title: Social Democratic Party (Portugal)

text: In the 2015 general election, the PSD and CDS-PP ran in a joint coalition, called Portugal Ahead, led by Pedro Passos Coelho and Paulo Portas. The coalition won the elections by a wide margin over the Socialists, capturing 38.6% of the votes while the Socialists captured only 32%, although the coalition lost 25 MPs and a more than 11% of the votes, thus falling well short of an absolute majority. The PSD/CDS-PP coalition was asked by the then President of the Republic, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, to form a government with Passos Coelho as Prime Minister.


title: Social Democratic Party (Portugal)

text: The 2nd PSD/CDS government was duly formed and took the oath of office on 30 October 2015, but fell after a no-confidence motion was approved two weeks later. Its 11 days of rule make it the shortest-lived government since Portugal has been a democracy holding free elections. After that, the PSD returned to the opposition benches, and the Socialist Party was able to form an agreement with BE and CDU to support a PS minority government led by António Costa. Pedro Passos Coelho continued as party leader, but a weak opposition strategy led to bad polling numbers for the PSD. All of this culminated with the results of the 2017 local elections. In these elections, the PSD achieved their worst results ever, winning just 98 mayors and 30% of the votes. Passos Coelho announced he would not run for another term as PSD leader. On 13 January 2018, Rui Rio defeated Pedro Santana Lopes by a 54% to 46% margin and became the new party leader.


title: Social Democratic Party (Portugal)

text: In order to avoid bankruptcy due to mounting debt, in 2017, the party, alongside the Portuguese Socialist Party, the Portuguese Communist Party, BE and the ecologist party PEV, voted in favour of abolishing party fundraising limits, thereby opening all portuguese parties to private political donorship, that they are not obligated to disclose. The new proposal was reluctantly approved by the Portuguese president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.


title: Social Democratic Party (Portugal)

text: During his first year in the leadership, Rio faced big internal opposition and, in January 2019, Rio won a motion of confidence presented by Luís Montenegro. In the EP 2019 elections, the PSD achieved their worst result ever in a national election, winning just 22% of the votes. However, the party recovered a lot of ground in the October 2019 general elections, achieving 28% of the votes, against the 36% of the PS. Nonetheless, Rio's leadership was, once again, challenged and he faced, in a two round leadership contest in January 2020, Luís Montenegro and Miguel Pinto Luz. Rio won the 1st round with 49% of the votes and defeated Luís Montenegro in the 2nd round by 53% to 47% margin, thus being re-elected as party leader.


title: Social Democratic Party (Portugal)

text: In the Azores 2020 regional elections, the PSD was able to return to power, after 24 years in opposition, by forging a controversial deal with CHEGA, plus CDS, PPM and IL. The PSD won almost 34% of the votes, while the PS fell more than 7 pp, compared with 2016, to 39%, an unexpected result, and overall the right wing parties had a 1 seat majority over all the left. After 2020, the PSD controls the governments of Portugal's only two autonomous regions.


title: Social Democratic Party (Portugal)

text: The 2021 local elections were quite positive for the PSD, despite not winning the most mayors in the country as a whole. The party, and its led-coalitions, won a combined 32% of the votes and were able to win, from the PS, several cities like Coimbra, Funchal and Barcelos. The main gain of the PSD was the victory in Lisbon, where Carlos Moedas defeated, against all odds and predictions, the PS incumbent mayor Fernando Medina. In October 2021, disagreements between the PS and BE-CDU led to the rejection of the 2022 budget and the calling of a snap general election for 30 January 2022. Despite a close race predicted by polls, the PSD suffered a big setback by winning just 29% of the votes and seeing the PS gaining a surprise absolute majority, with 41% of the votes. After the election, PSD leader Rui Rio opened the process to elect a new party leader. On 28 May 2022, Luís Montenegro was elected party leader by a landslide, gathering more than 72% of the votes.


title: Social Democratic Party (Portugal)

text: The party was founded based on classical social democracy and was a centre to centre-left party, but later it evolved into catch-all centre-right party. The party has been described as liberal-conservative, conservative, or conservative-liberal, with Christian democratic, liberal and economically liberal elements.


title: Social Democratic Party (Portugal)

text: The PSD is frequently referred to as a party that is not ideology-based, but rather a power party (). It frequently adopts a functional big tent party strategy to win elections. Due to this strategy, which most trace to Cavaco Silva's leadership, the party is made up of many factions, mostly centre-right (including liberal democrats, Christian democrats and neoconservatives) as well as quasi-social-democrats and former communists:


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Exorcist: The Beginning is a 2004 American supernatural horror film directed by Renny Harlin. The film serves as a prequel to "The Exorcist" (1973) and is the fourth installment in "The Exorcist" series. It stars Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, and James D'Arcy.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: "Exorcist: The Beginning" was retooled from Paul Schrader's already completed "", which Morgan Creek Productions executives feared would be unsuccessful. The film was released in the United States on August 20, 2004, by Warner Bros. Pictures.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Reviews for "Exorcist: The Beginning" were overwhelmingly negative, and it was a financial failure. Schrader was subsequently allowed to release his version, "Dominion", which was somewhat better reviewed than Renny Harlin's film but still earned mostly negative reviews.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: In Cairo, Egypt in 1949, a young Father Lankester Merrin struggles with his shattered faith. He is haunted by an incident in a small village in the occupied Netherlands during World War II, where he served as parish priest: near the end of the war, a sadistic Nazi SS commander, in retaliation for the murder of a German trooper, forced Merrin to participate in arbitrary executions in order to save a full village from slaughter.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Merrin is approached by a collector of antiquities named Semelier who invites him to come to a British excavation in a valley called Derati in the Turkana region of British Kenya. The dig excavates a Christian Byzantine-era church built circa 500 A.D. — long before Christianity had reached that region of Africa. Semelier asks Merrin to recover an ancient relic of a demon, thought to be in the church, before the British can find it. Merrin agrees and travels to the dig site. He is joined by Father Francis.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Upon arriving at the site with their translator and guide Chuma, Merrin meets the chief excavator, a brutish man named Jefferies with visible boils on his face and Sarah Novak, a doctor. In addition, Merrin learns that the diggers are disappearing or leaving in droves because the local tribesmen fear the church is cursed. Merrin witnesses a digger inexplicably experience a seizure.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Merrin, Chuma, and Francis visit the dig site and finds only the dome uncovered; the rest of the church is buried beneath the earth. Merrin discovers that the church is in perfect condition, as though it had been buried immediately after its construction was completed. The three enter the church through the dome and find the place in near-pristine condition, but note two disturbing oddities; the statues of the angels holding weapons point their spears downward instead of triumphantly toward heaven. and that someone has vandalized and desecrated the church placing Christ on the cross in an upside-down position. Merrin and Francis deduce the sculptors were trying to depict the angels restraining something that was beneath the church.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Determined to learn more about the archaeological dig, Merrin asks to consult with the lead archaeologist, Monsieur Bession. Sarah tells Merrin that Bession went insane three weeks earlier and was transferred to a mental hospital in Nairobi. Merrin visits Bession's tent at the dig site and sees dozens of drawings of the same demon artifact the collector had asked Merrin to find. Merrin visits Bession, but when he enters his room, he discovers Bession has carved a Hooked Cross on his chest and is speaking in the voice of the sadistic SS commander who tormented Merrin during the war. Bession then slashes his own throat after saying he was "free". Father Gionetti, warden of the asylum, speculates that Bession was not possessed but rather "touched" by a demon, which drove him mad and eventually to suicide. Merrin is very skeptical, but before he returns to the dig site, Father Gionetti gives him the volume of Roman rituals to use in exorcism, although Merrin claims he will never use them.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Upon returning to the village, strange events continue. A local boy is attacked and killed by hyenas that seem to continuously stalk the dig, night and day. His younger brother, Joseph, enters a fugue state after watching his brother get ripped to pieces. The local chief's wife gives birth to a stillborn baby who is covered in maggots and Jefferies, a man involved with the dig, gets attacked in the bar. Around the same time, Merrin discovers a passageway leading to a cave underneath the church that houses an ancient pagan temple with the statue of the demon Pazuzu. He also finds evidence that this temple was used to conduct human sacrifices. Upon his return, he sees the local tribe cremate the stillborn baby. This makes Merrin suspicious, because there are stories of an epidemic that wiped out an entire village in the valley 50 years earlier. He had been told that the dead were buried in a graveyard just outside the valley. When he digs up the graves of the supposed victims of this plague, they are empty.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Merrin confronts Father Francis about it, and Francis reveals to him the history of the Derati valley; a great army led by two priests came to the valley searching for the origin of evil 1,500 years prior. When they arrived in the valley, the evil presence consumed them and one killed the other. When the lone surviving priest made it back, Emperor Justinian ordered a church be built over the site, and then buried to seal the evil force inside of it. The builders of the church never meant it to be recorded in Vatican documents, however, a vague reference to it was recorded and found in 1893. Four priests subsequently came to Derati and enlisted the local tribe to help them. All of the tribesmen and the priests disappeared. The Vatican then ordered that the false graveyard be built and stories of a plague spread around to keep people away from the valley. Francis reveals that it is believed that the valley in Derati was the traditional spot of Lucifer's fall after the war in heaven. Later Merrin, Chuma and Major Granville discover Jefferies tied up in the Church, with his organs pecked out by crows.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: The dig's doctor, Sarah, turns out to be the possessed individual and she kills Francis. Merrin has the demon exorcised from her in the tunnels below the church but she dies. Merrin and Joseph emerge from the church, (once again buried in sand) and history has repeated itself. Only Father Merrin and the little boy are left as the British soldiers and the local tribes have annihilated each other. Sometime later Merrin once again a priest returns to Rome and meets with Semelier at a cafe, explaining he was unable to find the relic, Semelier replies: "But you found something...Didn't you?"


