of the Second World War and depicts the positional war during the Ardennes offensive and the tragic combination of people and their fates in epic breadth. The author, Heinz Küpper, who died in 2005 and whose novels included "Wohin mit dem Kopf" and "Zweikampf mit Rotwild", Norbert Scheuer from Kall and Ute Bales from Gerolstein are today the most important representatives of the Eifel in the field of contemporary, German-language prose. In their works, they present the Eifel, both physically and symbolically, as a rugged landscape, which becomes a reflection of spiritual landscapes. Particularly interesting here (in comparison to the perspective of the more down-to-earth narrator) is the Eifel's literary composition from the point of view of the outsider.


title: Eifel

text: This literature challenges us to confront the region and its people, especially where there is no attempt to romanticize the Eifel, but where hopelessness and despair in the face of poverty and misery, intellectual narrowness or rigid systems of values become apparent. Although Norbert Scheuer was born in the Eifel, the narrators of his novels and stories take the perspective of the distanced or the outsider. Norbert Scheuer has succeeded in presenting life in the Eifel in a multifaceted way and making it interesting for readers in the entire German-speaking area, especially in his latest book "Kall, Eifel" (2005). In Ute Bales' novels, landscape and people are inseparably connected. The characteristic of the Eifel landscape and its inhabitants is the starting point of a narrative style that shows people as ""lonely, lost, in a misunderstood place"" in and with their suffering, as in the novel "Kamillenblumen" (2010) about the peddler, Traud, from Kolverath.


title: Eifel

text: One literary genre that has been flourishing in many regions and cities in Germany over the last few decades is the crime novel with a local or regional setting. Jacques Berndorf has become the best-selling German crime novelist with detective novels such as "Eifel-Blues" (1989), "Eifel-Sturm" (1999) or "Eifel-Träume" (2004). In 1996, he was awarded the top prize at the Eifel Literature Festival. In addition, Ralf Kramp was awarded the sponsorship prize. Kramp was the first author to write Eifel crime stories for children with his series about the "black cloverleaf" ("schwarzes Kleeblatt"). Harald Schneider (born 1962) is the author of the children's detective series "Die Meisterschnüffler", an interactive read that leads readers from 8 years old to different locations in the Eifel. Carola Clasen, Carsten Sebastian Henn, Andreas Izquierdo, Rudolf Jagusch, Martina Kempff, Elke Pistor, Edgar Noske and Hans Jürgen Sittig are other authors who contribute to the genre of Eifel crime novels. Historical crime novels have been penned by Günter Krieger and Petra Schier. Josef Zierden has published an Eifel thriller travel guide that covers countless crime novel scenes in the Eifel. In the town of Hillesheim there is an Eifel crime novel hiking trail that links the scenes of novels by Jacques Berndorf and Ralf Kramp. The crime novel house in Hillesheim houses the largest collection of detective novels in the German-speaking world with a stock of 30,000 books, and there is also a "crime café" in the house.


title: Eifel

text: The Eifel was a destination for German impressionists, among them Eugen Bracht, who painted there with colleagues, and August von Brandis, who often spent several days there with architecture students from Aachen in order to give them an understanding of landscape painting. Two of Bracht's paintings are preserved at the castles of Manderscheid.


title: Shear wall

text: In structural engineering, a shear wall is a vertical element of a system that is designed to resist in-plane lateral forces, typically wind and seismic loads. In many jurisdictions, the International Building Code and International Residential Code govern the design of shear walls.


title: Shear wall

text: A shear wall resists loads parallel to the plane of the wall. Collectors, also known as drag members, transfer the diaphragm shear to shear walls and other vertical elements of the seismic force resisting system. Shear walls are typically light-framed or braced wooden walls with shear panels, reinforced concrete walls, reinforced masonry walls, or steel plates.


title: Shear wall

text: Plywood is the conventional material used in wood (timber) shear walls, but with advances in technology and modern building methods, other prefabricated options have made it possible to inject shear assemblies into narrow walls that fall at either side of an opening. Sheet steel and steel-backed shear panels in the place of structural plywood in shear walls has proved to provide stronger seismic resistance.


title: Shear wall

text: A shear wall is stiffer in its principal axis than it is in the other axis. It is considered as a primary structure which provides relatively stiff resistance to vertical and horizontal forces acting in its plane. Under this combined loading condition, a shear wall develops compatible axial, shear, torsional and flexural strains, resulting in a complicated internal stress distribution. In this way, loads are transferred vertically to the building's foundation. Therefore, there are four critical failure mechanisms; as shown in Figure 1. The factors determining the failure mechanism include geometry, loading, material properties, restraint, and construction.


title: Shear wall

text: The slenderness ratio of a wall is defined as a function of the effective height divided by either the effective thickness or the radius of the gyration of the wall section. It is highly related to the slenderness limit that is the cut-off between elements being classed "slender" or "stocky". Slender walls are vulnerable to buckling failure modes, including Euler in-plane buckling due to axial compression, Euler out-of-plane buckling due to axial compression and lateral torsional buckling due to bending moment. In the design process, structural engineers need to consider all these failure modes to ensure that the wall design is safe under various kinds of possible loading conditions.


title: Shear wall

text: In actual structural systems, the shear walls may function as a coupled system instead of isolated walls depending on their arrangements and connections. Two neighboring wall panels can be considered coupled when the interface transfers longitudinal shear to resist the deformation mode. This stress arises whenever a section experiences a flexural or restrained warping stress and its magnitude is dependent on the stiffness of the coupling element. Depending on this stiffness, the performance of a coupled section will fall between that of an ideal uniform element of similar gross plan cross-section and the combined performance of the independent component parts. Another advantage of coupling is that it enhances the overall flexural stiffness dis-proportionally to shear stiffness, resulting in smaller shear deformation.


title: Shear wall

text: The location of a shear wall significantly affects the building function, such as natural ventilation and daylighting performance. The performance requirements vary for buildings of different functions.


title: Shear wall

text: Hotel or dormitory buildings require many partitions, allowing insertions of shear walls. In these structures, traditional cellular construction (Figure 2) is preferred and a regular wall arrangement with transverse cross walls between rooms and longitudinal spine walls flanking a central corridor is used.


title: Shear wall

text: A structure of shear walls in the center of a large building—often encasing an elevator shaft or stairwell—form a "shear core". In multi-storey commercial buildings, shear walls form at least one core (Figure 3). From a building services perspective, the shear core houses communal services including stairs, lifts, toilets and service risers. Building serviceability requirements necessitates a proper arrangement of a shear core. From the structural point of view, a shear core could strengthen the building's resistance to lateral loads, i.e., wind load and seismic load, and significantly increase the building safety.


title: Shear wall

text: Concrete shear walls are reinforced with both horizontal and vertical reinforcement (Figure 4). A reinforcement ratio is defined as the ratio of the gross concrete area for a section taken orthogonal to the reinforcement. Construction codes of practice define maximum and minimum amounts of reinforcement as well as the detailing of steel bars. Common construction methods for in-situ reinforced concrete walls include traditional shuttered lifts, slip form, jump form and tunnel form.


title: Shear wall

text: The traditional shuttered lifts method should be used when the total number of walls is small or the arrangement is irregular. In this method, walls are formed one story at one time together with the columns. Although it is slow, this technique may produce a premium finish quality or texture.


title: Shear wall

text: Slip forming is method of concrete placement whereby a moving form is used to create a continuous wall extrusion. This method is very efficient for well-suited structures, such as flanged and core wall systems. A very accurate wall thickness can be achieved but the surface is rough because of the abrasion of the form on the walls.


title: Shear wall

text: Jump forming, also known as climbing forming, is a method of construction whereby the walls are cast in discrete lifts. It is a stop-start process with day joints formed at each lift level. Similar to slip forming, jump forming is only efficient for structures with repetition of wall arrangement. Moreover, it is convenient for adding connections and extrusions at the floor level due to the discrete features. Nevertheless, the inclusion of day joints leaves higher chances for defects and imperfections.


title: Shear wall

text: Tunnel form construction uses a formwork system to cast slabs and walls as a single pour operation. It is suitable for cellular structures with regular repetition of both horizontal and vertical members. The advantage of this method is that the construction can progress vertically and horizontally at the same time, thereby increasing the integrity and stability of the structure.


title: Shear wall

text: Due to functional requirements, the designer may choose non planar sections like C,L as opposed to the planar sections like rectangular/bar bell sections. Nonplanar sections require 3D analysis and are a research area.


