title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Bradley raised the possibility of using nuclear weapons in Korea at a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting on 9 July 1950 at Eisenhower's instigation, but there was no support for the idea. The Army staff sent a cable to Collins in Tokyo suggesting that he seek out MacArthur's opinion. In a teleconference on 13 July, Major General Charles L. Bolte proposed sending nuclear weapons. MacArthur had already turned down Air Force proposals to fire bomb North Korean cities, and suggested that atomic bombs could be used to isolate North Korea by taking out bridges and tunnels. The Army staff considered this impractical. However, on 28 July, the Joint Chiefs decided to send ten nuclear-capable B-29 bombers of the 9th Bombardment Wing to Guam as a deterrent to Chinese action against Taiwan. Truman publicly denied that he was considering the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, but authorized the transfer to Guam of atomic bombs without their fissile cores. The deployment did not go well; one of the bombers crashed on takeoff from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California on 5 August, killing the mission commander, Brigadier General Robert F. Travis, and 18 others. The remaining nine bombers remained in Guam until 13 September, when they returned to the United States. The bomb assemblies stayed behind.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: At a press conference on 13 July, Truman was asked if United States forces would cross the 38th parallel into North Korea, and he replied that he would "make that decision when it becomes necessary to do it". Some of his advisors, most notably the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Dean Rusk, and the Director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, John M. Allison, argued that Security Council Resolution 83 provided a legal basis for the invasion of North Korea. Others, notably George F. Kennan and Paul Nitze, disagreed. In addition to the legality, the administration also had to consider the danger of intervention by the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China if United Nations forces approached their borders.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: MacArthur's early ambitions for an amphibious operation against North Korea had to be shelved due to the deteriorating situation in the south, which compelled him to commit the formation earmarked for the assault, the 1st Cavalry Division, to the defence of the Pusan Perimeter, to which the Eighth Army retreated in August. MacArthur then resumed his planning for an amphibious operation, which he tentatively scheduled for 15 September 1950. Navy and Marine Corps officers like Rear Admiral James H. Doyle, the commander of Amphibious Group One, and Major General Oliver P. Smith, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, were appalled by the proposed landing beaches at Inchon, which featured huge tides, broad mudflats, narrow and treacherous channels, and high seawalls. Omar Bradley called it "the worst possible place ever selected for an amphibious landing". While the Inchon-Seoul area was a key communications center, the risks of the landing were daunting. Collins and Sherman flew to Tokyo to be briefed on the plans by MacArthur, who declared: "We shall land at Inchon, and I shall crush them."


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: MacArthur was invited to speak at the 51st National Encampment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Chicago on 26 August 1950. He declined the invitation, but instead sent a statement that could be read out aloud, in which he contradicted Truman's policy towards the island of Formosa, saying: "Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia." Truman was infuriated by the word "appeasement," and discussed the possibility of relieving MacArthur with Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson. Johnson responded that MacArthur was "one of the greatest, if not the greatest generals of our generation". Truman told Johnson to send MacArthur an order withdrawing his statement, which he did; but it had already been read into Congressional Record. As it turned out, it was not MacArthur who was relieved, but Johnson. Truman had become irritated with Johnson's conflict with Secretary of State Acheson, and although he had said that Johnson would remain his Secretary of Defense for "as long as I am President," he asked Johnson for his resignation. Publicly, Johnson received much of the blame for the defense cuts that had led to the lack of preparedness and consequent early defeats in Korea. He was replaced by General of the Army George Marshall.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: MacArthur held that his military objective was the destruction of the North Korean Army. That being the case, operations would be necessary north of the 38th parallel, although his Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, warned on 31 August that 37 Chinese divisions were grouping on the border between China and North Korea. The Joint Chiefs agreed with MacArthur on this issue. A National Security Council paper endorsed the legality of action north of the 38th parallel. The paper recommended that only South Korean troops be employed in the border regions with China and Russia. Should the Soviet Union intervene, MacArthur was to immediately retreat to the 38th parallel; but in the case of Chinese intervention, he was to keep fighting "as long as action by UN military forces offers a reasonable chance of successful resistance". Truman endorsed the report on 11 September, but MacArthur remained in the dark because of the changeover of Secretaries of Defense, and was not informed until 22 September. When Truman was asked at a press conference on 21 September whether he had concluded to conduct operations in North Korea, he replied that he had not.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In the meantime, MacArthur's amphibious assault at Inchon went ahead on 15 September. "The success of Inchon was so great and the subsequent prestige of General MacArthur was so overpowering," Collins later recalled, "that the Chiefs hesitated thereafter to question later plans and decisions of the general, which should have been challenged." In response to a rumor that the Eighth Army planned to halt at the 38th parallel and await United Nations authorization to cross, Marshall sent a message to MacArthur informing him that: "We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of 38th parallel. Announcement above referred to may precipitate embarrassment in the UN where evident desire is not to be confronted with necessity of a vote on passage, rather to find you have found it militarily necessary to do so." A few days later, MacArthur was instructed not to issue an announcement that his forces had crossed the 38th parallel. On 7 October a United Nations General Assembly Resolution was passed that could be broadly construed as permitting the invasion of North Korea.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: With the 1950 mid-term elections drawing near, and Truman abstaining from overt campaigning while the troops were fighting in Korea, members of Truman's staff, most notably George Elsey, came up with another way to garner votes for the Democratic Party. In July 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt had traveled to Hawaii to meet with MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz. At this meeting, Roosevelt made the decision to attack the Philippines in the final year of the Pacific war. It was a political triumph in an election year, refuting Republican claims that Roosevelt fixated on Europe at the expense of the Pacific.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Truman emulated this by flying to the Pacific to meet MacArthur. Initially, Truman was unenthusiastic about the idea, as he disliked publicity stunts, but in October 1950, in the wake of the victories at Pusan and Inchon, MacArthur's star was burning bright. By meeting with him, Truman could emphasize his own part in the victories, as Commander-in-Chief. A message was sent to MacArthur suggesting a meeting on Hawaii or Wake Island. MacArthur replied that he "would be delighted to meet the President on the morning of the 15th at Wake Island". When MacArthur discovered that the President would be bringing the news media with him, MacArthur asked if he could bring correspondents from Tokyo. His request was denied.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Truman arrived at Wake Island on 15 October, where he was greeted on the tarmac by MacArthur, who had arrived the day before. MacArthur shook hands with the President rather than salute, and declined an offer to stay for lunch with the President, which Bradley considered "insulting". This did not bother Truman; what did annoy the President, a former haberdasher, was MacArthur's "greasy ham and eggs cap that evidently had been in use for twenty years". The meeting, which had no agenda and no structure, took the form of a free-wheeling discussion between the President and his advisors on one hand, and MacArthur and the CINCPAC, Admiral Arthur Radford, on the other. Topics discussed included Formosa, the Philippines and the wars in Vietnam and Korea. MacArthur noted that "No new policies, no new strategy of war or international politics, were proposed or discussed." Robert Sherrod, who was present as a correspondent, felt that he "had witnessed nothing but a political grandstand play".


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: However, MacArthur did say things that would later be used against him. When asked by the President about the odds of Soviet or Chinese intervention in Korea, MacArthur replied:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: MacArthur expressed the hope that the Eighth Army could withdraw to Japan by the end of the year. When Bradley asked if a division could be sent to Europe, MacArthur replied that he could make one available in January. In fact, Chinese troops had already begun crossing the Yalu into North Korea, and by November 180,000 had done so.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: When he returned from Wake, MacArthur faced the challenge of turning his promises into reality. On 24 October, he ordered his principal subordinates, Lieutenant General Walton Walker, the commander of the Eighth Army, and Major General Edward Almond of X Corps, to "drive forward with all speed and full utilization of all their force". He also lifted the prohibition on troops other than South Koreans operating along the borders with China and the Soviet Union. Collins considered this a violation of the orders that the Joint Chiefs had issued on 27 September, but MacArthur pointed out that it was only, in the words of the original directive, "a matter of policy". He added that the matter had been raised at Wake Island, but no one else recalled this, particularly not Truman, who, unaware of these discussions, told reporters on 26 October that Koreans and not Americans would occupy the border areas. Within days, MacArthur's forces had encountered the Chinese in the Battle of Onjong and the Battle of Unsan.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Truman did not relieve MacArthur for the military reverses in Korea in November and December 1950. Truman later stated that he felt that MacArthur was no more to blame than General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower was for the military reverses he had suffered during the Battle of the Bulge. But this did not mean that it did not factor into his decision. "I considered him a great strategist," Truman later recalled, "until he made the march into North Korea without the knowledge that he should have had of the Chinese coming in."


