title: North Carolina Highway 133

text: NC 133 starts at the intersection of East Oak Island Drive and Country Club Drive near Yaupon Beach on Oak Island. The start of the road is just about one-half mile (0.80 km) from the Oak Island lighthouse, a tourist attraction in the area. Running north along Country Club Drive, NC 133 crosses the Intracoastal Waterway on the G. V. Barbee Bridge. The road name changes to Long Beach Road SE and passes the Cape Fear Regional Jetport to the east. 2.1 miles (3.4 km) north of the G. V. Barbee Bridge, NC 133 meets NC 211 (Southport-Supply Road SE) at an intersection northwest of Southport. The road briefly becomes a four-lane undivided road between Old Long Beach Road and an area just north of NC 211. North of the intersection, NC 133 continues northeast along Long Beach Road SE for 1.7 miles (2.7 km). At an intersection with, NC 87 (River Road SE), NC 133 turns to the north and runs concurrently with NC 87 for one mile (1.6 km). Near Boiling Spring Lakes, NC 133 turns right toward Wilmington, maintaining the name River Road SE. The border of Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point coincides with the eastern side of the road in this area. Additionally, NC 133 runs to the south and east of Boiling Spring Lakes. Following the boundary of Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, NC 133 bears to the northeast until it nears Liliput Creek where it turns to the northwest. Access to Orton Plantation and Brunswick Town State Historical Site is located off of NC 133 north of Sunny Point. Between Liliput Creek and Belville, the road generally parallels both the Cape Fear River and Brunswick River. A historical marker dedicated to Robert Howe is located off of NC 133 in Belville. In Leland the road meets U.S. Route 17 (US 17), US 74, and US 76 at a diverging diamond interchange. NC 133 merges onto the freeway, running concurrently with US 17/US 74/US 76 across the Brunswick River.


title: North Carolina Highway 133

text: NC 133 and US 74 exit the freeway at a trumpet interchange with US 421 west of Downtown Wilmington. US 17, US 76, and US 421 continue to the east and cross into downtown Wilmington via the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge. NC 133, US 74, and US 421 run concurrently to the north, paralleling the Northeast Cape Fear River. An intersection north of the trumpet interchange provides access to the USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial. The three routes pass over the Cape Fear River on the S. Thomas Rhodes Bridge. US 74 and NC 133 turn east from the north-south road and cross the Northeast Cape Fear River via the Isabel Stellings Holmes Bridge. Following an interchange with Third Street, the roads run concurrently along the Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. NC 133 exits off the freeway at Castle Hayne Road in the community of Hightsville. Following Castle Hayne Road to the north, NC 133 goes through Wrightsboro, a census-designated community north of downtown Wilmington. Wilmington International Airport is located east of NC 133, with access from 23rd Street and Gordon Road. NC 133 meets Interstate 140 (I-140) north of Wrightsboro at a partial cloverleaf interchange. Near Skippers Corner, NC 133 meets US 117 and NC 132 at a roundabout. NC 132 ends at the roundabout, and NC 133 exits to the north, running concurrently with US 117. NC 133 and US 117 both run through Castle Hayne and cross over the Northeast Cape Fear River, entering Pender County. North of the bridge, NC 133 turns left at Old Blossom Ferry Road and follows the road to the northwest. The route is primarily rural north of Castle Hayne, passing south of Cape Fear Elementary School and Cape Fear Middle School. NC 133 ends at an intersection with NC 210 in Bells Crossroads.


title: North Carolina Highway 133

text: In 1969, the routing of NC 133 was adjusted to its modern route between the Brunswick River and Northeast Cape Fear River. NC 133 ran concurrently with US 17/US 74/US 76 in Brunswick County until reaching US 421 at an interchange. NC 133 then ran concurrently with US 421 north to the Isabel Stellings Holmes Bridge, where it crossed the Northeast Cape Fear River concurrent with US 117. Both highways then followed Front Street and Fourth Street in downtown Wilmington, along with Cornelius Harnett Drive and Castle Hayne Road towards Wrightsboro. In 1978, NC 133 was placed onto the modern-day freeway between Belville and US 421, running concurrently with US 17/US 74/US 76. Between 1980 and 1984, the section of NC 133 running concurrently with US 421 was mulitlaned and adjusted slightly to the west NC 133 was removed from its routing along North Front Street, North Fourth Street, Cornelius Harnett Drive, and Castle Hayne Road in 2005. This temporary gap in the route was due to the construction of the Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway in Downtown Wilmington. The route was reestablished in February 2008 via the Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway.


title: Mona Gordon Wilson

text: The daughter of Harold Wilson and Elizabeth Farquahar Tainsh, she was born in Toronto and was educated at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She served in the American Army Nursing Corps during World War I. After the war, she served with the American Red Cross in eastern Europe. She returned to Canada, earned a degree in public health nursing from the University of Toronto and became chief Red Cross public health nurse for Prince Edward Island, serving from 1922 to 1931. Wilson introduced public health initiatives such as nursing classes, school programs, health clinics, home visits and Junior Red Cross branches to the island. In 1931, when the province established a Department of Health, she was named Provincial Director of Public Health Nursing. From 1940 to 1946, she was assistant commissioner of the British Red Cross for Newfoundland. She also helped establish a number of organizations on Prince Edward Island, including the Girl Guides, the Zonta Club and the Business and Professional Women's Club of Charlottetown.


title: John the Laz

text: John was born as Mithridates in the region of Lazica, part of the Kingdom of Iberia during the reign of Vakhtang I. Mithridates was most probably a eunuch and chamberlain at the Roman royal court. He changed his name after he became a monk following his ordination. John, moved by the example of Saint Passarion of Palestine, he and his adept, another Georgian by birth, Peter the Iberian, whom he met in the Great Palace of Constantinople, decided to escape to Jerusalem and organize a monastery with a shelter for poor pilgrims, where they would engage in "uninterrupted praise and warship of God". They chose the place near the Tower of David. Per Vita Petri Iberi, "blessed fathers Peter and John went to the deserted place near the Jordan River, and built a monastery there". When a dispute arose with the neighbor concerning the monastery's property line, words came to blows, and neighbor punched John in his face. In c. 444, John, with Peter left Jerusalem for Gaza. Peter soon became a bishop of Gaza. John had a weak physical health and suffered from skin disease. He was affected with kind of herpes that broke out on his whole face. Peter, worried about his friend's health, took John to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Peter and John knelt down and prayed all night with "bitter tears and groans", and eventually, at dawn, John's face was completely cured with the "devine power of the holy cross".


title: Henry H. Crapo

text: Crapo was elected Alderman of New Bedford, and became Chairman of Council Committee on Education. In the latter role he prepared a report upon which was based the order for the establishment of the free Public Library of New Bedford. On its organization, Mr. Crapo was chosen as a member of the board of trustees. This was the first free public library in Massachusetts, if not in the world. The Boston Free Library was established, however, soon afterwards. While a resident in New Bedford, he was much interested in horticulture, and to obtain the land necessary for carrying out his ideas he drained and reclaimed several acres of rocky and swampy land adjoining his garden. Here he started a nursery, which he filled with almost every description of fruit and ornamental trees, shrubs, flowers, etc. In this he was very successful and took great pride. He was a regular contributor to the New England Horticultural Journal, a position he filled as long as he lived in Massachusetts. As an indication of the wide reputation he acquired in that field of labor, it may be mentioned that after his death an affecting eulogy to his memory was pronounced by the President of the National Horticultural Society at its meeting in Philadelphia, in 1869. A fine barque built at Dartmouth, of which he was part owner, was named the "H. H. Crapo" in compliment to him.


title: Nikolai Aristov

text: Aristov was interested in geopolitics, the origin and ethnic structure of Türkic peoples. His work concentrated on the history of Kazakh and Kyrgyz people ("Kyrgyzes" in Aristov's published terminology) from the most ancient Usuns up to the end of the 19th century. Aristov set out on a lifelong venture to complement the works of the German classic of historical-geographical determinism K.Ritter and his followers P.P.Semenov-Tianshansky and V.V.Grigoriev in Russia. Aristov collected materials for "addition" to Ritter with example of Usuns - Kyrgyzes and Tien Shan history. In 1889 he published an article about Süan-Tszan ()travel across Western Turkestan 4, a preparatory research for his fundamental work. The author modestly saw his work only as addition to the K.Ritter "Physical geography of Asia", and saw his task only in "collecting all data and news available on history of the western Tien Shan and its population in the European scientific literature and in translations into European languages of the eastern sources".


title: Windows Vista

text: Microsoft began work on Windows Vista, known at the time by its codename "Longhorn", in May 2001, five months before the release of Windows XP. It was originally expected to ship in October 2003 as a minor step between Windows XP and "Blackcomb", which was planned to be the company's next major operating system release. Gradually, "Longhorn" assimilated many of the important new features and technologies slated for Blackcomb, resulting in the release date being pushed back several times in three years. In some builds of Longhorn, their license agreement said "For the Microsoft product codenamed 'Whistler'". Many of Microsoft's developers were also re-tasked to build updates to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to strengthen security. Faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on August 27, 2004, that it had revised its plans. For this reason, Longhorn was reset to start work on componentizing the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 codebase, and over time re-incorporating the features that would be intended for an actual operating system release. However, some previously announced features such as WinFS were dropped or postponed, and a new software development methodology called the Security Development Lifecycle was incorporated to address concerns with the security of the Windows codebase, which is programmed in C, C++ and assembly. Longhorn became known as Vista in 2005. Vista in Spanish means view.


title: Windows Vista

text: After several months of relatively little news or activity from Microsoft with Longhorn, Microsoft released Build 4008, which had made an appearance on the Internet around February 28, 2003. It was also privately handed out to a select group of software developers. As an evolutionary release over build 3683, it contained several small improvements, including a modified blue "Plex" theme and a new, simplified Windows Image-based installer that operates in graphical mode from the outset, and completed an install of the operating system in approximately one third the time of Windows XP on the same hardware. An optional "new taskbar" was introduced that was thinner than the previous build and displayed the time differently. The most notable visual and functional difference, however, came with Windows Explorer. The incorporation of the Plex theme made blue the dominant color of the entire application. The Windows XP-style task pane was almost completely replaced with a large horizontal pane that appeared under the toolbars. A new search interface allowed for filtering of results, searching for Windows help, and natural-language queries that would be used to integrate with WinFS. The animated search characters were also removed. The "view modes" were also replaced with a single slider that would resize the icons in real-time, in the list, thumbnail, or details mode, depending on where the slider was. File metadata was also made more visible and more easily editable, with more active encouragement to fill out missing pieces of information. Also of note was the conversion of Windows Explorer to being a .NET application.


