title: Macmillan Publishers

text: George Edward Brett opened the first Macmillan office in the United States in 1869 and Macmillan sold its U.S. operations to the Brett family, George Platt Brett, Sr. and George Platt Brett, Jr. in 1896, resulting in the creation of an American company, Macmillan Publishing, also called the Macmillan Company. Even with the split of the American company from its parent company in England, George Brett, Jr. and Harold Macmillan remained close personal friends. Macmillan Publishers re-entered the American market in 1954 under the name St. Martin's Press.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: Macmillan of Canada was founded in 1905; Maclean-Hunter acquired the company in 1973. Following numerous mergers, Macmillan Canada dissolved in 2002 after John Wiley & Co. acquired it.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: After retiring from politics in 1964, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harold Macmillan, grandson of co-founder Daniel, became chairman of the company, serving until his death in December 1986.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: He had been with the family firm as a junior partner from 1920 to 1940 (when he became a junior minister), and from 1945 to 1951 while he was in the opposition in Parliament.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: Pearson acquired the Macmillan name in America in 1998, following its purchase of the Simon & Schuster educational and professional group (which included various Macmillan properties). Holtzbrinck purchased it from them in 2001. McGraw-Hill continues to market its pre-kindergarten through elementary school titles under its Macmillan/McGraw-Hill brand. The US operations of Holtzbrinck Publishing changed its name to Macmillan in October 2007. Its audio publishing imprint changed its name from Audio Renaissance to Macmillan Audio, while its distribution arm was renamed from Von Holtzbrinck Publishers Services to Macmillan Publishers Services. Pan Macmillan purchased Kingfisher, a British children's publisher, from Houghton Mifflin in October 2007. Roaring Brook Press publisher Simon Boughton would oversee Kingfisher's US business.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: By some estimates, as of 2009, e-books account for three to five per cent of total book sales, and are the fastest growing segment of the market. According to "The New York Times", Macmillan and other major publishers "fear that massive discounting [of e-books] by retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony could ultimately devalue what consumers are willing to pay for books." In response, the publisher introduced a new boilerplate contract for its authors that established a royalty of 20 per cent of net proceeds on e-book sales, a rate five per cent lower than most other major publishers. Following the announcement of the Apple iPad on 27 January 2010—a product that comes with access to the iBookstore—Macmillan gave Amazon.com two options: continue to sell e-books based on a price of the retailer's choice (the "wholesale model"), with the e-book edition released several months after the hardcover edition is released, or switch to the agency model introduced to the industry by Apple, in which both are released simultaneously and the price is set by the publisher. In the latter case, Amazon.com would receive a 30 per cent commission. Amazon responded by pulling all Macmillan books, both electronic and physical, from their website (although affiliates selling the books were still listed). On 31 January 2010, Amazon chose the agency model preferred by Macmillan. In April 2012, the United States Department of Justice filed "United States v. Apple Inc.", naming Apple, Macmillan, and four other major publishers as defendants. The suit alleged that they conspired to fix prices for e-books, and weaken Amazon.com's position in the market, in violation of antitrust law. In December 2013, a federal judge approved a settlement of the antitrust claims, in which Macmillan and the other publishers paid into a fund that provided credits to customers who had overpaid for books due to the price-fixing.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: In 2010, Macmillan Education submitted to an investigation on grounds of fraudulent practices. The Macmillan division admitted to bribery in an attempt to secure a contract for an education project in southern Sudan. As a direct result of the investigation, sanctions were applied by the World Bank Group, namely a 6-year debarment (reduced from 8 years due to an early acknowledgment of misconduct by the company) declaring the company ineligible to be awarded Bank-financed contracts.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: In December 2011, Bedford, Freeman, and Worth Publishing Group, Macmillan's higher education group, changed its name to Macmillan Higher Education while retaining the Bedford, Freeman, and Worth name for its k–12 educational unit. Also that month, Brian Napack resigned as Macmillan president while staying on for transitional purposes.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: In 2012, parent company Holtzbrinck reorganized; Macmillan's consumer publishing operations were now led by John Turner Sargent from New York City.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: In May 2015, London-based Macmillan Science and Education merged with Berlin-based Springer Science+Business Media to form Springer Nature, jointly controlled by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: In January 2019, Toronto, Canada-based online writing community Wattpad announced an agreement with Macmillan [sic, Springer Nature America] for handling sales and distribution in the U.S. for its new publishing division Wattpad Books, alongside rival Penguin Random House that will handle the U.K. and India market, and Raincoast Books for the Canadian market.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: In November 2019, Macmillan announced that libraries would be able to buy only one copy of e-books for the first eight weeks after publication, in an effort to boost sales by creating long waits for borrowers at large library systems. This prompted complaints and some libraries boycotted the company; the policy was reversed in March 2020.


title: Macmillan Publishers

text: In September 2020, Macmillan announced that CEO John Sargent will be leaving at the end of the year due to "a disagreement regarding the direction of Macmillan." According to Holtzbrinck spokesperson Erin Coffey, the decision was made by Stefan von Holtzbrinck, CEO of the Holtzbrinck group.


title: National Socialist Movement (United States)

text: The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is a far-right, Neo-Nazi, white supremacist organization based in the United States. It is a part of the Nationalist Front. The party claimed to be the "largest and most active" National Socialist organization in the United States. It is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.


text: In January 2019, the leadership of the group was turned over to James Hart Stern, a Black civil rights activist, who announced his intention to undermine the group and "eradicate" it. In March 2019, in a press release the group's leader, Jeff Schoep, declared that Stern "does not speak for the National Socialist Movement and he holds no legal standing with the NSM". In addition to speaking out against Stern, he also announced that he was leaving the NSM and giving his position to Burt Colucci. Since then, Jeff Schoep has renounced his racist past and he has also renounced his involvement in all racist groups. In April 2021, Colucci was arrested for aggravated assault.


text: The National Socialist Movement was founded in 1974 in St. Paul, Minnesota, as the "National Socialist American Workers Freedom Movement" by Robert Brannen and Cliff Herrington, former members of the American Nazi Party before its decline. In 1994, Jeff Schoep became the group's chairman, a position which he held until January 2019. It was revealed in 2004 that Clifford Herrington, co-chairman of the NSM, was the husband of Andrea Herrington, founder and "high-priestess" of the theistic Satanist organization and website Joy of Satan Ministries, leading to a major debate and conflict both within the NSM itself and Joy of Satan Ministries, and to the Herringtons' eventual departure from the NSM.


text: The National Socialist Movement was responsible for leading the demonstration which sparked the 2005 Toledo riot. In April 2006, they held a rally on the State Capitol steps in Lansing, Michigan, which was met by a larger counter-rally and ended in scuffles.


text: In January 2009, the National Socialist Movement sponsored a half-mile section of U.S. Highway 160 outside of Springfield, Missouri, as part of the Adopt-A-Highway Trash Cleanup program. The highway was later renamed the "Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway" by the state legislature.


text: In 2009, the National Socialist Movement had 61 chapters in 35 states, making it the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. As of 2015, the National Socialist Movement claimed direct organized presences in seven countries around the world, and other affiliations beyond that.


text: On April 17, 2010, 70 members of the National Socialist Movement demonstrated in front of the Los Angeles City Hall, drawing a counter protest of hundreds of anti-fascist demonstrators.


text: In May 2011, the National Socialist Movement was described by "The New York Times" as being "the largest supremacist group, with about 400 members in 32 states, though much of its prominence followed the decay of Aryan Nation and other neo-Nazi groups".


text: On May 1, 2011, Jeff Hall, a leader of the California branch of the National Socialist Movement, was killed by his 10-year-old emotionally troubled son, who claimed he was tired of Hall beating him and his stepmother. Hall had run in 2010 for a seat on the board of directors of a Riverside County water board, a race in which he earned approximately 30% of the vote.


text: The National Socialist Movement held a rally on September 3, 2011, in West Allis, Wisconsin, to protest incidents at the Wisconsin State Fair on August 5, 2011, when a large crowd of young African-Americans allegedly targeted and beat white people as they left the fair around 11 p.m. Police claimed that the incident began as a fight among African-American youths that was not racially motivated. Dan Devine, the mayor of West Allis, stated on September 2, 2011, "I believe I speak for the citizens when I say they [the National Socialist Movement] are not welcome here."


text: In 2012, two former members of the National Socialist Movement were arrested and sentenced to prison for drug trafficking, stockpiling weapons, and plotting terrorist attacks against a Mexican consulate in the United States.


text: As of March 2015, the organization had planned a return to Toledo, Ohio, for a rally focusing on crime in the area. In June 2016, the group helped organize with the Traditionalist Worker Party the rally which turned into the 2016 Sacramento riot. In November 2016, following the election of Donald Trump, the organization changed its logo, replacing the swastika with an Odal rune in an attempt to enter mainstream politics. The account of its leader, Jeff Schoep, was suspended by Twitter on December 18, 2017.


text: In April 2021, Burt Colucci, still leader of the National Socialist Movement, was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona for aggravated assault on a Black man. Witnesses say he pulled a gun and aimed it at the man, along with hurling threatening remarks, His bail is set at $7,500. Two days before his arrest, he led a group of 15 members of the National Socialist Movement in a rally, although they had expected 100.


text: After the August riot and violence rising from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, two lawsuits targeting 21 racist "alt-right" and hate group leaders, including the National Socialist Movement and its leader Jeff Schoep, were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia and another lawsuit was filed in Virginia Circuit Court. Organizations named in both suits were the National Socialist Movement; the Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP); the League of the South (LOS), and Vanguard America, a two-year-old white supremacy group which claims to have 12 U.S. chapters. Two Ku Klux Klan groups, the Loyal White Knights and the East Coast Knights of the KKK, were named defendants in the federal suit.


