Background.

Guadalcanal campaign.

On 7 August 1942, Allied forces (primarily U.S.) landed on Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and Florida Islands in the Solomon Islands. The landings on the islands were meant to deny their use by the Japanese as bases for threatening the supply routes between the U.S. and Australia. They were also intended to secure the islands as starting points for a campaign to neutralize the major Japanese base at Rabaul and support the Allied New Guinea campaign. The landings initiated the six-month-long Guadalcanal campaign.  Taking the Japanese by surprise, by nightfall on 8 August the Allied landing forces had secured Tulagi and nearby small islands, as well as an

Troop movement.

On 28 August, 600 of Kawaguchi's troops were loaded onto the destroyers,,, and, designated Destroyer Division 20 (DD20). Because of a shortage of fuel, DD20 could not make the entire round trip to Guadalcanal at high speed in one night, but had to start the trip earlier in the day so that they could complete the trip by the next morning at a slower speed which conserved fuel. At 18:05 that day, 11 U.S. dive bombers from VMSB-232 under the command of

Battle.

Prelude.

Kawaguchi set the date for his attack on the Lunga perimeter for 12 September and began marching his forces west from Taivu towards Lunga Point on 5 September. He radioed 17th Army and requested that it carry out air strikes on Henderson Field beginning on 9 September, and that naval warships be stationed off Lunga Point on September 12 to "destroy any Americans who attempted to flee from the island." On 7 September, Kawaguchi issued his attack plan to "rout and annihilate the enemy in the vicinity of the Guadalcanal Island airfield." Kawaguchi's plan called for his forces to split into three, approach the Lunga perimeter inland, and launch a surprise night attack. Oka's force would attack the perimeter from the west while Ichiki's Second Echelon—renamed

First night's action.

The Americans knew of the approach of the Japanese forces from reports from native scouts and their own patrols, but did not know exactly where or when they would attack. The ridge around which Edson deployed his men consisted of three distinct hillocks. At the southern tip and surrounded on three sides by thick jungle was Hill 80 (so named because it rose above sea level). Six hundred yards north was Hill 123 ( high), the dominant feature on the ridge. The northernmost hillock was unnamed and about high. Edson placed the five companies from the Raider battalion on the west side of the ridge and the three Parachute battalion companies on the east side, holding positions in depth from Hill 80 back to Hill 123. Two of the five Raider companies, "B" and "C", held a line between the ridge, a small, swampy lagoon, and the Lunga River. Machine-gun teams from "E" Company, the heavy weapons company, were scattered throughout the defenses. Edson placed his command post on Hill 123.  At 21:30 on 12 September, the Japanese cruiser and three destroyers

Second night's action on the ridge.

Expecting the Japanese to attack again that night, Edson directed his troops to improve their defenses on and around the ridge. After a failed attempt by two companies to retake the ground on the Marine right flank lost to Kokusho the night before, Edson repositioned his forces. He pulled his front back about to a line that stretched, starting at the Lunga River and crossing the ridge about south of Hill 123. Around and behind Hill 123 he placed five companies. Any Japanese attackers surmounting Hill 80 would have to advance over of open terrain to close with the Marine positions at Hill 123. With only a few hours to prepare, the Marines were able to construct only rudimentary and shallow fortifications. They were low on ammunition, with one or two grenades for each Marine. Vandegrift ordered a reserve force consisting of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (2/5) to move into a position just to the rear of Edson's troops. In addition, a battery of four 105mm howitzers from the 3rd Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment under Lieutenant colonel James J. Keating moved to a location from where it could provide direct fire onto the ridge, and a forward artillery observer was placed with Edson's front line units.  Late in the afternoon, Edson stepped onto a grenade box and addressed his exhausted troops, saying,  Edson's speech

Kuma and Oka attacks.

As the battle on the ridge took place, Kawaguchi's Kuma and Oka units also attacked the Marine defenses on the east and west sides of the Lunga perimeter. The Kuma battalion—led by Major Takeshi Mizuno—attacked the southeastern sector of the Lunga perimeter, defended by Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment (3/1). Mizuno's attack started around midnight, with one company attacking through Marine artillery fire and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the Marine defenders before being thrown back. Mizuno was killed in the attack. After daybreak, the Marines, believing that the rest of Mizuno's battalion was still in the area, sent forward six light tanks without infantry support to sweep the area in front of the Marine lines; four Japanese anti-tank guns destroyed

Aftermath.

At 13:05 on 14 September, Kawaguchi led the survivors of his shattered brigade away from the ridge and deeper into the jungle, where they rested and tended to their wounded all the next day. Kawaguchi's units were then ordered to withdraw west to the Matanikau River valley to join with Oka's unit, a march over difficult terrain. Kawaguchi's troops began the march on the morning of 16 September. Almost every soldier able to walk had to help carry the wounded. As the march progressed, the exhausted and hungry soldiers, who had eaten their last rations on the morning before their withdrawal, began to discard their heavy equipment and then their rifles. By the time most of them reached Oka's positions at Kokumbona five days later, only half still carried their weapons. The Kuma battalion's survivors, attempting to follow Kawaguchi's Center Body forces, became lost, wandered for three weeks in the jungle, and almost starved to death before finally reaching Kawaguchi's camp.  In total, Kawaguchi's forces lost about 830 killed in the attack, including 350 in Tamura's battalion, 200 in Kokusho's battalion,

Significance.

On 15 September, General Hyakutake at Rabaul learned of Kawaguchi's defeat, the Imperial Japanese Army's first defeat involving a unit of this size in the war. The general forwarded the news to the Imperial General Headquarters in Japan. In an emergency session, the top Japanese army and navy command staffs concluded that, "Guadalcanal might develop into the decisive battle of the war." The results of the battle began to have a telling strategic impact on Japanese operations in other areas of the Pacific. Hyakutake realized that, in order to send sufficient troops and material to defeat the Allied forces on Guadalcanal, he could no longer support the major Japanese offensive on the Kokoda Track in New Guinea. Hyakutake—with the concurrence of the General Headquarters—ordered his troops on New Guinea, who were within of their objective of Port Moresby—to withdraw until the Guadalcanal matter was resolved. The Japanese were never able to restart their drive towards Port Moresby; the defeat at Edson's Ridge contributed not only to Japan's defeat in the Guadalcanal campaign, but also to Japan's ultimate defeat throughout the South Pacific.  After delivering more forces during the next month the Japanese mounted a major ground offensive on Guadalcanal, led by Hyakutake, in late October 1942 at the Battle for Henderson Field, but it resulted in an even more decisive defeat for the Japanese. Vandegrift later stated that Kawaguchi's assault on the ridge in September was the only time during the entire campaign he had doubts about the outcome and that had it succeeded, "we would have been in a pretty bad condition." Historian Richard B. Frank adds, "The Japanese never came closer to victory on the island itself than in September 1942, on a ridge thrusting up from the jungle just south of the critical airfield, best known ever after as Bloody Ridge."

The Battle of Edson's Ridge, also known as the Battle of the Bloody Ridge, Battle of Raiders Ridge, and Battle of the Ridge, was a land battle of the Pacific campaign of World War II between Imperial Japanese Army and Allied (mainly United States Marine Corps) ground forces. It took place from 12–14 September 1942, on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, and was the second of three separate major Japanese ground offensives during the Guadalcanal campaign.

Die Schlacht am Bloody Ridge war eine Schlacht um den Flugplatz Henderson Field auf Guadalcanal, Salomon-Inseln, zwischen den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und Japan im Zweiten Weltkrieg während des Pazifikkriegs vom 13. bis zum 16. September 1942. Der Schauplatz ist auch unter dem Namen „Edson's Ridge“ bekannt, benannt nach Oberst Merritt Austin Edson, dem kommandierenden Offizier der dort kämpfenden Marines (US-Namensvarianten: "Battle of Edson's Ridge, Battle of the Bloody Ridge, Battle of Raiders Ridge, Battle of the Ridge)."


Early career.

Born in Adachi, Tochiazuma is the youngest son of former "sekiwake" and January 1972 tournament winner Tochiazuma Tomoyori, who was the first bearer of the Tochiazuma "shikona" (fighting name). After his career, Daisuke's father became an elder in the Japan Sumo Association with the name Tamanoi Tomoyori and began his own sumo stable, of which his son was a member.  The younger Tochiazuma entered professional sumo in November 1994, using his birth name as a "shikona". He had a remarkably rapid rise, winning his first 26 matches (equalling Itai's record) and reaching the "jūryō" division in May 1996, only nine tournaments after his debut. At that point he adopted his father's old "shikona". He broke into the top "makuuchi" division at the end of that year and won the Fighting Spirit prize in his first tournament. In July 1997, Tochiazuma was promoted to the prestigious "san'yaku" ranks and was a "sekiwake" for much of the time during the following years, although he bounced back and forth a few times due to injuries. He earned 12 "sanshō" prizes, including seven for Technique.

"Ōzeki".

After three double figure scores and two consecutive runner-up performances Tochiazuma was promoted to "ōzeki" for the first time in January 2002, and instantly won the tournament – exactly 30 years after his father's own championship. He was the first "ōzeki" since Kiyokuni in 1969 to win the championship on his "ōzeki" debut. He also became the first wrestler since Haguroyama in 1941 to win the tournament championship in all six professional sumo divisions. Tochiazuma's other top division championship victories occurred in November 2003 and January 2006. However, he never won two consecutive tournaments, nor could he achieve an "equivalent performance" over three tournaments, which is needed for promotion to the top "yokozuna" rank. His January 2006 success brought Asashōryū's record run of seven consecutive tournament victories to an end, but Tochiazuma could manage only third place in the following tournament. It also proved to be the last top division championship won by a Japanese born wrestler for ten years.  Tochiazuma holds the record for the number of times a wrestler has achieved promotion to the "ōzeki" rank after being demoted. He lost his "ōzeki" rank twice following injuries, but both times he came back by scoring at least ten wins in the next tournament. He is the only wrestler who has succeeded in doing so since the introduction of the current rules on "ōzeki" promotion and demotion in 1969. His final promotion to "ōzeki" in 2005 was especially spectacular, as even his own stable had suggested that the scapula injury he suffered in November 2004 could have meant the end of his career.  He had great strength as well as technical skill, and was one of the few wrestlers to regularly trouble Asashōryū when he was at his peak as a "yokozuna", defeating him six times between 2003 and 2006.

