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Marvel Zombies Return | The first issue revolves around the attempts of Zombie Spider-Man to cure himself of his condition when he lands on an Earth similar to his own, later designated "Earth-Z". Upon becoming aware that his counterpart from this universe is still in college and that Kingpin has yet to steal the Lifeline Tablet, the Zombie Spider-Man tries to recover it first to see if he can use it to cure himself and become a hero again. However, alerted by his presence, Kingpin hires the Sinister Six — Kraven The Hunter, Mysterio, Electro, The Vulture, Doctor Octopus and Sandman to create a distraction so he can steal the tablet. However, Zombie Spider-Man ends up killing Kingpin and all the Sinister Six minus Sandman, who in turn brutally kills the Spider-Man of this Earth. Due his actions, however, the zombified members of the Sinister Six kill his friends and Zombie Spider-Man kills them for good to prevent spreading the contagion. The issue also advances the overarching storyline by having Zombie Giant-Man attack and eat Earth-Z's Uatu the Watcher. |
Marvel Zombies Return | The fifth issue ties these threads together, resolving the fates of all of the original Marvel Zombies. Years after Hulk's attack on NYC, Earth-Z has suffered the same fate Earth-2149 endured and there is no longer life on it, with the Avengers (Sentry, Moon Knight, Thundra, Quasar, Super-Skrull, Namor, Quicksilver) revealed to have killed Earth-2149's Wasp, Luke Cage and Black Panther while Zombie Giant-Man is working on a dimensional teleporter to devour more universes. However, thanks to Earth-Z's zombified Professor X, the Avengers are led to a trap and engage in a battle against Zombie Spider-Man and the New Avengers (Earth-Z's Wolverine, Hulk, Iron Man and Sandman). Zombie Giant-Man then teletransports all of them to Uatu's laboratory to use Sentry to power the teleporter. However, the nanite-infused Sandman ends up killing all zombies present minus Sentry, who is trapped on the teletransporter. At the end, Earth-Z's Uatu reveals himself to be alive and sends the Sentry, the last Earth-Z Marvel Zombie, back through time and space to his arrival on Earth-2149 (the original Marvel Zombies universe). In doing so, it closes a time loop, which keeps the virus contained on Earths 2149 and Earth 91126, both of which it has devastated, since (according to the Watcher himself) no one has the ability to destroy it outright, so there is no other option than let the hunger devour itself. |
A Hero's Song | A Hero's Song was Dvořák's last orchestral work and the final of his five symphonic poems, the others being The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning Wheel, and The Wild Dove (Opp. 107–110). It is also the last instance of him writing purely instrumental music, as he dedicated himself to vocal and operatic works after its completion. He began working on the piece on August 4, 1897, immediately after revising the third act of his opera The Jacobin. The work was completed in three months, during which time Dvořák lived at his summer residence in his hometown of Příbram, and spent time at his chateau of the patron Josef Hlávka in Lužany. The piece was completed on October 25 of the same year, and was published in 1899 by Fritz Simrock in Berlin. The symphonic poem coincidentally anticipated Richard Strauss's similar tone poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), which was composed a year later. In fact, Dvořák originally intended to title the piece A Hero's Life, a name which had been suggested to him by his pupil Vítězslav Novák. |
Enrico Ferri (politician) | From 1988 to 1989 he served as Minister of Public Works in the De Mita Cabinet and is known for having set the limit of 110 km/h on the highway. In 1989 he was elected MEP for the PSDI and in 1992 he was elected Deputy in the National Parliament. In 1990 he was also elected Mayor of Pontremoli . On 30 April 1993 he was appointed Secretary of the PSDI. In 1994 he was newly elected MEP for his party. In 1995 he was also re-elected Mayor of Pontremoli, with the support of Forza Italia and National Alliance. This led to further fractures within the party and the official expulsion by the Socialist International and the Party of European Socialists, to which the PSDI and Ferri adhered. Ferri was thus forced to leave the party secretariat. On 10 December 1994, together with Luigi Preti, he founded the European Liberal Social Democracy (SOLE). In January 1995 a PSDI congress definitively put the current of Ferri and Preti into the minority, appointing Gian Franco Schietroma as party secretary. In 1995 the SOLE movement became an autonomous party and approached the centre-right area, forging a privileged collaboration with the Christian Democratic Centre. Luigi Preti, not in favor of this choice, detached himself from the SOLE by creating the Movement for the Social Democratic Rebirth, a political subject federated with Forza Italia. |
Nicole Galloway | In 2017, the Missouri Alliance for Freedom sued the State Auditor's Office and filed a complaint with Republican Missouri attorney general Josh Hawley alleging that Galloway "unlawfully withheld public records from her state-provided cell phone." In February 2018, Hawley's office issued a report that found Galloway complied with the Missouri Sunshine Law. The same month, the judge dismissed the majority of the claims against the State Auditor's Office, and ordered the Missouri Alliance for Freedom to re-plead its claims. In January 2019, following a trial, Circuit Court Judge Jon Beetem ruled against the Missouri Alliance for Freedom on all claims, ending the suit with a judgment in favor of Galloway. The judge concluded that the State Auditor's Office had made "an enormous good-faith effort to comply with several very large public records requests" and found that the office's records custodian did not apparently realize (until it was too late) that the phones issued by the office to Galloway and to employees automatically deleted text messages after 30 days. The Missouri Alliance for Freedom chose not to appeal. |
Niko Kovač | On 16 October 2013, Davor Šuker, president of the Croatian Football Federation (HNS), announced that Niko Kovač would take over as caretaker manager of the Croatia senior team. He replaced Štimac, who was sacked after Croatia scraped into the World Cup play-offs having taken only one point from their last four qualifiers. However, one day later, in an inaugural press conference, Šuker stated HNS signed a two-year contract with Kovač and his staff including his brother Robert Kovač, Vatroslav Mihačić and Goran Lacković, until the end of Croatia's UEFA Euro 2016 campaign. His first two matches for Croatia were in the World Cup play-offs against Iceland. Croatia managed to qualify for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil after winning the play-off tie against Iceland 2–0 on aggregate. At the World Cup, Croatia won 4–0 against Cameroon and lost 3–1 against Brazil and Mexico. Croatia did not qualify from their group. On 9 September 2015, HNS terminated Kovač's contract after Croatia lost 2–0 to Norway in the UEFA Euro 2016 qualifying. |
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v Baxter Healthcare Pty Ltd | Nicholas Seddon, a lawyer and academic specialising in commercial and government law, claimed the High Court's judgment leaves "many uncertainties", particularly regarding whether derivative governmental immunity will extend to private sector providers carrying out governmental functions that have been contracted to them (as opposed to merely providing goods or services to the government). Robertson Wright echoed these concerns, arguing the joint judgment did not "set out in as helpful detail" as it might the factors to be taken into account in deciding whether governmental immunity will derive to a party dealing with the government. Seddon also criticised the outcome of the case itself, arguing it is "difficult to see how derivative immunity does not inevitably flow" from the governmental immunity from the TPA. He suggested that the application of the TPA to a party that deals with a government compromises the intention of Parliament that State and Territory governments should be immune from the TPA. |
Calico Cooper | Calico Cooper is an American singer, dancer, stage performer, actress, comedian, and choreographer. She is the daughter of the shock rock singer Alice Cooper and his wife, the dancer Sheryl Cooper. She began performing with her father occasionally since 1997 and was hired by him at age 18 for his Brutally Live tour. For the next decade, she toured with, and directed portions of, Alice Cooper's live shows, specializing in violent black comedy routines. In 2011 she left touring to concentrate on her acting career. Since 2012 she has been a vocalist and stage performer for the heavy metal band Beasto Blanco. Her film credits include minor roles in The Curse of El Charro , Rolling , a deleted scene in Halloween , Dakota Skye , Suck , and an uncredited scene in Hall Pass , and co-starring roles in Thirty Proof Coil , 13/13/13 , Welcome to Hell , and the short film Fire Fucking Fire . Her television credits include the character Lila Black in Bloomers and guest starring as Jane Miller in a 2016 episode of Hawaii Five-0. |
Calico Cooper | Calico Cooper was born on May 19, 1981, to Alice and Sheryl Cooper, who resided at Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles. A year after her birth, the Coopers moved to Paradise Valley, Arizona. They also lived for some time in Chicago before relocating once again to Paradise Valley in 1985. In the early 1980s, Alice's continued substance abuse was putting a severe strain on his relationship with Sheryl, a strain which was exacerbated by the birth of Calico. Sheryl initiated divorce proceedings in November 1983. Alice finally committed to sobriety that year, and Sheryl reconciled with him months later in 1984. Sheryl, a professional dancer, enrolled Calico in dance at age 3. The Coopers felt it was important for their children to attend public school, and Calico's schooling included Hopi Elementary and Arcadia High School. While attending Arcadia High, she belonged to a dance company and professionally performed and competed at the national level in classical ballet, jazz, acrobatics, and tap. She also started instructing dance. In her teens, Cooper attracted tabloid attention with her awkward attempts at glamorous fashion. She remembers being mocked by the British press at the age of 14. |
Calico Cooper | At the age of 16, Calico started performing roles in her father's touring stage shows. Her first role was occasional, specifically as one of the evil clowns who opened Alice's shows at the time. After graduating high school, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. However, she then found work performing in her father's stage shows. At age 18, she was hired by Alice to perform multiple roles in and provide choreography and design costumes for his Brutal Planet tour. The most known character she portrayed in the tour was the dominatrix "bullwhip girl", for which she was instructed by Sheryl, who had previously portrayed the character. She also inherited the sadistic nurse character who often presided over Alice's beheading. With the latter character, Calico at first continued Sheryl's role—an "ingenue" or "1940s actress" that the audience would want to protect—but after a few years transformed the nurse into a character, "Nurse Rozetta", that the audience would hate and whose defeat would make Alice almost a hero. Cooper said "I really caught my confidence. All of a sudden, instead of the nurse just being sexy or provocative, I was like, "What if I made you hate her more than you hate Alice? I bet I could do that.'" A routine she performed in 2000, dressed as the nurse, involved Alice grabbing her by the neck and slamming her into the hatch of an overturned vehicle. During one show that year, at the Aerial Theater in Houston, Texas, Calico received a minor ankle laceration. |
Calico Cooper | During Alice's 2001–2003 Brutally Live and Dragontown tours, Calico portrayed Britney Spears in a satirical macabre comedic bit which ended in her fighting Alice, being dragged off stage by him, and Alice re-appearing with a mock-up of Calico-as-Spears' severed head impaled on a pole. During the bit, Alice would wear a shirt reading "Britney Wants Me" on the front and "Dead" on the back. On the Dirty Diamonds tour in 2005, Calico replaced the Britney character with a mock Paris Hilton who has her throat ripped out by a chihuahua, sending fake blood spurting into the audience. Another routine as Hilton involved her attempting to stab Alice only for him to deflect the blow, grab her by the hair, and drag her offstage. The Hilton character would come on during Alice's performance of "I Wish I Were Born in Beverley Hills". Calico in 2010 said that she felt that Spears and Hilton, whom she knows personally, understood the humor, and that one concert where she performed the Hilton bit, Hilton was in the audience. Other characters she portrayed on that tour included a vampire, a henchman, and the nurse character, the last of whom would hold up an imitation of Alice's severed head after his character was guillotined. She said in 2010 that sometimes there was backlash as to the propriety of what Alice would act out with his daughter. Her response was that she was now 27, she was not getting hurt, and not playing a love interest. "People misunderstand, but there's always been blood, guts, incest. When Shakespeare did it, it was like, 'he's a genius!' but when Alice Cooper does it, it's like, 'That's gross!'" Alice in 2009 stated that, while on tour, Calico would not be able to fully clean off her bruising makeup between concerts, and when she and Alice would go to the mall together they would get concerned looks from strangers. |
Calico Cooper | In the mid-2000s, when not on tour with Alice Cooper, Calico acted in several independent films, mostly horror, including The Curse of El Charro, JunkfoodHorrorfest , where she portrayed a "junkie serial killer", and Rolling , where she portrayed a character using MDMA at a rave. A role in a deleted scene in the 2007 Halloween remake earned her Screen Actors Guild card. She played a lead role in The Visitor, which was in pre-production in 2008. Cooper portrayed Heather in Dakota Skye , a barmaid in the horror film Suck , and co-starred as the "Woman" character in Thirty Proof Coil . Her first starring role in a film was in the 2010 horror film Thirty Proof Coil. She claims that she landed many horror movie roles due to her shows with Alice. When she left the Alice Cooper tours in 2011, at the advice of local actors she enrolled in master classes taught by Ivana Chubbuck. After taking the course, at Chubbuck's recommendation, she auditioned, successfully, for the improv comedy groups The Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. She also studied with the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, Margie Haber, and Gordon Hunt. In 2011, she landed a starring role in the TV series Bloomers as the recurring character Lila Black and made an uncredited cameo in Hall Pass . She portrayed Marcy in 13/13/13 and co-starred in Welcome to Hell , which incorporated the short Family Time originally from 2013, portraying Susan, a murderous pedophile mother. She portrayed herself in The Curse of Denton Rose in 2020. Additional television roles include the murderer Jane Miller in a 2015 episode of Hawaii Five-0, and the character Tabitha in the 2016 episode "Danger & Thunder" in the children's comedy series Henry Danger. In 2016 she made an appearance on The Mindy Project. Cooper's directing and production work includes directing commercials and music videos and producing the crime-comedy film Love of Mass Destruction, which she co-starred in, the short film The Taxi Man, and the single-episode TV series The Normal Ones, a show she also wrote and co-starred in. In the 2024 short film Fire Fucking Fire, which debuted at Tribeca Festival in June, Cooper co-starred as the rock star love interest Meg opposite Ally (Rachel Paulson). |
