Joseph Newton Chandler III

Robert Ivan Nichols, alias Joseph Newton Chandler III (September 12, 1926 – July 23, 2002), was a formerly unidentified American identity thief who died by suicide in Eastlake, Ohio, in July 2002. After his death, investigators were unable to locate his family and discovered that he had stolen the identity of an eight-year-old boy who was killed in a car crash in Texas in 1945.
The lengths to which Nichols went to hide his identity led to speculation that he was a fugitive.
In late 2016, U.S. Marshals Service, Cleveland, Ohio, announced that forensic genealogist Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick of Identifinders International had compared the then-unidentified man's Y-STR profile to public genetic genealogy Y-STR databases to determine his possible last name was "Nicholas". In March 2018 the DNA Doe Project identified the man as Robert Ivan Nichols. The U.S. Marshals Service announced the identification at a press conference in Cleveland on June 21, 2018.
Background.
Real Joseph Chandler.
Joseph Newton Chandler III (March 11, 1937 – December 21, 1945), born in Buffalo, New York, was eight years old when he was killed in a traffic accident along with his parents in Texas on December 21, 1945. Reports differ on whether the accident took place in Sherman or Weatherford.
Nichols' life and identity theft.
Robert Nichols was born on September 12, 1926, in New Albany, Indiana, to Silas and Alpha Nichols, who had four boys. He joined the US Navy in World War II and served as a firefighter on the USS "Aaron Ward", which was bombed by the Japanese in May 1945 off Okinawa. He was wounded in the back and hip by shrapnel and awarded the Purple Heart. He burned his uniforms after the war.
Nichols married Laverne Kort in 1947; they had three sons and Nichols worked for General Electric as a draftsman. In 1964, Nichols left his wife and sons and filed for divorce the same year. He moved to Dearborn, Michigan, where he told his parents that he worked in the automobile industry. In March 1965 he wrote to his parents that he had moved to Richmond, California, and he also sent a letter to his son Phil from Napa, California, the same month. His family never heard from him again and they reported him missing in 1965. When the family used detectives to attempt to find him in California and Indiana, they were unable to turn up anyone who knew him. Nichols worked using his real name until about 1976 according to the US Internal Revenue Service.
Nichols stole Chandler's identity in September 1978 in Rapid City, South Dakota, after applying for a Social Security card. He then moved to Cleveland, where he briefly worked for the Edko Company, an engineering business. Nichols later worked as an electrical designer and draftsman for Lubrizol, a chemical company headquartered in Wickliffe, Ohio. The company laid him off in 1997. He had claimed to have a sister named "Mary Wilson"; however, the address he provided for her in Columbus, Ohio, was fictitious. It was eventually revealed that Nichols was actually born at the same address in New Albany.
Nichols was described as being a hermit who left his home only to go to work and eat. Co-workers have said he rarely talked to anyone and appeared to have few or no friends. In one instance at a Halloween gathering in 1992, he came to the event dressed as a gangster, yet talked to no one the entire night. He also took part in behavior perceived as eccentric and unusual, such as listening to white noise for hours, and once drove to an L.L. Bean store in Maine, only to promptly turn around and drive back to Ohio after discovering that there were no spots available in the store's parking lot. In 1989 he arrived at a local hospital with lacerations to his penis, claiming to have received them via a vacuum cleaner. He also had a knack for tinkering, and made homemade electronic devices. He had a computer that he occasionally used, which was accidentally broken by the first set of investigators who worked on the case. According to these investigators, searches related to Nazism and "plastic explosives" were found on his computer.
Suicide.
His body was discovered in his apartment on July 30, 2002. He was believed to have killed himself about a week earlier; he had shot himself in the mouth with a .38-caliber Charter Arms revolver he had purchased a few months earlier. On his calendar he had marked down the days until his suicide, and before he shot himself he closed the blinds and turned off the air conditioning, likely to quicken the decomposition process. He had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer, which may have influenced his decision to end his own life.
He had $82,000 in his bank account and had listed his co-workers as emergency contacts. His identity theft was revealed only when authorities could not find any relatives and discovered that the real Chandler had died decades prior. Authorities were unable to find any usable fingerprints to assist in identification and were able to get a DNA sample only after discovering he had visited a Lake County, Ohio, hospital for colon cancer surgery back in 2000.
Theories.
Authorities had speculated that he was a fugitive of some kind, possibly on the run after having committed one or more violent crimes. There are many theories about what he may have been hiding from, none of which have been confirmed.
Some internet sleuths suggested that he might have been the infamous unidentified serial murderer known as the Zodiac killer, as he did somewhat resemble police sketches of the Zodiac, and was known to have lived in California, where the Zodiac operated. Another theory was that he may have been a fugitive named Steven Campbell, an engineer from Cheyenne, Wyoming wanted for attempted murder. Authorities also considered the possibility that he could have been a German soldier or Nazi official from the Second World War who had fled to the United States in an attempt to escape prosecution for alleged war crimes.
Investigators are also following a potential link to the unsolved 1989 murder of Amy Mihaljevic.
Identification.
In 2014, at the request of the local police, Peter J. Elliott, United States Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio, reopened the Chandler case. Based on DNA extracted from a tissue sample from a Lake County, Ohio hospital, a CODIS profile was generated, but no hits were found. In 2016, he asked forensic genealogist Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick to compare Chandler's Y-STR profile obtained from a tissue sample to the public Y-STR genetic genealogy databases. A match indicated his possible surname as Nicholas or Nichols. In 2018, Fitzpatrick and Press's organization DNA Doe Project used autosomal SNP analysis, with bioinformatics analysis of the DNA results performed by Full Genomes Corporation, and the use of GEDmatch, a public personal genomics database, to find DNA matches, to identify Chandler as an engineering draftsman from New Albany, Indiana, named Robert Ivan Nichols. A CODIS match with Phil Nichols, Robert Nichols' son, confirmed the identification.


CDuce

CDuce is an XML-oriented functional language, which extends XDuce in a few directions.
It features XML regular expression types, XML regular expression patterns,
XML iterators. CDuce is not strictly speaking an XML transformation language since
it can be used for general-purpose programming.
CDuce conforms to basic standards: Unicode, XML, DTD, Namespaces are fully supported, XML Schema is partially supported.


Bokode

A bokode is a type of data tag which holds much more information than a barcode over the same area. They were developed by a team led by Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab. The bokode pattern is a tiled series of Data Matrix codes. The name is a portmanteau of the words bokeh—a photographic term—and barcode. Rewritable bokodes are called bocodes. They are circular with a diameter of . A bokode consists of an LED covered with a photomask and a lens. They are readable from different angles and from away by any standard digital camera. Powered bokodes are relatively expensive because of the LED and the power it requires. However, prototypes have been developed which function passively with reflected light like a typical barcode.
Bokodes convey a privacy advantage compared to radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags: bokodes can be covered up with anything opaque, whereas RFID tags must be masked by material opaque to radio frequencies, such as the sleeve provided by the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles when issuing their enhanced state IDs.