title: Shear wall

text: Modeling techniques have been progressively updated during the last two decades, moving from linear static to nonlinear dynamic, enabling more realistic representation of global behavior, and different failure modes. Different modeling techniques shear walls span from macro models such as modified beam-column elements, to micro models such as 3D finite element models. An appropriate modeling technique should:


title: Shear wall

text: Different models have been developed over time, including macro-models, vertical line element models, finite-element models, and multi-layer models. More recently, fiber-section beam-columns elements have become popular, as they can model most of the global response and failure modes properly, while avoiding sophistications associated with finite element models.


title: Venezuelans

text: Venezuelans (Spanish: "venezolanos") are the citizens identified with the country of Venezuela. This connection may be through citizenship, descent or cultural. For most Venezuelans, many or all of these connections exist and are the source of their Venezuelan citizenship or their bond to Venezuela.


title: Venezuelans

text: Venezuela is a diverse and multilingual country, home to a melting pot of people of distinct origins, as a result, many Venezuelans do not regard their nationality with ethnicity, but with citizenship or allegiance. Venezuela as Argentina and Brazil, received most immigrants, during 1820s to 1930s Venezuela received a major wave of 2.1 million European immigrants, being the third country in Latin America to have received Europeans, behind Argentina and Brazil.


title: Venezuelans

text: Writing was not used in pre-Columbian times, a historical stage where various groups began to move throughout the Americas, thus making it difficult to find evidence of the people who began to populate this land. However, archaeological excavations show evidence of certain periods that were taking place on the continent.


title: Venezuelans

text: Venezuela was probably first settled by humans 16,000 years ago, due to migration flows from other indigenous cultures of America, from the south to the Amazon, from the west through Los Andes and north by the Caribbean Sea.


title: Venezuelans

text: There are four periods of diversity that develop in the current Venezuela, which also entering a new period, it did not mean the end of the previous.


title: Venezuelans

text: The first migrations to the continent were probably from East Asia to 15,000 years. C. These early migrants (called forth by the generic name "Indians") came at first to be located in North America, later moving to the territory of present Venezuela. Now for their offspring, it was clear verify the Asian features on their faces that will adapt to the climate and lifestyle.


title: Venezuelans

text: During this period, various mammals were disappearing by climatic changes already beginning to take place from 5000 years ago, so the population in the mainland, starts to move towards the coast and spread to some nearby islands, trying to find new feeding alternatives.


title: Venezuelans

text: On August 2, 1498 (516 years), Christopher Columbus, and the Spanish colonizers' ships, first landed on the American mainland in what is currently Venezuelan territory. Colonization was rapid despite small local indigenous rebellions, and the Spaniards manage to conquer the territory. During this period, the most significant crossbreeding process took place. One that will later define the social profile of the country.


title: Venezuelans

text: With the passage of time, and the introduction of the African continent, a third race, the Africans, started to integrate into the population, creating heterogeneity in the faces of the society of the time.


title: Venezuelans

text: During colonial centuries in Venezuela began to settle the "peninsular whites", coming directly from the Iberian Peninsula and which were those who held positions in the crown, representing only 15% of the population. Another group of whites who were born in Venezuela were originally called "Creole", representing 20% of the population: they were mostly from the Canary Islands and they worked mainly in petty trade. The other two smaller groups were the original inhabitants and indigenous blacks brought from Africa: they were about 5% of the population. Soon the original groups started to have interbreedings and this created a process of "fusion" between the different racial groups: The "brown" were descendants of the unions between Whites, Indians and Blacks and by the 18th century were the largest racial and social group being more than 60% of the population.


title: Venezuelans

text: This process is currently responsible for the majority of Venezuelans who are of mixed race. This number, however, would continue to decrease after the economic boom in the mid 20th century.


title: Venezuelans

text: The country has a diverse population that reflects its rich history and the people that have lived here since antiquity to the present. The historic amalgam of different principal groups form the basis of the current demographics of Venezuela: the European immigrants, the Amerindian peoples, African, Asian, Middle Eastern and other recent immigrants.


title: Venezuelans

text: Many of the indigenous peoples were absorbed by the mixed population, but the remaining 500,000 currently represent more than 85 different cultures.


title: Venezuelans

text: European immigrants were mainly Spanish colonists, but another large and growing number are descendants of Europeans (Portuguese, Italians, Germans and Americans) who migrated to the region in mid-twentieth century during the oil growth in the country. Small numbers are descendants of French, English and Polish, as they emigrated during World War II and the Cold War.


title: Venezuelans

text: Black Africans were brought as slaves, mostly coastal lowlands, beginning early in the sixteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth century. Other immigrant populations are Asian and Middle East, particularly Lebanon, Syria and the Arab world, some Jews from southern Spain, Israel and Central European nations, East Asians like Chinese and Japanese, Dominicans, Trinidadians and Tobagonians, Haitians, Cubans, Peruvians, Argentinians, Uruguayans, Chileans, Ecuadorians and Colombians, this being the greatest social impact due to a large number of displaced individuals who entered the Venezuelan territory during the armed conflict in that country; which generated a high supply of labor, personnel and domestic economy informal.


title: Venezuelans

text: Currently, according to the critic D'Ambrosio and other academics, about 51.6% of Venezuelans are mestizos or mulattos (called "Criollos": the 40% of them are with mostly white features, 20% with mostly black features and 10% with mostly Indians features), 45% are white, 2% are black and 1% Indians.


title: Venezuelans

text: Notably, according to these scholars, is the fact that virtually there are no pure blacks nor indigenous people in Venezuela. With the exception of direct descendants of immigrants or specific indigenous tribes.


title: Venezuelans

text: In addition, according to a genetic autosomal DNA study conducted in 2008 by the University of Brasilia (UNB), the composition of the population of Venezuela is: 60.60% European, 23% of Native American contribution and 16% of Africa's contribution.


title: Venezuelans

text: made Venezuela the sixth-most populous country in Latin America (after Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Peru). Approximately more than one million (4-6% of the total population) are living in other countries.


title: Venezuelans

text: More than ninety percent of the Venezuelans live in urban areas – a figure significantly higher than the world average. The literacy rate (98 percent) in Venezuela is also well above the world average, and the rate of population growth slightly exceeds the world average. A large proportion of Venezuelans are young, largely because of recent decreases in the infant mortality rate. While 30 percent of the people are 14 years old or younger, just 4 percent are aged 65 or older.


title: Venezuelans

text: The country has a diverse population that reflects its colorful history and the peoples that have resided there throughout. The historic amalgam of the different main groups forms the basics of Venezuela's current demographics: European immigrants, Amerindian peoples, Africans, Asians


title: Venezuelans

text: (including the Arabs/West Asians) and other recent immigrants. The autosomal DNA genetic composition of population in Venezuela, is 60.60% of European contribution, 23% of Amerindian contribution, and 16.30% of African contribution.


title: Venezuelans

text: Many of the indigenous peoples were absorbed into the Moreno population, because of the heavy mixture of European and African people. They represent over half of the country's population (about 51.6%). This proportion is beginning to decrease, though, as mixed lower income Venezuelans are more likely to flee to other South American countries.


title: Venezuelans

text: Early European settlers and post-independence immigrants were mostly Spanish colonists, but a high number of other Europeans brought in were from Portuguese, Italian, and German immigrants to the region in the middle 20th century by the Petroleum Growth, and in much smaller numbers of French, English, Polish, Russian, Greek, Scandinavian, Romanian, Ukrainian and Hungarian communities who immigrated during the Second World War and the Cold War. 300,000 Italians and an equal numbers of Spaniards immigrated in the 1940s and 1950s, and earlier who were fleeing from the Spanish Civil War (1930s).


title: Venezuelans

text: Up to 95% of Venezuelans live principally in important urban areas like Greater Caracas, Maracaibo, Maracay, Valencia, Lecheria, Barquisimeto/Cabudare, Colonia Tovar, Punto Fijo; the Andean States, Margarita Island and Araya Peninsula. They represent almost half of the population with 43.6% self-identifying as ‘blanco’ (white) in the 2011 census.


title: Venezuelans

text: African slaves were brought as slaves, mostly to the coastal lowlands, beginning early in the 16th century, and continuing into the mid 19th century.


title: Venezuelans

text: Although they are located in almost the entire country, the Black and African population are concentrated in places where they used to be slaves and worked as farm hands on subsistence farms of plantains, cocoa, tobacco, sugar cane and cotton in the Aroa Valley, Litoral varguense, Eastern Falcon state; Gibraltar, Bobures and Palmarito in the Sur del Lago Region; and in areas where slaves would run away during Colonial Venezuela and formed cumbes, communities in mountainous and isolated areas, such as, the Sierra de Falcón, Barlovento Region (Acevedo, Andrés Bello, Brión, Buroz and Páez municipalities), Ocumare de La Costa, Choroní; El Callao and Paria Peninsula (where Afro-Trinidadian also migrated); and through Los Llanos, well dispersed in small to decent percents. They represent 3.6% of the population.


