title: Rebecca West

text: As West grew older, she turned to broader political and social issues, including Mankind's propensity to inflict violent injustice on itself. Before and during World War II, West travelled widely, collecting material for books on travel and politics. In 1936–38, she made three trips to Yugoslavia, a country she came to love, seeing it as the nexus of European history since the late Middle Ages. Her non-fiction masterpiece, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is an amalgamation of her impressions from these trips. "New York Times" reviewer Katherine Woods wrote: "In two almost incredibly full-packed volumes one of the most gifted and searching of modern English novelists and critics has produced not only the magnification and intensification of the travel book form, but, one may say, its apotheosis." West was assigned by Ross' magazine to cover the Nuremberg trials for "The New Yorker", an experience she memorialized in the book "A Train of Powder". In 1950, she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also went to South Africa in 1960 to report on apartheid in a series of articles for "The Sunday Times", particularly regarding a prominent trial for a seditious uprising aiming to establish Communist rule. She accidentally misidentified a South African judge for some questions put by another judge and was sued for libel along with the "Sunday Times" whose editor, Harry Hodson, failed to support West. She wrote "My problem is complicated by the fact that the defence, the people who would naturally be against the Judge and for me, are mostly Communist and won’t lift a finger for me. It worries me a lot. It’s so hard to work with this hanging over me." She felt her only support was her friends, the anti-apartheid politician Bernard Friedman and his wife, with whom she stayed in Johannesburg. “I will get over this case. But it isn’t easy to feel that some people are for no reason that you know of possessed by an intention to ruin you; and I also felt I was letting you down in South Africa. I have been deeply grateful for all the kindness and sympathy you have shown me and I thought of Tall Trees as a warm place in a chilly world.”


title: Rebecca West

text: She travelled extensively well into old age. In 1966 and 1969, she undertook two long journeys to Mexico, becoming fascinated by the indigenous culture of the country and its mestizo population. She stayed with actor Romney Brent in Mexico City and with Katherine (Kit) Wright, a long-time friend, in Cuernavaca.


title: Rebecca West

text: Her husband became both sleepy and inattentive as he got older. The sleepiness led to a car accident where no one was hurt but Henry was charged with dangerous driving. He became obsessed with the Norwegian ballerina Gerd Larsen; he would refuse to travel with West, instead preferring to return to London to be with Larsen. West initially considered this to be purely her husband's infatuation, but came to think that Larsen was driven by money. At her husband's funeral West had the upsetting problem of Larsen's request to be amongst the mourners, even though she had only known him for 18 months. Henry's will left £5,000 for Larsen. After her husband's death in 1968, West discovered that he had been unfaithful with other women.


title: Rebecca West

text: After she was widowed, she moved to London, where she bought a spacious apartment overlooking Hyde Park. Unfortunately, it was next door to the Iranian embassy. During the May 1980 incident, West, then 87, had to be evacuated. In the last two decades of her life, West kept up a very active social life, making friends with Martha Gellhorn, Doris Lessing, Bernard Levin, comedian Frankie Howerd, and film star and director Warren Beatty, who filmed her for the production "Reds", a biography of journalist John Reed and his connection with the Russian Revolution. She also spent time with scholars such as Jane Marcus and Bonnie Kime Scott, who began to chronicle her feminist career and varied work. She wrote at an unabated pace, penning masterful reviews for "The Sunday Telegraph", publishing her last novel "The Birds Fall Down" (1966), and overseeing the film version of the story by BBC in 1978. The last work published in her lifetime was "1900" (1982). "1900" explored the last year of Queen Victoria's long reign, which was a watershed in many cultural and political respects.


title: Rebecca West

text: At the same time, West worked on sequels to her autobiographically inspired novel "The Fountain Overflows" (1957); although she had written the equivalent of two more novels for the planned trilogy, she was never satisfied with the sequels and did not publish them. She also tinkered at great length with an autobiography, without coming to closure, and started scores of stories without finishing them. Much of her work from the late phase of her life was published posthumously, including "Family Memories" (1987), "This Real Night" (1984), "Cousin Rosamund" (1985), "The Only Poet" (1992), and "Survivors in Mexico" (2003). Unfinished works from her early period, notably "Sunflower" (1986) and "The Sentinel" (2001) were also published after her death, so that her "oeuvre" was augmented by about one third by posthumous publications.


title: Rebecca West

text: West's relationship with her son, Anthony West, was not a happy one. The rancor between them came to a head when Anthony, himself a gifted writer, his father's biographer ("H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life" [1984]), and a novelist, published "Heritage" (1955), a fictionalized autobiography. West never forgave her son for depicting in "Heritage" the relationship between an illegitimate son and his two world-famous, unmarried parents, and for portraying the mother in unflattering terms. The depiction of West's alter ego in "Heritage" as a deceitful, unloving actress (West had trained as an actress in her youth) and poor caregiver so wounded West that she broke off relations with her son and threatened to sue any publisher who would bring out "Heritage" in England. She successfully suppressed an English edition of the novel, which was only published there after her death, in 1984. Although there were temporary rapprochements between her and Anthony, a state of alienation persisted between them, causing West grief until her dying hour. She fretted about her son's absence from her deathbed, but when asked whether he should be sent for, answered: "perhaps not, if he hates me so much."


title: Rebecca West

text: West suffered from failing eyesight and high blood pressure in the late 1970s, and became increasingly frail. Her last months were mostly spent in bed, at times delirious and other times lucid; she complained that she was dying too slowly. She died on 15 March 1983, and is buried at Brookwood Cemetery, Woking.


title: Rebecca West

text: Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have a lasting place in English literature. No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of the world more intelligently.


title: Rebecca West

text: She is honoured with a blue plaque at Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, her childhood home which also provided the setting for her novel "The Judge".


title: Rebecca West

text: West grew up in a home filled with discussions of world affairs. Her father was a journalist who often involved himself in controversial issues. He brought home Russian revolutionaries and other political activists, and their debates helped to form West's sensibility, which took shape in novels such as "The Birds Fall Down", set in pre-revolution Russia. But the crucial event that moulded West's politics was the Dreyfus affair. The impressionable Rebecca learned early on just how powerful was the will to persecute minorities and to subject individuals to unreasonable suspicion based on flimsy evidence and mass frenzy. West had a keen understanding of the psychology of politics, how movements and causes could sustain themselves on the profound need to believe or disbelieve in a core of values—even in contradiction of reality.


title: Rebecca West

text: It would seem that her father's ironic, sceptical temper so penetrated her sensibility that she could not regard any body of ideas as other than a starting point for argument. Although she was a militant feminist and active suffragette, and published a perceptive and admiring profile of Emmeline Pankhurst, West also criticised the tactics of Pankhurst's daughter, Christabel, and the sometimes doctrinaire aspects of the Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).


title: Rebecca West

text: The first major test of West's political outlook was the Bolshevik Revolution. Many on the left saw it as the beginning of a new, better world, and the end of the crimes of capitalism. West regarded herself as a member of the left, having attended Fabian socialist summer schools as a girl. Yet to West, both the Revolution and the revolutionaries were suspect. Even before the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, West expressed her doubts that events in Russia could serve as a model for socialists in Britain or anywhere else.


title: Rebecca West

text: West paid a heavy price for her cool reaction to the Russian Revolution; her positions increasingly isolated her. When Emma Goldman visited Britain in 1924 after seeing Bolshevik violence firsthand, West was exasperated that British intellectuals ignored Goldman's testimony and her warning against Bolshevik tyranny.


title: Rebecca West

text: For all her censures of communism, however, West was hardly an uncritical supporter of Western democracies. Thus in 1919–1920, she excoriated the US government for deporting Goldman and for the infamous Palmer Raids. She was also appalled at the failure of Western democracies to come to the aid of Republican Spain, and she gave money to the Republican cause.


title: Rebecca West

text: A staunch anti-fascist, West attacked both the Conservative governments of her own country for appeasing Adolf Hitler and her colleagues on the left for their pacifism. Neither side, in her view, understood the evil Nazism posed. Unlike many on the left, she also distrusted Joseph Stalin. To West, Stalin had a criminal mentality that communism facilitated. She was outraged when the Allies switched their loyalties as to Yugoslav resistance movements by deciding in 1943 to start backing the Communist-led Partisans led by Tito in Yugoslavia, thus abandoning their support of Draža Mihailović's Chetniks, whom she considered the legitimate Yugoslav resistance. She expressed her feelings and opinions on the Allies' switch in Yugoslavia by writing the satirical short story titled "Madame Sara's Magic Crystal", but decided not to publish it upon discussion with Orme Sargent, Assistant Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. Writing in her diary, West mentioned that Sargent had persuaded her that "the recognition of Tito was made by reason of British military necessities, and for no other reason." Following Sargent's claim, she described her decision not to publish the story as an expression of "personal willingness to sacrifice myself to the needs of my country." After the war, West's anti-Communism hardened as she saw Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other Eastern and Central European states succumb to Soviet domination.


title: Rebecca West

text: In 1951 she provided a critical review of Alistair Cooke's sympathetic portrait of Alger Hiss during his postwar trials from a classical liberalism point of view. It is not surprising in this context that West reacted to US Senator Joseph McCarthy differently from her colleagues. They saw a demagogue terrorising liberals and leftists with baseless accusations of Communist conspiracy. West saw an oaf blundering into the minefield of Communist subversion. For her, McCarthy was right to pursue Communists with fervour, even if his methods were roughshod, though her mild reaction to McCarthy provoked powerful revulsion among those on the left and dismay even among anti-Communist liberals. She refused, however, to amend her views.