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In an attempt to slow the Chinese advance, MacArthur ordered the bridges across the Yalu to be bombed. After due consultation with his advisers, Truman declared that he would not approve of such an action, and the Joint Chiefs cancelled the order. When MacArthur protested, the President and the Joint Chiefs authorized the bombings, subject to the caveat that Chinese air space not be violated. Major General Emmett O'Donnell would later cite this to the Congressional inquiry into MacArthur's relief as an example of undue political interference in military operations. The Yalu River had many bends, and in some cases there were very restricted lines of approach without overflying the Yalu. This made life easier for the Communist antiaircraft gunners, but correspondingly less so for the aircrew. Within weeks, MacArthur was forced to retreat, and both Truman and MacArthur were forced to contemplate the prospect of abandoning Korea entirely.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: At a press conference on 30 November 1950, Truman was asked about the use of nuclear weapons: The implication was that the authority to use atomic weapons now rested in the hands of MacArthur. Truman's White House issued a clarification, noting that "only the President can authorize the use of the atom bomb, and no such authorization has been given," yet the comment still caused a domestic and international stir. Truman had touched upon one of the most sensitive issues in civil-military relations in the post-World War II period: civilian control of nuclear weapons, which was enshrined in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: On 9 December 1950, MacArthur requested field commander's discretion to employ nuclear weapons; he testified that such an employment would only be used to prevent an ultimate fallback, not to recover the situation in Korea. On 24 December 1950, MacArthur submitted a list of "retardation targets" in Korea, Manchuria and other parts of China, for which 34 atomic bombs would be required. In June 1950, Louis Johnson released a study on the potential uses of radioactive agents. According to Major General Courtney Whitney, MacArthur considered the possibility of using radioactive wastes to seal off North Korea in December 1950, but he never submitted this to the Joint Chiefs. After his dismissal, Senator Albert Gore Sr. put a similar proposal to Truman. In January 1951, MacArthur refused to entertain proposals for the forward deployment of nuclear weapons.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In early April 1951, the Joint Chiefs became alarmed by the build up of Soviet forces in the Far East, particularly bombers and submarines. On 5 April 1951, they drafted orders for MacArthur authorizing attacks on Manchuria and the Shantung Peninsula if the Chinese launched airstrikes against his forces originating from there. The next day Truman met with the chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Gordon Dean, and arranged for the transfer of nine Mark 4 nuclear bombs to military control. Dean was apprehensive about delegating the decision on how they should be used to MacArthur, who lacked expert technical knowledge of the weapons and their effects. The Joint Chiefs were not entirely comfortable about giving them to MacArthur either, for fear that he might prematurely carry out his orders. Instead, they decided that the nuclear strike force would report to the Strategic Air Command (SAC). This time the bombers deployed with the fissile cores. SAC did not intend to attack air bases and depots; the bombers would target industrial cities in North Korea and China. Deployments of SAC bombers to Guam continued until the end of the war.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: There has been debate whether MacArthur advocated the employment of nuclear weapons, including over whether his submission to the Joint Chiefs of Staff was tantamount to a recommendation. In his testimony before the Senate Inquiry, he stated that he had not recommended their use. In 1960, MacArthur challenged a statement by Truman that he had wanted to use nuclear weapons, saying that "atomic bombing in the Korean War was never discussed either by my headquarters or in any communication to or from Washington"; Truman, admitting that he did not have documentation of any such claim, said that he was merely providing his personal opinion. In interview with Jim G. Lucas and Bob Considine on 25 January 1954, posthumously published in 1964, MacArthur said,


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In 1985 Richard Nixon recalled discussing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with MacArthur:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was particularly disturbed by Truman's gaffe about nuclear weapons, and sought to revive the wartime Quebec Agreement, under which the United States would not use nuclear weapons without Britain's consent. The British were concerned that the United States was drifting into a war with China. In a visit to the United States in December 1950, Attlee raised the fears of the British and other European governments that "General MacArthur was running the show". As MacArthur's views about the importance of Asia in world affairs were well known, it was feared that the United States would shift its focus away from Europe. In this instance, MacArthur was defended by Bradley, whose anglophobia dated back to World War II.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The British became alarmed in January 1951 when the Americans began talking of evacuating Korea. The British argued that to maintain European faith and unity it was vital to maintain some presence in Korea, even if it was nothing more than a toehold in the Pusan area. Once again, Bradley defended MacArthur, but it was clear that he had become an irritant in the relationship between the two countries. However, the alliance with Britain itself was unpopular in Congress. House Minority Leader Joseph William Martin, Jr. slammed Truman for following Attlee's Britain to "slavery to government and crippling debt".


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: On 1 December 1950, MacArthur was asked by a reporter if the restrictions on operations against Chinese forces on the far side of the Yalu River were "a handicap to effective military operations". He replied that they were indeed "an enormous handicap, unprecedented in military history". On 6 December, Truman issued a directive requiring all military officers and diplomatic officials to clear with the State Department all but routine statements before making them public, "and...refrain from direct communications on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines, and other publicity media". Major General Courtney Whitney gave MacArthur a legal opinion that this applied "solely to formal public statements and not to communiqués, correspondence or personal conversations". MacArthur made similar remarks in press statements on 13 February and 7 March 1951.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In February and March 1951, the tide of war began to turn again, and MacArthur's forces drove north. Seoul, which had fallen on 4 January, was recaptured on 17 March. This raised hopes in Washington that the Chinese and North Koreans might be amenable to a ceasefire agreement, and Truman prepared a statement to this effect. MacArthur was informed of it by the Joint Chiefs on 20 March, and he warned the new commander of the Eighth Army, Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, that political constraints might soon impose limits on his proposed operations. On 23 March, MacArthur issued a communiqué about offering a ceasefire to the Chinese:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The next day, MacArthur authorized Ridgway to advance up to north of the 38th Parallel. Truman would later report that "I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea...I was never so put out in my life." Truman felt that MacArthur's communiqué, which had not been cleared in accordance with the December directive, had pre-empted his own proposal. He later wrote:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: For the moment, however, he did. There had been dramatic confrontations over policy before, the most notable of which was between President Abraham Lincoln and Major General George McClellan, in 1862. Another example was President James Polk's recall of Major General Winfield Scott after the Mexican–American War. Before relieving MacArthur, Truman consulted history books on how Lincoln and Polk dealt with their generals. Truman later said that Polk was his favorite president because "he had the courage to tell Congress to go to Hell on foreign policy matters".


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: There were genuine differences of opinion over policy between MacArthur and the Truman administration. One was MacArthur's deep-seated belief that it was not possible to separate the struggle against Communism in Europe from that going on in Asia. This was seen as the result of being stationed for too many years in East Asia, and of his perspective as a theater commander responsible only for part of the Far East. Another important policy difference was MacArthur's belief that China was not, as Acheson maintained, "the Soviet Union's largest and most important satellite," but an independent state with its own agenda that, in MacArthur's words, "for its own purposes is [just temporarily] allied with Soviet Russia". If MacArthur's thesis was accepted, then it followed that expanding the war with China would not provoke a conflict with the Soviet Union. The Joint Chiefs emphatically disagreed, although this contradicted their position that it was Europe and not Asia that was the prime concern of the Soviet Union. Even among Republicans, there was little support for MacArthur's position.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: On 5 April, Martin read the text of a letter he had received from MacArthur, dated 20 March, criticizing the Truman administration's priorities on the floor of the House. In it, MacArthur had written:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: MacArthur later wrote that Martin had released the letter "for some unexplained reason and without consulting me", but it had not been marked as being confidential or off the record.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The practice of intercepting and decrypting diplomatic messages of friend and foe alike was a closely held secret in the 1950s. In mid-March 1951, Truman learned through such intercepts that MacArthur had conversations with diplomats in Spain's and Portugal's Tokyo embassies. In these talks, MacArthur had expressed confidence that he would succeed in expanding the Korean War into a major conflict resulting in the permanent disposal of the "Chinese Communist question" and MacArthur did not want either country to be alarmed if this happened. The content of this particular intercept was known by only a very few of Truman's closest advisers, two being Paul Nitze, Director of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, and his associate, Charles Burton Marshall. Truman considered MacArthur's conversations outright treachery and concluded that MacArthur had to be relieved but was unable to act immediately because of MacArthur's political support and to avoid broader knowledge of the existence of the electronic intercepts of diplomatic messages. Interestingly, several weeks earlier, MacArthur had recommended to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he be authorized to retaliate immediately against targets on the Chinese mainland in the event of Chinese Communist air or sea attacks against Formosa (now Taiwan) or United States forces outside Korea. The Joint Chiefs responded by granting qualified approval.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Ridgway had prepared an offensive known as Operation Rugged, and pressed MacArthur for permission to launch it. On 15 March 1951, the day after Seoul had been recaptured a second time, Truman had responded to a reporter's question about whether UN forces would again be allowed to move north of the 38th Parallel by saying that it would be "a tactical matter for the field commander". MacArthur thereupon gave Ridgway permission to launch his attack, setting an objective line north of the 38th Parallel that would secure Seoul's water supply. He did so without consulting with Washington until after the attack began on 5 April 1951. It was making steady progress when MacArthur was relieved on 11 April.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Following the completion of flight operations the evening of 7 April 1951, Task Force 77, the Seventh Fleet's fast carrier task force, with the carriers and , departed Korean waters in the Sea of Japan bound for the Straits of Formosa. At 11:00 on 11 April, Task Force 77 operating near the west coast of Taiwan, commenced an "aerial parade" along the east coast of mainland China. Concurrently, the destroyer arrived at its assigned station offshore from the Chinese seaport of Swatow (Shantou), provoking the Chinese to surround it with an armada of over 40 armed powered junks. Although Task Force 77 was conducting its aerial parade over the horizon to the west, nearly two hours passed before aircraft from the task force appeared over Swatow and made threatening passes at the Chinese vessels and the port city. MacArthur officially received notification of his dismissal shortly after 15:00 Tokyo time (14:00 on the China coast), although he had found out about it half an hour before. Two hours later, the "Bole" retired from its station without hostile action being initiated by either side. Author James Edwin Alexander expressed the opinion that the "Bole" and its crew were made "sitting ducks" by MacArthur trying to provoke the Chinese into attacking a U.S. warship in an attempt to expand the conflict. Rear Admiral Samuel J. Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, stated that while some historians like Alexander had circumstantial evidence that this was a provocation plot by MacArthur, there is no direct evidence to prove that claim. Cox said it was also possible that the ship was on an intelligence mission to directly observe the junk ships because for over a month the U.S. military was greatly worried about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan after witnessing an unusually large armada of junk boats, which would potentially be the invasion fleet, gathering together on the Chinese coast opposite of Taiwan.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: On the morning of 6 April 1951, Truman held a meeting in his office with Marshall, Bradley, Acheson, and Harriman to discuss what would be done about MacArthur. Harriman was emphatically in favor of MacArthur's relief, but Bradley opposed it. George Marshall asked for more time to consider the matter. Acheson was personally in favor of relieving MacArthur but did not disclose this. Instead, he warned Truman that it would be "the biggest fight of your administration". At a second meeting the next day, Marshall and Bradley continued to oppose relief. On 8 April, the Joint Chiefs met with Marshall in his office. Each of the chiefs in turn expressed the opinion that MacArthur's relief was desirable from a "military point of view," but they recognized that military considerations were not paramount. They were concerned that "if MacArthur were not relieved, a large segment of our people would charge that civil authorities no longer controlled the military". The four advisers met with Truman in his office again on 9 April. Bradley informed the president of the views of the Joint Chiefs, and Marshall added that he agreed with them. Truman wrote in his diary that "it is of unanimous opinion of all that MacArthur be relieved. All four so advise." Later, before Congress, the Joint Chiefs would insist that they had only "concurred" with the relief, not "recommended" it.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: On 11 April 1951, President Truman drafted an order to MacArthur, which was issued under Bradley's signature:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Although Truman and Acheson accused MacArthur of insubordination, the Joint Chiefs avoided any suggestion of this. MacArthur was not, in fact, relieved for insubordination. Insubordination was a military offense, and MacArthur could have requested a public court martial similar to that of Billy Mitchell in the 1920s. The outcome of such a trial was uncertain, and it might well have found him not guilty and ordered his reinstatement. The Joint Chiefs agreed that there was "little evidence that General MacArthur had ever failed to carry out a direct order of the Joint Chiefs, or acted in opposition to an order". "In point of fact," Bradley insisted, "MacArthur had stretched but not legally violated any JCS directives. He had violated the President's 6 December directive, relayed to him by the JCS, but this did not constitute violation of a JCS order."