title: Venezuelans

text: Before the Spanish colonization of the region that would become the country of Venezuela, the territory was the home to many different indigenous peoples. Today more than fifty different indigenous ethnic groups inhabit Venezuela. Most of them speak languages belonging to the Arawakan, Cariban, and Chibchan languages families. Pure indigenous Amerindians comprise around 2 percent of the population. There are 101 languages listed for Venezuela in the Ethnologue database, of which 80 are spoken today as living languages. Today, they're mostly located south of the Orinoco, in the Guayana Region, an area that covers half of the country but the population represents just 2.7% of Venezuelans; other important regions where they're located are on Zulia state, Apure state, the Eastern Region and Orinoco Delta.


title: Venezuelans

text: The largest sub-groups are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Mainland China, India, Japan and Korea. The first wave of immigrants began in 1847 and consisted of mainly Cantonese immigrants; then the second wave during beginning of the 1940s and 1950s, consisted of Chinese and Japanese immigrants; reaching a peak in the mid-1970s in connection with the oil boom, where Korean and Indian immigrants (mostly Indo-Caribbeans) formed a new group to the country. Asian people represent around 1% of the Venezuelan population.


title: Venezuelans

text: The Chinese in Venezuela are the 4th largest diaspora in the Americas after the United States, Canada and Peru.


title: Venezuelans

text: Arab immigration to Venezuela started as early as the 19th and 20th centuries. They came mostly from Western Asia, particularly Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. They are mostly located in the most important urban areas and Margarita Island, representing around 5% of the population in Venezuela. In religion, the majority of Arab-Venezuelans are Christians who belong to the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. There are few Muslims.


title: Venezuelans

text: According to the Venezuelan Institute of Statistics, about one million Venezuelans have Syrian origins and more than 20,000 Venezuelans are registered in the Venezuelan Embassy in Damascus. Other sources stated that there is around 60,000 Syrian-Venezuelans living in Syria. More than 200,000 people from the Sweida area carry Venezuelan citizenship and most are members of Syria's Druze sect, who immigrated to Venezuela in the past century.


title: Venezuelans

text: According to a 2011 poll, 88.3 percent of the population is Christian, primarily Roman Catholic (71%), 17 percent Protestant, and the remaining 0.03 percent Mormons (LDS Church). The Venezuelans without religion are 9% (atheist 2%, agnostic or indifferent 6% and doesn't know/doesn't respond 1% ), almost 3% of the population follow other religions (1% of them are of santeria).


title: Showtrial (TV series)

text: Showtrial is a British television legal drama created by Ben Richards and starring Tracy Ifeachor and Céline Buckens. The five-part series commenced on BBC One in October 2021.


title: Showtrial (TV series)

text: Talitha Campbell, the arrogant daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur, is arrested following the disappearance of fellow student, Hannah Ellis, the hard-working daughter of a single mother. From Talitha's arrest to the jury's final verdict, "Showtrial" switches between both sides of the legal battle, as defence and prosecution fight for their version of what really happened to Hannah, and the truth about Talitha: was she falsely accused or is she a callous murderer?


title: Showtrial (TV series)

text: BBC One commissioned "Showtrial" in 2019. Principal photography began in April 2021 in Bristol, including at the University of Bristol.


title: Andy Townsend

text: Andrew David Townsend (born 23 July 1963) is a former professional footballer and sports co-commentator for Premier League Productions and CBS Sports.


title: Andy Townsend

text: As a player he was a midfielder who notably played in the Premier League for Chelsea, Aston Villa and Middlesbrough. He also played in the Football League for Southampton, Norwich City and West Bromwich Albion. Prior to his professional career he had spent four years in Non-League with Welling United. Despite being born in England, Townsend played in World Cups for the Republic of Ireland national team, making 70 appearances and scoring seven goals.


title: Andy Townsend

text: Following retirement, Townsend moved into sports commentary and was ITV Sport's co-commentator for all of their major coverage of games until 2015. He has also commentated for BT Sport, Talksport and BBC Radio 5 Live.


title: Andy Townsend

text: Townsend was born in Maidstone, Kent, but grew up in Bexley, where he attended Upton Primary School in Bexleyheath, followed by Bexleyheath School.


title: Andy Townsend

text: He began his playing career in August 1980 with Welling United in the Athenian League, while working as a computer operator for Greenwich Borough Council in south-east London. After making 105 appearances for Welling, he was signed by Weymouth in March 1984 for £13,500.


title: Andy Townsend

text: In January 1985, he was signed by Lawrie McMenemy at Southampton for £35,000 and made his professional debut at home to Aston Villa on 20 April 1985 as Southampton qualified for Europe, only to be banned in the aftermath of the Heysel Stadium disaster.


title: Andy Townsend

text: Over the next season, he was in and out of the team (then managed by Chris Nicholl) but broke his leg in a pre-season friendly against his old club Weymouth in August 1986. He fought his way back to fitness and rejoined the side the following January.


title: Andy Townsend

text: In the 1987–88 he was a virtual ever-present, playing alongside Jimmy Case and Glenn Cockerill in the Southampton midfield. He was a hard-tackling, hard-working midfielder with an eye for goal. It was a shock, therefore, when Nicholl sold him to First Division rivals Norwich City in August 1988, for a fee of £300,000.


title: Andy Townsend

text: He made his debut as a substitute against Middlesbrough on 3 September 1988, before replacing the suspended Trevor Putney for his first full appearance in a 3–1 win over "Spurs" on 22 October. He retained his place in the Norwich midfield and ended the season with 36 league appearances (5 as substitute) with five goals. He also made six FA Cup appearances with two goals against Port Vale in the Third Round on 7 January 1989. Under manager Dave Stringer, he was a member of the "Canaries"' 1988–89 side that finished fourth in the top flight and reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup. At the season's end, Townsend was shortlisted for the PFA Players' Player of the Year award, which was won by Mark Hughes.


title: Andy Townsend

text: After making a total of 138 appearances for Chelsea, scoring 12 goals but winning no trophies (they never finished higher than 11th in the league while he was there), he transferred to Aston Villa in July 1993 for £2.1million.


title: Andy Townsend

text: He finally won some silverware when Villa won the 1994 League Cup, beating Manchester United 3–1. He captained Villa when they reclaimed the trophy in 1996 with a 3–0 victory over Leeds United.


title: Andy Townsend

text: In August 1997, just after the start of the 1997–98 season, he transferred to Bryan Robson's Middlesbrough for £500,000 having made 134 league appearances for "the Villans", scoring eight league goals.


title: Andy Townsend

text: He made 37 appearances in his first season on Teesside, scoring twice as "Boro"' won promotion to the Premier League. In the 1998–99 season, he formed a useful partnership with Paul Gascoigne as Middlesbrough finished comfortably in mid-table in their first season back in the Premier League.


title: Andy Townsend

text: In the following season, he found it harder to get into the first team and on 17 September 1999 he moved down a division to West Bromwich Albion for £50,000. Townsend's high wage demands prevented a move back to Norwich or a loan spell with non-league Boston United.


title: Andy Townsend

text: In his one season at West Bromwich Albion he only made 17 league appearances before a recurrent knee injury forced his retirement in July 2000, after a season in which Albion narrowly avoided relegation to Division Two.


title: Andy Townsend

text: His contribution to Norwich's successful season saw Townsend selected for the Republic of Ireland, making his debut against France in February 1989. He qualified for Ireland due to his Irish family heritage.'


title: Andy Townsend

text: He played in the next year's World Cup, in Italy, where he played in all five of Ireland's matches. They reached the quarter-finals, the country's strongest ever campaign. The Irish drew their three group matches – against England, Egypt and the Netherlands. Scoring a penalty in the shoot-out with Romania, his country were eventually sunk by a Salvatore Schillaci goal for the hosts. They had conceded just three goals in those five games.


title: Andy Townsend

text: He was captain of the Ireland squad for the 1994 World Cup. All four teams of Group E finished on four points, they got their revenge on the Italians, but were defeated by Mexico and drew with Norway. Ireland lost 2–0 to the Dutch at the Citrus Bowl in the knock-out stage.