title: Windows Vista

text: Most builds of Longhorn and Vista were identified by a label that was always displayed in the bottom-right corner of the desktop. A typical build label would look like "Longhorn Build 3683.Lab06_N.020923-1821". Higher build numbers did not automatically mean that the latest features from every development team at Microsoft was included. Typically, a team working on a certain feature or subsystem would generate their working builds which developers would test with, and when the code was deemed stable, all the changes would be incorporated back into the main development tree at once. At Microsoft, several "Build labs" exist where the compilation of the entirety of Windows can be performed by a team. The name of the lab in which any given build originated is shown as part of the build label, and the date and time of the build follow that. Some builds (such as Beta 1 and Beta 2) only display the build label in the version information dialog (Winver). The icons used in these builds are from Windows XP.


title: Windows Vista

text: By 2004, it had become obvious to the Windows team at Microsoft that they were losing sight of what needed to be done to complete the next version of Windows and ship it to customers. Internally, some Microsoft employees were describing the Longhorn project as "another Cairo" or "Cairo.NET", referring to the Cairo development project that the company embarked on through the first half of the 1990s, which never resulted in a shipping operating system (though nearly all the technologies developed in that time did end up in Windows 95 and Windows NT). Microsoft was shocked in 2005 by Apple's release of Mac OS X Tiger. It offered only a limited subset of features planned for Longhorn, in particular fast file searching and integrated graphics and sound processing, but appeared to have impressive reliability and performance compared to contemporary Longhorn builds. Most Longhorn builds had major Windows Explorer system leaks which prevented the OS from performing well, and added more confusion to the development teams in later builds with more and more code being developed which failed to reach stability.


title: Windows Vista

text: In a September 23, 2005 front-page article in The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, who had overall responsibility for the development and delivery of Windows, explained how development of Longhorn had been "crashing into the ground" due in large part to the haphazard methods by which features were introduced and integrated into the core of the operating system, without a clear focus on an end-product. Allchin went on to explain how in December 2003, he enlisted the help of two other senior executives, Brian Valentine and Amitabh Srivastava, the former being experienced with shipping software at Microsoft, most notably Windows Server 2003, and the latter having spent his career at Microsoft researching and developing methods of producing high-quality testing systems. Srivastava employed a team of core architects to visually map out the entirety of the Windows operating system, and to proactively work towards a development process that would enforce high levels of code quality, reduce interdependencies between components, and in general, "not make things worse with Vista". Since Microsoft decided that Longhorn needed to be further componentized, work started on builds (known as the Omega-13 builds, named after a time travel device in the film Galaxy Quest) that would componentize existing Windows Server 2003 source code, and over time add back functionality as development progressed. Future Longhorn builds would start from Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and continue from there.


title: Windows Vista

text: After Longhorn was named Windows Vista in July 2005, an unprecedented beta-test program was started, involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers and companies. In September of that year, Microsoft started releasing regular Community Technology Previews (CTP) to beta testers from July 2005 to February 2006. The first of these was distributed at the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, and was subsequently released to beta testers and Microsoft Developer Network subscribers. The builds that followed incorporated most of the planned features for the final product, as well as a number of changes to the user interface, based largely on feedback from beta testers. Windows Vista was deemed feature-complete with the release of the "February CTP", released on February 22, 2006, and much of the remainder of the work between that build and the final release of the product focused on stability, performance, application and driver compatibility, and documentation. Beta 2, released in late May, was the first build to be made available to the general public through Microsoft's Customer Preview Program. It was downloaded over 5 million times. Two release candidates followed in September and October, both of which were made available to a large number of users.


title: Windows Vista

text: While Microsoft had originally hoped to have the consumer versions of the operating system available worldwide in time for the 2006 holiday shopping season, it announced in March 2006 that the release date would be pushed back to January 2007 in order to give the company—and the hardware and software companies that Microsoft depends on for providing device drivers—additional time to prepare. Because a release to manufacturing (RTM) build is the final version of code shipped to retailers and other distributors, the purpose of a pre-RTM build is to eliminate any last "show-stopper" bugs that may prevent the code from responsibly being shipped to customers, as well as anything else that consumers may find troublesome. Thus, it is unlikely that any major new features would be introduced; instead, work would focus on Vista's fit and finish. In just a few days, developers had managed to drop Vista's bug count from over 2470 on September 22 to just over 1400 by the time RC2 shipped in early October. However, they still had a way to go before Vista was ready to RTM. Microsoft's internal processes required Vista's bug count to drop to 500 or fewer before the product could go into escrow for RTM. For most of the pre-RTM builds, only 32-bit editions were released.


title: Windows Vista

text: On June 14, 2006, Windows developer Philip Su posted a blog entry which decried the development process of Windows Vista, stating that "The code is way too complicated, and that the pace of coding has been tremendously slowed down by overbearing process." The same post also described Windows Vista as having approximately 50 million lines of code, with about 2,000 developers working on the product. During a demonstration of the speech recognition feature new to Windows Vista at Microsoft's Financial Analyst Meeting on July 27, 2006, the software recognized the phrase "Dear mom" as "Dear aunt". After several failed attempts to correct the error, the sentence eventually became "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all". A developer with Vista's speech recognition team later explained that there was a bug with the build of Vista that was causing the microphone gain level to be set very high, resulting in the audio being received by the speech recognition software being "incredibly distorted".


title: Windows Vista

text: For graphics, Vista introduces a new Windows Display Driver Model and a major revision to Direct3D. The new driver model facilitates the new Desktop Window Manager, which provides the tearing-free desktop and special effects that are the cornerstones of Windows Aero. Direct3D 10, developed in conjunction with major graphics card manufacturers, is a new architecture with more advanced shader support, and allows the graphics processing unit to render more complex scenes without assistance from the CPU. It features improved load balancing between CPU and GPU and also optimizes data transfer between them. WDDM also provides video content playback that rivals typical consumer electronics devices. It does this by making it easy to connect to external monitors, providing for protected HD video playback, and increasing overall video playback quality. For the first time in Windows, graphics processing unit (GPU) multitasking is possible, enabling users to run more than one GPU-intensive application simultaneously.


title: Windows Vista

text: User Account Control, or UAC is perhaps the most significant and visible of these changes. UAC is a security technology that makes it possible for users to use their computer with fewer privileges by default, to stop malware from making unauthorized changes to the system. This was often difficult in previous versions of Windows, as the previous "limited" user accounts proved too restrictive and incompatible with a large proportion of application software, and even prevented some basic operations such as looking at the calendar from the notification tray. In Windows Vista, when an action is performed that requires administrative rights (such as installing/uninstalling software or making system-wide configuration changes), the user is first prompted for an administrator name and password; in cases where the user is already an administrator, the user is still prompted to confirm the pending privileged action. Regular use of the computer such as running programs, printing, or surfing the Internet does not trigger UAC prompts. User Account Control asks for credentials in a Secure Desktop mode, in which the entire screen is dimmed, and only the authorization window is active and highlighted. The intent is to stop a malicious program from misleading the user by interfering with the authorization window, and to hint to the user about the importance of the prompt.


title: Windows Vista

text: Whereas prior releases of Windows supported per-file encryption using Encrypting File System, the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista include BitLocker Drive Encryption, which can protect entire volumes, notably the operating system volume. However, BitLocker requires approximately a 1.5-gigabyte partition to be permanently not encrypted and to contain system files for Windows to boot. In normal circumstances, the only time this partition is accessed is when the computer is booting, or when there is a Windows update that changes files in this area, which is a legitimate reason to access this section of the drive. The area can be a potential security issue, because a hexadecimal editor (such as dskprobe.exe), or malicious software running with administrator and/or kernel level privileges would be able to write to this "Ghost Partition" and allow a piece of malicious software to compromise the system, or disable the encryption. BitLocker can work in conjunction with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) cryptoprocessor (version 1.2) embedded in a computer's motherboard, or with a USB key. However, as with other full disk encryption technologies, BitLocker is vulnerable to a cold boot attack, especially where TPM is used as a key protector without a boot PIN being required too.


title: Windows Vista

text: There are some issues for software developers using some of the graphics APIs in Vista. Games or programs built solely on the Windows Vista-exclusive version of DirectX, version 10, cannot work on prior versions of Windows, as DirectX 10 is not available for previous Windows versions. Also, games that require the features of D3D9Ex, the updated implementation of DirectX 9 in Windows Vista are also incompatible with previous Windows versions. According to a Microsoft blog, there are three choices for OpenGL implementation on Vista. An application can use the default implementation, which translates OpenGL calls into the Direct3D API and is frozen at OpenGL version 1.4, or an application can use an Installable Client Driver (ICD), which comes in two flavors: legacy and Vista-compatible. A legacy ICD disables the Desktop Window Manager, a Vista-compatible ICD takes advantage of a new API, and is fully compatible with the Desktop Window Manager. At least two primary vendors, ATI and NVIDIA provided full Vista-compatible ICDs. However, hardware overlay is not supported, because it is considered as an obsolete feature in Vista. ATI and NVIDIA strongly recommend using compositing desktop/Framebuffer Objects for same functionality.


title: Windows Vista

text: Windows Vista shipped in six different product editions. These were deviced across separate consumer and business target markets, with editions varying in features to cater to specific sub-markets. For consumers, there are three editions, with two available for economically more developed countries. Windows Vista Starter edition is aimed at low-powered computers with availability only in emerging markets. Windows Vista Home Basic is intended for budget users. Windows Vista Home Premium covers the majority of the consumer market and contains applications for creating and using multimedia; the home editions consequentally cannot join a Windows Server domain. For businesses, there are three editions as well. Windows Vista Business is specifically designed for small and medium-sized enterprises, while Windows Vista Enterprise is only available to Software Assurance customers. Windows Vista Ultimate contains all features from the Home and Business editions, as well as Windows Ultimate Extras. In the European Union, Home Basic N and Business N variants without Windows Media Player are also available due to sanctions brought against Microsoft for violating anti-monopoly laws; similar sanctions exist in South Korea.