text: The 96 page federal court filing accused the white supremacists of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and other statutes and its plaintiffs seek compensation and punitive damages. It also asked the courts to intervene with legal orders that would prevent a repeat of the deadly events that occurred in Charlottesville on August 11 and 12, 2017, and bar the use of private militias at such events. The plaintiffs who were named in the 96-page federal suit were described as "University of Virginia undergraduates, law students and staff, persons of faith, ministers, parents, doctors, and businesspersons – white, brown and black; Christian and Jewish; young and old". The City of Charlottesville, along with several businesses and neighborhood associations, were plaintiffs in the 81-page state suit.


text: The federal and state lawsuits both claimed that the August rally in Charlottesville had been planned for weeks, with its organizers making extensive use of social media – coordinating everything from telling individuals to buy tiki torches to making use of an internet-based communications system that was originally designed for gamers. The federal suit claimed that "hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists traveled from near and far to descend upon the college town ... in order to terrorize its residents, commit acts of violence, and use the town as a backdrop to showcase for the media and the nation a neo-nationalist agenda".


text: While the federal suit focused on prosecuting civil rights violations, the state suit focused on describing and prosecuting violations which it claimed were committed for the illegal purpose of using militia forces to protect alt-right and white nationalist demonstrations.


text: On February 28, 2019, the Associated Press reported that, according to Michigan corporate records, Jeff Schoep had been replaced as director and president of the National Socialist Movement in January by James Hart Stern, a Black civil rights activist. Stern became its leader after he received a call for help from Schoep who wanted to get out of the organization due to the legal issues that were mounting against it, and he has said that he wants to use his position to undermine the group. Stern had previously been instrumental in dissolving a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Michigan. Stern wrote in a blog post in February that he had worked with Schoep to replace the Nazi swastika as the group's symbol with an Odal rune, and that he would be meeting with Schoep to sign a proclamation in which the movement would disavow white supremacy.


text: In 2014, Stern and Schoep became friends when Schoep called Stern to ask about his connection to Edgar Ray Killen, the head of the Klan chapter that Stern dissolved. According to Stern, Schoep said that Stern was the first black man who he had reached out to since Malcolm X. When Stern learned that Schoep was a white supremacist, he arranged for a meeting between the two men. Since then, they have engaged in debates about the Holocaust, the swastika, White nationalism, and the fate of the National Socialist Movement, with Stern attempting to change Schoep's mind. He was not able to do that, but in 2019, Schoep came to him and asked for his advice with regard to the group's legal problems. He felt that the National Socialist Movement was an "albatross hanging around his neck" and wished to cut ties with the group in order to start a new organization that would be more appreciated in the mainstream of white nationalism. Stern then encouraged Schoep to turn control of the NSM over to him, and Schoep agreed.


text: Stern filed documents with a Federal court in Virginia, asking that it issue a judgment against the group before one of the pending Charlottesville-related lawsuits went to trial, but because the law does not allow a corporation to be its own attorney, Stern is looking for outside counsel to re-file the papers. Stern did not plan to dissolve the movement, in order to prevent any of its former members from reincorporating it. He planned to turn the group's website into a place for lessons about the Holocaust.


text: The group's former community outreach director, Matthew Heimbach, commented that Schoep had been in conflict with its membership, which resisted the ideological changes that Schoep wished to make, and wanted to remain "a politically impotent white supremacist gang". Heimbach estimated that the group had 40 dues-paying members as of last year. In a video posted on his blog, Stern took credit for "eradicating" the National Socialist Movement. Burt Colucci is currently the Movement's 'Commander,' a position disputed by many outside of the neo-nazi group.


text: James Stern died of cancer on October 11, 2019, leaving the future of his plans for the NSM uncertain. Since then, Jeff Schoep has renounced his racist past and he has also renounced his involvement in all racist groups.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: Kevin James Clifton (born 13 October 1982) is an English professional dancer and actor who was a professional dancer on the BBC TV series "Strictly Come Dancing", having previously worked as an assistant choreographer. He has also featured on "Burn the Floor". He was given the nickname "Kevin from Grimsby" by Sir Bruce Forsyth.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: On 15 December 2018, Clifton won the sixteenth series of Strictly with his celebrity partner Stacey Dooley, who has been his girlfriend since 2019. He appeared in every year's final from when he joined the show in 2013, with the exception of 2017 and 2019. He announced on 6 March 2020 that he was leaving the show, saying that he wanted to focus on "other areas of his career."


title: Kevin Clifton

text: Clifton started dancing ballroom and Latin as a child in his home village of Waltham, near Grimsby, taught by his parents, former World Champions Keith and Judy Clifton. He competed nationally and internationally as a child initially partnering his sister Joanne. Later, when they both chose to move on to different partners he chose Latin as his primary dance style so as not to directly compete against his sister. He was a Youth World Number 1 and four time British Latin Champion and won International Open titles in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Japan, France, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Belgium. At the time of his retirement from competitive dancing in 2007, he was ranked 7th in the world.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: In 2010, Clifton made his musical theatre debut in "Dirty Dancing The Musical" at the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End, where he partnered BBC1's "So You Think You Can Dance" winner, Charlie Bruce. From January 2008 to June 2013, Clifton and his future wife Karen Hauer were principal dancers of the Burn The Floor Dance Company, performing in the show's record breaking Broadway run, as well as starring at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London's West End. He also performed with the show in Japan, Australia, South Africa and the United States, as well as making guest appearances on "Dancing with the Stars" in the United States and "So You Think You Can Dance" in the Netherlands. They rejoined Burn The Floor as principal dancers for a short tour of Australia and Japan in Spring 2014.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: In 2013, Clifton appeared on series 11 of "Strictly Come Dancing" and was partnered with Susanna Reid. He had previously auditioned for the show with his partner Karen Hauer, but they had only needed a female dancer at the time, so he was instead employed as a choreographer for the show in 2012. In the 2013 Blackpool performance of the show he was joined in the opening dance by his family. On the same show, Reid and Clifton scored 39/40 for their paso doble, putting them at the top of the leaderboard. He won the 2013 Strictly Come Dancing Pro Challenge becoming the Guinness World Records holder for most Drunken Sailors in 30 seconds The couple's popularity ensured they reached the final, on 21 December, where they finished as runners up with Natalie Gumede behind model Abbey Clancy.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: In 2014's series 12 of "Strictly Come Dancing" Clifton was paired with pop star Frankie Bridge. They were declared the runners-up with Simon Webbe beaten by Caroline Flack and Pasha Kovalev. In 2015, Clifton, recently married to co-professional dancer Karen Hauer, returned for the thirteenth series of the show and was partnered up with "EastEnders" actress Kellie Bright. Bright and Clifton scored a perfect 40 for their Tango and Showdance and eventually finished as joint runners up with Georgia May Foote and Giovanni Pernice.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: Clifton has also taken part in the "'Strictly live tour'." For the 2014 tour he continued his partnership with series 11 partner, Susanna Reid. He was due to dance again with Frankie Bridge for the 2015 tour, but she had to pull out due to pregnancy, he instead danced with series 6 contestant Rachel Stevens. Clifton and Bridge were however reunited for the 2016 tour.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: In 2016 Clifton again took part in "Strictly Come Dancing", where he partnered singer and media personality Louise Redknapp. On 17 December 2016, Clifton became the first professional dancer in the show's history to compete in four consecutive finals; he was also the only professional dancer not to be in the dance-off. For the fourth time, Clifton finished as a series runner-up, after he and Redknapp lost out in the final result to Ore Oduba and Ore's partner, (Kevin's sister) Joanne.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: For series 15 in 2017, Clifton was partnered with Scottish comedian Susan Calman. Calman expressed her great delight at the partnering with Clifton, of whom she is a fan. They were eliminated on week 10, after a dance-off against Alexandra Burke and Gorka Márquez. This was the first time Clifton did not make it to final.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: For series 16, in 2018, Clifton was partnered with English television presenter and journalist, Stacey Dooley. The couple were the series winners.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: He partnered TV host Anneka Rice for the series seventeen, in 2019, they were the second couple to be eliminated after the judges chose to save David James and Nadiya Bychkova; making this Clifton's shortest series to date. He did however return to dance with former footballer Alex Scott for weeks 6 & 7 while Scott's normal partner Neil Jones was recovering from an injury to his Calf muscle. Following this series, Clifton chose to quit the show to “focus on other projects”.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: Week 3 featured Donny Osmond as a guest judge, he scored Frankie and Kevin a 10, making their official total 45


title: Kevin Clifton

text: After fellow professional Neil Jones was injured, Clifton also partnered professional footballer Alex Scott in weeks 6 and 7.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: In August 2017, Kevin & Karen Clifton announced they would be touring the UK again in 2018 with their theatre tour 'Kevin and Karen Dance', following their first nationwide tour in 2017. He also played Stacee Jaxx in the 2018-19 UK Tour of Rock of Ages and in September 2022, he will star in the UK Tour of Strictly Ballroom directed by Strictly Judge Craig Revel Horwood. He will star as the Artilleryman in the upcoming 2022 Tour of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds from March to April.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: Clifton grew up in the small North East Lincolnshire town of Waltham, attending the East Ravendale Primary school, where he was notable for his Michael Jackson impressions. He later attended Caistor Grammar School, doing well academically before choosing to pursue his dance career rather than attend the sixth form.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: Clifton has been married three times. His first marriage was to a dance partner when he was 20 years old. He then married professional dancer Clare Craze. They split up in 2010 and their divorce was finalised in 2013. He then married fellow professional dancer Karen Hauer, having proposed to her on her birthday, on stage during a performance of "Burn the Floor". They wed on 11 July 2015. On 15 March 2018, Clifton confirmed he and Karen Hauer were no longer together romantically.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: In 2019, it was confirmed that Clifton was dating his most recent "Strictly Come Dancing" celebrity partner Stacey Dooley. It was announced via Twitter on 26 August 2022 that they were expecting their first baby together, four years after confirming their relationship.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: Clifton currently owns a property investment business with a friend, describing it in an interview as a 'second career'.