Fighting style.

Tochiazuma had an all-round style, equally adept at "yotsu" (grappling) techniques, and "tsuki/oshi" (thrusting and pushing) techniques. Early in his career he was regarded as an "oshi-sumo" specialist, and "oshi-dashi" (push out) was the "kimarite" he used most often overall, but he also won many bouts by "yori-kiri" or force out. His favourite grip on the "mawashi" was "hidari-yotsu" (right hand outside, left hand inside), and he was fond of using "uwatenage" (overarm throw) and "uwatedashinage" (pulling outer arm throw).

Retirement from sumo.

At the end of 2006, Tochiazuma underwent knee surgery, leaving him with little time to prepare for the 2007 New Year tournament. He managed only five wins there, but preserved his "ōzeki" status with eight wins in March. However, he pulled out of that tournament on the 12th day and was admitted to hospital, complaining of headaches and dizziness. He was diagnosed with high blood pressure and a brain scan revealed he had also suffered a mild stroke. On May 7, 2007, Tochiazuma announced his retirement from sumo. He kept his ring name as he made the transition into his role as "oyakata", as "ōzeki" are permitted to do so for three years.  Tochiazuma's "danpatsu-shiki", or official retirement ceremony, took place on 2 February 2008 at the Ryōgoku Kokugikan, with around 10,000 people in attendance. Coming from Tokyo, he naturally had a huge supporters network in the capital, and the event was a sell-out. He had lost a noticeable amount of weight since his retirement.  Upon his father's retirement in September 2009 he became Tamanoi-"oyakata" and took over the running of Tamanoi stable. In July 2011 he produced his first top division wrestler, Fujiazuma, and veteran Yoshiazuma also won promotion in the following tournament. In 2013 the Mongolian-born Azumaryū reached the top division, and he is the only "sekitori" in the stable as of 2017. Tamanoi-"oyakata" is also a Deputy Director of the Japan Sumo Association, responsible for the running of the regional tours or "jungyō".

Family.

He was married in December 2008 to a 31-year-old former office worker and the reception was held in February 2009. Their first child, a daughter, was born in February 2012.

Career record.

Tochiazuma Daisuke (born November 9, 1976 as Daisuke Shiga in Tokyo, Japan) is a retired sumo wrestler. He began his professional career in 1994, reaching the top division just two years later after winning a tournament championship in each of the lower divisions. After winning twelve special prizes and four gold stars, he reached his highest rank of "ōzeki" in 2002 and won three top division tournament championships before retiring because of health reasons in 2007 at the age of 30. In 2009 he became the head coach of Tamanoi stable.

Tochiazuma Daisuke, jap., eig. Shiga Daisuke (; * 9. November 1976 in Adachi, Präfektur Tokio) ist ein ehemaliger japanischer Sumōringer und Inhaber des zweithöchsten Ranges Ōzeki.


Biography.

Stern was born in New York City. He went to Harvard University as an undergraduate, from 1952 to 1956. He then attended Albert Einstein College of Medicine, completing his M.D. in 1960. In 1961, Stern was member of the Freedom Riders, a group of black and white activists challenging racial segregation in the south by traveling together on bus rides.  He continued his educational career doing research at the NIH in psychopharmacology from 1962–1964. In 1964, Stern decided to specialize in psychiatric care, completing his residency at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1972 he started a psychoanalytic education at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.  For more than 30 years, he worked in research and practice as well in developmental psychology and psychodynamic psychotherapy.  In his research, he dedicated his time to the observation of infants and to clinical reconstruction of early experiences. His efforts continue to contribute to currently existing developmental theories.  He was well known as an expert researcher of early affective mother-child bonding. Research and discoveries on the field of affective bonding was one of his leading activities.  Before his death, Stern was an honorary professor in Psychology at the University of Geneva, adjunct professor in the department of Psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical School and a lecturer at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.  He received Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Copenhagen (2002), Dk; Palermo, It; Mons Hainaut, Be; Alborg, Dk; Padua, It, and Stockholm University.  He died, aged 78, in Geneva, Switzerland, following a heart failure. He actively contributed to the ongoing work of the Boston Process of Change Study Group only a few months prior.

Theoretical contributions.

Stern's most prominent works consider the area of motherhood and infants.

The layered self.

(1) In "The Interpersonal World of the Infant", Stern proposed that an infant develops in a series of overlapping and interdependent stages or layers, which are increasingly interpersonally sophisticated. He distinguished four main senses of self: 'the sense of an "emergent self", which forms from birth to age two months, the sense of a "core self", which forms between the ages of two and six months, the sense of a "subjective self", which forms between seven and fifteen months, and a sense of a "verbal self"'.  The emergent sense gathers together the earliest'sense of physical cohesion (..."going on being", in Winnicott's term)'.  In the 'next life period, age two to seven months, the infant gains enough experience...[to] create an organizing subjective perspective that can be called a sense of a core self'. At this stage, while intensely involved in social interaction with the [m]other, essentially 'the other is a "self-regulating other" for the infant...one who regulates the infant.'  Thereafter, at the next stage of the subjective self, 'for there to be an intersubjective exchange about affect...the mother must go beyond true imitations, which have been an enormous and important part of her social repertoire during the first six months or so', and develop 'a theme-and-variation format..."purposeful misattunements"'.  Finally, during the second year of the infant's life language emerges', to provide for a verbal self — creating thereby 'a new domain of relatedness', but one which'moves relatedness onto the impersonal, abstract level intrinsic to language and away from the personal, immediate level'.  (2) In a later edition of "The Interpersonal World" —'revisiting a book written fifteen years earlier' — Stern added two more layers to his hierarchy of the self: the 'core self-with-another' preceding the subjective self; and finally the 'narrative self, or selves', developing out of the verbal self.  Highlighting the setting of the narrative self in what he called 'The World of Stories', Stern emphasized how the capacity for 'interpreting the world of human activities in terms of story plots...psychological explanations embedded in the structure of a narrative...unfolds according to a genetically determined timetable' around the age of three or four. On the positive side, 'the child, narrating an autobiographical story...is creating his identity'; on the negative side, however, possibilities for distortion, and for the consolidation of a false self, also emerge at this time: 'if the lived past and the narrated past are very discrepant...story making can establish and perpetuate distortions of reality – distortions that contribute significantly to mental disturbance'.

The motherhood constellation.

In "The Motherhood Constellation", Stern describes the motherhood constellation, a mother's instinctual focus on and devotion to her infant, as being critical to the child's development. Psychoanalytic support could take the form of '"the good grandmother transference"...appropriate to the motherhood constellation'.

Proto-narratives.

In 1995; he introduced the term "proto-narrative envelope." "This 'envelope,'" Person et al. write, "contains experience organized with the structure of a narrative. But...a story without words or symbols, a plot visible only through the perceptual, affective, and motoric strategies to which it gives rise". Stern stressed how early experiences of mother-child interaction 'have a beginning, a middle, and an end and a line of dramatic tension; they are tiny narratives... 'proto-narrative envelopes'.' He described "ports of entry" in terms of intervention to affect change in the relationship of mother and infant. These are the mother's view of herself, the mother's view of the infant, the infant's view of her/himself, and the infant's view of the mother. All of these are to be considered when designing an intervention strategy for a dysfunctional dyadic relationship.

Daniel N. Stern (August 16, 1934 – November 12, 2012) was a prominent American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist, specializing in infant development, on which he had written a number of books — most notably "The Interpersonal World of the Infant" (1985).

Daniel Norman Stern (* 16. August 1934 in New York City; † 12. November 2012 in Genf) war ein US-amerikanischer Psychiater und Psychoanalytiker. Er war als Kinder- und Jugendanalytiker einer der führenden Spezialisten der empirischen Säuglingsforschung. Dabei orientierte er sich an einem psychoanalytisch orientierten Verständnis der Persönlichkeit, beobachtete aber keine Alltagssituationen, wie dies von seinen psychoanalytischen Vorgängern praktiziert wurde, sondern schuf experimentelle Situationen. Stern wurde 1999 mit dem Internationalen Sigmund-Freud-Preis für Psychotherapie ausgezeichnet.


Development.

Previous systems.

To counter air raids on London during World War I, Edward Ashmore constructed a system known as the London Air Defence Area (LADA). Ashmore put defensive weapons into three rings around the city, searchlights and anti-aircraft artillery in the outer ring, fighter aircraft in the middle ring, and the innermost ring in the city contained more anti-aircraft guns. Ashmore set up a large plotting table at Horse Guards in London. Information from spotters was relayed to this central room where wooden blocks were placed on a large map to indicate the location of aircraft and other information. Observers around the map could relay this information to one of 25 regional control rooms, who re-created the portions of the map relevant to them and passed the information to the various weapons

RDF.

A month after the Thames Estuary plan was approved, the Tizard Committee was formed to consider newspaper stories and other claims made over the years of electronic "rays" that could stop an airplane engine and even kill a pilot at long range. The committee consulted well-known radio expert Robert Watt for a judgement on the reports. Watt asked his assistant, Arnold Wilkins, to carry out the necessary calculations. Wilkins quickly concluded that it was impossible; the amount of radio energy needed would be well beyond the state of the art of existing electronics. When Watt asked about alternatives, Wilkins recalled a General Post Office (GPO) report on aircraft causing fading in radio reception, and suggested that this effect might be used to detect aircraft at long range. The two wrote a joint memo on the concept and returned it to the Tizard Committee in time for their first formal meeting in late January 1935.  The committee seized upon the concept as a potential solution to the problem of bomber detection and the fear that the bomber will always get through. A second memo with more detailed calculations arrived in February and was shown to the Air Member for Supply

Teething trouble.