Calico Cooper | In 2012, bassist Chuck Garric formed a band with Chris "Brother" Latham, Beasto Blanco, and Garric invited Cooper to perform backing vocals on some songs on their first album, Live Fast Die Loud . She was reluctant at first as she had promised herself never to be in a band because she did not think she was a good singer. Garric told her "you're a really good actress so just act like you're a singer", and after going into the studio she discovered that she could sing to her satisfaction. Originally the plan had been for her to be a back-up singer, but during the recording process Garric increasingly featured her singing. When Beasto Blanco decided to go on a bar tour of Europe, Cooper decided to properly join the group. While she had previously told herself she would never be in a band, she realized "I want to be in this band. This is it." During their European tour, they developed a signature sound and visual style, melding heavy metal with a gruesome stage show, Cooper dressing in fishnet, chains, and leather, and often brandishing some form of weapon, including a Louisville slugger with nails through it and a CO2 gun. Calico said that when she focused her career on film and television work, she missed performing live, and joining Beasto Blanco allowed her spontaneity and opportunities to push boundaries. She considers her body an instrument: "I couldn't take up an instrument if I wanted to during Beasto because I'm so busy with my body." According to Cooper, on every tour she creates new costume pieces and does make-up for her character. The character, "Machine Girl", keeps evolving, as Cooper says she is "never done testing her boundaries." According to Cooper, "some tours she's meaner, some sexier, some downright ridiculous." Inspiration for "Machine Girl" includes the art of H. R. Giger and Frank Frazetta, with "maybe a little Magic: The Gathering sprinkled in". She recounts that one time a kid came up to her after a show and said she looked like Sindel from Mortal Kombat. "I told him he had a good eye, but if he told anyone my secret, I'd finish him. He got the joke, Thank God." In 2017, Cooper said her costumes are provided by Hazmat Design, and Cooper will look at "Vikings and baroque era gowns and ninja folklore" when collaborating with Hazmat to create the pieces. A reviewer of a concert by the band in 2022 compared the aesthetic of the group to Mad Max: Fury Road with the stagecraft of Alice Cooper. |
Taylor v. Louisiana | 53% of the persons eligible for jury service in these parishes were female, and that no more than 10% of the persons on the jury wheel in St. Tammany Parish were women. During the period from December 8, 1971, to November 3, 1972, 12 females were among the 1,800 persons drawn to fill petit jury venires in St. Tammany Parish. It was also stipulated that the discrepancy between females eligible for jury service and those actually included in the venire was the result of the operation of La.Const., Art. VII, § 41, and La.Code Crim.Proc., Art. 402. In the present case, a venire totaling 175 persons was drawn for jury service beginning April 13, 1972. There were no females on the venire. After being tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, appellant sought review in the Supreme Court of Louisiana, where he renewed his claim that the petit jury venire should have been quashed. The Supreme Court of Louisiana, recognizing that this claim drew into question the constitutionality of the provisions of the Louisiana Constitution and Code of Criminal Procedure dealing with the service of women on juries, squarely held, one justice dissenting, that these provisions were valid and not unconstitutional under federal law. |
Taylor v. Louisiana | The background against which this case must be decided includes our holding in Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145 , that the Sixth Amendment's provision for jury trial is made binding on the States by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment. Our inquiry is whether the presence of a fair cross-section of the community on venires, panels, or lists from which petit juries are drawn is essential to the fulfillment of the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of an impartial jury trial in criminal prosecutions.... Both in the course of exercising its supervisory powers over trials in federal courts and in the constitutional context, the Court has unambiguously declared that the American concept of the jury trial contemplates a jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. A unanimous Court stated in Smith v. Texas, 311 U. S. 128, 311 U. S. 130 , that "t is part of the established tradition in the use of juries as instruments of public justice that the jury be a body truly representative of the community." To exclude racial groups from jury service was said to be "at war with our basic concepts of a democratic society and a representative government." A state jury system that resulted in systematic exclusion of Negroes as jurors was therefore held to violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Glasser v. United States, 315 U. S. 60, 315 U. S. 85-86 .... |
Evernote Corporation | After being founded in 2004 by Russian–American computer entrepreneur Stepan Pachikov, EverNote Corporation ('EverNote' stylized with a capital 'N' at the time) started marketing software for Windows desktop PCs, tablet PCs and handheld devices like the handwriting recognition software ritePen and the note-taking and web clipping application EverNote (also with a capital 'N'), a Windows application which stored notes on an 'infinite roll of paper'. Under new CEO Phil Libin, the company shifted its focus to the Web, smartphones and also the Apple Mac, starting with Evernote (now with lower-case 'n') 3.0 in 2008. The Evernote Web service launched into open beta on June 24, 2008, and reached 11 million users in July 2011. In October 2010, the company raised a US$20 million funding round led by DoCoMo Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Since then, the company raised an additional $50 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures, and another $70 million in funding led by Meritech Capital and CBC Capital. On November 30, 2012, Evernote raised another $85 million in funding led by AGC Equity Partners/m8 Capital and Valiant Capital Partners. On November 9, 2014, Evernote raised an additional $20 million in funding from Nikkei, Inc. |
St. Francis Brooklyn Terriers women's basketball | In 2012, Thurston replaced Brenda Milano, who coached the Terriers for 9 seasons leading them to the NEC playoffs only 3 times. After not making the NEC Tournament for four consecutive seasons, from 2008 to 2011, first-year head coach Thurston was able to secure the 7th seed in 2012. The Terriers also won more than 10 games for the first time in 5 years that season and had an overall record of 11–19. For the 2013–14 season the Terriers made a pair of appearances on ESPN3 for the first time in their history. The 2013–14 Terriers improved to 6–2 on the season for the first time since the 1976–77 season. After going 11–2 by winning 5 straight games, the Terriers for the first time in program history were ranked inside the top 25 of a national basketball poll at 25th in the CollegeInsider.com Top 25 Mid-Major Poll. The 2013–14 squad set the single-season school record with 19 wins during the year. The Terriers also notched 10 conference wins, which was the most in St. Francis Brooklyn women's basketball history to that point. |
Silicone rubber | Condensation curing systems can be one-part or two-part systems. In one-part or RTV (room-temperature vulcanizing) system, a cross-linker exposed to ambient humidity (i.e., water) experiences a hydrolysis step and is left with a hydroxyl or silanol group. The silanol condenses further with another hydrolyzable group on the polymer or cross-linker and continues until the system is fully cured. Such a system will cure on its own at room temperature and (unlike the platinum-based addition cure system) is not easily inhibited by contact with other chemicals, though the process may be affected by contact with some plastics or metals and may not take place at all if placed in contact with already-cured silicone compounds. The crosslinkers used in condensation cure systems are typically alkoxy, acetoxy, ester, enoxy or oxime silanes such as methyl trimethoxy silane for alkoxy-curing systems and methyl triacetoxysilane for acetoxy-curing systems. In many cases an additional condensation catalyst is added to fully cure the RTV system and achieve a tack-free surface. Organotitanate catalysts such as tetraalkoxy titanates or chelated titanates are used in alkoxy-cured systems. Tin catalysts such as dibutyl tin dilaurate (DBTDL) can be used in oxime and acetoxy-cured systems. Acetoxy tin condensation is one of the oldest cure chemistries used for curing silicone rubber, and is the one used in household bathroom caulk. Depending on the type of detached molecule, it is possible to classify silicone systems as acidic, neutral or alkaline. |
Silicone rubber | Polysiloxanes differ from other polymers in that their backbones consist of Si–O–Si units instead of C–C units. The large bond angles and bond lengths make polysiloxanes more flexible than basic polymers such as polyethylene. A C–C backbone unit has a bond length of 1.54 Å and a bond angle of 112°, whereas an Si–O backbone unit has a bond length of 1.63 Å and a bond angle of 130°. Polymer segments in polysiloxanes can move farther and change conformation easily, making for a flexible material. Polysiloxanes tend to be more stable and less chemically active because more energy is required to break the silicon-oxygen bond. Although silicon is a congener of carbon, having the same electron bonding configuration, silicon analogues of carbonaceous compounds generally exhibit different properties. The difference in total charge and mass between carbon with 6 protons and 6 neutrons, and silicon with 14 protons and 14 neutrons causes an added layer of electrons and their screening effect changes the electronegativity between the two elements. For example the silicon-oxygen bond in polysiloxanes is significantly more stable than the carbon-oxygen bond in polyoxymethylene, a structurally similar polymer. The difference is partly due to the higher bond energy, the energy required to break the Si-O bond, and also because polyoxymethylene decomposes formaldehyde, which is volatile and escapes driving decomposition forward, but Si-containing decomposition products of silicone are less volatile. |
Olufemi Vaughan | Olufemi Vaughan's scholarship and research revolves around five interrelated themes in African political and historical studies: Traditional socio-political structures in modern African states; Governance and development in African states; African migrations and globalization; State-society relations and political legitimacy in Nigeria; and Religion and State Formation in Nigeria. He is the author and editor of ten books and over eighty scholarly articles and reviews, including Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s–1990s, considered a seminal work on the study of traditional authorities in contemporary African states, Religion and the Making of Nigeria, an acclaimed work on the foundational role of Christianity and Islam in the formation of the Nigerian state and society, and Chiefs, Power, and Social Change: Chiefship and Modern Politics in Botswana, 1880s–1990s. His articles and reviews have appeared in scholarly journals such as the Journal of African History, African Affairs: Journal of the Royal African Society, Journal of Asian & African Studies, Politique Africaine, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, American Historical Review, Journal of Modern African Studies, Canadian Journal of History, Canadian Journal of African Studies, African Studies Review, and The International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. |
Joachim Stenbäcken | Joachim Stenbäcken is a Swedish former handball player who played as a pivot. He was born and raised in Vårgårda and made his senior debut for Vårgårda IK in the 1978–79 season. He later moved to Alingsås HK before signing for top division club IFK Karlskrona in 1982. In his first season with the club they reached the final of the IHF Cup, where they were defeated by Soviet club ZTR Zaporizhia. He scored more than 400 goals in his five seasons for Karlskrona. In 1987 he left the club and joined second division club SoIK Hellas, where he played for two seasons. In 1989 he signed for IFK Kristianstad and helped them to promotion back to the top division in his first season. They were relegated after one season but were promoted again a year later. He left the club in 1995 and signed for league rivals Stavstens IF. He later returned to Hellas before rejoining Kristianstad, who were now playing in lower divisions, in 1998. He continued to play for the club until he retired in 2004. He played 340 matches for Kristianstad and scored 1350 goals for the club, the second most behind Bo Ahlberg. In total he scored 2400 goals in his career. |
Pokémon | The player character takes the role of a Pokémon Trainer. The Trainer has three primary goals: travel and explore the Pokémon world; discover and catch each Pokémon species in order to complete their Pokédex; and train a team of up to six Pokémon at a time and have them engage in battles. Most Pokémon can be caught with spherical devices known as Poké Balls. Once the opposing Pokémon is sufficiently weakened, the Trainer throws the Poké Ball against the Pokémon, which is then transformed into a form of energy and transported into the device. Once the catch is successful, the Pokémon is tamed and is under the Trainer's command from then on. If the Poké Ball is thrown again, the Pokémon re-materializes into its original state. The Trainer's Pokémon can engage in battles against opposing Pokémon, including those in the wild or owned by other Trainers. Because the franchise is aimed at children, these battles are never presented as overtly violent and contain no blood or gore. Pokémon never die in battle, instead fainting upon being defeated. |
Pokémon | The main idea behind Pokémon was conceived by Satoshi Tajiri. Tajiri was born on August 28, 1965, and grew up in Machida, a suburb of Tokyo. As a child, he enjoyed discovering and catching insects and other small creatures in the various ponds and fields that surrounded his town. During Japan's economic miracle, many cities, including Machida, were significantly expanded. As a consequence, Machida's nature was largely destroyed. In his second year of junior high school, an arcade hall opened in Tajiri's neighborhood, introducing him to video games. While studying electrical engineering at Tokyo College of Technology , Tajiri began publishing a doujinshi magazine titled Game Freak. The title was inspired by the 1932 film Freaks, which Tajiri was fascinated with at the time. He self-published the first issue of the magazine in March 1983, at the age of 17. At the time, magazines specializing in video games did not yet exist in Japan, allowing Game Freak to fill a gap in the market. Sometime later, Tajiri was contacted by aspiring manga artist Ken Sugimori, who became Game Freak's illustrator. Game Freak folded in the late 1980s, by which point Tajiri had become a respected game journalist in Japan's fledgling video game industry. |