title: Kevin Clifton

text: As well as taking part in various charity campaigns and visits in his role as a Strictly professional, Clifton is also a patron of the Wheelchair DanceSport Association and the 2014 Dance Proms.


title: Trivago

text: Trivago N.V., marketed with lowercase styling as trivago, is a German technology company specializing in internet-related services and products in the hotel, lodging and metasearch fields. The company is headquartered in Düsseldorf. The American online travel company Expedia Group owns a majority of the company's stock.


title: Trivago

text: The company was founded in Düsseldorf, Germany, in January 2005. Seeing an opportunity in the hotel search space, the founding team developed Germany's first hotel search engine. Shortly after launch, Stephan Stubner resigned as Managing Director, but the three other founders (Rolf Schrömgens, Peter Vinnemeier and Malte Siewert) remained.


title: Trivago

text: Initially, Trivago received €1 million from investors, including the Samwer brothers, Florian Heinemann, and Christian Vollmann. In 2007, Trivago received US$1.14 million in Series B funding from the British company HOWZAT media LLP. In December 2010, Trivago sold a quarter of the company for US$52.86 million to a US investment fund, Insight Venture Partners.


title: Trivago

text: In December 2012, Expedia, an American travel company, announced that it would acquire a stake in Trivago for $632 million. The deal was completed in 2013.


title: Trivago

text: In December 2014, Trivago acquired mobile app product and development company Rheinfabrik. After the acquisition, Rheinfabrik remains independent from Trivago in its work.


title: Trivago

text: On December 16, 2016, Trivago became publicly traded on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol TRVG.


title: Trivago

text: On November 5, 2019, CEO Rolf Schrömgens announced he will step down at the end of the year and be replaced by Chief Financial Officer Axel Hefer.


title: Trivago

text: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Trivago 2020 had to cut many jobs. In March 2020, sales had fallen by 95% compared to the previous year.


title: Trivago

text: In January 2021, Trivago acquired weekend.com, a startup focused on finding travelers inspirational weekend getaway packages.


title: Trivago

text: Trivago is headquartered in Düsseldorf, where the international operations are conducted and 100% of the company's employees work.


title: Trivago

text: As a hotel price comparison website, Trivago makes money from advertising partners primarily using a cost-per-click (CPC) business model. Booking platforms, hoteliers and other providers list rates and advertise on the Trivago site, paying for the clicks received from Trivago users.


title: Trivago

text: Trivago also offers free and fee-based versions of its Hotel Manager product, which hoteliers use to market their facilities on the Trivago site. Trivago claims to be the world's largest online hotel search site, comparing rates from over 1 million hotels and more than 250 booking sites worldwide. Since their majority shareholder is Expedia, the effort is to direct bookings to their sites by way of various "adjustments" to how other sites' rates are perceived.


title: Trivago

text: The tRI aggregates all ratings for destinations listed on Trivago and ranks them between 0 and 100. The index includes criteria such as location, price, food, internet, room and facilities, and is used to create annual Trivago rankings and awards such as the Reputation Ranking, Island Ranking, Ski Ranking, the Top Hotel Awards, and the Best Value Destinations (based on an algorithm combining the tRI with price).


title: Trivago

text: The Trivago Hotel Price Index (tHPI) displays the average overnight accommodation prices for the most popular cities worldwide. Prices are based on the cost of a standard double room, taken from over 2 million daily price inquiries over the past month.


title: Trivago

text: Trivago focuses on online marketing (SEM and display advertising), public relations and brand marketing (TV).


title: Trivago

text: When the company aired its first U.S. TV advertisement in 2012, the ad's spokesman inspired a trending Twitter hashtag, #trivagoguy, based on his unusual look.


title: Trivago

text: According to "Rolling Stone", Trivago "wanted someone real, approachable and genuine" when it chose actor Tim Williams to star in the ad. The Trivago guy became an unexpected celebrity, with some people noting his unbuttoned shirt and creepy vibe, while others found his scruffy appearance and deep voice "inexplicably sexy".


title: Trivago

text: Trivago responded to the comments by launching a contest that invited people to give the Trivago guy a makeover. The Trivago guy inspired parodies, fan fiction and a large gay following.


title: Trivago

text: Many commenters asked why Trivago chose not to have the actor wear a belt. According to the actor, that was an accident. "Unfortunately none of the belts fit the belt loops that I had on," Williams said. "I think that was probably the best break we could have gotten." Following the large response for the U.S. Trivago guy, the company decided to create French and Spanish Trivago guys.


title: Trivago

text: For Latin America (the whole Spanish-speaking region) Trivago's commercials are presented by Spanish actor Gonzalo Peña. In Brazil, the man shown on screen is the well-known actor and model Willian Mello.


title: Trivago

text: In 2016, the company aired ads in India with Abhinav Kumar. Abhinav became popular and an internet sensation for his role in ubiquitous Trivago ads in India.


title: Trivago

text: In Japan, Trivago is represented in their TV commercials by singer/songwriter , who uses the pseudonym "Strae" in the United States. In Malaysia, actress and TV host Dahlia Shazwan has starred in Trivago's advertisements.


title: Trivago

text: In August 2018, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) alleged in a court case brought against Trivago in the Federal Court of Australia that the company had misled consumers on their website and in their television advertising. The court found that search results were ordered giving preference to the highest paying "cost per click" advertisers, rather than outright cheapest prices. It was also found that the company's television advertising misled consumers by purporting to be "impartial and objective", when it fact it wasn't. The ACCC case started in the Federal Court of Australia in September 2019. In January 2020, the court found that Trivago breached Australian consumer law by misleading consumers on which hotel deals were best and made false representations to consumers. The ACCC argued Trivago promised customers impartial, objective and transparent hotel price comparisons which would allow them to quickly and easily identify the cheapest offer available. Instead, Trivago promoted its best advertisers, the ACCC claimed. The ACCC claimed Trivago failed to properly disclose its operating model and used misleading "strike-through" price comparisons that compared a more expensive luxury room with a standard room.


title: Trivago

text: In April 2022, the Federal Court fined Trivago AUD44.7 million, plus legal costs for misleading consumers. The ACCC had pushed for a fine of AUD90 million. Justice Moshinsky of the Federal Court noted Trivago's breaches of the law were "extremely serious".


title: Bogie

text: A bogie ( ) (in some senses called a truck in North American English) is a chassis or framework that carries a wheelset, attached to a vehicle—a modular subassembly of wheels and axles. Bogies take various forms in various modes of transport. A bogie may remain normally attached (as on many railroad cars and semi-trailers) or be quickly detachable (as the dolly in a road train or in railway bogie exchange); it may contain a suspension within it (as most rail and trucking bogies do), or be solid and in turn be suspended (as most bogies of tracked vehicles are); it may be mounted on a swivel, as traditionally on a railway carriage or locomotive, additionally jointed and sprung (as in the landing gear of an airliner), or held in place by other means (centreless bogies).


title: Bogie

text: While "bogie" is the preferred spelling and first-listed variant in various dictionaries, bogey and bogy are also used.


title: Bogie

text: A "bogie" in the UK, or a "railroad truck", "wheel truck", or simply "truck" in North America, is a structure underneath a railway vehicle (wagon, coach or locomotive) to which axles (and, hence, wheels) are attached through bearings. In Indian English, "bogie" may also refer to an entire railway carriage. In South Africa, the term "bogie" is often alternatively used to refer to a freight or goods wagon (shortened from "bogie wagon").


title: Bogie

text: The bogie was invented by John B. Jervis along with the 4-2-0 locomotive to support the firebox on it in the early 1830s, but it didn't get accepted for decades. The first standard gauge British railway to build coaches with bogies, instead of rigidly mounted axles, was the Midland Railway in 1874.


title: Bogie

text: Usually, two bogies are fitted to each carriage, wagon or locomotive, one at each end. Another configuration is often used in articulated vehicles, which places the bogies (often Jacobs bogies) under the connection between the carriages or wagons.


title: Bogie

text: Most bogies have two axles, but some cars designed for heavy loads have more axles per bogie. Heavy-duty cars may have more than two bogies using span bolsters to equalize the load and connect the bogies to the cars.


title: Bogie

text: Usually, the train floor is at a level above the bogies, but the floor of the car may be lower between bogies, such as for a bilevel rail car to increase interior space while staying within height restrictions, or in easy-access, stepless-entry, low-floor trains.


title: Bogie

text: The connections of the bogie with the rail vehicle allow a certain degree of rotational movement around a vertical axis pivot (bolster), with side bearers preventing excessive movement. More modern, bolsterless bogie designs omit these features, instead taking advantage of the sideways movement of the suspension to permit rotational movement.


title: Bogie

text: Modern diesel and electric locomotives are mounted on bogies. Those commonly used in the North America include Type A, Blomberg, HT-C and Flexicoil trucks.


title: Bogie

text: On a steam locomotive, the leading and trailing wheels may be mounted on bogies like pony trucks or Bissel bogies. Articulated locomotives (e.g. Fairlie, Garratt or Mallet locomotives) have power bogies similar to those on diesel and electric locomotives.


title: Bogie

text: A rollbock is a specialized type of bogie that is inserted under the wheels of a rail wagon/car, usually to convert for another track gauge. Transporter wagons carry the same concept to the level of a flatcar specialized to take other cars as its load.


title: Bogie

text: Tram bogies are much simpler in design because of their axle load, and the tighter curves found on tramways mean tram bogies almost never have more than two axles. Furthermore, some tramways have steeper gradients and vertical, as well as horizontal, curves, which means tram bogies often need to pivot on the horizontal axis, as well.


title: Bogie

text: Some articulated trams have bogies located under articulations, a setup referred to as a Jacobs bogie. Often, low-floor trams are fitted with nonpivoting bogies and many tramway enthusiasts see this as a retrograde step, as it leads to more wear of both track and wheels and also significantly reduces the speed at which a tram can round a curve.