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Producer James G. Robinson first began development on an untitled prequel to "The Exorcist" in 1997, with the first draft of the screenplay penned by"" co-writer William Wisher Jr. In October 1999, Morgan Creek Productions hired Tom McLoughlin, director of "", to helm the film. With a script finally in place, production was slated to occur the following spring in Africa. McLoughlin departed due to issues with the script. In October 2001, numerous publications reported that John Frankenheimer was on board as director, with a new screenplay revised by Caleb Carr. Liam Neeson was attached to portray the character of Father Lankester Merrin. William Peter Blatty was not expected to take part in the production. After a July 2003 release date was slotted, Frankenheimer was forced to step down from the project due to his declining health and was replaced by Paul Schrader. Gabriel Mann joined the cast in April 2002, while shooting was expected to take place in the spring in the United Kingdom and Spain. The following month, the film was officially titled "Exorcist: The Begininng" and Stellan Skarsgård and Billy Crawford were added to the cast, the former of which replacing Neeson. Principal photography on Schrader's film began on November 11, 2002 in Morocco with Vittorio Storaro handling cinematography duties. The crew spent six weeks filming in Morocco and then a further two months in Rome. By the time filming had wrapped in February 2003, six writers had contributed to the screenplay and the budget had nearly doubled.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: An early cut of Schrader's film that ran at 130 minutes was shown to the studio in early 2003. The cut was widely derided due to a lack of scares and gore. The studio at first opted to re-edit the film to make it scarier, which Schrader opposed. Additional photography was then planned, which according to Schrader only grew "bigger and bigger" as time went on. Schrader attested that he faithfully adapted Carr's screenplay on screen and that the studio went through "buyer's remorse" during production. Later reports indicated that Schrader was first given the option to re-edit the film twice, with neither cut managing to satisfy the studio. Sheldon Kahn was brought in to re-cut the film without Schrader's involvement. Schrader was "livid" and reportedly demanded that Kahn leave. By then, the studio met with other filmmakers to direct new scenes to make the film scarier. Carr was expected for rewrites, but instead the studio opted to fire Schrader and scrap the film entirely in August 2003. Morgan Creek sought for a new director starting in October.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Renny Harlin was among the directors who met with Robinson and suggested rewriting the script, casting new actors, and adding more action. The studio was impressed and hired Harlin. Harlin quickly began overseeing rewrites by Skip Woods. Alexi Hawley and Harlin himself penned subsequent revisions. Skarsgård was the only cast member retained from the original shoot. In November 2003, special makeup effects artist Gary J. Tunnicliffe confirmed he would be involved with the film. Filming under Harlin's direction began in the winter of 2003 in Rome. Two weeks into production, the director's leg was shattered after being struck by a car, resulting in a two week hiatus for filming. Harlin shot six weeks on crutches. Production concluded after twelve weeks. By June 2004, work was still being done on the film. The film was finished mere days before its official release. After initially being given a $35 million budget under Schrader's direction, the reshoots and post-production work ballooned the film's budget to over $90 million.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: The film was released on DVD and VHS on March 1, 2005. The film was released for the first time on blu-ray on September 23, 2014. Sony Pictures re-released the film on October 13, 2020.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: "Exorcist: The Beginning" grossed $41.8 million in the United States and Canada, and $36.2 million in international territories, for a worldwide total of $78.1 million.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: On its opening weekend, the film grossed $18 million, earning the top spot at the box office. With a budget that spiraled up to over $90 million, the film was unsuccessful at the box office.


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, "Exorcist: The Beginning" holds an approval rating of 11% from 133 reviews, with an average rating of 3.6/10. The site's consensus reads "A mediocre, gory horror film, nowhere near the quality of the 1973 original". On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average of 30 out of 100 based on 22 reviews, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: William Peter Blatty (the author/screenwriter of "The Exorcist") said that watching "Exorcist: The Beginning" was his "most humiliating professional experience". On the other hand, Blatty said that "Dominion" is "a handsome, classy, elegant piece of work".


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: Roger Ebert wrote: "I've seen both versions and much prefer Schrader's, and yet it must be said that Harlin did not prostitute himself in his version".


title: Exorcist: The Beginning

text: "Exorcist: The Beginning" was nominated for two Golden Raspberry Awards, Worst Director and Worst Remake or Sequel, but lost to two other Warner Bros. films, "Catwoman" and "", respectively.


title: Piston

text: A piston is a component of reciprocating engines, reciprocating pumps, gas compressors, hydraulic cylinders and pneumatic cylinders, among other similar mechanisms. It is the moving component that is contained by a cylinder and is made gas-tight by piston rings. In an engine, its purpose is to transfer force from expanding gas in the cylinder to the crankshaft via a piston rod and/or connecting rod. In a pump, the function is reversed and force is transferred from the crankshaft to the piston for the purpose of compressing or ejecting the fluid in the cylinder. In some engines, the piston also acts as a valve by covering and uncovering ports in the cylinder.


title: Piston

text: An internal combustion engine is acted upon by the pressure of the expanding combustion gases in the combustion chamber space at the top of the cylinder. This force then acts downwards through the connecting rod and onto the crankshaft. The connecting rod is attached to the piston by a swivelling gudgeon pin (US: wrist pin). This pin is mounted within the piston: unlike the steam engine, there is no piston rod or crosshead (except big two stroke engines).


title: Piston

text: The typical piston design is on the picture. This type of piston is widely used in car diesel engines. According to purpose, supercharging level and working conditions of engines the shape and proportions can be changed.


title: Piston

text: High-power diesel engines work in difficult conditions. Maximum pressure in the combustion chamber can reach 20 MPa and the maximum temperature of some piston surfaces can exceed 450 °C. It is possible to improve piston cooling by creating a special cooling cavity. Injector supplies this cooling cavity «A» with oil through oil supply channel «B». For better temperature reduction construction should be carefully calculated and analysed. Oil flow in the cooling cavity should be not less than 80% of the oil flow through the injector.


title: Piston

text: The pin itself is of hardened steel and is fixed in the piston, but free to move in the connecting rod. A few designs use a 'fully floating' design that is loose in both components. All pins must be prevented from moving sideways and the ends of the pin digging into the cylinder wall, usually by circlips.


title: Piston

text: Gas sealing is achieved by the use of piston rings. These are a number of narrow iron rings, fitted loosely into grooves in the piston, just below the crown. The rings are split at a point in the rim, allowing them to press against the cylinder with a light spring pressure. Two types of ring are used: the upper rings have solid faces and provide gas sealing; lower rings have narrow edges and a U-shaped profile, to act as oil scrapers. There are many proprietary and detail design features associated with piston rings.


title: Piston

text: Pistons are usually cast or forged from aluminium alloys. For better strength and fatigue life, some racing pistons may be forged instead. Billet pistons are also used in racing engines because they do not rely on the size and architecture of available forgings, allowing for last-minute design changes. Although not commonly visible to the naked eye, pistons themselves are designed with a certain level of ovality and profile taper, meaning they are not perfectly round, and their diameter is larger near the bottom of the skirt than at the crown.