Pokémon | Tajiri's knowledge of video games brought him into contact with Tsunekazu Ishihara. Ishihara had studied Arts and Science at Tsukuba University, and was trained in CGI. After working in advertising for two years, Ishihara joined a company named Sedic in 1983, which created video graphics and software, including one video game, Otocky . As video games grew in popularity, Sedic also produced a number of game-related television shows for Fuji Television's late-night slot. In his job as a TV producer, Ishihara befriended Tajiri, as well as Shigesato Itoi, who would later become CEO of Ape, Inc. Ishihara was also the general director of the world's first gaming encyclopedia: TV Games: Encyclopedia of Video Games (テレビゲーム―電視遊戯大全, Terebigēmu ― Denshi Yūgi Taizen). Hatakeyama & Kubo wrote that, at the time, Ishihara was probably the most well-connected man in the industry, with a knowledge of games "beyond comparison". Ishihara was also interested in playing cards, and contributed to the development of at least three simple card games designed by Itoi and published by Ape. |
Pokémon | Tajiri started to think of what was to become Pokemon while completing Quinty, and before he officially founded Game Freak. Around this time, Nintendo announced the upcoming release of the Game Boy, a handheld console that would revolutionize the gaming industry. Tajiri learned that the device would have a link port, and with the corresponding Game Link Cable, two Game Boys could be linked together. Sometime later, Tajiri remembered an incident while playing Dragon Quest II , a role-playing game (RPG) for the Famicom (NES). The game features randomly appearing items of varying rarity, including an extremely rare item called Mysterious Hat. Tajiri did not encounter any, while Ken Sugimori, who was also playing the game, encountered two. Upon recalling this experience, Tajiri realized that the cable now made it possible to transfer things from one cartridge to another. He noted that, until then, the Game Link Cable was only used for competing, but not for something else. Combining this inspiration with his memories of catching insects and other small species, Tajiri's idea would eventually evolve into a virtual recreation of his boyhood experiences, and an attempt to "regain the world that he had lost". He would later state that the game represents "the story of a boy's summer day". |
Pokémon | Tajiri and the Game Freak staff began pondering over a game centered on capturing creatures of differing rarity. Since the Game Boy is a portable device, these creatures could then be exchanged with other players in real life using the link cable. Once the player has caught a creature in-game, it was to be stored in miniaturized form in a special capsule. This facet of the game was inspired by Ultraseven, a tokusatsu show that Tajiri had enjoyed as a child. The series' titular character owns a number of capsules containing miniaturized kaiju (monsters), which come out and return to their original sizes when the capsule is thrown into mid-air. Kaiju media in general were an important influence on Pokemon, as many Game Freak staff members had grown up with them. Other influences that have been cited by Tajiri include: gashapon, capsules with toy figures in them that can be drawn from vending machines; collectible cards, such as baseball cards, Ultraman cards and menko; The Final Fantasy Legend , the first RPG for the Game Boy; and petting in Japan, with Tajiri noting that having Pokemon is similar to having pets. Tajiri initially named his project Capsule Monsters, which GF's staff commonly shortened to Capumon. However, it later turned out that the term Capsule Monsters could not be trademarked, and it was subsequently decided to call the game Pocket Monsters, which became Pokemon. According to Tomisawa , the phrase "Capsule Monsters" was already registered. According to Hatakeyama & Kubo , the word "capsule" could not be used in the trademark. Tomisawa states that the Game Freak staff then came up with several alternatives, before someone within the team suggested "Pocket Monsters". |
Pokémon | In March 1989, Nintendo co-founded Ape, Inc. with Itoi. Ape's principal work was Mother , a role-playing game written by Itoi, but it was also founded with the intent to give outside talent a chance to pitch new, innovative games. At the time, Ape was housed in the same Kanda-Sudachō office building as Nintendo, located in Tokyo. Ishihara, a friend of both Itoi and Tajiri, was involved with Ape's management . Tajiri's relationship with Ishihara prompted Tajiri to present his idea for Pokemon at Ape's office. Present during Tajiri's pitch was Takashi Kawaguchi, who worked at Nintendo's General Affairs Department and was also a manager at Ape. Kawaguchi brought the idea to Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who reportedly said: "This is it. This is the idea I've been waiting for." By pure coincidence, Ishihara had come up with an idea for a game similar to that of Tajiri, and around the same time was discussing it with Ape. This game, Toto, involved "using the Game Boy as an insect cage". Ishihara emphasized, however, that the idea of trading creatures with the link cable was Tajiri's. GF and Ape agreed to merge their projects together. According to Tajiri, the two teams initially collaborated on the game, but the work proved difficult, one of the reasons being that Ape was busy developing EarthBound. Tajiri eventually figured that "rather than working with Ape, we had to do something on our own, or the project would never get finished". Ape, Inc. is not credited on the final product. |
Pokémon | The development contract was signed at the beginning of 1990, with a planned delivery of the game in October. Tajiri directed the project, working under Ishihara. Ishihara was the producer – he managed the budget, staff, and work schedule, monitored the game's overall progress, and served as a liaison between Game Freak and Nintendo. Ishihara also contributed ideas to the development, and helped with debugging. Sugimori was in charge of the graphics and character design. Masuda created all music and sound effects, and did part of the programming. The budget that Nintendo granted to Game Freak was low. Thus, Pocket Monsters was initially planned as a small, compact game, based primarily around Tajiri's core idea of exchanging. However, as development progressed, GF's ideas and ambitions for Pokemon grew. They soon realized that the game they were beginning to envision would not be easy to make. Sugimori admitted that, at the time, no one at GF had much knowledge of RPGs. "We thought we could handle it, but as we began working, we realized it was going to be tough", he acknowledged. Pokemon was suspended indefinitely, and GF turned their focus on other titles (see Game Freak § Games). |
Pokémon | After the game's initial development phase in 1990 and '91, the staff "tinkered with it from time to time", as Sugimori put it. For instance, by October 1992, a large number of Pokemon had been designed, and a poll was held that month among all staff members to gauge the popularity of the different species. Several more such votes followed to determine collectively which Pokemon should be included. Still, development had mostly come to a halt until the summer of 1994, after the release of the platform game Pulseman, upon which Tajiri decided it was time to make a serious effort towards finishing Pokemon. By this point, Game Freak's experience had grown considerably. Over the years, a number of new staff members had been added to the company. One of them was Atsuko Nishida, a graphic artist who created Pikachu, among others. Ishihara used his knowledge of card games to add more depth to the battle system, and among other things suggested Pokemon types. Ishihara also came up with the idea of the Pokedex, a portable encyclopedic device which players can use to keep track of the Pokemon they caught. Throughout the years, Tajiri had several conversations with Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's top game designer who Tajiri described as a mentor figure. Although, in a 2018 retrospect, Miyamoto downplayed his role in advising Tajiri, and stated that his contributions to Pokemon were in fact limited. Miyamoto did, however, suggest the use of different colored cartridges for the game, in response to Tajiri's and Ishihara's musings about making each playthrough slightly different, as to 'individualize' the player's experience. According to Tajiri, "five or seven colors" were considered, but they eventually settled on two: a Red version and a Green version. Both games were identical, but each had Pokemon not found in the other, encouraging players to socialize and trade to complete their collection. |
Pokémon | Ishihara aspired to create video games of his own. As Pocket Monsters Red and Green were nearing completion, Ishihara founded Creatures, Inc. on November 8, 1995. Upon founding, the company was housed in the same Kanda-Sudachō office building as Nintendo, located in Tokyo. Co-ownership of the Pokemon property, which Ishihara helped create, was subsequently assigned to Creatures. This resulted in Pokemon having three legal owners: Game Freak, the main developer; Creatures, representing producer Ishihara; and Nintendo, the publisher. Anne Allison wrote that Nintendo also bought Pokemon after it was finished. Hatakeyama & Kubo noted that the ownership structure of Pokemon is uncommon. They wrote that "Pokemon is probably the only property in the world today for which the original rights are not concentrated in a single company", like The Walt Disney Company does with their IPs. Tajiri and Ishihara did consider merging Game Freak and Creatures at one point. However, Tajiri decided against it because he feared it would erase what he had built up since he was a teenager. "I felt threatened by the idea of changing how Game Freak was operating, and starting back over with Mr. Ishihara", he said. "It was an identity problem. If Game Freak ceased to exist, then so would I". Tajiri noted that, since Game Freak and Creatures both focus on Pokemon, it sometimes felt more like different departments than different companies. |
Pokémon | After the release of Pokemon Red and Green, Game Freak continued to grow, and a number of new employees were hired. For training purposes, they were ordered to study and make bug fixes to the source code of Red & Green, and to create new sprites for it. The upgraded version was dubbed Pokemon Blue. It was originally not meant to be sold. Only a small number of handmade copies were made, intended as a special gift to "20 to 100 people". After Kubo learned of it, he encouraged Tajiri and Ishihara to allow an official release of Blue. President Hiroshi Yamauchi initially rejected this, fearing it would confuse people into believing it was an entirely new Pokemon game. Kawaguchi then suggested an alternative, which Yamauchi agreed with: Blue would not receive a normal retail release, but would be made available only through mail order for a limited time as a special offer. It was announced in the November issue of CoroCoro, which explicitly stated that Blue was not a new game, but rather a special, limited edition to celebrate the sale of 1 million copies of Red and Green. The offer was a surprisingly big success: 300,000 units were expected to be sold, but over 600,000 were ordered. |
Pokémon | The Pokemon Trading Card Game was one of the first collectible card games (CCGs) developed in Japan. Its creation was influenced by Magic: The Gathering, the first CCG in history. Indeed, the Pokemon Trading Card Game can be considered a simplified version of Magic. First released in the United States in 1993, Magic had gained popularity not just in North America and Europe, but also in Asia. Ishihara was fond of playing cards, and had contributed to the development of at least three simple card games designed by Shigesato Itoi and released through Ape, Inc. At the time, Ishihara was particularly interested in Magic: The Gathering. While developing the Pokemon RPG, he realized that the concept behind it could be adapted into a Magic-like CCG. The Pokemon Card Game was designed by Ishihara, Akihiko Miura, Kōichi Ōyama, and Takumi Akabane. All were former staff members of Ape and had previously worked on EarthBound : Miura was the game's main designer, Ōyama was its art director, and Akabane was one of its chief debuggers. |
Pokémon | CoroCoro again proved a valuable information channel. The Pokemon card game was first announced in the November issue, the same one that announced Pokemon Blue. The issue came bundled with two promo cards: one of Purin (Jigglypuff) and one of Pikachu. Surveys showed that they were respectively the most and second-most popular Pokemon at the time. On October 20, 1996, the first card set was released. Booster packs were launched the same day, containing 10 randomly inserted cards. In the West, the booster packs contained 11 cards. The original set of the Pokemon card game would be titled the Base Set in English. Many more sets would follow. Despite being ignored by the media, except for the CoroCoro, the cards became an instant success upon release. 87 million Pokemon cards were shipped by the end of March 1997, six months after its launch, and one month before the debut of the next big installment of the franchise: the Pokemon anime series. The success of the TV series would cause the cards' sales figure to explode: by March 1998, a total of 499 million cards had been produced in Japan. |
Pokémon | By August 1996, Kubo had become convinced of Pokemon's potential, and believed Shogakukan should create a Pokemon anime. Nintendo was hesitant, realizing that if the anime would flop, it would negatively affect the popularity of the game. Ishihara initially opposed the idea, because he thought it would overly hasten the 'consumption' of the property: he feared that if the series would end, people would assume that Pokemon has ended, and move on to the next thing. At the time, Creatures and Game Freak were planning the sequel(s) to Red and Green, Pokemon Gold and Silver, and Ishihara did not want the anime to end before they could release their new game(s). Kubo was ultimately able to resolve the concerns of all parties involved. An important aspect of Kubo's bargaining power was the then-ongoing Mini 4WD craze and its accompanying hit series Bakusō Kyōdai Let's & Go!!. Kubo had an important role in the creation of both, which impressed the stakeholders. To appease Ishihara, Kubo promised him that Pokemon would last for at least one and a half year. This was unusually long for a debuting anime, and required a big investment. Kubo's proposal for Pokemon was officially approved on September 26, 1996. For Nintendo of Japan, it was the first time they licensed a TV series. Kubo assigned independent producer Choji Yoshikawa to lead the project. |
Pokémon | A production council was formed to produce the Pokemon anime. Different people appeared at different meetings, but four individuals usually present were Ishihara of Creatures, Sugimori of Game Freak, Yuyama of OLM, and independent producer Yoshikawa. Yoshikawa had the final say. The council decided on the anime's worldview, characters, general storyline, and various important details. The early meetings, which were also attended by Tajiri, usually started with a Q&A session in which Tajiri and Ishihara were asked about the Pokemon universe. The council was careful to have the anime be in concordance with the video game. Inevitably, there had to be differences between the two, but all agreed that the overall worldview as envisioned by Tajiri should not be disturbed. At the start of the video game, the player has to choose one of three starter Pokemon: Fushigidane, Hitokage, or Zenigame (Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle). The council didn't want to unfairly popularize any of them, and wanted the protagonist to start out with a different Pokemon. Hatakeyama & Kubo wrote that, by coincidence, three people independently suggested to the council that a Pikachu should be a main character in the anime: Kubo, Yuyama, and Keisuke Iwata of TV Tokyo's Film Department. In the end, all council members agreed that Pikachu should be one of Pokemon's central icons. They expected Pikachu to appeal to both boys and girls, as well as their mothers. This would expand Pokemon's audience, which was considered a core objective of the anime. |