title: Bogie

text: In the past, many different types of bogie (truck) have been used under tramcars (e.g. Brill, Peckham, maximum traction). A maximum traction truck has one driving axle with large wheels and one nondriving axle with smaller wheels. The bogie pivot is located off-centre, so more than half the weight rests on the driving axle.


title: Bogie

text: The retractable stadium roof on Toronto's Rogers Centre used modified off-the-shelf train bogies on a circular rail. The system was chosen for its proven reliability.


title: Bogie

text: Rubber-tyred metro trains use a specialised version of railway bogies. Special flanged steel wheels are behind the rubber-tired running wheels, with additional horizontal guide wheels in front of and behind the running wheels, as well. The unusually large flanges on the steel wheels guide the bogie through standard railroad switches, and in addition keep the train from derailing in case the tires deflate.


title: Bogie

text: To overcome breaks of gauge some bogies are being fitted with variable gauge axles (VGA) so that they can operate on two different gauges. These include the SUW 2000 system from ZNTK Poznań.


title: Bogie

text: The Cleminson system is not a true bogie, but serves a similar purpose. It was based on a patent of 1883 by James Cleminson, and was once popular on narrow-gauge rolling stock, e.g. on the Isle of Man and Manx Northern Railways. The vehicle would have three axles and the outer two could pivot to adapt to curvature of the track. The pivoting was controlled by levers attached to the third (centre) axle, which could slide sideways.


title: Bogie

text: Some tanks and other tracked vehicles have bogies as external suspension components (see armoured fighting vehicle suspension). This type of bogie usually has two or more road wheels and some type of sprung suspension to smooth the ride across rough terrain. Bogie suspensions keep much of their components on the outside of the vehicle, saving internal space. Although vulnerable to antitank fire, they can often be repaired or replaced in the field.


title: Bogie

text: An articulated bogie is any one of a number of bogie designs that allow railway equipment to safely turn sharp corners, while reducing or eliminating the "screeching" normally associated with metal wheels rounding a bend in the rails. There are a number of such designs, and the term is also applied to train sets that incorporate articulation in the vehicle, as opposed to the bogies themselves.


title: Bogie

text: If one considers a single bogie "up close", it resembles a small rail car with axles at either end. The same effect that causes the bogies to rub against the rails at longer radius causes each of the pairs of wheels to rub on the rails and cause the screeching. Articulated bogies add a second pivot point between the two axles (wheelsets) to allow them to rotate to the correct angle even in these cases.


title: Bogie

text: In trucking, a bogie is the subassembly of axles and wheels that supports a semi-trailer, whether permanently attached to the frame (as on a single trailer) or making up the dolly that can be hitched and unhitched as needed when hitching up a second or third semi-trailer (as when pulling doubles or triples).


title: Bogie

text: Radial steering trucks, also known as radial bogies, allow the individual axles to align with curves in addition to the bogie frame as a whole pivoting. For non-radial bogies, the more axles in the assembly, the more difficulty it has negotiating curves, due to wheel flange to rail friction. For radial bogies, the wheel sets actively "steer" through curves, thus reducing wear at the wheel flange to rail interface and improving adhesion.


title: Bogie

text: In the USA, this has been implemented for locomotives both by EMD and GE. The EMD version, designated HTCR, was made standard equipment for the SD70 series, first sold in 1993. However, the HTCR in actual operation had mixed results and relatively high purchase and maintenance costs. Thus EMD introduced the HTSC truck in 2003, which basically is the HTCR stripped of radial components. GE introduced their version in 1995 as a buyer option for the AC4400CW and later Evolution Series locomotives. However it also met with limited acceptance due to relatively high purchase and maintenance costs, and customers have generally chosen GE Hi-Ad standard trucks for newer and rebuilt locomotives.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Searches for Noah's Ark have been reported since antiquity, as ancient scholars sought to affirm the historicity of the Genesis flood narrative by citing accounts of relics recovered from the Ark. With the emergence of biblical archaeology in the 19th century, the potential of a formal search attracted interest in alleged discoveries and hoaxes. By the 1940s, expeditions were being organized to follow up on these apparent leads. This modern search movement has been informally called "arkeology."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In 2020, the Institute for Creation Research acknowledged that, despite many expeditions, Noah's Ark had not been found and is unlikely to be found. Many of the supposed findings and methods used in the search are regarded as pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology by geologists and archaeologists.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: At the end of the Genesis flood narrative, when the flooding subsides, the Ark is said to come to rest "on the mountains of Ararat." The Book of Jubilees specifies a particular mountain, naming it "Lûbâr". The Torah does not describe any particular holiness about the Ark, and so little attention is given to its fate after Noah's departure.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: According to the Talmud, the Assyrian king Sennacherib found a beam from the Ark and, reasoning that it was the god who delivered Noah from the flood, fashioned the wood into an idol. This expands upon the biblical account of Sennacherib worshiping in the temple of Nisroch, interpreting the god's name to be derived from the Hebrew word "neser" ("beam"). A Midrash regarding the Book of Esther says that the gallows erected by Haman was built using a beam from the Ark.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Opinions on the location of "the mountains of Ararat" have varied since antiquity. Interpretations of the Noah story were influenced by the Armenian flood myth about Masis, and the Syrian version about Qardu in Corduene, until these locations became conflated. The targumim for Genesis 8 interpret "Ararat" as "Qadron" and "Kardu" (i.e., Corduene). In his recounting of the Flood, Josephus seeks to link the story of Noah to the Sumerian flood myth as described by Berossus, Hieronymus of Cardia, Mnaseas of Patrae, and Nicolaus of Damascus, thereby placing Noah's Ark on a mountain in Armenia, where he says relics from the ship are exhibited "to this day." However, Josephus later describes Carrhae as the location of the Ark, again claiming that the locals would show the remains to visitors. Jerome of Stridon translated "Ararat" as "Armenia" in the Vulgate, whereas the Armenians themselves associated Noah's Ark with Corduene until the 11th century.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In the early Christian church, stories about the remains of Noah's Ark were regarded as evidence that the ship had been located, identified, and preserved in some form. This became useful in Christian apologetics for affirming the events of the Pentateuch as fact. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote: "Thus even today the remains of Noah’s ark are still shown in Cardyaei." Similarly, John Chrysostom proposed to ask non-believers: "Have you heard of the Flood--of that universal destruction? That was not just a threat, was it? Did it not really come to pass---was not this mighty work carried out? Do not the mountains of Armenia testify to it, where the Ark rested? And are not the remains of the Ark preserved there to this very day for our admonition?" However, with the widespread adoption of Christianity in Europe, the apologetic value of Ark relics diminished, as there were far fewer non-believers to persuade.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: By the 5th century, a legend had arisen that Jacob of Nisibis scaled a mountain in search of Noah's Ark. As related by Faustus of Byzantium, Jacob and his party traveled to the mountains of Armenia, and "came to Sararad mountain which was in the borders of the Ayraratean lordship, in the district of Korduk'." Near the summit, an angel visited him in his sleep, instructing him to climb no further. In consolation, the angel provided Jacob with a board taken from the Ark. Jacob brought the artifact back to the city, which is said to have preserved the relic ever since. Agathangelos relates a similar story, although not directly related to the Ark, in which the 3rd century Armenian king Tiridates scales Masis and brings back eight rocks to use in the foundation of new churches.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In the 7th century, the "Etymologiae" states that remains of the Ark are still at Mount Ararat in Armenia, whereas


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: the Quran describes the Ark landing on "al-jūdī," which is understood to refer to Qardu, now known as Mount Judi. Heraclius is reported to have scaled Mount Judi to visit the site of the Ark in either 628 or 629. One legend claims that Omar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb removed the Ark from a site near Nisibis and used the wood to construct a mosque.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Despite the longstanding association of Armenia with Ararat in Western Christianity, Christians in Armenia did not adopt the idea of Masis as the landing site of the Ark until the arrival of Crusaders in the late 11th century. Thereafter, Armenians adopted the Western identification of Masis as "Mount Ararat," and relocated the Jacob of Nisibis legend to that peak. The angel's admonition to Jacob became a new explanation for the pre-Christian taboo against climbing the sacred mountain. Regardless of this cultural impediment, other travelers claimed the summit was physically inaccessible, due to the permanent snow line and an abundance of precipices.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Late medieval reports from Ararat often mentioned the survival of Ark fragments, but there was less consensus about whether the vessel itself survived. Petachiah of Regensburg simply declared "the Ark is not there, for it has decayed." Just over a century later, however, Hayton of Corycus claimed that "on the mountain's summit something black is visible, which people say is the Ark."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Sir Walter Raleigh objected to the view that the Ark landed in Armenia, arguing that the Armenian mountains could merely be a sub-range of "the mountains of Ararat." He proposed a definition of "Ararat" that would encompass the Taurus, Caucasus, Sariphi, and Paropamisus mountain ranges. This interpretation would allow the Ark to have landed to the east of Mesopotamia, which Raleigh felt was necessary to explain why Noah's descendants migrated to Shinar "from the east" in .