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The intention was that MacArthur would be personally notified of his relief by Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, who was touring the front in Korea, at 20:00 on 11 April (Washington, D.C. time), which was 10:00 on 12 April (Tokyo time). However, Pace did not receive the message due to a signals failure in Korea. Meanwhile, reporters began asking if rumors of MacArthur's relief were true. Truman then "decided that we could not afford the courtesy of Secretary Pace's personal delivery of the order," and called a press conference at which he issued his statement to the press:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In Tokyo, MacArthur and his wife were at a luncheon at the American embassy for Senator Warren Magnuson and William Stern, executive vice president of Northwest Airlines, when Colonel Sidney Huff, MacArthur's aide and one of the "Bataan gang" who had escaped from Corregidor with the general in 1942, heard about the relief from commercial radio broadcast. Huff promptly informed Mrs. MacArthur, who in turn told the general. Japanese radio stations soon picked up the story, but the official notice would not arrive for another half hour.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Civilian control of the military is an American tradition dating back to the founding of the republic. In his 1965 memoirs, Truman wrote:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Following the relief, most of the avalanche of mail and messages sent to the White House by the public supported MacArthur. On issues like character, integrity, honor and service, they rated MacArthur as the better man. What support Truman garnered was largely based on the principle of civilian control.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: "The United States Constitution", wrote Samuel P. Huntington, "despite widespread belief to the contrary, does provide for civilian control." It drew no distinction between civil and military responsibilities, and provided for no subordination of the one to the other. By dividing responsibility for the military between the executive and the legislature, it made control more difficult. Any attempt by one branch to assert control would likely involve a clash with the other. Debates nominally about civilian control were usually, in practice, about which branch would exercise control rather than how control would be exercised. The framers of the constitution did not consider the issue of the management of a distinct and technically sophisticated military profession because no such thing existed at the time. It appeared in the 19th century as a result of social changes brought about by the French Revolution, and technological changes wrought by the industrial revolution. While the framers believed in civilian control of the military, they framed it in terms of a people's militia in which civilian and military were one and the same.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Another American tradition is that of an apolitical military, although this custom was of more recent origin, dating back only to the period after the American Civil War. Few officers voted in the 19th century, but not so much from a lack of interest in politics as because frequently moving from state to state and living on Federal land effectively disenfranchised them under the laws of many states and/or made it impractical for them to vote at a time when casting a ballot in person on Election Day was the only way to vote. It was only under General of the Army William T. Sherman, the Commanding General of the United States Army from 1869 to 1883, who hated politics, that the custom of an apolitical military became firmly established.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Nor, unlike their European counterparts, did American generals and admirals have influence on or involvement in foreign policy; but mainly because in the frontier Army of MacArthur's youth, there was no requirement to do so. This began to change after the Spanish–American War, when American military forces started to be deployed overseas in the Pacific, Asia and the Caribbean for extended periods of time.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The concept of the theater of war developed during World War II. At such a senior level of command, military and political issues tended to merge. As theater commander in the Southwest Pacific, MacArthur had been accountable to the Australian government as well as his own, making him, in President Roosevelt's words to him, "an ambassador as well as Supreme Commander". MacArthur's less than wholehearted support for the "Europe first" strategy was apt to cause annoyance in Washington when the chain of command was bypassed by MacArthur through the Prime Minister of Australia, John Curtin.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: But on 26 June 1950, Truman sent the armed forces into Korea without any such Congressional mandate. The subsequent United Nations Security Council resolution authorized military assistance to South Korea, but the United Nations Participation Act laid down that:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The Congressional inquiry triggered by MacArthur's relief ruled that Truman's actions violated both constitutional and statutory requirements. While presidents had in the past used extra-legal military force, this was in "fights with pirates, landings of small naval contingents on barbarous or semi-barbarous coasts, the dispatch of small bodies of troops to chase bandits or cattle rustlers across the Mexican border, and the like". Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who opposed the war in Korea, argued that "when we agreed to the United Nations Charter we never agreed to supplant our Constitution with the United Nations Charter. The power to declare and make war is vested in the representatives of the people, in the Congress of the United States."


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The news of MacArthur's relief was greeted with shock in Japan. The Diet of Japan passed a resolution of gratitude for MacArthur, and the Emperor Hirohito visited him at the embassy in person, the first time a Japanese Emperor had ever visited a foreigner with no standing. The "Mainichi Shimbun" said:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In the "Chicago Tribune", Senator Robert A. Taft called for immediate impeachment proceedings against Truman:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Newspapers like the "Chicago Tribune" and the "Los Angeles Times" opined that MacArthur's "hasty and vindictive" relief was due to foreign pressure, particularly from the United Kingdom and the British socialists in Attlee's government. The Republican Party whip, Senator Kenneth S. Wherry, charged that the relief was the result of pressure from "the Socialist Government of Great Britain".


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: On 17 April 1951, MacArthur flew back to the United States, a country he had not seen since 1937. When he reached San Francisco he was greeted by the commander of the Sixth United States Army, Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer. MacArthur received a parade there that was attended by 500,000 people. He was greeted on arrival at Washington National Airport on 19 April by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Jonathan Wainwright. Truman sent Vaughan as his representative, which was seen as a slight, as Vaughan was despised by the public and professional soldiers alike as a corrupt crony. "It was a shameful thing to fire MacArthur, and even more shameful to send Vaughan," one member of the public wrote to Truman.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress where he delivered his famous "" speech, in which he declared:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In response, the Pentagon issued a press release noting that "the action taken by the President in relieving General MacArthur was based upon the unanimous recommendations of the President's principal civilian and military advisers including the Joint Chiefs of Staff". Afterwards, MacArthur flew to New York City where he received the largest ticker-tape parade in history up to that time. He also visited Chicago and Milwaukee, where he addressed large rallies.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In May and June 1951, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held "an inquiry into the military situation in the Far East and the facts surrounding the relief of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur". The Senate thereby attempted to avoid a constitutional crisis. Because of the sensitive political and military topics being discussed, the inquiry was held in closed session, and only a heavily censored transcript was made public until 1973. The two committees were jointly chaired by Senator Richard Russell, Jr. Fourteen witnesses were called: MacArthur, Marshall, Bradley, Collins, Vandenberg, Sherman, Adrian S. Fisher, Acheson, Wedemeyer, Johnson, Oscar C. Badger II, Patrick J. Hurley, and David G. Barr and O'Donnell.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The testimony of Marshall and the Joint Chiefs rebutted many of MacArthur's arguments. Marshall emphatically declared that there had been no disagreement between himself, the President, and the Joint Chiefs. However, it also exposed their own timidity in dealing with MacArthur, and that they had not always kept him fully informed. Vandenberg questioned whether the Air Force could be effective against targets in Manchuria, while Bradley noted that the Communists were also waging limited war in Korea, having not attacked UN airbases or ports, or their own "privileged sanctuary" in Japan. Their judgment was that it was not worth it to expand the war, although they conceded that they were prepared to do so if the Communists escalated the conflict, or if no willingness to negotiate was forthcoming. They also disagreed with MacArthur's assessment of the effectiveness of the South Korean and Chinese Nationalist forces. Bradley said:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The committees concluded that "the removal of General MacArthur was within the constitutional powers of the President but the circumstances were a shock to national pride". They also found that "there was no serious disagreement between General MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs of Staff as to military strategy." They recommended that "the United States should never again become involved in war without the consent of the Congress".