Pokémon | During the council's first meeting, Yoshikawa brought up the issue on whether the Pokemon in the anime could talk, and if not, how they could communicate. In the video games, each Pokemon has a specific cry. In Anakubo's CoroCoro manga, most Pokemon could speak. At first, the council believed there should be a mixture of Pokemon that could talk and Pokemon that could not. However, this idea was eventually discarded: the Pokemon had to make a specific cry. The council agreed that Pokemon were like animals, and while the humans and the Pokemon should be able to understand each other in the series, they should not speak each other's language. It was decided that Pikachu would repeatedly say its own name in various intonations. The role of Pikachu was given to Ikue Otani. During try-outs, Yuyama had Otani voice Pikachu in normal Japanese, as well as in 'Pikachu talk', in which it only said the syllables of its name. Yuyama realized that, even in the latter style of limited communication, Otani was experienced enough to still convey the messages and emotions needed. |
Pokémon | ShoPro paid half of the production cost of Pokemon. TV Tokyo paid the other half and was granted co-ownership of the anime. The ads during Pokemon's commercial breaks were managed by advertisement agency JR Kikaku , which was in turn paid by sponsors buying advertisement space. In negotiating with TV Tokyo, Kubo managed to secure the 19:00 – 19:30 timeslot on Tuesdays. Pocket Monsters premiered on April 1, 1997. By November, it had become the highest-rated program on TV Tokyo. The anime succeeded in its goal of widening Pokemon's audience. Although the video games and the cards remained mostly of interest to boys, the anime also got more girls interested in the franchise, and girls' purchases of Pokemon products increased. This has been partly credited to Pikachu, who gained widespread popularity among children. The success of this character would later lead to the game Pokemon Pikachu, released in Japan on September 12, 1998 (it would be released in the West as Pokémon Yellow). An adaptation of Pokemon Blue, this 'Pikachu version' was made to resemble the TV series more. |
Pokémon | A copyright council was formed, headed by Ishihara. Beginning in April 1997, the council met every Tuesday, in the conference room of Creatures' office, at the Nintendo Kanda Building in Sudachō, Tokyo. Attendees usually included Ishihara and his secretary, representatives of Nintendo, Game Freak, ShoPro, TV Tokyo, and JR Kikaku, as well as head of the anime Yoshikawa. Broadly put, every meeting had three types of agenda items: discussing Pokemon-related events and basic policies in Japan, discussing Shogakukan publication plans, and considering merchandise proposals. For merchandising, the council set the bar high. Fiercely protective of Pokemon's brand equity, Ishihara was unwilling to greenlit an item just because it had a picture of a Pokemon printed on it. To avoid the market being flooded with low-quality goods, Ishihara put very specific demands on the products he evaluated. Furthermore, in most cases, the council opted to contract one company for each product category. Because of this, most merchandise proposals were rejected: of the approximately 7,500 applications submitted in 1997, only about 5% was approved. |
Pokémon | The intense stimuli brought about by the episode triggered a variety of adverse health effects in more than 10,000 viewers, primarily irritated eyes, headaches, dizziness, and nausea. A small part suffered a photosensitive epileptic seizure, manifested in loss of conscious and/or convulsions. Hundreds of children were brought to hospitals, although a part of them had recovered enough upon arrival and did not need to be hospitalized. No one died. Broadcasting of Pokemon was halted, and new guidelines were implemented to help prevent similar events from happening. With the show on hiatus, ShoPro and OLM worked on a feature Pokemon film. By the time the incident occurred, its script was already written, and the movie was in the storyboard stage. In mid-January, the staff resumed creating new episodes. The Pokemon anime series returned on April 16, 1998. The film, titled Pocket Monsters the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back, premiered on July 18, 1998 (it would later be released in the West as Pokémon: The First Movie). |
Pokémon | Possibly the first person to show interest in a North American launch of Pokemon was Minoru Arakawa, founder and then-president of Nintendo of America (NoA). Arakawa visited Japan to participate in Shoshinkai 1996, held November 22–24. It was around this time when he first played one of the three Pokemon titles. He thought the games were promising, but Nintendo of Japan (NoJ) had no plans at the time to release them elsewhere. He returned to America with a few cartridges and tested the game on his employees – they did not believe it would work in the US. At the time, role-playing games (RPGs) were not very popular outside Japan, and NoA executives believed that American children did not have the attention span for such a complex title. Americans were said to be more interested in sport- and action-oriented games, preferably with realistic graphics. Japanese people, by contrast, were alleged to care more about characters and plot. Up to that point, few Japanese properties had been successfully mainstreamed in the US, and if they were, it was alleged to be on account of having been properly Americanized: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was considered a prime example of this. Visually, Pokemon was believed to be too kawaii, or cute. It was assumed that Pokemon could not succeed on cute alone – it must also be cool. In an effort to enhance the franchise's coolness, NoA considered a graphical redesign and contracted a few external artists to create some test-designs for the American market. The mockups they proposed included 'graffiti style' drawings, 'beefed-up' and more muscular looking Pokemon, and a new Pikachu that looked like "a tiger with huge breasts". Arakawa concluded that it "didn't work", and by that time, the anime had begun its production in Japan, leading NoA to conclude it was too late for a graphical revamp anyway. |
Pokémon | Market research turned back negative: American kids reportedly did not like Pokémon. Arakawa ignored the study and, convinced of the franchise's potential, allocated an enormous budget to Pokémon's launch. The exact amount was not disclosed, but was reportedly equal to or more than $50 million , approximately the same amount as the launch budget of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. Arakawa admitted that it was "quite a bit of money", but NoA "had been doing well for several years, so we had a lot of money to spare". He opined that if Pokémon would be as successful in the US as it had been in Japan, "an investment of 1 would turn into 100". NoA and 4Kids proceeded to devise a strategy on how to localize Pokémon for the United States. Arakawa appointed Gail Tilden to lead the project, prompting her to leave her position at Nintendo Power magazine. Tilden said that they "decided to make an all-out effort to repeat the phenomenon in the Western world". In two press releases, NoA self-described Pokémon's marketing campaign as "aggressive". |
Pokémon | The localization of the Pokémon anime was done by 4Kids, and directed by Norman J. Grossfeld. Grossfeld strongly believed that the anime should be Americanized. At NATPE 1998, he asked ShoPro for a "kind of carte blanche, to let me change the show as I think would work for this market", to which ShoPro agreed. However, no national TV station was interested in buying the anime or financing its localization. Kahn then decided to self-finance Pokémon's production costs, despite realizing this "could very well bring down 4Kids" if the show would fail. According to Kahn, they "spend a fortune" on the localization. To have it broadcast in syndication, 4Kids offered the show for free to local TV stations across the country, in exchange for a portion of the advertising revenue. NoA assisted, persuading dozens of stations to carry the series by offering to buy some of their advertisement space, spending a total of $5 million . Despite all this, most broadcasters were still reluctant to carry Pokémon, with Grossfeld experiencing difficulties getting through their "preconceived notions or their snobbery for Western-produced animation over something from Asia". At the time, anime had not yet found mainstream popularity in the West. Contemporary news reports cited Sailor Moon as an example of an anime that had failed to catch on with American youth. Still, with NoA's help, 4Kids ultimately succeeded in contracting 112 broadcasters for Pokémon, reaching "about 85 to 90 percent" of television households. However, many broadcasters gave it off-peak time slots, with starting times like 06:00 or 06:30. Prior to the late 1990s, this was the case for many anime in the US. |
Pokémon | Outside North America, 4Kids distributed the anime in cooperation with Brian Lacey of Lacey Entertainment. The series was presented at MIP TV, in Cannes, France, from April 3–8, 1998. Broadcasters were initially not interested due to its Japanese origins, and preferred to wait and see how the anime would fare in the US. After its American success, Lacey received inquiries about the series throughout 1999 from multiple international broadcasters. Lacey noted that, in Europe, this was a stark contrast compared to previous years: "I was trying to sell this sort of stuff for years and buyers would tell me they were moving away from Japanese animation shows", he said. In October 1999, the franchise was launched in the European key markets of Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. The anime started broadcasting in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in December 1999. In 2000, broadcasting rights for the first season were secured by TV stations in South Africa, Russia, Iceland, and Finland. In Israel, the anime debuted in February 2000. For unclear reasons, Red and Blue were not officially released there. Thriving only on the strength of the TV series, The First Movie, the cards, and imported video games, the Israeli Pokémon still became a success. |
Pokémon | In North America, the debuting Pokémon franchise quickly rose to success. Red and Blue sold 200,000 copies in its first month. By December, the Pokémon anime had become the highest-rated syndicated children's show during the weekdays. This attracted the attention of two media companies: Warner Bros., co-owner of The WB channel; and Saban Entertainment/Fox Family Worldwide, owners of the Fox Kids channel. A bidding war ensued between the parties, which was won by Warner Bros. On February 13, 1999, Pokémon launched on the Kids' WB national television block. The debut episode became the most watched premiere in Kids' WB's history. In European countries, the anime received similar levels of success. For example, in Germany, "a highly competitive kids market", Pokémon was purchased by RTL 2. The show's popularity bolstered the entire program block, more than tripling its viewers. Andrea Lang, RTL 2's editor of cartoons and children's programs, said: "We were speechless. We've never had a comparable success". By March 1998, half a year before Pokémon's overseas launch, 499 million Pokémon cards had been produced. By March 1999, the total number of cards shipped reached 764 million. By March 2000, this figure would grow further to 4.255 billion cards, manufactured in both Japanese and American factories. |
Pokémon | By April 1999, there was a general consensus in the US that Pokémon had become a phenomenon and the newest children's fad. By some, the fad was referred to as "Pokémania", including journalists of Time and USA Today. In the US, severe scarcity occurred of Pokémon goods, especially Pokémon cards, causing companies to miss profits. A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, published on August 3, 1999, cited a Toys "R" Us manager as saying that a supply of 600 booster packs would last 24 hours. The CEO of one card distributor stated that they were "thousands of boxes behind" on orders. In the same article, a Wizards spokeswoman stated that more employees and printers had been hired to increase card production. However, near the end of the month, a different Wizards spokeswoman told The Washington Post that they had "exhausted most of the card-printing capacity of the United States". Similarly, USA Today reported in November 1999 that factories making Hasbro's Pokémon toys had expanded production by 20 times, but demand still exceeded supply. In Europe, scarcity of Pokémon merchandise also occurred. |
Pokémon | By 2002, the relationship between Pokémon USA (PUSA) and Wizards of the Coast had deteriorated. That year, at least seven high-profile employees were poached from Wizards by PUSA: Wizard's former art director, senior graphic designer, business manager, events marketing director, project management director, and two vice presidents. All employees had signed NDAs. In March 2003, PUSA told Wizards that their contract would not be renewed, and that Wizards would not be distributing the new Ruby & Sapphire card set. Later, Wizards was also prohibited from releasing the sets Jamboree and Legendary Collection II. Notably, Jamboree was the first set containing cards designed by Wizards themselves. As considerable time and money was invested into creating them, Wizards was upset when they were barred from putting them out. On October 1, 2003, the day after their agreement expired, Wizards filed suit against Pokémon USA, alleging that the defendant had seized their intellectual property and trade secrets, and illegally tried to gain advantage over them in the competitive trading card market. The case was settled out of court. Jamboree and Legendary Collection II have remained unreleased. |
Pokémon | Following Ruby and Sapphire, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl were released for the Nintendo DS on September 28, 2006 in Japan and on April 22, 2007 in North America. A third version, Pokémon Platinum, was released on September 28, 2008 in Japan and on March 22, 2009 in North America. They form the fourth generation (Generation IV) in the Pokémon video game series. Diamond and Pearl were designed based on the DS's various features such as its Wi-Fi capabilities and slot for Game Boy Advance cartridge. Pokémon president Tsunekazu Ishihara dubbed the games as the "ultimate" Pokémon titles because they allowed the player to trade and battle Pokémon including every Pokémon from previous iterations globally through WiFi, as opposed to previously only able to do so locally and with fewer Pokémon. The games' characters are 2D and the environments are rendered in 3D, and it is considerably difficult to differentiate them because Game Freak designed them this way to innovate the graphics while also retaining the traditional game style and feel. |
Pokémon | The games were followed by Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, which were released on June 23, 2012 in Japan and on October 7, 2012 in North America. The games were developed for the DS rather than the more powerful Nintendo 3DS to maintain continuity with the game world in Black and White and they were presented from a different perspective in the storyline. Since the games are their first sequels, director Masuda explained that they have strived to find a "fine balance" to appeal to both newcomers and returning players by implementing introductory explanations, and by placing a Pokémon Center in the first in-game city, they were able to further this approach by providing newcomers with a detailed walkthrough and also returning players with new updates. During development phase, director Takao Unno revealed that they had experimented with a 100-player multiplayer experience via their communication feature Entralink drawing from their vision of players "sharing the same space, same time and same game" but this feature was never implemented due to technical limitations. |