title: Windows Vista

text: Windows Vista's Basic and Classic interfaces work with virtually any graphics hardware that supports Windows XP or 2000; accordingly, most discussion around Vista's graphics requirements centers on those for the Windows Aero interface. As of Windows Vista Beta 2, the NVIDIA GeForce 6 series and later, the ATI Radeon 9500 and later, Intel's GMA 950 and later integrated graphics, and a handful of VIA chipsets and S3 Graphics discrete chips are supported. Although originally supported, the GeForce FX 5 series has been dropped from newer drivers from NVIDIA. The last driver from NVIDIA to support the GeForce FX series on Vista was 96.85. Microsoft offered a tool called the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to assist Windows XP and Vista users in determining what versions of Windows their machine is capable of running. The required server connections for this utility are no longer available. Although the installation media included in retail packages is a 32-bit DVD, customers needing a CD-ROM or customers who wish for a 64-bit install media can acquire this media through the Windows Vista Alternate Media program. The Ultimate edition includes both 32-bit and 64-bit media. The digitally downloaded version of Ultimate includes only one version, either 32-bit or 64-bit, from Windows Marketplace.


title: Windows Vista

text: Two areas have seen changes in SP1 that have come as the result of concerns from software vendors. One of these is desktop search; users will be able to change the default desktop search program to one provided by a third party instead of the Microsoft desktop search program that comes with Windows Vista, and desktop search programs will be able to seamlessly tie in their services into the operating system. These changes come in part due to complaints from Google, whose Google Desktop Search application was hindered by the presence of Vista's built-in desktop search. In June 2007, Google claimed that the changes being introduced for SP1 "are a step in the right direction, but they should be improved further to give consumers greater access to alternate desktop search providers". The other area of note is a set of new security APIs being introduced for the benefit of antivirus software that currently relies on the unsupported practice of patching the kernel (see Kernel Patch Protection).


title: Windows Vista

text: While in 2005 Microsoft claimed "nearly all PCs on the market today will run Windows Vista", the higher requirements of some of the "premium" features, such as the Aero interface, affected many upgraders. According to the UK newspaper The Times in May 2006, the full set of features "would be available to less than 5 percent of Britain's PC market"; however, this prediction was made several months before Vista was released. This continuing lack of clarity eventually led to a class action against Microsoft as people found themselves with new computers that were unable to use the new software to its full potential despite the assurance of "Vista Capable" designations. The court case has made public internal Microsoft communications that indicate that senior executives have also had difficulty with this issue. For example, Mike Nash (Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management) commented, "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine" because his laptop lacked an appropriate graphics chip needed for Vista's advanced features.


title: Windows Vista

text: Windows Vista supports additional forms of DRM restrictions. One aspect of this is the Protected Video Path, which is designed so that "premium content" from HD DVD or Blu-ray Discs may mandate that the connections between PC components be encrypted. Depending on what the content demands, the devices may not pass premium content over non-encrypted outputs, or they must artificially degrade the quality of the signal on such outputs or not display it at all. Drivers for such hardware must be approved by Microsoft; a revocation mechanism is also included, which allows Microsoft to disable drivers of devices in end-user PCs over the Internet. Peter Gutmann, security researcher and author of the open source cryptlib library, claims that these mechanisms violate fundamental rights of the user (such as fair use), unnecessarily increase the cost of hardware, and make systems less reliable (the "tilt bit" being a particular worry; if triggered, the entire graphic subsystem performs a reset) and vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. However, despite several requests for evidence supporting such claims Peter Gutmann has never supported his claims with any researched evidence. Proponents have claimed that Microsoft had no choice but to follow the demands of the movie studios, and that the technology will not actually be enabled until after 2010; Microsoft also noted that content protection mechanisms have existed in Windows as far back as Windows ME, and that the new protections will not apply to any existing content, only future content.


title: It Came from the Desert

text: A Sega Genesis/Mega Drive version was to be released in 1990, but was cancelled. It is an overhead shooter with the main protagonist running around on foot, although it features more free roaming gameplay than traditional scrolling shooters. Among the differences in play mechanics, the Sega version allowed the player to create powerups that were fashioned by collecting machinery pieces and joining them together in different combinations. The storyline also differs from the game, instead casting the player not as the scientist from the original but as a teenage pest control worker known as Buzz who makes a variety of improvisational weapons with various materials combined with his pest control equipment. Prior to cancellation, former Black Pearl Software programmer Matt Harmon stated that the Genesis/Mega Drive version was 99% complete. Although the Sega version was never actually offered for sale, it was distributed as a ROM image (for use with console emulators) from the Cinemaware website after the turn of the 21st century. Despite the similarity of camera perspective, the Sega version did not appear to reuse any of the graphical elements created for use in the computer-based versions. In 2014, Cinemaware teamed up with Pier Solar developer WaterMelon to develop a cartridge version called Extended Cut with new cutscenes, endings, a new intro sequence and "additional gameplay elements". As of April 2016, the game still has not been released.


title: List of Accel World characters

text: Haru's Brain Burst avatar, Silver Crow (シルバー・クロウ, Shirubā Kurou), has a tall, thin, fragile metallic frame that is completely devoid of weapons, forcing Haru to fight barehanded. His avatar was created by his desires to be thinner and fly away into the sky in order to escape his miserable life. The avatar possesses a mouth underneath its visor, allowing Silver Crow to eat while in the game world. Silver Crow is the first and only avatar with the ability to fly, sprouting wings on its back when its special ability is activated. Lacking in both physical strength and defensive capability, Silver Crow is dependent on Haru's squash-honed speed and reflexes in order to survive fights. Silver Crow's default finishing move is a basic headbutt, typically ineffective in most circumstances. Haru eventually learns how to utilize the Incarnate System (IS) to focus his willpower, gaining the ability to form energy blades from the bracers on Silver Crow's forearms, a technique he names "Laser Sword", and later refines into more powerful and far-reaching versions called "Laser Lance" and "Laser Javelin". He also gains eventually another Incarnate Skill called "Light Speed" that sharply increases the speed of his flight for a short time.


title: List of Accel World characters

text: Kuroyukihime (黒雪姫, lit. Black Snow Princess) is the leader of the Nega Nebulas legion. Her real name is Sayuki Kuroba (黒羽 早雪, Kuroba Sayuki) (although Sky Raker calls her "Sacchan"). Her pseudonym is Japanese word play with Snow White Shirayukihime (白雪姫, lit. White Snow Princess). Beautiful and popular, she is also the Student Council Vice-President at Umesato Junior High School. She has been a Burst Linker since she was eight years old. Kuroyukihime was formerly the Black King, although she was driven into hiding after beheading the first Red King, Red Rider, while trying to defeat the other kings to reach level 10. She values Haru as more than a subordinate and is often the voice of reason to him when he is willing to go to extremes to protect her. Prior to her hospitalization, she confesses to Haru that she fell in love with him. Her non-accelerated avatar is her real-world self dressed in black and sporting red and black butterfly wings. She is estranged from her family since she injured her sister, who is also the White King, out of anger after learning that she was tricked by her.


title: List of Accel World characters

text: Her Brain Burst avatar is Black Lotus (ブラック・ロータス, Burakku Rōtasu), also known as "World End," a slender robot with a feminine form which features limbs ending in sharp blades. These weapons instantly cut anything they touch due to the Absolute Cutting Property the avatar possesses, which has the side effect of permanently removing whatever is cut from an opponent's avatar. However, the blades have a frail lateral portion that breaks after receiving too much damage. To compensate for this weakness, Kuroyukihime developed a technique she calls "Soft Act". Black Lotus has three special abilities: Death by Barraging; Death by Embracing, which was used on Red Rider; and Death by Piercing, a one-hit-kill direct attack. She also has three incarnate system skills: "Vorpal Strike", "Star Burst Stream" and "The Eclipse", that she learned from her former subordinate Graphite Edge. Lotus also displays an ability called Overdrive: Mode Green, which causes the purple parts of its body to turn green and increase its speed and attack power for a limited time. Lacking feet, Black Lotus hovers slightly off the ground via air jets on the legs, with which it is able to achieve incredible speeds. Kuroyukihime is voiced by Sachika Misawa in Japanese and Kira Buckland in English.


title: List of Accel World characters

text: Takumu Mayuzumi (黛 拓武, Mayuzumi Takumu) is Haru's childhood friend and Chiyuri's boyfriend at the start of the series, nicknamed "Taku." Being smart and athletic, he attends a prestigious school. His non-accelerated avatar is the tin man. Initially, he abuses the enhanced reflexes he obtains while accelerated to have an advantage in the kendo tournaments he attends in real life. After Kuroyukihime is hospitalized, Takumu attempts to assassinate her until he is stopped by Haru, who convinces him to join forces. After confessing to Chiyu about what he's done, it seems they've broken up. Despite that he is waiting to see if Chiyu would get back together with him. He is a mentor figure to Haru due to his advanced knowledge of the Accelerated World. After teaming up with the Nega Nebulas, he transfers to Umesato Junior High School and begins wearing glasses despite the Neuro-Linker's ability to correct vision problems, wanting to see the world through his own eyes. Takumu was bullied throughout elementary school, possessing a scar on his neck from the beatings he would receive from the kendo team.


title: List of Accel World characters

text: Her Brain Burst avatar, Lime Bell (ライム・ベル, Raimu Beru), appears as a witch girl with an Enhanced Armament resembling a large bell containing a clock face replacing the left forearm. Her avatar was created from her desire to return to the life she had when she, Haru, and Takumu had a very close friendship. Lime Bell's special ability is known as "Citron Call," a healing ability which can fully recover any Duel Avatar it targets. However, in the final battle with Dusk Taker, Chiyuri reveals the true ability of Citron Call: to reverse time on the target so that the damage never existed. This also applies to the target's special abilities as well, demonstrated by Lime Bell reversing time on Dusk Taker so that he never took Silver Crow's wings. Lime Bell is the third avatar with a healing ability, the first being one of the current kings and the second having retired after uninstalling Brain Burst because healers are coveted and fought over in Accel World. In Vol 15, she used IS on her own due to her overwhelming feelings of love for her friends, a situation that is the complete reverse to how Chrome Falcon used Negative IS due to intense anger and despair. Chiyuri is voiced by Aki Toyosaki in Japanese and Michelle T. Hseih in English.