Lee Hays

Lee Hays (March 14, 1914 – August 26, 1981) was an American folk-singer and songwriter, best known for singing bass with the Weavers. Throughout his life, he was concerned with overcoming racism, inequality, and violence in society. He wrote or co-wrote "Wasn't That a Time?", "If I Had a Hammer", and "Kisses Sweeter than Wine", which became Weavers' staples. He also familiarized audiences with songs of the 1930s labor movement, such as "We Shall Not Be Moved".
Childhood.
Hays came naturally by his interest in folk music since his uncle was the eminent Missouri and Arkansas folklorist Vance Randolph, author of, among other works, the bestselling "Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales" and "Who Blewed Up the Church House?". Hays' social conscience was ignited when at age five he witnessed public lynchings of African-Americans.
He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the youngest of the four children of William Benjamin Hays, a Methodist minister, and Ellen Reinhardt Hays, who before her marriage had been a court stenographer. William Hays's vocation of ministering to rural areas took him from parish to parish, so, as a child, Lee lived in several towns in Arkansas and Georgia. He learned to sing sacred harp music in his father's church. Both his parents valued learning and books. Mrs. Hays taught her four children to type before they began learning penmanship in school, and all were excellent students. There was a gap in age of ten years between Lee and next oldest sibling, his brother Bill.
In 1927, when Lee was thirteen, his childhood came to an abrupt end as tragedy struck the family. The Reverend Hays was killed in an automobile accident on a remote road and soon afterward Lee's mother had to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Lee's sister, who had begun teaching at Hendrix-Henderson College, also broke down temporarily and had to quit her job to move in with their oldest brother in Boston, Massachusetts.
Teenage years.
The period immediately following his father's death was so painful that Lee Hays could not bring himself to talk much about it, even to Doris Willens, the writer he selected to be his biographer. His brothers, both recently married, sent him to Emory Junior College in Georgia from which he graduated in 1930 at sixteen (but already over six feet tall and looking much older than his years). He traveled alone to enroll at Hendrix-Henderson College (now Henderson State University) in Arkansas, the Methodist school that his father and siblings had attended, but the expense of their mother's institutionalization and the effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 meant that college tuition money was not available for Lee. Instead he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where his oldest brother, Reuben, who worked in banking, was now located. Reuben found Lee a job as a page in a public library. There the rebellious Hays embarked on an extensive program of self-education, becoming radicalized in the process:
Every book that was considered unfit for children to read was marked with a black rubber stamp. So I'd go through the stacks and look for these black stamps. Always the very best books. They weren't locked-up books, just books that would not normally issued to children—D. H. Lawrence, a number of European novels. Reading those books was like doors opening. Don't forget that the fundamentalist South was a closed, fixed society. The world was made in six days; everything was foreordained and fixed in the universe. ... This was the time of the Great Depression ... the whole country was in the grip of a terrible sickness, which troubled me as it did everyone else. And I didn't understand it until I started reading Upton Sinclair and the little mag[azines]. ... Somewhere along in there I became some kind of Socialist, just what kind, I have never figured out.
In 1932, Hays moved out of his brother's house into a room at the Cleveland YMCA, where he stayed for two years. Hearing about the activities of the radical white Presbyterian minister Claude C. Williams, a Christian Marxist who had become converted to the cause of racial equality and was trying to organize a coal miners' union in Paris, Arkansas, Hays decided to return to Arkansas and join Williams in his work. He enrolled at the College of the Ozarks, a Presbyterian school that allows students to work in lieu of tuition, intending to study for the ministry and devote his life to the poor and dispossessed. There he met a fellow student, Zilphia Johnson (later Zilphia Horton), another acolyte of Williams, who was to become almost as important in Hays' life as Williams himself. An accomplished musician and singer, Zilphia had broken with her father, who was the owner of the Arkansas coal mine that Williams was trying to organize, and had become a union organizer herself. Hays moved in with Williams and his family: "I got to be his [Williams'] chief helper for quite a while", he later wrote. From 1934 to 1940, writes Doris Willens, "Williams was the dominant figure in Hays' life—a surrogate father—a man of the cloth but with a radical difference". The following year, Williams was dismissed by the elders of his Paris, Arkansas, church for being too radical (i.e., for fraternizing with blacks) and was subsequently jailed, beaten, and almost killed when he tried to organize an interracial hunger march of tenant farmers in Fort Smith, Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border. His life was saved only because his activities attracted newspaper publicity and the attention of northerners. One of these was Willard Uphaus, a professor of divinity at Yale University, who had recently been appointed executive secretary of the National Religion and Labor Foundation, and who became Williams' admirer and supporter. After his release from jail, Williams moved his family away from Fort Smith to Little Rock to get them out of harm's way. Hays dropped out of school in order to follow them, living on odd jobs for a time. He then went to visit Zilphia, who had married Myles Horton, a founder and the director of the Highlander Folk School, an adult education and labor organizing school in Monteagle, Tennessee.
At Highlander, Zilphia Horton directed music, theater, and dance workshops. During a miner's union meeting in Tennessee, she recruited Hays as a song leader: "When Zilphia got up and said, 'Brother Lee Hays will now lead us in singing', I damn near dropped through the floor. There was no backing out; I had to take the plunge and I've been doing it ever since." Later, he wrote that "Claude [Williams] and Zilphia [Horton] did more to change and shape my life than any people I can recall."
In her drama classes at Highlander Zilphia borrowed the techniques of the New Theater League in New York, which encouraged participants to create plays out of their own experience, which would then be staged at labor conferences. It was a revelation for Hays to see how the arts could serve to empower people for social action. He decided to go to New York and study playwrighting himself.
Armed with a letter of introduction from Claude Williams and Willard Uphaus, Hays became a resident at a student program at New York City's progressive Judson Memorial Church. There, he and a friend, Alan Hacker, a photojournalist, raised funds to make a documentary film about the plight of Southern sharecroppers and about efforts at Highlander and elsewhere to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), one of the first racially integrated labor unions in the United States. In preparation, Hays and Hacker took classes with photographer Paul Strand, among others. They shot the film in Mississippi at an experimental Quaker-run cooperative inter-racial cotton farm. Even so, they were harassed by local planters and their scripts and notebooks were stolen and had to be recreated from memory. The film, "America's Disinherited", which due to limited funds was quite brief, premiered at the Judson Church in May 1937 and was shown in schools and other venues (a copy is now in the film archives of the Museum of Modern Art). It demonstrates the use of singing in building a movement: "The turning point in the film is when an image of clenched black and white hands is followed by one of biracial strikers marching and singing 'Black and white together / We shall not be moved'". Shortly after it was completed, Alan Hacker died of an illness he had contracted during the filming.
During this period Hays also wrote a play about the STFU, "Gumbo" (a word used by the sharecroppers for their soil), which was produced at Highlander.
Commonwealth College.
In 1937, when Claude Williams was appointed director of Commonwealth College in Mena Arkansas, a labor organizing school, he hired Lee Hays to direct a theater program. The school newspaper, the "Commonwealth Fortnightly", announced that:
Lee Hays, a native of Little Rock, will join Commonwealth's faculty at the beginning of the fall quarter ... to teach Workers' Dramatics and to supervise Commonwealth's drama groups.
The announcement noted that as former assistant to the drama director at Highlander Folk School and a member of the Sharecropper Film Committee which produced "America's Disinherited": "Lee [Hays] brings with him to Commonwealth valuable experience and ability."
While at Commonwealth, Hays and his drama group wrote and produced numerous plays, of which one by Hays, "One Bread, One Body", toured with considerable success. He also compiled a 20-page songbook of union organizing songs based on hymns and spirituals. Playwright and fellow student Eli Jaffe said that Hays "was deeply religious and extremely creative and imaginative and firmly believed in the Brotherhood of Man." Waldemar Hille, who was the dean of music at Elmhurst College in Chicago and who had spent Christmas of 1937 at Commonwealth, thought that Hays was the most talented person at the college and was particularly enchanted with the folk songs and singing he encountered there. By the next year, however, another observer noted that the "brilliant" and hitherto energetic Hays appeared "disheveled" and was "sick all the time". Doris Willens, his biographer, speculates that Hays's physical and mental states were possibly a response to the ongoing tribulations of his mentor and of Commonwealth College.
Long subject to the virulent hostility of its neighbors and in dire financial straits, the embattled school was riven by internecine struggles between its more radical members and the more moderate socialists on its board. In 1940 the board expelled the avowedly Marxist Claude Williams for allegedly allowing Communist infiltration and for being excessively preoccupied with the issue of racial discrimination, and soon after, the institution was disbanded.
The Almanacs and World War II.
As the clouds gathered around Commonwealth College, Hays headed north to New York, taking with him his collection of labor songs, which he planned to turn into a book. But a short stayover in Philadelphia with the poet Walter Lowenfels and his hospitable family turned into a long visit. The German-born Lowenfels, a highly cultured man and a modernist poet who was fascinated by Walt Whitman and edited a book of his poetry, became another surrogate father to Hays, influencing him deeply. (Together the two men later wrote, perhaps Hays' best song, "Wasn't That a Time?") Under Lowenfels' influence, Hays also began to write modernist poems, one of which was published in "Poetry" Magazine in 1940. He also had pieces based on Arkansas folklore published in "The Nation". Publication of these pieces led to his forming a friendship with another "Nation" contributor, Millard Lampell.
Arriving in New York, Hays and Lampell became roommates. They were soon joined by Pete Seeger, who like Hays was also contemplating putting together an anthology of labor songs. Together the trio began to sing at left-wing functions and to call themselves the Almanac Singers. It was a somewhat fluid group that included Josh White and Sam Gary and later Sis Cunningham (a fellow Commonwealth College alumna), Woody Guthrie (with whom Hays collaborated on his 1940 debut album, "Dust Bowl Ballads"), and Bess Lomax Hawes, among others. The Almanac's first album, issued in May 1941, was the controversial "Songs for John Doe", comprising six pacifist songs, two of them co-written by Hays and Seeger and four by Lampell. The songs attacked the peacetime draft and the big U.S. corporations which were then receiving lucrative defense contracts from the federal government while practicing racial segregation in hiring. Since at that time isolationism was associated with right-wing conservatives and business interests, the pro-business but interventionist "Time Magazine" lost no time in accusing the left-wing Almanacs of "scrupulously echoing" what it called "the mendacious Moscow tune" that "Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J. P. Morgan war" ("Time", June 16, 1941). Concurrently, in the "Atlantic Monthly", Carl Joachim Friedrich, a German-born but anti-Nazi professor of political science at Harvard, deemed the Almanacs treasonous and their album "a matter for the Attorney General" because subversive of military recruitment and morale. On June 22, Hitler unexpectedly broke the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact and attacked Russia. Three days later, Franklin Roosevelt, threatened by black labor leaders with a huge march on Washington protesting segregation in defense hiring and the army, issued Executive Order 8802 banning racial and religious discrimination in hiring by recipients of federal defense contracts. The army, however, refused to desegregate. Somewhat mollified, nevertheless, labor leaders canceled the march and ordered union members to get behind the war and to refrain from strikes; copies of the isolationist "Songs for John Doe" were destroyed (a month after being issued). Asked by an interviewer in 1979 about his support of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Hays said: "I do remember that the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact was a very hard pill to swallow. . . . To this day I don't quite follow the line of reasoning behind that one, except to give Stalin more time." According to Hays's biographer, Doris Willens:
That the pact gave Stalin more time was the story then put out; millions around the world didn't buy it [in part because of Stalin's 1939 attack on Finland] and at that point lost faith in the Soviet Union . . . (Many others had lost faith earlier, during the Moscow purge trials.) But as a disciple of Claude [Williams], Lee in 1940 held firm with those who continued to believe that America and Britain were maneuvering not to defeat Nazi Germany, or rather, not just yet, but first to turn Hitler to their desired end of destroying the Soviet Union. ...
In short, 1940 was a bad time to say a good word for "peace." Worse, the only other voices opposing the war emanated from the extreme right, particularly America Firsters, a group suspected of harboring the hope that Hitler would eventually triumph . . . . Whatever uneasiness the Hitler-Stalin pact churned up, Lee hoped to submerge by throwing his vast energies into the service of the dynamic Congress of Industrial Organizations [(CIO)]—the challenger to the fat and lazy and bureaucratic old American Federation of Labor. A singing labor movement, that was the goal. If you got the unions singing, peace and brotherhood had to follow. It seemed so clear and simple.
The Almanacs, who now included Sis Cunningham, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and Bess Lomax Hawes, discarded their anti-war material with no regrets and continued to perform at union halls and at hootenanies. In June 1941 they embarked on a CIO tour of the United States, playing in Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle. They also issued several additional albums, including one, "Dear Mr. President" (recorded c. January 1942, issued in May), strongly supporting the war. Bad publicity, however, pursued them because of their reputation as former isolationists who had become pro-war "prematurely" (i.e., six months before Pearl Harbor). As key members, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, and Woody Guthrie joined the war effort (Seeger in the army and Guthrie and Houston in the Merchant Marine) the group disbanded. Hays was rejected from the Armed Forces because of a mild case of tuberculosis; and indeed, he felt sick all the time, missed performances, and developed a reputation for hypochondria. Even before this, Seeger and the other Almanacs found Hays difficult to work with and so erratic that they had asked him to leave the group.
People's Songs.
When the war ended, however, a group of songwriters gathered in Pete Seeger's in-laws' apartment in Greenwich Village and founded People's Songs, "organized to create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American people". They elected Pete Seeger president and Lee Hays executive secretary. Corporate counsel was Joseph R. Brodsky. In his new position Hays found some of his old energy returning. He wrote to friends, old and new (a new one was Fred Hellerman, later of the Weavers), who he thought might be interested. He brought in his old friend Waldemar Hille to be music editor of the People's Songs "Bulletin" and solicited songs and stories from Zilphia Horton, who sent in her new favorite, "We Shall Overcome". In its first year every issue of the People's Songs "Bulletin" featured a new song by Hays. One, written with Walter Lowenfels after a disastrous accident in a coal mine contained this verse:
<poem>
Do you know how the coalminers die
To bring you coal from the earth?
They die by the hundreds and they die by the thousands
And that is what your coal is worth.
</poem>
Bernard Asbell, a member of People's Songs, who in 1961 wrote the best-selling book, "When FDR Died", recalled:
When I think of that period I think of Pete and Lee. Lee and Pete. Lee's deep bass singing "Roll the Union On". He and Pete are the two guys who made folk music serve political purposes. .. . Lee was the one with the sense of history, who tied it all together. He was the one who brought the sharecroppers in, and the union songs based on hymns. His images inspired us... convinced us that the Left was the great continuum of the American tradition, or at least that it was part of the mainstream of the American tradition. Lee thought in terms of events, history; he saw large, and that rubbed off on the rest of us. He was the philosopher of the folk music movement. He stretched the canvas. And he was funny—and God, we needed that. There wasn't much humor around.
Although the first year of People's Songs was very successful, once again his co-workers found Hays "difficult" and indecisive. At a board meeting in late 1946, Pete Seeger proposed Hays be replaced as executive secretary with energetic young friend of his, Felix Landau, whom Pete had met during his army days in Saipan. In retrospect, Pete confessed "I think it was a mistake. Lee's perceptions were probably truer than mine."
Crushed, Hays returned to Philadelphia to stay with Walter Lowenfels and family. From there he began contributing a weekly column to the People's Songs "Bulletin" aiming to educate younger people about Claude Williams and the labor and civil rights struggles of the 1930s.
In 1948, People's Songs put all of its efforts into supporting the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket. Not long after Wallace's decisive defeat, People's Songs went bankrupt and disbanded. A spinoff, however, People's Artists, showed somewhat more vitality.
The Thanksgiving after Wallace's defeat, People's Songs decided to put on a fundraising hootenanny that included folk dances from many lands. A group of People's Artists, comprising Seeger, Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert, worked up a musical accompaniment to the dances, which they called (in the "One World" spirit of the Progressive movement) "Around the World". It featured an Israeli song, the Appalachian "Flop-eared mule", and "Hey-lally-lally-lo" from the Bahamas. The audience went wild. In 1949 the new quartet began appearing at leftist functions and soon they were featured on Oscar Brand's WNYC radio show as "The No Name Quartet". Four months later they settled on a name: the Weavers.
People's Artists sponsored the concert given by Paul Robeson and classical pianists Leonid Hambro and Ray Lev in Peekskill, New York, that sparked the Peekskill Riots on September 4, 1949. The Weavers were present. Hays escaped in a car with Guthrie and Seeger after a mob claiming to be anti-communist patriots attacked the cars of audience and performers after the show. Hays wrote a song, "Hold the Line", about the experience, that the Weavers recorded on Charter records with Robeson and writer Howard Fast. If I Had a Hammer", written with Pete Seeger and also recorded on the Charter label, dates from this embattled period.
A few months later, in December, the Weavers began an incredibly successful run at the Village Vanguard. One fan, Gordon Jenkins, a bandleader who had had numerous hits under his belt and was a director of Decca records, returned night after night. Born in Missouri, Jenkins was especially entranced with Lee Hays' folksy stage patter, laced with colorful Ozark anecdotes. Jenkins convinced his reluctant fellow executives at Decca to record the group. Jenkins backed them up with his own lush string orchestra and huge chorus, but tactfully and with care, so as not to obscure the words and musical personalities of the groups' personnel. To everyone's surprise, the Weavers, who seemed to fit into no musical category, produced billboard hit after billboard hit, selling millions of singles. However, the Korean War had begun and the red scare was in full swing. In September 1950, "Time" magazine reviewed them this way:
The Weavers and the Red Scare.
In 1950, Pete Seeger was listed as a probable subversive in the anti-communist pamphlet "Red Channels" and was placed on the entertainment industry blacklist along with other members of the Weavers. Lee Hays was denounced as a member of the Communist Party during testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities by Harvey Matusow, a former Communist Party member (he later recanted).
Their records dropped from Decca's catalog and from radio broadcasts, and unable to perform live on television, radio, or in most music venues, the Weavers broke up in 1952. Subsequently, Hays liked to maintain that another entertainer, called Lee Hayes, spelled with an "e", was also banned from entertaining because of the similarity of his name. "Hayes couldn't get a job the whole time I was blacklisted," he claimed.
Hays spent the blacklist years rooming with the family of fellow blacklist victim Earl Robinson (composer of "The House I Live In", "Ballad for Americans", and "Joe Hill"), in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. He wrote reviews and short stories, one of which, "Banquet and a Half", published in "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine" and drawing on his experiences in the South in the 1930s, was the recipient of a prize and was reprinted in the U.S. and Britain. In 1953, Hays' mother, whom he had seen only once since her entry into custodial care, died. In 1955 he was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities: he declined to testify, pleading the Fifth Amendment. 1955 was also the year of a sold-out Weavers Carnegie Hall reunion concert. The Weavers had not lost their audience appeal—the LP of the concert ("The Weavers at Carnegie Hall") issued two years later by Vanguard, was one of the three top-selling albums of the year. This led to a tour (made difficult by Hays' invalidism and anxieties), another album, and more tours, including one to Israel.
Later life.
In 1958, Hays began recording a series of children's albums with the Baby Sitters, a group that included a young Alan Arkin, the son of a family friend of the Robinsons. After the great financial success of Peter Paul and Mary's cover of "If I Had a Hammer" in the mid-1960s, Hays, whose mental and physical health had been shaky for years, lived mostly on income from royalties.
In 1967, he moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York where he devoted himself to tending his organic vegetable garden, cooking, writing, and socializing. He wrote to a friend that in his new surroundings he had no idea how to earn new money but that, "Having a listed number with no fear of Trotskyite crank calls is a huge relief". At the insistence of his old friend Woody's son, Arlo Guthrie, however, he did appear, playing himself as a preacher at a 1960 evangelical meeting, in the film "Alice's Restaurant" (1969), based on Arlo's hit song of that name.
Hays, who had always been overweight, had been diagnosed in 1960 with diabetes, a condition the doctors thought he had probably suffered from, along with TB, for many years previously. This led to a heart condition and he was fitted with a pacemaker. Both his legs eventually had to be amputated. Younger friends, among them Lawrence Lazare and Jimmy Callo, helped to take care of him.
His bad health notwithstanding, Hays performed in several Weavers reunion concerts, the last of which was in November 1980 at New York City's Carnegie Hall. His last public performance with the group took place in June 1981 at the Hudson River Revival in Croton Point Park. Two months later he was dead. The documentary film "", for which Hays had written the script, was released in 1982.
Near the end of his life Hays, wrote a farewell poem, "In Dead Earnest", inspired perhaps by Wobbly organizer Joe Hill's lyrical "Last Testament" but with an earthy Ozark frankness:
<poem>
"In Dead Earnest"
If I should die before I wake,
All my bone and sinew take:
Put them in the compost pile
To decompose a little while.
Sun, rain, and worms will have their way,
Reducing me to common clay.
All that I am will feed the trees
And little fishes in the seas.
When corn and radishes you munch,
You may be having me for lunch.
Then excrete me with a grin,
Chortling, "There goes Lee again!"
'Twill be my happiest destiny
To die and live eternally.
</poem>
He died on August 26, 1981 from diabetic cardiovascular disease at home in Croton, and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were mixed with his compost pile.