Pokémon | In Generation VI, Pokémon X and Y were released worldwide for the 3DS on October 12, 2013, and they are the first games to be released in this way. The developers focused on the themes of "beauty," "bond," and "evolution," and it is based on these themes that they created the games' core mechanic where Pokémon could achieve a higher form of evolution by strengthening their bonds with trainers; however, to maintain game balance, they limited this feature to a special, temporary phenomenon. The games' shift to fully 3D graphics allowed the player to freely manipulate the camera angles although due to technical limitations objects far away are rendered in lower polygon models, and producer Hitoshi Yamagami addressed to 2D players that "Game Freak big fans of 2D graphics... So there are some elements in there that I think fans of 2D will appreciate as well." When asked about the Horde battle and Sky battle types, he stated that Horde battles are to supplant the roles of "really strong pokemon " to help the player more easily progress through the games and also to add "more excitement to the battles and a sense of danger," and that they added the Sky battles to take advantage of the games' 3D camera angels capabilities. |
Pokémon | Ohmori stated that with the innovation to 3D in X and Y the designers decided to examine more minor aspects concerning with the Pokémon themselves such as their motions, such as when they designed the games' first starter Pokémon to capitalize on its owl-like characteristics with its head "twists round and round." With the 3DS technologies, the developers are able to design the characters to be more expressive as themselves including different facial expressions and reactions. In addition to portraying Pokémon harmoniously coexisting with people and vice versa in the games, the developers replaced the traditional Gym mechanic with Island Trials, deepening the players' connection with the story and their Pokémon. The enhanced versions Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon were released worldwide on November 17, 2017. The games added an alternate storyline and additional characters, Pokémon, and other features. Developer Shigeki Morimoto revealed that they were developed by the younger staff members and veterans so the more veterans can prioritized on developing more important titles, and the developers considered them to be their culmination with the 3DS. |
Pokémon | As the franchise's popularity grew, children began taking their Pokémon cards to school for trading and playing. Soon, the cards were alleged to be "disrupting learning, poisoning playground friendships and causing such distraction that some children forget their homework, tune out in class and even miss school buses as they scramble to acquire one more card". The cards "turn the playground into a black market", with card swaps sometimes inciting conflicts. Certain children engaged in "aggressive trading", tricking other (often younger) kids into unfair deals, forcing teachers to arbitrate. Some parents expressed their concerns about the craze, but feared that their children would be ostracized if they were to deny them Pokémon products. In the US, the Pokémon cards ended up "almost universally banned" from school grounds. Similar bans occurred in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and European countries. In September 1999, US-based law firm Milberg filed a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo of America, Wizards of the Coast, and 4Kids. The suit claimed that the booster packs constitute a form of lottery and promote gambling in kids. Susan Estrich noted that similar lawsuits had been filed against trading-card makers in the US, without success. The Pokémon card suit is not known to have gone to court, and is believed to have been settled. |
Pokémon | The Pokémon anime series was criticized by some as "cheap Japanese animation" that is "violent" and has "little educational value". Michelle Orecklin of Time dismissed the TV series as "less a cartoon than a half-hour exercise in Pokémon product placement". Allison wrote that even those within Pokémon's US marketing team agreed that the anime's visuals were "not especially sophisticated" compared to Disney cartoons. Pokémon: The First Movie premiered in the United States on November 12, 1999, and in European countries in February 2000. While a huge box-office success, the film was received negatively by several Western film critics. The Guardian decried it as a "contemptuously cheap animated cash-in on the monster kids' craze". The American adult animated series South Park satirized Pokémon in the episode "Chinpokomon", aired on November 3, 1999. In the episode, the titular media franchise is portrayed as a low-quality line of products that is part of an evil plan by the Japanese government to invade the US. South Park co-creator Matt Stone commented that, at the time, Pokémon was "scary huge". |
Pokémon | Kohler wrote that Pokémon was considered "ruthlessly commercial", and that it "program children to be consumers of anything and everything Pokémon". CNN quoted child psychiatrist John Lochridge as worrying that "Pokémon's creators and marketers deliberately set out to create a fantasy world so compelling that children would quickly become obsessed". He believed that kids were being "brainwashed", and said: "I have had parents tell me that they cannot get their kids to do anything except Pokémon, so this stuff seems to really capture their minds, in a way". These concerns were countered by psychologist William Damon, who told Newsweek that obsessing is in fact a normal part of a child's neurological development. It should concern parents only when the obsession gets dangerous or excessive. An op-ed in the New Zealander newspaper The Dominion Post claimed that the anti-Pokémon sentiment was particularly American: "The backlash, which seems largely confined to the United States, may be no more than the sound of the world's leading cultural imperialist gagging on a taste of its own medicine". |
Pokémon | Anne Allison wrote that, before the 1990s, Japan figured little in the face of the worldwide hegemony of Euro-American cultural industries, in particular that of the US. "Hollywood has been hostile to imports", she wrote, "and foreignness has largely been, and been seen as, an impediment to mass popularization in the United States". The surprise success of Pokémon was "an undeniable breakthrough in the homeland of Disney" that "changed preexisting assumptions about the US marketplace at the same time that it was constantly resisted for deviating from them". Pokémon was a welcomed boon to Japan's faltering economy, and positively influenced the country's soft power. Kamo interviewed various American children and found that kids who thought Pokémon was cool, were more likely to believe that Japan was a cool nation. Allison gave a similar finding: all the children she interviewed knew where Pokémon originated, and "many said that, as a result of Pokémon and other 'cool' Japanese goods, they had developed an interest in Japan. A number said that they now wanted to study Japanese and travel there one day". Kohler wrote: "Japanese are proud of Pokémon, the most successful export of Japanese popular culture ever". Although, Iwabuchi questioned to what extent Pokémon really is 'Japanese', and to what extent it is simply a good property with universal appeal. He noted that Japanese nationalist commentators celebrated Pokémon's global success and retrospectively attributed this to its "Japanese cultural power", while ignoring the localization of Pokémon overseas, as well as decades of increasing cooperation and cultural exchange between countries (globalization). |
John Marinatto | Marinatto was a native of Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from Providence College in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in business management. He later worked at Providence as an Associate Director of Alumni/Development and as Director of Sports Information. Marinatto was later the athletic director at Providence for 14 years. He directed all aspects of the Providence Friars athletic program, including a $10 million annual budget and a staff of over 100 employees. While at Providence, Marinatto served as the Chairman of the Big East Athletic Directors' Executive Committee from 1996 to 2000, the longest tenure of any athletic director in the history of the conference. He also served the conference as the Chairman of the Athletic Directors' Finance Committee from 1992 to 1993. In addition, Marinatto served as Chairman of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, Women's Basketball Committee and Television Committee, and was a member of the Men's Basketball Committee, Academic Affairs Committee and Championships and Competition Committee. |
Bi-amping and tri-amping | Most audible differences are subtle. If at all noticeable, many benefits of bi-amping cannot be realized if passive crossover networks of a speaker system are not removed. Benefits include transients are less likely to cause amplifier overload (clipping) or speaker damage, and reduced intermodulation distortion, elimination of errors introduced by low frequency passive crossover, reduction of load presented to the power amplifier, better matching of power amplifier and speaker driver and others. In large professional sound systems, Bi-amping is pretty much the norm with the greater benefits easily outweighing the costs. All speakers are two-way transducers and can introduce current back into the driving circuit from ambient sound. The driving amplifier tries to control the effect of this with its damping factor (having a high resistance to such current), but with a passive crossover, this current can still leak across to the other driver units in the circuit. A Bi-amped system is therefore able to better resist ambient sound feeding back into the circuit. With high volumes and larger venues, such ambient feedback can have a significant damaging effect to the overall sound. |
Psi-Force | Psi-Force was brought together by a paranormal named Emmett Proudhawk. Before the White Event, he worked for the CIA on a project investigating children with higher than usual ESP scores. After the White Event, he gained telepathic powers, including the ability to control others and project bolts of force. At the same time he began to have prophetic dreams. The dreams led him to gather those children who had higher ESP scores and had, after the White Event, developed new abilities. He compiled a list of names, which included all of the original members of the team, as well as Thomas Boyd. Of those, he could only find Tucker, Crawley, Jessup, Ling, and Inyushin. He visited the hometown of each teen and mentally compelled them to run away to San Francisco. Then he personally rescued Inyushin from a Russian project investigating paranormals and brought her to the United States. He was killed by a KGB agent code-named 'Mindwolf' (who was working for the Siberian Project and also possessed psionic powers similar to Proudhawk's) shortly after gathering the Sanctuary kids together. When Mindwolf used his powers and attacked the teens, Tucker felt a mental compulsion to take Proudhawks's medallion. He had the others concentrate upon the medallion with him, and thus discovered they had a new ability - the creation of a gestalt entity known as the "Psi-Hawk". |
Psi-Force | The series was noted for the characters' more confrontational interactions with others, particularly authority figures. They came into conflict with many different groups which wanted to capture them including both the Soviet and American governments. Early issues of the book stressed the nature of the team as one of runaways. When Fabian Nicieza took over writing chores the stories began to focus more on the group's interactions with various paramilitary organizations. At one point, one of their number, Thomas Boyd, was drafted into the US military and the remaining members staged a raid on a US Army base to rescue him. Nicieza also introduced the shadowy Medusa Web organization, a group of mercenaries/terrorists who were occasional opponents and occasional allies of the group. Towards the end of the book's run, Psi-Force spent some time at a Siberian training facility for Russian paranormals. When the Russian paranormal Rodstvow, who had been a repeated enemy of the group, showed up the teens teamed up with the Medusa Web and the Russians to combat him. After this, the remaining members became operatives of the Medusa Web. |
Vedic period | The end of the Vedic period is marked by linguistic, cultural and political changes. The grammar of Pāṇini marks a final apex in the codification of Sutra texts, and at the same time the beginning of Classical Sanskrit. Meanwhile, in the Kosala-Magadha region, the shramana movements (including Jainism and Buddhism) objected the self-imposed authority and orthodoxy of the intruding Brahmins and their Vedic scriptures and ritual. According to Bronkhorst, the sramana culture arose in "Greater Magadha," which was Indo-European, but not Vedic. In this culture, kshatriyas were placed higher than Brahmins, and it rejected Vedic authority and rituals. Greater Magadha reached its zenith under the Maurya Empire. Meanwhile, the Achaemenid invasion of Cyrus and Darius I of the Indus valley in the early 6th century BCE marks the beginning of outside influence, which continued in the Kingdoms of the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, and Indo-Parthians. This period culminated with the Kushan and Gupta Empire, which resulted in the "Hindu Synthesis". |
Vedic period | The emergence of monarchical states in the later Vedic age led to a distancing of the rajan from the people and the emergence of a varna hierarchy. The society was divided into four social groups—Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. The later Vedic texts fixed social boundaries, roles, status and ritual purity for each of the groups. The Shatapatha Brahmana associates the Brahmana with purity of parentage, good conduct, glory, teaching or protecting people; Kshatriya with strength, fame, ruling, and warfare; Vaishya with material prosperity and production-related activities such as cattle rearing and agriculture; Shudras with the service of the higher varnas. The effects of Rajasuya sacrifice depended on the varna of the sacrificer. Rajasuya endowed Brahmana with lustre, Kshatriya with valour, Vaishya with procreative power and Shudra with stability. The hierarchy of the top three varnas is ambiguous in the later Vedic texts. Panchavamsha Brahmana and verse 13.8.3.11 of the Shatapatha Brahmana place Kshatriya over Brahmana and Vaishya, whereas, verse 1.1.4.12 places Brahmana and Vaishya over the Kshatriya and Shudra. The Purusha Sukta visualised the four varnas as hierarchical, but inter-related parts of an organic whole. Despite the increasing social stratification in the later Vedic times, hymns like Rigveda IX.112 suggest some amount of social mobility: "I am a reciter of hymns, my father a physician, and my mother grinds (corn) with stones. We desire to obtain wealth in various actions." |
Vedic period | Household became an important unit in the later Vedic age. The variety of households of the Vedic era gave way to an idealised household which was headed by a grihapati. The relations between husband and wife, father and son were hierarchically organised and the women were relegated to subordinate and docile roles. Polygyny was more common than polyandry and texts like Tattiriya Samhita indicate taboos around menstruating women. Various professions women took to are mentioned in the later Vedic texts. Women tended to cattle, milked cows, carded wool; were weavers, dyers, and corn grinders. Women warriors such as Vishpala, who lost a leg in battle, are mentioned. Two female philosophers are mentioned in the Upanishads. Patrick Olivelle, in his translation of the Upanishads, writes that "the fact that these women are introduced without any attempt to justify or to explain how women could be engaged in theological matters suggests the relatively high social and religious position of at least women of some social strata during this period." |