title: List of Accel World characters

text: Fuuko Kurasaki (倉崎 楓子, Kurasaki Fūko) is a retired Burst Linker known as Sky Raker (スカイ・レイカー, Sukai Reikā), associated with the element of wind. She is also the vice-commander of Nega Nebulus. Sky Raker is Ash Roller's "guardian" (the one who gave him Brain Burst) and the only person in Accel World he shows respect towards. Before Silver Crow existed she was known as "the person closest to the sky" in the Accelerated World, gaining the nicknames "Astro", "ICBM" and "Icarus". She became obsessed with the desire to fly and as a result was abandoned by her friends and "parent." Eventually, she gets the help of her only remaining friend and master Black Lotus to reach level 8. Having spent several level up bonus points trying to obtain the ability to fly, she eventually asks Black Lotus to cut off her avatar's legs to reduce her avatar's weight and increase her will. She is introduced to Silver Crow by Ash Roller in the Unlimited Neutral Field to help him control his willpower and use the Incarnate System to fly without his wings. After meeting her in the real world, Haru realizes she has mechanical prosthetic legs. Sky Raker later rejoins Nega Nebulus before the Hermes' Cord Vertical Race and regains her legs near the end of the race.


title: Corduroy Road Remains

text: In the 19th century, the road between Ipswich and Drayton was one of the main roads of the Moreton Bay district. It was established in the 1840s as a bridle track between head stations, but soon became the principal route for wool drays and supplies, and by 1852 was listed by the New South Wales government as the only first-class road in the Moreton Bay area. Just four years earlier, however, it was described as being in a "wretched condition' and by 1859 very little had changed with the Darling Downs Gazette pointing out that "the road of Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was a bowling green" in comparison to the Ipswich to Drayton route. This was not a unique circumstance, with Queensland road networks in general described as "always bad and often impassable" in the Statistical Register of 1860. With a constant lack of money and a decentralized system of road administration it would be some time before conditions improved. Road construction was expensive and labour-intensive with no local authority to pay for or facilitate road building.


title: Corduroy Road Remains

text: As settlement spread, the development and maintenance of roads became essential for a burgeoning rural economy. During the 1850s efforts were made to improve the passage to the Darling Downs. At Laidley Creek the banks were graded and a low wooden bridge was erected in 1850 at the instigation of the Downs squatters. The following year, the Colonial government spent £300 in the Moreton Bay district, including £170 on road improvements on the Darling Downs route. In 1854, Phillip D. Vigors was appointed by the New South Wales government as Surveyor of Moreton Bay Roads and instructed to oversee the construction of a trafficable road from Brisbane through Ipswich to Drayton. The work was painstakingly slow and when Vigors resigned in 1856 he reported 'there is abundant work for the next year at least for two surveyors to do nothing but survey and mark the roads in the district". More money was injected into road development in the Laidley area in May 1857 when the Brisbane Board of Works allocated £500 to build a bridge over Laidley Creek - a project completed 6 years later. It seems most likely that it was during this period of development in the 1850s and 1860s that the corduroy road was constructed.


title: Transformer (deep learning architecture)

text: Attention weights are calculated using the query and key vectors: the attention weight a i j {\displaystyle a_{ij}} from token i {\displaystyle i} to token j {\displaystyle j} is the dot product between q i {\displaystyle q_{i}} and k j {\displaystyle k_{j}} . The attention weights are divided by the square root of the dimension of the key vectors, d k {\displaystyle {\sqrt {d_{k}}}} , which stabilizes gradients during training, and passed through a softmax which normalizes the weights. The fact that W Q {\displaystyle W^{Q}} and W K {\displaystyle W^{K}} are different matrices allows attention to be non-symmetric: if token i {\displaystyle i} attends to token j {\displaystyle j} (i.e. q i ⋅ k j {\displaystyle q_{i}\cdot k_{j}} is large), this does not necessarily mean that token j {\displaystyle j} will attend to token i {\displaystyle i} (i.e. q j ⋅ k i {\displaystyle q_{j}\cdot k_{i}} could be small). The output of the attention unit for token i {\displaystyle i} is the weighted sum of the value vectors of all tokens, weighted by a i j {\displaystyle a_{ij}} , the attention from token i {\displaystyle i} to each token.


text: RoPE (rotary positional embedding), is best explained by considering a list of 2-dimensional vectors [ ( x 1 ( 1 ) , x 1 ( 2 ) ) , ( x 2 ( 1 ) , x 2 ( 2 ) ) , ( x 3 ( 1 ) , x 3 ( 2 ) ) , . . . ] {\displaystyle } . Now pick some angle θ {\displaystyle \theta } . Then RoPE encoding is RoPE ( x m ( 1 ) , x m ( 2 ) , m ) = ( cos  m θ − sin  m θ sin  m θ cos  m θ ) ( x m ( 1 ) x m ( 2 ) ) = ( x m ( 1 ) cos  m θ − x m ( 2 ) sin  m θ x m ( 2 ) cos  m θ + x m ( 1 ) sin  m θ ) {\displaystyle {\text{RoPE}}{\big (}x_{m}^{(1)},x_{m}^{(2)},m{\big )}={\begin{pmatrix}\cos m\theta &-\sin m\theta \\\sin m\theta &\cos m\theta \end{pmatrix}}{\begin{pmatrix}x_{m}^{(1)}\\x_{m}^{(2)}\\\end{pmatrix}}={\begin{pmatrix}x_{m}^{(1)}\cos m\theta -x_{m}^{(2)}\sin m\theta \\x_{m}^{(2)}\cos m\theta +x_{m}^{(1)}\sin m\theta \\\end{pmatrix}}} Equivalently, if we write the 2-dimensional vectors as complex numbers z m := x m ( 1 ) + i x m ( 2 ) {\displaystyle z_{m}:=x_{m}^{(1)}+ix_{m}^{(2)}} , then RoPE encoding is just multiplication by an angle: RoPE ( z m , m ) = e i m θ z m {\displaystyle {\text{RoPE}}{\big (}z_{m},m{\big )}=e^{im\theta }z_{m}} For a list of 2 n {\displaystyle 2n} -dimensional vectors, a RoPE encoder is defined by a sequence of angles θ ( 1 ) , . . . , θ ( n ) {\displaystyle \theta ^{(1)},...,\theta ^{(n)}} . Then the RoPE encoding is applied to each pair of coordinates.


text: ALiBi (Attention with Linear Biases) is not a replacement for the positional encoder on the original transformer. Instead, it is an additional positional encoder that is directly plugged into the attention mechanism. Specifically, the ALiBi attention mechanism is Attention ( Q , K , V ) = softmax ( Q K T d k + s B ) V {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}{\text{Attention}}(Q,K,V)={\text{softmax}}\left({\frac {QK^{\mathrm {T} }}{\sqrt {d_{k}}}}+sB\right)V\end{aligned}}} Here, s {\displaystyle s} is a real number ("scalar"), and B {\displaystyle B} is the linear bias matrix defined by B = ( 0 1 2 3 ⋯ − 1 0 1 2 ⋯ − 2 − 1 0 1 ⋯ − 3 − 2 − 1 0 ⋯ ⋮ ⋮ ⋮ ⋮ ⋱ ) {\displaystyle B={\begin{pmatrix}0&1&2&3&\cdots \\-1&0&1&2&\cdots \\-2&-1&0&1&\cdots \\-3&-2&-1&0&\cdots \\\vdots &\vdots &\vdots &\vdots &\ddots \\\end{pmatrix}}} in other words, B i , j = j − i {\displaystyle B_{i,j}=j-i} . The idea being that the linear bias matrix is a softened mask. Just as 0 {\displaystyle 0} represent full attention paid, and − ∞ {\displaystyle -\infty } represents no attention paid, the linear bias matrix increases attention paid in one direction and decreases attention paid in the other direction.


text: Random Feature Attention uses Fourier random features: φ ( x ) = 1 D [ cos  ⟨ w 1 , x ⟩ , sin  ⟨ w 1 , x ⟩ , ⋯ cos  ⟨ w D , x ⟩ , sin  ⟨ w D , x ⟩ ] T {\displaystyle \varphi (x)={\frac {1}{\sqrt {D}}}^{T}} where w 1 , . . . , w D {\displaystyle w_{1},...,w_{D}} are independent samples from the normal distribution N ( 0 , σ 2 I ) {\displaystyle N(0,\sigma ^{2}I)} . This choice of parameters satisfy E [ ⟨ φ ( x ) , φ ( y ) ⟩ ] = e − ‖ x − y ‖ 2 2 σ 2 {\displaystyle \mathbb {E} =e^{-{\frac {\|x-y\|^{2}}{2\sigma ^{2}}}}} , or e ⟨ x , y ⟩ / σ 2 = E [ ⟨ e ‖ x ‖ 2 / 2 σ 2 φ ( x ) , e ‖ y ‖ 2 / 2 σ 2 φ ( y ) ⟩ ] ≈ ⟨ e ‖ x ‖ 2 / 2 σ 2 φ ( x ) , e ‖ y ‖ 2 / 2 σ 2 φ ( y ) ⟩ {\displaystyle e^{\langle x,y\rangle /\sigma ^{2}}=\mathbb {E} \approx \langle e^{\|x\|^{2}/2\sigma ^{2}}\varphi (x),e^{\|y\|^{2}/2\sigma ^{2}}\varphi (y)\rangle } Consequently, the one-headed attention, with one query, can be written as Attention ( q , K , V ) = softmax ( q K T d k ) V ≈ φ ( q ) T ∑ i e ‖ k i ‖ 2 / 2 σ 2 φ ( k i ) v i T φ ( q ) T ∑ i e ‖ k i ‖ 2 / 2 σ 2 φ ( k i ) {\displaystyle {\text{Attention}}(q,K,V)={\text{softmax}}\left({\frac {qK^{\mathrm {T} }}{\sqrt {d_{k}}}}\right)V\approx {\frac {\varphi (q)^{T}\sum _{i}e^{\|k_{i}\|^{2}/2\sigma ^{2}}\varphi (k_{i})v_{i}^{T}}{\varphi (q)^{T}\sum _{i}e^{\|k_{i}\|^{2}/2\sigma ^{2}}\varphi (k_{i})}}} where σ = d K 1 / 4 {\displaystyle \sigma =d_{K}^{1/4}} . Similarly for multiple queries, and for multiheaded attention.