ADGB was disbanded in 1936, its duties were handed to the Air Ministry, and divided into Fighter Command and Bomber Command. Dowding was promoted to Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Fighter Command on its creation on 6 July 1936.  The first operational CH station was set up at the radar researchers' new laboratory at Bawdsey Manor. In spite of rapid progress, RDF still had teething problems. On one occasion, Dowding was watching the displays of the test system for any sign of the attackers when he heard them pass overhead, a complete failure. These problems were remedied over the next year, and in April 1937, tests using the prototype CH radar at Bawdsey demonstrated great promise. This version also allowed the controllers to measure the altitude of the aircraft to within.  To increase warning time, the CH systems were built close to the

Building the system.

Dowding recognized that the main problem was not technical but too many sources of information, none of them with complete coverage, and none able to report useful information to the fighters on their own. Dowding, Tizard, and mathematician Patrick Blackett, another founding member of the committee, began evolving a new system that inherited concepts from ADGB.  To handle the mass of data and the potential for overlap, Dowding instituted a policy of sending all location reports from the radars to a new fighter direction centre at Fighter Command headquarters. This mimicked the system the OC had already set up for coordinating the reports from many individual spotters into a map covering a larger area. The new system did the same at a far larger scale, all of the UK. Telephone operators in contact with the CH and OC centres relayed reports to workers around the map,

Description.

Filtering.

The first improvement Dowding suggested was to add a "filter room" at FCHQ, where all CH reports were sent.  CH stations converted their angle and range measurements into a location on the Ordnance Survey National Grid. A telephone operator, or "teller", forwarded this location to the filter room, where a "plotter" would place a small coloured marker at that location on a large map covering most of the UK, the colours being the same as those adopted by the Observer Corps to indicate the time of the report. The rapidity of reporting caused plot markers to pile up on the map, which became quite cluttered during larger missions. Since each station had inaccuracies, the plots spread out on the map.  Observers watching the progress of plots, tried to determine which of these represented one group of aircraft. When they were confident that a group of markers was a formation, a wooden block was placed on the map in

Reporting hierarchy.

The second improvement introduced by Dowding was aimed at reducing the amount of information being sent to the pilots, and speeding its delivery. For this task, Dowding introduced a hierarchy of control and information flow which ensured that only the information the pilots needed was forwarded to them. At the topmost level was FCHQ filter room, located at Bentley Priory. FCHQ maintained an overall view of the entire battlespace. This information was then forwarded one step down a hierarchy, to the Groups.  During the Battle of Britain the defensive fighters were split among four active Groups, 10 through 13. 11 Group, which handled most of the fighting, had its plotting room located in

Information sources.

Chain Home offered an enormous improvement in early detection times compared to older systems of visual or acoustic location. It was not uncommon for CH stations on the southeast coast of Kent to detect enemy raids as they were still forming up over their airfields in France. Additionally, this information was available day or night, in any weather. However, to provide maximum warning time, the CH stations had to be placed as close to the shore as possible. As they could only locate objects in front of them, this meant that CH provided no service over land. This required two additional locating services.  The task of tracking enemy aircraft over land fell to the Royal Observer Corps. Because of the large number of ROC stations and the relatively small areas they covered, information duplication and overload was a concern. For this reason, information from the ROC was sent to a parallel system of Observer Centres, who acted as both filter and communications stations. This pre-filtered information was then sent into the Dowding reporting chain.

Command.

The most visible part of the Dowding System were the "operations rooms". The most advanced of these were located at FCHQ and Group HQs. These rooms typically consisted of three layers: a large plotting table on the lowest level, communications operators located at desks around and above the plot, and a second storey above the plot, sometimes behind glass, where commanders could observe and communicate.  Command of the battle was devolved to the group. Observing the map from above, group commanders could track the movements of enemy aircraft through their patch, examine the tote board, select a squadron and called their sector to have them scramble. The orders could be as simple as "Squadron nine-two, intercept hostile two-one".  The sector would then phone the office for that squadron (often nothing more than a small shack) and order

Physical construction.

FCHQ and Group Control centres, in keeping with their importance in the battle, were located in bomb-proof bunkers away from airfields. Most of these were built just before the war. Communications were ensured by hundreds of miles of dedicated phone lines laid by the GPO and buried deep underground to prevent them from being cut by bombs.  Sector Control centres tended to be relatively small, and were mostly housed in brick, single-storey, tile-roofed structures above ground, where they were vulnerable to attack.

Effects on the battle.

The effect of this system was profound, and remains a widely used example of the concept of force multiplication.  Before the introduction of radar the task of interception appeared to be increasingly difficult, if not impossible. As bomber speeds and altitudes grew, the time available to arrange an interception was dropping. Although fighter performance was also increasing, certain aspects like getting the pilot into the aircraft and taking off introduced fixed delays that did not improve. With the only detection means being the observers and acoustic location with ranges on the order of under the very best conditions, the bombers would be over their targets before the spotters could call in the raid and the fighters could climb to their altitude.  Given this lopsided balance of power, fighter operations prior to the introduction of radar were generally in the form of standing patrols or "sweeps", with the fighters being sent up to fly along a pre-arranged path or area in the hopes of encountering the enemy. During World War I interception missions, the vast majority of patrols returned home without ever having seen the enemy. The same was true for all forces during the Battle of France, where 30% interception rates were considered typical, and 50% excellent.  In the case of an attack by a high-speed force, the attackers could pick the time and place of the attack. They would encounter only the aircraft already in the air along that route, so they could outnumber the defenders in any given area. To ensure there were a reasonable number of fighters along any approach route, huge numbers of aircraft would need to be in the air at all times covering all the routes. Since a fighter spends most of its time on the ground being maintained and refuelled, some multiple of the airborne numbers would be needed, along with a similarly huge number of pilots, as each pilot could only be expected to fly so long per day. Such a system was essentially impossible, and was one of the reasons it was widely believed that "the bomber will always get through".  A startling illustration of this scenario was provided by the RAF itself. In the summer of 1934, a series of large-scale exercises with up to 350 aircraft were carried out. About half the number were bombers attempting to approach London, and the other half fighters trying to stop them. The initial results were so dismal that the commanders attempted to improve the results, eventually giving the fighter controllers complete details of the bomber's

Problems.

Although the Dowding system proved itself in combat, the system and command of the battle had several problems. A huge volume of information flowed through the system, especially into the FCHQ filter room. On 11 January 1940, an operations research report on the Dowding system concluded that the filter room had been intended to correlate radar reports, but had developed into something much more complicated. Too much control took place in the filter room, which was producing results with "appallingly low standards". Given the success of the FCHQ filter room, it is unclear whether the report was inaccurate or if the problems had been solved by the time of the Battle of Britain.  It was known that the filter room could be overwhelmed by a high volume of reports, and it was a constant complaint that it was a single point of failure in reports from OR and in the RAF and Air Ministry. Most critics wanted the filter room to be moved from Bentley Priory to Group commands, lowering the reporting volume at each location and providing duplication. Dowding refused the change, leading to increasing friction with other commanders. Information overload occurred on several occasions and the filter room had to ask certain CH stations to stop reporting. But this had little effect on their capabilities. Later, stations reported information for multiple formations as a single plot.  Radio communications was another problem. The TR.9D HF radio telephone set in fighters at the

Aftermath.

Dowding resisted suggestions to devolve the filter room to the group level to reduce demand on FCHQ. The matter was raised several times, the last time on 27 September, when the Air Council's request was once again dismissed by Dowding. He was then summoned to the Air Staff on 1 October and was forced to implement this change, although he delayed this until all fighters were equipped with new IFF Mark II systems.  On 24 November 1940, Dowding was removed from command. This was due partly to his lack of action on ending the feud between Leigh-Malory and Park, partly due to his refusal to devolve command, and partly due to the lack of success against the increasing tempo of night bombing, which by this time had become The Blitz.  The groups soon had their own filter rooms. The introduction of ground-controlled interception radars (GCI) in the winter of 1940–41 allowed further devolution of command because sector controllers could directly detect and control the aircraft in their area. Working with IFF, now widely used, the GCI display eliminated the need for separate detection and plotting, as well as the communications links and manpower needed to operate the reporting system. The Dowding system remained in use for the rest of the war for daytime missions, both for (rare) defensive situations, as well providing support for aircraft supporting offensive daytime raids during 1943 and later.  After the war, the fighter control system was largely demobilized. The explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 and the presence of Tupolev Tu-4 "Bull" aircraft that could deliver it to the UK led to the rapid construction of the ROTOR system. ROTOR re-used many existing GCI and CH systems with more sophisticated control rooms in fortified underground bunkers. ROTOR was itself replaced by AMES Type 80 Master Control rooms and then the Linesman/Mediator system in the 1960s.

The Dowding system was the world's first wide-area ground-controlled interception network, controlling the airspace across the United Kingdom from northern Scotland to the southern coast of England. It used a widespread dedicated land-line telephone network to rapidly collect information from Chain Home (CH) radar stations and the Royal Observer Corps (ROC) in order to build a single image of the entire UK airspace and then direct defensive interceptor aircraft and anti-aircraft artillery against enemy targets. The system was built by the Royal Air Force just before the start of World War II, and proved decisive in the Battle of Britain.

Das Dowding-System bezeichnet das englische Luftverteidigungskonzept im Zweiten Weltkrieg, basierend auf Radar, zentraler Informationsverarbeitung und mittels Sprechfunk geführten Abfangjägern. Der Name geht auf den bis Oktober 1940 verantwortlichen Oberbefehlshaber des RAF Fighter Command Hugh Dowding zurück. Obwohl das Prinzip der Luftverteidigung Londons bereits durch "Major General" E.B. Ashmore im Jahr 1918 entwickelt wurde, wurde die volle Wirksamkeit erst durch die Einbindung von Radar und modernen Jagdflugzeugen erreicht. Seine größte Bedeutung erreichte das Dowding-System während der Luftschlacht um England.


Origins.