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: Polls showed that the majority of the public still disapproved of Truman's decision to relieve MacArthur, and were more inclined to agree with MacArthur than with Bradley or Marshall. Truman's approval rating fell to 23 percent in mid-1951, which was lower than Richard Nixon's low of 25 percent during the Watergate Scandal in 1974, and Lyndon Johnson's of 28 percent at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968. , it is the lowest Gallup Poll approval rating recorded by any serving president.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The increasingly unpopular war in Korea dragged on, and the Truman administration was beset with a series of corruption scandals. He eventually decided not to run for re-election. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate in the 1952 presidential election, attempted to distance himself from the President as much as possible. The election was won by the Republican candidate, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose administration ramped up the pressure on the Chinese in Korea with conventional bombing and renewed threats of using nuclear weapons. Coupled with a more favorable international political climate in the wake of the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, this led the Chinese and North Koreans to agree to terms. The belief that the threat of nuclear weapons played an important part in the outcome would lead to their threatened use against China on a number of occasions during the 1950s.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: As a result of their support of Truman, the Joint Chiefs became viewed as politically tainted. Senator Taft regarded Bradley in particular with suspicion, due to Bradley's focus on Europe at the expense of Asia. Taft urged Eisenhower to replace the chiefs as soon as possible. First to go was Vandenberg, who had terminal cancer and had already announced plans to retire. On 7 May 1953, Eisenhower announced that he would be replaced by General Nathan Twining. Soon after it was announced that Bradley would be replaced by Admiral Arthur W. Radford, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Pacific Command, Collins would be succeeded by Ridgway, and Admiral William Fechteler, who had become CNO on the death of Sherman in July 1951, by Admiral Robert B. Carney.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: The relief of MacArthur cast a long shadow over American civil-military relations. When Lyndon Johnson met with General William Westmoreland in Honolulu in 1966, he told him: "General, I have a lot riding on you. I hope you don't pull a MacArthur on me." For his part, Westmoreland and his senior colleagues were eager to avoid any hint of dissent or challenge to presidential authority. This came at a high price. In his 1998 book "Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam", then-Lieutenant Colonel H. R. McMaster argued that the Joint Chiefs failed in their duty to provide the President, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara or Congress with frank and fearless professional advice. This book was an influential one; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, General Hugh Shelton, gave copies to every four-star officer in the military.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: On the one hand, the relief of MacArthur established a precedent that generals and admirals could be fired for any public or private disagreement with government policy. In 1977, Major General John K. Singlaub publicly criticized proposed cuts in the size of American forces in South Korea, and was summarily relieved by President Jimmy Carter for making statements "inconsistent with announced national security policy". During the Gulf War in 1990, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney relieved the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Michael Dugan, for showing "poor judgment at a very sensitive time" in making a series of statements to the media during a visit to Saudi Arabia. In 2010, President Barack Obama fired General Stanley A. McChrystal after McChrystal and his staff made disparaging remarks about senior civilian government officials in an article published in "Rolling Stone" magazine. This elicited comparisons with MacArthur, as the war in Afghanistan was not going well. On the other hand, Major General James N. Post III was relieved and issued a letter of reprimand in 2015 for discouraging personnel under his command from communicating with the Congress, which he described as "treason".


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: MacArthur's relief "left a lasting current of popular sentiment that in matters of war and peace, the military really knows best," a philosophy that became known as "MacArthurism". In February 2012, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis published a report entitled "Dereliction of Duty II" in which he criticized senior military commanders for misleading Congress about the war in Afghanistan, especially General David Petraeus, noting that:


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: During the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton used endorsements from the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William J. Crowe, and 21 other retired generals and flag officers to counter doubts about his ability to serve as Commander in Chief. This became a feature of later presidential election campaigns. During the 2004 presidential election, twelve retired generals and admirals endorsed Senator John Kerry, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, and the former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Merrill "Tony" McPeak, who also appeared in television advertisements defending Kerry against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. During this election campaign, one retired four-star General, Tommy Franks, spoke at the Republican National Convention while another, John Shalikashvili, addressed the Democratic National Convention.


title: Relief of Douglas MacArthur

text: In early 2006, in what was called the "Generals Revolt," six retired generals, Major General John Batiste, Major General Paul D. Eaton, Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, Major General John M. Riggs, Major General Charles H. Swannack Jr. and General Anthony C. Zinni, called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, accusing him of "abysmal" military planning and lack of strategic competence. The ethics of a system under which serving generals felt compelled to publicly support policies that they privately believed were potentially ruinous for the country and cost the lives of military personnel, did not escape critical public comment, and was mocked by political satirist Stephen Colbert at a dinner attended by President George W. Bush and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace. Rumsfeld resigned in November 2006. By 2008, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, felt obliged to pen an open letter in which he reminded all servicemen that "The U.S. military must remain apolitical at all times."


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: James Arthur Osmond (born April 16, 1963), also known as Little Jimmy Osmond, is an American singer, actor, and businessman. He is the youngest member of the sibling musical group the Osmonds. As a solo artist, Osmond has accumulated six gold records, one platinum record, and two gold albums.


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: Osmond was born in Canoga Park, California, the ninth and youngest child of Olive May (née Davis; 1925–2004) and George Virl Osmond (1917–2007). His older siblings are Virl, Tom, Alan, Wayne, Merrill, Jay, Donny, and Marie Osmond. He is also the only one of the nine Osmond siblings not to have been born in the family's hometown of Ogden, Utah. Osmond was taught by tutors to accommodate his professional life. He was also educated by Mary Osmond, his brother Merrill's wife.


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: He received his first gold record at age five for a song he recorded in Japanese, "My Little Darling". He was the first Osmond to achieve this. His recording of "Long Haired Lover from Liverpool" in 1972 resulted in "The Guinness Book of World Records" designating him the youngest performer to have a #1 single on the UK Singles Chart. The song was credited to "Little Jimmy Osmond". In Japan, he had the moniker "Jimmy Boy".


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: In 1978, Osmond starred in the feature film "The Great Brain". He starred in other acting roles as well, including two episodes of the TV series "Fame". He performed on stage and television often with his older siblings. In 1985, he met Latino impresario Manuel Montoya at A&M Records, and this led to his only Spanish recording, "Siempre Tu". He toured Latin American markets, including Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela and Chile. On the heels of this, he served as a juror at the 1986 edition of the OTI Festival. The 2012 Osmonds album "I Can't Get There Without You" was performed with Jimmy Osmond on lead vocals; it was the first album to feature Jimmy as lead singer, as older brother Merrill Osmond historically held that role in the band. In live performances, Jimmy often serves as a co-lead singer with Merrill, a role previously held by Donny during the band's heyday in the early 1970s.


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: Osmond is president of Osmond Entertainment. He has developed and supervised most of the Osmonds' merchandising business, as well as producing hundreds of hours of programming for networks including ABC, PBS, the BBC and the Disney Channel.


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: He has also performed in musical theater. Like his brother Donny many years earlier, he starred in "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat". He also starred in "Boogie Nights" in 2004 at the Grand Theatre, Blackpool. In 2005, "Jimmy Osmond's American Jukebox Show" toured the UK in 2005, again to the Grand Theatre in Blackpool. Co-stars of the show included Billy Pearce and Jimmy's brothers Jay and Wayne. From December 11, 2010 to January 2, 2011, he played Buttons in "Cinderella" at the White Rock Theatre in Hastings; from December 16, 2011, to January 15, 2012, he played the role of Wishee Washee in "Aladdin" at Grand Theatre, Swansea; and from December 1, 2017, to January 7, 2018, the role of Abanzar in the pantomime "Aladdin" at His Majesty's Theatre in Aberdeen.


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: He has appeared on several UK TV shows, including the reality TV series "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!" broadcast by ITV in 2005 (he finished in fourth place), a 2006 appearance on "All Star Family Fortunes", a celebrity version of "Come Dine with Me", "Celebrity Family Fortunes", and "Everybody Dance Now". In January 2010, Osmond participated in the British ITV1 celebrity reality television programme "Popstar to Operastar". In 2016 Jimmy was a finalist on the UK version of Celebrity Masterchef.


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: In 2014, Osmond authored a semi-autobiographical children's picture book, "Awesome Possum Family Band". The same year, he took over the operations of the Andy Williams Moon River Theatre in Branson, Missouri, where he is now responsible for producing and booking shows. In 2015, Osmond was awarded an honorary doctorate of arts and humanities by Iowa Wesleyan University. The first Osmond family member to receive that distinction, he delivered the keynote commencement speech on May 9, 2015.


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: Osmond married Michelle Larson on June 7, 1991. They have four children. Sophia Michelle (born September 28, 1994), Zachary James (born October 10, 1997), Arthur Wyatt (born February 16, 2000) and Isabelle Olive Renee (born February 27, 2002).