title: Treaty of Amiens

text: The terms of the preliminary agreement required Britain to restore most of the French colonial possessions that it had captured since 1794, to evacuate Malta and to withdraw from other occupied Mediterranean ports. Malta was to be restored to the Order of St. John, whose sovereignty was to be guaranteed by one or more powers, to be determined at the final peace. France was to restore Egypt to Ottoman control, to withdraw from most of the Italian peninsula and to agree to preserve Portuguese sovereignty. Ceylon, previously a Dutch territory, was to remain with the British, and Newfoundland fishery rights were to be restored to their prewar status. Britain was also to recognise the Seven Islands Republic, established by France on the Ionian Islands that are now part of Greece. Both sides were to be allowed access to the outposts on the Cape of Good Hope. In a blow to Spain, the preliminary agreement included a secret clause in which Trinidad was to remain with Britain. Spain would finally recover the island of Menorca.


title: Treaty of Amiens

text: In November 1801, Cornwallis was sent to France with plenipotentiary powers to negotiate a final agreement. The expectation among the British populace that peace was at hand put enormous pressure on Cornwallis, something that Bonaparte realised and capitalised on. The French negotiators, Napoleon's brother Joseph as well as Talleyrand, constantly shifted their positions, leaving Cornwallis to write, "I feel it as the most unpleasant circumstance attending this unpleasant business that, after I have obtained his acquiescence on any point, I can have no confidence that it is finally settled and that he will not recede from it in our next conversation." The Batavian Republic, whose economy depended on trade that had been ruined by the war, appointed Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, its ambassador to France, to represent it in the peace negotiations. He arrived in Amiens on 9 December. The Dutch role in the negotiations was marked by a lack of respect on the part of the French, who thought of them as a "vanquished and conquered" client whose present government "owed them everything".


title: Treaty of Amiens

text: Britain ended the uneasy truce created by the Treaty of Amiens when it declared war on France in May 1803. The British were increasingly angered by Napoleon's re-ordering of the international system in Western Europe, especially in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. Frederick Kagan argues that Britain was irritated in particular by Napoleon's assertion of control over Switzerland. Furthermore, Britons felt insulted when Napoleon stated that their country deserved no voice in European affairs, even though King George III was an elector of the Holy Roman Empire. For its part, Russia decided that the intervention in Switzerland indicated that Napoleon was not looking toward a peaceful resolution of his differences with the other European powers. Britain was labouring under a sense of loss of control, as well as loss of markets, and was worried by Napoleon's possible threat to its overseas colonies. Frank McLynn argues that Britain went to war in 1803 out of a "mixture of economic motives and national neuroses – an irrational anxiety about Napoleon's motives and intentions." However, in the long run Napoleon's intentions were hostile to British national interests. Furthermore, Napoleon was not ready for war, making it seem an optimal time for Britain to try to stop him. Britain therefore seized upon the Malta issue by refusing to follow the terms of the Treaty of Amiens that required its evacuation of the island.


title: Treaty of Amiens

text: Actions taken by Bonaparte after the treaty was signed heightened tensions with Britain and signatories to the other treaties. He used the time of peace to consolidate power and reorganise domestic administration in France and some of its client states. His effective annexation of the Cisalpine Republic and his decision to send French troops into the Helvetic Republic (Switzerland) in October 1802, was another violation of the Treaty of Lunéville. However, Britain had not signed that treaty, and the powers that had signed it tolerated Napoleon's actions. Tsar Alexander had just congratulated Bonaparte for withdrawing from there and other places, but the Swiss move increased the belief in his cabinet that Bonaparte was not to be trusted. Bonaparte met British protests over the action with belligerent statements, again denying Britain's right to be formally involved in matters on the continent and pointing out that Switzerland had been occupied by French troops when the treaty was signed. He also demanded for the British government to censor the strongly anti-French British press and to expel French expatriates from British soil. Those demands were perceived in London as affronts to British sovereignty.


title: Treaty of Amiens

text: Britain refused to remove troops from Egypt or Malta, as agreed upon in the treaty. Bonaparte formally protested the continuing British occupations and, in January 1803, published a report by Horace Sebastiani that included observations on the ease with which France might capture Egypt, alarming most of the European powers. In an interview in February 1803 with Lord Whitworth, Britain's French ambassador, Bonaparte threatened war if Malta was not evacuated and implied that he could have already retaken Egypt. The exchange left Whitworth feeling he was given an ultimatum. In a public meeting with a group of diplomats the following month, Bonaparte again pressed Whitworth, implying that the British wanted war since they were not upholding their treaty obligations. The Russian ambassador, Arkadiy Ivanovich Morkov, reported the encounter back to St. Petersburg in stark terms. The implicit and explicit threats contained in the exchange may have played a role in Russia's eventual entry into the Third Coalition. Morkov also reported rumours that Bonaparte would seize Hamburg as well as Hanover if war was renewed. Although Alexander wanted to avoid war, that news apparently forced his hand; he began collecting troops on the Baltic coast in late March. The Russian foreign minister wrote of the situation, "The intention already expressed by the First Consul of striking blows against England wherever he can, and under this pretext of sending his troops into Hanover Northern Germany ... entirely transforms the nature of this war as it relates to our interests and obligations."


title: Treaty of Amiens

text: When France moved to occupy Switzerland, the British had issued orders for their military not to return Cape Colony to the Dutch, as stipulated in the Treaty of Amiens, only to countermand them when the Swiss failed to resist. In March 1803, the British ministry received notice that Cape Colony had been reoccupied by the military, and it promptly ordered military preparations to guard against possible French retaliation for the breach of the treaty. They falsely claimed that hostile French preparations had forced them into that action and that they were engaged in serious negotiations. To cover up their deception, the ministry issued a sudden ultimatum to France, demanding an evacuation of Holland and Switzerland and British control of Malta for ten years. The exchange prompted an exodus of foreigners from France, and Bonaparte quickly sold Louisiana to the United States to prevent its capture by Britain. Bonaparte made "every concession that could be considered as demanded or even imposed by the British government" by offering to guarantee the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, place Malta in the hands of a neutral third party and form a convention to satisfy Britain on other issues. His rejection of a British offer involving a ten-year lease of Malta prompted the reactivation of the British blockade of the French coast. Bonaparte, who was not fully prepared to resume the war, made moves designed to show renewed preparations for an invasion of Britain. Matters reached a diplomatic crisis point when the British rejected the idea of mediation by Tsar Alexander and, on 10 May, ordered Whitworth to withdraw from Paris if the French did not accede to their demands in 36 hours. Last-minute attempts at negotiation by Talleyrand failed, and Whitworth left France on 13 May. Britain declared war on France on 18 May, thus starting the Napoleonic Wars, which would rage in Europe for the following 12 years.


title: David Shenton

text: Shenton was born on May 20, 1949, in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire. In 1965 he attended Ashton-under-Lyne College of Further Education and in 1967 he studied printed textiles at Loughborough College of Art. He received his teaching certificate at Leeds University in 1971. Shenton has been an illustrator of LGBTQ comics since the 1970s and has addressed social issues including same-sex marriage and the aids crisis. His early comics can be found in gay newspapers like Gay News, Him, and Capital Gay. As a freelance artist, his work has been featured in the Guardian Building Design, Gay News, Disability Now, Solicitors' Journal, and Opticians. In addition to his art career, Shenton has taught literacy at Norwich Prison, Hackney College, and the Education Department of the London Zoo. His book Stanley and The Mask of Mystery was published in 1983 by Gay Men's Press. In 1988, New Zealand publication Pink Triangle said that Shenton and fellow cartoonist Alison Bechdel were "in the forefront of cartooning in the late 80s." In 2020, the BBC produced a video feature of Shenton and his comics as part of Norwich Pride. Currently, he posts comics daily on his Facebook page .


title: St Donat's Castle

text: The Stradling family served as magistrates, members of parliament, sheriffs and deputy lieutenants of Glamorganshire from the 13th to the 18th centuries. A number achieved more than local fame. The third Sir Edward Stradling, in a run of nine Edwards, fought at the Battle of Agincourt, married a great-granddaughter of Edward III and established himself as a powerful landowner and courtier. One of Edward's sons, Henry, was seized by pirates in the Bristol Channel while travelling from his Somerset estates to St Donat's, and was released only on payment of a large ransom. This event has subsequently been much embellished by, among others, Taliesin Williams in his account The Doom of Colyn Dolphyn: A Poem, with Notes Illustrative of Various Traditions of Glamorganshire, which involves the eponymous Breton pirate and the witch Mallt-y-Nos. Henry Stradling's nautical misadventures continued; after acceding to the baronetcy, he died of a fever at Famagusta, returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.The Stradlings remained adherents of the Catholic faith following the Reformation and experienced persecution as a consequence. Sir Thomas Stradling was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1561, following accusations of his having used the appearance of a "miraculous" cross in the trunk of an ash tree on the St Donat's estate to encourage support for the Catholic cause.


title: St Donat's Castle

text: Morgan Williams, a colliery owner from Aberpergwm and the owner in the Edwardian period, from 1901 to 1909, carried out extensive and careful restoration, employing the noted architects George Frederick Bodley and Thomas Garner. Williams's sensitive reconstructions were praised by Henry Avray Tipping, the writer, architect and garden designer. The architectural writer Michael Hall was also impressed, describing Bodley's drawing room as "Edwardian antiquarian taste at its most refined". The process of reconstruction was less harmonious, Williams and Garner rowed constantly and Garner ultimately resigned. Almost all of Bodley and Garner's work was eradicated in the "brutal" remodelling undertaken by William Randolph Hearst. Williams also assembled a collection of arms and armour which was housed at the castle, and made major improvements to the castle's setting, moving the village which previously stood close to the castle's walls to a new location outside of the gates and constructing three entrance lodges. In 1903, the novelist Violet Paget, writing under her pseudonym Vernon Lee, used the castle as the model for St Salvat's Castle in her Gothic novel Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh Coast in the Eighteenth Century. Godfrey Williams, Morgan's son, disliked St Donat's, by tradition on account of its being haunted although this is disputed, and in 1921, having first culled the herd of deer that his father had reintroduced to the park, put the castle up for sale. Its advertisement in The Times, dated 3 May 1921, described the castle as "a comfortable and liveable old-world home of the first importance". In 1922, it was bought, along with 123 acres (50 ha) of land, by Richard Pennoyer, an American diplomat married to the Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury. Pennoyer was to own St Donat's for less than three years.