title: Rebecca West

text: Although West's anti-communism earned the high regard of conservatives, she never considered herself one of them. In postwar Britain, West voted Labour and welcomed the Labour landslide of 1945 but spoke out against domination of the Labour Party by British trade unions, and thought left-wing politicians such as Michael Foot unimpressive. She had mixed feelings about the Callaghan government. West admired Margaret Thatcher, not for Thatcher's policies, but for Thatcher's achievement in rising to the top of a male-dominated sphere. She admired Thatcher's willingness to stand up to trade union bullying.


title: Rebecca West

text: In the end, West's anti-communism remained the centrepiece of her politics because she so consistently challenged the communists as legitimate foes of the status quo in capitalist countries. In West's view, communism, like fascism, was merely a form of authoritarianism. Communists were under party discipline, and therefore could never speak for themselves; West was a supreme example of an intellectual who spoke for herself, no matter how her comments might injure her. Indeed, few writers explicitly acknowledged how much West's embrace of unpopular positions hurt her on the left. A whole generation of writers abandoned West and refused to read her, as Doris Lessing suggested.


title: Rebecca West

text: West's parents had her baptised into the Church of England two months after birth and she considered herself a Christian, though an unconventional believer. At times, she found God to be wicked; at other times she considered him merely ineffectual and defeated. However, she revered Christ as the quintessentially good man, she had great respect for the literary, pictorial, and architectural manifestations of the Christian ethos, and she considered faith a valid tool to grapple with the conundrums of life and the mysteries of the cosmos. Although her writings are full of references to the Bible and ecclesiastical history, she was essentially anti-doctrinaire and occasionally blasphemous. In 1926 she expressed the unorthodox belief that "Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation." Moreover, she rejected specific articles of belief such as the virgin birth, Original sin, the Atonement, and Providence. Her contribution to Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Letters Series, "Letter to a Grandfather" (1933), is a declaration of "my faith, which seems to some unfaith" disguised as philosophical fiction. Written in the midst of the Great Depression, "Letter to a Grandfather" traces the progressive degeneration of the notion of Providence through the ages, concluding skeptically that "the redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it." As for the Atonement, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is in part meant as a refutation of that very doctrine, which she saw as having sparked a fatal obsession with sacrifice throughout the Christian era and, specifically, as having prompted Neville Chamberlain to formulate his policy of appeasement, which she vehemently opposed. She wrote:All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing ... [Augustine] developed a theory of the Atonement which was pure nonsense, yet had the power to convince ... This monstrous theory supposes that God was angry with man for his sins and that He wanted to punish him for these, not in any way that might lead to his reformation, but simply by inflicting pain on him; and that He allowed Christ to suffer this pain instead of man and thereafter was willing on certain terms to treat man as if he had not committed these sins. This theory flouts reason at all points, for it is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.


title: Rebecca West

text: World War II shocked her into a more conventional belief: "I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them." In the early 1950s, she thought she had a mystical revelation in France and actively tried to convert to Catholicism. There was a precedent in her family for this action, as her sister, Letitia, had earlier converted to Catholicism, thereby causing quite a stir, but West's attempt was short-lived, and she confessed to a friend: "I could not go on with being a Catholic ... I don't want, I can't bear to, become a Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and I cannot believe that I am required to pay such a price for salvation." Her writings of the 1960s and early 1970s again betray a profound mistrust towards God: "The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him."


title: Rebecca West

text: Alongside her fluctuating Christianity, West was fascinated with Manichaeanism. She describes the Manichean idea that the world is a mixture of two primeval kingdoms, one of light the other of darkness, as an "extremely useful conception of life" affirming that a "fusion of light and darkness" is "the essential human character." On the other hand, West criticised "the strictly literal mind of the founder [of Manichaeanism] and his followers" and what she perceived as the meanness of Christian heretics who adopted Manichaean ideas. West states that "the whole of modern history could be deduced from the popularity of this heresy in Western Europe: its inner sourness, its preference for hate over love and for war over peace, its courage about dying, its cowardice about living." Regarding the suppression of Manichaean heresies by the Christian authorities West says that whilst "it is our tendency to sympathise with the hunted hare... much that we read of Western European heretics makes us suspect that here the quarry was less of a hare than a priggish skunk." Nonetheless Manichean influence persists in an unpublished draft of West's own memoirs where she writes: "I had almost no possibility of holding faith of any religious kind except a belief in a wholly and finally defeated God, a hypothesis which I now accept but tried for a long time to reject, I could not face it."


title: Rebecca West

text: West's interest in Manichaeanism reflects her lifelong struggle with the question of how to deal with dualisms. At times she appears to favour the merging of opposites, for which Byzantium served as a model: "church and state, love and violence, life and death, were to be fused again as in Byzantium." More dominant, however, was her tendency to view the tensions generated in the space between dualistic terms as life-sustaining and creative; hence, her aversion to homosexuality and her warning not to confuse the drive for feminist emancipation with the woman's desire to become like a man. Her insistence on the fundamental difference between men and women reveals her essentialism, but it also bespeaks her innate Manichaean sensibility. She wanted respect and equal rights for women, but at the same time she required that women retain their specifically feminine qualities, notably an affinity with life: "Men have a disposition to violence; women have not. If one says that men are on the side of death, women on the side of life, one seems to be making an accusation against men. One is not doing that." One reason why she does not want to make an accusation against men is that they are simply playing their assigned role in a flawed universe. Only love can alleviate destructive aspects of the sex-antagonism: "I loathe the way the two cancers of sadism and masochism eat into the sexual life of humanity, so that the one lifts the lash and the other offers blood to the blow, and both are drunken with the beastly pleasure of misery and do not proceed with love's business of building a shelter from the cruelty of the universe." In addition to the operations of love, female emancipation is crucial to removing the moral, professional, and social stigma associated with the notion of the "weaker sex," without trying to do away altogether with the temperamental and metaphysical aspects of the gender dualism itself. Thus, the "sex war" described in West's early short story "Indissoluble Matrimony" (1914) elevates the female character, Evadne, in the end because she accepts the terms of the contest without superficially trying to "win" that war.


title: Rebecca West

text: The task of reconciling dualisms can also be seen in West's political propensities. As Bernard Schweizer has argued: "St. Augustine and Schopenhauer emphasized the fallenness of human life, implying a quietistic stance that could be confused with conservatism, while the Reclus brothers [famous French anarchists] urged her to revolt against such pessimistic determinism. West's characteristically heroic personal and historic vision is a result of these two contending forces." West's conviction that humanity will only fulfill its highest potentials if it adheres to the principle of process reflects the same preoccupation: "Process is her most encompassing doctrine," states Peter Wolfe. "Reconciling her dualism, it captures the best aspects of the male and female principles."


title: Rebecca West

text: Long time book reviewer and senior editor at "Time", Whittaker Chambers, considered West "a novelist of note ... a distinguished literary critic ... above all ... one of the greatest of living journalists."


title: Rebecca West

text: Virginia Woolf questioned Rebecca West being labelled as an "arrant feminist" because she offended men by saying they are snobs in chapter two of "A Room of One's Own": was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?"


title: Rebecca West

text: Bill Moyers's interview "A Visit With Dame Rebecca West," recorded in her London home when she was 89, was aired by PBS in July 1981. In a review of the interview, John O'Connor wrote that "Dame Rebecca emerges as a formidable presence. When she finds something or somebody the adjective suddenly becomes withering."


title: Rebecca West

text: West's first novel, "The Return of the Soldier", was turned into a major motion picture in 1982, directed by Alan Bridges, starring Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie. More recently, an adaptation of "The Return of the Soldier" for the stage by Kelly Younger titled "Once a Marine" took West's theme of shell-shock-induced amnesia and applied it to a soldier returning from the war in Iraq with PTSD.


title: Rebecca West

text: There have been two plays about Rebecca West produced since 2004. "That Woman: Rebecca West Remembers", by Carl Rollyson, Helen Macleod, and Anne Bobby, is a one-woman monologue in which an actress playing Rebecca West recounts her life through some of her most famous articles, letters, and books. "Tosca's Kiss", a 2006 play by Kenneth Jupp, retells West's experience covering the Nuremberg trials for "The New Yorker".


title: Rebecca West

text: Robert D. Kaplan's influential book "Balkan Ghosts" (1994) is an homage to West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" (1941), which he calls "this century's greatest travel book".


title: Rebecca West

text: In February 2006, BBC broadcast a radio version of West's novel "The Fountain Overflows", dramatized by Robin Brook, in six 55-minute installments.


title: Nidia Guenard

text: Nidia Guenard (born March 12, 1979) is an American retired professional wrestler. She is best known for winning the reality television series "Tough Enough" in 2001 and for her subsequent appearances with the World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment. She was with the company until 2004.


title: Nidia Guenard

text: Guenard won a year's contract with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) after she co-won the first season of "Tough Enough", a show meant both to be a "WWF Superstar" talent search, and a semi-documentary of the difficulties of being a trainee professional wrestler.


title: Nidia Guenard

text: Guenard made a few appearances on WWF episodes in 2001 before being sent to the Ohio Valley Wrestling (OVW) promotion, with whom WWE had a talent-development agreement. While in OVW she feuded with Victoria.