title: Piston

text: Early pistons were of cast iron, but there were obvious benefits for engine balancing if a lighter alloy could be used. To produce pistons that could survive engine combustion temperatures, it was necessary to develop new alloys such as Y alloy and Hiduminium, specifically for use as pistons.


title: Piston

text: A few early gas engines had double-acting cylinders, but otherwise effectively all internal combustion engine pistons are single-acting. During World War II, the US submarine "Pompano" was fitted with a prototype of the infamously unreliable H.O.R. double-acting two-stroke diesel engine. Although compact, for use in a cramped submarine, this design of engine was not repeated.


title: Piston

text: Trunk pistons are long relative to their diameter. They act both as a piston and cylindrical crosshead. As the connecting rod is angled for much of its rotation, there is also a side force that reacts along the side of the piston against the cylinder wall. A longer piston helps to support this.


title: Piston

text: Trunk pistons have been a common design of piston since the early days of the reciprocating internal combustion engine. They were used for both petrol and diesel engines, although high speed engines have now adopted the lighter weight slipper piston.


title: Piston

text: A characteristic of most trunk pistons, particularly for diesel engines, is that they have a groove for an oil ring below the gudgeon pin, in addition to the rings between the gudgeon pin and crown.


title: Piston

text: The name 'trunk piston' derives from the 'trunk engine', an early design of marine steam engine. To make these more compact, they avoided the steam engine's usual piston rod with separate crosshead and were instead the first engine design to place the gudgeon pin directly within the piston. Otherwise these trunk engine pistons bore little resemblance to the trunk piston; they were extremely large diameter and double-acting. Their 'trunk' was a narrow cylinder mounted in the centre of the piston.


title: Piston

text: Large slow-speed Diesel engines may require additional support for the side forces on the piston. These engines typically use crosshead pistons. The main piston has a large piston rod extending downwards from the piston to what is effectively a second smaller-diameter piston. The main piston is responsible for gas sealing and carries the piston rings. The smaller piston is purely a mechanical guide. It runs within a small cylinder as a trunk guide and also carries the gudgeon pin.


title: Piston

text: Lubrication of the crosshead has advantages over the trunk piston as its lubricating oil is not subject to the heat of combustion: the oil is not contaminated by combustion soot particles, it does not break down owing to the heat and a thinner, less viscous oil may be used. The friction of both piston and crosshead may be only half of that for a trunk piston.


title: Piston

text: A slipper piston is a piston for a petrol engine that has been reduced in size and weight as much as possible. In the extreme case, they are reduced to the piston crown, support for the piston rings, and just enough of the piston skirt remaining to leave two lands so as to stop the piston rocking in the bore. The sides of the piston skirt around the gudgeon pin are reduced away from the cylinder wall. The purpose is mostly to reduce the reciprocating mass, thus making it easier to balance the engine and so permit high speeds. In racing applications, slipper piston skirts can be configured to yield extremely light weight while maintaining the rigidity and strength of a full skirt. Reduced inertia also improves mechanical efficiency of the engine: the forces required to accelerate and decelerate the reciprocating parts cause more piston friction with the cylinder wall than the fluid pressure on the piston head. A secondary benefit may be some reduction in friction with the cylinder wall, since the area of the skirt, which slides up and down in the cylinder is reduced by half. However, most friction is due to the piston rings, which are the parts which actually fit the tightest in the bore and the bearing surfaces of the wrist pin, and thus the benefit is reduced.


title: Piston

text: Deflector pistons are used in two-stroke engines with crankcase compression, where the gas flow within the cylinder must be carefully directed in order to provide efficient scavenging. With cross scavenging, the transfer (inlet to the cylinder) and exhaust ports are on directly facing sides of the cylinder wall. To prevent the incoming mixture passing straight across from one port to the other, the piston has a raised rib on its crown. This is intended to deflect the incoming mixture upwards, around the combustion chamber.


title: Piston

text: Much effort, and many different designs of piston crown, went into developing improved scavenging. The crowns developed from a simple rib to a large asymmetric bulge, usually with a steep face on the inlet side and a gentle curve on the exhaust. Despite this, cross scavenging was never as effective as hoped. Most engines today use Schnuerle porting instead. This places a pair of transfer ports in the sides of the cylinder and encourages gas flow to rotate around a vertical axis, rather than a horizontal axis.


title: Piston

text: In racing engines, piston strength and stiffness is typically much higher than that of a passenger car engine, while the weight is much less, to achieve the high engine RPM necessary in racing.


title: Piston

text: Hydraulic cylinders can be both single-acting or double-acting. A hydraulic actuator controls the movement of the piston back and/or forth. Guide rings guides the piston and rod and absorb the radial forces that act perpendicularly to the cylinder and prevent contact between sliding the metal parts.


title: Piston

text: Steam engines are usually double-acting (i.e. steam pressure acts alternately on each side of the piston) and the admission and release of steam is controlled by slide valves, piston valves or poppet valves. Consequently, steam engine pistons are nearly always comparatively thin discs: their diameter is several times their thickness. (One exception is the trunk engine piston, shaped more like those in a modern internal-combustion engine.) Another factor is that since almost all steam engines use crossheads to translate the force to the drive rod, there are few lateral forces acting to try and "rock" the piston, so a cylinder-shaped piston skirt isn't necessary.


title: Piston

text: There are two special type of pistons used in air cannons: close tolerance pistons and double pistons. In close tolerance pistons O-rings serve as a valve, but O-rings are not used in double piston types.