title: St Donat's Castle

text: William Randolph Hearst inherited a mining and real estate fortune from his mother, and made a fortune of his own through the establishment of the Hearst Corporation, the largest newspaper and magazine company in the world. Part of the revenues were spent on the building of San Simeon, his Spanish-style castle in California, which began construction in 1919. By 1925 he was eager to purchase a genuine castle, and on 13 August he sent a wire to Alice Head, the London-based managing director of his European operations, "Want buy castle in England . St Donat's perhaps satisfactory at proper price. See if you can get right price on St Donat's or any other equally good." Within two months it was Hearst's, or specifically, the property of the National Magazine Company. The price paid for the castle and 111 acres (45 ha) of surrounding land was $130,000. Hearst employed Sir Charles Allom as his architect and designer. Allom was a noted decorator, the founder of White Allom and Company, and had been knighted in 1913 for his redecoration of Buckingham Palace.


title: St Donat's Castle

text: Hearst attracted strong opinions. Theodore Roosevelt called him "an unspeakable blackguard (with) all the worst faults of the corrupt and dissolute monied man". Winston Churchill, who stayed as Hearst's guest at St Donat's and at San Simeon, described him in a letter to Clementine Churchill as "a grave simple child – with no doubt a nasty temper – playing with the most costly toys ... two magnificent establishments, two charming wives, complete indifference to public opinion, oriental hospitalities". Churchill's mention of "two charming wives" refers to Marion Davies, Hearst's long-time mistress and a constant presence at both San Simeon and St Donat's. P. G. Wodehouse, invited to San Simeon, recalled Hearst's way of dealing with over-staying guests: "The longer you are there, the further you get from the middle . I sat on Marion's right the first night, then found myself being edged further and further away till I got to the extreme end, when I thought it time to leave. Another day, and I should have been feeding on the floor."


title: St Donat's Castle

text: Hearst undertook a "rapid and ruthless" redevelopment and rebuilding programme at St Donat's. He spent around £250,000 on repairs, reconstruction, refurbishment, and furnishings between 1925 and 1937, renovating the castle with architectural trophies from across the United Kingdom and abroad; at the peak of his buying, Hearst's expenditure reportedly accounted for a quarter of the world's entire art market. Alice Head, manager of Hearst's London operations and the actual purchaser of St Donat's, recorded her exhilaration: "We were on top of the wave – out of (one) year's profits, we bought The Connoisseur, we bought St Donat's and we bought vast quantities of antiques." The writer Clive Aslet described Hearst's passion for antiquities as "naked obsession... romance gave way to rape", and his mania for collecting was satirised in Orson Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane. Kane's palace Xanadu, modelled on San Simeon, is described as containing "A collection of everything, so big that it can never be catalogued or appraised. Enough for ten museums, the loot of the world." Hearst's actions were vigorously opposed, particularly in relation to the destruction of the Augustinian foundation Bradenstoke Priory in Wiltshire. Built in 1142, by the 20th century the priory was in poor repair. Hearst purchased the site in 1929, under conditions of secrecy, and had workmen take down the cloister, tithe barn, prior's lodging and refectory. Parts were shipped to California; major elements were incorporated into St Donat's as part of the newly created Bradenstoke Hall; while other pieces, including the tithe barn, were lost. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings ran a poster campaign on the London Underground, using text that was considered libellous and which had to be pasted over. The campaign also saw questions on the issue being raised in Parliament. Hearst was unconcerned, Miss Head responding to the SPAB secretary: "Mr Hearst and I are well aware of your views. You must please allow us to hold our own opinions."


title: St Donat's Castle

text: Hearst did not visit until September 1928, and even then spent only one night in residence. Having undertaken a night-time tour of the castle which was illuminated by kerosene lamps, he left the following morning to board the Berengaria for New York. During the voyage home he wrote a 25-page memorandum with instructions for further improvements to the castle. Over the next decade his time at St Donat's amounted to some four months; between his purchase in 1925 and his death in 1951 he visited, normally for a month at the end of his summer European tours, in 1930, 1931, 1934 and, for the last time, in 1936. His infrequent visits were invariably undertaken with a large entourage, whom he sometimes took for drinks to the Old Swan Inn at the nearby village of Llantwit Major. Among his guests were the actors Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, in addition to politicians including Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and a young John F. Kennedy, who visited with his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Kennedy. Visiting writers included Elinor Glyn, Ivor Novello and Bernard Shaw. Of St Donat's, Shaw was quoted as saying: "This is what God would have built if he had had the money."


title: St Donat's Castle

text: The castle site offers natural defences, in the form of steep slopes to two sides and the coast to a third. The unprotected side to the east is encircled by a deep dry moat. The castle is built of local lias limestone rubble with Sutton stone and sandstone dressings. The outer gatehouse is approached through modern battlements. The gatehouse has a portcullis room above, with an original fireplace of c. 1300 and a wooden portcullis with wooden doors behind. The first (outer) court beyond is the earliest part of the castle, constructed by the de Haweys in the late-12th century to replace a Norman timber fortification. The most recent RCAHMW survey, published in 2000, identified "significant vestiges" of the earliest stone castle which had been missed by earlier surveys. This discovery enabled a definitive dating for the first stone-built castle to "before 1200". The architectural historian John Newman draws comparisons with Newcastle at Bridgend and Coity Castle. To the sides of this gateway are a domestic range and the Brewhouse, the last major additions made by the Stradlings. The inner wall mostly survives and has a small original tower to the north, and a square gatehouse on the east beside the rectangular Mansell Tower, an enlargement of the original keep. In an article in The Archaeological Journal, C. P. Spurgeon notes the design similarities between the tower's door jambs and those in the chancel of St Donat's church, indicating an earlier construction date than that of the work undertaken by Peter de Stradling.


title: St Donat's Castle

text: The exterior walls of the inner ward are decorated with a set of terracotta medallions or busts. The writer Simon Jenkins suggests it is unclear whether they are original to the castle or imported from elsewhere, although the architectural historian John Newman records that they were in situ by 1804. They appear to be modelled on the busts of the emperors by Giovanni da Maiano at Hampton Court. There are differing views as to the provenance of the medallions. Cadw is certain that two, those said to depict Marcus Aurelius and Cleopatra, are by da Maiano and were originally part of the Hampton Court set. It also suggests they could have been installed as early as the 16th century. Alan Hall agrees, noting the close connection between Cardinal Wolsey, to whom Pope Leo X had presented them, and Sir Thomas Arundell, father-in-law of the fourth Sir Edward Stradling. Newman is less definitive, although he notes their varying quality and suggests that further investigation should be undertaken.


title: St Donat's Castle

text: The historian Anthony Emery, in the second of his three-volume history, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500, describes the interiors created by Hearst and Allom at St Donat's as "spectacular...surpassing all other work there in size and richness". Their joint creation, the Bradenstoke Hall, contains two large fireplaces of French origin as well as the eponymous, imported roof. The banqueting hall, on the ground floor of the west range, is another example of Hearst's indiscriminate use of architectural salvage. The roof is 15th-century, probably Flemish and was acquired from St Botolph's Church, Boston, Lincolnshire. It has coloured ceiling bosses depicting a wide array of subjects, including flowers, griffins, the beasts of the Apostles and a head of Christ. The fireplace, cut to fit and with jambs from a different piece, is from a château in Beauvais. The entrance screen is from a Devon church. Hearst's breakfast room, off the banqueting hall, reuses another piece of the St Botolph's ceiling, as well as a fireplace from the prior's lodgings at Bradenstoke. The library above contains a major example of linenfold panelling, the Ellenhall Wainscot. Originally from a Staffordshire manor house, the panelling was sold to a dealer by the Earl of Lichfield in 1918 and subsequently acquired by Hearst. The Lady Anne Tower on the south-western corner is a Hearst/Allom reconstruction of the original 16th-century tower. The north range interior was remodelled in the late 1920s and contains Hearst's and Davies's bedroom suites, with an interconnecting door concealed in the panelling of Hearst's room. The panelling of Hearst's bedroom is original, but not to its current location. Allom salvaged it from the Stradling's Red Parlour, which Hearst demolished. Alan Hall notes the similarity of the panelling to that in the Senior Common Room at Jesus College, Oxford, a foundation attended and supported by members of the Welsh gentry, including the Stradlings.


title: St Donat's Castle

text: Later development in the early 20th century by Morgan Williams saw the establishment of a Tudor-style garden with carved heraldic beasts on pedestals. This was followed by additions by Hearst, including a number of garden structures, such as an Italianate summerhouse overlooking the Rose Garden in which he installed a telephone exchange with connections to New York and California. Hearst built a 150 feet (46 m) long outdoor swimming pool on the lowest terrace, on the site of the castle's medieval tilt-yard. The pool was designed by Allom, assisted by Julia Morgan, Hearst's main architect for San Simeon. Beyond the pool site are the Cavalry Barracks. Newman dates these as 17th-century, but both Alan Hall and Cadw suggest a slightly earlier dating, in the 16th century, as a response to the threat of Spanish invasion. They were certainly converted to stabling, from whence the name derives, in the 17th century, and the Stradlings kept their horses at the barracks during the Civil War. By the 20th century the barracks were in a ruinous state and Hearst converted them into guest accommodation and a pool house in the 1930s. Between 1978 and 1981 Atlantic College rebuilt them in the original 17th-century style to serve as student accommodation. The college installed an indoor swimming pool and replaced the Allom/Morgan outdoor pool. Beyond the barracks, the castellated sea walls and towers have their origins in the 16th century, but were completely reconstructed by Hearst in the 1920s. The watchtower on the opposite slope to the castle is also probably 16th-century, or possibly late-15th-century, and is shown in a state of completion in a view of the castle dated 1740. It decayed thereafter, was restored in the late-19th century, but is again derelict in the early 21st century. It was almost certainly intended as a seaward look-out.