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) originated from a discussion between journalist Edmund Rogers and the physicist William F. Barrett in autumn 1881. This led to a conference on 5 and 6 January 1882 at the headquarters of the British National Association of Spiritualists which the foundation of the Society was proposed. The committee included Barrett, Rogers, Stainton Moses, Charles Massey, Edmund Gurney, Hensleigh Wedgwood and Frederic W. H. Myers. The SPR was formally constituted on 20 February 1882 with philosopher Henry Sidgwick as its first president.  The SPR was the first organisation of its kind in the world, its stated purpose being "to approach these varied problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated."  Other early members included the author Jane Barlow, the renowned chemist Sir William Crookes, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, Nobel laureate Charles Richet and psychologist William James.  Members of the SPR initiated and organised the International Congresses of Physiological/Experimental psychology.  Areas of study included hypnotism, dissociation, thought-transference, mediumship, Reichenbach phenomena, apparitions and haunted houses and the physical phenomena associated with séances. The SPR were to introduce a number of neologisms which have entered the English language, such as 'telepathy', which was coined by Frederic Myers.  The Society is run by a President and a Council of twenty members, and is open to interested members of the public to join. The organisation is based at 1 Vernon Mews, London, with a library and office open to members, and with large book and archival holdings in Cambridge University Library, Cambridgeshire, England. It publishes the peer reviewed quarterly "Journal of the Society for Psychical Research" ("JSPR"), the irregular "Proceedings" and the magazine "Paranormal Review". It holds an annual conference, regular lectures and two study days per year and supports the "LEXSCIEN" on-line library project.

Research.

Psychical research.

Among the first important works was the two-volume publication in 1886, "Phantasms of the Living", concerning telepathy and apparitions, co-authored by Gurney, Myers and Frank Podmore. This text, and subsequent research in this area, was received negatively by the scientific mainstream, though Gurney and Podmore provided a defense of the society's early work in this area in mainstream publications.  The SPR "devised methodological innovations such as randomized study designs" and conducted "the first experiments investigating the psychology of eyewitness testimony (Hodgson and Davey, 1887), [and] empirical and conceptual studies illuminating mechanisms of dissociation and hypnotism"  In 1894, the "Census of Hallucinations" was published which sampled 17,000 people. Out of these, 1, 684 persons reported having experienced a hallucination of an apparition. Such efforts were claimed to have undermined "the notion of dissociation and hallucinations as intrinsically pathological phenomena"  The SPR investigated many spiritualist mediums such as Eva Carrière and Eusapia Palladino.  During the early twentieth century, the SPR studied a series of automatic scripts and trance utterances from a group of automatic writers, known as the cross-correspondences.  Famous cases investigated by the Society include Borley Rectory and the Enfield Poltergeist.  In 1912 the Society extended a request for a contribution to a special medical edition of its Proceedings to Sigmund Freud. Though according to Ronald W. Clark (1980) "Freud surmised, no doubt correctly, that the existence of any link between the founding fathers of psychoanalysis and investigation of the paranormal would hamper acceptance of psychoanalysis" as would any perceived involvement with the occult. Nonetheless, Freud did respond, contributing an essay titled "A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis" to the Medical Supplement to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.

Exposures of fraud.

Much of the early work involved investigating, exposing and in some cases duplicating fake phenomena. In the late 19th century, SPR investigations into séance phenomena led to the exposure of many fraudulent mediums.  Richard Hodgson distinguished himself in that area. In 1884, Hodgson was sent by the SPR to India to investigate Helena Blavatsky and concluded that her claims of psychic power were fraudulent. However these findings were much later (April 1986) reviewed and retracted by the SPR.  In 1886 and 1887 a series of publications by S. J. Davey, Hodgson and Sidgwick in the SPR journal exposed the slate writing tricks of the medium William Eglinton. Hodgson with his friend, S. J. Davey, had staged fake séances for educating the public (including SPR members). Davey gave sittings under an assumed name, duplicating the phenomena produced by Eglinton, and then proceeded to point out to the sitters the manner in which they had been deceived. Because of this, some spiritualist members such as Stainton Moses resigned from the SPR.  In 1891, Alfred Russel Wallace requested for the Society to properly investigate spirit photography. Eleanor Sidgwick responded with a critical paper in the SPR which cast doubt on the subject and discussed the fraudulent methods that spirit photographers such as Édouard Isidore Buguet, Frederic Hudson and William H. Mumler had utilised.  Due to the exposure of William Hope and other fraudulent mediums, Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass resignation of eighty-four members of the Society for Psychical Research, as they believed the Society was opposed to spiritualism. Science historian William Hodson Brock has noted that "By the 1900s most avowed spiritualists had left the SPR and gone back to the BNAS (the London Spiritualist Alliance since 1884), having become upset by the sceptical tone of most of the SPR's investigations."

Criticism of the SPR.

The Society has been criticised by both spiritualists and sceptics.

Criticism from spiritualists.

Prominent spiritualists at first welcomed the SPR and cooperated fully. But relations soured when spiritualists discovered that the SPR would not accept outside testimony as proof, and the society accused some prominent mediums of fraud. Spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle resigned from the SPR in 1930, to protest what he regarded as the SPR's overly restrictive standards of proof. Psychic investigator and believer in spiritualism Nandor Fodor criticised the SPR for its "strong bias" against physical manifestations of spiritualism.

Criticism from skeptics.

Sceptics have criticised members of the SPR for having motives liable to impair scientific objectivity. According to SPR critics John Grant and Eric Dingwall (a member of the SPR), early SPR members such as Henry Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, and William Barrett hoped to cling to something spiritual through psychical research. Myers stated that "[T]he Society for Psychical Research was founded, with the establishment of thought-transference—already rising within measurable distance of proof—as its primary aim." Defenders of the SPR have stated in reply that "a 'will to believe' in post-mortem survival, telepathy and other scientifically unpopular notions, does not necessarily exclude a "will to know" and thus the capacity for thorough self-criticism, methodological rigour and relentless suspicion of errors."  The sceptic and physicist Victor J. Stenger has written:  Ivor Lloyd Tuckett an author of an early sceptical work on psychical research wrote that although the SPR have collected some valuable work, most of its active members have "no training in psychology fitting them for their task, and have been the victims of pronounced bias, as sometimes they themselves have admitted." Trevor H. Hall, an ex-member of the Society for Psychical Research, criticised SPR members as "credulous and obsessive wish... to believe." Hall also claimed SPR members "lack knowledge of deceptive methods."  Writer Edward Clodd asserted that the SPR members William F. Barrett and Oliver Lodge had insufficient competence for the detection of fraud and suggested that their spiritualist beliefs were based on magical thinking and primitive superstition. Clodd described the SPR as offering "barbaric spiritual philosophy", and characterised the language of SPR members as using such terms as "subliminal consciousness" and "telepathic energy," as a disguise for "bastard supernaturalism."  A 2004 psychological study involving 174 members of the Society for Psychical Research completed a delusional ideation questionnaire and a deductive reasoning task. As predicted, the study showed that "individuals who reported a strong belief in the paranormal made more errors and displayed more delusional ideation than sceptical individuals". There was also a reasoning bias which was limited to people who reported a belief in, rather than experience of, paranormal phenomena. The results suggested that reasoning abnormalities may have a causal role in the formation of paranormal belief.  Some sceptical members have resigned from the SPR. Eric Dingwall resigned and wrote " After sixty years' experience and personal acquaintance with most of the leading parapsychologists of that period I do not think I could name half a dozen whom I could call objective students who honestly wished to discover the truth. The great majority wanted to prove something or other: They wanted the phenomena into which they were inquiring to serve some purpose in supporting preconceived theories of their own."

Presidents.

The following is a list of presidents:

Publications.

The Society publishes "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research", the "Journal of the Society for Psychical Research", and the "Paranormal Review", as well as the online Psi Encyclopedia.

"Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research".

First published in 1882 as a public record of the activities of the SPR, the "Proceedings" are now reserved for longer pieces of work, such as Presidential Addresses, and are only occasionally published. The current editor is Dr David Vernon.

"Journal of the Society for Psychical Research".

The "Journal of the Society for Psychical Research" has been published quarterly since 1884. It was introduced as a private, members-only periodical to supplement the "Proceedings". It now focuses on current laboratory and field research, but also includes theoretical, methodological and historical papers on parapsychology. It also publishes book reviews and correspondence. The current editor is Dr David Vernon.

"Paranormal Review".

The "Paranormal Review" is the magazine of the Society for Psychical Research. Formerly known as the "Psi Researcher", it has been published since 1996. Previous editors have included Dr Nicola J. Holt. The current editor is Dr Leo Ruickbie.

Other societies.

A number of other psychical research organisations use the term 'Society for Psychical Research' in their name.

Further reading.

SPR histories  Scholarly studies  Criticism

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) is a nonprofit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal. It describes itself as the "first society to conduct organised scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models." It does not, however, since its inception in 1882, hold any corporate opinions: SPR members assert a variety of beliefs with regard to the nature of the phenomena studied.

Die Society for Psychical Research (abgekürzt SPR) ist ein Verein zur Erforschung parapsychologischer Phänomene. Sie wurde 1882 in London gegründet und war die erste ihrer Art.


Plot.