title: Nidia Guenard

text: Guenard debuted on the SmackDown! brand on the June 6, 2002 episode, in a backstage segment with The Hurricane (who was her on-screen ex-boyfriend) and Jamie Noble. Noble and Guenard then became an on-screen couple in a "trailer trash" gimmick. They were both playing as heels, with Nidia leading Noble to several wins, due to interference during the matches. At the King of the Ring she led Noble to winning the Cruiserweight Championship from The Hurricane. She then began to feud with SmackDown! Diva Torrie Wilson leading to many solo and mixed tag team matches with Guenard and Noble against Wilson and various other cruiserweights, including Funaki, Billy Kidman, Rey Mysterio, and Brian Kendrick.


title: Nidia Guenard

text: On the October 16, 2003 episode of "SmackDown!" Guenard was blinded by Tajiri during a match between Tajiri and Noble, after which Tajiri spewed his "Black mist" onto her face (this version of the mist was only ever seen in this instance). Storyline-wise, this encounter resulted in a physical 'injury' to Guenard. After recovering, Guenard started appearing at ringside with sunglasses on, to 'sell' the after effects of her injuries. During this time, Noble would throw Guenard in front of various opponents at a match's climax, to both save himself and let him later accuse them of "hitting a woman", etc. Later in this storyline, Rey Mysterio revealed to Guenard that Noble was exploiting her in the aforementioned manner, resulting in Guenard turning against Noble and becoming a fan favorite in the process. The two feuded, culminating in a match at No Way Out in which Noble had to wear a blindfold. True to character, Noble cheated to win as he removed his blindfold during the match.


title: Nidia Guenard

text: Guenard was drafted to the Raw Brand on March 22, 2004. She became a face and claimed to be excited that she was drafted to Raw, where she can compete for the WWE Women's Championship. She made her debut match on the March 29, 2004 episode of "Raw", defeating Molly Holly. She then tag teamed regularly with Stacy Keibler and Victoria against heels Trish Stratus, Gail Kim, Molly Holly and Jazz. With the shift to "Raw" also came a change in character, as Guenard's Hispanic heritage was played up; to this effect, she was no longer billed as being from the South but instead she was billed as being from Puerto Rico and she no longer spoke English during promos, instead speaking Spanish in a quick and angry fashion. Guenard was released from her WWE contract on November 3, 2004 along with several other performers, in a routine purge of talent.


title: Nidia Guenard

text: Guenard worked several wrestling matches post-WWE, including versus Gail Kim for Mexico's Toryumon and for Australia's World Series Wrestling. In addition, she worked for TNA overseas "a few times." In a ClubWWI.com interview, she said they were fun to work for, but she liked her freedom from wrestling, in general. She also wrestled for Northeast Wrestling (NWE), where she feuded with Jackie Gayda.


title: Nidia Guenard

text: Guenard is a vegetarian. In February 2010, she began training at the Culinary Institute Lenôtre in Houston, Texas.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: The Fall of Troy is an American rock band from Mukilteo, Washington. The band is a trio consisting of Thomas Erak (guitars, vocals, keyboards), Andrew Forsman (drums, percussion) and Tim Ward (bass, screamed vocals) who was later replaced by Frank Ene following his departure from the band in late 2007. Ene would remain in the band until their initial break-up in 2010, but Ward rejoined the band in Ene's place for their reunion in 2013.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: The trio is known for their technical and dynamic style, unorthodox song structures, energetic stage presence and also for their song "F.C.P.R.E.M.I.X." which was featured in several video games. The group has released six full-length albums, two EPs, and two singles. Prior to The Fall of Troy's formation, when each member was about 17 years old, all three founding members were in another group named The 30 Years War, who released two EPs.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: Late in his freshman year at Kamiak High School, Erak provided vocals and guitar for the band The Tribune. The band recorded one EP but disbanded by mid-2002. Erak and classmate Mike Munro then started a four-piece hardcore band under the name The 30 Years War. The band was rounded out with drummer Andrew Forsman. The group had originally intended a much mellower sound than employed. Erak stayed on guitar and vocals, Munro moved to second guitar, and bass and drums were filled by Tim Ward and Forsman respectively. During the life of The 30 Years War, two EPs were independently released, entitled "Martyrs Among the Casualties" and "Live at the Paradox".


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: Just as The 30 Years War were about to go into the studio to record again, Munro quit, stating that school commitments rendered him unable to continue playing with the band. After Munro left, the band changed its name to "The Fall of Troy" using the same method with which they had chosen their previous name: "opening a history textbook and pointing at a random location until [they] found a selection they liked".


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: In May 2003, the trio entered The Hall of Justice in Seattle, Washington with producer Joel M. Brown to record their first full length. They were all about 17 and a half years of age, and the album was recorded in one take over their spring break in one week. The album was released on November 4, 2003 (see 2003 in music) on Lujo Records, and reissued on August 22, 2006 (see 2006 in music) by Equal Vision Records.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: The trio also recorded their independently released "Ghostship EP" shortly after the release of the self-titled, in 2004. Early versions of the demos included keyboards by Jesse Erickson of Mukilteo, WA and had no vocals. The demos on the "Ghostship EP"; Part I, II, IV, and V, showcase the Phantom on the Horizon concept album, while "Macaulay McCulkin" is on 2005's "Doppelgänger".


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: The band was invited to submit a new demo for Equal Vision, which saw the band working with Ghostship producers Gordon Edward Greenwood III and Dustin Kochel once again. The resulting two tracks were "Tom Waits" and "Laces Out, Dan". Equal Vision used these tracks as promos for the yet to be recorded album.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: In March 2005, the band entered the studio to record their second album, titled "Doppelgänger". It was released on August 16, 2005 in Compact Disc and vinyl format, which also had alternate artwork. The trio started touring extensively from the release of "Doppelgänger" through the first quarter of 2006.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: "F.C.P.R.E.M.I.X." was released as the only single from the album and has led to some mainstream success. The music video was released June 6, 2006 and received massive airplay on MTV and FUSE. The song was featured in "Saints Row" for Xbox 360 and in "MLB 2K6" for Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube, PSP and Xbox 360. The song is also featured in "".


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: In mid-December 2006, the band entered the studio with producer Matt Bayles (Minus the Bear, Botch, Pearl Jam, Mastodon) to begin work on their third full-length album "Manipulator". The album achieved 4 out of 5 K's in Kerrang! magazine and 7 out of 10 from Metal Hammer magazine.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: The album features Nouela Johnston of the Seattle band People Eating People contributing vocal and keyboard parts to many songs. The album includes the previously written, "Seattlantis," and mostly all new material, including songs such as, "Problem!?," "Cut Down All the Trees and Name the Streets After Them," and a song with the palindromic title, "A Man. A Plan. A Canal. Panama." Before its release date the band stated that the first single from "Manipulator" would be "Cut Down All the Trees and Name the Streets After Them," which was also the first song released to the public on the band's MySpace. The music video for this song was released August 8, 2007, also on the band's MySpace.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: To support "Manipulator", the band went on tour with and opened for Deftones in the summer of 2007. Footage of this tour was used for the single, "Ex-Creations," which was released later on January 16, 2008 on MySpace as well.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: In late November 2007, during their tour with Coheed and Cambria, Timothy took a break from the band. It was later confirmed by the band that he had left the band due to stress. He was replaced by Frank Ene of the band "...Of Stalwart Fads".


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: On November 28, 2008, "Phantom on the Horizon" was released. The EP features all five "Ghostship" parts, with interludes. Erak has described the album as "one song separated by tracks." The album was played in its entirety on their West Coast and East Coast tours, followed by some "deep cuts" from the group's catalogue each night of the tour. Only 3,000 copies have been pressed (despite the misprint reverse side of the "Phantom on the Horizon" CD casing numbering the CD's out of a total of 3,300) and were sold online and at shows. After the 1500 physical copies held aside for online ordering sold out on December 1, an MP3 version of the album became available online retailers such as iTunes. A vinyl edition followed in 2009, with 1,000 clear copies sold through Hot Topic stores and 1,000 orange copies sold directly from the band's website.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: On February 26, 2009, The Fall of Troy confirmed on their website and their MySpace profile that they were entering the studio that week with producer Terry Date to record the follow-up to "Manipulator", which will include "a dozen or so songs" and should be in stores this summer. It was revealed on April 30, 2009 that Rody Walker, lead vocalist for the progressive metal band, Protest The Hero, would make a guest appearance on the record. "In the Unlikely Event", their fourth studio album, was released on October 6, 2009.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: On February 26, 2010, The Fall of Troy announced that they would disband after completing a spring US tour.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: Following Fall of Troy's breakup, Thomas Erak went on to form Just Like Vinyl. In January 2013, it was announced that Erak joined the post-hardcore band Chiodos. Andrew Forsman replaced Erak as drummer of the local band The Monday Mornings in 2010. Tim Ward relocated to Idaho following his removal from The Fall of Troy and has been recording and releasing demos online under the monikers Messed Up Coyote, Cool Timmy, Trash Kids, Dorothey Valens, and Stranger Danger. Frank Ene formed the band Chineke in 2010 as lead guitarist and vocalist.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: On February 21, 2011, Thomas announced the releasing of a live video named The Fall of Troy: Live at the Glasshouse. It was filmed in Pomona, CA, on October 12, 2009.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: In August 2011, Enjoy The Ride Records reissued The Fall of Troy's Doppelganger on vinyl. Only 1,500 copies were pressed, 1,000 of these featuring a black and red split coloring and sold at Hot Topic. The other 500 feature a black and red split with added "bone splatter" coloring and were sold online. In November 2011, Enjoy The Ride Records reissued 2007's Manipulator on vinyl as a double LP. Only 1,000 copies were pressed with 500 featuring a blue, pink, and orange split on LP1 and a black, white, and grey split on LP2 exclusive to Enjoy The Ride Records' website. The other 500 were once again sold at Hot Topic featuring the same colors in a spiral swirl.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: The original lineup of The Fall of Troy reunited for three nights in December 2013 in Austin, Texas. Each night, the band performed one of their first three albums ("The Fall of Troy", "Doppelgänger" and "Manipulator") in their entirety. During the VIP reunion show, the band announced they would continue making music in 2014 by releasing an album free of charge. In December 2014, Thomas Erak announced that he left Chiodos to focus on The Fall of Troy's new album and his family. The Fall of Troy went on a 10th anniversary U.S. tour of their second album "Doppelgänger" in September and November 2015 with And So I Watch You from Afar and Kylesa as direct support for each respective leg.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: After two years of teases and updates, The Fall of Troy formally announced its fifth studio album and follow-up to 2009's "In the Unlikely Event". The new album, titled "OK", was self-released on April 20, 2016 (three weeks after its formal announcement) through the band's website for a pay what you want model in addition to a limited-edition vinyl version. Coinciding with the album's announcement, the band posted the track "401k" for online streaming followed by a music video for the track "Inside Out". The group further released "OK#2", "OK#3.1", and "OK#3.2", all of which are alternate/instrumental versions of "OK".