title: County Clare

text: County Clare () is a county in Ireland, in the Southern Region and the province of Munster, bordered on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Clare County Council is the local authority. The county had a population of 118,817 at the 2016 census. The county town and largest settlement is Ennis.


title: County Clare

text: Clare is north-west of the River Shannon covering a total area of . Clare is the seventh largest of Ireland's 32 traditional counties in area and the 19th largest in terms of population. It is bordered by two counties in Munster and one county in Connacht: County Limerick to the south, County Tipperary to the east and County Galway to the north. Clare's nickname is "the Banner County".


title: County Clare

text: The county is divided into the baronies of Bunratty Lower, Bunratty Upper, Burren, Clonderalaw, Corcomroe, Ibrickan, Inchiquin, Islands, Moyarta, Tulla Lower and Tulla Upper. These in turn are divided into civil parishes, which are divided into townlands. These divisions are cadastral, defining land boundaries and ownership, rather than administrative.


title: County Clare

text: Bodies of water define much of the physical boundaries of Clare. To the south-east is the River Shannon, Ireland's longest river, and to the south is the Shannon Estuary. The border to the north-east is defined by Lough Derg which is the third largest lake on Ireland. To the west is the Atlantic Ocean, and to the north is Galway Bay. Loop Head (Irish: Ceann Léime, meaning 'leap head') is the county's westernmost point of land.


title: County Clare

text: County Clare contains The Burren, a unique karst region, which contains rare flowers and fauna. At the western edge of The Burren, facing the Atlantic Ocean, are the Cliffs of Moher. The highest point in County Clare is Moylussa, , in the Slieve Bernagh range in the east of the county.


title: County Clare

text: County Clare hosts the oldest known evidence of human activity in Ireland. The patella of a bear, which was subject to butchering close to the time of death, was found in the Alice and Gwendoline Cave, near Edenvale House, Clarecastle. The bone features a number of linear-cut marks, and has been dated to circa 10,500 BC, from the Paleolithic era. This discovery, publicized in 2017, pushed back Ireland's occupation by 2,500 years - what was previously regarded as the oldest site of occupation was the Mesolithic site of Mount Sandel, County Londonderry. This bear bone was discovered in 1903 during an archaeological excavation but was not studied until over a century later.


title: County Clare

text: There was a Neolithic civilization in the Clare area – the name of the peoples is unknown, but the Prehistoric peoples left evidence behind in the form of ancient dolmen: single-chamber megalithic tombs, usually consisting of three or more upright stones. Clare is one of the richest places in Ireland for these tombs. The most noted one is in The Burren area; it is known as "Poulnabrone dolmen", which translates to "hole of sorrows". The remains of the people inside the tomb have been excavated and dated to 3800 BC.


title: County Clare

text: Ptolemy created a map of Ireland in his "Geographia" with information dating from 100 AD; it is the oldest written account of the island that includes geographical features. Within his map, Ptolemy names the Gaelic tribes inhabiting it and the areas in which they resided; in the area of Clare, he identified a tribe known as the "Gangani". Historians have found the tribes on the west of Ireland the most difficult to identify with known peoples; however, historians William Camden and Charles O'Conor speculated a possible connection between the Gangani and the "Concani", one of the eleven tribes in the confederacy of the Cantabri in the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula.


title: County Clare

text: During the Early Middle Ages, the area was part of the Kingdom of Connacht ruled by the Uí Fiachrach Aidhne. In the Middle Ages, it was annexed to the Kingdom of Munster to be settled by the Dalcassians. It was renamed Thomond, meaning North Munster. Brian Boru became a leader from here during this period, perhaps the most noted High King of Ireland.


title: County Clare

text: From 1118 onwards the Kingdom of Thomond was in place as its own petty kingdom, ruled by the O'Brien Clan. After the Norman invasion of Ireland, Thomas de Clare established a short-lived Norman lordship of Thomond, extinguished at the Battle of Dysert O'Dea in 1318 during Edward Bruce's invasion.


title: County Clare

text: There are two main hypotheses for the origins of the county name "Clare". One is that the name is derived from Thomas de Clare who was deeply embroiled in local politics and fighting in the 1270s and 1280s. An alternative hypothesis is that the county name "Clare" comes from the settlement of Clare (now Clarecastle), whose Irish name (plank bridge) refers to a crossing over the River Fergus.


title: County Clare

text: In 1543, during the Tudor conquest of Ireland, Murrough O'Brien, by surrender and regrant to Henry VIII, became Earl of Thomond within Henry's Kingdom of Ireland. Henry Sidney as Lord Deputy of Ireland responded to the Desmond Rebellion by creating the presidency of Connaught in 1569 and presidency of Munster in 1570. He transferred Thomond from Munster to Connaught, which he shired, Thomond becoming County Clare.


title: County Clare

text: About 1600, Clare was removed from the presidency of Connaught and made a presidency in its own right under the Earl of Thomond. When Henry O'Brien, 5th Earl of Thomond died in 1639, Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford decreed Clare should return to the presidency of Munster, but the Wars of the Three Kingdoms delayed this until the Restoration of 1660.


title: County Clare

text: Clare's county nickname is the "Banner County", for which various origins have been suggested: the banners captured by Clare's Dragoons at the Battle of Ramillies; or the banner of Catholic emancipation raised by Daniel O'Connell's victory in an 1828 by-election for County Clare that led to Parliament passing the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.