Laura Whitehorn

Laura Jane Whitehorn (born April 1945) is an American activist who participated in the 1983 United States Senate bombing and was imprisoned 14 years in federal prison. In the 1960s, she organized and participated in civil rights and anti-war movements.
Early days.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Whitehorn holds a master's degree from Brandeis University. After working as an organizer for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Whitehorn became a member of the Weathermen/The Weather Underground organization in 1969. She traveled with them to Havana, Cuba as part of the organization's instruction in the ideology of Marxism and urban warfare, visiting one of the camps established by Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine.
"The Days of Rage".
On October 6, of that same year, the Weathermen blew up an 1889 commemorative nine-foot bronze statue of a Chicago policeman located in Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, preceding several days of street fighting between protesters and police. According to FBI records, the "Days of Rage" or the "National Action" rapidly degenerated into destructive riots and open confrontations with Chicago Police, leaving a vast amount of public property destroyed, including 100 shattered windows in the vicinity. The Weather Underground Organization (WUO) made a number of demands, primarily related to the Vietnam War. Whitehorn, along with approximately 55 other people, was arrested for her participation in the violence. A Federal Grand Jury in Chicago later returned a number of indictments charging WUO members with violation of Federal Antiriot Laws. The Antiriot Law charges were dropped in January 1974.
Townhouse explosion.
The March 6, 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion was a culmination of the political direction in which Weatherman had been headed, according to Whitehorn. "We were out of touch with what was going on, and we lost sight of the fact that if you're a revolutionary, the first thing you have to try to do is preserve human life." Three Weathermen died in the explosion, Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton, and Ted Gold.
Whitehorn said great care was taken during the numerous bombings to ensure that no one would be hurt, including the janitorial staff.
Feminist education.
In 1971, Laura Whitehorn helped organize and lead a takeover and occupation of a Harvard University building by nearly 400 women to protest the war in Vietnam and demand a women's center. One of the founders of the Boston/Cambridge Women's School, Whitehorn helped establish the school as an alternative source of feminist education. Operated and taught by a collective of female volunteers until it closed in 1992, Boston/Cambridge Women's School had gained the reputation as the longest running women's school in the United States at the time.
Climate of militancy.
The dead end of militancy and violence for their own sake was obvious after the townhouse explosion, says Whitehorn. Events at the 1972 Republican National Convention protest led Whitehorn to question once more the need for militancy, confirming her belief that they should allow for militancy when guided by a political framework, but not militancy for militancy's sake.
Battle of Boston.
During the Boston busing crisis, which the WUO referred to as "the Battle of Boston," Whitehorn was among a small group of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC) activists in the Boston area who sat with baseball bats in people's homes, protecting families from local white supremacists who tried to attack with bats, Molotov cocktails and spray-paint. While Whitehorn and other members of the aboveground cadre carried out their vigilance for two years, the WUO engaged in only minor confrontational tactics in response to the Boston crisis.
Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.
The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, of which Whitehorn was a member, planned the Hard Times Conference (with WUO support and leadership) as a way to build a national multiracial coalition. The goal was to bring together a multiracial crowd of more than 2,000 people at the University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago, from January 30 to February 1, 1976. The slogan for the conference was "Hard Times are Fighting Times."
Even though attendance far surpassed what the WUO and PFOC had anticipated, the conference became a political disaster. Whitehorn was so nauseated by the politics of the conference that she became physically ill in the middle of it. "I hated it more than anything else I've ever done, she told Nicole Kief in an interview on October 20, 2002. She began to pull away from the WUO.
By the early 1980s, Whitehorn was active in a variety of radical organizations, in addition to the May 19 Communist Organization, including the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, a radical art group named for Nguyen Thi Binh, the Viet Cong's lead negotiator at the Paris Peace Talks. During this time, Whitehorn worked with subversive movements in Rhodesia, South Africa and Palestine.
Bombings: the May 19 Communist Organization.
The May 19 Communist Organization, also known as the May 19th Coalition and the May 19 Communist Movement, was a self-described revolutionary organization formed by splintered-off members of the Weather Underground. Originally known as the New York Chapter of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), the group was active from 1978 to 1985. Between 1983 and 1985, the group bombed the United States Senate as well as three military installations in the Washington D.C. area and four sites in New York City.
Arrests.
On May 11, 1985 group members Marilyn Buck, wanted for her role in the 1981 Brinks armored car robbery, and Linda Sue Evans were arrested in Dobbs Ferry, New York by FBI agents who had trailed them in the hope the pair would lead them to other fugitives. Whitehorn was arrested the same day in a Baltimore apartment rented by Buck and Evans. At the time of the arrests, group members Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were already under arrest, Rosenberg for explosives and weapons charges connected with the Brinks robbery, Blunk for similar charges. Fugitive group members Alan Berkman and Elizabeth Ann Duke were captured by the FBI 12 days later near Philadelphia; however, Duke jumped bail and disappeared before trial. The case became known as the Resistance Conspiracy Case.
Indictment, plea and sentencing.
On May 12, 1988, the seven members of the group under arrest were indicted. The indictment described the goal of the conspiracy as being "to influence, change and protest policies and practices of the United States Government concerning various international and domestic matters through the use of violent and illegal means" and charged the seven with bombing the United States Capitol Building, three military installations in the Washington D.C. area, and four sites in New York City. The military sites bombed were the National War College at Fort McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Computer Center, and the Washington Navy Yard Officers Club. In New York City, the sites bombed were the Staten Island Federal Building, the Israeli Aircraft Industries Building, the South African consulate, and the offices of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.
On September 6, 1990 "The New York Times" reported that Whitehorn, Evans and Buck had agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and destruction of Government property. Prosecutors agreed to drop bombing charges against Rosenberg, Blunk and Berkman, who were already serving long prison terms (Rosenberg and Blunk 58 years, Berkman 10) for possession of explosives and weapons. Whitehorn also agreed to plead guilty to fraud in the possession of false identification documents found by the FBI in the Baltimore apartment.
At the December 6, 1990 sentencing of Whitehorn and Evans by Federal District Judge Harold H. Greene, in a courtroom packed with supporters, Whitehorn was sentenced to 20 years in prison and Evans to an additional five years after completing a 35-year sentence being served for illegally buying guns. Buck was already serving 17 years on other convictions, and was later sentenced to a 50-year term for the Brinks holdup and other armed robberies.
On August 6, 1999 Whitehorn was released on parole after serving just over 14 years.
Years in prison.
During the 14 years Whitehorn served in prison, she directed AIDS education and wrote numerous publications. When asked if her political work ended once she was in prison, she replied that it had consisted basically of three areas: being a political prisoner, organizing and being part of the struggles for justice inside the prisons, and being part of the fight against HIV and AIDS.
Whitehorn lost many friends while she was in prison during some of the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. While Whitehorn served time in a Federal women's prison at Lexington, Kentucky, her father, Nathaniel, "Tanny" Whitehorn died on January 3, 1992. Whitehorn identifies many consequences of being behind bars for fourteen years, including losing someone you love. She notes that not being with them while they are dying, or being able to go to the memorial service afterwards, is just one way families are destroyed by prison.
Life after prison.
Since her release from prison in August 1999, Laura Whitehorn has been involved in a wide range of causes, including the release of political prisoners. She has contributed writings and art work to numerous books and articles, and has been a guest speaker at several universities, including an official guest of the African American Studies Department at Duke University in 2003, where she was presented as a human rights activist by Duke faculty. A past Senior Editor with "POZ Magazine" in New York City, much of her writing has to do with supporting AIDS healthcare providers and empowering patients through publications. Whitehorn is a member of the NY State taskforce on political prisoners, a group dedicated to supporting New York State "political prisoners" from the black liberation movement and anti-imperialist solidarity movement.
Laura Whitehorn appears in the documentary films, "OUT: The Making of a Revolutionary," directed by Sonja DeVries, and "The Weather Underground", (2002), directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, which includes a cast of former Weather Underground Organization members; Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Brian Flanagan, David Gilbert, Naomi Jaffe, and Mark Rudd.