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: In July 2020, The Fall of Troy announced a new album entitled "Mukiltearth". Released in August of that year, the album consists of six re-recorded tracks from "Martyrs Among the Casualties" (an EP released when the band was known as The 30 Years War), alongside four newly written tracks. Two songs were posted to YouTube and streaming services following the announcement of the album, titled "We Are The Future" and "Chain Wallet Nike Shoes", with the latter being a re-recording from "Martyrs Among the Casualties."


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: The Fall of Troy is characterized by a technical, intricate style, unorthodox song structures and energetic live performances. Thomas Erak's alternating guitar riffs and rhythmic chord work, paired with odd time signatures set the band apart from other post-hardcore bands. They also include abrupt transitions between melody and dissonance, as well as interchanging clean vocals and screams which was often split between Erak and Ward, respectively. Its music has been described as "danceable", however, and the band members have stated to pay as much attention to the groove as to complex structures. The Fall of Troy is usually categorized as mathcore, post-hardcore, math rock, progressive rock, and screamo.


title: The Fall of Troy (band)

text: At the beginning, the main influences of The Fall of Troy were local bands from the Seattle area, including Botch, The Blood Brothers, Sunny Day Real Estate, Raft of Dead Monkeys and Unwed Sailor, in addition to the Texan post-hardcore act At the Drive-In. They have expressed admiration for New Jersey mathcore group The Dillinger Escape Plan as well: Andrew Forsman singled out drummer Billy Rymer as an inspiration, while Thomas Erak lauded their 1999 debut album, "Calculating Infinity". Forsman has been particularly influenced by electronic music artists such as Aphex Twin.


title: William Newsom

text: William Alfred Newsom III (February 15, 1934 – December 12, 2018) was an American state appeals court judge, administrator of the Getty family trust, and the father of California Governor Gavin Newsom.


title: William Newsom

text: Newsom was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Christine Anne (née Brennan) and William A. Newsom II. He was known as Bill to all friends and family. A lifelong San Franciscan, Newsom had longstanding political and financial ties. His father ran Pat Brown's campaign for San Francisco district attorney, who then later became governor of California.


title: William Newsom

text: Newsom's late sister Barbara was once married to Ron Pelosi, brother-in-law of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. He was also a close friend of Gordon Getty, son of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, who lived in his house during the 1940s while attending St. Ignatius Catholic prep school in San Francisco.


title: William Newsom

text: Newsom went to University of San Francisco, followed by Stanford Law School and was admitted to the California Bar in 1962.


title: William Newsom

text: He worked as legal adviser to the Italian division of Getty Oil and then as a tax attorney for the Getty family. Newsom helped to deliver the ransom money for the release of John Paul Getty III.


title: William Newsom

text: In 1967, he married Tessa Menzies, and had two children (including Gavin) before divorcing after five years. In 1968, he ran unsuccessfully against State Senator Milton Marks, a popular Republican. Newsom was also corporate counsel and a board member for Trans-International Computer Investment Corporation (TCI), which handled classified government contracts, for which Newsom was issued a National Security Clearance. TCI went bankrupt in 1971 after what the Sacramento District Attorney called "the biggest stock fraud in California history," whose participants included many members of Governor Reagan's Kitchen Cabinet and appointment secretary Helene von Damm. For most of 1969 and 1970, Newsom traveled across Europe alongside former SS Gestapo member Otto von Bolschwing who had been brought to the US by the CIA under Operation Paperclip and appointed TCI's president by Getty due to his former Nazi intelligence connections and their value in obtaining defense technology contracts. It was during this time that von Bolschwing introduced Newsom to the business of importing and selling wine from Argentina - a business venture that would later be emulated by Newsom's son, Gavin.


title: William Newsom

text: In 1975, Jerry Brown appointed Newsom to the Superior Court bench in Auburn (Placer County) and later to the state Court of Appeal in San Francisco, where he served until his retirement in 1995. In this role he ruled on several prominent cases including the right of privacy for sufferers of HIV, the liability of the San Francisco 49ers for a player's injury and ruled against the prestigious Bohemian Club's ban on employing women. An advocate of rehabilitative justice, Newsom was also part of a panel of judges that ruled that the perpetrators of the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping would be eligible for parole.


title: William Newsom

text: Newsom served as a financial advisor for the Getty family businesses. He directly managed the Gordon P. Getty Family Trust, which is estimated at more than $2 billion. The trust earns about 2 percent a year resulting in approximately $40 million in annual income. He screened potential investments and made recommendations on real estate, stocks, bonds, and other ventures. "I make my living working for Gordon Getty", Newsom said in 2003.


title: William Newsom

text: Newsom was a keen environmentalist and served on the boards of both the Sierra Club Foundation and the Environmental Defense Fund. He helped to found the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation and was also a member of Earth Justice. He was also an advocate for otters and had one as a pet. During his judicial career he had had to curb his advocacy for environmental protection to maintain his professional neutrality. Newsom was also a keen walker and would take Gavin backpacking along the rivers of California. He had a large collection of books and would often read while in the bathtub.


title: William Newsom

text: Newsom was married to Tessa in 1966 and their son Gavin was born the next year; a daughter followed in 1968. Newsom was divorced shortly afterwards and Tessa died in 2002. In 2004 he administered the oath of office to Gavin upon his appointment as mayor of San Francisco.


title: William Newsom

text: Newsom died of ulcerative colitis at his home in San Francisco on December 12, 2018, at the age of 84, less than a month before his son Gavin took office as governor.


title: Kimono My House

text: Kimono My House is the third studio album by American rock band Sparks, released on May 1, 1974 by Island Records. The album is considered to be their commercial breakthrough, and was met with widespread acclaim.


title: Kimono My House

text: Preceded by the single "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us", "Kimono My House" peaked at No. 4 in the UK and No. 101 in the US. Retrospectively, "Kimono My House" is considered one of Sparks's best works and one of the best glam rock albums.


title: Kimono My House

text: In 1973, prior to the recording of the album, the brothers Ron and Russell Mael had accepted an offer to relocate to the United Kingdom in order to participate in the glam rock scene. The previous lineup consisting of Earle Mankey, James Mankey and Harley Feinstein was replaced with British musicians: Martin Gordon, Adrian Fisher and Norman "Dinky" Diamond joined the band to play bass, guitar and drums respectively. The group signed a record contract with Island Records and recorded "Kimono My House" in 1974. Although the Mael brothers had wanted Roy Wood to produce the album, he was unavailable, so Muff Winwood was hired instead. Winwood remained with the group to produce the follow-up album "Propaganda" later in 1974.


title: Kimono My House

text: The album's title is a line from the song on the album "Hasta Mañana, Monsieur", and a pun on the title of the song "Come On-a My House", made famous by Rosemary Clooney. The pun has a precedent, however, in the title of the track "Kimona My House" on jazz guitarist Dick Garcia's 1956 album "A Message from Garcia".


title: Kimono My House

text: Musically, "Kimono My House" represented a shift in sound and a focusing of Ron Mael's songwriting (now the indisputable lead songwriter). Sparks' two albums with the Mankey brothers had been diverse albums that featured a number of different styles, such as a cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Do-Re-Mi", "Here Comes Bob", which was performed by a small string section, and "The Louvre", which mixed both English and French lyrics.


title: Kimono My House

text: The new album embraced the more pop-oriented side of the Mael brothers' song-writing, which had previously been evident in songs such as "Wonder Girl" and "High C". Now, with challenging arrangements by the new British line-up and Winwood's simpler production, the songs were more focused. The album slotted in with the current popularity of glam rock—which was dominating the charts—in particular, the more experimental and electronic sound of Roxy Music and David Bowie. Lyrically, the songs remained unusual and humorous. The great number of words filled with pop-culture references, puns and peculiar sexual content, sung often in falsetto by Russell Mael, set Sparks apart from other groups.


title: Kimono My House

text: The particularity of their sound, which matched pop songwriting with complex lyrics, defined the group to their UK audience. Integral to the sound was Adrian Fisher's guitar playing and Martin Gordon's sonorous Rickenbacker bass. The novel input of competent and innovative musicians constituted a successful formula which was maintained only until the tour which followed the release of "Kimono My House", with Gordon fired before the tour and Fisher afterwards.