Vedic period | Early Vedic Aryans were organised into tribes rather than kingdoms. The chief of a tribe was called a rajan. The autonomy of the rajan was restricted by the tribal councils called sabha and samiti. The two bodies were, in part, responsible for the governance of the tribe. The rajan could not accede to the throne without their approval. The distinction between the two bodies is not clear. Arthur Llewellyn Basham, a noted historian and indologist, theorises that sabha was a meeting of great men in the tribe, whereas, samiti was a meeting of all free tribesmen. Some tribes had no hereditary chiefs and were directly governed by the tribal councils. Rajan had a rudimentary court which was attended by courtiers (sabhasad) and chiefs of sects (gramani). The main responsibility of the rajan was to protect the tribe. He was aided by several functionaries, including the purohita (chaplain), the senani (army chief), dutas (envoys) and spash (spies). Purohita performed ceremonies and spells for success in war and prosperity in peace. |
Vedic period | In the later Vedic period, the tribes had consolidated into small kingdoms, which had a capital and a rudimentary administrative system. To aid in governing these new states, the kings and their Brahmin priests arranged Vedic hymns into collections and developed a new set of rituals (the now orthodox Śrauta rituals) to strengthen the emerging social hierarchy. The rajan was seen as the custodian of social order and the protector of rashtra (polity). Hereditary kingship started emerging and competitions like chariot races, cattle raids, and games of dice, which previously decided who was worthy of becoming a king, became nominal. Rituals in this era exalted the status of the king over his people. He was occasionally referred to as samrat (supreme ruler). The rajan's increasing political power enabled him to gain greater control over the productive resources. The voluntary gift offering (bali) became compulsory tribute; however, there was no organised system of taxation. Sabha and samiti are still mentioned in later Vedic texts, though, with the increasing power of the king, their influence declined. By the end of the later Vedic age, different kinds of political systems such as monarchical states (rajya), oligarchical states (gana or sangha), and tribal principalities had emerged in India. |
Vedic period | According to Michael Witzel's analysis of the Kuru Kingdom, it can be characterized as the earliest Vedic "state", during the Middle Vedic Period. However, Robert Bellah observes that it is difficult to "pin down" whether the Kurus were a true "state" or a complex chiefdom, as the Kuru kings notably never adopted royal titles higher than "rājan," which means "chief" rather than "king" in the Vedic context. The Middle Vedic Period is also characterized by a lack of cities; Bellah compares this to early state formation in ancient Hawaii and "very early Egypt," which were "territorial states" rather than "city-states," and thus "it was the court, not the city, that provided the center, and the court was often peripatetic." Romila Thapar characterizes Vedic-era state formation as being in a condition of "arrested development," because local chiefs were relatively autonomous, and because surplus wealth that could have been directed towards state-building was instead used for the increasingly grandiose rituals that also served to structure social relations. The period of the Upanishads, the final phase of the Vedic era, was approximately contemporaneous with a new wave of state formations, linked to the beginning of urbanization in the Ganges Valley: along with the growth of population and trade networks, these social and economic changes put pressure on older ways of life, setting the stage for the Upanishads and the subsequent śramaṇa movements, and the end of the Vedic Period, which was followed by the Mahajanapada period. |
Vedic period | Economy in the Vedic period was sustained by a combination of pastoralism and agriculture. There are references, in the Rigveda, to the leveling of fields, seed processing, and storage of grains in large jars. War bounty was also a major source of wealth. Economic exchanges were conducted by gift giving, particularly to kings (bali) and priests (dana), and barter using cattle as a unit of currency. While gold is mentioned in some hymns, there is no indication of the use of coins. Metallurgy is not mentioned in the Rigveda, but the word ayas and instruments made from it such as razors, bangles, axes are mentioned. One verse mentions purification of ayas. Some scholars believe that ayas refers to iron and the words dham and karmara refer to iron-welders. However, philological evidence indicates that ayas in the Rigveda refers only to copper and bronze, while iron or śyāma ayas, literally "black metal", first is mentioned in the post-Rigvedic Atharvaveda, and therefore the Early Vedic Period was a Bronze Age culture whereas the Late Vedic Period was an Iron Age culture. |
Vedic period | Ochre coloured pottery culture was first found approximately between 1950 and 1951, in western Uttar Pradesh, in the Badaun and Bisjuar district. It is thought that this culture was prominent during the latter half of the 2nd millennium, within the transition between the Indus Valley civilization and the end of Harrapan culture. This pottery is typically created with wheel ware, and is ill-fired, to a fine to medium fabric, decorated with a red slip, and occasional black bands1. When this pottery was worked with, it often left an ochre color on the hands, most likely because of water-logging, bad firing, wind action, or a mixture of these factors. This pottery was found all throughout the doab, most of it found in the Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, and Bulandshahr districts, but also existing outside these districts, extending north and south of Bahadrabad. This pottery does, however, seem to exist within different time frames of popularity, ochre colored pottery seeming to occur in areas such as Rajasthan earlier than we see it in the doab, despite the doab being heavily associated with the culture. |
Vedic period | Gandhara grave culture refers to the protohistoric cemeteries found in the Gandhara region, stretching all the way from Bajuar to the Indus. These cemeteries seem to follow a set grave structure and "mortuary practice", such as inflexed inhumation and cremation. This culture is thought to occur in 3 stages: the lower, in which burials take place in masonry lined pits, the upper, in which urn burials and cremations are added, and the "surface" level, in which graves are covered with huge stone slabs. In the lower stage, excavators found that these graves are typically 2–3 feet deep, and covered with stones on top. After digging out the stones, skeletons were found facing southwest to northeast, with the head facing one direction, and the hands laying on top of one another. Female skeletons were often found wearing hair pins and jewelry. Pottery is greatly important to this culture, as pottery was often used as a "grave good", being buried with the bodies of the dead. Buried alongside the skeletons, we typically see various pots on top of the body, averaging at about 5 or less pieces of pottery per grave. Within this culture we typically see two kinds of pottery: gray ware, or red ware. |
Vedic period | Painted grey ware culture is a significant pottery style that has been linked to a group of people who settled in Sutlej, Ghagger, and the Upper Ganga/Yamuna Valleys, loosely classified with the early Aryans who migrated to India in the beginning of the Vedic period. It's also thought that the groups that introduced the painted grey ware culture also brought iron technology to the Indo-gangetic plains, making this pottery a momentous mark of the Northern Indian Iron Age. The style of grey-ware often includes clay wheel-thrown into a smooth texture, ash-grey in color, and often decorated with black ink, creating small circular patterns, sometimes spirals, swastikas, or sigmas. Grey-ware pottery is almost exclusively drinking ware, and tends to have three different forms: narrow-waisted, tall drinking glasses, middle-sized drinking goblets, and drinking vases with outturned lips. There was a distinct grey ware culture surrounding the establishment of the pottery, but while the culture is significant, grey ware has only made up 10–15% of found Vedic pottery, a majority of the pottery red ware, as grey ware pottery was seen as a "highly valued luxury". |
Familial amyloid cardiomyopathy | The onset of FAC caused by aggregation of the V122I mutation and wild-type TTR, and senile systemic amyloidosis caused by the exclusive aggregation of wild-type TTR, typically occur after age 60. Greater than 40% of these patients present with carpal tunnel syndrome before developing ATTR-CM. Cardiac involvement is often identified with the presence of conduction system disease (sinus node or atrioventricular node dysfunction) and/or congestive heart failure, including shortness of breath, peripheral edema, syncope, exertional dyspnea, generalized fatigue, or heart block. Unfortunately, echocardiographic findings are indistinguishable from those seen in AL amyloidosis, and include thickened ventricular walls (concentric hypertrophy, both right and left) with a normal-to-small left ventricular cavity, increased myocardial echogenicity, normal or mildly reduced ejection fraction (often with evidence of diastolic dysfunction and severe impairment of contraction along the longitudinal axis), and bi-atrial dilation with impaired atrial contraction. Unlike the situation in AL amyloidosis, the ECG voltage is often normal, although low voltage may be seen (despite increased wall thickness on echocardiography). Marked axis deviation, bundle branch block, and AV block are common, as is atrial fibrillation. |
Bruce C. Heezen | Heezen collaborated extensively with cartographer Marie Tharp. He interpreted their joint work on the Mid-Atlantic ridge and the East Pacific Rise as supporting S. Warren Carey's Expanding Earth Theory, developed in the 1950s, but under Tharp's influence "eventually gave up the idea of an expanding earth for a form of continental drift in the mid-1960s." Tharp was Heezen's assistant while he was a graduate student and he gave her the task of drafting seafloor profiles. When she showed Heezen that her plotting of the North Atlantic revealed a rift valley, Heezen initially dismissed it as "girl talk." Eventually they discovered that not only was there a North Atlantic rift valley, but a mountain range with a central valley that spanned the earth. They also realized that the oceanic earthquakes they had been separately plotting fell within the rift, a revolutionary theory at the time. He presented this mid-ocean rift and earthquake theory as his own work at Princeton in 1957. At that lecture, preeminent geologist Harry Hess told Heezen, "Young man, you have shaken the foundations of geology!" |
Siasconset Golf Club | Siasconset Golf Club, also known as the Siasconset Golf Course and commonly shortened to the Sconset Golf Course, is one of the easternmost golf courses in Massachusetts, perched on the edge of Nantucket Island in Siasconset, Massachusetts. This is the oldest golf course still active on Nantucket and one of the oldest golf courses in America. It once was considered the oldest privately owned golf course in the country still open to the public but, as of May 1, 2012, it is no longer privately owned. It is still known by island locals as "Skinner's Golf Club", or "Skinner's", because Robert "Skinner" Coffin was a co-owner and the superintendent of the course for many years and use to host a recreational golf tournament, known as "The Skinner Open", which was held during the years 1977 to 2011. It is currently operating as a public 9-hole course. This course was also listed in Links Magazine's article titled "The Top 10 Old Courses You Can Play". On October 24, 2019, this course was named the New England Golf Course Owners Association's "Golf Course of New England" for 2020. |
The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3 | The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3 is a compilation album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison released on 11 June 2007 in the UK with a digital version released in the U.S. on iTunes Store on 12 June 2007. Manhattan/EMI Music Catalog Marketing released the CD version of the album on 19 June 2007 in the United States. This new two-disc collection of 31 tracks was compiled by Morrison himself. It offers an overview of his large volume of material since the release of The Best of Van Morrison Volume Two in 1993. The album's thirty-one tracks include previously unreleased collaborations with Tom Jones ("Cry For Home") and Bobby Bland ("Tupelo Honey") as well as duets with John Lee Hooker, B.B. King and Ray Charles. The 2003 duet with Ray Charles is "Crazy Love", a song originally recorded on Morrison's 1970 album Moondance. "Blue and Green" was previously donated to be used on the charity album Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now, which raised money for relief efforts intended for Gulf Coast victims devastated by hurricane Katrina. The duet with Tom Jones, "Cry For Home", was taken from the same recording sessions that produced the "Sometimes We Cry" duet between the two artists, which featured on Jones' successful album Reload. "Cry for Home" was released as a single on 4 June 2007 in the UK, and was followed by "Blue and Green" on 27 August. |
Tyler Stewart | Stewart is the only band member who has not actively written songs for the group's albums nor does he write for a side project. He has received a writing credit on only three songs in the band's catalogue: "Grade 9" from Gordon, "Why Say Anything Nice?" from Barenaked Ladies Are Men (co-written with Page and Robertson), and "Allergies" from Snacktime! (lyrics co-written with Kevin Hearn, music written by all five then-members). Up until the 2009 acrimonious departure of lead singer Steven Page, Stewart had sung lead on only two recorded songs. Stewart sings lead on "Allergies" and a cover of "Holly Jolly Christmas" which was cut from Barenaked for the Holidays. Stewart also sings lead on a version of "Feliz Navidad" which the band has performed live for holiday shows since 2004. The song has also been played on other occasions with the word "navidad" replaced by lyrics relevant to the event (such as "Feliz Ships and Dip", and "Feliz Halloween", among others). Stewart assumed some of Page's vocal responsibilities for live performances, including "Alcohol" from Stunt. Stewart also sings the chorus on the song "Four Seconds" from All in Good Time. |
Tyler Stewart | Stewart's wife, Jill (née Spratt), is a former high school French teacher, and the two were married on September 19, 1998; they have three daughters, Mili, born April 2, 1999, Hazel, born April 16, 2001, and Carmen, born January 28, 2011. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking. He is a huge hockey fan and actively promotes Women's Hockey in Canada, serving on the board of The Ladies First Hockey Foundation and coaching his daughters' teams, one being The George Bell Titans. Stewart also went to high school with former Leafs goalie Curtis Joseph where the two became friends. He also enjoys playing hockey, and is a member of the Jokers Hockey Club in the Canadian Exclaim! Hockey Summit of the Arts. Stewart is also an occasional panelist/contributor on the post-game show for Hockey Night in Canada, and an on-air contributor to the morning show on The Fan 590. He took part in Super Skate, a celebrity hockey game fundraiser at Madison Square Garden for the Christopher Reeve Foundation in 1999, 2001 and 2002. Participants included Denis Leary, Kim Alexis, Rick Moranis, Chris Jericho, Gary Dell'Abate, Chad Smith, Darren Pang and Jason Priestley, among others. Stewart is a member of the Canadian Charity Artists Against Racism and has worked with them on campaigns like radio PSAs. |