title: Andy Townsend

text: Townsend's most prominent role was as part of ITV Sport's live Champions League, FA Cup and England internationals coverage. He took over from Ron Atkinson as the channel's lead co-commentator, forming a long-running partnership with main commentator Clive Tyldesley, as well as appearing as a studio pundit. He co-hosted Talksport's "Weekend Sports Breakfast" on Sundays with Mike Parry, and hosted the station's drive-time show on Fridays. He also hosted the mid morning discussion on talkSPORT from 10am to 1pm from Monday to Friday, having replaced Jon Gaunt, who was sacked for calling a guest a Nazi. He left the station because he no longer wanted to commute from his Midlands home to the London studio. He also hosts ITV1's regional programme "Soccer Night", alongside Peter Beagrie. Townsend was part of ITV's coverage of the Premier League after they won the rights from the BBC to show top flight football on Saturday evening. In January 2015 ITV confirmed that Townsend, along with presenter Adrian Chiles, would not be retained by the broadcaster after the expiry of his contract in the summer of 2015, with the channel having lost Champions League broadcasting rights.


title: Andy Townsend

text: After leaving ITV in 2015 he joined BT Sport as a co-commentator for their coverage of the Premier League, FA Cup, UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League. He made his co-commentating debut on 15 February 2015, co-commentating on Arsenal vs Middlesbrough in the FA Cup fifth round alongside Ian Darke.


title: Andy Townsend

text: He has also presented BBC Radio 5 Live and written columns for the "Daily Mail". He has also been the commentator on several EA football games with Clive Tyldesley including "2006 FIFA World Cup", "UEFA Champions League 2006-2007", "UEFA Euro 2008", "2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa", "UEFA Euro 2012", "2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil" and most recently "FIFA 12" to this game "FIFA 17".


title: Andy Townsend

text: Townsend was a consultant for Harlequin Property, where he helps set up football schools at their Caribbean resorts. The company's proposed investment into Port Vale had set in motion plans for him to become a football advisor at the club, though nothing was to come of these talks.


title: Andy Townsend

text: He is patron of the George Coller Memorial Fund. He ran in the Great North Run in 2007, finishing in a time of 2 hours and 20 minutes.


title: Nice While It Lasted

text: "Nice While It Lasted" is the series finale of Netflix's animated comedy-drama television series "BoJack Horseman". Written by series creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg and directed by Aaron Long, it was released on Netflix on January 31, 2020, alongside the second half of the sixth season. In the episode, titular character BoJack Horseman is arrested and sentenced to prison for breaking and entering, but is granted a furlough to attend the wedding of his ex-girlfriend, Princess Carolyn. The episode was widely praised as a poignant ending to the series.


title: Nice While It Lasted

text: After the events of "The View from Halfway Down", BoJack is rescued from drowning by the occupants of his former house. BoJack is convicted of breaking and entering and is sentenced to 14 months in a maximum security prison.


title: Nice While It Lasted

text: A year later, BoJack is granted furlough and is picked up by Mr. Peanutbutter to attend Princess Carolyn and Judah's wedding; they head off to buy BoJack a suit for the event and BoJack admits that his prison sentence was "kind of for everything" he'd done over the years. Mr. Peanutbutter takes BoJack to the Griffith Observatory, where he officially gives back the 'D' to the Hollywoo sign in a celebration of the success of his show "Birthday Dad". Due to a misunderstanding, he commissioned a 'B' instead, so that "Hollywoo" is renamed to "Hollywoob".


title: Nice While It Lasted

text: At the wedding, Todd finds BoJack and asks him for help to go to the beach, saying he wants to sit on BoJack's shoulders to get a better view and adding that he saw BoJack looked overwhelmed at the ceremony and thought a walk would help. The two watch the fireworks for Princess Carolyn and Judah. BoJack tells Todd that he is comfortable being in jail; he stays out of trouble and is beating his sobriety record. Todd convinces him that once he completes his sentence, he just has to set a new record every day. BoJack is amused by his uncertainty over whether Todd is being stupid or smart and Todd cheerfully says "I never know!", before saying his brief moment of metaphorical intelligence was nice while it lasted, with Bojack agreeing it was.


title: Nice While It Lasted

text: Later, BoJack meets with Princess Carolyn and congratulates her on the wedding reception. Princess Carolyn tells BoJack that Hollywoob is waiting for his comeback with "The Horny Unicorn", and assures him people may give him another chance. BoJack asks Princess Carolyn to dance, and he tells her he fantasized about convincing her to go through with the wedding. Princess Carolyn assures him she does not need that, and she is happy with the decision she made. BoJack tells her that she deserves to be happy, and asks for representation should he decide to re-enter the business. Princess Carolyn smiles, instead offering to 'recommend some excellent people'. BoJack returns a smile as they continue to dance.


title: Nice While It Lasted

text: Later, BoJack climbs onto the roof and finds Diane smoking. BoJack tells her he misses her, and she reminds him of the voicemail he left when he broke into his old house and nearly drowned. She reveals to him she thought he was dead for seven hours, and how she hates herself for feeling guilty about not taking care of him. BoJack apologizes. Diane reveals that she is happily married to her husband Guy, and they have moved to Houston together. She advises him that there are people who help you become who you are, but they are not meant to stay in your life forever. Diane implies she will be cutting ties with BoJack, but after he tells her "You don't owe me anything" she doesn't make it explicit. When she gets up to leave, BoJack convinces her to stay and let him tell her a "funny" story from prison about how BoJack's efforts to stop the annoying Film Night picks of the jail's gang leader led to that leader picking an even worse movie which they now watch every week. Diane is amused and says it is a nice night, and BoJack agrees. The two stare at the sky in silence.


title: Nice While It Lasted

text: "Nice While it Lasted" has received widespread critical acclaim. "The A.V. Club"'s Les Chappell gave it an A rating, calling it "the right bittersweet close for this bittersweet series", noting its poignant understanding of, and ultimate lessons about, life. Scott Meslow of "Vulture.com" gave it four out of five stars, praising its emotional depth.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ilya Vladimirovich Ponomarev (; born 6 August 1975) is a Russian politician who was a member of the State Duma from 2007 to 2016.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: He was the only member of the State Duma not to vote in favour of the Russian gay propaganda law (he abstained) and to vote against Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014. In 2015, while in the United States, Ponomarev was formally charged with embezzlement, which he called politically motivated. In 2016, he was impeached for not performing his duties, and he went into exile in Ukraine where he obtained Ukrainian citizenship in 2019.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Following the start of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ponomarev stated that he had joined Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, and he denounced the invasion. Ponomarev also endorsed acts of sabotage and arson in Russia, and launched a Russian-language opposition television channel called "February Morning" (). Following the killing of Darya Dugina, Ponomarev has claimed to have been in contact with a hitherto-unknown group called the National Republican Army which he said claimed responsibility for the killing. He claims not to be a member but a supporter who is trusted to receive press releases. Ponomarev's claims have been treated by observers with scepticism.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev is the author of the book, Does Putin Have to Die?: The Story of How Russia Becomes a Democracy after Losing to Ukraine, to be released by Skyhorse Publishing.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev was born in Moscow. He holds a BSc in Physics from Moscow State University and a Master of Public Administration from the Russian State Social University. He started his career when he was 14 years old at the Institute for Nuclear Safety (IBRAE), Russian Academy of Sciences. Ponomarev was one of the founders of two successful high technology start-ups in Russia, the first one (RussProfi) when he was sixteen years old. His first job position was at the Institute for Nuclear Safety (IBRAE) at the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1995 and 1996, Ponomarev acted as a representative of the networking software company Banyan Systems in Russia, creating one of the largest distributed networks in Russia for the now-defunct oil company Yukos. Following jobs at Schlumberger and Yukos in the late 1990s, he became a successful technology entrepreneur. From 2002 to 2007, Ponomarev served as the chief information officer of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev held the role of vice president at Yukos Oil Company, at the time the largest Russian oil and gas corporation. Ponomarev's duties during those four years included those of corporate CIO, and chief executive of Yukos' subsidiary company ARRAVA IMC, which specialized in advanced oilfield technologies and services. Ponomarev later founded the Siberian Internet Company, which was the origin of prominent Internet projects in Russia such as Gazeta.ru. He also spent time as the Director for Business Development and Marketing for Schlumberger Oilfield Services, and the vice president for strategy, regional development, and government relations at IBS, which was at that time the largest Russian system integration and software consulting company.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: From 2006 to 2007, Ponomarev served as the national coordinator for the "high-tech parks task force", a $6 billion private-public project to develop a network of small communities across the country to foster innovation and R&D activities.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In December 2007, Ponomarev was elected to the State Duma, representing Novosibirsk. In the Duma, Ponomarev chaired the Innovation and Venture Capital subcommittee of the Committee for Economic Development and Entrepreneurship, and the Technology Development subcommittee of the Committee of Information Technologies and Communications. He introduced and secured passage of legalization of limited liability partnerships in Russia, the Net Businesses Act, and tax breaks for technology companies.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev's political views are considered to be "unorthodox left": a progressive libertarian position. Some people describe him as "neo-communist", and critics inside the Communist Party of Russia have identified him as "neotrotskyist". Ponomarev's policy goals included the following:


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Internationally, Ponomarev advocated a broader "Northern Union" between the nations of Europe, the Americas, and the former USSR, but strongly criticizes the American model of globalization exemplified by the IMF, the WTO and the G8 structures. He describes his proposals as "social globalism", and is critical of nationalism and clericalism. He also criticized the privatization process in Russia, and blamed its neoliberal architects for the failure to establish a true democracy in Russia.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: From 2012 to 2014, Ponomarev was involved in International Business Development, Commercialization and Technology Transfer for the Skolkovo Foundation, managing the project initiated by Pres. Dmitry Medvedev to create Skoltech: a university established jointly by Russia and MIT.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In April 2014, Ponomarev organized a coalition of opposition groups for the election of the Mayor of Novosibirsk, and withdrew his own candidacy to support the coalition's candidate: Communist Anatoly Lokot, who won the election.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: He was a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (IT), Council for Foreign and Defense Policies, and the Council for National Strategy, and a fellow at the Open Russia foundation. He also chaired the Boards of Trustees of the Institute of Innovation Studies (a think tank working on legislation for high-tech industries) and the Open Projects Foundation (an investment vehicle for projects in crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and open government). In 2010 Ponomarev co-founded the Korean-Russian Business Council (KRBC).. In 2014, Ponomarev founded the Institute of Siberia, an analytical center focused on the regional development of Siberia.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: During his political career, he was a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation from 2002 to 2007, and a member of the Central Committee of the social-democrat political party A Just Russia from 2007 to 2013. In the spring of 2014, he took part in forming an alliance between Greens and Social Democrats.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In 2012, Ponomarev and fellow MP Dmitry Gudkov took a leadership role in street protests against Putin's rule. Following the 4 March presidential election, in which Putin was elected for his third term as president, Ponomarev accused the government of rigging the election, claiming that it should have been close enough for a runoff. In May, Ponomarev criticized Putin's decision to retain Igor Shuvalov in his cabinet despite a corruption scandal. The following month, Ponomarev and Gudkov led a filibuster against a bill by Putin's United Russia party which allowed large fines to be imposed on anti-government protesters; though the filibuster was unsuccessful, the action attracted widespread attention. Later, Ponomarev joined other political leaders in a successful challenge to the legislation before the Constitutional Court, overturning some of its provisions.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In June 2012, Ponomarev made a speech in the Duma in which he called United Russia members "crooks and thieves", a phrase originally used by anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. In September of that year, Duma members voted to censure Ponomarev and bar him from speaking for one month. United Russia members also proposed charging him with defamation.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In July, he strongly criticized the government response to the widespread flooding in Southern Russia Krymsk, which killed 172 people. Together with several other civil activists, including Alyona Popova, Mitya Aleshkovsky, Danila Lindele and Maria Baronova, he organized a nationwide fundraising campaign which generated almost one million dollars in small donations to aid flood victims.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In December 2012, Ponomarev was the most vocal critic of the Dima Yakovlev Law, which restricted international adoption of Russian orphans (he was the only MP to vote against the bill in the first reading, and one of only eight opponents during the final reading). In 2013, Ponomarev was the only MP who refused to support the gay propaganda law. On 20 March 2014, Ponomarev was the only State Duma member to vote against the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation following the 2014 Crimean crisis.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In 2012, Ponomarev supported the Internet Restriction Bill, with the stated purpose of fighting online child pornography and drug sales, introduced by fellow Just Russia parliamentarian Yelena Mizulina. Critics compared the results to those of the Chinese Internet firewall: a RosKomCenzura blocklist of censored pages, domain names, and IP addresses. Ponomarev claimed that he wished to ultimately limit government involvement in Internet regulation and allow more self-regulation, but Maxim "Parker" Kononenko (a Russian blogger and journalist) accused Ponomarev of acting in the commercial interests of a technology company which had Ponomarev's father Vladimir as a member of the board of directors According to the law, all Internet providers are obliged to install expensive DPI hardware, which it was believed would be sold by said company. However, the company ultimately never sold any DPI servers , and Vladimir Ponomarev resigned from the board to avoid the appearance of impropriety.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In July 2013, Ponomarev stated during a meeting of the Pirate Party of Russia that his support for Mizulina's bill had been a mistake; he later voted against new initiatives by the Russian government to restrict Internet freedom, and became instrumental in the campaign against the "Russian version of SOPA". Despite this, Ponomarev is portrayed by some other opposition activists (such as Alexei Navalny and Leonid Volkov) as a "censorship lobbyist", which Ponomarev claims is due to unrelated political disagreements and the struggle for influence over the Russian Internet community.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In October 2012, the pro-government news channel NTV aired a documentary which accused Ponomarev's aide Leonid Razvozzhayev of arranging a meeting between a former opposition leader, the Left Front's Sergei Udaltsov, and Givi Targamadze, a Georgian official, for the purpose of overthrowing President Vladimir Putin. A spokesman for Russian investigators stated that the government was considering terrorism charges against Udaltsov, and Razvozzhayev, Udaltsov, and Konstantin Lebedev, an assistant of Udaltsov's, were charged with "plotting mass riots". Razvozzhayev fled to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he applied for asylum from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but disappeared after leaving the office for lunch. He resurfaced in Moscow three days later, where the website "Life News" recording him leaving a Moscow courthouse, shouting that he had been abducted and tortured. A spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee claimed that Razvozzhayev had not been abducted, but had turned himself in freely and volunteered a confession of his conspiracy with Udaltsov and Lebedev to cause widespread rioting.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Vladimir Burmatov, a United Russia MP, called on Ponomarev to resign from the State Duma for his association with Razvozzhayev.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev was the only member of the State Duma to vote against annexation of Crimea during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Despite his criticism of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution as being driven by an alliance of neoliberals and nationalists, he justified his position in the Duma by saying that it was necessary to maintain friendly relations with the "brotherly Ukrainian nation" and avoid military confrontation, and argued that Russia's actions in Crimea would push Ukraine outside the traditional sphere of Russian influence and possibly provoke further expansion of NATO. After the 445-1 vote, many people called for his resignation. He was the target of public demonization including a huge billboard in the center of Moscow describing him as a "national traitor". He was also threatened with censure and expulsion, but responded that deputies cannot be prosecuted or removed because of the way they vote, and the parliament took no further action regarding the status of Ponomarev as deputy.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In August 2014, while he was in California, federal bailiffs froze Ponomarev's bank accounts and announced that they would not allow him to return to Russia, due to an ongoing investigation. He began living in San Jose, California, but since 2016 is a permanent resident of Ukraine's capital Kyiv, effectively in exile. In April 2015, the Duma attempted to revoke his constitutional protection from criminal prosecution.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Russian investigators claimed Ponomarev had embezzled 22 million rubles earmarked for the Skolkovo technology hub, an accusation Ponomarev describes as politically motivated. Russian investigators alleged that Skolkovo Vice-President Aleksey Beltyukov had paid Ponomarev about $750,000 for ten lectures and one research paper; Ponomarev was initially not prosecuted for this because of his parliamentary immunity, but a court ordered him to return a part of the money. However, later in 2015, the Moscow Bauman Court heard Ponomaryov's case "in absentia" and decided to arrest him, issuing an international warrant. Despite not residing in Russia, Ponomarev continued to hold his parliamentary position, and would technically have remained an active member of the Duma until the September 2016 Duma election.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: On 10 June 2016, the State Duma impeached Ponomarev for truancy and not performing his duties. It was the first application of the controversial 2016 law that allows Duma to impeach its deputies.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev told "The Daily Beast" in April 2016 that he lived in Ukraine's capital Kyiv full-time. Ukraine granted him a Ukrainian temporary residence permit. The government of Ukraine under Petro Poroshenko granted Ponomarev Ukrainian citizenship in 2019.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: From exile he continued to speak to the Western press as a commentator on deteriorating Russia–Ukraine relations and clampdown on dissent in Russia. After fellow former Russian MP Denis Voronenkov was shot and killed in Kyiv on 23 March 2017, Ponomarev was given personal protection by the Ukrainian Security Service. Voronenkov was on his way to meet Ponomarev when he was shot.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Following the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ponomarev joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In an interview with "Meduza", Ponomarev claimed he had joined the Territorial Defense Forces and "took up a machine gun." Ponomarev explained his joining the Ukrainian forces as "not fighting against [Russia], I'm fighting against Putin and Putinism and Russian fascism," and compared his service to Ukraine to Willy Brandt's assistance to the Allies against Nazi Germany.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: With the war continuing, Ponomarev launched a Russian-language YouTube-based video news outlet called "February Morning" (), an accompanying Telegram-based news service "Rospartizan" (), as well as a central website utro02.tv.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Profiling the operations in June 2022, "The Guardian" notes that the outlets cover anti-government "partisan" activity in Russia, such as attacks on military recruitment centers, and endorse them to the extent of including instructions on bomb-making and operations security tradecraft. Asked whether he should be called a "foreign agent", similar to other journalists branded by the Kremlin under Russian 2022 war censorship laws, Ponomarev replied “I would be proud if they called me that. Terrorist, extremist, it's an act of recognition."