title: Kimono My House

text: The other key component of the Sparks sound in this period was Ron Mael's keyboard. On the previous two albums Ron had primarily used a Wurlitzer electronic piano, but he found that the instrument did not stand up well to the rigours of touring, because the metal reeds that generated the notes frequently broke. When the group relocated to the UK, Mael purchased an RMI Electra-Piano model 300. This instrument had three basic sound options, a piano sound, an organ sound and a harpsichord sound, but Mael used only the piano sound for his work with Sparks.


title: Kimono My House

text: Although the tonal quality was markedly inferior to a Wurlitzer or a Fender Rhodes – Mael later described the piano setting on the Electra-Piano as "incredibly terrible" – the RMI had several notable advantages for a touring musician. Unlike the electro-mechanical Wurlitzer and Rhodes, the RMI was a completely solid-state instrument, with each note generated by its own dedicated LC oscillator circuit, so it was both more robust and lighter than a Wurlitzer, and the tone generator circuits were very stable and did not drift out of tune, which was a common problem for many early electronic performance keyboards like the Minimoog synthesiser. To compensate for the very basic sound of the Electra-Piano, Mael fed the instrument through an Echoplex tape echo unit, giving it the highly distinctive "shimmer" that features prominently on their breakthrough single "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us".


title: Kimono My House

text: Ron Mael: "It was the first time I was really aware that technology can give some kind of mystery to the sound. There was a kind of haunting quality to the RMI with the Echoplex. Real tape delay gave it a little of a wobbly feel. That sound, these days, you can approximate it, but to get that thing, you need the old gear. I'm not a big collector of vintage gear, but I kept that Echoplex, 'cause it's just such a beautiful machine."


title: Kimono My House

text: The visuals were aided and abetted by the physical presence of the group. Ron and Russell milked their peculiar image, with Ron's toothbrush moustache, reserved wardrobe and usually silent demeanour sat in diametrical opposition to his younger brother's long curly hair and energetic and flamboyant stage persona. Taken together, the sound and look of the group caused a sensation, producing what seemed to the mass audience to be an "overnight success".


title: Kimono My House

text: What sounds like a honking saxophone line at the end of ”Equator”, is in fact a mellotron played by Ron Mael; the seductive whispers on the track are delivered by a sped-up Russell Mael.


title: Kimono My House

text: The original concept for the cover came from Ron Mael, who was inspired by a Japanese World War II propaganda photograph he had seen in an old wartime edition of "Life" magazine. The original image depicted two Japanese women in traditional dress disdainfully holding their noses with one hand while holding a photograph of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. However, in place of the Churchill photo, Mael's homemade mockup substituted the cover of Sparks' previous album, "A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing" (1973).


title: Kimono My House

text: The final version of the front cover was executed by the same team who created the classic early covers for Sparks' labelmates Roxy Music—Island Records Marketing Director Tim Clark, photographer Karl Stoecker and stylist Nicholas de Ville. It is notable for having neither the name of the band nor the album title on it.


title: Kimono My House

text: The two women pictured, in kimono, were actresses Michi Hirota and Kuniko Okamura. They were members of Japan's Red Buddha Theatre headed by Stomu Yamashta, which was performing in London at the time. Interviewed in 2014, Hirota recalled:


title: Kimono My House

text: We were both actresses touring with a Japanese theatre company in Europe and the USA. My husband Joji Hirota was musical director. A record company (Island records) approached our director looking for Japanese women, and we were asked to do the modeling. I am the woman on the right (with a fan).


title: Kimono My House

text: We were not told much, they just let us move freely. We didn't know how to arrange our hair properly or how to fix our kimono. There was nobody to dress us. The session took 4 or 5 hours. It had such an impact, however I thought that I looked bit ugly.


title: Kimono My House

text: Yes, I kept one Polaroid photo in which I looked rather "kawaii" (cute in Japanese), which Karl dropped on the floor. Hope this is OK with him. I keep it in my personal photo album.


title: Kimono My House

text: The back cover includes the band name, the album title, list of songs and photos of the band members. The inner sleeve for the original vinyl record was printed with a full set of song lyrics on one side and a black and white photograph of the Mael brothers, framed in a spotlight, on the reverse.


title: Kimono My House

text: "Kimono My House" became a popular release, peaking at No. 4 on the UK Albums Chart, and was awarded gold status by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) in September 1974. The single "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" was a surprise hit and reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart, being certified silver in June 1974. It was held off the top spot by the Rubettes' bubblegum pop song "Sugar Baby Love", which remained at No. 1 for four weeks. Sparks' second Island era single, "Amateur Hour", reached the top ten in the UK later that summer.


title: Kimono My House

text: Outside the UK, "Kimono My House" and its singles made a significant impact across Europe, notably in Germany, where both singles reached No. 12. In the US, the album reached No. 101 on the "Billboard" 200. The group's two Bearsville Records albums had garnered critical praise but few sales. The only significant chart performance had been for "Wonder Girl", which had been a minor regional hit and had crept into the lower reaches of the "Cashbox" chart at No. 92. In place of "Amateur Hour", "Talent Is an Asset" was selected as the album's second single in the US, and the album's third in New Zealand.


title: Kimono My House

text: Upon its release, "New Musical Express" published an enthusiastic one page review dubbing the album "an instant classic". Reviewer Ian Mac Donald wrote that all of the songs "sound like standards", adding "this record makes you jump in every sense" before concluding: ""Kimono My House" is the real breakthrough – I think you're gonna love it". "Sounds" praised the freshness of the material, saying, "the music is completely new and innovative". Reviewing "Kimono My House" for "Rolling Stone" in 1974, Gordon Fletcher was complimentary of Ron Mael's "whimsical" lyrics, which he felt revealed "a unique (if slightly warped) perspective and a volatile sense of humor", but found that they tended to be obscured by Winwood's "obfuscating" production. Fletcher further criticized Russell Mael's singing on the album as "a disappointing stab at intelligible vocals". "The Spokesman Review"s critic wrote that it was "the most invigorating appealing" album "that I've heard in longer than I can recall at the moment". Reviewer Robert Hilburn wrote that the songs were "rich with vigor" with "great harmonies and dynamic tempo changes".


title: Kimono My House

text: English singer and Smiths frontman Morrissey has frequently cited "Kimono My House" as one of his favorite albums and famously wrote a letter to the "NME", at the age of 15, extolling its virtues. He later told the Mael brothers that it had been a key influence on him deciding to embark upon a music career. In 2010, Morrissey included it in a list of his 13 favorite albums of all time for "The Quietus". Icelandic singer Björk has also named the album as one of her all-time favorites. Steve Jones, guitarist and composer for the Sex Pistols, also hailed the album, recalling that in 1974, "The first Be-Bop Deluxe album, "Axe Victim", and Sparks' "Kimono My House" were both big albums for me and Cookie [Paul Cook]. We'd sit in his bedroom for hours listening to them". John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers named Adrian Fisher's guitar playing on "Kimono My House" and its follow-up "Propaganda" as one of his influences for the album "By the Way" (2002). The album was featured in Robert Dimery's book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". In 2020, the album was ranked at number 476 on "Rolling Stone"s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.


title: Kimono My House

text: "Kimono My House" was remastered and re-issued by Island in 1994 and 2006. The first issue by the Island Masters subsidiary added the non-album B-sides "Barbecutie" and "Lost and Found". The '21st Century Edition' added a live recording of "Amateur Hour" recorded by a subsequent (1975) line-up of the group and sleeve notes by Paul Lester, the deputy editor of "Uncut".


title: Kimono My House

text: A remastered "40th Anniversary Edition" was released on 15 December 2014 on vinyl only, including previously unreleased demo material from the band's archives. Coinciding with the release the entire album was performed, along with the 35-piece Heritage Orchestra, at the Barbican Centre on 19 and 20 December, where the band also performed brand new orchestral arrangements by Nathan Kelly. The programme also featured songs from their other 22 albums. The second date was added after the first night sold out.


title: Kimono My House

text: As part of the live performance with the Heritage Orchestra, the band released the song "Thank God It’s Not Christmas" as a single. Stewart Mason of AllMusic said:


title: Kimono My House

text: “One of the many highlights on the phenomenal "Kimono My House", "Thank God It’s Not Christmas" is the archetypal song from Sparks’ Island Records era. Adrian Fisher’s lead guitar and Ron Mael’s piano duel insistently with a prominent string section, as Russell Mael sings an alternately wry and depressing lyric about the desire to find activities that distract oneself from a slowly disintegrating relationship. The lyrics are truly magnificent, both in their literal meaning and the way they work with the music, creating a rhythmic counter-melody that echoes Fisher’s guitar line, and Muff Winwood’s crystal-clear production emphasizes the song’s soaring, anthemic elements; although "Amateur Hour" and "This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us" were the hits and "Here In Heaven" is more beloved by fans, "Thank God It’s Not Christmas" is possibly the album’s highest point."


title: G. M. Sundar

text: G. M. Sundar is an Indian actor and film producer who has acted in a number of Tamil films. He turned producer for the film "Urumattram".


title: G. M. Sundar

text: He studied acting at the Film and Television institute, Adyar. He was given his first role by director K. Balachander in the film "Punnagai Mannan".


title: G. M. Sundar

text: Later, Sundar was cast by Kamal Haasan in the film "Kadamai Kanniyam Kattupaadu" and "Sathyaa", produced by Raaj Kamal Films.