Donn J. Robertson | "When his battalion was pinned down by intense hostile mortar, machine-gun and grenade fire during a sustained drive to seize heavily fortified Hill 362, on 28 February, Lieutenant Colonel Robertson voluntarily left his position in the forward observation post and, moving along the front line units, inspired his men to heroic effort in resuming the attack until they had advanced up the southern slopes and seized the crest of this vitally strategic hill. With the battalion badly depleted by casualties, only a skeleton platoon left as a reserve, and all regular company commanders and many platoon leaders dead, he rallied his tired, depleted units and directed them to dig in for the night before the enemy, in a desperate attempt to split the regimental front, launched a strong counterattack against the left flank of the battalion. Refusing to permit a complete withdrawal, he dashed fearlessly through heavy machine-gun and mortar fire to the imperiled position and ordered an immediate attack which repulsed the Japanese and regained fifty yards of lost terrain. Then, reorganizing his defenses by consolidating the left of his line with the battalion on his left, he remained throughout the night at the front lines, encouraging his exhausted men to hold fast despite overwhelming odds and directed them in thwarting repeated attempts by the Japanese to penetrate the regimental line." |
Metrolinx | Metrolinx has been criticized for not having enough executive power in planning transit outside of municipal politics, despite being established to take political delay out of transportation planning. After Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto in December 2010, he declared Transit City, the provincially funded transit expansion plan of light rail lines, dead. These lines were a large component of Metrolinx's 2008 Big Move. Metrolinx was again criticized when, in January 2012, its CEO declared that it would bend to what Toronto City Council wanted regarding how the Eglinton-Scarborough Crosstown LRT line should be built. The issue centred on whether the more suburban stretches of the line, from Laird Drive to Kennedy Station, should be built at street level instead of a more costly underground alignment. Metrolinx was criticized after a Toronto Star investigation found that the agency has approved two transit stations, Kirby and Lawrence East, for the GO Regional Express Rail expansion due to political pressure from the Ministry of Transportation. Kirby is in the Vaughan riding of the then-transportation minister, Steven Del Duca, and Lawrence East in Scarborough is part of Toronto mayor John Tory's "SmartTrack" plan, his signature campaign promise. Both stations were not recommended to be constructed in the near term by an external consultant, AECOM, hired by Metrolinx. However, they were both shortlisted to begin construction. Ontario's auditor general found that Metrolinx incurred about $436 million "in sunk and additional" – unrecoverable – costs between 2009 and 2018 due to numerous changes in transit plans. |
History of malaria | Spanish missionaries found that fever was treated by Amerindians near Loxa (Ecuador) with powder from Peruvian bark (later established to be from any of several trees of genus Cinchona). It was used by the Quechua Indians of Ecuador to reduce the shaking effects caused by severe chills. Jesuit Brother Agostino Salumbrino , who lived in Lima and was an apothecary by training, observed the Quechua using the bark of the cinchona tree for that purpose. While its effect in treating malaria (and hence malaria-induced shivering) was unrelated to its effect in controlling shivering from cold, it was nevertheless effective for malaria. The use of the "fever tree" bark was introduced into European medicine by Jesuit missionaries (Jesuit's bark). Jesuit Bernabé de Cobo , who explored Mexico and Peru, is credited with taking cinchona bark to Europe. He brought the bark from Lima to Spain, and then to Rome and other parts of Italy, in 1632. Francesco Torti wrote in 1712 that only "intermittent fever" was amenable to the fever tree bark. This work finally established the specific nature of cinchona bark and brought about its general use in medicine. |
History of malaria | In 1848, German anatomist Johann Heinrich Meckel recorded black-brown pigment granules in the blood and spleen of a patient who had died in a mental hospital. Meckel was thought to have been looking at malaria parasites without realizing it; he did not mention malaria in his report. He hypothesized that the pigment was melanin. The causal relationship of pigment to the parasite was established in 1880, when French physician Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, working in the military hospital of Constantine, Algeria, observed pigmented parasites inside the red blood cells of people with malaria. He witnessed the events of exflagellation and became convinced that the moving flagella were parasitic microorganisms. He noted that quinine removed the parasites from the blood. Laveran called this microscopic organism Oscillaria malariae and proposed that malaria was caused by this protozoan. This discovery remained controversial until the development of the oil immersion lens in 1884 and of superior staining methods in 1890–1891. |
History of malaria | In 1885, Ettore Marchiafava, Angelo Celli and Camillo Golgi studied the reproduction cycles in human blood (Golgi cycles). Golgi observed that all parasites present in the blood divided almost simultaneously at regular intervals and that division coincided with attacks of fever. In 1886 Golgi described the morphological differences that are still used to distinguish two malaria parasite species Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium malariae. Shortly after this Sakharov in 1889 and Marchiafava & Celli in 1890 independently identified Plasmodium falciparum as a species distinct from P. vivax and P. malariae. In 1890, Grassi and Feletti reviewed the available information and named both P. malariae and P. vivax (although within the genus Haemamoeba.) By 1890, Laveran's germ was generally accepted, but most of his initial ideas had been discarded in favor of the taxonomic work and clinical pathology of the Italian school. Marchiafava and Celli called the new microorganism Plasmodium. H. vivax was soon renamed Plasmodium vivax. In 1892, Marchiafava and Bignami proved that the multiple forms seen by Laveran were from a single species. This species was eventually named P. falciparum. Laveran was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "in recognition of his work on the role played by protozoa in causing diseases". |
History of malaria | Three possible mechanisms of relapse were proposed by Marchoux in 1926 (i) parthenogenesis of macrogametocytes: (ii) persistence of schizonts in small numbers in the blood where immunity inhibits multiplication, but later disappears and/or (iii) reactivation of an encysted body in the blood. James in 1931 proposed that sporozoites are carried to internal organs, where they enter reticuloendothelial cells and undergo a cycle of development, based on quinine's lack of activity on them. Huff and Bloom in 1935 demonstrated stages of avian malaria that transpire outside blood cells (exoerythrocytic). In 1945 Fairley et al. reported that inoculation of blood from a patient with P. vivax may fail to induce malaria, although the donor may subsequently exhibit the condition. Sporozoites disappeared from the blood stream within one hour and reappeared eight days later. This suggests the presence of forms that persist in tissues. Using mosquitoes rather than blood, in 1946 Shute described a similar phenomenon and proposed the existence of an 'x-body' or resting form. The following year Sapero proposed a link between relapse and a tissue stage not yet discovered. Garnham in 1947 described exoerythrocytic schizogony in Hepatocystis (Plasmodium) kochi. In the following year, British biologists Henry Edward Shortt and Cyril Garnham described the liver stages of P. cynomolgi in monkeys. In the same year, a human volunteer consented to receive a massive dose of infected sporozoites of P. vivax and undergo a liver biopsy three months later, thus allowing Shortt et al. to demonstrate the tissue stage. The tissue form of Plasmodium ovale was described in 1954 and that of P. malariae in 1960 in experimentally infected chimpanzees. |
History of malaria | In the early twentieth century, before antibiotics, patients with tertiary syphilis were intentionally infected with malaria to induce a fever; this was called malariotherapy. In 1917, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, a Viennese psychiatrist, began to treat neurosyphilitics with induced Plasmodium vivax malaria. Three or four bouts of fever were enough to kill the temperature-sensitive syphilis bacteria (Spirochaeta pallida also known as Treponema pallidum). P. vivax infections were then terminated by quinine. By accurately controlling the fever with quinine, the effects of both syphilis and malaria could be minimized. While about 15% of patients died from malaria, this was preferable to the almost-certain death from syphilis. Therapeutic malaria opened up a wide field of chemotherapeutic research and was practiced until 1950. Wagner-Jauregg was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the therapeutic value of malaria inoculation in the treatment of dementia paralytica. |
History of malaria | Johann "Hans" Andersag and colleagues synthesized and tested some 12,000 compounds, eventually producing Resochin as a substitute for quinine in the 1930s. It is chemically related to quinine through the possession of a quinoline nucleus and the dialkylaminoalkylamino side chain. Resochin (7-chloro-4- 4- (diethylamino) – 1 – methylbutyl amino quinoline) and a similar compound Sontochin (3-methyl Resochin) were synthesized in 1934. In March 1946, the drug was officially named Chloroquine. Chloroquine is an inhibitor of hemozoin production through biocrystallization. Quinine and chloroquine affect malarial parasites only at life stages when the parasites are forming hematin-pigment (hemozoin) as a byproduct of hemoglobin degradation. Chloroquine-resistant forms of P. falciparum emerged only 19 years later. The first resistant strains were detected around the Cambodia‐Thailand border and in Colombia, in the 1950s. In 1989, chloroquine resistance in P. vivax was reported in Papua New Guinea. These resistant strains spread rapidly, producing a large mortality increase, particularly in Africa during the 1990s. |
History of malaria | Rockefeller Foundation studies showed in Mexico that DDT remained effective for six to eight weeks if sprayed on the inside walls and ceilings of houses and other buildings. The first field test in which residual DDT was applied to the interior surfaces of all habitations and outbuildings was carried out in central Italy in the spring of 1944. The objective was to determine the residual effect of the spray on anopheline density in the absence of other control measures. Spraying began in Castel Volturno and, after a few months, in the delta of the Tiber. The unprecedented effectiveness of the chemical was confirmed: the new insecticide was able to eradicate malaria by eradicating mosquitoes. At the end of World War II, a massive malaria control program based on DDT spraying was carried out in Italy. In Sardinia – the second largest island in the Mediterranean – between 1946 and 1951, the Rockefeller Foundation conducted a large-scale experiment to test the feasibility of the strategy of "species eradication" in an endemic malaria vector. Malaria was effectively eliminated in the United States by the use of DDT in the National Malaria Eradication Program . The concept of eradication prevailed in 1955 in the Eighth World Health Assembly: DDT was adopted as a primary tool in the fight against malaria. |
Riad Seif Forum | Following the death of Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad in June 2000, Seif assembled "leading intellectuals and independent voices" to discuss "how to open up Syria's ... political system." The group — which met on Wednesdays evenings, in Seif's living room — "debated human rights, pluralism, press and academic freedoms, and how to build a civil society," and was the first of ten such forums that "marked the onset" of the Damascus Spring. It was later dubbed the Forum for National Dialogue according to journalist Robin Wright. In January 2001, Seif announced his intention to create a new political party to compete with the ruling Ba'th Party. A major seminar/meeting of the Forum was held on 5 September 2001. Several hundred people attended and leaders of the Syrian opposition called for political reform and democratic elections and discussed amending the constitution and issuing a call for a civil disobedience campaign. Following this Seif and the nine other opposition leaders were arrested. |
Odinic Rite | The term was re-introduced in the late 1930s by Alexander Rud Mills, an Australian fascist. Having formulated "his own unique blend" of Ariosophy, Mills drew heavily on writings of pioneering Austrian Ariosophist and Wotanist Guido von List. Much of Mills' ideology focused around what he conceived as the "British race", a group who he believed also inhabited not only Britain but other parts of the world colonised by the British Empire. That concept was particularly problematic given the ethnically and linguistically diverse nature of the British population during the early 20th century. Mills believed that while Christianity was alien to the "British race", Odinism was 'native' and thus could be better understood by them. He expressed the view that "our own racial ideas and traditions (not those of others) are our best guide to health and national strength". He was critical of Christianity, believing it to be "unnatural" because – in his view – it encouraged the breaking down of racial barriers. In Mills' theology, the Norse gods were symbols of the divine rather than actual anthropomorphic entities, and he believed that each racial group had its own symbolic system for interpreting and understanding divinity. For Mills, Odin represented an archetypal father figure, with other deities from Norse mythology, such as Thor and Frigg, having minor roles. |
Spontaneous symmetry breaking | An actual measurement reflects only one solution, representing a breakdown in the symmetry of the underlying theory. "Hidden" is a better term than "broken", because the symmetry is always there in these equations. This phenomenon is called spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) because nothing (that we know of) breaks the symmetry in the equations.: 194–195 By the nature of spontaneous symmetry breaking, different portions of the early Universe would break symmetry in different directions, leading to topological defects, such as two-dimensional domain walls, one-dimensional cosmic strings, zero-dimensional monopoles, and/or textures, depending on the relevant homotopy group and the dynamics of the theory. For example, Higgs symmetry breaking may have created primordial cosmic strings as a byproduct. Hypothetical GUT symmetry-breaking generically produces monopoles, creating difficulties for GUT unless monopoles (along with any GUT domain walls) are expelled from our observable Universe through cosmic inflation. |
Spontaneous symmetry breaking | The strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces can all be understood as arising from gauge symmetries, which is a redundancy in the description of the symmetry. The Higgs mechanism, the spontaneous symmetry breaking of gauge symmetries, is an important component in understanding the superconductivity of metals and the origin of particle masses in the standard model of particle physics. The term "spontaneous symmetry breaking" is a misnomer here as Elitzur's theorem states that local gauge symmetries can never be spontaneously broken. Rather, after gauge fixing, the global symmetry (or redundancy) can be broken in a manner formally resembling spontaneous symmetry breaking. One important consequence of the distinction between true symmetries and gauge symmetries, is that the massless Nambu–Goldstone resulting from spontaneous breaking of a gauge symmetry are absorbed in the description of the gauge vector field, providing massive vector field modes, like the plasma mode in a superconductor, or the Higgs mode observed in particle physics. |