Michael J. McGuire

Michael John McGuire (born June 29, 1947) is an American environmental engineer and writer whose career has focused on drinking water quality improvement. He has been recognized for his expertise in the control of trace organic and inorganic contaminants and microbial pathogens in water. He is also known for his work in the identification, control and treatment of taste and odor problems in drinking water. He has published numerous articles in professional journals and he has been the co-editor of five books and compilations of articles. He published a book that documented the first continuous disinfection of a drinking water supply in the U.S. He has been active in the American Water Works Association, and he has served as a volunteer and officer in that organization. In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Early life and education.
Michael J. McGuire was born in 1947 at Brooke General Army Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. He attended grammar school in a number of locations, because his father was in the U.S. Army and stationed in several places during McGuire's early years. From 1955 to 1957, McGuire attended the grammar school run for U.S. Army dependents in Orléans, France. He went to Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Virginia.
He earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. During the period 1970 to 1972, he attended Drexel University part-time while he worked for the Philadelphia Water Department. After earning his master's degree in Environmental Engineering in 1972, he returned to Drexel University on a full-time basis to study for his PhD degree. He completed his PhD and graduated in 1977.
Early career.
McGuire worked for the Philadelphia Water Department from 1969 to 1973. Throughout this period, he was assigned to the Research and Development Unit under Joseph V. Radziul. He participated in a variety of projects including the supervision of a research program that involved the surveillance of the water quality of the Delaware River Estuary. The program required operational supervision of a boat pilot, chemists, engineers, and technicians and the formulation of a data analysis program. He designed an unusual application of automated water quality analytical equipment aboard a research vessel. His other projects included investigation of the availability of future water resources, preparation of testimony given before governmental bodies, and investigation of the effects of urbanization on water quality and quantity.
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
McGuire moved to California in 1977 where he had a two-year stint with the consulting engineering firm, Brown and Caldwell. In 1979, he was offered a position as a water quality engineer with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (Metropolitan). He directed a variety of physical chemical treatment and environmental chemistry projects, and he ran the central water laboratory for Metropolitan. As Water Quality Manager and Director of Water Quality for Metropolitan he supervised the Water Quality Branch and Division, respectively, which grew to a total of 82 scientists, engineers and administrators. During this period he designed a comprehensive research program to determine the cause of earthy musty odor problems in six southern California reservoirs. Once the cause was isolated to blue-green algae growing on the bottom of the reservoirs, he devised a methodology to control the growth of the algae and prevent the occurrence of taste and odor problems in the Metropolitan service area. In 1984–85, he managed the conversion of Metropolitan's secondary disinfection system from free chlorine to chloramines.
In 1990, he became Assistant General Manager at Metropolitan where he was responsible for administration and environmental compliance. Five divisions reported to him in addition to Metropolitan's Affirmative Action Officer.
Consulting firms and teaching assignments.
In 1992, McGuire left Metropolitan and opened a one-man consulting engineering firm—McGuire Environmental Consultants, Inc. (MEC). After five years, he started to grow the firm until it ultimately had 37 employees in three offices: Santa Monica and Newport Beach, California and Denver, Colorado. During the period 1992 to 2000, McGuire was the leader of the Technology Working Group that fed information to the multi-stakeholder regulatory negotiations process (including the USEPA) which resulted in the adoption of five landmark drinking water regulations: Interim Surface Water Treatment Rule, Stage 1 Disinfectants and Disinfection Byproducts Rule, Information Collection Rule, Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule and Stage 2 Disinfectants and Disinfection Byproducts Rule.
In April 2005, the national engineering firm Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. purchased MEC. McGuire worked for Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. for a little more than three years as a vice president while he managed the Santa Monica, California office. He managed several major investigations including a demonstration project that showed how chlorite ion could control nitrification, and bench- and pilot-scale projects with Glendale, California that demonstrated the most cost-effective ways to remove hexavalent chromium from drinking water.
In August 2008, he left Malcolm Pirnie and opened up a one-man consulting firm, Michael J. McGuire, Inc. He has been providing consulting services in the field of drinking water quality to water utilities and related clients.
From 2010 to 2014, he was a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles where he taught a course in water treatment plant design. In 2014, he was appointed as Adjunct Professor at UCLA where he continued to teach courses in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the Institute of Environment and Sustainability. From 2014 to 2016, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the "Journal" American Water Works Association.
McGuire is a registered professional engineer in California, Arizona (inactive), Pennsylvania, New Jersey (inactive) and Texas (inactive). He is also a Board Certified Environmental Engineer through the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists.
Publications.
McGuire is a widely published author who has written and presented over 300 professional articles and co-edited five books and collected works. Subject areas for his publications include: treatment plant optimization, activated carbon adsorption of organic compounds, corrosion of distribution system materials, occurrence and control of disinfection byproducts, identification and control of tastes and odors, removal of asbestos fibers, perchlorate removal, control of chloramines and nitrification, removal of hexavalent chromium, compliance with drinking water regulations, oxidation with ozone and PEROXONE and the history of drinking water disinfection. In 2013, his book entitled, "The Chlorine Revolution: Water Disinfection and the Fight to Save Lives" was published by the American Water Works Association.
Professional associations.
McGuire has been a member of a number of professional associations. Since 1971, he has been active in the American Water Works Association. He was Vice President of AWWA from 1994 to 1996. He has been a member of the Water Environment Foundation for over 40 years. He is a member of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, American Academy of Environmental Engineers, American Chemical Society, American Society of Civil Engineers and the International Water Association.
He has participated in several committees of the National Research Council of the National Academies.
Honors.
McGuire received the George Warren Fuller Award in 1994 from AWWA. In 2001, he received the Publications Award from AWWA which is given to “recognize and honor the most notable contribution, scientific or practical, to the public water supply profession as published in the Journal AWWA….” In 2005 he received the George A. Elliot Award from the CA-NV Section AWWA and he was selected as an Honorary Member of AWWA in 2006. In 2009, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. and he was presented with the A.P. Black Research Award by AWWA. The citation for his election to the NAE reads “For scientific contributions that have improved the safety and aesthetics of drinking water.” In 2014, McGuire received the Dr. John L. Leal Award from AWWA. The award is given "for distinguished service to the water profession in commemoration of the sound medical/public health expertise and the courageous leadership advancing public health that characterized the life of Dr. John L. Leal." McGuire received the Abel Wolman Award of Excellence in 2016 from the American Water Works Association. The Abel Wolman Award is given “to recognize those whose careers in the water works industry exemplify vision, creativity and excellent professional performance characteristic of Abel Wolman's long and productive career.”


H. Emerson Blake

H. Emerson Blake (also credited as Emerson Blake, or Chip Blake) is an ecologist, writer, and editor of many books. He was formerly the editor-in-chief at Orion Magazine, executive director of the Orion Society, and editor-in-chief at Milkweed Editions.
Biography.
Blake is originally from Philadelphia. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder and finished his graduate work at Antioch University New England. While at Antioch, he helped found Whole Terrain, an environmentally-themed literary journal, and edited the first volume, Environmental Identity and Professional Choices (1992).
Though he studied ecology, Blake has been ensconced in the world of small publishing, editing, and nature writing. He was hired in 1992 at Orion Magazine as associate editor and continued as managing editor until 2003. When Milkweed Editions co-founder Emilie Buchwald retired in 2003, Blake took over as editor-in-chief of the small publishing company. In June 2005, Blake returned to take his current post as editor-in-chief of Orion Magazine and executive director of the Orion Society, moving on from Milkweed for personal reasons.
Books and essays he has edited have been nominated and won many awards including the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Literary Award, the John Oakes Award in Environmental Journalism, the Minnesota Book Award, the Oregon Book Award, and The New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has served as a judge for the Phil Reed Writing Award alongside Nikki Giovanni, Janisse Ray, Bill McKibben, Wilma Dykeman, and Jan DeBlieu.
He has served as a visiting faculty member at Sterling College in Craftsbury, Vermont.
Blake resides in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.


Takebackthefuture


Unbreakable International

Unbreakable International is an Australian media company responsible for film, television and music productions.
Film.
Feature film in development 2015.
Television.
"Bondi Ink Tattoo Crew" series one (10 × 60') goes behind the scenes at the busiest tattoo store in Australia during the frenetic summer season on the one and only Bondi Beach. A group of talented young artists show what they are really made of and, along with the help of the stars of NY Ink Mike Diamond and world-famous tattoo artist Megan Massacre the shop sees some incredible summer stories put into ink. An Unbreakable International Production for Network Ten (Australia).