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev has been outspoken against what he views as the comfort and complacency of Russians including those privately opposed to Putin. Either in spite or because of his own exile, since the outbreak of war he has exhorted Russians not to flee the country but to fight the regime. He has gone so far as to support Kaja Kallas's call for Schengen Area states to cease issuing tourist visas to Russian nationals and restricting the movement to refugees who have fought the regime.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In a May 2022 conference of exiles in Vilnius sponsored by the Free Russia Forum, Ponomarev appealed to attendees to support the arsons of military commissariats in Russia. A "Spektr (") reporter noted an indifferent response from the attendees.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev and his media outlets came to the attention of Western news outlets following the car bomb assassination of Darya Dugina. Ponomarev personally read a statement claiming responsibility for the attack from a hitherto-unknown group calling itself National Republican Army (NRA) (). The statement condemned both Dugina and her father, Eurasianist political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who was nearly killed in the same attack. Ponomarev spoke enthusiastically about the assassination, calling it a "[A] new page in Russian resistance to Putinism. New—but not the last."


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev also used both February Morning and "Rospartizan" to publicize the purported manifesto of National Republican Army declaring Vladimir Putin an usurper and public enemy to be destroyed. The statement calls for the mutiny of Russian military to end to "fratricidal war between the Slavic peoples." The purported manifesto also calls for the adoption of the white-blue-white flag in place of the Russian tricolor; the white-blue-white flag motif had previously been adopted by February Morning on air and in social media profiles.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Russia's state-owned TASS news agency quoted the Federal Security Service claimed the assassin was a Ukrainian citizen named Natalya Vovk. Ponomarev told "Meduza" that his contacts deny that Vovk directly carried out the attack, while also leaving open the possibility that she had some other undisclosed role. Ponomarev also claimed that he contributed to her escape from Russia, and called her "a person who deserves protection."


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In an interview about the Russian NRA conducted by for the "Kyiv Post", Ponomarev acknowledged his support of the group while disavowing his own membership, and denied having direct foreknowledge of its actions. Ponomarev's account describes the NRA as being a "a network" rather than an organization, which consists of clandestine cells that are compartmentalized and autonomous. He describes the group as having "a slight left-leaning orientation," and that it "embraces social justice, gets rid of oligarchs, and moves away from the new-liberalism approaches of Yeltsin and Putin." Asked about the reaction from fellow exiles and dissidents to his support of partisan activity, Ponomarev claimed to have been disinvited from an opposition meeting.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In a subsequent interview with "Spektr", Ponomarev agreed with his interviewer Lev Kadik's characterization of his own role "vis-a-vis" the NRA as similar to the role of Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin "vis-a-vis" the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and claimed that his role is limited to providing publicity, helping fugitives, and providing technical assistance; he denied providing weapons. In addition, Ponomarev offered parallels to the relationship of African National Congress and its armed wing UMkhonto we Sizwe.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: , "The Guardian" and Associated Press articles concerning the death of Dugina and its aftermath state that the claim of a National Republican Army responsibility cannot be confirmed.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: In an interview with Ponomarev for "Meduza", both the interviewer Svetlana Reiter and the editor note skepticism about his claims about the Russian NRA, his accommodations of Putin in his Duma career, and the source of his wealth. Separately, "Meduza" managing editor Kevin Rothrock questioned Ponomarev's integrity, the existence of the NRA, and implied that both Dugin and Dugina were "civilians" who should not have been targeted.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Sergey S. Radchenko, the Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told Deutsche Welle he found the claim of responsibility and manifesto to both be "dodgy."


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Citing the livestream of Yulia Latynina, Cathy Young mused on the possibility that Ponomarev is a "a grifter trying to sell a good story," but noted that the NRA manifesto's appeal to patriotism is not suggestive of black propaganda.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Deutsche Welle's reporter in Kyiv Roman Goncharenko said that "there are more questions than answers" about the group, and noted that the group's purported manifesto employs a call to action "fight like us, fight with us, fight better than us!" () inspired by the Deutscher Fernsehfunk children's television show "" that aired in both East Germany and the Soviet Union until 1991.


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Asked about the reaction from fellow exiles and dissidents to his support of partisan activity, Ponomarev claimed to have been disinvited from an opposition meeting. This was later specified to be a forthcoming meeting in Vilnius in August 2022, co-organized by prominent liberal dissidents Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky under the name of the Russian Action Committee (). Ponomarev responded by mocking the gathering as the "Committee of Inaction."


title: Ilya Ponomarev

text: Ponomarev is divorced. He has a son and a daughter. His mother, Larisa Ponomareva, was an MP in the upper house of Russia's Parliament, the Federation Council, until September 2013, when she was forced to resign following her lone vote against the Dima Yakovlev Law. Ponomarev is a nephew of Boris Ponomarev, Secretary for International Relations of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Ponomarev's grandfather Nikolai Ponomarev was the Soviet ambassador to Poland.


title: Jagger–Richards

text: Jagger–Richards (spelled Jagger–Richard from 1963 to 1978) is the songwriting partnership between English musicians Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones. They are one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in history. In addition to Jagger and Richards' songwriting partnership, they have also produced or co-produced numerous Rolling Stones albums under the pseudonym The Glimmer Twins.


title: Jagger–Richards

text: Similar to the contemporary songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both Jagger and Richards write lyrics and music.


title: Jagger–Richards

text: Jagger and Richards have different recollections about their first songwriting endeavours but both credit manager Andrew Loog Oldham as the catalyst for their collaboration. Richards agrees that it was Oldham who pressed the pair to write songs after the duo had first emphasized other people's material; Oldham noted that there weren't that many obscure great songs out there for the band to cover. Richards recalled:


title: Jagger–Richards

text: According to John Lennon, he and Paul McCartney might have been instrumental in inspiring Jagger and Richards to start writing their own material. In 1963 Lennon and McCartney gave the Stones one of their compositions, "I Wanna Be Your Man." In a "Playboy" interview in 1980, Lennon recalled:


title: Jagger–Richards

text: The first original Jagger/Richards song to be released as the A-side of a Rolling Stones single was "Tell Me (You're Coming Back)", from their debut album. Released as a single in the US only, it peaked at number 24 on the charts there. The earlier "Good Times, Bad Times" had been released as the B-side to their cover of Bobby and Shirley Womack's "It's All Over Now". The band's first UK single featuring an A-side Jagger/Richards original was "The Last Time"; released in February 1965, it went to number one in the UK and number nine in the US.


title: Jagger–Richards

text: Although most Jagger/Richards compositions have been collaborations, some of the songs credited to the famous partnership have been solo songwriting from either Jagger, whose examples include "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Brown Sugar", or Richards, whose examples include "Happy", "Ruby Tuesday", and "Little T&A". This is comparable to the Lennon–McCartney partnership, who also adhered to a tradition of joint credits even on numbers that were written by just one of the pair. Mick Jagger stated in his comprehensive 1995 interview with Jann Wenner of "Rolling Stone" magazine "I think in the end it all balances out."


title: Jagger–Richards

text: On 26 June 2013, the duo's songwriting credits were handed over to BMG, marking the first time they would be managed by an outside company in over 40 years.


title: Jagger–Richards

text: Jagger–Richards compositions that have been released only by artists other than the Rolling Stones include:


title: Jagger–Richards

text: Jagger and Richards adopted the nickname "The Glimmer Twins" after a vacation cruise they took to Brazil in December 1968/January 1969 with their then-girlfriends, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg. An older English couple on the ship kept asking Richards and Jagger who they were. When they refused to reveal their identities, the woman reportedly kept asking, "just give us a glimmer" (as in "give us a hint about who you are"), which amused Jagger and Richards.