Spontaneous symmetry breaking | Dynamical breaking of a gauge symmetry is subtler. In conventional spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking, there exists an unstable Higgs particle in the theory, which drives the vacuum to a symmetry-broken phase (i.e, electroweak interactions.) In dynamical gauge symmetry breaking, however, no unstable Higgs particle operates in the theory, but the bound states of the system itself provide the unstable fields that render the phase transition. For example, Bardeen, Hill, and Lindner published a paper that attempts to replace the conventional Higgs mechanism in the standard model by a DSB that is driven by a bound state of top-antitop quarks. (Such models, in which a composite particle plays the role of the Higgs boson, are often referred to as "Composite Higgs models".) Dynamical breaking of gauge symmetries is often due to creation of a fermionic condensate — e.g., the quark condensate, which is connected to the dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry in quantum chromodynamics. Conventional superconductivity is the paradigmatic example from the condensed matter side, where phonon-mediated attractions lead electrons to become bound in pairs and then condense, thereby breaking the electromagnetic gauge symmetry. |
Hartford circus fire | While many people burned to death, others died as a result of the ensuing chaos. Sources and investigators differ on how many people were killed and injured. Various people and organizations say it was 167, 168, or 169 persons (the 168 figure is usually based on official tallies that included a collection of body parts that were listed as a "victim") with official treated injury estimates running over 700 people. The number of actual injuries is believed to be higher than those figures, since many people were seen that day heading home in shock without seeking treatment in the city. It is commonly believed that the number of fatalities is higher than the estimates given, due to poorly kept residency records in rural towns, and the fact that some smaller remains were never identified or claimed. Additionally, free tickets had been handed out that day to many people in and around the city, some of whom appeared to eyewitnesses and circus employees to be drifters who would never have been reported missing. |
Hartford circus fire | The best-known victim of the circus fire was a young blond girl wearing a white dress. She is known only as "Little Miss 1565", named after the number assigned to her body at the city's makeshift morgue. Oddly well preserved even after her death, her face has arguably become the most familiar image of the fire. Her true identity has been a topic of debate and frustration in the Hartford area since the fire occurred. She was buried without a name in Hartford's Northwood Cemetery, where a victims' memorial also stands. Two police investigators, Sgts. Thomas Barber and Edward Lowe, photographed her and took fingerprints, footprints and dental charts. Despite massive publicity and repeated displays of the famous photograph in nationwide magazines, she was never claimed. Barber and Lowe spent the rest of their lives trying to identify her. They decorated her grave with flowers each Christmas, Memorial Day and July 4. After their deaths, a local flower company continued to decorate the grave. |
Hartford circus fire | In 1991, arson investigator Rick Davey (along with co-writer Don Massey) published A Matter of Degree: The Hartford Circus Fire and Mystery of Little Miss 1565, in which he claims the girl was Eleanor Emily Cook and from Massachusetts. Davey also contends that there was a conspiracy within the judicial system to convict the Ringling defendants, and that Segee was the arsonist. Before writing the book, Davey spent six years researching the case and conducting his own experiments as to how the fire really may have started. He described the original investigation as both "flawed and primitive", though he did not work on the original case. Eleanor Cook's brother Donald Cook had contacted authorities in 1955 insisting that the girl was his sister, but nothing came of it, and Donald later worked with Davey to establish her identity. Donald believes that family members were shown the wrong body in the confusion at the morgue. In 1991, the body was declared to be that of 8-year-old Eleanor Emily Cook, though Cook's aunt and uncle had examined the body and it did not fit the description they provided. The Connecticut State Police forensics unit compared hair samples and determined they were probably from the same person. The body was exhumed in 1991 and buried next to her brother, Edward, who had also died in the fire. |
Hartford circus fire | Various assertions put forth in A Matter of Degree have been fiercely disputed by investigators who worked on the case, as well as by other writers, most notably Stewart O'Nan, who published The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy in 2001. O'Nan points to the fact that Little Miss 1565 had blond hair while Eleanor Cook was a brunette. The shape of Little Miss 1565's face and that of Eleanor Cook are dissimilar, and the heights and ages of the two girls do not match. Perhaps most significantly, when shown a photograph of Little Miss 1565, Eleanor's mother Mildred Corintha Parsons Cook immediately stated that it was not that of her daughter. She firmly maintained that stance until her death in 1997, age 91. Badly injured in the fire, Mrs. Cook had been unable to claim her two dead children and was too emotionally traumatized to pursue it later. She had been told that Eleanor was not in any of the locations where bodies were kept for identification. She believed that Eleanor was one of two children who had been burned beyond recognition and remained unidentified. O'Nan thinks that Eleanor Cook may be body number 1503. He further points to the differences in the dental records of Eleanor Cook and the records made of Little Miss 1565 after her death. |
Reuven Yudalevich | His generosity began at age twenty when he and his friend purchased a lottery ticket in monthly payments. Eventually his friend could not keep up the payments, so Reuven continued paying for his friend's portion of the lottery. He eventually won a large sum of money and gave half of the winnings to his friend as if his friend had continued paying all along. It is assumed he used the money to then travel to Palestine. He apparently met a group of Bilu pioneers made up of twelve men where, at the port of Smyrna, all of their money was stolen from their cashier, Israel Belkind. Reuven gave them 100 rubles and continued the trip to Palestine. In Jaffa he joined the "Pioneers of Jewish Settlement Committee" or "Halutzey Yesud HaMaala" which eventually bought the land for Rishon Le Zion from Tzvi Leventine. Ten families set up the village and Reuven sent money to get the group of pioneers he had met in Smyrna so that they could purchase passage to Palestine. The migrations at this time to Palestine are known as The First Aliya. |
Mass media in Romania | The public television company Televiziunea Română and the public radio Societatea Română de Radiodifuziune cover all the country and have also international programs. The state also owns a public news agency ROMPRES. The private media is grouped in media companies such as Intact Media Group, Media Pro, Realitatea-Caţavencu, Ringier, SBS Broadcasting Group, Centrul Național Media and other smaller independent companies. Cable television is widely available in almost all localities, and some have even adopted digital television. It offers besides the national channels a great number of international and specialized channels. FM stations cover most cities and most of them belong to national radio networks. Overall readership of most newspapers is slowly declining due to increasing competition from television and the Internet. Tabloids and sport newspapers are among the most read national newspapers. In every large city there is at least one local newspaper, which usually covers the rest of the county. An Audit Bureau of Circulations was established in 1998 and today represents a large number of publications. |
Mass media in Romania | Romania has very high penetration rates for cable television in Europe, with over 79% of all households watching television through a CATV network in 2007. The market is extremely dynamic, and dominated by two giant companies – Romanian based RCS&RDS and United States based UPC-Astral. Broadcast television is very limited because of the high penetration of cable. In the early 1990s, only two state owned TV channels were available, one only in about 20% of the country. Private TV channels were slow to appear, because of lack of experience and high start-up costs. In this environment, cable TV companies appeared and thrived, providing 15-20 foreign channels for a very low price. Many small, startup firms gradually grew, and coverage increased (coverage wars were frequent in the early period). However, this period soon ended, with consolidation around 1995–1996 with gentlemen agreements between larger companies over areas of control and pricing, with claims of monopoly abounding. This process of consolidation was completed around 2005–2006, when only two big suppliers of cable remained: UPC-Astral and RDS. Cable TV is now available in most of the country, including most rural areas. Satellite digital TV appeared in 2004. |
Vaccine Act of 1813 | Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President of the United States be, and he is hereby authorized to appoint an agent to preserve the genuine vaccine matter, and to furnish the same to any citizen of the United States, whenever it may be applied for, through the medium of the post-office; and such agent shall, previous to his entering upon the execution of the duties assigned to him by this act, and before he shall be entitled to the privilege of franking any letter or package as herein allowed, take and subscribe the following oath or affirmation, before some magistrate, and cause a certificate thereof to be filed in the general post-office: "I, A. B. do swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that I will faithfully use my best exertions to preserve the genuine vaccine matter, and to furnish the same to the citizens of the United States; and also, that I will abstain from every thing prohibited in relation to the establishment of the post-office of the United States." And it shall be the duty of the said agent to transmit to the several postmasters in the United States a copy of this act: and he shall also forward to them a public notice, directing how and where all application shall be made to him for vaccine matter. |
Vaccine Act of 1813 | SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That all letters or packages not exceeding half an ounce in weight, containing vaccine matter, or relating to the subject of vaccination, and that alone, shall be carried by the United States' mail free of any postage, either to or from the agent who may be appointed to carry the provisions of this act into effect: Provided always, that the said agent before he delivers any letter for transmission by the mail, shall in his own proper handwriting, on the outside thereof, endorse the word "Vaccination," and thereto subscribe his name, and shall previously furnish the postmaster of the office where he shall deposit the same with a specimen of his signature; and if said agent shall frank any letter or package, in which shall be contained any thing relative to any subject other than vaccination, he shall, on conviction of every such offence, forfeit and pay a fine of fifty dollars, to be recovered in the same manner as other fines or violations of law establishing the post-office: Provided also, that the discharge of any agent, and the appointment of another in his stead, be at the discretion of the President of the United States. |
Fornication | Ethical issues arising from sexual relations between consenting heterosexuals who have reached the age of consent have generally been viewed as matters of private morality, and so have not generally been prosecuted as criminal offenses in the common law. This legal position was inherited by the United States from the United Kingdom. Later, some jurisdictions, a total of 16 in the southern and eastern United States, as well as the states of Wisconsin: 353 and Utah, passed statutes creating the offense of fornication that prohibited (vaginal) sexual intercourse between two unmarried people of the opposite sex. Most of these laws either were repealed or were struck down by the courts in several states as being odious to their state constitutions. In Pollard v. Lyon , the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a District of Columbia U.S. District Court ruling that spoken words by the defendant in the case that accused the plaintiff of fornication were not actionable for slander because fornication, although involving moral turpitude, was not an indictable offense in the District of Columbia at the time as it had not been an indictable offense in Maryland since 1785 . See also State v. Saunders, 381 A.2d 333 , Martin v. Ziherl, 607 S.E.2d 367 . As of December 2023, the only states in America that have laws banning fornication are: |
Fornication | There are many instances from the pre-modern era and several recent cases of stoning for zina being legally carried out. Zina became a more pressing issue in modern times, as Islamist movements and governments employed polemics against public immorality. During the Algerian Civil War, Islamist insurgents assassinated women suspected of loose morals, the Taliban have executed suspected adultresses using machine guns, and zina has been used as justification for honor killings. After sharia-based criminal laws were widely replaced by European-inspired statutes in the modern era, several countries passed legal reforms that incorporated elements of hudud laws into their legal codes. Iran witnessed several highly publicized stonings for zina in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution. In Nigeria, local courts have passed several stoning sentences, all of which were overturned on appeal or left unenforced. In Pakistan, the Hudood Ordinances of 1979 subsumed prosecution of rape under the category of zina, departing from traditional judicial practice, and making rape extremely difficult to prove while exposing the victims to jail sentences for admitting illicit intercourse. Although these laws were amended in 2006, they still blur the legal distinction between rape and consensual sex. According to human rights organizations, stoning for zina has also been carried out in Saudi Arabia. |
Fornication | On another occasion, Luther wrote, "I pass over the good or evil which experience offers, and confine myself to such good as Scripture and truth ascribe to marriage. It is no slight boon that in wedlock fornication and unchastity are checked and eliminated. This in itself is so great a good that it alone should be enough to induce men to marry forthwith, and for many reasons... The first reason is that fornication destroys not only the soul but also body, property, honor, and family as well. For we see how a licentious and wicked life not only brings great disgrace but is also a spendthrift life, more costly than wedlock, and that illicit partners necessarily occasion greater suffering for one another than do married folk. Beyond that it consumes the body, corrupts flesh and blood, nature, and physical constitution. Through such a variety of evil consequences God takes a rigid position, as though he would actually drive people away from fornication and into marriage. However, few are thereby convinced or converted." |