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: Like the rest of his family, Osmond is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).


title: Jimmy Osmond

text: On December 27, 2018, following his performance as Captain Hook in the Birmingham Hippodrome's staging of the pantomime "Peter Pan", Osmond was taken to the hospital where he was diagnosed with having had a stroke. He had previously suffered a stroke in 2004 caused by a since-corrected patent foramen ovale. He spoke publicly for the first time since the stroke in April 2019, stating that he was in good health and was taking a "long-overdue break" from show business for the time being. He has not spoken publicly since then but has continued to operate his businesses including the Andy Williams Performing Arts Center. In a February 2020 interview, Jimmy's brother Merrill stated that Jimmy continued to recover, still planned on maintaining his business ventures, and that Merrill hoped that Jimmy would eventually return to the group.


title: Sakamoto Days

text: Sakamoto Days (stylized in all caps) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Yuto Suzuki. It began serialization in Shueisha's "Weekly Shōnen Jump" in November 2020. It is simultaneously published in English by Viz Media and the "Manga Plus" online platform.


title: Sakamoto Days

text: Taro Sakamoto used to be an unrivaled hitman, earning legendary status in the underworld. But one day, the unthinkable happened. Sakamoto fell in love. He started dating, retired, got married, and had a kid, growing overweight as a result. Though now working as a humble convenience store owner, the world of hitmen still follows him. Sakamoto, along with Shin, a young man with telepathy and employee at his small store, will protect his humble life and family, or die trying.


title: Sakamoto Days

text: "Sakamoto Days" is written and illustrated by . Suzuki first published a one-shot titled in Shueisha's "Jump GIGA" on December 26, 2019. "Sakamoto Days" debuted in Shueisha's "shōnen" manga magazine "Weekly Shōnen Jump" on November 21, 2020. Shueisha has collected its chapters into individual "tankōbon" volumes. The first volume was released on April 2, 2021. As of November 4, 2022, nine volumes have been released.


title: Sakamoto Days

text: The series is simulpublished in English by Viz Media and the "Manga Plus" online platform. Viz Media will release its volumes in print, starting on April 5, 2022.


title: Sakamoto Days

text: These chapters have yet to be published in a "tankōbon" volume. They were originally serialized in Japanese in issues of Shueisha's magazine "Weekly Shōnen Jump" and its English digital version published by Viz Media and in "Manga Plus" by Shueisha.


title: Sakamoto Days

text: In October 2022, it was announced that the series would receive a novel adaptation which will feature an exclusive story. It is set to be released in Q2 2023.


title: Sakamoto Days

text: As of October 2022, the manga had 2.2 million copies in circulation. The series ranked 6th on the Nationwide Bookstore Employees' Recommended Comics of 2022. Manga author Hiromu Arakawa recommended the series with a comment featured on the "obi" of the 6th volume. "Sakamoto Days" was nominated for Best Print Manga at the 2021 Next Manga Awards. It placed 9th out of 50 nominees, but won the U-Next Prize. The series has been nominated for the 68th Shogakukan Manga Award in the "shōnen" category in 2022.


title: Metroid Prime 4

text: Metroid Prime 4 is an upcoming video game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. The title was announced during an online showcase at E3 2017, and was reportedly initially developed by Bandai Namco Studios. In early 2019, development restarted under Retro Studios, developer of the previous "Metroid Prime" games. Kensuke Tanabe, who worked on the first "Prime" games, returned as a producer.


title: Metroid Prime 4

text: Nintendo announced "Metroid Prime 4" during their E3 2017 broadcast. Bill Trinen, director of product marketing at Nintendo of America, confirmed that "Metroid Prime 4" would involve "Metroid" producer Kensuke Tanabe but not Retro Studios, which had developed the previous "Metroid Prime" games. While not confirmed by Nintendo, "Eurogamer" reported that "Prime 4" was being developed by Bandai Namco Studios of Japan and Singapore; the Bandai Singapore staff included former LucasArts staff who had worked on the cancelled "Star Wars 1313".


title: Metroid Prime 4

text: In 2018, then-Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé stated that "Metroid Prime 4" was "well into development" and "proceeding well". However, Nintendo did not show it during their E3 2018 presentation, and said they would only share more information once they believed they "had something that would wow people".


title: Metroid Prime 4

text: In a video released online in early 2019, Nintendo EPD general manager Shinya Takahashi announced that development on "Metroid Prime 4" had restarted under Retro Studios with Tanabe. Takahashi said that development under the previous studio had not met Nintendo's standards and that the decision to restart the project was not taken lightly.


title: Metroid Prime 4

text: In October 2020, Retro posted a job advertisement seeking storyboard artists to work on "emotional" and "interesting and innovative scenes that elevate the narrative"; "Video Games Chronicle" took this as an indication of a more cinematic focus than previous "Metroid Prime" games.


title: Lightning strike

text: A lightning strike or lightning bolt is an electric discharge between the atmosphere and the ground. Most originate in a cumulonimbus cloud and terminate on the ground, called cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning. A less common type of strike, ground-to-cloud (GC) lightning, is upward-propagating lightning initiated from a tall grounded object and reaching into the clouds. About 25% of all lightning events worldwide are strikes between the atmosphere and earth-bound objects. Most are intracloud (IC) lightning and cloud-to-cloud (CC), where discharges only occur high in the atmosphere. Lightning strikes the average commercial aircraft at least once a year, but modern engineering and design means this is rarely a problem. The movement of aircraft through clouds can even cause lightning strikes.


title: Lightning strike

text: A single lightning event is a "flash", which is a complex, multistage process, some parts of which are not fully understood. Most CG flashes only "strike" one physical location, referred to as a "termination". The primary conducting channel, the bright, coursing light that may be seen and is called a "strike", is only about one inch in diameter, but because of its extreme brilliance, it often looks much larger to the human eye and in photographs. Lightning discharges are typically miles long, but certain types of horizontal discharges can be tens of miles in length. The entire flash lasts only a fraction of a second.


title: Lightning strike

text: Warning signs of an impending strike nearby can include a crackling sound, sensations of static electricity in the hair or skin, the pungent smell of ozone, or the appearance of a blue haze around persons or objects (St. Elmo's fire). People caught in such extreme situations – without having been able to flee to a safer, fully enclosed space – are advised to assume the "lightning position", which involves "sitting or crouching with knees and feet close together to create only one point of contact with the ground" (with the feet off the ground if sitting; if a standing position is needed, the feet must be touching).


title: Lightning strike

text: Lightning strikes can produce severe injuries, and are lethal in between 10 and 30% of cases, with up to 80% of survivors sustaining long-term injuries. These severe injuries are not usually caused by thermal burns, since the current is too brief to greatly heat up tissues; instead, nerves and muscles may be directly damaged by the high voltage producing holes in their cell membranes, a process called electroporation.


title: Lightning strike

text: In a direct strike, the electrical currents in the flash channel pass directly through the victim. The relatively high voltage drop around poorer electrical conductors (such as a human being), causes the surrounding air to ionize and break down, and the external flashover diverts most of the main discharge current so that it passes "around" the body, reducing injury.


title: Lightning strike

text: Metallic objects in contact with the skin may "concentrate" the lightning's energy, given it is a better natural conductor and the preferred pathway, resulting in more serious injuries, such as burns from molten or evaporating metal. At least two cases have been reported where a strike victim wearing an iPod suffered more serious injuries as a result.


title: Lightning strike

text: During a flash, though, the current flowing through the channel and around the body can generate large electromagnetic fields and EMPs, which may induce electrical transients (surges) within the nervous system or pacemaker of the heart, upsetting normal operations. This effect might explain cases where cardiac arrest or seizures followed a lightning strike that produced no external injuries. It may also point to the victim not being directly struck at all, but just being very close to the strike termination.


title: Lightning strike

text: Another effect of lightning on bystanders is to their hearing. The resulting shock wave of thunder can damage the ears. Also, electrical interference to telephones or headphones may result in damaging acoustic noise.


title: Lightning strike

text: According to "National Geographic", annually about 2,000 people are killed worldwide by lightning. According to these figures, then, the average human has roughly a one in 60,000 to 80,000 chance of falling victim to lightning in a lifetime of about 65–70 years. Furthermore, due to increased awareness and improved lightning conductors and protection, the number of annual lightning deaths has been decreasing steadily year by year.


title: Lightning strike

text: According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, over the last 40 years, the United States averaged 51 annual lightning strike fatalities, making it the second-most frequent cause of weather-related death after floods. In the US, between 9 and 10% of those struck die, with an annual average of 25 deaths in the 2010s decade (16 in 2017).


title: Lightning strike

text: In the United States in the period 2009 to 2018 an average of 27 lightning fatalities occurred per year. In the United States an average of 23 people died from lightning per year from 2012 to 2021 It was also reported that some people who are injured receive lifelong brain injuries.


title: Lightning strike

text: In Kisii in western Kenya, some 30 people die each year from lightning strikes. Kisii's high rate of lightning fatalities occurs because of the frequency of thunderstorms and because many of the area's structures have metal roofs.


title: Lightning strike

text: These statistics do not reflect the difference between direct strikes, where the victim was part of the lightning pathway, indirect effects of being close to the termination point, such as ground currents, and resultant, where the casualty arose from subsequent events, such as fires or explosions. Even the most knowledgeable first responders may not recognize a lightning-related injury, let alone particulars, which a medical examiner, police investigator, or on the rare occasion a trained lightning expert may have difficulty identifying to record accurately. This ignores the reality that lightning, as the first event, may assume responsibility for the overall and resulting accident.