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: The first recorded ascent of Ararat was led by Friedrich Parrot in 1829. In his account of the expedition, Parrot wrote that "all the Armenians are firmly persuaded that Noah's Ark remains to this very day on the top of Ararat, and that, in order to preserve it, no human being is allowed to approach it."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: James Bryce scaled Ararat in 1876. On his ascent, he discovered "a piece of wood about four feet long and five inches thick, evidently cut by some tool, and so far above the limit of trees that it could by no possibility be a natural fragment of one." Bryce cut off a portion of the wood to keep, and later argued that it might plausibly be a remnant of Noah's ark. Although he admitted another explanation for the wood had occurred to him, he determined that "no man is bound to discredit his own relic."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: On 26 March 1883, an avalanche was reported at Mount Ararat which destroyed several villages. As an April Fools' Day joke, George McCullagh Reed, writing as "Pollex" for his opinion column in the "New Zealand Herald", claimed that the avalanche had revealed the remains of Noah's Ark. Reed's story largely takes the form of a dispatch supposedly received from the "Levant Herald" in Constantinople, which he believed to have ceased operations several years earlier; in fact the paper had by that time relaunched as the "Eastern Express". The report describes the findings of "Commissioners appointed by the Turkish Government," including a nonexistent English scientist named "Captain Gascoyne," which had already been submitted to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. A reference to "an enterprising American traveller" seeking to purchase the Ark for exhibition in the United States was intended by Reed to be recognized as P. T. Barnum.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Over the next several months, Reed's prank was picked up by newspapers around the world. While some publications presented the story tongue-in-cheek, others uncritically reprinted much of what Reed originally wrote, attributing it (as he had) to a correspondent in Constantinople. On 24 November, Reed wrote another column apologizing for the hoax and expressing amusement that the story had spread so far:


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Despite this retraction, the story has continued to be circulated, often referencing the "Prophetic Messenger" article, which Tim LaHaye and John D. Morris called "the most complete and accurate account of the discovery."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: John Joseph Nouri claimed to have discovered Noah's Ark on the summit of Mount Ararat in April 1887. Little else about him is known for certain. He was born in Baghdad in 1865, and in 1885 he was consecrated as an archdeacon in the Chaldean Catholic Church. During his tour of the United States, he attracted attention with his long list of formal titles: "His Pontifical Eminence, the most Venerable Prelate, Monseignior. The Zamorin Nouri. John Joseph Prince of Nouri, D.D, LL., D. (By Divine Providence.) Chaldean Patriarchal Archdeacon of Babylon and Jerusalem, Grand Apostolic Ambassador of Malabar, India and Persia. The Discoveror of Noah's Ark and the Golden Mountains of the Moon. The Sacred Crown's Supreme Representative General of the Holy Orthodox, Oriental, Patriarchal Imperiality of 900,000,000 People of Asia. The First Universal Exploring Traveler of One Million Miles." Those who knew him, including J. O. Kinnaman, Frederick G. Coan, and John Henry Barrows, regarded him as a charismatic, well-traveled scholar who spoke multiple languages.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In 1893, Nouri attended the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago. By his account, he was invited to the event to speak about his encounter with the Ark, although the official reports of the event do not say whether such a lecture occurred. Later that year, while visiting San Francisco, Nouri was robbed and left at the Napa Insane Asylum, which took him into custody as a patient. Although he eventually arranged his release, the incident raised questions about his mental state and, therefore, the legitimacy of his extraordinary claims. Upon researching the case for a 2014 paper, Emrah Şahin concluded that "Nouri, though of an unusual character, was sane." An 1897 report that Nouri had been crowned Patriarch at the Chaldean Pontifical Cathedral at Thrissur has been taken as vindication of his authenticity. Nevertheless, Turkish officials did not corroborate his claim of discovering Noah's Ark.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Searches since the mid-20th century have been largely supported by evangelical, millenarian churches and sustained by ongoing popular interest, faith-based magazines, lecture tours, videos and occasional television specials.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In 1940 the article "Noah's Ark Found" appeared in a special edition of "New Eden", one of several booklets published in Los Angeles by Floyd M. Gurley. The article was credited to "Vladimir Roskovitsky," and contained his account of discovering Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat circa 1917, "just before the Russian revolution."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: According to the story, Roskovitsky was a Russian aviator stationed northeast of Ararat. In August (no year is provided) he was ordered to perform a test flight of an airplane equipped with a new supercharger. Flying near Ararat, Roskovitsky and his co-pilot spotted an enormous shipwreck on the shore of a lake on the mountain. His captain later identified the wreckage as Noah's Ark, and submitted a report to the government, which sent 150 soldiers to the site. The expedition's report was supposedly sent to the tsar just days before "godless Bolshevism took over," causing the report to be suppressed and presumably destroyed "to discredit all religion and belief in the truth of the Bible." Roskovitsky, identified as a White Russian, is said to have fled to the United States to enjoy the freedom to pursue his newfound faith.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: The story is inconsistent with Russian history, as Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne at the end of the February Revolution, months before the Bolsheviks took power in the October Revolution. References to parachutes, oxygen cans, and superchargers in aircraft are anachronistic for the given timeframe. Nevertheless, the story became very popular and was widely reprinted. By 1942, however, at least two publications had retracted the story.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Inquiries to "New Eden" about the article were referred to Benjamin F. Allen, the source for the story. However, Allen had not intended for the story to be published until it could be corroborated, and he resented the embellishments Gurley had added. In October 1945 he described the version of the story he told to Gurley, writing: "In conversation with him I had given him the few details originating from two soldiers in the Czarist Russian army during the First World War, deceased many years ago. The story by these soldiers came to me from their relatives of how a Russian aviator had sighted a suspicious looking structure in one of Ararat's obscure canyons. Infantrymen were sent on foot to investigate and their officers and they decided it must be Noah's Ark, with one end sunk in a small swamp. "These were the only details they gave."" Allen said that "95%" of the "New Eden" article, including the name "Vladimir Roskovitsky," had been fabricated by Gurley, who issued an apology at his request.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Despite Gurley's retraction, interest in the Russian aviator story persisted, as attention turned to verifying Allen's version. Real estate agent Eryl Cummings, who learned of the Roskovitsky story in 1945, was particularly inspired to investigate the possibility that Noah's Ark had been discovered. In November 1945 he founded the Sacred History Research Expedition for the purpose of investigating the matter, and through his research he later came to be considered "the dean of American ark hunters."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Cummings discovered a new lead in an article from the October 6, 1945 issue of the Russian-language magazine "Rosseya", which was similar to Gurley's Roskovitsky account. The "Rosseya" article, written by former Russian officer Alexander A. Koor, placed the tsar's expedition in December 1917, and described the Ark as measuring long, wide, and high. Koor's version ended with a rumor that the expedition's report was intercepted by Leon Trotsky, who had the courier shot. Cummings later contacted Koor, who said he had served in the Ararat region in 1915, and heard of the Ark expedition from fellow officers he met in 1921. This was enough to convince Cummings that Koor had not simply plagiarized the "New Eden" article. An amateur archaeologist, Koor also claimed to have discovered cuneiform inscriptions at Ararat describing the story of the Flood. Following his correspondence with Cummings, Koor would take an interest in promoting the discredited Book of Veles.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In November 1948, Edwin Greenwald reported for the Associated Press that Kurdish villagers had discovered a large, petrified wooden ship on Mount Ararat. Shukra Asena, who owned land in the area, reported to Greenwald that a farmer named Reshit found the ship's prow in September, about two-thirds of the way up the mountain. Asena claimed that Reshit spread word of his discovery, and people from many of the local villages had climbed Ararat to view the object.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Although the article was largely secondhand hearsay, British amateur archaeologist Egerton Sykes hoped to organize an expedition to establish that Reshit's discovery was in fact Noah's Ark. Aaron J. Smith, dean of the People's Bible College in North Carolina, joined Sykes in preparing for the operation. The pair received publicity when "Pravda" accused them of planning a surveillance operation for "Anglo-American imperialists," citing the proximity of Mount Ararat to the Soviet border. When Sykes was unable to proceed due to a lack of funding, Smith went on without him.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Upon arrival in Turkey, the expedition spent two months in Istanbul, arranging all of the permits necessary to proceed to Ararat. Following this delay, Greenwald joined Smith's party, which planned to hire Reshit as a guide. However, Reshit could not be located, despite the offer of a reward for information. Although Greenwald's article had indicated that Reshit's find had been witnessed by people throughout the area, no such witnesses could be found by the team.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Although the mission ended in failure, Smith remained hopeful that Noah's Ark would be found on Ararat someday. Expedition member Necati Dolunay argued that the project "has done a great deal for science and research as regards the ark. It finally has utterly disproved opinions and observations during more than 100 years that the ark is in plain sight."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In 1986, David Fasold interviewed a man named Ali Oğlu Reșit Sarihan, whom he believed to be the Reshit described by Shukra Asena thirty-eight years earlier. According to Fasold, the object that Reshit allegedly discovered in 1948 was not located on Mount Ararat as originally reported, but was in fact the Durupınar site.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Harold Williams, a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, related the story of Haji Yearam in a 1952 letter to Ark researcher Eryl Cummings. Over the next few years, Eryl and his wife Violet worked to corroborate the story, locating Yearam's death certificate in 1956 and securing Williams's permission, in 1958, to publish his letters. It is unclear if the story was widely circulated until the 1970s, when Violet Cummings began writing books about the Ark.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Yearam was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist who had immigrated from Armenia to the United States, eventually settling in Oakland, California. In 1915, Harold Williams and his parents began caring for the elderly, ailing Yearam. "Haji asked me to [...] write down carefully a story he was very anxious to tell," Williams wrote, "because he was sure that it would be of use some day after he was dead and gone." According to Williams, this deathbed statement revealed that Yearam, as a boy, had been part of a secret expedition that located Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. The exact timeframe of this alleged expedition is uncertain, though Violet Cummings concludes that it occurred circa 1856.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In Yearam's story, as related by Williams, his home village was at the foot of Mount Ararat, and his community had once made regular pilgrimages up to the Ark. One day "three vile men who did not believe the Bible" hired Yearam and his father as guides, as they intended to search the mountain in order to disprove the Noah's Ark story. When Yearam's father led them to the Ark, the three scientists "went into a Satanic rage at finding what they hoped to prove nonexistent." After trying and failing to destroy the vessel, the scientists agreed to cover up the discovery and made Yearam and his father swear to keep the secret under threat of torture and murder. Williams later explained that Yearam "wanted his story preserved so that when the right time came it might encourage brave men to go and locate the Ark and give to the world such proof as could not be denied"