title: Jagger–Richards

text: Jagger and Richards began to produce the Stones' albums under the pseudonym "The Glimmer Twins" starting with "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll" (released in 1974). The Glimmer Twins were the sole credited producers for the band's studio and live albums from then, up to and including "Still Life" (released in 1982). Starting with "Undercover" (released in 1983), the Glimmer Twins have shared production credit for the Rolling Stones albums with other producers, most frequently Don Was (five times) and Chris Kimsey (three times).


title: Jagger–Richards

text: Besides their production work for the Rolling Stones, Jagger and Richards also used the Glimmer Twins for their co-production credit on Peter Tosh's album "Bush Doctor", released in 1978. A rare exception to Jagger and Richards' use of the Glimmer Twins name for production credits appeared on John Phillips' "Pay Pack & Follow" album, recorded 1973–1979 and released in 2001, for which Jagger and Richards were credited as producers under their own names.


title: Jagger–Richards

text: The partnership of Jagger and Richards has been described by "Rolling Stone" as the sixth greatest songwriter of all time. "Rolling Stone" considers the duo to have "defined a rock song's essential components...and established a blueprint for future rockers to follow."


title: Barn (album)

text: Barn is the 41st studio album by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Neil Young and his 14th with Crazy Horse. The album was released on December 10, 2021, by Reprise Records. A stand-alone film of the same name directed by Young's wife Daryl Hannah was also be released for streaming and on Blu-ray.


title: Barn (album)

text: Reviewing in his Substack-published "Consumer Guide" column, Robert Christgau gave "Barn" an "A" and declared it the first worthwhile album of new Young songs since 2009's "Fork in the Road". In comparison to that album, he said that "Crazy Horse is quieter and gentler [here] as the green consciousness their boss embraced as of 2003's "Greendale" turns ever more militant and also, unfortunately but fittingly, much darker". Among the highlights in Christgau's mind were "Canerican", "Change Ain't Never Gonna", "Human Race", "Tumblin' Through the Years", and "Don't Forget Love", although he was most impressed by "Welcome Back", calling it a "full-bore astonishment" whose sincerity is evinced in Young's guitar, "so quiet and caring it feels like love". He ultimately named it the best album of 2021.


title: Barn (album)

text: Writing for "PopMatters", John Amen gave the project a 7/10, concluding, "Their navigations of sublimity vs. subtlety, maximalism vs. spaciousness, and free improvisation vs. precise composition are like inexhaustible stylistic lodes ..."


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias (; ; 483–375 BC) was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to ask miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies." He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist" although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.


title: Gorgias

text: His chief claim to recognition is that he transplanted rhetoric from his native Sicily to Attica, and contributed to the diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose.


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias was born circa 483 BC in Leontinoi, a Chalcidian colony in eastern Sicily that was allied with Athens. His father's name was Charmantides. He had a brother named Herodicus, who was a physician, and sometimes accompanied him during his travels. He also had a sister, whose name is not known, but whose grandson dedicated a golden statue to his great uncle at Delphi. It is not known whether Gorgias married or had children. Gorgias is said to have studied under the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles of Acragas ( 490 –  430 BC), but it is not known when, where, for how long, or in what capacity. He may have also studied under the rhetoricians Corax of Syracuse and Tisias, but very little is known about either of these men, nor is anything known about their relationship with Gorgias.


title: Gorgias

text: It is not known what kind of role Gorgias may have played in the politics in his native Leontinoi, but it is known that, in 427 BC, when he was around sixty years old, he was sent to Athens by his fellow-citizens as the head of an embassy to ask for Athenian protection against the aggression of the Syracusans. After 427 BC, Gorgias appears to have settled in mainland Greece, living at various points in a number of city-states, including Athens and Larisa. He was well known for delivering orations at Panhellenic Festivals and is described as having been "conspicuous" at Olympia. There is no surviving record of any role he might have played in organizing the festivals themselves.


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias's primary occupation was as a teacher of rhetoric. According to Aristotle, his students included Isocrates. (Other students are named in later traditions; the "Suda" adds Pericles, Polus, and Alcidamas, Diogenes Laërtius mentions Antisthenes, and according to Philostratus, "I understand that he attracted the attention of the most admired men, Critias and Alcibiades who were young, and Thucydides and Pericles who were already old. Agathon too, the tragic poet, whom Comedy regards as wise and eloquent, often Gorgianizes in his iambic verse"). Additionally, although they are not described as his students, Gorgias is widely thought to have influenced the styles of the historian Thucydides, the tragic playwright Agathon, the doctor Hippocrates, the rhetorician Alcidamas, and the poet and commentator Lycophron.


title: Gorgias

text: years old (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33). He won admiration for his ability to speak on any subject (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33). He accumulated considerable wealth; enough to commission a gold statue of himself for a public temple. After his Pythian Oration, the Greeks installed a solid gold statue of him in the temple of Apollo at Delphi (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33). He died at Larissa in Thessaly.


title: Gorgias

text: The philosophies of the pre-Socratic Greek Sophists are controversial among scholars in general, due to their highly subtle and ambiguous writings and also to the fact that they are best known as characters in Plato's dialogues. Gorgias, however, is particularly frustrating for modern scholars to attempt to understand. While scholars debate the precise subtleties of the teachings of Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus, they generally agree on the basic frameworks of what these thinkers believed. With Gorgias, however, scholars widely disagree on even the most basic framework of his ideas, including over whether or not that framework even existed at all. The greatest hindrance to scholarly understanding of Gorgias's philosophy is that the vast majority of his writings have been lost and those that have survived have suffered considerable alteration by later copyists.


title: Gorgias

text: These difficulties are further compounded by the fact that Gorgias's rhetoric is frequently elusive and confusing; he makes many of his most important points using elaborate, but highly ambiguous, metaphors, similes, and puns. Many of Gorgias's propositions are also thought to be sarcastic, playful, or satirical. In his treatise "On Rhetoric", Aristotle characterizes Gorgias's style of oratory as "pervasively ironic" and states that Gorgias recommended responding to seriousness with jests and to jests with seriousness. Gorgias frequently blurs the lines between serious philosophical discourse and satire, which makes it extremely difficult for scholars to tell when he is being serious and when he is merely joking. Gorgias frequently contradicts his own statements and adopts inconsistent perspectives on different issues. As a result of all these factors, Scott Porter Consigny calls him "perhaps the most elusive of the polytropic quarry hunted in Plato's "Sophist".


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias has been labelled "The Nihilist" because some scholars have interpreted his thesis on "the non-existent" to be an argument against the existence of anything that is straightforwardly endorsed by Gorgias himself. According to Alan Pratt, nihilism is "the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated." It is associated with pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence.


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias presented his nihilist arguments in "On Non-Existence"; however, the original text is no longer extant. We only know his arguments through commentary by Sextus Empiricus and Pseudo-Aristotle's "De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia." Ostensibly Gorgias developed three sequential arguments: first, that nothing exists; second, that even if existence exists, it is inapprehensible to humans; and third, that even if existence is apprehensible, it certainly cannot be communicated or interpreted to one's neighbors.


title: Gorgias

text: That being said, there is consensus in late 20th century and early 21st century scholarship that the label 'nihilist' is misleading, in part because if his argument were genuinely meant to support nihilism it would be self-undermining. The argument, of course, "is" itself something, and has pretensions to communicate knowledge, in conflict with its explicit pronouncement that there is nothing and that it can't be known or communicated. Gisela Striker argues: "I find it hard to believe that anyone should ever have thought that Gorgias seriously advocated the view that nothing is and that he was, therefore, a 'nihilist.' Similarly Caston states: "Gorgias would have to be not merely disconsolate, but quite dull-witted, to have missed the conflict between his presentation and its content". Finally, Wardy says, "This sadly mistaken reading overlooks the most obvious consequence of Gorgias' "paradoxologia" (παραδοξολογία): his message refutes itself, and in consequence, so far from constituting a theory of "logos", it confronts us with a picture of what language cannot be, with what it cannot be assumed to aspire to be." Gigon and Newiger make similar points.


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias ushered in rhetorical innovations involving structure and ornamentation, and he introduced "paradoxologia" – the idea of paradoxical thought and paradoxical expression. For these advancements, Gorgias has been labeled the "father of sophistry" (Wardy 6). Gorgias is also known for contributing to the diffusion of the Attic Greek dialect as the language of literary prose. Gorgias was the first orator known to develop and teach a "distinctive style of speaking" (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33).