title: Lightning strike

text: It has been reported that "30-60 people are struck by lightning each year in Britain, and on average, 3 (5-10%) of these strikes are fatal."


title: Lightning strike

text: In 2015 it was reported that between five and ten deaths from lightning occur in Australia every year with over 100 injuries occurring.


title: Lightning strike

text: It has been reported that "A direct strike accounts for only 3 to 5 per cent of all injuries and death, while ground currents, which spread out over the ground after lightning strikes, account for up to 50 per cent... ...Where the lightning strikes the ground, the ground becomes highly electrified and if you're within that area of ground electrification..." you can receive an electrical shock from the lightning.


title: Lightning strike

text: Trees are frequent conductors of lightning to the ground. Since sap is a relatively poor conductor, its electrical resistance causes it to be heated explosively into steam, which blows off the bark outside the lightning's path. In following seasons, trees overgrow the damaged area and may cover it completely, leaving only a vertical scar. If the damage is severe, the tree may not be able to recover, and decay sets in, eventually killing the tree.


title: Lightning strike

text: In sparsely populated areas such as the Russian Far East and Siberia, lightning strikes are one of the major causes of forest fires. The smoke and mist expelled by a very large forest fire can cause electric charges, starting additional fires many kilometers downwind.


title: Lightning strike

text: When water in fractured rock is rapidly heated by a lightning strike, the resulting steam explosion can cause rock disintegration and shift boulders. It may be a significant factor in erosion of tropical and subtropical mountains that have never been glaciated. Evidence of lightning strikes includes erratic magnetic fields.


title: Lightning strike

text: Telephones, modems, computers, and other electronic devices can be damaged by lightning, as harmful overcurrent can reach them through the phone jack, Ethernet cable, or electricity outlet. Close strikes can also generate EMPs, especially during "positive" lightning discharges.


title: Lightning strike

text: Lightning currents have a very fast rise time, on the order of 40 kA per microsecond. Hence, conductors of such currents exhibit marked skin effect, causing most of the currents to flow through the outer surface of the conductor.


title: Lightning strike

text: In addition to electrical wiring damage, the other types of possible damage to consider include structural, fire, and property damage.


title: Lightning strike

text: The field of lightning-protection systems is an enormous industry worldwide due to the impacts lightning can have on the constructs and activities of humankind. Lightning, as varied in properties measured across orders of magnitude as it is, can cause direct effects or have secondary impacts; lead to the complete destruction of a facility or process or simply cause the failure of a remote electronic sensor; it can result in outdoor activities being halted for safety concerns to employees as a thunderstorm nears an area and until it has sufficiently passed; it can ignite volatile commodities stored in large quantities or interfere with the normal operation of a piece of equipment at critical periods of time.


title: Lightning strike

text: Most lightning-protection devices and systems protect physical structures on the earth, aircraft in flight being the notable exception. While some attention has been paid to attempting to control lightning in the atmosphere, all attempts proved extremely limited in success. Chaff and silver iodide crystal concepts were devised to deal directly with the cloud cells, and were dispensed directly into the clouds from an overflying aircraft. The chaff was devised to deal with the electrical manifestations of the storm from within, while the silver iodide salting technique was devised to deal with the mechanical forces of the storm.


title: Lightning strike

text: Hundreds of devices, including lightning rods and charge transfer systems, are used to mitigate lightning damage and influence the path of a lightning flash.


title: Lightning strike

text: A lightning rod (or lightning protector) is a metal strip or rod connected to earth through conductors and a grounding system, used to provide a preferred pathway to ground if lightning terminates on a structure. The class of these products is often called a "finial" or "air terminal". A lightning rod or "Franklin rod" in honor of its famous inventor, Benjamin Franklin, is simply a metal rod, and without being connected to the lightning protection system, as was sometimes the case in the past, will provide no added protection to a structure. Other names include "lightning conductor", "arrester", and "discharger"; however, over the years these names have been incorporated into other products or industries with a stake in lightning protection. Lightning arrester, for example, often refers to fused links that explode when a strike occurs to a high-voltage overhead power line to protect the more expensive transformers down the line by opening the circuit. In reality, it was an early form of a heavy duty surge-protection device. Modern arresters, constructed with metal oxides, are capable of safely shunting abnormally high voltage surges to ground while preventing normal system voltages from being shorted to ground.


title: Lightning strike

text: In 1962, the USAF placed protective lightning strike-diversion tower arrays at all of the Italian and Turkish Jupiter MRBM nuclear armed missiles sites after two strikes partially arming the missiles.


title: Lightning strike

text: The exact location of a lightning strike and when it will occur are still impossible to predict. However, products and systems have been designed of varying complexities to alert people as the probability of a strike increases above a set level determined by a risk assessment for the location's conditions and circumstances. One significant improvement has been in the area of detection of flashes through both ground- and satellite-based observation devices. The strikes and atmospheric flashes are not predicted, but the level of detail recorded by these technologies has vastly improved in the past 20 years.


title: Lightning strike

text: Although commonly associated with thunderstorms at close range, lightning strikes can occur on a day that seems devoid of clouds. This occurrence is known as "a bolt from the blue [sky]"; lightning can strike up to 10 miles from a cloud.


title: Lightning strike

text: Lightning interferes with amplitude modulation (AM) radio signals much more than frequency modulation (FM) signals, providing an easy way to gauge local lightning strike intensity. To do so, one should tune a standard AM medium wave receiver to a frequency with no transmitting stations, and listen for crackles among the static. Stronger or nearby lightning strikes will also cause cracking if the receiver is tuned to a station. As lower frequencies propagate further along the ground than higher ones, the lower medium wave (MW) band frequencies (in the 500–600 kHz range) can detect lightning strikes at longer distances; if the longwave band (153–279 kHz) is available, using it can increase this range even further.


title: Lightning strike

text: Lightning-detection systems have been developed and may be deployed in locations where lightning strikes present special risks, such as public parks. Such systems are designed to detect the conditions which are believed to favor lightning strikes and provide a warning to those in the vicinity to allow them to take appropriate cover.


title: Lightning strike

text: The U.S. National Lightning Safety Institute advises American citizens to have a plan for their safety when a thunderstorm occurs and to commence it as soon as the first lightning is seen or thunder heard. This is important, as lightning can strike without rain actually falling. If thunder can be heard at all, then a risk of lightning exists.


title: Lightning strike

text: The National Lightning Safety Institute also recommends using the F-B (flash to boom) method to gauge distance to a lightning strike. The flash of a lightning strike and resulting thunder occur at roughly the same time. But light travels 300,000 km/sec, almost a million times the speed of sound. Sound travels at the slower speed of about 340 m/sec (depending on the temperature), so the flash of lightning is seen before thunder is heard. A method to determine the distance between lightning strike and viewer involves counting the seconds between the lightning flash and thunder. Then, dividing by three to determine the distance in kilometers, or by five for miles. Immediate precautions against lightning should be taken if the F-B time is 25 seconds or less, that is, if the lightning is closer than 8 km or 5 miles.


title: Lightning strike

text: A report suggested that whether a person was standing up, squatting, or lying down when outside during a thunderstorm does not matter, because lightning can travel along the ground; this report suggested being inside a solid structure or vehicle was safest.


title: Lightning strike

text: The riskiest activities include fishing, boating, camping, and golf. A person injured by lightning does not carry an electrical charge, and can be safely handled to apply first aid before emergency services arrive. Lightning can affect the brainstem, which controls breathing.


title: Lightning strike

text: Several studies conducted in South Asia and Africa suggest that the dangers of lightning are not taken sufficiently seriously there. A research team from the University of Colombo found that even in neighborhoods that had experienced deaths from lightning, no precautions were taken against future storms. An expert forum convened in 2007 to address how to raise awareness of lightning and improve lightning-protection standards, and expressed concern that many countries had no official standards for the installation of lightning rods.


title: Lightning strike

text: All events associated or suspected of causing damage are called "lightning incidents" due to four important factors.


title: Lightning strike

text: As such it is often inconclusive, albeit highly probable a lightning flash was involved, hence categorizing it as a "lightning incident" covers all bases.


title: Lightning strike

text: Airplanes are commonly struck by lightning without damage, with the typical commercial aircraft hit at least once a year. Sometimes, though, the effects of a strike are serious.