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Haji Yearam died on 3 May 1920. Williams claimed that, around that same time, he read a newspaper article about a scientist in London who gave a deathbed confession about concealing the discovery of Noah's Ark. This second account was supposed to be remarkably consistent with the statement Yearam had given. Williams said that he saved the newspaper, keeping it with his transcript of Yearam's story; however, both were destroyed in a 1940 house fire. Despite a diligent search, no copy of the article about the dying scientist has ever been located.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: The chief criticism of Williams's account is that it is entirely hearsay evidence. Williams is the sole source for a story he considered to be very important in 1920, yet he made no effort to share it before the destruction of his evidence twenty years later, and no effort to publish it until the 1950s. The motivations of the story's scientists make no sense except to conform to their villainous role in what Larry Eskridge characterizes as a "melodrama." The TalkOrigins Archive suggests that the depiction of unbelievers, indicates that the entire story was manufactured as religious propaganda.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: French industrialist Fernand Navarra claimed to have located Noah's Ark in his 1956 book "J'ai Trouvé l'Arche de Noé". According to Navarra, he was inspired to search for the ship in 1937, after listening to an Armenian friend describe the legends his grandfather had told him in 1920. In 1952, he was invited to join an Ararat expedition with Jean de Riquer and Sehap Atalay, which reported no sign of the Ark. However, Navarra would later claim that, while alone, he sighted a large, dark mass that he said could only be the Ark. Since he could not reach this object or provide proof for its existence, he decided not to reveal his discovery until he could return.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: After failing to return to the site in 1953, Navarra resolved to return in 1955. For his next attempt, he sought to avoid potential delays caused by securing permission from the Turkish authorities to climb Ararat. To that end, he disguised the mission as a family vacation, bringing his wife and three sons to Turkey and scaling the mountain with eleven-year-old Raphael Navarra. The father and son filmed their recovery of a beam of hand-hewn wood, which Fernand said was cut from the structure he located in 1952. To make the wood easier to carry without arousing suspicion from the Turks, they cut the beam into smaller pieces.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In 1956 Navarra submitted his wood to several institutions for scientific analysis. The wood was identified as oak. Analyses based on color, density, and lignitization reportedly indicated the wood was about 5,000 years old, in line with the literalist timeframe of the Flood. However, these methodologies for dating wood are unreliable, and rejected by most scientists. Personal correspondence from 1959 refers to an unknown report that Navarra's wood had been radiocarbon dated to exactly 4,484 years old. Such a precise figure is not possible to obtain from radiocarbon dating, and does not correspond to any biblical chronology except that of Navarra, who wrote in 1955 that the Flood occurred "4,484 years ago."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: The Archaeological Research Foundation conducted several expeditions to locate Navarra's site in the 1960s, but were unable to find it. Acting as a consultant, Navarra supplied maps which ARF found vague and inconsistent with the mountain. In negotiations for him to personally lead ARF to the site, Navarra demanded considerable financial compensation and royalties from whatever the team might find. The two sides came to an agreement for a 1968 mission, in which Navarra arrived late and injured his foot while attempting to catch up. By 1969 the efforts of ARF had been taken over by a new organization, the Foundation, led by Ralph Crawford and with Navarra serving on the board of directors. On a SEARCH expedition in 1969, Navarra became separated from the rest of the party and, shortly thereafter, identified a site where the team found pieces of wood.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: SEARCH board member Elfred Lee arranged for radiocarbon dating on samples from Navarra's specimens. The 1955 samples were analyzed by five institutions, with results dating the wood to approximately 1,200-1,700 years ago. Two analyses of the 1969 samples dated the wood to about 1,350 years ago. In 1984, Navarra gave another piece of wood to James Irwin, who submitted it for another round of tests. Irwin's sample was found to be about 1500 years old, with evidence that the pitch coating was of far more recent origin, and applied using modern technology.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Several allegations have cast doubt on Navarra's credibility. Although Navarra said in 1958 that Sehap Atalay had collected wood from the Navarra site, Atalay contradicted that claim in 1962. According to Atalay, Navarra gave him the wood on his way back from the 1955 expedition. In 1970, Jean de Riquer accused Navarra of attempting to buy ancient wood from villagers at the foot of Ararat during their 1952 expedition. During his own ascents of Ararat, Gunnar Smars met Kurdish guides who accompanied Navarra on one or more private climbs around 1968 or 1969, unbeknownst to SEARCH.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: During a 1959 geodetic survey of Turkey, an anomalous shape near Doğubayazıt was identified by İlhan Durupınar of the Turkish Air Force and Sevket Kurtis of Ohio State University. The size and shape of the object resemble a boat approximately long and wide, inviting speculation that it could be Noah's Ark. Evangelist George Vandeman organized an expedition to the site in 1960, which determined that the shape was a natural geological formation.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Interest in the site was renewed by Ron Wyatt, who visited the site in 1977, 1979, and 1984. Based on Wyatt's promotion of his research, the Turkish government declared the site a national park in 1986. Geophysicist John Baumgardner and salvage expert David Fasold strongly advocated that the site was in fact Noah's Ark, but both of them eventually broke with Wyatt to express misgivings about their findings. In 1996, Fasold co-authored a paper with geologist Lorence G. Collins, asserting that the site "cannot have been Noah's Ark nor even a man-made model."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In the mid-1960s, oil engineer Fred Drake claimed to have seen six photographs of Noah's Ark in 1954. According to Drake, the photos were taken by his colleague George Greene, who had taken a helicopter flight around Mount Ararat while working at a Turkish oil pipeline. The pictures showed an unidentified protrusion on the mountain, resembling the prow of a large wooden ship. An investigation by the Archeological Research Foundation determined that Greene tried and failed to organize an expedition to Ararat, and then relocated to British Guiana, where he died in 1962. Greene's friends and family were uncertain what became of his Ararat photos, which were never found.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: A 1990 article by Bill Crouse listed various natural formations on Ararat that appeared to resemble a ship in photographs until mountaineers examined them in person. Crouse believed one of these "phantom arks," a prow-shaped chunk of basalt photographed by Tom Crotser in the 1970s, could be the same object seen by Greene.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In 1970, Armenian-American Georgie Hagopian reported that his uncle took him to see Noah's Ark twice during his childhood. Different accounts of his story place the first sighting in 1902, 1906, or 1908, with the second incident occurring about two years later. According to this account, the moss-covered Ark lay on the edge of a cliff, so that only one side was accessible. Hagopian said that many other boys in his childhood community told him that they had seen the structure. The TalkOrigins Archive takes issue with the "apparent ease" with which these children supposedly reached the Ark site, in contrast with the difficulties reported by other explorers.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: By Hagopian's estimate, the Ark was over long, wide, and over high. To reconcile this estimate with traditional interpretations of the Ark's size, John Warwick Montgomery suggested that "Dimensions regularly appear greater than they actually are to small children." However, Hagopian's recollection of an window (which is consistent with traditional views) is accepted as a precise estimate by Violet Cummings.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Hagopian said that his uncle wanted to keep a piece of the Ark, but was unable to cut into the wood using a knife or a blast of gunpowder. He adamantly rejected Fernand Navarra's claim to have found fragments of the Ark. Attempting to reconcile the two claims, Montgomery raised the possibility that the Ark was "not uniformly petrified." Hagopian, however, believed the entire structure was "absolutely petrified," and that "Almighty God would never permit the Ark to be cut and broken up."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Astronaut James Irwin, the eighth person to walk on the moon, experienced a religious epiphany during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. The following year, he resigned from NASA and founded an evangelical organization, the High Flight Foundation. During his outreach work, Irwin met Eryl Cummings in 1976 and expressed interest in joining one of his expeditions in search of Noah's Ark. At the time, Turkish policy had closed off Mount Ararat to explorers, and Irwin was denied a permit in 1977. However, following the 1980 coup Irwin's celebrity allowed him to establish a rapport with President Kenan Evren, who invited him to lead an expedition in 1982.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Irwin's 1982 mission ended in disaster when he left the group, in search of a shortcut to the summit, and fell off the trail. He had no memory of what caused the fall, but later speculated that he'd been caught in a rockslide and struck by a rock. He awoke hours later, badly wounded, and crawled into his sleeping bag to survive the night. The expedition team sent out a search party the following day, which rescued him and brought him down the mountain for medical treatment.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Undeterred, Irwin returned to Ararat a month later, this time with his wife and son. He hoped to pursue a tip offered to him by another explorer, who reported seeing an object about up the mountain in Ahora Gorge. Mary Irwin later expressed misgivings about her husband's mental state so soon after his fall. "Because Jim’s rationale wasn’t quite right after being hit so hard on his head," she wrote in 2012, "he deduced we wouldn’t need backpacks and climbing gear." Without proper equipment, the team struggled to make progress during the night, and were forced to abandon the expedition.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In August 1983, Irwin made another attempt, partnering with Marvin Steffins. They chartered an airplane to survey Ararat, and led a 22-member expedition, including Eryl Cummings and several members of Irwin's family. During the climb, a Turkish guide had sighted wood where the snowline had receded. A blizzard forced the team to turn back before they could reach the site. "It's easier to walk on the moon," Irwin said, regarding the difficulties in climbing Ararat. "I've done all I possibly can, but the ark continues to elude us."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Irwin fully intended to try again in 1984. However, he acknowledged the possibility that the Ark might not be found. Although he firmly believed the ship had really existed, he was far less certain that it had not been destroyed over the centuries. "The likelihood of it surviving at all," he said, "is small." He also suspected that many of the reported sightings on Mount Ararat were false. Nevertheless, he scaled the mountain that summer to look for the wood sighted the previous year. When he reached the site, he found only a pair of abandoned skis.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: During the 1985 climbing season, Kurdish rebels had ambushed at least four parties on Ararat. By the time Irwin could begin his climb on 24 August, only five of his 22-member party were allowed to accompany him, and the expedition was escorted by thirty Turkish soldiers. Just as the team reached the summit, Turkish officials ordered them to descend. By the time the party received permission to resume the mission, they were too exhausted to continue. According to the US Ambassador to Turkey, Robert Strausz-Hupé, the government was reacting to Soviet maneuvers near the border, and concern that Irwin would become a high value target for terrorists.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Irwin planned to make a sixth trip to Ararat in July 1986, with a smaller team. These plans were disrupted when he suffered arrhythmia on 6 June. By July, however, he had resumed plans for the expedition. "My doctor is against my traveling, and he said that I cannot go over 10,000 feet," Irwin said. "But the Lord willing, I will be there." After completing an aerial survey of Ararat, Irwin's team was detained at their hotel, under accusations of violating Soviet and Iranian airspace. The party was released once local officials confirmed Irwin's flight had been authorized. According to expedition member Bob Cornuke, Irwin expressed concern that his fame attracted media attention and security risks that were hampering the search. "Jim himself had confided on our last trip, as the permit process reached new heights of lunacy, that the problems could be traced to "him", not (as some had come to suspect) a sinister Turkish plot to prevent us from finding the ark." In September, Irwin announced "I think I’ve done all I can to attract attention to the ark. I think it is time others take up the search."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: A 1987 heat wave in Turkey convinced Irwin to change his mind and return for his seventh expedition to Mount Ararat. He believed the warm temperatures might have melted enough of the mountain's glaciers to make Noah's Ark easier to spot from the air. Irwin's High Flight Foundation teamed with the Institute for Creation Research, Evangelische Omroep, and International Exploration, Inc. for a joint operation. According to ICR's John D. Morris, the Turkish government had banned exploration of Ararat earlier in the year, and only approved this expedition on the condition that the team also evaluate the Durupınar site. Permits to explore Ararat itself were revoked before the party could begin its intended mission. Ultimately the expedition was only able to arrange a high-altitude aerial survey, staying no less than from Soviet and Iranian airspace.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: The 1987 expedition would be Irwin's last, as doctors ordered him to give up the search. When the High Flight Foundation organized another trip in 1988, Bob Cornuke led the party while Irwin stayed home.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Optometrist and Ararat explorer Don Shockey learned in 1985 that Ed Davis had spoken to his church about seeing Noah's Ark during World War II. Shockey invited Davis to speak at an "ark-a-thon" convention he organized in 1986 at Farmington, New Mexico. Davis was interviewed extensively about his story by Shockey's organization, and later subjected to a polygraph test on behalf of James Irwin's High Flight Foundation.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In 1943 Davis was a sergeant in the United States Army Corps of Engineers, stationed in Hamadan to work on the Persian Corridor between Khorramshahr and Qazvin. According to Davis, during this assignment he befriended a local driver named Badi, and his father Abas-Abas, who claimed to have visited Noah's Ark atop the mountain near their village. Around 1 July, Abas-Abas invited Davis to join them in one such visit, saying that enough snow and ice had melted to partially expose the ship. Upon reaching "Doomsday Point," Davis said he saw the Ark, which "first appeared as a huge rock formation covered by fog." It was lying in a cove lake, within a canyon below his position, and broken into two portions. Abas-Abas claimed that the Ark had been whole in his youth, and had only broken apart within his lifetime.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Ark researchers disagree about whether Davis's experience involved Mount Ararat in Turkey's Ağrı Province. Davis said the mountain he visited could be seen from his unit's base in Hamadan, but Ağrı is away. The first published version of his account describes Badi and Abas-Abas as Kurds, which is consistent with a story about visiting a village in Ağrı. However, in footage of his original interview Davis says the villagers were Lurs, an ethnic group in western Iran. Several different mountains in Lorestan are identified by the Lurs as the landing site of Noah's Ark. Similarly, Lur tradition places the Garden of Eden, which Davis also reported seeing, in Lorestan.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In November 1985, actor George Jammal wrote to Duane Gish, vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research, falsely claiming to have searched for Noah's Ark between 1972 and 1984. Jammal described being aided by "Mr. Asholian," "Alis Buls Hitian," and "Vladimir Sobitchsky." The story culminated with Jammal and Vladimir locating the Ark in a cave of ice, whereupon Vladimir fell to his death trying to photograph the ship. Jammal also claimed to have taken a piece of wood from the site.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: ICR's John D. Morris responded to Jammal in 1986, seeking to arrange an interview. Jammal prepared by studying books about the search for the Ark, as well as the 1976 Sun Classic Pictures film "In Search of Noah's Ark". During the interview, Jammal used cold reading techniques to elicit information from Morris that would determine Jammal's answers to Morris's questions. According to Jammal, Morris repeatedly offered to finance an expedition to corroborate his story.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Years later, when Sun began work on a follow-up to "In Search of Noah's Ark", Morris shared his information on Jammal. David Balsiger, researching the story for Sun, was advised by Ark researchers David Fasold and Bill Crouse that Jammal's account was not credible. Unsure whether to perpetuate the hoax, Jammal contacted noted skeptic Gerald A. Larue, who described how he felt misrepresented by Sun's 1992 TV-movie "Ancient Secrets of the Bible". On 20 February 1993, CBS aired Sun's "The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark", which featured a segment on Jammal's story and showed him displaying a piece of wood purportedly taken from the Ark. Larue issued a press release exposing the hoax, which was largely ignored until "Time" covered the story in July.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Following the exposure of the hoax, Jammal was initially reluctant to comment for fear of legal reprisal. However, in October 1993 he admitted that he made up the entire story. The wood he presented on-screen had in fact been pine found near some railroad tracks in Long Beach, California, which he boiled with spices and baked in an oven. Jammal was critical of Sun's failure to verify his story. "I even gave the production company a piece of the wood to test," he wrote, "but they obviously weren't interested in truth; all they wanted was a good performance. If they had actually been concerned about truth, they should have asked me why Noah's Ark smelled like teriyaki sauce!" A representative for Sun stated that Jammal's segment would be edited from future releases of "The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark".