A prologue outlines the story's alternate timeline. The failure of the D-Day invasion causes the United States to withdraw from the European theater and General Dwight D. Eisenhower to retire in disgrace. The US continues the Pacific War against Japan and, led by General Douglas MacArthur, uses atomic bombs in its victory. In Europe, Nazi Germany successfully achieved the invasion of the United Kingdom, which results in George VI and the rest of the British royal family fleeing to Canada in exile while it still rules the Empire. Under Nazi supervision Edward VIII regains the throne while Wallis Simpson becomes his queen. Winston Churchill also goes into exile in Canada and lives there until his death in 1953. Germany corrals the rest of Europe (except neutral Switzerland as well as Vatican City) into the Greater German Reich, abbreviated to as "Germania". German society is largely clean and orderly, at least on the surface, with the SS reorganised into an elite, peacetime police force.  Germania is a state embroiled in its perpetual war with the Soviet Union, which is still led by the 85-year-old Joseph Stalin well into the 1960s. The 1960 election of Democratic President Joseph Kennedy, whose anti-Semitic views have been well-publicized, gives the Nazi leadership a chance to secure a détente with the United States and its South American allies. In 1964, as Adolf Hitler's 75th birthday approaches and Kennedy heads to Germany for a summit meeting, the nation opens its borders to the media of the US and of Latin America.  The week before the summit, a body is discovered floating in a lake near Berlin by Hermann Jost (Rupert Penry-Jones), an SS cadet in training. SS Major Xavier March (Rutger Hauer) is assigned the case and questions Jost, who admits that he saw the body being dumped by Odilo "Globus" Globočnik (John Shrapnel), an Obergruppenführer in the Gestapo and a right-hand man of Reichsführer-SS Reinhard Heydrich. The dead man is revealed to be Josef Bühler, a retired Nazi Party official who managed the Jewish resettlement to Germany's Eastern European territories during the war. The Gestapo takes over the case for "state security" reasons, and Jost dies in an apparent training accident.  Meanwhile, Charlotte "Charlie" Maguire (Miranda Richardson), a member of a visiting US press entourage, is discreetly given an envelope by an old man at her hotel. Inside is a photograph of several high-ranking Nazi officials outside a villa. A note on the photograph leads her to Wilhelm Stuckart, another retired Nazi Party official, but she finds him dead at his apartment. March is reassigned to the Stuckart case, but when he takes Charlie to the crime scene, the Gestapo claims jurisdiction, and March's superior, Arthur Nebe (Peter Vaughan), warns him against further investigation. When they follow up on the photo, Charlie and March visit Wannsee to learn the identities of the men, who attended the Wannsee Conference. Each is found to have died under suspicious circumstances except for Franz Luther (John Woodvine), who gave Charlie the picture.  March tells Charlie to get out of Germany since he now realizes that there is a plot at the very highest levels to cover up whatever was discussed at the conference. Luther contacts Charlie and asks her to meet him on a train, where he requests that she communicate his desire for safe passage to the US, in exchange for what he knows about "the biggest secret of the war." SS troops corner Luther and kill him, but March rescues Charlie. March later blackmails a colleague to get Luther's file and learns that he had a mistress, former stage actress Anna von Hagen.  Posing as an official of the US embassy to process Luther's safe passage, Charlie visits Hagen and obtains Luther's papers. Hagen reveals that the Jews were not really resettled, but killed en masse by the Germans during the war, as planned at the conference. March, horrified by the photos and the documents that prove the genocide to have happened, agrees to join Charlie in escaping Germany with his son Pili. However, the Gestapo has already persuaded Pili to betray his father, and March is lured into a trap set by Globus. During his escape, March kills a Gestapo agent but is mortally wounded. He manages to reach a phone booth and calls Pili one more time before he dies. As Kennedy arrives at the Great Hall, a member of the press entourage helps Charlie slip the documents to him via the US ambassador. Kennedy looks at the materials and decides to fly back to the US immediately.  The epilogue reveals that the narrator is a grown-up Pili. He notes that although Charlie was eventually arrested by the Gestapo, the revelation of the mass slaughter of the Jews derailed any prospect of a strategic alliance with the US and resulted in revolutions across Europe and the Nazi regime's eventual collapse.

Production.

Mike Nichols bought the film rights before the novel was published in the United States. When a theatrical film proved unfeasible, the production moved to HBO. The film was budgeted at $7 million and was filmed entirely in Prague.  The newly-opened Praha Penta Hotel, today's Hilton Prague Old Town, doubled for Berlin's Hotel Adlon, where Charlie stays. The headquarters of Radio Free Europe, today the New Building of the National Museum, served as the Berlin Police HQ, where March works. The National Monument in Vitkov was used as the Sepp Dietrich SS Academy. The rear facade of the headquarters of Motokov, the Czech state car company, today the City Empiria tower, served as the exterior of the Reichsarchiv. The Nazi rally in the finale was filmed at Letná Park, including at the former Stalin Monument.

Critical reception.

The film received mixed reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes rated it at 50% from six reviews.  Ken Tucker of "Entertainment Weekly" graded the film at B+. He states that the book's plot was faithfully reproduced and helped pull good performances from Hauer and Richardson. He also took note of Menaul's directing by adding small details such as advertisements on the Beatles' shows. However, Tucker said the predictability of the revelation detracted from the film.  Since its release, Harris has announced he was disappointed with the adaptation. Speaking to "The Independent" in 2012, he said:

Awards.

Miranda Richardson received a Golden Globe Award in 1995 for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV for her performance. Rutger Hauer's performance was also nominated, as well as the film itself. The film also received an Emmy nomination in 1995 for Special Visual Effects.

Fatherland is a 1994 TV film adaptation of the 1992 book of the same name by Robert Harris. The film was produced by HBO, and stars Rutger Hauer as Xavier March and Miranda Richardson as Charlotte "Charlie" McGuire.

Vaterland ist eine Verfilmung des gleichnamigen Romans des englischen Autors Robert Harris durch Christopher Menaul im Jahr 1994. Gedreht wurde der Film in Prag. Der Film kam nicht in die deutschen Kinos und wurde ab dem 27. Januar 1995 auf VHS vermarktet.


Early life.

Vladimir Dal's father was a Danish physician named Johan Christian von Dahl (1764 – October 21, 1821), a linguist versed in the German, English, French, Russian, Yiddish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages. His mother, Julia Adelaide Freytag, was of German and probably French (Huguenot) descent. She spoke at least five languages and came from a family of scholars.  The prospective lexicographer was born in the town of Lugansky Zavod, in Novorossiya under the jurisdiction of Yekaterinoslav Governorate, part of the Russian Empire (present-day Luhansk, Ukraine). The settlement of Lugansky Zavod had been established in 1795.  Dal served in the Russian Navy from 1814 to 1826, graduating from the Saint Petersburg Naval Cadet School in 1819. In 1826 he began studying medicine at Dorpat University and participated as a military doctor in the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829) and in the campaign against Poland in 1831–1832. Following disagreement with his superiors, he resigned from the Military Hospital in Saint Petersburg and took an administrative position with the Ministry of the Interior in Orenburg Governorate in 1833. He took part in General Perovsky's military expedition against Khiva of 1839-1840. Dal then served in administrative positions in Saint Petersburg (1841-1849) and in Nizhny Novgorod (1849- ) before his retirement in 1859.  Dal had an interest in language and folklore from his early years. He started traveling by foot through the countryside, collecting sayings and fairy tales in various Slavic languages from the region. He published his first collection of fairy-tales () in 1832. Some others, yet unpublished, were put in verse by his friend Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) and have become some of the most familiar texts in the Russian language. After Pushkin's fatal duel in January 1837, Dal was summoned to his deathbed and looked after the great poet during the last hours of his life. In 1838 Dal was elected to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Lexicographic studies.

In the following decade, Dal adopted the pen name Kazak Lugansky ("Cossack from Luhansk") and published several realistic essays in the manner of Nikolai Gogol. He continued his lexicographic studies and extensive travels throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Having no time to edit his collection of fairy tales, he asked Alexander Afanasyev to prepare them for publication, which followed in the late 1850s. Joachim T. Baer wrote: While Dal was a skilled observer, he lacked talent in developing a story and creating psychological depth for his characters. He was interested in the wealth of the Russian language, and he began collecting words while still a student in the Naval Cadet School. Later he collected and recorded fairy tales, folk songs, birch bark woodcuts, and accounts of superstitions, beliefs, and prejudices of the Russian people. His industry in the sphere of collecting was prodigious. His magnum opus, "Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian language", was published in four huge volumes in 1863–1866. "The Sayings and Bywords of the Russian people", featuring more than 30,000 entries, followed several years later. Both books have been reprinted innumerable number of times. Baer says: "While an excellent collector, Dal had some difficulty ordering his material, and his so-called alphabet-nest system was not completely satisfactory until Baudouin de Courtenay revised it thoroughly in the third (1903–1910) and fourth (1912–1914) editions of the "Dictionary"."  Dal was a strong proponent of the native rather than adopted vocabulary. His dictionary began to have a strong influence on literature at the beginning of the 20th century; in his 1911 article "Poety russkogo sklada" ("Poets of the Russian Mold"), Maximilian Voloshin wrote: Just about the first of the contemporary poets who began to read Dal was Vyacheslav Ivanov. In any case, contemporary poets of the younger generation, under his influence, subscribed to the new edition of Dal. The discovery of the verbal riches of the Russian language was for the reading public like studying a completely new foreign language. Both old and popular Russian words seemed gems for which there was absolutely no place in the usual ideological practice of the intelligentsia, in that habitual verbal comfort in simplified speech, composed of international elements. While studying at Cambridge, Vladimir Nabokov bought a copy of Dal's dictionary and read at least ten pages every evening, "jotting down such words and expressions as might especially please me"; Alexander Solzhenitsyn took a volume of Dal with him as his only book when he was sent to the prison camp at Ekibastuz. The encompassing nature of Dal's dictionary gives it critical linguistic importance even today, especially because a large proportion of the dialectal vocabulary he collected has since passed out of use. The dictionary served as a base for Vasmer's "Etymological dictionary of the Russian language", the most comprehensive Slavic etymological lexicon.  For his great dictionary Dal was honoured by the Lomonosov Medal, the Constantine Medal (1863) and an honorary fellowship in the Russian Academy of Sciences.  He is interred at the Vagankovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. To mark the 200th anniversary of Vladimir Dal's birthday, UNESCO declared the year 2000 The International Year of Vladimir Dal.

Blood libel affair.

Dal served in the Ministry of Domestic Affairs. His responsibilities included overseeing investigations of murders of children in the western part of Russia.  In 1840, the Damascus Affair had revived the medieval blood libel canard in Europe (the anti-Semitic accusation that Jews use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes), and Czar Nicholas I instructed his officials, especially Vladimir Dal, to thoroughly investigate the legend. In 1844, just 10 copies of a 100-page report, intended only for the czar and senior officials, were submitted. The paper was entitled ""Investigation on the Murder of Christian Children by the Jews and the Use of Their Blood."" It was claimed there that although the vast majority of Jews had not even heard of ritual murder, it and the use of blood for magical purposes were committed by sects of fanatical Hasidic Jews. While the paper is often attributed to Dal, the question of the authorship (or multiple authorships) remains controversial.  In 1914, 42 years after Dal's death, during the blood libel trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kiev, the then 70-year-old report was published in St. Petersburg under the title "Notes on Ritual Murders". The name of the author was not stated on this new edition, intended for the general public.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (; November 10, 1801 – September 22, 1872) was one of the greatest Russian-language lexicographers and a founding member of the Russian Geographical Society. He knew at least six languages, including Turkic, and is considered one of the early Turkologists. During his lifetime he compiled and documented the oral history of the region that was later published in Russian and became part of modern folklore.