title: Lightning strike

text: A 2020 lightning bolt across the southern United States set the record for the longest lightning bolt ever detected. The bolt stretched for 477 miles (768 kilometers) over Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, although it was between clouds and did not strike the ground. The World Meteorological Organization confirmed its record-breaking status in January 2022.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: Chronic Lyme disease (CLD) is the name used by some people with "a broad array of illnesses or symptom complexes for which there is no reproducible or convincing scientific evidence of any relationship to "Borrelia burgdorferi" infection" to describe their condition and their beliefs about its cause. Both the label and the belief that these people's symptoms are caused by this particular infection are generally rejected by medical professionals, and the promotion of chronic Lyme disease is an example of health fraud. Chronic Lyme disease is distinct from genuine Lyme disease, a known medical disorder caused by infection with "Borrelia burgdorferi", or with post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, a set of lingering symptoms which may persist after successful treatment of infection with Lyme bacteria.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: Despite numerous studies, there is no evidence that symptoms associated with CLD are caused by any persistent infection. The symptoms attributed to chronic Lyme are generic and non-specific symptoms, such as fatigue and muscle pain, and in many cases are likely due to fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. Fibromyalgia can be triggered by an infection, and antibiotics are not a safe or effective treatment for post-infectious fibromyalgia.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: A number of alternative health products are promoted for chronic Lyme disease, of which possibly the most controversial and harmful is long-term antibiotic therapy, particularly intravenous antibiotics. Recognised authorities advise against long-term antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease, even where some symptoms persist post-treatment. Following disciplinary proceedings by state medical licensing boards in the United States, a subculture of "Lyme literate" physicians has successfully lobbied for specific legal protections, exempting them from the standard of care and science-based treatment guidelines. Such legislation has been criticised as an example of "legislative alchemy", the process whereby pseudomedicine is legislated into practice.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: "Chronic Lyme disease" is distinct from untreated late-stage Lyme disease, which can cause arthritis, peripheral neuropathy and/or encephalomyelitis. Chronic Lyme disease is also distinct from the post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS), when symptoms linger after standard antibiotic treatments. PTLDS is estimated to occur in less than 5% of people who had Lyme disease and were treated. In contrast to these recognized medical conditions, the promotion of "chronic" lyme disease is a quintessential example of health fraud. In many cases there is no objective evidence that people who believe they have chronic Lyme have ever been infected with Lyme disease: standard diagnostic tests for infection are often negative.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: While it is undisputed that people can have severe symptoms of an illness, the cause and appropriate treatment promoted by "chronic Lyme" advocates are controversial. The symptoms are similar to those of fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. Fibromyalgia can be triggered by an infection, and then persist when the infection is completely removed from the body. A few doctors attribute these symptoms to persistent infection with "Borrelia", or co-infections with other tick-borne pathogens, such as "Ehrlichia" and "Babesia". Some conclude that the initial infection may cause an autoimmune reaction that continues to cause serious symptoms even after the bacteria have been eliminated by antibiotics.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: A review looked at several animal studies that found persistence of live but disabled spirochetes following treatment of "B. burgdorferi" infection with antibiotics. The authors noted that none of the lingering spirochetes were associated with inflamed tissues and criticized the studies for not having considered adequately the different pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics of the antibiotics used to treat the animals in the trials versus what would be expected to be used to treat humans. The authors concluded, "There is no scientific evidence to support the hypothesis that such spirochetes, should they exist in humans, are the cause of post-Lyme disease syndrome."


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: Major US medical authorities, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Academy of Neurology, and the National Institutes of Health, have stated there is no convincing evidence that "Borrelia" is involved in the various symptoms classed as CLD, and particularly advise against long-term antibiotic treatment as it is ineffective and potentially harmful. Prolonged antibiotic therapy presents significant risks and can have dangerous, even deadly, side effects. Randomized placebo-controlled studies have shown that antibiotics offer no sustained benefit in people with chronic Lyme, with evidence of both placebo effects and significant adverse effects from such treatment. Many people who believe that they have chronic Lyme have fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia can be difficult to treat, and antibiotics do not work at all for fibromyalgia. A pressure group called the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS) says that the persistence of "B. burgdorferi" may be responsible for manifestations of chronic Lyme disease symptoms.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: Chronic Lyme can generally be explained as a misdiagnosis of fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. However, among people who self-identify as having chronic Lyme, the idea of chronic Lyme functions as a type of social identity. In this sense, the goal of the label is not to identify particular objective facts that differentiate one medical condition from another; instead, the main goal is to validate the real suffering experienced by people living with an invisible illness and to provide social support for them as they cope with it.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: While there is general agreement on the optimal treatment for Lyme disease, the existence of chronic Lyme is generally rejected because there is no evidence of its existence. Even among those who believe in it, there is no consensus over its prevalence, symptoms, diagnostic criteria, or treatment. The evidence-based perspective is exemplified by a 2007 review in "The New England Journal of Medicine," which noted the diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease is used by a few physicians despite a lack of "reproducible or convincing scientific evidence", leading the authors to describe this diagnosis as "the latest in a series of syndromes that have been postulated in an attempt to attribute medically unexplained symptoms to particular infections." Medical authorities agree with this viewpoint: the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the American Academy of Neurology, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), advise against long-term antibiotic treatment for people who identify as having chronic Lyme disease, given the lack of supporting evidence and the potential for harmful side-effects including toxicities.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: A minority, primarily not medical practitioners, holds that chronic Lyme disease is responsible for a range of unexplained symptoms, sometimes in people without any evidence of past infection. This viewpoint is promoted by many who have been told they have the condition by people who lack experience in science or medicine. Groups, advocates, and the small number of physicians who support the concept of chronic Lyme disease have organized to lobby for recognition of this diagnosis, as well as to argue for insurance coverage of long-term antibiotic therapy, which most insurers deny, as it is at odds with the guidelines of major medical organizations.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: Paul G. Auwaerter, director of infectious disease at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, cited the political controversy and high emotions as contributing to a "poisonous atmosphere" around Lyme disease, which he believes has led to doctors trying to avoid having Lyme patients in their practices.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: In 2006, Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Attorney General, opened an antitrust investigation against the IDSA, accusing the IDSA Lyme disease panel of undisclosed conflicts of interest and of unduly dismissing alternative therapies and chronic Lyme disease. The investigation was closed on May 1, 2008, without charges when the IDSA agreed to submit to a review of its guidelines by a panel of independent scientists and physicians which would occur on July 30, 2009, citing mounting legal costs and the difficulty of presenting scientific arguments in a legal setting.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: According to the agreement with Blumenthal, the IDSA Lyme disease guidelines remained in place and unchallenged. A "Forbes" piece described Blumenthal's investigation as "intimidation" of scientists by an elected official with close ties to Lyme advocacy groups. The "Journal of the American Medical Association" described the decision as an example of the "politicization of health policy" that went against the weight of scientific evidence and may have a chilling effect on future decisions by medical associations.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: The expert panel's review was published in 2010, with the independent doctors and scientists in the panel unanimously endorsing the guidelines, stating "No changes or revisions to the 2006 Lyme guidelines are necessary at this time", and concluding long-term antibiotic treatments are unproven and potentially dangerous. The IDSA welcomed the final report, stating that "Our number one concern is the patients we treat, and we're glad patients and their physicians now have additional reassurance that the guidelines are medically sound."


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: The state of Connecticut, meanwhile, enacted a law on June 18, 2009, "to allow a licensed physician to prescribe, administer or dispense long-term antibiotics for a therapeutic purpose to a patient clinically diagnosed with Lyme disease." The states of Rhode Island, California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Maine, and Iowa have similar laws.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: Massachusetts (2016) and Rhode Island (2003) have laws mandating insurance coverage for long-term antibiotic therapy for Lyme disease when deemed medically necessary by a physician. In 1999 Connecticut had passed a similar, though somewhat more restrictive law.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: In 2001, "The New York Times Magazine" reported that Allen Steere, chief of immunology and rheumatology at Tufts Medical Center and a co-discoverer and leading expert on Lyme disease, had been harassed, stalked, and threatened by patients and patient advocacy groups angry at his refusal to substantiate their diagnoses of "chronic" Lyme disease and endorse long-term antibiotic therapy. Because this intimidation included death threats, Steere was assigned security guards.


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: A 2004 study in "The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal" stated nine of nineteen Internet websites surveyed contained what were described as major inaccuracies. Websites described as providing inaccurate information included several with the word "lyme" in their domain name (e.g., lymenet.org), as well as the website of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society. A 2007 article in "The New England Journal of Medicine" argued media coverage of chronic Lyme disease ignored scientific evidence in favor of anecdotes and testimonials:


title: Chronic Lyme disease

text: The 2008 documentary film "Under Our Skin: The Untold Story of Lyme Disease" opened June 19, 2009, in New York City. The film, made by a director whose sister self-identified with the condition, is based on the premise that chronic Lyme disease exists. A columnist for "Entertainment Weekly" wrote of the film:


title: Katyusha (song)

text: "Katyusha" ( – a diminutive form of , "Yekaterina" — Katherine), also transliterated as "Katjuša", "Katioucha", or "Katiusza", is a Soviet folk-based song and military march composed by Matvey Blanter in 1938, with lyrics written by the Soviet poet Mikhail Isakovsky. It gained fame during World War II as a patriotic song, inspiring the population to serve and defend their land in the war effort. The song was still popular in Russia in 1995. The song is the source of the nickname of the BM-8, BM-13, and BM-31 "Katyusha" rocket launchers that were used by the Red Army in World War II.


title: Katyusha (song)

text: The song is about a Russian woman called Katyusha. Standing on a steep riverbank, she sings a song to her beloved, a soldier serving far away. The theme of the song is that the soldier will protect the Motherland and its people while his grateful girl will keep and protect their love. Its lyrics became relevant during the Second World War, when many Soviet men left their wives and girlfriends to serve in World War II, known in Russia as The Great Patriotic War.


title: Katyusha (song)

text: The song's popularity began to increase with the beginning of Operation Barbarossa launched by Germany against the Soviet Union. The song was sung by female students from a Soviet industrial school in Moscow, bidding farewell to soldiers going to the battle front against Nazi Germany. Its first official performance was by Valentina Batishcheva in the Column Hall of Moscow's House of the Unions, at the State Jazz Orchestra concert in autumn 1938. It has since been performed many times by other famous singers, including Lidia Ruslanova, Tamara Sinyavskaya, Georgi Vinogradov, Eduard Khil, Anna German, Ivan Rebroff, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Joseph Kobzon, countertenor Vitas, Beloe Zlato, a duet by Marina Devyatova and Katya Ryabova, a duet by Maria Voronova and Varvara (real name Elena Vladimirovna Susova), Elena Vaenga, and more. "Katyusha" is part of the repertoire of the Alexandrov Ensemble.