title: County Clare

text: Scattery Island, in the Mouth of the Shannon off the Clare coast, was transferred to Limerick Corporation and the county of the city of Limerick after the dissolution of the monasteries in the mid-16th century. It was assigned to County Clare after the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840. Under the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, part of the judicial county of Galway (Drummaan, Inishcaltra North and Mountshannon electoral divisions) was transferred to county Clare. This area contains the village of Mountshannon on the north-western shore of Lough Derg.


title: County Clare

text: Fianna Fáil lost its overall majority on the council in 2004. As of the 2009 local election, Fianna Fáil is the largest party, with 13 of the 28 seats.


title: County Clare

text: The county seat is at Ennis, which also serves as a major regional hub for County Clare. Among its emergency services, it contains the Ennis Hospital, the HQ of the Clare Divisional Garda, the Clare Fire Brigade and Civil Defence.


title: County Clare

text: The council has two representatives on the Southern Regional Assembly, where it is part of the Mid-West strategic planning area.


title: County Clare

text: Prior to 2014, there were four town councils in Clare: Ennis, Kilrush, Kilkee and Shannon. All town councils in Ireland were abolished under the Local Government Reform Act 2014.


title: County Clare

text: Since 1921, County Clare has been represented in Dáil Éireann by the constituency of Clare, which currently has four Teachtaí Dála (TDs). Since 2020, the whole of the county has been in the constituency. At various times, portions of County Clare have been in other constituencies: Clare–South Galway (1969–77), Galway West (1977–81), Limerick East (1992–2011) and Limerick City (2011–20).


title: County Clare

text: The constituency was historically a Fianna Fáil stronghold. Prominent former TDs for Clare include Éamon de Valera, who became Taoiseach and President and former president Patrick Hillery.


title: County Clare

text: The population of Clare was 118,817 people at the 2016 census. The main urban areas are Ennis with a population of 25,276 and Shannon with 9,729.


title: County Clare

text: The demographic profile for Clare in general is fairly young: 22% are under age 14, while 12% are over 65, compared to the national average of 20% and 11%, respectively. There is a slightly higher percentage of males with 50.5%, while females number 49.5%.


title: County Clare

text: English is the main language spoken in Clare. The vast majority of the population are Irish people, accounting for 86%. Most immigrants are Europeans, totalling an additional 7,520; there is also a small African minority of 1,124 people, while other ethnic groups are very small in number.


title: County Clare

text: In addition, Clare had a large diaspora due to vast emigration during the 19th century. There are millions of people around the world who can trace their family background to Clare; such descendants are found mostly in North America, Great Britain, Australia, South Africa, Argentina and New Zealand. Many people from the Irish diaspora visit the Clare area to trace their family roots and background.


title: County Clare

text: Most of the names in Clare are derived from sept members of the Dalcassian race of Gaels. Some of the most common examples are O'Brien, O'Dea, McMahon, McInerney, McNamara, McGarry, Moloney, O'Grady, Hogan, Considine, Griffey/Griffin and Lynch. Names of assimilated Norman origin include Burke, Dalton, and Comyn.


title: County Clare

text: The great majority of the population follow Christianity; at least 92% of the people in the area polled as part of the Ireland Census 2006 identified as Christians. There are numerous abbeys and priories in Clare. Some of the ruins of such structures, such as Scattery Island, Bishop's Island, and Drumcliff monasteries, are ancient, dating to the sixth century when Christianity was first introduced to Ireland. The former was founded by Saint Senan, who was born locally near Kilrush in 488 and is counted amongst the Twelve Apostles of Ireland.


title: County Clare

text: Numerous other saints came from Clare, such as Flannan, Mochulleus, Moula, Caimin, Maccreiche, Munchin and more. In the present day, the Catholic Church still commands a large majority, with 88% of the populace declaring themselves as followers of the religion. This percentage is slightly higher than the national average.


title: County Clare

text: Most of Clare falls under the Catholic Diocese of Killaloe, which is part of the ecclesiastical province of Cashel and Emly. The Bishop of Killaloe is seated at the St Peter and Paul Cathedral in Ennis. A small portion of the north-western part of Clare falls under the Diocese of Galway, Kilmacduagh and Kilfenora.


title: County Clare

text: As part of the local council's architectural conservation project, around eighty Christian churches have been designated as protected structures. Among the more notable structures are the ruins of Corcomroe Abbey, Quin Abbey, and Dysert O Dea Monastery.


title: County Clare

text: The largest religious minority is the Church of Ireland, which is part of the Anglican Communion. It has just under 2000 adherents in Clare. The county is part of the Diocese of Limerick and Killaloe, one of the three cathedrals of the diocese being St Flannan's Cathedral in Killaloe. Other religious communities in Clare are very small in comparison. In 2016, about 11% of the population reported no religion. Up from 5% in 2011


title: County Clare

text: West Clare and some pockets in East Clare were recognised as part of the Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking area, by the Irish Free State government in the original "Coimisiún na Gaeltachta" in 1926. The most prominent of these areas with native Irish language speakers were west of Ennis in Kilmihil, Kilrush, Doonbeg, Doolin, Ennistimon, Carrigaholt, Lisdoonvarna and Ballyvaughan. However, by the time of the second "Coimisiún na Gaeltachta" in 1956, the decline in the number of Gaelic speakers had been such that West Clare was removed from the list. It remained covered by the Gaeltacht (Housing) Acts until 2001.


title: County Clare

text: Close geographic proximity to the Aran Islands (which were once part of Thomond) and local trade with fishermen from there meant that the language was used by residents of Fanore, Murroogh, Doolin and Quilty more than in other places. The last native Clare Irish speaker, the "seanchaí" Paddy Pháraic Mhíchíl Ó Sionáin (Shannon) of Fisherstreet, Doolin, died in the early 1990s.