Blogging in New Zealand

Blogging in New Zealand is dominated by a community of around 600 blogs that comment largely on New Zealand politics, society and occurrences. One list of over 200 "author-operated, public discourse" blogs in New Zealand (ranked according to traffic, links incoming, posting frequency and comments) suggests New Zealand blogs cover a wide range of ideological positions but lack female contributors. Blogging is an active part of the media of New Zealand.
Some personal blogs have been around since the mid 1990s, but there are now blogs about cities, science, law and fashion magazines. Political bloggers include current and former party apparatchiks such as David Farrar (Kiwiblog), Jordan Carter, Peter Cresswell and Trevor Loudon, and journalists and commentators such as Russell Brown and Martyn Bradbury.
Political blogs.
New Zealand politicians and political groups operate political blogs which, unlike overseas counterparts, allow comments. The former ACT party leader Rodney Hide often comments from within the House of Representatives and Craig Foss operates a personal blog. The Green Party expands on party press releases, and Labour MPs discuss policy and Parliamentary business. Blogging is a central campaigning tool for many political lobbying groups.
Relationship to politics.
A 2007 "New Zealand Herald" article by Bill Ralston described political bloggers as being potentially the most powerful "opinion makers" in New Zealand politics. A few weeks earlier the "National Business Review" had stated that, "Any realistic 'power list' produced in this country would include either [David] Farrar or his fellow blogger and opinion leader Russell Brown." And in 2008 "The Press" said that year's election "could be the time when New Zealand's burgeoning political bloggers finally make their presence felt". The article saw the increasing influence of the Internet (as opposed to television and radio) on people's lives and the number of professional journalists now maintaining blogs as the reason for the blogosphere's increased significance, alongside the fact that unlike newspapers blogs can link directly to facts and sources.
The blogosphere has also made an impact on parliament – Russell Brown is quoted as saying, "Every now and then you see a line from the blog turn up in a parliamentary speech" and in December 2007 then prime minister Helen Clark accused political journalists of "rushing to judgment" on their blogs.
Much of the research conducted on the New Zealand political blogosphere has conducted by Kane Hopkins and Donald Matheson. Their studies looked at how blogs were used during the 2005 and 2008 general elections, particularly what role blogs played in enhancing discourse on important election issues and possible implications on deliberative democracy. One study showed that blogs did little to determine mainstream media agendas, instead they were included to respond to and follow traditional media narratives.
Another study highlighted the significant growth of participation in a blogs comments section between the 2005 and 2008 general elections. For example, analysis showed that in Kiwiblog the number of comments in comparative sample grew from 2177 (from 401 individuals) to 6547 comments (from 532 individuals). However, the number of people who participated in the comments sections regularly (that is, they made more than 10 comments) was fewer than 100 individuals.
Controversies.
Tim Selwyn, an Auckland man convicted of sedition in 2006, is also a prominent blogger, often bringing up controversial points. The pamphlet for which he was convicted and imprisoned on a charge of sedition was published on his website. Selwyn was also criticised in parliament for sending letters about his prison experiences to his co-blogger Martyn 'Bomber' Bradbury, who posted them on the blog.
In January 2007 another controversial blog, CYFS Watch, appeared. The blog's stated aim was unveiling examples of alleged incompetence by the Child Youth and Family Service (known by its acronym CYFS) of the Ministry of Social Development. The Ministry responded to the publication of the blog, which published the details of several social workers, by complaining to internet company Google. The blog remained online until 22 February 2007 when Google deleted the site, due to the anonymous blogger making death threats towards Green MP Sue Bradford because of her Crimes (Abolition of Force as a Justification for Child Discipline) Amendment Bill 2005.
On 23 December 2009, Cameron Slater was charged with five counts of breaching name suppression orders. The charges relate to two blog posts that contained pictures which reveal the identities of two New Zealanders. On 11 January 2010, Slater published a blog post that used binary and hexadecimal code to reveal the identity of a person charged with indecent assault on a 13-year-old girl. The Nelson Bays police announced that they would investigate this further breach of New Zealand's name suppression laws.
On 1 June 2010, Dannevirke blogger Henk van Helmond was convicted of breaching a name suppression order and given a suspended sentence. The judge suppressed the publication of any details which might identify van Helmond's blog.
Relationship with media.
The majority of bloggers still rely upon the media for the provision of news stories to comment upon. However, they do not repeat the news, instead putting forward their viewpoint on it. The mainstream media at first was highly critical of bloggers. In January 2007 "The New Zealand Herald" printed an editorial that stated "[M]ost bloggers – and we're talking 95 per cent – are fly-by-night, gutless wonders who prefer to spit inarticulate venom under inarticulate pseudonyms." Since then though the newspaper has picked up multiple stories first broken on blogs (see below).
Some current and former bloggers have worked in or for the media industry, such as Russell Brown, Keith Ng, Tze Ming Mok and Dave Crampton. Political scientist Bryce Edwards who maintains the liberation blog has also been a guest columnist for "The New Zealand Herald" as has Geoffrey Miller of Douglas to Dancing.
Breaking news.
There have been many notable examples of bloggers breaking news stories and then having the media pick it up. For instance, Idiot/Savant found that neither Rodney Hide nor Heather Roy had been showing up to Parliament and consequently the ACT party had not voted in the 2006 budget debate. The story was subsequently picked up by the media. In February 2008 a blog post by Russell Brown about the Wikipedia article on Bill English being edited from a computer at Parliament received coverage in The New Zealand Herald. The story had first been broken on The Standard, a blog with links to the Labour Party.
A similar story was that of a computer at Air New Zealand being used to edit the Wikipedia article on Air New Zealand Flight 901 which was first mentioned on a website and later picked up by "The Press". In April 2008, blogger David Farrar revealed the Green Party's preliminary party list. The story was subsequently picked up by NZPA. In June blogger 'Skinny' revealed that a photo used in promotional material about the 2008 budget was of an American family, not a New Zealand one, and the story was then published in "The New Zealand Herald".
Local blogs.
There are numerous personal blogs. They range from music blogs to group blogs to local blogs. There are many long-running personal blogs, which have been around since the mid- or late-1990s, including Joanna McLeod (1998), Paul Reynolds (1997–2010), Robyn Gallagher (1996), and Bruce Simpson (1995).
With the development of the fashion industry in New Zealand, a lot of fashion blogs have appeared, most of them being online magazines. They include Thread, NZ Girl, Fashion NZ, Style Keeper, Stolen Inspiration, Lost in the Haze and The Late Club. A group of science, technology and medical bloggers are operating through the Science Media Centre and Royal Society of New Zealand.


The Fred Waring Show

The Fred Waring Show is an American television musical variety show that ran from April 17, 1949 to May 30, 1954 on CBS. The show was hosted by Fred Waring and featured his choral group "The Pennsylvanians".
Synopsis.
Sponsored by General Electric, the series aired every Sunday night at 9 p.m. after "The Ed Sullivan Show", excluding the summer months. It was initially 60 minutes in length, but its time slot was cut to 30 minutes beginning in January 1952. During the 1954 season, the show alternated on Sunday nights with "General Electric Theater". Focusing on currently popular music and standard tunes, the show included performances by his orchestra and large chorus, as well as dancing and sketches.
The show's theme was "Sleep", which was composed by Earl Burtnett and Adam Geibel. Bob Banner was the producer and director.
In 1957, "The Fred Waring Show" made a brief return to television as a summer replacement daytime series in the time slot usually occupied by "The Garry Moore Show". This version originated from a resort operated by Waring at Shawnee on Delaware, Pennsylvania.
A review of the program in the trade publication "Broadcasting" described the program as featuring "friendly banter with his crew, plus renditions of old-time favorite songs and ballads by the chorus and vocalists."
Conflict over control.
Producing the early Waring show caused conflicts between Waring and network officials over whether he should adapt performances to fit the new medium or whether TV should adapt its procedures to accommodate Waring's group's performances. Murray Forman wrote in his book, "One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television", "Fred Waring wrestled with CBS executives for direct input in the production and performances on his program ... seeking to assert greater autonomy and control over the show's musical performances."


Computer Originated World

The Computer Originated World (COW) was the method of creating the BBC1 symbol that was used between 18 February 1985 and 16 February 1991. It was later used by the international, commercial television service BBC World Service Television from its launch until 26 January 1995.
BBC1.
Launch.
The Computer Originated World replaced the previous "Noddy" globe symbols at 7 pm on 18 February 1985. Unusually, the new look was unveiled whilst the channel was still on the air rather than waiting for the following morning to launch it. The globe was created by the BBC graphics and BBC computer departments and work began in 1983. The need to replace the "Noddy" globes came about as the globes were the only mechanically produced idents around on television, as more and more television companies started to use computer graphics, made popular by the launch of Channel 4. The COW was originally planned to launch on 1 January 1985, but Michael Grade, then controller of BBC1, delayed the launch to coincide with a larger schedule change that accompanied the launch of the soap opera "EastEnders", and updated and renewed weather graphics. This launch was hoped to reinvent BBC1 following ratings slide and ever increasing competition from their commercial rivals at ITV.
The globe itself launched at 7 pm on 18 February, introducing one of the new flagship programmes: "Wogan", a chat show hosted by Terry Wogan and featuring a variety of guests. The old "Noddy" globe had been used throughout the day until the 7 pm launch.
Components of look.
The Computer Originated World itself is a semi-transparent blue globe with golden continents and gold "BBC1" legend located below the globe in a font similar to that used in the early days of the BBC. The globe revolved at a steady pace throughout, and had the effect of a spotlight added to the surface. The continents were placed in such a way that the continents appeared to float on the water. The caption had the option of displaying the legend 'Ceefax 170' and later 'Ceefax 888' in reference to the subtitles available with the programme. Regional variations also included a legend with the region name, also in gold, below the BBC1 legend. The globe was generated when needed by the computer programme located in a metal box. This box had switches on the front that could turn the BBC1 caption, regional caption and subtitles caption on and off, as these elements were added later. These generators were delivered to all 11 regions and installed before Christmas 1984.
The look also featured an altered clock face to that used previously. This clock was once again electronic, but was changed to a black background, blue counters and gold hands to match the ident. The updated BBC1 legend also featured below the clock. The nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as BBC Midlands, did receive their own variations of the clock, however it is not believed that any other English regions received their own variations. The network BBC One clock did not have a centre dot; this was never rectified throughout the run of the clock due to an oversight, however the dot was present on regional variations.
The new look also marked a change in programme slide design. These new slides featured the BBC1 legend upright and sideways in a black sidebar to the left of the screen. The remainder of the screen featured a picture of the programme and the programme name located at the bottom. However, the programme slides were still optically developed. This was changed in September 1988 when the introduction of Quantel Paintbox allowed captions to be created digitally. The design was altered slightly with the BBC1 legend made more textured, slightly smaller and moved to the bottom of the screen. The font was also changed to Optima, with text remaining in the same position. All this would now be located over the image rather than separate from it.
Promotions were not uniform, but were based on a seasonal scheme before being replaced. The promotions usually didn't contain any channel branding but would occasionally feature parts of the BBC1 legend in the design.
Christmas idents.
During Christmas times, the '1' and the globe was altered into a variety of guises. One was made for each year the ident was in existence, None were used by BBC Scotland, instead using their own idents.
BBC World Service Television.
Components of look.
Upon the launch of BBC World Service Television on 11 March 1991 to replace BBC TV Europe, the channel reused the COW symbol. Technically, the globe itself remained the same with changes made only to presentational style and the caption below the globe and the whole look being brought into line with corporate branding at the time.
The ident itself was modified with the caption beneath showing a BBC corporate logo, with the slanted legend 'World Service Television' beneath, in the same style as used for regional variations of the BBC1 ident at the time. No clock accompanied the look, due to the various time zones used around the world, with serious or news programming being introduced by the globe.
Presentational style mirrored by that used on BBC1 and 2 at the time, and featured a static globe, positioned with Britain, Europe and Africa in view, with BBC logo beneath located in the top left corner of the screen. The logo was present throughout the presentation. Static captions also featured this globe symbol in the top left corner, located in a sidebar of generic lines, with programme title overlaid the image at the bottom of the screen. The station was also unusual, in the fact that it had a static, opaque permanent digital on-screen graphic (DOG) of the BBC logo in the top right corner of the screen.
The look appears to have been dropped on 26 January 1995.
Replacement.
The look on BBC World Service Television was dropped in favour of a look consisting entirely of real and simulated flags on the screen, with a single large BBC logo in centre screen. This was to emphasise the role that news played on the channel, and to associate itself more closely as a news channel, rather than BBC1. This is primarily evident, as the look was reused for that purpose upon the channel's split into BBC World, as well as the original BBC Arabic Television.