Wladimir Iwanowitsch Dal (, auch "Woldemar Ferdinand Dahl"; * in Lugansk; † in Moskau) war einer der größten russischen Lexikografen und Autor des umfangreichsten Wörterbuchs der russischen Sprache (russ. "Tolkowy slowar shiwogo welikorusskogo jasyka", zu Deutsch: "Bedeutungswörterbuch der lebendigen großrussischen Sprache").


History.

Origins.

The first appearance of a newspaper using the name "The Irish Times" occurred in 1823, but this closed in 1825. The title was revived—initially as a thrice-weekly publication but soon becoming a daily—by a 22-year-old army officer, Lawrence E. Knox (later known as Major Lawrence Knox), with the first edition being published on 29 March 1859. It was founded as a moderate Protestant newspaper, reflecting the politics of Knox, who envisaged it as a "new conservative daily newspaper". Its headquarters were at 4 Lower Abbey Street in Dublin. Its main competitor in its early days was the Dublin "Daily Express".

The Arnotts.

After Knox's death in 1873, the paper was sold to the widow of Sir John Arnott, MP, a former Lord Mayor of Cork and owner of Arnotts, one of Dublin's major Department stores. The sale, for £35,000, led to two major changes. Its headquarters was shifted to 31 Westmoreland Street, remaining in buildings on or near that site until 2005. Its politics also shifted dramatically, becoming predominantly Unionist in outlook, and it was closely associated with the Irish Unionist Alliance. The paper, along with the "Irish Independent" and various regional papers, called for the execution of the leaders of the failed 1916 Easter Rising.  Though the paper became a publicly listed company in 1900, the family continued to hold a majority shareholding until the 1960s (even after the family lost control, the great-grandson of the original purchaser was the paper's London editor). The last member of the Arnott family to sit on the paper's board was Sir Lauriston Arnott, who died in 1958.  The editor during the 1930s, R. M. Smyllie, had strong anti-fascist views: he angered the Irish Catholic hierarchy by opposing General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Later, "The Irish Times", like other national newspapers, had problems with Irish Government censorship during World War II. The Times was largely pro-Allied and was opposed to the Éamon de Valera government's policy of neutrality.

The Irish Times Trust.

In 1974, ownership was transferred to a non-charitable trust, The Irish Times Trust. The former owner, Major Thomas McDowell, was made "president for life" of the trust which runs the paper and was paid a large dividend. However several years later the articles of the Trust were adjusted, giving Major McDowell 10 preference shares and one more vote than the combined votes of all the other directors should any move be made to remove him. Major McDowell died in 2009. The Trust was set up in 1974 as "a company limited by guarantee" to purchase The Irish Times Limited and to ensure that "The Irish Times" would be published as an independent newspaper with specific editorial objectives. (See below).  The Trust is regulated by a legal document, the Memorandum and Articles of Association, and controlled by a body of people (the Governors) under company law. It is not a charity and does not have charitable status. It has no beneficial shareholders and it cannot pay dividends. Any profits made by "The Irish Times" cannot be distributed to the Trust but must be used to strengthen the newspaper, directly or indirectly.  The Trust is composed of a maximum of 11 Governors. The Trust appoints Governors who are required to be "representative broadly of the community throughout the whole of Ireland".  As of June 2012, Ruth Barrington is the chair of the trust, and the governors are Tom Arnold, David Begg, Noel Dorr, Margaret Elliott, Rosemary Kelly, Eoin O'Driscoll, Fergus O'Ferrall, Judith Woodworth, Barry Smyth, and Caitriona Murphy.

Recent history.

In 1969, the longest-serving editor of "The Irish Times", Douglas Gageby, was allegedly called a "white nigger" by the company chairman (a former Irish British army officer), because of the newspaper's coverage of Northern Ireland at the outset of the Troubles, which was upsetting the British government.  The paper established its first bureau in Asia when foreign correspondent Conor O'Clery moved to Beijing in 1996.  The paper suffered considerable financial difficulty in 2002 when a drop in advertising revenue coincided with a decision by the company to invest its reserves in the building of a new printing plant. None of the journalists were laid off, but many took a voluntary redundancy package when the paper was greatly restructured. Some foreign bureaux were closed and it also stopped publishing 'colour' pages devoted to Irish regions, with regional coverage now merged with news. The paper's problems stemmed partly from internal strife which led to Major McDowells's daughter, Karen Erwin, not being made chief executive. The reorganisation had the desired effect; after posting losses of almost €3 million in 2002, the paper returned to profit in 2003.  John Waters, a columnist who spoke out about the perceived vast salaries of the editor, managing director and deputy editor, was sacked and re-hired a week later, in November 2003. Former editor Geraldine Kennedy was paid more than the editor of the UK's top non-tabloid newspaper "The Daily Telegraph", which has a circulation of about nine times that of "The Irish Times". Later, columnist Fintan O'Toole told the "Sunday Independent": "We as a paper are not shy of preaching about corporate pay and fat cats but with this there is a sense of excess. Some of the sums mentioned are disturbing. This is not an attack on Ms Kennedy, it is an attack on the executive level of pay. There is double-standard of seeking more job cuts while paying these vast salaries.  In January 2005, the paper was due to run a front-page story on the Provisional IRA's denial of involvement in the Northern Bank robbery, one of Europe's largest ever, and a column by Kevin Myers, which said that the Provisional IRA were responsible. Myers asked for clarification of the decision from the editor, and later left the paper.  The following May, the paper launched a new international edition, which was available in London and southeast England at the same time as other daily newspapers (previously, copies of the Irish edition were flown from Dublin to major cities in Britain on passenger flights, arriving around lunchtime). It was printed at the Newsfax plant in Hackney, and uses the "Financial Times" distribution network.  The Central Bank of Ireland fined "The Irish Times" in 2008 after it admitted breaking market abuse rules.  In 2009, the Supreme Court ordered the paper to pay €600,000 in costs despite winning its case about the importance of protecting journalistic sources, and called its destruction of evidence "reprehensible conduct".  The newspaper has been criticized for its perceived support of the British Army. An article in "The Phoenix" magazine examined an article in "The Irish Times" published in August 2010 on Irish nationals serving in the British Army. According to "The Phoenix", the article romanticized the war in Afghanistan and was little more than a recruitment advertisement for the British Army. The magazine accused the editor Geraldine Kennedy and the Irish Times board of violating the Defence Act which prohibits any kind of advertising for recruitment for a foreign army and article 15.6.1 of the Constitution of Ireland which states "The right to raise and maintain military or armed forces is vested exclusively in the Oireachtas".  On 9 September 2011, the paper published a pseudonymous article by Kate Fitzgerald. Unknown to the paper, she had taken her life on 22 August 2011. The revelation sparked a nationwide debate on suicide with her parents appearing on television to discuss suicide and depression. The article criticised the reaction to her illness by her employer, The Communications Clinic, although it was only after she was identified as the author that her employer became known. The article was later removed from the paper's website, causing controversy online. The editor later told her parents that sections of her article were factually incorrect, but could not say which ones. Kate's parents complained to the Office of the Press Ombudsman about an apology made to The Communications Clinic, their complaint was upheld.  In September 2019, the paper reprinted an article from the "New York Times" by William Broad. The article claimed that "the blossoming anxiety over professed health risks of 5G [fifth generation wireless technology] 'can be traced to a single scientist and a single chart'". A complaint to the Office of the Press Ombudsman of the Press Council of Ireland was filed by Professor Tom Butler of the University College Cork. The Press Council Ombudsman upheld Butler's complaint, ruling that "The Irish Times breached Principle 1 (Truth and Accuracy) of the Code of Practice of the Press Council of Ireland".

Diversification.

The company has diversified from its original "Irish Times" title as a source of revenue. Irish Times Limited has taken a majority share for €5m in the Gazette Group Newspapers, a group publishing three local newspapers in West Dublin, and has acquired a property website, MyHome.ie, the second-largest property internet website in Ireland, for €50m, seen as insurance against the loss of revenue from traditional classified property advertising. In June 2009, journalists called on the board and trust to review "the flawed investment and diversification strategy of the company" and passed a motion saying that "ongoing investment in loss-making projects poses a serious threat to employment" at the newspaper. Four months later, the company announced a loss of €37 million and that 90 staff would be made redundant. The director, Maeve Donovan, who instigated the "investment and diversification" strategy, subsequently retired. She dismissed suggestions that she would receive a significant "golden handshake", saying that her package would be "nothing out of the ordinary at all". She was given a €1m "ex-gratia" payment by the newspaper "relating to a commutation of pension rights agreed with her".  The managing director said in 2009 that mobile phone applications would be a key investment for newspapers and "The Irish Times" now has an application for the iPhone and Android smartphones.  In June 2010, Gazette group newspapers' managing director claimed the company's affairs were being conducted oppressively by its majority shareholder, the Irish Times.

Offices.

In 1895, the paper moved from its original offices on Middle Abbey Street to D'Olier Street in the centre of Dublin. "D'Olier Street" became a metonym of "The Irish Times" which in turn was personified as "The Old Lady of D'Olier Street". In October 2006, the paper relocated to a new building on nearby Tara Street.

Online.

In 1994, "The Irish Times" established a website called Irish-times.ie; it was the first newspaper in Ireland and one of the first 30 newspapers in the world to do so. The company acquired the domain name "Ireland.com" in 1997, and from 1999 to 2008, used it to publish its online edition. It was freely available at first but charges and a registration fee were introduced in 2002 for access to most of the content. A number of blogs were added in April 2007 written by Jim Carroll, Shane Hegarty, and Conor Pope. On 30 June 2008, the company relaunched Ireland.com as a separate lifestyle portal and the online edition of the newspaper was now published at irishtimes.com. It was supplied free of charge, but a subscription was charged to view its archives.  On 15 October 2012 John O'Shea, Head of Online, "The Irish Times", announced that the ireland.com domain name had been sold to Tourism Ireland, and that the ireland.com email service would end on 7 November 2012. The domain name was sold for €495,000. The ending of the email service affected about 15,000 subscribers.  The newspaper announced on 17 February 2015 the reintroduction of a paywall for its website, "irishtimes.com", beginning on 23 February.