title: County Clare

text: In the early 21st century, the pressure group "Coiste Forbartha Gaeltachta Chontae an Chláir" has sought to restore the official status of West Clare as a Gaeltacht area. They are encouraging immersion classes to revive use of the language.


title: County Clare

text: County Clare has a strong history of Traditional music. It is the home of the Kilfenora Céilí Band, the Tulla Céilí Band, Stockton's Wing, Elizabeth Crotty, Sharon Shannon, Noel Hill, Peadar O'Loughlin, Martin Hayes and legendary tin-whistler Micho Russell. Ennis in County Clare is also the birthplace of Grammy-nominated songstress Maura O'Connell whose grandmother started a fish market in the town. The county has many traditional music festivals and one of the most well known is the Willie Clancy Summer School, which is held every July in the town of Milltown Malbay in memory of the renowned uilleann piper, Willie Clancy.


title: County Clare

text: Andy Irvine has written two songs celebrating County Clare: one is "West Coast of Clare" (recorded with Planxty in 1973), in which he mentions Spanish Point and Milltown Malbay. The other is "My Heart's Tonight in Ireland" (recorded on his solo album "Rain on the Roof" in 1996, and again on "Changing Trains" in 2005), in which he mentions several towns and villages in County Clare: Milltown Malbay, Scariff, Kilrush, Sixmilebridge, Kilkishen, Lahinch, Ennistymon, Liscannor and Kilkee, and also makes two references to the music of Willie Clancy:


title: County Clare

text: Milltown Malbay is home to Oidhreacht an Chlair, an institute for higher education in all aspects of Irish tradition, history and literature.


title: County Clare

text: The Clare hurling team has one of the best records of success in the country in recent years with many cups such as the Liam MacCarthy Cup having been won in 1914, 1995, 1997 and 2013 and also finalists in 2002. Clare won the Munster Final in football in 1992 beating Kerry. There is a strong Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) presence in County Clare with the founder of the GAA, Michael Cusack, having been born in Carron which is situated in the heart of The Burren in North Clare. Irish rugby internationals from Clare include Keith Wood, Anthony Foley & Marcus Horan.


title: County Clare

text: Clare is served by two national primary roads—a classification referring to the major routes between major urban centres in Ireland. This includes the N18 connecting Limerick to Galway, which passes through Ennis and by route of the N19—Shannon. These two roads are part of the wider Western and Southern Corridor connecting many of the major settlements right across the island in these areas. There are also some significant national secondary roads—across the coast, stretching from Ballyvaughan, through Ennistymon and Kilkee, before arriving at Kilrush is the N67. In addition to this the N68 connects Kilrush to Ennis, while Ennis is connected to Ennistymon via the N85.


title: County Clare

text: Mainland public transport is mostly limited to buses ran by Irish Government owned company Bus Éireann; there are around 25 buses running frequent routes which pass through the majority of large settlements in Clare. Clare Bus, runs a limited number of "accessible buslines". The Ennis railway station operated by government owned Iarnród Éireann is the most significant railway station in Clare today; it was opened on 2 July 1859. By route of Limerick the trains run from Ennis to Dublin and it generally takes 3 hours to complete the journey. There was previously a far more extensive local railway network in Clare, laid while part of the United Kingdom, the West Clare Railway was in existence from its opening in 1887 by Charles Stewart Parnell until 1961 covering much of the county. It was quite inefficient however, leading Percy French to write the song "Are Ye Right There Michael?" about his experience. Much of it was dug up and dismantled by the Irish government from the 1950s—1970s after being deemed uneconomic, however there remains local advocacy groups who wish to conserve and restore parts of it.


title: County Clare

text: The third busiest airport in Ireland is located in Clare with the Shannon Airport, which officially opened in 1945. Along with Dublin Airport and Cork Airport it is one of the three primary airports in the country, handling 3.62 million passengers in 2007. Shannon was the first airport in Ireland to receive transatlantic flights. Ryanair is the main airline handling flights with Great Britain and Continental European countries such as Spain, France, and Germany as the primary destinations. Much traffic from the United States is received, which Aer Lingus mostly handles; it is sometimes used as a military stopover which has caused some controversy in the country, but nonetheless has generated significant revenue for the airport. There are some local ferry services as much of the county is surrounded by water; there is one from Killimer to Tarbert Island in Kerry and also from Doolin to the Aran Islands of Inisheer and Inishmore.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: Pisces is a constellation of the zodiac. Its vast bulk – and main asterism viewed in most European cultures per Greco-Roman antiquity as a distant pair of fishes connected by one cord each that join at an apex – are in the Northern celestial hemisphere. Its old astronomical symbol is (♓). Its name is Latin for "fishes". It is between Aquarius, of similar size, to the southwest and Aries, which is smaller, to the east. The ecliptic and the celestial equator intersect within this constellation and in Virgo. This means the sun passes directly overhead of the equator, on average, at approximately this point in the sky, at the March equinox.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: The March equinox is currently located in Pisces, due south of ω Psc, and, due to precession, slowly drifting due west, just below the western fish towards Aquarius.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: Due to the dimness of these stars, the constellation is essentially invisible in or near any major city due to light pollution.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: M74 is a loosely wound (type Sc) spiral galaxy in Pisces, found at a distance of 30 million light years (redshift 0.0022). It has many clusters of young stars and the associated nebulae, showing extensive regions of star formation. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain, a French astronomer, in 1780. A type II-P supernova was discovered in the outer regions of M74 by Robert Evans in June 2003; the star that underwent the supernova was later identified as a red supergiant with a mass of 8 solar masses. It is the brightest member of the M74 Group.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: NGC 488 is an isolated face-on prototypical spiral galaxy. Two supernovae have been observed in the galaxy.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: CL 0024+1654 is a massive galaxy cluster that lenses the galaxy behind it, creating arc-shaped images of the background galaxy. The cluster is primarily made up of yellow elliptical and spiral galaxies, at a distance of 3.6 billion light-years from Earth (redshift 0.4), half as far away as the background galaxy, which is at a distance of 5.7 billion light-years (redshift 1.67).