Climate justice without borders


List of animated films in the public domain in the United States

The following is a list of animated films in the public domain in the United States for which there is a source to verify its status as public domain under the terms of U.S. copyright law. For more information, see List of films in the public domain in the United States. Films published before are not included because all such films are in the public domain (Note: while the film in and of itself may be in the public domain, the original versions may incorporate elements that remain under a separate copyright).
Some shorts listed here were produced for the United States government such as the "Private Snafu" series. Because they were produced for the U.S. government, they automatically fall into the public domain.
Warner Bros. Pictures.
The films listed below were last owned by Warner Bros. when the time for their renewals came up.
Source: "Film Superlist: Motion Pictures in the U.S. Public Domain"
United Artists.
The films listed below were last owned by United Artists when the time for their renewals came up.
Source: "Film Superlist: Motion Pictures in the U.S. Public Domain"
Universal Pictures.
The films listed below were last owned by Universal when the time for their renewals came up.
Source:
National Periodical Publications.
The films listed below were last owned by National Periodical Publications when the time for their renewals came up.
U.S. Government films.
The films listed below are works of the United States government, which makes them public domain.
Source: "Film Superlist: Motion Pictures in the U.S. Public Domain"


Tape head

A tape head is a type of transducer used in tape recorders to convert electrical signals to magnetic fluctuations and vice versa. They can also be used to read credit/debit/gift cards because the strip of magnetic tape on the back of a credit card stores data the same way that other magnetic tapes do. Cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes, 8-tracks, VHS tapes, and even floppy disks and modern hard drive disks all use the same principle of physics to store and read back information. The medium is magnetized in a pattern. It then moves at a constant speed over an electromagnet. Since the moving tape is carrying a changing magnetic field with it, it induces a varying voltage across the head. That voltage can then be amplified and connected to speakers in the case of audio, or measured and sorted into ones and zeroes in the case of digital data.
Principles of operation.
The electromagnetic arrangement of a tape head is generally similar for all types, though the physical design varies considerably depending on the application - for example videocassette recorders (VCR) use rotating heads which implement a helical scan, whereas most audio recorders have fixed heads. A head consists of a core of magnetic material arranged into a doughnut shape or toroid, into which a very narrow gap has been let. This gap is filled with a diamagnetic material, such as gold. This forces the magnetic flux out of the gap into the magnetic tape medium more than air would, and also forces the magnetic flux out of the magnetic tape medium into the gap. The flux thus magnetises the tape or induces current in the coil at that point. A coil of wire wrapped around the core opposite the gap interfaces to the electrical side of the apparatus. The basic head design is fully reversible - a variable magnetic field at the gap will induce an electric current in the coil, and an electric current in the coil will induce a magnetic field at the gap.
Reversibility.
While a head is reversible in principle, and very often in practice, there are desirable characteristics that differ between the playback and recording phases. One of these is the impedance of the coil - playback preferring a high impedance, and recording a low one. In the very best tape recorders, separate heads are used to avoid compromising these desirable characteristics. Having separate heads for recording and playback has other advantages, such as off-tape monitoring during recording, etc.
Head gap width.
The width of the head gap is also critical - the narrower the gap, the better the head will be - a narrow gap gives much better transcription in the magnetic domain (which equals to more output with high frequency signals in the case with playback heads). The desirability for a narrow gap means that most practical heads are made by forming a narrow V-shaped groove in the back face of the core, and grinding away the front face until the V-groove is just breached. In this way, gaps of the order of micrometres are achievable.
A record head, on the other hand, has a gap typically six times larger than that of the replay head, this gives a larger flux to magnetise the tape. The ideal gap size in a cassette deck are; wide record head gap and narrow playback head. The larger gap does not affect frequency response because the 'image' is largely made by the trailing edge of the gap. A combined record/replay head has a compromise size gap typically three times that of a replay only head.
There are also negative aspects of narrow head gaps, particularly for magnetic recording. The narrower the head gap, the more bias signal must be used to maintain linearity of the signal on tape which in turn will reduce the high frequency headroom or SOL (Saturated Output Level), particularly with slower tape speeds. Manufacturers must find a compromise between intended tape speeds and head gaps for this reason.
Types.
The physical design of a head depends on whether it is fixed or rotating. In either case, the face of the head where the gap is must be made hard wearing and highly smooth to avoid excessive head wear. It can also be seen that due to the construction method of the head gap, head wear will tend to widen the gap, reducing the head's performance over time. The vertical alignment of the heads (the azimuth) must also match between recording and playback for good fidelity, and the gap should be as close to exactly vertical as possible for highest frequency response. Most tape transport mechanisms will allow fine mechanical adjustment of the azimuth of the heads. Sometimes this can be achieved by automatic circuitry - the actual mechanical azimuth adjustment being carried out by taking advantage of the piezo effect of certain types of crystal material.
Rotating heads.
Rotating play heads, as used in video recorders, digital audio tape and other applications, are used to achieve a high relative head/tape speed while maintaining a low overall tape transport speed. One or more transducers are mounted on a rotating drum set at an angle to the tape. The drum spins rapidly compared to the speed that the tape moves past it, so that the transducers describe a path of stripes across the tape, rather than linearly along it as a fixed head does. The wear characteristics of such helical scan heads are even more critical, and highly polished heads and tapes are required. The electrical signals of rotating heads are coupled either inductively or capacitively - there is no direct connection to the head coils.
Erase heads.
An erase head is constructed in a similar manner to a record or replay head, but has a much larger gap, or more frequently, two large gaps. The erase head is powered during recording from a high frequency source (usually the same oscillator that provides the AC bias). In some inexpensive cassette recorder designs, the erase head is a permanent magnet that is mechanically moved into contact with the moving tape only during recording. Permanent magnet erase heads are also sometimes used in machines that are equipped with DC bias.
Osbourne heads.
Instead of feeding both the bias signal and the audio signal into the same recording head, a few brands of audio tape recorder, notably Tandberg, Akai and its US cousin Roberts, used a separate bias head on the opposite side of the tape from the recording head; this system was termed cross-field.
Head materials.
Record and replay heads are traditionally made of soft iron (the softness is an essential requisite for good record and replay characteristics). This material features extremely good electro-acoustical properties, but wears away fairly rapidly with a consequent deterioration of performance. Some higher end recorders featured heads made from ferrite, which features excellent electro-acoustical properties while being a very hard material which resists wear. Its two main disadvantages are that it is brittle and easily damaged, and that it has a much higher noise output due to the Barkhausen effect. In more recent years, more exotic materials have appeared, some involving ceramics, which offer the best of both of the traditional materials.
Cleaning.
With use the head will become dirty with loose tape shedding. Video head cleaner can be used to clean video or audio or erase or control track heads.


Joshua Frank

Joshua Frank (born in Billings, Montana) is an investigative journalist, author and editor living in the United States and covers current political and environmental topics. Along with Jeffrey St. Clair he is the editor of the political magazine and website CounterPunch. His work appears in Seattle Weekly, OC Weekly and regularly at CounterPunch. Frank's investigative work has been supported by The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.
Frank graduated from Billings West High School in 1997 and holds a graduate degree in environmental conservation from New York University.


Meet the Mormons

Meet the Mormons is a 2014 American documentary film directed by Blair Treu and produced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The film documents the lives of six devout Mormons living in the United States, Costa Rica, and Nepal. The LDS Church donated all net proceeds from the theatrical release of the film to the American Red Cross.
Production.
The film was originally designed for viewing in the Legacy Theater in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City, but after screenings with test audiences, LDS Church leadership decided to release the film first in theaters across the United States. According to Jeffrey R. Holland, the film is "not a proselytizing effort but informative" and is an "opportunity to share who Mormons really are". The film is financed and distributed by the LDS Church, a first for the church. It is shot in documentary format and will be translated into 10 languages.
American singer-songwriter and actor David Archuleta sang the track "Glorious" for the film.
Featured people.
The film features Jermaine Sullivan, "The Bishop", and his family. Sullivan is an African-American who is an academic counselor at the University of Phoenix. He was bishop of a ward in Atlanta, Georgia when the film was made, and now serves as a stake president. The film also covers Sullivan's wife and children. Darius Gray was among the associates of Sullivan interviewed.
"The Coach", Ken Niumatalolo, head football coach at the United States Naval Academy.
"The Fighter", Carolina Muñoz Marin, an MMA fighter from Costa Rica who had a chance to go pro international, but she and her husband decided it would separate their family too much.
"The Humanitarian", Bishnu Adhikari, a man from Nepal, with a degree in engineering who is the country director for Choice Humanitarian in Nepal. The organization works to improve the living situation in rural parts of Nepal.
"The Candy Bomber", Gail Halvorsen, the United States Air Force pilot best known as the "Berlin Candy Bomber" who dropped candy to children during the Berlin airlift from 1948 to 1949.
"The Missionary Mom", Dawn Armstrong, her story is chronicled from the birth of a son when she was a teenager, abandonment by his biological father, meeting her current husband - who had both her oldest son and her deceased next oldest son sealed to him when they were married in the temple, to her oldest son leaving to serve a mission.
Release.
"Meet the Mormons" was released on October 10, 2014, in the United States by Purdie Distribution and Excel Entertainment. The LDS Church donated all net proceeds from the theatrical release of film to the American Red Cross. Beginning January 2015, the LDS Church began showing the film in all of its visitors' centers and historical sites.
Theme song.
The theme song from the documentary was "Glorious" originally written and recorded by Stephanie Mabey. It is found in her album "Wake Up Dreaming" released on August 1, 2012.
For the film version, the song was sung by David Archuleta, a finalist in season 7 of "American Idol". The Archuleta version was released as a single in English language accompanied by a music video. An alternative Spanish version as "Glorioso" was also released again sung by Archuleta.
Reception.
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 18% based on 11 reviews, with an average rating of 5.2 out of 10. On Metacritic the film has a score of 29 out of 100 based on reviews from 6 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".
The film has been criticized as propaganda. Critics felt the documentary lacked information about Mormon history, its tenets, and its controversies. Producer Jeff Roberts responded to these reviews saying, "Most reviewers wanted the movie to be controversial, but we wanted to tell stories about those who make up our base." Some reviewers praised the movie for its "slick" cinematography.
The film grossed $2,509,808 in its opening weekend, placing it outside the top 10. , it is listed 34th in revenue-producing documentary films.