title: G. M. Sundar

text: Apart from mainstream films, Sundar played the lead role in the national award-winning film "Ooruku Nooruper" directed by B. Lenin. He also acted in and produced a short film, "Urumattram", which won the national award for the Best Environmental Film.


title: G. M. Sundar

text: After a brief hiatus, Sundar has entered into the second phase of his acting career through Nalan Kumarasamy's "Kadhalum Kadanthu Pogum", starring Vijay Sethupathi and Madonna Sebastian. It was a critical and box office success.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: John White () was an English colonial governor, explorer, artist, and cartographer. White was among those who sailed with Richard Grenville in the first attempt to colonize Roanoke Island in 1585, acting as artist and mapmaker to the expedition. He would most famously briefly serve as the governor of the second attempt to found Roanoke Colony on the same island in 1587 and discover the colonists had mysteriously vanished.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: During his time at Roanoke Island he made several watercolor sketches of the surrounding landscape and the native Algonkin peoples. These works are significant as they are the most informative illustrations of a Native American society of the Eastern seaboard; the surviving original watercolors are now preserved in the print room of the British Museum.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: In 1587, White became governor of Sir Walter Raleigh's failed attempt at a permanent settlement on Roanoke Island, known to history as the "Lost Colony". This was the earliest effort to establish a permanent English colony in the New World. White's granddaughter Virginia Dare was the first English child born in North America. In late 1587 White returned to England for supplies. The return expedition was delayed due to various reasons, including the Spanish Armada. Governor White finally returned to Roanoke Island in August 1590, but found the colony had been long deserted.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: After the failure of the colony, White retired to Raleigh's estates in Ireland, reflecting upon the "evils and unfortunate events" which had ruined his hopes in America, though never giving up hope that his daughter and granddaughter were still alive.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: John White's exact date of birth is unknown but it seems likely he was born sometime in the 1530s–1540s. White is known to have attended church in the parish of St. Martin Ludgate in London. In 1566, he married Tomasyn Cooper; with whom he had a son, Thomas, who died young, and a daughter, Eleanor. Little is known of White's training as an artist but it is possible that he apprenticed as an illustrator under a London master.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: In the late sixteenth century efforts to establish an English colony in the New World began to gain momentum, and White soon became an enthusiastic supporter. In 1577, White may have accompanied Martin Frobisher to search for precious metals and a northwest passage to Asia on his Baffin Island and Greenland expeditions. Despite this, White was not mentioned by name. His drawings from this period were of the lands and people encountered on the voyage. In 1585, White accompanied the expedition led by Sir Ralph Lane to attempt to found the first English colony in North America. White was sent by Sir Walter Raleigh as Sir Richard Grenville's artist-illustrator on his first voyage to the New World; working closely with the scientist Thomas Harriot, he served as mapmaker and artist to the expedition, which encountered considerable difficulties and returned to England in 1586.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: In 1585 White had been commissioned to "draw to life" the inhabitants of the New World and their surroundings. During White's time at Roanoke Island, he completed numerous watercolor drawings of the surrounding landscape and native peoples. These works are significant as they are the most informative illustrations of a Native American society of the Eastern seaboard, and predate the first body of "discovery voyage art" created in the late 18th century by the artists who sailed with Captain James Cook. They represent the sole-surviving visual record of the native inhabitants of America encountered by England's first settlers.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: White's enthusiasm for watercolor was unusual – most contemporary painters preferred to use oil-based paints. White's watercolors would soon become a sensation in Europe; it was not long before the watercolors were engraved by the Flemish master engraver Theodor de Bry. Through the medium of print, the illustrations became widely known and distributed; they were published in 1590 under the title "America".


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: After Lane's colonists returned to England in 1586, Sir Walter Raleigh, who held the land patent for the proposed English colony of Virginia, tasked White with the job of organising a new settlement in the Chesapeake Bay area, one which would be self-sustaining and which would include women and children. During 1586 White was able to persuade 113 prospective colonists to join Raleigh's expedition, including his daughter Eleanor and his son-in-law Ananias Dare, recently married at St Bride's Church in Fleet Street. His efforts did not go unrewarded; on 7 January 1587, Raleigh named "John White of London Gentleman, to be the chief Governor" of the new colony. White, with thirteen others, were incorporated under the name of "The Governor and Assistants of the Cities of Raleigh of Virginia".


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: In May 1587 White's colonists sailed for Virginia in the "Lion". They were guided by the Portuguese navigator Simon Fernandez, the same pilot who had led the 1585 expedition and who was given by his fellow sailors the unhappy nickname of "the swine." The settlers' chosen destination was not Roanoke but the Chesapeake Bay. But, upon reaching Roanoke in late July, and allowing the colonists to disembark, Fernandez refused to let White's men re-board the ship.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: According to White's journal, Fernandez's deputy "called to the sailors in the pinesse, charging them not to bring any of the planters [settlers] back againe, but leave them on the island." Faced with what amounted to a mutiny by his navigator, White appears to have backed down and acquiesced in this sudden change of plan. Despite the governor's protests, Fernandez held that "summer was farre spent [summer was almost over], wherefore hee would land all the planters in no other place."


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: This second colony at Roanoke set about repairing the structures left behind in 1585. They also searched for the fifteen men left behind by the previous expedition, but found only bones. From an early stage there were tensions with the local Algonkin Indians, though initially things went well. White quickly made contact with friendly natives led by Chief Manteo, who explained to him that the lost fifteen had been killed by hostile Secotan, Aquascogoc, and Dasamongueponke warriors, choosing a time and place of attack "of great advantage to the savages."


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: On 8 August 1587, White led a dawn attack on the Dasamongueponkes that went disastrously wrong. White and his soldiers entered the Dasamongueponke village in the morning "so early that it was yet dark," but mistakenly attacked a group of hitherto friendly Indians, killing one and wounding many. "We were deceaved," wrote White in his journal, "for the savages were our friendes." Henceforth, relations with the local tribes would steadily deteriorate.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: On 18 August 1587, there was happier news – White became a grandfather. "Eleanor, daughter to the governor and wife to Ananias Dare, one of the assistants, was delivered of a daughter in Roanoke." The child was healthy and "was christened there the Sunday following, and because this child was the first Christian born in Virginia, she was named Virginia."


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: However, the colonists' food supplies soon began to grow short, and in late 1587 the settlers pressed White to return to England "for the better and sooner obtaining of supplies, and other necessaries." Because the colony had been deposited in Roanoke rather than the Chesapeake area, supply ships from England ignorant of Fernandez's change of plan would most likely not land in Roanoke at all, and the settlement might not survive the coming winter. White was reluctant to abandon his colony, anxious that his enemies in England "would not spare to slander [him] falsely" should he leave, and worried that his "stuff and goods might be spoiled and most of it pilfered away." Eventually the colonists agreed to stand surety for White's belongings and he was prevailed upon to sail, "much against his will," to seek help.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: Misfortune struck White's return to England from the beginning. The anchor of the flyboat on which White was quartered could not be raised, and many crew members were severely injured during the attempt. Worse, their journey home was delayed by "scarce and variable winds" followed by "a storm at the north-east," and many sailors starved or died of scurvy. On 16 October 1587 the desperate crew, at last, landed in Smerwicke, in the west of Ireland, and White was finally able to make his way back to Southampton.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: Further bad news awaited White on his return to England. Just two weeks previously Queen Elizabeth I had issued a general "stay of shipping," preventing any ships from leaving English shores. The reason was the "invincible fleetes made by the King of Spain, joined with the power of the Pope, for the invading of England" – the Spanish Armada. White's patron Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to provide ships to rescue the colony but he was over-ruled by the Queen.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: In early 1588 White was able to scrape together a pair of small pinnaces, the "Brave" and the "Roe", which were unsuitable for military service and could be spared for the expedition to Roanoke. Unluckily for White, they were barely suited for the Atlantic crossing and the governor endured further bad luck as the ships were intercepted by French pirates, who "playd extreemely upon us with their shot," hitting White (to his great embarrassment) "in the side of the buttoke." White and his crew escaped to England with their lives, but "they robbed us of all our victuals, powder, weapons and provision," and the journey to Virginia had to be abandoned. By this stage White appears to have formed the view that he was born under "an unlucky star."


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: Finally, in March 1590, with the immediate threat of a Spanish invasion by now abated, Raleigh was able to equip White's rescue expedition. Two ships, the "Hopewell" and the "Moonlight" set sail for Roanoke. The return journey was prolonged by extensive privateering and several sea battles, and White's eventual landing at the Outer Banks was further imperiled by poor weather. The landing was hazardous and was beset by bad conditions and adverse currents. During the landing on Roanoke, of the mariners who accompanied White, "seven of the chiefest were drowned."


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: Governor White finally reached Roanoke Island on 18 August 1590, his granddaughter's third birthday, but he found his colony had been long deserted. The buildings had collapsed and "the houses [were] taken downe." The few clues about the colonists' whereabouts included the letters "CRO" carved into a tree, and the word "CROATOAN" carved on a post of the fort. Croatoan was the name of a nearby island (likely modern-day Hatteras Island) and of a local tribe of Native Americans. Roanoke Island was originally not a planned location for the colony and the idea of moving elsewhere had been discussed. Before the Governor's departure, he and the colonists had agreed that a message would be carved into a tree if they had moved and would include an image of a Maltese Cross if the decision was made by force. White found no such cross and was hopeful that his family were still alive.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: True to their word, the colonists had looked after White's belongings, which had been carefully buried and hidden. However, local Indians had looted the hiding place, and White found "about the place many of my things spoyled and broken, and my books torne from the covers, the frames of some of my pictures and mappes rotten and spoyled with rayne, and my armour almost eaten through with rust."