title: Matthew Logelin

text: In 2009, Logelin left his job at Yahoo! and moved to India for two months with his daughter, where he began writing a memoir about his experience. India and its surrounding areas were a place of great significance for both him and his late wife – he had proposed in Kathmandu, Nepal, on the steps of a temple in Durbar Square, and the two had traveled through India together during one of his foreign work assignments, a year after they were married. It was during that trip that they visited the Taj Mahal and, upon hearing the story of how the monument came to be built, his wife turned to him with tears in her eyes and declared, "You would never do something like this for me." The memory impacted Logelin so deeply that it prompted him to write his memoir. "Figuratively speaking, is my Taj Mahal to her," he explained in 2009. "I'm doing what I can to bring that legacy back for her." Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss and Love details his courtship and marriage, as well as the moments surrounding his wife's death and the first year of his daughter's life without her mother. "Selfishly, I want her to know her mom through this," he has said.


title: Gordon Risius

text: Born on 10 July 1945 to Rudolf Risius and his wife Irene, née Spier, Risius studied at the College of Law and was admitted a solicitor in 1972. He was commissioned into the Army Legal Corps (later the Army Legal Services Branch) as a captain with seniority from 1973. He was promoted to major in 1978 and lieutenant-colonel in 1983, serving the Headquarters of the British Land Forces in Hong Kong, the British Army of the Rhine, Northern Ireland, the Ministry of Defence, the 4th Armoured Division and the British Land Forces in Cyprus. He was promoted to colonel in 1992, and served at the Ministry of Defence. He was promoted to Brigadier in 1994; he was Brigadier Legal at the Headquarters of the British Army of the Rhine until 1995, then the same at the Headquarters of the Land Command until 1996 and, finally, he was Brigadier Prosecutions in 1997. That year, he was appointed Director of the Army Legal Services Branch and promoted to the rank of Major-General. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 2000 Birthday Honours and ceased to be Director in 2003.


title: Sarcolestes

text: Originally, Lydekker found that Sarcolestes represented a theropod. He cited lack of a predentary as excluding the taxon from ornithopods, and tooth morphology as excluding it from sauropods. Within theropods, it was found to be sufficiently different from one main groups of theropods including Coelurus, Calamosaurus, and Compsognathus, and the megalosaurids including Megalosaurus. Thus, Lydekker placed it in Thecodontosauridae, a group of theropods (now placed in Sauropodomorpha) including Thecodontosaurus. Lydekker noted that Sarcolestes was similar in dental morphology to Priodontognathus, and that together they might be shown to be related to scelidosaurids. However, he also noted that together they may represent their own group within Theropoda. In 1901, Franz Nopcsa found that Sarcolestes was in fact herbivorous, and classified it in Stegosauridae with genera such as Polacanthus, Stegosaurus, Hylaeosaurus, Stenopelix and various others. Peter Galton concluded that Sarcolestes represents a genus within Nodosauridae, with a dentary similar to that of Sauropelta. However, others have cast doubt on this assignment and even the validity of Sarcolestes. Sarcolestes is one of a few ankylosaurians known from the Middle Jurassic; Spicomellus may be slightly older, having been found in the Bathonian–Callovian El Mers III Formation of Morocco.


title: Bane in other media

text: Bane appears in The Dark Knight Rises, portrayed by Tom Hardy. Intending to portray the character as "more menacing" than the aforementioned Batman & Robin incarnation, Hardy gained 14 kilograms (31 lb) of muscle for the role, increasing his weight to 90 kilograms (200 lb). Prior to the film's release, Bane's voice received criticism for being unintelligible due to his mask. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Christopher Nolan said "I think when people see the film, things will come into focus. Bane is very complex and very interesting and when people see the finished film people will be very entertained by him." "We wanted a very physical monster. We wanted more of the Darth Vader, if you like, and that was very important in the story dynamics." Hardy himself also commented on the voice in another interview with Entertainment Weekly, saying "It's a risk, because we could be laughed at—or it could be very fresh and exciting", and that "The audience mustn't be too concerned about the mumbly voice... As the film progresses, I think you'll be able to tune to its setting." Hardy says the voice he developed had several influences, including Bane's intellect, Caribbean heritage, and in particular, bare-knuckle fighter Bartley Gorman.


title: Bane in other media

text: Bane is involved with the League of Shadows and is posing as the self-proclaimed leader of a revolution against the rich and the corrupt, who he contends are oppressing "the people", and keeping them subservient with "myths of opportunity". Political theorist and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek sees Bane's revolutionary charade as fighting "structural injustice", while likening the ruse to a modern-day Che Guevara who is counter-intuitively driven to violence out of a sense of love. Others have compared Bane to a "high-tech Robespierre on steroids", a melded triad of Lenin, bin Laden and Steve Austin set on fomenting "proletarian retribution", and "the one thing that's worse than the second film's raving anarchist: a demagogue." For his part, Nolan has said that his draft for the script was inspired by Charles Dickens' 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, centered around the French Revolution. This homage to Dickens' story is briefly illustrated by having Bane finger knit paracord (incidentally a real-life habit of Hardy's) in one scene of the film, symbolizing the Reign of Terror-based character Madame Defarge from the book.


title: Bane in other media

text: While little information is given about Bane's backstory, he is said to have been born and raised in a centuries-old foreign penitentiary known as "the Pit", where he spent most of his life incarcerated as a prisoner. Additionally, he was a friend and guardian to Talia al Ghul, whose mother, the daughter of a local warlord, was banished to the Pit by her father and later killed by inmates. Bane also sustained severe injuries after being attacked by the other inmates, which were exacerbated by a doctor's failed attempts to treat him. This gave him chronic pain, which is lessened with a mask that provides him with a constant stream of analgesic gas. Subsequently, Bane was rescued and recruited by Talia's father, Ra's al Ghul, into the League of Shadows, though Ra's eventually excommunicated him for being a reminder of the prison that his wife, Talia's mother, was left to die in. After Ra's' death during the events of Batman Begins, however, Bane rejoined the League as its new leader alongside Talia. Arriving in Gotham, Bane steals weapons from Wayne Enterprises and breaks Batman's back, before leaving him in the Pit. He is later defeated during a riot between Gotham citizens and the League when Catwoman kills him with the Batpod's rockets.


title: Earth to Echo

text: The three sneak in, but get caught by the same construction worker, who reveals himself as Dr. Lawrence Masden, a scientist who intends to keep Echo on Earth so that he can study its technology. Masden's group is revealed as the group that shot Echo down in the first place. Masden tries to convince the kids that if Echo repairs the key to his spaceship and takes off in it, it will kill everyone in the neighborhood; the kids pretend to be convinced, and promise to help Masden find the spaceship if he takes them to Munch and Echo. Masden brings the three to a scrap junkyard, where Echo seemingly dies as a result of the violent experimentation inflicted on him, but with encouragement from the kids, he revives, completes his repairs, and distracts the agents long enough for the kids to drive back home. At Alex's house, the spaceship key goes into the ground by itself, and they realize the agents invented the false construction project as a cover to dig up the neighborhood, as the entire ship is in the ground beneath it.


title: Yossi Katz (geographer)

text: While doing research on the Jewish National Fund (which was charged with buying and developing land in Ottoman Palestine (later the British Mandate for Palestine), Katz accidentally run into the issue of the Holocaust survivor assets held in Israel. His 1997 article on the subject, "Forgotten Property. The Fate of the Property of Those Who Perished in the Holocaust in Israel" (in Hebrew) exposes that Israeli banks, the Administrator General and various land-dealing organizations held much property arisen from the investments of the European Jews in Israel during 1920s and 1930s. The article triggered political actions and was instrumental in establishing a Parliamentary Investigative Committee on the issue, and Yossi Katz was appointed a consultant by the Knesset to deal with the issue starting in 2000. The same year Katz expanded his article into the book (in Hebrew) Rechush Shenishkach . Katz wrote that much property (land, houses, shares, securities, etc.) in Mandate Palestine were purchased by European Jews, many of whom perished in the Holocaust. Since a considerable number of these Jews were citizens of Germany and other "enemy states", their properties were seized by British Custodian of Enemy Property in 1939. But some of it remained in other hands. Later the British Custodian transferred the seized assets to the corresponding Israel Custodian, who treated them in the same way, as "enemy property". They were further transferred to Administrator General. According to Israeli lawyer Mordechai Tzivin, under the British Law, Rabbanut formally became the apotropos (legal custodian) of some of these properties, but as Katz demonstrated, Rabbanut failed in this respect.


title: Indian National Army in Singapore

text: It would not be until 9 May 1942 that the INA would come into full effect. However, following the events of 17 February 1942 Farrer Park meeting, the Indians in Singapore begun to enjoy special privileges during the Japanese 'pacification' of Singapore . This was clearly seen in the vastly different ways in which the Japanese treated the Indians and Chinese. During these early months, it was reported that roughly 50 000 Chinese in Singapore and the Malayan Peninsula were brutally killed in what is now known as the 'Sook Ching Massacre' . In contrast, the Indians received far more lenient treatment. However, this is not to say that the Indians felt no fear at all. In fact, the attitudes of the Japanese forces towards the Chinese population did instill some fear in the general Indian civilian population as well as leaders such as Pritam Singh. This was significant for the Indian leaders, during the Farrer Park meeting who had expressed reservations about collaborating with the Japanese as these incidents further cemented their initial beliefs about the cruel nature of the Japanese and would further affirm their decision to not join the INA in May 1942.


title: Indian National Army in Singapore

text: The vast difference in treatments provided to those who joined the INA and those who refused further prompted those who initially did not wish to join to change their minds. The Indian POWs who aligned themselves with the INA were often well fed and given simpler, less taxing duties to perform. They were given great amounts of freedom in these camps (termed as volunteer camps) and were entitled to various forms of entertainment such as "patriotic theatrical and song nights that were also used as instruments to get POWs to join the INA". In a blatant violation of the conditions set by Mohan Singh prior to the formation of the INA, which would later serve as a source of conflict between Singh and the Japanese forces, the POWs who chose to not join the INA were subject to great physical and mental torture as they were sent to 'concentration camps', where they were deprived of food, medical aid and other basic rights. An excerpt from Bryon Farewell details some of the methods and techniques that the Japanese used to coerce the Indian POWs into join the INA.