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Honolulu businessman Daniel McGivern began investigating the search for Noah's Ark in 1995, and eventually financed commercial satellite photos of Mount Ararat. According to his research, a 2003 heat wave melted enough ice and snow on the northwestern slope to reveal a dark patch, which he interpreted as resembling three beams and a crossbeam. In April 2004, McGivern and Turkish mountaineer Ahmet Ali Arslan announced plans for an expedition to the site in July. A "Guardian" article associated McGivern's site with the Ararat anomaly, a similar phenomenon observed in surveillance photos of Mount Ararat declassified by the US government in the 1990s.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Although McGivern hoped to begin the expedition by 15 July, he instead spent the entire summer trying to obtain approval from the Turkish government. His request was finally declined in September. Critics suggested that McGivern announced the expedition before obtaining permission as a publicity stunt to persuade Turkey to authorize it. The choice of Arslan, who claimed in 1989 to have photographed Noah's Ark, to lead the mission was also questioned. "Ahmet is a big talker," according to an ark researcher commenting to "National Geographic". "In one conversation he will say that he has 3,000 photos, and in another conversation ten minutes later 5,000 photos."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: McGivern said he would not make another attempt the following year. "I don't have Ark fever like many who go year after year," he said. "A good businessman calculates what amount of money and time he will invest and has to know when to walk away." However, in 2011 he said he had funded other, smaller expeditions, and had spent $500,000 on research.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: During an unsuccessful expedition in 1988, Bob Cornuke became convinced that Noah's Ark could not be on Mount Ararat. He gave up the search, forming the Bible Archeology Search and Exploration Institute in 1992 to seek out other biblical locations and artifacts. However, in 1998 Cornuke learned of the idea that places the Ark's landing site east of Shinar. In this context he reevaluated the testimony of Ed Davis, and concluded that the site Davis described must be in Iran.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In June 2006, the BASE Institute announced the discovery of a large object resembling petrified wood on Mount Takht-e Suleyman in the Alborz. The object, located above sea level, was reported to be similar in size to estimates for the Ark. The BASE website asserted that this object was the same one Ed Davis claimed to have seen, but stopped short of proclaiming it Noah's Ark, instead calling it "a candidate." "I think we've found something that deserves a lot more research," Cornuke said. "It has a distinct possibility that it could be something like the ark."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Critics of the announcement objected to the lack of peer review on Cornuke's findings. Looking at the expedition's photos, experts in geology and ancient timber disputed the possibility that the object was petrified wood. The expedition included many "business, law, and ministry leaders," but no professional geologists or archaeologists. Cornuke's interpretation of scripture was also criticized, as Genesis does not indicate whether Noah's descendants migrated to Shinar directly from Ararat, or from some unnamed intermediate location. Moreover, Genesis 11:2 can be plausibly translated to indicate that the clan migrated "eastward", suggesting a point of origin west of Shinar.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: By 2010, Cornuke had stopped looking for Noah's Ark, saying "I came down (from the mountain) with all this evidence for Noah’s Ark, and nobody cared." In 2012 he wrote "In all my 25 years of searching for the ark I have never seen the old boat."