title: Katyusha (song)

text: In 1943, the Kingdom of Italy, until then one of the Axis powers, joined the Allies. During the next two years, Italian partisans fought against German forces in Italy and Italian Fascists. wrote Italian lyrics for "Katyusha". His adaptation, "Fischia il vento" (The Wind Blows), became one of the most famous partisan anthems, along with "Bella ciao" and "La Brigata Garibaldi".


title: Katyusha (song)

text: During the last battles on the Eastern Front, the Blue Division used the melody of "Katyusha" for an adaptation called "Primavera" (Spring), a chant extolling the value of Spanish fascist fighters.


title: Katyusha (song)

text: During the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), Greek partisans who fought against the German invasion in 1941 wrote their version of "Katyusha" named "Ο ύμνος του ΕΑΜ" (The Hymn of EAM). The text to the melody was written by Vassilis Rotas, recorded much later by Thanos Mikroutsikos and sung by Maria Dimitriadi.


title: Katyusha (song)

text: The song was translated into Hebrew and performed by 1945, and has been popular ever since in Israel.


title: Katyusha (song)

text: Katyusha is also a popular song sung in the People's Republic of China due to influence from the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century and is still widely popular. The popularity of these songs even reached a point in China that at the time young people would deem it a great shame if they couldn't sing them. During the 2015 Moscow Victory Day Parade, the Chinese honor guard contingent led by Li Bentao surprised hundreds of locals when they sang Katyusha during their march back to their living quarters during a nighttime rehearsal. That same parade saw the song being performed by the Massed Bands of the Moscow Garrison during the march past of foreign contingents (specifically that of India, Mongolia, Serbia and China).


title: Katyusha (song)

text: It is a popular song in Iceland (particularly among schoolchildren) where it is known as "" ("Be Ready When Spring Calls"), the lyrics by Tryggvi Þorsteinsson encourage hard work in the hayfields in spring.


title: Katyusha (song)

text: In Finland the best known version (in Finnish) of the song is called "Sörkan sällit", which is also quite popular a student soirée song.


title: Katyusha (song)

text: Katyusha has appeared in numerous works, most often in tandem with Russian or Soviet topics, including the 2012 anime "Girls und Panzer" (though the song is excluded in the English dub and international editions, being replaced with an orchestral cover of korobeniki in the english dub.), a level featuring the USSR in the 1989 NES video game "Super Dodgeball", and in the 2013 album "The Circus At The End Of The World" by the band Abney Park.


title: Bruce Spence

text: Bruce Spence (born 17 September 1945) is a New Zealand–Australian actor. Spence has amassed over 100 film and television credits and has also acted in theatre.


title: Bruce Spence

text: Spence's best known film role is as the gyrocopter pilot in "Mad Max 2" (1981). He also played the lead role in Werner Herzog's "Where the Green Ants Dream" (1984) and portrayed Jedediah the pilot in "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" (1985).


title: Bruce Spence

text: In the 21st century, Spence played the Mouth of Sauron in "" (2003), the Trainman in "The Matrix Revolutions" (2003), and Baxter in Disney's "Inspector Gadget 2" (2003), and voiced the character Chum in "Finding Nemo" (2003). He also portrayed Tion Medon in "" (2005) and played Lord Rhoop in "" (2010).


title: Bruce Spence

text: Spence portrayed the palaeontologist (Huxley) in the Australian performance of BBC's "Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience". In his role, Spence narrated the activities of life-sized mechanical dinosaurs operated by teams of puppeteers and drivers.


title: Bruce Spence

text: In 2008, Spence joined the television series "Legend of the Seeker", which was based on the "Sword of Truth" series by Terry Goodkind. He played the role of Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander, co-starring with Craig Horner and Bridget Regan. The show ran for two seasons.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: Giorgio Napolitano (; born 29 June 1925) is an Italian politician who served as president of Italy from 2006 to 2015, the first Italian president to be re-elected to the presidency. Due to his dominant position in Italian politics, some critics have sometimes referred to him as "Re Giorgio" ("King Giorgio"). In office from 2006 to 2015, he is the longest-serving and longest-lived president in the history of the modern Italian Republic, which has been in existence since 1946.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: Napolitano was a longtime member of the Italian Communist Party and of its post-Communist social democratic successors, from the Democratic Party of the Left onwards. He was a leading member of a modernizing faction on the right of the party. First elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1953, he took an assiduous interest in parliamentary life and was President of the Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 1994. He was Minister of the Interior from 1996 to 1998 under Romano Prodi.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: Napolitano was appointed a Senator for life in 2005 by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. In May 2006, he was elected by Parliament as President of Italy. During his first term of office, he oversaw governments both of the centre-left, led by Prodi, and the centre-right, led by Silvio Berlusconi. In November 2011, Berlusconi resigned as Prime Minister amid financial and economic problems. Napolitano, in keeping with his constitutional role, then asked former EU commissioner Mario Monti to form a cabinet which was referred to as a "government of the president" by critics.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: When his seven-year presidential term expired in April 2013, Napolitano (then aged 87) reluctantly accepted re-election, becoming the first President of Italy to serve a second term, to safeguard the continuity of the country's institutions during the parliamentary deadlock that followed the 2013 general election. On being reelected as President with broad cross-party support in Parliament, he overcame the impasse by inviting Enrico Letta to propose a government in the form of a grand coalition. When Letta handed in his resignation on 14 February 2014, Napolitano mandated Matteo Renzi (Letta's factional challenger) to form a new government. After a record eight and a half years as President, Napolitano resigned at age 89 in January 2015.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: Napolitano was often accused by his critics of having transformed a largely ceremonial role into a political one, becoming, during the years of his tenure, the real kingmaker of Italian politics. As of 2022, Napolitano is currently the only living former Italian President.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: Napolitano was born in Naples, in 1925. His father Giovanni was a liberal lawyer and poet, while his mother was Carolina Bobbio, a descendant of a noble Piedmontese family. From 1938 to 1941, he studied at the Classical Lyceum Umberto I of Naples, but in 1941 his family moved to Padova and he was graduated to the lyceum Titus Livius. In 1942, he matriculated at the University of Naples Federico II, studying law. During this period, Napolitano adhered to the local University Fascist Youth ("Gioventù Universitaria Fascista"), where he met his core group of friends, who shared his opposition to Italian Fascism. As he would later state, the group "was in fact a true breeding ground of anti-fascist intellectual energies, disguised and to a certain extent tolerated".


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: An enthusiast of the theatre since secondary school, during his university years he contributed a theatrical review to the "IX Maggio" weekly magazine and had small parts in plays organized by the "Gioventù Universitaria Fascista" itself. He played in a comedy by Salvatore Di Giacomo at Teatro Mercadante in Naples. Napolitano dreamt of being an actor and spent his early years performing in several productions at the Teatro Mercadante.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: Napolitano has often been cited as the author of a collection of sonnets in Neapolitan dialect published under a pseudonym, Tommaso Pignatelli, and entitled "Pe cupià ’o chiarfo" ("To mimic the downpour"). He denied this in 1997 and, again, on the occasion of his presidential election, when his staff described the attribution of authorship to Napolitano as a "journalistic myth". He published his first acknowledged book, entitled "Movimento Operaio e Industria di Stato" (which can be translated as "Workers' Movement and State Industry"), in 1962.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: During the existence of the Italian Social Republic (1943–1945), a puppet state of Nazi Germany in the final period of World War II, Napolitano and his circle of friends took part in several actions of the Italian resistance movement against German and Italian fascist forces.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: In 1944, along with the group of Neapolitan Communists, as Mario Palermo and Maurizio Valenzi, Napolitano prepared the arrival in Naples of Palmiro Togliatti, the long-time leader of the Italian Communist Party who was in exile since 1926 when the Communist Party of Italy was banned by the Italian Fascist government, and Togliatti was one of few leaders not to be arrested, as he was attending a meeting of the Comintern in Moscow.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: Following the end of the war in 1945, Napolitano joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and became its federal secretary for Naples and Caserta. In 1947, he graduated in jurisprudence with a final dissertation on political economy, entitled "Il mancato sviluppo industriale del Mezzogiorno dopo l'unità e la legge speciale per Napoli del 1904" ("The lack of industrial development in the Mezzogiorno following the unification of Italy and the special law of 1904 for Naples"). He became a member of the Secretariat of the Italian Economic Centre for Southern Italy in 1946, which was represented by Senator Paratore, where he remained for two years. Napolitano played a major role in the Movement for the Rebirth of Southern Italy for over ten years.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: Napolitano was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1953 for the electoral district of Naples, and was reelected in every election until 1996. He was elected to the National Committee of the party during its eighth national congress in 1956, largely thanks to the support offered by Palmiro Togliatti, who wanted to involve younger politicians in the central direction of the party. He became responsible for the commission for Southern Italy within the National Committee.


title: Giorgio Napolitano

text: In 1953 a document of the Italian Ministry of Interior reported Napolitano as a member of the secret armed paramilitary groups of the Communist Party in the city of Rome (so-called "Gladio Rossa").