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: Due to the weather, which "grew to be fouler and fouler," White had to abandon the search of adjacent islands for the colonists. The ship's captain had already lost three anchors and could not afford the loss of another. White returned to Plymouth, England, on 24 October 1590.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: The loss of the colony was a personal tragedy for White, from which he never fully recovered. He would never return to the New World, and in a letter to Richard Hakluyt he wrote that he must hand over the fate of the colonists and his family "to the merciful help of the Almighty, whom I most humbly beseech to helpe and comfort them."


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: Little is known of White's life after the failure of the Roanoke Colony. He lived in Plymouth, and also owned a house at Newtown, Kylmore (Kilmore, County Cork), Ireland. He appears to have been in Ireland living on the estates of Sir Walter Raleigh, making maps of land for Raleigh's tenants, and reflecting upon the "evils and unfortunate events" which had ruined his hopes in the New World, though never giving up hope that his daughter and granddaughter were still alive.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: The last surviving document related to White is a letter he wrote from Ireland in 1593 to the publisher of the prints of his Roanoke drawings. However, a record from May 1606 that Bridget White, who was appointed estate administrator for her brother "John White", may refer to him.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: White is chiefly remembered today for his watercolors, which represent a unique record of 16th-century Algonquian society. All of White's surviving works are now in the print room of the British Museum.


title: John White (colonist and artist)

text: In 2007, the British Museum placed the entire group of John White's watercolors on public display under the collection, ""A New World: England's First View of America"." There are more than seventy watercolors in the travelling exhibit. There were plans to show the collection at the North Carolina Museum of History.


title: Boolean expression

text: In computer science, a Boolean expression is an expression used in programming languages that produces a Boolean value when evaluated. A Boolean value is either true or false. A Boolean expression may be composed of a combination of the Boolean constants true or false, Boolean-typed variables, Boolean-valued operators, and Boolean-valued functions.


title: Boolean expression

text: Boolean expressions correspond to propositional formulas in logic and are a special case of Boolean circuits.


title: Boolean expression

text: Most programming languages have the Boolean operators OR, AND and NOT; in C and some languages inspired by it, these are represented by "||" (double pipe character), "&&" (double ampersand) and "!" (exclamation point) respectively, while the corresponding bitwise operations are represented by "|", "&" and "~" (tilde). In the mathematical literature the symbols used are often "+" (plus), "·" (dot) and overbar, or "∨" (vel), "∧" (et) and "¬" (not) or "′" (prime).


title: Boolean expression

text: Some languages, e.g., Perl and Ruby, have two sets of Boolean operators, with identical functions but different precedence. Typically these languages use and, or and not for the lower precedence operators.


title: Boolean expression

text: Some programming languages derived from PL/I have a bit string type and use BIT(1) rather than a separate Boolean type. In those languages the same operators serve for boolean operations and bitwise operations. The languages represent OR, AND, NOT and EXCLUSIVE OR by "|", "&", "¬" (infix) and "¬" (prefix).


title: Boolean expression

text: Some programming languages, e.g., Ada, have short-circuit Boolean operators. These operators use a lazy evaluation, that is, if the value of the expression can be determined from the left hand Boolean expression then they do not evaluate the right hand Boolean expression. As a result, there may be side effects that only occur for one value of the left hand operand.


title: Timeline of women's education

text: This is a timeline of women's education. It includes people, institutions, law reforms and events associated with the education of women in history worldwide.


title: Bad Girls Club (season 11)

text: The eleventh season of the Oxygen reality television series "Bad Girls Club" is titled Bad Girls Club: Miami and premiered on August 13, 2013. This is the second season to take place in Miami, the first being season 5, and was filmed in early 2013.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: In 2020, the U.S. government announced that it was considering banning the Chinese social media platform TikTok upon a request from then-U.S. president Donald Trump, who viewed the app as a national security threat. The result was that TikTok owner ByteDance—which initially planned on selling a small portion of TikTok to an American company—agreed to divest TikTok to prevent a ban in the United States and in other countries where restrictions are also being considered due to privacy concerns, which themselves are mostly related to its ownership by a firm based in China.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: TikTok would later announce plans to file legal action challenging the order's transactional prohibitions with U.S. companies. The lawsuit against the Trump administration's order was filed on August 24, and contended that the administration's order was motivated by Trump's efforts to boost re-election support through protectionist trade policies aimed at China. A separate suit filed the same day by TikTok's U.S. technical program manager Patrick Ryan against Trump and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross sought a temporary restraining order (TRO), arguing that his due process rights were violated and the ban was an "unconstitutional taking" of Ryan's property under the Fifth Amendment; the suit also claimed Trump's action was likely a retaliation because of the TikTok pranks targeting the June 20 campaign rally.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: American technology company Microsoft had previously proposed an idea to acquire TikTok's algorithm and other artificial intelligence technology, but this was declined by ByteDance, as its executives expressed concern that it would likely be opposed by the Chinese government, which criticized the Trump administration's order previously as a "smash and grab" forced sale and (on September 13, 2021) suggested it would prefer the shuttering of U.S. operations over such a sale.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: In January 2019, an investigation by the American think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics described TikTok as a "Huawei-sized problem" that posed a national security threat to the West, because of the app's popularity with Western users. They included armed forces personnel and its alleged ability to convey location, image and biometric data to its Chinese parent company, which is legally unable to refuse to share data with the Chinese government under the China Internet Security Law. Observers have also said that ByteDance's founder and CEO Zhang Yiming issued a letter in 2018 stating that his company would "further deepen cooperation" with the ruling Chinese Communist Party to promote its policies. TikTok's parent company ByteDance says that TikTok is not available in China and its data is stored outside of China, but its privacy policy has reserved the right to share any information with Chinese authorities. In response to national security, censorship, and anti-boycott compliance concerns, in October 2019, Senator Marco Rubio asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to open an investigation into TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. The same month, Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Schumer sent a joint letter to the Director of National Intelligence requesting a security review of TikTok and its parent company. In July 2020, the United States Department of the Treasury admitted that TikTok was under CFIUS review.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: In November 2019, it was reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States opened an investigation into ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly. The same month, following a request by Senator Chuck Schumer, U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy agreed to assess the risks of using TikTok as a recruitment tool. Senator Josh Hawley introduced the National Security and Personal Data Protection Act to prohibit TikTok's parent company and others from transferring personal data of Americans to China. Senator Josh Hawley also introduced a bill to ban downloading and using TikTok on government devices because of national security concerns. In December 2019, the United States Navy as well as the U.S. Army banned TikTok from all government-issued devices. The Transportation Security Administration also prohibited its personnel from posting on the platform for outreach purposes. Following its prohibition by the U.S. military, the Australian Defence Force also banned TikTok on its devices. Legislation was subsequently introduced in the U.S. Senate that would prohibit all federal employees from using or downloading TikTok.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: The Democratic National Committee issued a warning to the Democratic campaigns, state parties, and committees to ensure that additional security measures are implemented while using TikTok, citing concerns regarding the application's spying nature. In July 2020, the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign instructed its staff to delete TikTok for security reasons.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: Experts have been split on the question of whether or not TikTok poses a security risk, with some saying that it does while other experts have said that it does not.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On July 7, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the government was considering banning TikTok. In response, suggested that Trump's proposed TikTok ban may threaten free speech and "set a very problematic precedent" for banning apps in the United States. Patrick Jackson, chief technology officer of privacy company Disconnect, said the app sends an abnormal amount of data—mostly information about the phone—to its server, but there is limited evidence that TikTok is sharing these data with the Chinese government. He also noted that the amount of collected data was similar to that collected by American-originated social media platforms and was less than that collected by Facebook.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On July 31, 2020, President Donald Trump announced a decision ordering China's ByteDance to divest ownership of the application, and had threatened to shut down its U.S. operations through executive action as soon as August 1 if the company did not comply. While the President has authority to intervene in transactions involving foreign companies doing business in the United States (including placing companies on an "entity list" that restricts a company's ability to conduct business with American companies), Trump did not specify how he would enforce a ban. Microsoft was reported to be in talks of acquiring the company. Later that day, President Trump announced plans to ban TikTok in the United States, and signaled opposition to any sale to a U.S.-based company. Trump's ban threat and his indication he would oppose any sale to an American buyer was condemned by TikTok users, many of whom argued that national security concerns were being used as a cover by the administration to justify a ban as retaliation for pranks aimed at Trump by TikTok users (particularly, a ticket-purchasing effort to inflate projected and depress actual attendance of his June 20 campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma) and other content satirizing Trump or critical of him and his actions, especially in relation to his response to the George Floyd protests. Some have speculated that a ban or the threat thereof would result in political backlash, pushing many users (particularly within the app's core user base of adults aged 18–34, including those eligible to vote for the first time, which make up roughly 50% of the app's U.S. users) to vote against Trump, likely in favor of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: After Trump proposed to ban TikTok in the U.S on July 31, 2020, security researchers expressed their concern about limitations of freedom. In one article, "PCMag" quoted Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel who said that "banning an app that millions of Americans use to communicate with each other is a danger to free expression and is technologically impractical."