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In 2004, Media Evangelism founder Andrew Yuen Man-fai and pastor Boaz Li Chi-kwong announced the discovery of parts of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. They reported that their team found a large wooden structure at an elevation of during their fourth trip to the mountain. According to an exhibit at Hong Kong's Noah's Ark theme park, the search team had been exploring Ararat as Noah's Ark Ministries International since 2003. Yuen and Li had no evidence of their claim beyond blurred images, as they said a "mysterious force" disrupted their video footage. In 2005, Media Evangelism released a documentary, "The Days of Noah", based on the NAMI expedition.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: According to NAMI's website, Turkish mountaineer Ahmet Ertuğrul (nicknamed "Paraşut") submitted a sample of petrified wood to NAMI, which he claimed to have obtained in August 2006 from a second wooden structure, located up Mount Ararat. NAMI claimed that an expedition was sent in February 2007, which found that the 2004 site had collapsed due to an earthquake, and was prevented from examining the 2006 site due to weather conditions. An October 2007 press conference announced that a follow-up mission in August successfully recovered more petrified wood from the site Ertuğrul reported.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: In a press conference on 25 April 2010, NAMI announced that an October 2009 expedition had excavated and filmed the wood structure discovered by Ertuğrul. Although NAMI's website claimed Ertuğrul discovered the site in August 2006, he stated at the press conference that he learned of it in June 2008. The wooden structure reported by Yuen and Li in 2004 was not addressed. According to NAMI, specimens from the site were carbon-dated to 4800 BP. Footage of the interior of the structure was released on NAMI's YouTube account. NAMI said that Turkey would submit the location for designation as a World Heritage Site; however, when reached for comment a spokesperson for UNESCO said that the organization had not received such a request.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: The immediate response to the announcement was largely skeptical. Mainstream scientists objected to the lack of professional archaeologists involved with the research, and the decision to reveal the findings via a media event rather than publishing a peer-reviewed study. Creationists also expressed concern about the lack of data available for independent corroboration. Andrew A. Snelling later said that NAMI supplied him with their radiocarbon dating report, which showed that only one test of one sample had produced the publicized result of 4800 BP. Moreover, Snelling rejected the 4800 BP result as evidence for Noah's Ark, based on creationist beliefs about carbon-14 levels in antediluvian wood. Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism expressed doubt that NAMI secured permission to conduct their expeditions, and began an investigation as to how NAMI transported its wood samples from Turkey to China.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Within days of the announcement, Randall Price, who had consulted with NAMI in 2008, came forward with allegations that Ertuğrul hired Kurdish workers to construct the site using wood from an old structure near the Black Sea. NAMI issued a statement saying that its relationship with Price ended in October 2008, and he was therefore unfamiliar with findings made after that time. Defending NAMI's claims, team members argued that it would not be possible to haul enough materials up Mount Ararat to build the structure that they had described. In rebuttal, Price and his colleague Don Patton cited the use of heavy equipment in other Ararat expeditions, as well as a 2007 publicity stunt in which Greenpeace built a replica of Noah's Ark on the mountain.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: After promoting the release of the 2011 film "The Days of Noah 2: Apocalypse", the NAMI website NoahsArkSearch.net was no longer updated. Support for NAMI's claims was later taken up by Norman Geisler, who invited Ertuğrul to speak at an apologetics conference organized by Southern Evangelical Seminary in October 2015. Joel Klenck, formerly associated with NAMI, has continued to promote NAMI's claims as recently as December 2020.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: NAMI and Ertuğrul never disclosed the location of the site they reported, although Price and Patton claimed in 2010 to have independently located it. Donald Mackenzie, a self-styled missionary who had searched for Noah's Ark for nearly a decade, traveled to Ararat in 2010 hoping to find Ertuğrul's site on his own. Mackenzie contacted his family from the mountain in September, but was never heard from again. His abandoned campsite was later found, but the circumstances of his disappearance remain unknown.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Modern organized searches for the ark tend to originate in American evangelical circles. According to Larry Eskridge,


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: An interesting phenomenon that has arisen within twentieth-century conservative American evangelism – the widespread conviction that the ancient Ark of Noah is embedded in ice high atop Mount Ararat, waiting to be found. It is a story that has combined earnest faith with the lure of adventure, questionable evidence with startling claims. The hunt for the ark, like evangelism itself, is a complex blend of the rational and the supernatural, the modern and the premodern. While it acknowledges a debt to pure faith in a literal reading of the Scriptures and centuries of legend, the conviction that the Ark literally lies on Ararat is a recent one, backed by a largely twentieth-century canon of evidence that includes stories of shadowy eyewitnesses, tales of mysterious missing photographs, rumors of atheistic conspiracy, and pieces of questionable "ark wood" from the mountain. (...) Moreover, it skirts the domain of pop pseudoscience and the paranormal, making the attempt to find the ark the evangelical equivalent of the search for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. In all these ways, it reveals much about evangelicals' distrust of mainstream science and the motivations and modus operandi of the scientific elite.


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: Ark-seeker Richard Carl Bright considers the search for the ark a religious quest, dependent on God's blessing for its success. Bright is also confident that there is a multinational government conspiracy to hide the "truth" about the ark:


title: Searches for Noah's Ark

text: I firmly believe that the governments of Turkey, Russia, and the United States know exactly where the ark sits. They suppress the information, but (...) God is in charge. The structure will be revealed in its time. We climb the mountain and search, hoping it is, in fact, God's time as we climb. Use us, O Lord, is our prayer.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: The Army of the Czech Republic (, AČR), also known as the Czech Army, is the military service responsible for the defence of the Czech Republic in compliance with international obligations and treaties on collective defence. It is also set to support peacekeeping, rescue and humanitarian operations both within the national territory and abroad. Armed Forces consist of the General Staff, the Land Forces, the Air Force and support units.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: From 1954 to 1989, the extensive Czechoslovak People's Army (about 200,000) formed one of the pillars of the Warsaw Pact military alliance. After the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic is completing a major reorganisation and reduction of the armed forces, which intensified after the Czech Republic joined NATO on 12 March 1999.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: As defined by the Czech Law No. 219/1999 Coll., the Armed Forces of the Czech Republic () are the military forces of the Czech Republic. They consist of the Army of the Czech Republic, the Military Office of the President of the Republic and the Castle Guard.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: Military history of the Czech people dates back to the Middle Ages and the creation of Duchy of Bohemia and Kingdom of Bohemia. During the Hussite Wars, Jan Žižka became a military leader of such skill and eminence that the Hussite legacy became an important and lasting part of the Czech military traditions. European wars of religion once again wrecked the Czech lands, and at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, Czech freedom was lost to the Habsburg monarchy. Throughout the centuries of foreign rule, the Czechs were subjected, at times, to intense Germanization. Nevertheless, Czechs maintained their ethnic identity and seized the opportunity for independence during World War I. Czechs and Slovaks deserted the armies of Austria-Hungary in large numbers to form the Czechoslovak Legion.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: 1918–1950 - Czechoslovak Armed Forces (this official name was given to the Czechoslovak Army on March 19, 1920 on the basis of the Armed Forces Act)


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: The Czechoslovak Armed Forces were originally formed on 30 June 1918 when 6,000 members of the Czechoslovak Legion in France, which had been established in 1914, took oath and received a battle banner in Darney, France, thus preceding the official declaration of Czechoslovak independence by four months. There were also 50 000 legion soldiers in Russia at that time. The military achievements of the Czechoslovak legions on the French, Italian and especially Russian front became one of the main arguments that the Czechoslovak pro-independence leaders, especially for T. G. Masaryk in America, could use to gain the support for the country's independence by the Allies of World War I.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: In 1938, servicemen of the Czechoslovak Army and the State Defense Guard fought in an undeclared border war against the German-backed Sudetendeutsches Freikorps as well as Polish and Hungarian paramilitary forces. As a result of the Munich Agreement, areas heavily populated by ethnic German speaking people were incorporated into the Third Reich and military aged men living there were subject to being drafted into the Wehrmacht. In 1939, after the Slovak State proclaimed it's independence and the remainder of Carpathian Ruthenia was occupied and annexed by Hungary, the German occupation of the Czech Lands followed and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed after the negotiations with Emil Hácha. The Protectorate's government possessed its own armed force, the Government Army (6,500 men), tasked with public security and rearguard duties. On the other side of the conflict, a number of Czechoslovak units and formations served with the Polish Army (Czechoslovak Legion), the French Army, the Royal Air Force, the British Army (the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade), and the Red Army (I Corps). Four Czech and Slovak-manned RAF squadrons were transferred to Czechoslovak control in late 1945.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: From 1954 until 1990, the Army was known as the Czechoslovak People's Army (ČSLA). Although the ČSLA, as formed in 1945, included both Soviet- and British-equipped/trained expatriate troops, the "Western" soldiers had been purged from the ČSLA after 1948 when the communists took power. The ČSLA offered no resistance to the invasion mounted by the Soviets in 1968 in reaction to the "Prague Spring", and was extensively reorganized by the Soviets following the re-imposition of communist rule in Prague.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: Of the approximately 201,000 personnel on active duty in the ČSLA in 1987, about 145,000, or about 72 percent, served in the ground forces (commonly referred to as the army). About 100,000 of these were conscripts. There were two military districts, Western and Eastern. A 1989 listing of forces shows two Czechoslovak armies in the west, the 1st Army at Příbram with one tank division and three motor rifle divisions, the 4th Army at Písek with two tank divisions and two motor rifle divisions. In the Eastern Military District, there were two tank divisions, the 13th and 14th, with a supervisory headquarters at Trenčín in the Slovak part of the country.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: During the Cold War, the ČSLA was equipped primarily with Soviet arms, although certain arms like the OT-64 SKOT armored personnel carrier, the L-29 "Delfín" and L-39 "Albatros" aircraft, the P-27 "Pancéřovka" antitank rocket launcher, the vz. 58 assault rifle or the Uk vz. 59 machine gun were of Czechoslovak design.


title: Army of the Czech Republic

text: The Army of the Czech Republic was formed after the Czechoslovak Armed Forces split after the 1 January 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia. Czech forces stood at 90,000 in 1993. They were reduced to around 65,000 in 11 combat brigades and the Air Force in 1997, to 63,601 in 1999, and to 35,000 in 2005. At the same time, the forces were modernized and reoriented towards a defensive posture. In 2004, the army transformed itself into a fully professional organization and compulsory military service was abolished. The Army maintains an active reserve. Paradoxically, the extent of this centralised structure is not recognised by applying the 50-30-20 NATO rule on sustainable military budget.