title: Indian National Army in Singapore

text: Some academics believe that the INA acted as a catalyst for the |India independence movement as it sped up the end of British rule in India. The INA and its legacy continued to aid the Indian Nationalist movements and brought together various groups of people who were previously in conflict with each other. This was especially so after the trials of some of the INA officers between 1945 and 1946. The trials were said to have "created a widespread revolutionary anti-British sentiment in India. A consensus of opinion arose among almost all the political parties in India which condemned the Government's policy of trying certain I.N.A. officers by court martial.". The Muslim League, Hindu religious groups such as the Mahasabha and Akali Dal, and the Socialist leaders all came together to lend their support to the INA soldiers. In fact, the Indian National Congress was able to gain popularity amongst the general Indian population by choosing to side with the INA officers despite their varying religious faiths, thus establishing itself as a secular political party which could represent the interest of all groups of Indians. This would eventually play an important role in the Indian National Congress winning the first general elections in 1947, following the departure of the British.


title: Indian National Army in Singapore

text: Padang (literally "the field" in Malay language), where Subhas Chandra Bose addressed the INA soldiers several times. On 9 July 1943 he mobilised the resources for the independence of India with the inspiring words, "Time has come for three million Indians living in East Asia to mobilise all their available resources including money and manpower. Half-hearted measures will not do. …Out of this total mobilisation I expect at least three hundred thousand soldiers and three crores that is thirty million dollars." On 5 August 1943 in another address at Padang he inspired, and received overwhelming response, when he questioned the soldiers if they felt "Jai Hind" (Victory for India) and "Chalo Dhili" (Lets march on Delhi) slogans were essential part of their spirit. This field is now a gazetted national monument of Singapore, and also houses Singapore Cricket Club Ground where the first One Day International cricket match was held during the 1995–96 Singer Cup - a triangular series involving India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.


title: Gainor Hughes

text: Gainor Hughes gained fame by fasting for almost six years. reports suggest the fast began in 1773 or 4. During this period, she refused any substantial sustenance. The Chester Chronicle suggested the fast had originated in an illness which led to three days of unconsciousness, and to a subsequent dislike of the smell of meat. Unsurprisingly, her physical condition eventually reflected this shortage of nutrition. Gainor's contemporaries were preoccupied with the effect of her fast on her spiritual life. Along with the press, local bards and ballad-singers became interested in the case. The fact that Gainor survived without food was a miracle in the eyes of the balladeers, and a notable balladeer Elis Roberts (Elis y Cowper) set her alongside central Biblical characters who were saved from starvation and adversity through 'God's great miracles'. For Roberts and for his contemporary Jonathan Hughes of Llangollen, Gainor was living proof of the veracity of verse 4: 4 in Matthew's gospel, with its claim that man does not live by bread alone but rather by the words of God and his wondrous grace. In an intense piety, Gainor would shout and cry her praise of God, bearing witness through prayer to a spiritual world, Hughes reported. Elis Roberts likewise emphasized her readiness to pray and praise the Lord, morning, and evening. Ballads appeared consistently throughout the fast. Reports published in the Chester Chronicle suggest how Gainor may have become famous during her lifetime, with visitors travelling between forty and fifty miles to see her.


title: Bargain-Loving Brits in the Sun

text: After ordering 46 new episodes of Bargain Loving Brits in the Sun in 2022, the channel recommissioned the show in 2023 with an order totalling 136 episodes. Even though this order included 16 episodes to be broadcast in peak-time, only three episodes of series 11 were broadcast in this timeslot, including a tribute to the late Graham 'Happy Days' Boland. Instead of broadcasting the next episode in its 8pm Sunday night slot, the show was replaced in the schedule with a repeat of Greggs: What's Really in it? with Grace Dent. Nevertheless, the rest of the primetime series 11 episodes were moved into the daytime slot to run back-to-back with the episodes commissioned for that timeslot. In 2024 the cast included Ding Dong Val, the Avon sales lady, ex-haulage contractor Uncle Ron, who was now getting into the bar business in Benidorm, pitmaster Chunkz from barbecue business The Saucy Pig, holiday park representative Bambi Dhami, part-time drag queen Colin 'Coco' Brown, seen performing his act by night and at the animal rescue centre he runs with his Spanish partner Sebastian in Murcia during the day, Nigel the Benidorm TikTok Guide and drag duo Wayne and Des.


title: Bargain-Loving Brits in the Sun

text: This is the British seaside version of the main Spanish show. It started off as Bargain Loving Brits in Blackpool in 2017 before locations on the east coast of England were added for following series under the amended title. Over the series, cast members have included impressario Simon Green, aka Betty Legs Diamond, Kurt and Lisa Walsh from The Crypt on Blackpool's Birley Street, the residents of residents at Merlewood Caravan Park, Lorraine and Neville in their Rock 'n' Roll-inspired B&B in Skegness, Phil Charles and Adam Tugwell's Dr Who-inspired B&B in Blackpool, Daisy and Matt at the Natureland seal sanctuary in Skegness, the drag queens of Funny Girls cabaret bar in Blackpool, and the donkey business run by John and his daughter Thalia in Skegness. In addition to Blackpool and Skegness the show also visited locations in Scarborough over its four series. Including Bargain Loving Brits in Blackpool as the first season, the first three series were each made up of six episodes, after which the episode order was increased, though Channel 5 have only broadcast three episodes of the last series before Bargain Loving Brits by the Sea was dropped from the primetime schedule, with this last episode featuring an appearance from comedian Mick Miller.


title: Myosotis ultramafica

text: Myosotis ultramafica plants are single rosettes that are sometimes stoloniferous and can cluster together to form loose clumps. The rosette leaves have petioles 2–17 mm long. The rosette leaf blades are 4–12 mm long by 1.5–4 mm wide (length: width ratio 1.4–43: 1), usually oblanceolate or narrowly obovate, and widest above the middle, with an obtuse (rarely acute) apex. The upper and lower surfaces and edges of the leaf are densely covered in mostly straight (some flexuous), mostly appressed (some patent), antrorse (forward-facing) hairs that are oriented mostly parallel to the mid vein. The hairs on the undersurface of the leaf are sometimes only patchily distributed near the leaf tip and on the mid vein. Each rosette has 1–9 ascending, unbranched partially bracteate inflorescences that are up to 71 mm long. The cauline leaves are up to 7 per inflorescence and are similar to the rosette leaves but smaller and decrease in size and become sessile toward the tip. Each inflorescence has up to 7 flowers, each borne on a pedicel up to 4 mm long at fruiting, and the lowest 1–3 flowers with a bract. The calyx is 4–5 mm long at flowering and 5–9 mm long at fruiting, lobed about one-third its length, and densely covered in antrorse (or a mixture of antrorse and retrorse) hairs that are mostly flexuous, and appressed to patent. The corolla is white, up to 8 mm in diameter, with a cylindrical tube, petals that are obovate or narrowly obovate, and small yellow scales alternating with the petals. The stamens are 7–8 mm long (measured from the base of the calyx to the anther tips). The anthers are partly exserted, with the tips only just surpassing the scales. The four smooth, shiny, dark brown nutlets are 1.4–1.9 mm long by 0.8–1.1 mm wide and narrowly ovoid or ovoid in shape.


title: Siggi's Dairy

text: During summer 2008, rapid demand outpaced the company's production capabilities. Siggi had to cease production and shipping of the yogurt so he could raise money to purchase the necessary equipment to increase production and meet demands. According to Siggi, "We couldn't keep up with the demand, we couldn't cool the yogurt down fast enough to meet the production volumes. So, we had to shut the plant down for about three or four months and rebuild it". The company nearly went bankrupt during the plant closure. As of August 2010, Hilmarsson's company, Icelandic Milk & Skyr Corporation, had nine employees and approximately 350 cows from six family farms. By the following year, the company was producing 100,000 six-ounce cups of yogurt each week. To handle the potential of growing demand, the company began transitioning to a larger plant in 2013. Within a few years, the company had a backup manufacturing facility in Wisconsin; Siggi said, "When your business grows enough, you don't want to rely on just one plant." As of 2014, Siggi's yogurt was largely only available at Whole Foods and Target stores.


title: 2020 Summer Olympics Parade of Nations

text: This was the first edition in which the new protocols approved at the 138th Session of the International Olympic Committee held days before the ceremony were used officially. Some rules were maintained from previous procedures, such as the obligation for the Greek delegation to be the first to enter during the Parade of Nations and the maintenance of the entry of other delegations in the alphabetical order of the organizing country were maintained as the same entering as the last team. However, others were changed, such as the entry of IOC Refugee Olympic Team, composed of refugees from several countries immediately behind the Greek team. Another change was the positioning of the teams whose countries will be the future hosts of the next Summer Olympic Games, which entered the reverse sequence. According to the original planning, the United States would be the 5th delegation to enter placed between Afghanistan and United Arab Emirates delegations, but as the 2028 Summer Olympics are scheduled to be held in Los Angeles, they were placed as 204th delegation. This situation also happened with France which according to the protocol manual would be the 151st delegation, positioned between Brazil and Bulgaria, but due to the fact that Paris will be the host city of the 2024 Summer Olympics who entered as the 205th delegation before the host nation Japan.


title: Themes in Minority Report

text: The main theme of Minority Report is the classic philosophical debate of free will vs. determinism. One of the main questions the film raises is whether the future is set or whether free will can alter the future. As critic C. A. Wolski commented, "At the outset, Minority Report... promises to mine some deep subject matter, to do with: do we possess free will or are we predestined to our fate?" However, there is also the added question of whether the precogs' visions are correct. As reviewer James Berardinelli asked, "is the Precogs' vision accurate, or has it in some way been tampered with? Perhaps Anderton isn't actually going to kill, but has been set up by a clever and knowledgeable criminal who wants him out of the way." The precog Agatha also states that since Anderton knows his future, he can change it. However, the film also indicates that Anderton's knowledge of the future may actually be the factor that causes Leo Crow's death. Berardinelli describes this as the main paradox regarding free will vs. determinism in the film, "ere's the biggest one of all: Is it possible that the act of accusing someone of a murder could begin a chain of events that leads to the slaying. In Anderton's situation, he runs because he is accused. The only reason he ends up in circumstances where he might be forced to kill is because he is a hunted man. Take away the accusation, and there would be no question of him committing a criminal act. The prediction drives the act – a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can see the vicious circle, and it's delicious (if a little maddening) to ponder." Film scholar Dean A. Kowalski argues that in this scenario free will still exists, as the perpetrators control their actions, and the precogs' visions are but the facts that resulted from their choices.