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On August 1, ByteDance—which initially sought to maintain a minority interest in a sale to a U.S. buyer—agreed to divest TikTok outright to prevent a ban in the United States and in other countries (including Japan, Pakistan and Australia) where restrictions are also being considered because of privacy concerns primarily related to its ownership by a China-based firm. A preliminary deal to sell the platform to Microsoft was submitted to President Trump for review, in which Microsoft would also assume data management responsibilities; preliminary terms allowed American investors in the platform to eventually acquire minority stakes in TikTok post-sale. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham later expressed support for the Microsoft proposal. In a video statement posted on TikTok that morning, Manager of U.S. Operations Vanessa Pappas stated that the company is "not planning on going anywhere" and is "building the safest app because we know it's the right thing to do." On August 2, it was reported by "The Wall Street Journal" that Microsoft paused talks with ByteDance. Later that day, Microsoft confirmed that talks would continue following a conversation between CEO Satya Nadella and President Trump. Reportedly, after White House advisers persuaded him to hold off on banning TikTok outright because of the possible legal and political repercussions involved, Trump subsequently agreed to put a 45-day hold on any action against TikTok to allow ByteDance to divest the platform to Microsoft or, should a deal with the tech company not materialize, another American corporation. On August 6, Trump signed an executive order banning the platform in 45 days if it is not sold by ByteDance; Trump also signed a similar order against the WeChat application owned by the Chinese multinational company Tencent. On August 14, Trump issued a new executive order giving ByteDance 90 days to sell or spin off its U.S. TikTok business. In the order, Trump said that there is "credible evidence" that leads him to believe that ByteDance "might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States." On August 17, Oracle entered the race to buy TikTok's operations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, working with U.S. investors—including General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, who own stakes in TikTok—to secure a bid.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On August 21, TikTok announced plans to file legal action challenging the order's to-be-outlined transactional prohibitions with U.S. companies. The lawsuit against the Trump administration's order—formally filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on August 24—contended that the administration's order was motivated by Trump's efforts to boost re-election support through protectionist trade policies aimed at China; that TikTok/ByteDance was deprived of due process rights under the Fifth Amendment that apply to foreign and domestic businesses; failed to provide evidence that TikTok was a bona fide security threat or provide "justification for its punitive actions"; had relied on a May 2019 national emergency declaration with respect to "Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain", rather than invoking a new emergency declaration; and that the purported national security threat identified by the CFIUS was based on "outdated news articles" and did not address demonstrative data security documentation provided by TikTok. The company iterated that many of its top personnel—including then-CEO Kevin Mayer—were based within the United States and were not subject to Chinese law, and that content moderation was led by an independent, U.S.-based technical staff. The lawsuit also contended that the order's application of the IEEPA violated a 1994 Congressional amendment expanding the act's list of First Amendment-protected materials to encompass any media, including software technologies, regardless of "format or medium of transmission."


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: A separate suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California the same day by TikTok U.S. technical program manager Patrick Ryan against Trump and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross sought a temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing its enforcement by the U.S. Department of Commerce in order to ensure that TikTok employees could continue to be paid their salaries, arguing that the executive order's restrictions on financial transactions with banks, credit firms and payroll providers unlawfully jeopardizes TikTok U.S. employees' ability to receive salary payments, and that the ambiguity on prohibited transactions with ByteDance violated Ryan's due process rights as well as being an "unconstitutional taking" of Ryan's property under the Fifth Amendment. In addition to claims that it was motivated by anti-China bias, the lawsuit also said Trump's action was likely also a retaliatory action over the aforementioned prank targeting the June 20 campaign rally. The Department of Justice contended in a September 10 response to Ryan's lawsuit that his claims of irreparable financial harm by the order is speculative until Ross issued further guidance on 20 September and alone did not justify a TRO, and that neither Ryan nor the court had the right to determine whether the order was issued in response to a bona fide national emergency because it is a "nonjusticiable political question" and Congress has not created a right of action for citizens to challenge use of the IEEPA and the National Emergencies Act.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On August 28, the Chinese government's Commerce and Science and Technology Ministries updated their export control rules, restricting the export of "technology based on data analysis for personalized information recommendation services." The restrictions—which had not been updated since 2008 and, although government officials asserted that it was not aimed at any particular company, was seen as an effort to delay or prohibit a full sale of TikTok—effectively required ByteDance to undergo a government-reviewed licensing procedure if parts of TikTok were sold to a company based outside China.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On September 13, ByteDance informed Microsoft that it would not sell TikTok's U.S. operations to the Seattle-based tech company; at issue was Microsoft's proposal to acquire TikTok's algorithm and other artificial intelligence technology, which ByteDance executives expressed concern would likely be opposed by the Chinese government, which criticized the Trump administration's order previously as a "smash and grab" forced sale and on September 13, suggested it would prefer the shuttering of U.S. operations over such a sale. Later on September 13, it was reported that TikTok had chosen Oracle to act as the former's "trusted tech partner"; the partnership—intended to address the Trump administration's concerns over data security, and avoid an outright sale of its business and technological assets that the Chinese government would likely oppose—would involve ByteDance transferring management of the app's U.S. user data to Oracle's cloud services, and possibly offering it and other investors expanded minority stakes in the U.S. operations whilst allowing ByteDance to keep control of TikTok's business assets and technological IP. Observers stated that political considerations also played a factor in the deal, citing Oracle Co-Founder, Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison's support of Trump—one of the few U.S. tech executives to support his presidency—and his role as one of Trump's major campaign donors as well as Co-CEO Safra Catz's former role on Trump's transition team following his 2016 election.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On September 15, the "Financial Times" reported that this would be structured as a spin-off of TikTok as an independent company with minority stakes held by Oracle — who will be responsible for ensuring that user data is processed under U.S. jurisdiction.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: The "Associated Press" reported on September 18 that the U.S. would proceed with its ban on TikTok downloads on 20 September 2020, followed by a complete ban of using the app on November 12.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On September 19, TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance Ltd., filed a complaint in Washington, challenging the Trump administration's recent moves to prevent the app from operating in the U.S., citing that the administration did so for political reasons rather than to stop an "unusual and extraordinary threat". The Trump administration postponed the planned ban on September 20 by a week.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On 23 September 2020, TikTok filed a request for a preliminary injunction to prevent the app from being banned by the Trump administration. This request was filed with the District Court for the District of Columbia. Just a week prior, a different preliminary injunction from WeChat users filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California was approved by Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: Donald Trump left office January 20, 2021. The following June, new president Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration ban on TikTok, and instead ordered the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the app to determine if it poses a threat to U.S. national security. On June 25, 2021, CNBC reported that "Direction and approvals for all kinds of decision-making, whether it be minor contracts or key strategies, come from ByteDance’s leadership, which is based in China." According to Jim Lewis, a strategic technologies researcher at CSIS, "If the Chinese government wants to look at the data that ByteDance is collecting, they can do so, and no one can say anything about it."


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: In October 2021, following the Facebook Files and controversies about social media ethics, a bipartisan group of lawmakers also pressed TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat on questions of data privacy and moderation for age appropriate content. Lawmakers questioned head of U.S. policy at TikTok Mr. Beckerman about whether TikTok’s Chinese ownership could expose consumer data to Beijing stating concern that the company could be required by the Chinese government to turn Americans’ data over to the government. TikTok told U.S. lawmakers it does not give information to China's government. TikTok's representative stated that TikTok's data is stored in the U.S. with backups in Singapore. According to the company's representative, TikTok had 'no affiliation' with the subsidiary Beijing ByteDance Technology, in which the Chinese government has a minority stake and board seat.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: In June 2022 reports emerged that ByteDance employees in China could access US data and repeatedly accessed the private information of TikTok users, TikTok employees were cited saying that "everything is seen in China," while one director claimed a Beijing-based engineer referred to as a "Master Admin" has "access to everything."


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: Following the reports, TikTok announced that 100% of its US user traffic is now being routed to Oracle Cloud, along with their intention to delete all US user data from their own datacenters. This deal stems from the talks with Oracle instigated in September 2020 in the midst of Trump's threat to ban TikTok in the US.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On June 24 and June 28, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called for Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, citing national security concerns, saying TikTok "harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing." In November, U.S. Senators


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: Mark Warner and Tom Cotton called for greater action against TikTok, while Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Mike Gallagher announced their intentions to introduce legislation to ban the platform.


title: Donald Trump–TikTok controversy

text: On December 2, FBI director Chris Wray warned about the security threats posed by TikTok. In response, South Dakota and several other states banned the use of TikTok on government computers and smartphones.


title: Ultrafiltration

text: Ultrafiltration (UF) is a variety of membrane filtration in which forces such as pressure or concentration gradients lead to a separation through a semipermeable membrane. Suspended solids and solutes of high molecular weight are retained in the so-called retentate, while water and low molecular weight solutes pass through the membrane in the permeate (filtrate). This separation process is used in industry and research for purifying and concentrating macromolecular (10–10 Da) solutions, especially protein solutions.


title: Ultrafiltration

text: Ultrafiltration is not fundamentally different from microfiltration. Both of these separate based on size exclusion or particle capture. It is fundamentally different from membrane gas separation, which separate based on different amounts of absorption and different rates of diffusion. Ultrafiltration membranes are defined by the molecular weight cut-off (MWCO) of the membrane used. Ultrafiltration is applied in cross-flow or dead-end mode.


title: Ultrafiltration

text: Industries such as chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing, food and beverage processing, and waste water treatment, employ ultrafiltration in order to recycle flow or add value to later products. Blood dialysis also utilizes ultrafiltration.