Format and content.

The paper has the same standard layout every day. The front page contains one main picture and three main news stories, with the left-hand column, News Digest, providing a 'teaser' of some of the stories inside the Home News, World News, Sport and Business Today sections as well as other information such as winning lottery numbers and weather forecasts. Inside, it usually contains eight to twelve pages of Irish news, called "Home News", covering the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It devotes several pages to important stories such as the publication of government reports, government budgets, important courts cases, and so on.  World News contains news from its correspondents abroad and from news wires and services such as Reuters, the Guardian Service, and the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service. The paper has correspondents in London, Paris, Brussels, and Washington.  "The Irish Times" publishes its residential property supplement every Thursday, one of the printed residential property listings for the Dublin area. This is also online. Motoring and employment supplements are published on Wednesday and Friday respectively, and are also online.  A business supplement is published every Friday, as is an entertainment supplement called "The Ticket", with film, music, theatre reviews, interviews, articles, and media listings. It features cinema writer Donald Clarke and music writers Jim Carroll, Brian Boyd, Tony Clayton-Lea and others. Michael Dwyer, the distinguished film critic and recipient of the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, wrote for the supplement until his death in 2010.  On Saturdays, a Weekend section is published, with news features, arts profiles, television and radio columns, and book reviews of mainly literary and biographical works, with occasional reviews in the technology sector. The Saturday edition also includes the Magazine with consumer and lifestyle features on food, wine, gardening, and there are travel and sports supplements.  Three Sudoku puzzles and two crosswords are published daily including a cryptic crossword, formerly compiled by "Crosaire", and a "Simplex" crossword. There is also a letters page. J.J. Walsh has contributed a chess puzzle to the paper since April 1955, originally weekly the puzzle became a daily fixture in September 1972.  The paper carries political cartoons by Martyn Turner and the American cartoon strip, Doonesbury. The business section has a satirical illustration by David Rooney every Friday. Tom Mathews contributes an arts-inspired cartoon (called "Artoon") to the arts section on Saturday.  A weekly Irish language page is carried on Wednesdays.  "The Irish Times" tended to support the Lisbon Treaty. However, opposing views were also printed, including articles by Declan Ganley of Libertas Ireland, and other anti-Lisbon campaigners.

Purchase of "Irish Examiner" and other assets.

In December 2017, it was reported that "The Irish Times" had reached an agreement to purchase the newspaper, radio and website interests of Landmark Media Investments which include the "Irish Examiner". Initially subject to regulatory approval, this sale was completed in July 2018.

2018 redundancies.

In September 2018, "The Irish Times" started a voluntary redundancy scheme. This followed the Landmark Media Investments acquisition.

Print circulation.

Average print circulation was approximately 100,000 copies per issue in 2011, dropping to approximately 62,000 by 2017.

Digital Irish Times Circulation.

ABC measure digital circulation based on paid for digital subscriptions that include an ePaper in the package. This means that the free student edition and the basic package, which does not include an ePaper, are excluded from the below statistics.

Columns.

Regular columns include:

The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper and online digital publication. The Irish Times launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Paul O'Neill. The deputy editor is Deirdre Veldon. "The Irish Times" is published every day except Sundays.

The Irish Times ist eine irische überregionale Tageszeitung, gegründet am 29. März 1859 in Dublin. Der Herausgeber ist "Paul O'Neill", der am 5. April 2017 die Nachfolge von "Kevin O'Sullivan" antrat. The Irish Times wird täglich außer Sonntags veröffentlicht.


Etymology.

Shirak Province is named after the Shirak canton of the historic Ayrarat province of Ancient Armenia, ruled by the Kamsarakan noble family between the 3rd and 8th centuries.  According to Movses Khorenatsi, the name Shirak is derived from Shara, who was the great grandson of Hayk the legendary patriarch and founder of the Armenian nation. However, according to the Shirak Regional Museum, many historians assume that the name is derived from the name Eriakhi found in an ancient Urartian cuneiform, where king Argishti I narrated about his invasion of the land of "Eriakhi".

Geography.

Shirak Province occupies the northwestern part of Armenia and covers an area of (9% of total area of Armenia). It has borders with Lori Province from the east, Aragatsotn Province from the south, Kars Province of Turkey from the west and Samtskhe-Javakheti region of Georgia from the north.  Historically, the current territory of the province mainly occupies the "Shirak" canton of Ayrarat province of Ancient Armenia.  Shirak is mainly dominated by the Ashotsk Plateue (1900 to 2100 meters height) at the north and the Shirak Plain (1400 to 1800 meters height) at the centre and south of the province. The vast plains of the province are surrounded with the Bazum and Pambak mountains from the east, Javakheti Range and Yeghnakhagh mountains from the north and the Aragats mass from the south. Akhurian River at the east, separates Shirak from the Kars Province of Turkey.  Akhurian River with its reservoir is the main water resource in the province. Lake Arpi at the northwest of Shirak is the only lake of the province. The area is protected by the government as the Lake Arpi National Park.  Shirak is rich with tufa, pumice and limestone.  The climate is characterized with extremely cold snowy winters and mild summers. The annual precipitation level can reach up to.

History.

Classical antiquity and Urartu period.

Many ancient human settlements were found at the Akhurian valley dating back to around 9000 BC. The territory of Shirak has been settled since the early Stone Age. At the higher areas that are above 2000 meters, many remains were found from the early Bronze Age. Other remains from the 2nd millennium BC, revealed that a civilization was founded between the 20th and 12th centuries BC. Wuth the start of the Iron Age during the 12th century BC, the relations among the ethnic groups of Armenian Highland has been developed. Soon after the establishment of the Urartu Kingdom of Van at the end of the 9th century BC, Shirak became part of the kingdom. 2 cuneiform scripts have been found in Shirak left by King Argishti I (786-764 BC), where he narrates about the invasion of the land of Eriakhi (the name that Shirak is derived from, according to many historians). According to the scripts, the region was home to a well developed civilization based on agriculture and cattle-breeding.  in 720 BC, the Cimmerians conquered the region and probably founded the "Kumayri" settlement (now "Gyumri"), which bears phonetic resemblance to the word used by ancient Armenian in reference to Cimmerians. Historians believe that Xenophon passed through the territories of Shirak during his return to the Black Sea, a journey immortalized in his Anabasis.

Satrapy of Armenia and the ancient Armenian Kingdom.

By the second half of the 6th century BC, Shirak became part of the Achaemenid Empire. The remains of a royal settlement found near the village of Beniamin dating back to the 5th to 2nd centuries BC, are a great example of the Achemenid influence in the region. By the beginning of the 5th century BC, Shirak became part of the Satrapy of Armenia under the rule of the Orontids. Later in 331 BC, the entire territory was included in the Ayrarat province of Ancient Armenian Kingdom as part of the Shirak canton.  During the 1st century AD, Shirak was granted to the Kamsarakan family, who ruled the region during the Arsacid Kingdom of Armenia.

Foreign rule and Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia.

Following the partition of Armenia in 387 between the Byzantines and the Persians, and as a result of the fall of the Arsacid Kingdom of Armenia in 428, the region of Shirak became part of the Sasanian Empire of Persia.  However, Shirak is home to many early examples of the Armenian church architecture dating back to the 5th century, including the Yererouk, the Saint Mariné Church of Artik, and the Hokevank Monastery.  In 658 AD, during the height of the Arab Islamic invasions, Shirak -along with the rest of the Armenian territories- was conquered during the Muslim conquest of Persia, as it was part of Persian-ruled Armenia. It became part of the Emirate of Armenia under the Umayyad Caliphate. However, the Kamsarakan family continued to rule the region under the Arab Islamic rule of Armenia.  By the foundation of the Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia in 885, Shirak entered a new era of growth and progress, particularly when the city of Ani of Shirak became the capital of the kingdom in 961. By the second half of the 10th century, Shirak was under the influence of the Armenian Pahlavuni family, who were descendants of the Kamsarakans. The Pahlavunis had a great contribution in the progress of Shirak with the foundation of many fortresses, monastic complexes, educational institutions, etc. The monasteries of Khtzkonk, Harichavank, Marmashen and Horomos were among the prominent religious and educational centres of medieval Armenia.

Seljuk period, Zakarid Armenia and Turkmen rule.

After the fall of Armenia to the Byzantine Empire in 1045 and later to the Seljuk invaders in 1064, the region entered an era of downfall in all social, educational and cultural aspects.  However, with the establishment of the Zakarid Principality of Armenia in 1201 under the Georgian protectorate, the Eastern Armenian territories, mainly Lori and Shirak, entered into a new period of growth and stability, becoming a trade centre between the east and the west. After the Mongols captured Ani in 1236, Armenia turned into a Mongol protectorate as part of the Ilkhanate, and the Zakarids became vassals to the Mongols. After the fall of the Ilkhanate in the mid-14th century, the Zakarid princes ruled over Lori, Shirak and Ararat plain until 1360 when they fell to the invading Turkic tribes.  By the last quarter of the 14th century, the Aq Qoyunlu Sunni Oghuz Turkic tribe took over Armenia, including Shirak. In 1400, Timur invaded Armenia and Georgia, and captured more than 60,000 of the survived local people as slaves. Many districts including Shirak were depopulated. In 1410, Armenia fell under the control of the Kara Koyunlu Shia Oghuz Turkic tribe. According to the Armenian historian Thomas of Metsoph, although the Kara Koyunlu levied heavy taxes against the Armenians, the early years of their rule were relatively peaceful and some reconstruction of towns took place.

Iranian and Russian rule.