Timothy R. McClanahan

Timothy R. McClanahan (born 1957 in New Haven, Connecticut) is a biologist and a senior conservation zoologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and is known for his work on the ecology of coral reefs. He lives and works in Mombasa, Kenya, where he studies the marine tropical ecosystems of the western Indian Ocean, and is the director of the WCS coral reefs program for eastern Africa.
Education and career.
McClanahan received his bachelor's degree with honours in 1981, from the department of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He completed his master of sciences in 1984 and later his doctorate of philosophy at the University of Florida, in 1990, under the chairmanship of the ecologist Professor Howard T. Odum.
In 1991, he started his work as a conservation zoologist, initially at the Coral Reefs Conservation Project and later under the Wildlife Conservation Society, where he is still working as a senior conservation zoologist based in Kenya.
He is also member on editorial boards of a number of international journals, such as "Conservation Biology", "Marine Ecology Progress Series", "Ecosystems", "Environmental Conservation", "Global Change Biology", and "Aquatic Conservation".
Works.
McClanahan has been working principally on coral reef ecology, most notably for the western Indian Ocean region (especially the African coast and Kenya), including interdisciplinary work about the effects of human activity like fishing on marine ecosystems.
He has published over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, thirty book chapters, edited four books, compiled seven symposium papers, and produced numerous other publications including popular articles, editorials, and book reviews. According to an evaluation by the International Scientific Information that summarizes the scientific literature, he is the second most cited coral reef scientist in the past 10 years.
Honours and fellowships.
McClanahan has been awarded:
He is also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute for Biological Sciences, American Society of Naturalists, East African Wildlife Society, Ecological Society of America, the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association, and the International Science for Reef Studies.


Abani Mukherji

Abaninath Mukherji (, , 3 June 1891 – 28 October 1937) was an Indian revolutionary and émigré based in the Soviet Union who co-founded the Communist Party of India (Tashkent group). His name was often spelt Abani Mukherjee.
Biography.
Early life.
Abani Mukherji was born in the city of Jabalpur. Abani Mukherji's father was Trailokyanath Mukherji. After leaving school, he moved to Ahmedabad, where he trained as a weaver, and in 1910 he was employed as an assistant weaving master at the Bangla Laxmi Cotton Mills. In 1912, he was sent to Japan and Germany to study weaving. In Germany, he encountered socialism. After returning to Calcutta in December of the same year, he was employed at another cotton mill, Andrew Yule Mill.
Revolutionary activities.
In 1914, Mukherji met Rash Behari Bose and joined the revolutionary movement. In 1915, he was sent to Japan to acquire weapons for the revolutionaries. According to British intelligence reports, he was active in the Hindu–German conspiracy. In September 1915, while on his return journey to India, he was arrested in Singapore and incarcerated at the Fort Canning prison there, where he remained until he escaped in the autumn of 1917. The exact details of his escape are unclear, but he told his friend Suniti Kumar Chatterji that he was assisted by a group of sympathetic Irish soldiers. Mukherji managed to reach Java in the Dutch East Indies, where he stayed until the end of 1919, living under the name of Dar Shaheer. In Java, he was in contact with Indonesian and Dutch revolutionaries and became a communist. He also travelled to Amsterdam and back. In Amsterdam, he met S.J. Rutgers, who recommended him as a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International.
Communist International.
In 1920, Mukherji traveled to Russia to take part in the Second Congress of the Communist International. There he met M. N. Roy, and with Roy and Roy's wife Evelyn he drafted a document which was published in "Glasgow Socialist" on 24 June 1920, under the title "The Indian Communist Manifesto". Like Mukherji, Roy had been an Anushilan Samiti member during his early political life.
Mukherji took part as a delegate in the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Petrograd between 19 July – 7 August 1920. In the Russian language notes of the Congress, he is listed as a 'left-socialist', without party affiliation being stated. At the Congress, Mukherji met Vladimir Lenin for the first time. Directly after the Congress, Mukherji traveled to Baku in Soviet Azerbaijan to represent India at the Congress of the Peoples of the East.
The Communist Party of India (Tashkent group) was founded in Tashkent on 17 October 1920, two months after the end of the Second Congress of the Communist International. The principal movers in the founding of the party were Roy and Mukherji. After the founding of CPI, Roy returned to Moscow whilst Mukherji was put in charge of the Indian Military School, with the task of training armed forces to fight British colonialism. The same year, Mukherji became a member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
The following year, 1921, Mukherji went to Moscow to attend the Third Congress of the Communist International as a delegate with a consultative vote. There he also took part in a meeting of Indian revolutionaries.
Also in 1921 Mukherji drafted a document on the Malabar uprising, which he sent to Lenin. In 1922, Roy and Mukherji together wrote the book "India in Transition", a Marxist analysis of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which the Communist International published in four languages in 1922. The book argued that the 1857 rebellion had failed to rid India of feudalism. Roy had assigned to Mukherji the task of gathering statistical data for the book.
Return to India.
In December 1922, Mukherji returned from Moscow to India clandestinely, via Berlin. He privately met local communist leaders on his way. Once in India, he was sheltered by the Anushilan Samiti in Dacca. After meeting S.A. Dange at the Gaya session of the Indian National Congress in December 1922, and after meeting Bengal communist groups, Mukherji moved to Madras, where he met Singaravelu Chettiar. Mukherji helped Chettiar with his efforts to form the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan and to draw up its manifesto. Mukherji later returned to the Soviet Union.
Split with Roy.
Roy and Mukherji did however part ways and became bitter enemies. Mukherji learnt that during his travel to India, Roy had sent a circular to the Indian communist groups denouncing him and claiming that he did not represent the Communist International. By the mid-1920s, the break between them was complete.
Mukherji took an uncompromising attitude towards cooperation with nationalist sectors. In 1928, he described the Workers and Peasants Party as 'the party that is accumulating by itself the elements of future Indian Fascism.'
1930s.
During the 1930s, most of Mukherji's work was academic. He was an indologist at the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and became president of the All Union Association of Orientalists. He also worked at the Communist Academy.
Death.
Mukherji fell victim to the Great Purge by Joseph Stalin in the late 1930s, but his death was only acknowledged by the Soviet Union after 1955. Mukherji was arrested on 2 June 1937. He was assigned for the first category of repression (execution by firearms) in the list "Moscow-Center" and executed on 28 October 1937.
Personal life.
In 1920, while in Russia, Mukherji met Rosa Fitingov, who was then an assistant to one of Lenin's private secretaries, Lydia Fotieva. Rosa Fitingov was a Russian Jewish woman who joined the Communist Party in 1918. They married and had two children; a son named Gora and a daughter named Maya. Gora Mukerdzhi died fighting the invading Wehrmacht in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. His wife Rosa was later one of the founding members of the CPI and acted as M.N. Roy's interpreter.


Cassette demagnetizer

A cassette demagnetizer is a device that removes the magnetic field that accumulates during the use of audio cassettes in cassette decks.
The passage of magnetically charged tape over the metallic parts of the tape deck imparts a magnetic polarity that can reduce fidelity in recording and playback. Demagnetizers (also called "degaussers") remove this polarity.
Demagnetizers of the "cassette" type resemble cassettes and contain circuitry to demagnetize tape heads.
Demagnetizers of the "wand" type demagnetize anything that they touch, including tape heads and capstans. The wand's advantage lies in its demagnetizing other metal parts of the tape path, not just the heads. Used carelessly, it can "increase" the magnetization of the heads; if used too close to tapes, it can erase them.
The types of demagnetizer described above contain electronic circuitry and require a power source (either a battery or a power cord). A third design consists of a cassette shell with a head cleaning tape wound on the spools and a magnetic disc mounted above the head cleaner tape. When the deck "plays" the cassette, the tape cleans the heads and simultaneously the magnet rotates, creating the alternating magnetic field required for demagnetizing.
Some cassette decks demagnetizes themselves. These work by feeding the record head a high-frequency signal, whose amplitude is great at first and then is reduced to zero over a few seconds.