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias' extant rhetorical works – "Encomium of Helen" (Ἑλένης ἐγκώμιον), "Defense of Palamedes" (Ὑπέρ Παλαμήδους ἀπολογία), "On Non-Existence" (Περὶ τοῦ μὴ ὄντος ἢ Περὶ φύσεως), and "Epitaphios" (Επιτάφιος) – come to us via a work entitled "Technai" (Τέχναι), a manual of rhetorical instruction, which may have consisted of models to be memorized and demonstrate various principles of rhetorical practice (Leitch, et al. 29). Although some scholars claim that each work presents opposing statements, the four texts can be read as interrelated contributions to the up-and-coming theory and art ("technē") of rhetoric (McComiskey 32). Of Gorgias' surviving works, only the "Encomium" and the "Defense" are believed to exist in their entirety. Meanwhile, there are his own speeches, rhetorical, political, or other. A number of these are referred to and quoted by Aristotle, including a speech on Hellenic unity, a funeral oration for Athenians fallen in war, and a brief quotation from an "Encomium on the Eleans." Apart from the speeches, there are paraphrases of the treatise "On Nature or the Non-Existent." These works are each part of the Diels-Kranz collection, and although academics consider this source reliable, many of the works included are fragmentary and corrupt. Questions have also been raised as to the authenticity and accuracy of the texts attributed to Gorgias (Consigny 4).


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias' writings are intended to be both rhetorical (persuasive) and performative. He goes to great lengths to exhibit his ability of making an absurd, argumentative position appear stronger. Consequently, each of his works defend positions that are unpopular, paradoxical and even absurd. The performative nature of Gorgias' writings is exemplified by the way that he playfully approaches each argument with stylistic devices such as parody, artificial figuration and theatricality (Consigny 149). Gorgias' style of argumentation can be described as poetics-minus-the-meter ("poiêsis-minus-meter"). Gorgias argues that persuasive words have power ("dunamis") that is equivalent to that of the gods and as strong as physical force. In the "Encomium", Gorgias likens the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: "Just as different drugs draw forth different humors from the body – some putting a stop to disease, others to life – so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion" (Gorgias 32). The "Encomium" "argues for the totalizing power of language."


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias also believed that his "magical incantations" would bring healing to the human psyche by controlling powerful emotions. He paid particular attention to the sounds of words, which, like poetry, could captivate audiences. His florid, rhyming style seemed to hypnotize his audiences (Herrick 42).


title: Gorgias

text: Unlike other Sophists, such as Protagoras, Gorgias did not profess to teach "arete" (excellence, or, virtue). He believed that there was no absolute form of "arete", but that it was relative to each situation. For example, virtue in a slave was not the same as virtue in a statesman. He believed that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was the king of all sciences, since he saw it as a techné with which one could persuade an audience toward any course of action. While rhetoric existed in the curriculum of every Sophist, Gorgias placed more prominence upon it than any of the others.


title: Gorgias

text: Much debate over both the nature and value of rhetoric begins with Gorgias. Plato's dialogue "Gorgias" presents a counter-argument to Gorgias' embrace of rhetoric, its elegant form, and performative nature (Wardy 2). The dialogue tells the story of a debate about rhetoric, politics and justice that occurred at a dinner gathering between Socrates and a small group of Sophists. Plato attempts to show that rhetoric does not meet the requirements to actually be considered a "technê" but rather is a somewhat dangerous "knack" to possess, both for the orator and for his audience, because it gives the ignorant the power to seem more knowledgeable than an expert to a group.


title: Gorgias

text: Gorgias is the author of a lost work: "On Nature or the Non-Existent" (also "On Non-Existence"). Rather than being one of his rhetorical works, it presented a theory of being that at the same time refuted and parodied the Eleatic thesis. The original text was lost and today there remain just two paraphrases of it. The first is preserved by the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus in "Against the Logicians" and the other by Pseudo-Aristotle, the author of "On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias". Each work, however, excludes material that is discussed in the other, which suggests that each version may represent intermediary sources (Consigny 4). It is clear, however, that the work developed a skeptical argument, which has been extracted from the sources and translated as below:


title: Gorgias

text: The argument has largely been seen as an ironic refutation of Parmenides' thesis on Being. Gorgias set out to prove that it is as easy to demonstrate that being is one, unchanging and timeless as it is to prove that being has no existence at all. Regardless of how it "has largely been seen" it seems clear that Gorgias was focused instead on the notion that true objectivity is impossible since the human mind can never be separated from its possessor.


title: Gorgias

text: "How can anyone communicate the idea of color by means of words since the ear does not hear colors but only sounds?" This quote was used to show his theory that 'there is nothing', 'if there were anything no one would know it', 'and if anyone did know it, no one could communicate it'. This theory, thought of in the late 5th century BC, is still being contemplated by many philosophers throughout the world. This argument has led some to label Gorgias a nihilist (one who believes nothing exists, or that the world is incomprehensible, and that the concept of truth is fictitious).


title: Gorgias

text: For the first main argument where Gorgias says, "there is no-thing", he tries to persuade the reader that thought and existence are not the same. By claiming that if thought and existence truly were the same, then everything that anyone thought would suddenly exist. He also attempted to prove that words and sensations could not be measured by the same standards, for even though words and sensations are both derived from the mind, they are essentially different. This is where his second idea comes into place.


title: Gorgias

text: The "Encomium of Helen" is considered to be a good example of epideictic oratory and was supposed to have been Gorgias' "show piece or demonstration piece," which was used to attract students (Matsen, Rollinson and Sousa, 33). In their writings, Gorgias and other sophists speculated "about the structure and function of language" as a framework for expressing the implications of action and the ways decisions about such actions were made" (Jarratt 103). And this is exactly the purpose of Gorgias' "Encomium of Helen". Of the three divisions of rhetoric discussed by Aristotle in his "Rhetoric" (forensic, deliberative, and epideictic), the "Encomium" can be classified as an epideictic speech, expressing praise for Helen of Troy and ridding her of the blame she faced for leaving Sparta with Paris (Wardy 26).


title: Gorgias

text: Helen – the proverbial "Helen of Troy" – exemplified both sexual passion and tremendous beauty for the Greeks. She was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, the Queen of Sparta, and her beauty was seen by the Trojans as the direct cause of the decade long Trojan War between Greece and Troy. The war began after the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite asked Paris (a Trojan prince) to select who was the most beautiful of the three. Each goddess tried to influence Paris' decision, but he ultimately chose Aphrodite who then promised Paris the most beautiful woman. Paris then traveled to Greece where he was greeted by Helen and her husband Menelaus. Under the influence of Aphrodite, Helen allowed Paris to persuade her to elope with him. Together they traveled to Troy, not only sparking the war, but also a popular and literary tradition of blaming Helen for her wrongdoing. It is this tradition which Gorgias confronts in the "Encomium".


title: Gorgias

text: The "Encomium" opens with Gorgias explaining that "a man, woman, speech, deed, city or action that is worthy of praise should be honored with acclaim, but the unworthy should be branded with blame" (Gorgias 30). In the speech Gorgias discusses the possible reasons for Helen's journey to Troy. He explains that Helen could have been persuaded in one of four ways: by the gods, by physical force, by love, or by speech ("logos"). If it were indeed the plan of the gods that caused Helen to depart for Troy, Gorgias argues that those who blame her should face blame themselves, "for a human's anticipation cannot restrain a god's inclination" (Gorgias 31). Gorgias explains that, by nature, the weak are ruled by the strong, and, since the gods are stronger than humans in all respects, Helen should be freed from her undesirable reputation. If, however, Helen was abducted by force, it is clear that the aggressor committed a crime. Thus, it should be he, not Helen, who should be blamed. And if Helen was persuaded by love, she should also be rid of ill repute because "if love is a god, with the divine power of the gods, how could a weaker person refuse and reject him? But if love is a human sickness and a mental weakness, it must not be blamed as mistake, but claimed as misfortune" (Gorgias 32). Finally, if speech persuaded Helen, Gorgias claims he can easily clear her of blame. Gorgias explains: "Speech is a powerful master and achieves the most divine feats with the smallest and least evident body. It can stop fear, relieve pain, create joy, and increase pity" (Gorgias 31). It is here that Gorgias compares the effect of speech on the mind with the effect of drugs on the body. He states that Helen has the power to "lead" many bodies in competition by using her body as a weapon (Gumpert, 74). This image of "bodies led and misled, brought together and led apart, is of paramount importance in Gorgias' speech," (Gumpert, 74).