In 1501, most of the Eastern Armenian territories including Shirak were conquered by the emerging Safavid dynasty of Iran led by Shah Ismail I. Soon after in 1502, Shirak became part of the newly formed "Erivan Beglarbegi", a new administrative territory of Iran formed by the Safavids. During the first half of the 18th century, Kumayri became part of the Erivan Khanate under the rule of the Afsharid dynasty and later under the Qajar dynasty of Persia. In June 1804, the Russian Empire took control of Shirak region at the beginning of the Russo-Persian War of 1804–1813. The region became officially part of the Russian Empire at the Treaty of Gulistan signed on 1 January 1813. During the period of the Russian rule, the region witnessed a swift growth and the town of Gyumri became one of the developing cities in Transcaucasia. In 1829, in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War, there was a big influx of Armenian population, as around 3,000 families who had migrated from territories in the Ottoman Empire -in particular from the towns of Kars, Erzurum, and Doğubeyazıt- settled in Shirak. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin visited the region during his journey to the Caucasus and eastern Turkey in 1829.  In 1837 Russian Tsar Nicholas I arrived in Shirak and re-founded the city of Gyumri as Alexandropol. The name was chosen in honour of Tsar Nicholas I's wife, Princess Charlotte of Prussia, who had changed her name to "Alexandra Fyodorovna" after converting to Orthodox Christianity. A major Russian fortress was built in Alexandropol in 1837. The city was completely rebuilt by 1840 to become the centre of the newly established Alexandropol Uyezd, experiencing rapid growth during its first decade. The Alexandropol Uyezd included the northern Armenian territories of Shirak, Lori and Tavush.  In 1849, the Alexandropol Uyezd became part of the Erivan Governorate, and Shirak became an important outpost for the Imperial Russian armed forces in the Transcaucasus where their military barracks were established.  During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 Shirak became one of the major centres of the Russian troops. After the establishment of the railway station in Alexandropol in 1899, Shirak witnessed a significant growth as centre of trade and industry, becoming the most developed region within eastern Armenia.

20th century.

After the October Revolution of 1917 and the Russian withdrawal from Transcaucasia, the First Republic of Armenia was proclaimed on 28 May 1918, which included Shirak. On 10 May 1920, the local Bolshevik Armenians aided by the Muslim population, attempted a coup d'état in Alexandropol against the Dashnak government of Armenia. The uprising was suppressed by the Armenian government on May 14 and its leaders were executed. However, during another Turkish invasion, Turkish troops again attacked Shirak and occupied Alexandropol on 7 November 1920. Armenia was forced to sign the Treaty of Alexandropol on December 3 to stop the Turkish advance towards Yerevan, however a concurrent Soviet invasion led to the fall of the Armenian government on December 2. The Turkish forces withdrew from Alexandropol after the Treaty of Kars was signed in October 1921 by the unrecognized Soviet and Turkish governments.  Under the Bolsheviks, Alexandropol was renamed Leninakan in 1924, after the deceased Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Shirak became a major industrial region within the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Leninakan was the second-largest city, after the capital Yerevan. However, Shirak, and particularly Leninakan, suffered major damage during the 1988 Armenian earthquake which devastated many parts of northern Armenia. The earthquake occurred along a known thrust fault with a length of. Its strike was parallel to the Caucasus range and dipped to the north-northeast.  From 1930 until 1995, modern-day Shirak was divided into 5 raions and 1 city of republican subordination within the Armenian SSR: "Amasia", "Ghukasyan", "Akhurian", "Ani", "Artik" and the city of "Leniankan". With the territorial administration reform of 1995, the 5 raions and the city of Gyumri (Leninakan) were merged to form the Shirak Province.

Demographics.

Population.

According to the 2011 official census, Shirak has a population of 251,941 (121,615 men and 130,326 women), forming around 8.3% of the entire population of Armenia. The urban population is 146,908 (58.3%) and the rural is 105,033 (41.7%). The province has 3 urban and 116 rural communities. The largest urban community is the provincial centre of Gyumri, with a population of 121,976. The other urban centres of Artik and Maralik have a population of 19,534 and 5,398 respectively.  With a population of 4,838, the village of Azatan is the largest rural municipality of Shirak.  The dialect of Shirak is a variant of Karin dialect, closely related to Western Armenian.

Ethnic groups and religion.

The majority of the Shirak Province population are ethnic Armenians who belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church. The northern and middle parts of Shirak are under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Shirak headed by Bishop Mikayel Ajapahyan of the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God in Gyumri, while the southern part is under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Artik headed by Archimendrite Narek Avagyan of the Saint Gregory Cathedral in Artik.  There is a significant minority of Armenian Catholics in Shirak. The number of the Catholic population in the province is around 30,000. Gyumri is home to around 20,000, while the rest are found in the surrounding rural settlements. The villages of Arevik, Arpeni, Bavra, Ghazanchi, Marmashen, Mets Sepasar, Panik and Sizavet have a majority of Armenian Catholics, while the village of Azatan has around 1,500 Catholics (30% of village's population). As of 2016, Shirak is home to 9 catholic operating churches. The Cathedral of the Holy Martyrs in Gyumri is the seat of the Armenian Catholic Ordinariate of Eastern Europe headed by Archbishop Raphaël François Minassian.  The presence of the small Russian Orthodox community along with the Russian military base personnel in Gyumri is marked with the Saint Alexandra the Martyr's Church, Saint Michael the Archangel's Church and the church of Saint Arsenije.  The small village of Shirakavan has around 30 Yazidi residents.

Administrative divisions.

As a result of the administrative reforms in November 2017, Shirak is currently divided into 42 municipal communities ("hamaynkner"), of which 3 are urban and 39 are rural:  During the recent years, many rural settlements in Shirak became abandoned, including the villages of Akhuryan kayaran, Aravet, Lorasar and Yerizak.

Culture.

Media.

Shirak is home to many TV stations:  "Shrjapat" weekly is the local newspaper of Shirak.

Transportation.

Air transportation.

Shirak is served by the international Shirak Airport, about to the southeast of the Gyumri city centre. It was inaugurated in 1961 and is the second largest airport in Armenia. It is considered an alternative hub for the Zvartnots International Airport in Yerevan.  At the beginning of 2017, the government of Armenia focused on revitalizing the airport. Multiple new airlines began operating flights to the airport, including Taron Avia - a new Armenian airline based in Gyumri -, and Pobeda which is a Russian low-cost airline and a wholly owned subsidiary of Aeroflot. In order to attract more customers, the Ministry of Nature Protection made meteorological services free for all airlines flying to Gyumri, lowering ticket costs. The Gyumri Technology Center also participated in helping revitalize the airport by adding interior design details to improve the airport's look.

Railway.

The railway junction of Gyumri is the oldest and the largest one in Armenia. It was formed in 1897 and the first railway link to Alexandropol that connected the city with Tiflis was completed in 1899. The rail line was then extended from Alexandropol to Yerevan (in 1902), Kars (in 1902), Jolfa (in 1906), and Tabriz. As a result, Alexandropol became an important rail hub. , the Gyumri Railway Station operates regular trips to Yerevan and Batumi. The South Caucasus Railway CJSC, is the current operator of the railway sector in Armenia. The Gyumri-Yerevan railway trip has many stops in Shirak Province, including the stations of Bayandur, Shirakavan, Isahakyan, Aghin kayaran, Jrapi, Bagravan and Aniavan.

Public vans and taxis.

Public transport is available in the provincial centre Gyumri. It is mainly served by public vans, locally-known as "marshrutka". The central station of the city serves as bus terminal for inter-city transport, serving outbound routes towards the villages of Shirak, as well as major cities and towns in Armenia and neighbouring Georgia.  The M-7 Motorway passes across the province from east to west, connecting the city of Gyumri with the rest of Armenia.

Economy.

Agriculture.

The economy of the province is mainly based on agriculture, including farming and cattle-breeding. It has a share of 11.6% in the annual total agricultural product of Armenia. Around 80% (2,145.5 km2) of the total area of the province are arable lands, out of which 36.7% (787 km2) are ploughed.  The fertile Shirak plain is the largest producer of grains and potato in Armenia. The irrigation system in the province is highly developed. 9 water reservoirs of different sizes -with a total capacity of are able to irrigate around of farmlands.  Shirak is the 1st among the Armenian provinces in cattle-breeding business. There are also fish farming ponds near Gyumri and many rural communities.

Industry.

During the Soviet period, the region was a major industrial hub within the Armenian SSR. After the independence, the industrial sector of the region has drastically declined. Currently, the province contributes by 3.5% in the annual total industrial product of Armenia. Shirak is the largest producer of building materials in Armenia, mainly tufa stones and pumice.

Education.

Gyumri is the main educational centre of the province educational institutions. The city is home to 3 universities:  Branches of the National Polytechnic University of Armenia, Armenian State University of Economics, Yerevan Komitas State Conservatory, Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts, Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinematography, European Regional Educational Academy and Haybusak University of Yerevan are also operating in the city.  As of the 2015-16 educational year, Shirak has 167 schools.  The Turpanjian Theological High School of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin is operating since 1881 within the Harichavank monastic complex in Shirak.

Sport.

Football, basketball and chess are the most popular sports in the province. However, other Olympic sports including wrestling and weightlifting are also popular, mainly in Gyumri. Shirak is home to many former and current World, Olympic and European champions in several types of sports who competed under the flag of Soviet Union and later under the Armenian flag.  The city is represented by the FC Shirak at the Armenian Premier League competition. Aragats FC were the second football club in Gyumri, but they were dissolved in 2002 due to financial difficulties.  FC Tufagorts (dissolved in 1995) and FC Sipan (dissolved in 1993), both from the town of Artik, had also represented the province in the football competitions of Armenia.  The largest sport venue of the province is the Gyumri City Stadium. Gyumri is also home to the FFA Football Academy. The towns of Artik and Maralik have a football stadium each with minor capacities.  Gyumri is also famous for winter sports. The Gyumri school of winter sports renovated in 2015-16, is named after Ludvig Mnatsakanyan. The area of Ashotsk has a modern skiing trail hosting an international tournament for cross-country skiing.

Shirak (, ), is a province ("marz") of Armenia. It is located in the north-west of the country, bordering Turkey in the west and Georgia in the north. Its capital and largest city is Gyumri. It is as much semi-desert as it is mountain meadow or high alpine. In the south, the high steppes crash into mountain terrain, verdant green in the spring, hues of reddish brown in the summer. The province is served by the Shirak International Airport of Gyumri.

Schirak (,, in wissenschaftlicher Transliteration "Širaki marz," übersetzt "Provinz Schirak," in englischer Transkription "Shirak)" ist die nordwestlichste Provinz Armeniens.