Hassan II of Morocco Hassan dissolved Parliament and ruled directly, although he did not abolish the mechanisms of parliamentary democracy. When elections were eventually held, they were mostly rigged in favour of loyal parties. This caused severe discontent among the opposition, and protest demonstrations and riots challenged the King's rule. A US report observed that "Hassan appears obsessed with the preservation of his power rather than with its application toward the resolution of Morocco's multiplying domestic problems." In the early 1970s, King Hassan survived two assassination attempts. The first, in 1971, was a coup d'état attempt allegedly supported by Libya, organized by General Mohamed
ASCEND ASCEND ASCEND is an open source, mathematical modelling chemical process modelling system developed at Carnegie Mellon University since late 1978. ASCEND is an acronym which stands for Advanced System for Computations in Engineering Design. Its main uses have been in the field of chemical process modelling although its capabilities are general. ASCEND includes nonlinear algebraic solvers, differential/algebraic equation solvers, nonlinear optimization and modelling of multi-region 'conditional models'. Its matrix operations are supported by an efficient sparse matrix solver called "mtx". ASCEND differs from earlier modelling systems because it separates the solving strategy from model building. So domain experts (people writing