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: Pisces originates from some composition of the Babylonian constellations "Šinunutu" "the great swallow" in current western Pisces, and "Anunitum" the "Lady of the Heaven" (supposedly Inanna), at the place of the northern fish. In the first-millennium BC texts known as the "Astronomical Diaries", part of the constellation was also called DU.NU.NU ("Rikis-nu.mi", "the fish cord or ribbon").


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: Pisces is associated with the Greek legend that Aphrodite and her son Eros either shape-shifted into forms of fishes to escape, or were rescued by two fishes.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: In the Greek version according to Hyginus, Aphrodite and Eros while visiting Syria fled from the monster Typhon by leaping into the Euphrates River and transforming into fishes ("Poeticon astronomicon" 2.30, citing Diognetus Erythraeus). The Roman variant of the story has Venus and Cupid (counterparts for Aphrodite and Eros) carried away from this danger on the backs of two fishes (Ovid "Fasti" 2.457ff).


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: There is also a different origin tale that Hyginus preserved in another work. According to this, an egg rolled into the Euphrates, and some fishes nudged this to shore, after which the doves sat on the egg until Aphrodite (thereafter called the Syrian Goddess) hatched out of it. The fishes were then rewarded by being placed in the skies as a constellation ("Fabulae" 197). This story is also recorded by the Third Vatican Mythographer.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: In 1690, the astronomer Johannes Hevelius in his "Firmamentum Sobiescianum" regarded the constellation Pisces as being composed of four subdivisions:


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: In 1754, the astronomer John Hill (author) John Hill] proposed to sever a southern zone of Pisces as Testudo (the Turtle). 24 – 27 – YY(30) – 33 – 29 Psc., It would host a natural but quite faint asterism in which the star 20 Psc is the head of the turtle. While Admiral Smyth mentioned the proposal, it was largely neglected by other astronomers, and it is now obsolete.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: The Fishes are in the German lore of Antenteh, who owned just a tub and a crude cabin when he met two magical fish. They offered him a wish, which he refused. However, his wife begged him to return to the fish and ask for a beautifully furnished home. This wish was granted, but her desires were not satisfied. She then asked to be a queen and have a palace, but when she asked to become a goddess, the fish became angry and took the palace and home, leaving the couple with the tub and cabin once again. The tub is sometimes recognized as the Great Square of Pegasus.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: The stars of Pisces were incorporated into several constellations in Chinese astronomy. Wai-ping ("Outer Enclosure") was a fence that kept a pig farmer from falling into the marshes and kept the pigs where they belonged. It was represented by Alpha, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Mu, Nu, and Xi Piscium. The marshes were represented by the four stars designated Phi Ceti. The northern fish of Pisces was a part of the House of the Sandal, Koui-siou.


title: Pisces (constellation)

text: Pisces is a dim zodiac constellation between Aquarius and Aries. While astrological sign, water sign Pisces is deemed to fix on ecliptical longitudes 330° to 0, when the sun figures at these it is now mostly in Aquarius, due to the precession from when the constellation and the sign coincided. Precession results in Western astrology's zodiacal divisions, thus, not corresponding in the current era to the constellations that carry alike names while Jyotiṣa, widely used in Hindu and Jain culture, will assign events to the Sun's current background constellations.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps Rugby Football Club is a professional rugby union team. They last played in Premiership Rugby, the top division of English rugby until being suspended on 12 October 2022. On 17 October 2022 the club entered administration, resulting in relegation to the RFU Championship, and all staff being made redundant. They exited administration on 16 December 2022.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Founded in 1867 as Wasps Football Club, from 1923 to 1996 they were based at Repton Avenue in Sudbury, London. From 1996 to 2002 the team played at Loftus Road in Shepherd's Bush and from 2002 to 2014 they played at Adams Park in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. From 2014 and 2022 their home ground was the Coventry Building Society Arena in north Coventry. From 2023 they will play at the ARMCO Arena in Solihull.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps won 12 major titles. They were European Champions twice, in 2004 and 2007; won six English Championships including three in a row from 2003–05; and won three Anglo-Welsh Cups. They also won the 2003 European Rugby Challenge Cup. Wasps most recent trophy was the 2008 Premiership.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In their last completed season Wasps finished 9th. The most recent head coach was Lee Blackett who was appointed in February 2020, until being made redundant.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Hampstead Football Club was founded in 1866. A split in the membership resulted in the formation of two different clubs: Harlequin F.C. and Wasps. Wasps Football Club was itself formed in 1867 at the now defunct Eton and Middlesex Tavern in North London; names of insects, birds and other animals were considered fashionable in the Victorian period. In December 1870, Edwin Ash, Secretary of Richmond Football Club published a letter in the papers which said, "Those who play the rugby-type game should meet to form a code of practice as various clubs play to rules which differ from others, which makes the game difficult to play."


title: Wasps RFC

text: As a reasonably well-established club, the Wasps were eligible to be founder members of the Rugby Football Union (RFU). On 26 January 1871 the meeting was scheduled to take place. However a mix-up led to them sending their representative to the wrong venue at the wrong time on the wrong day. Another version of the story was that he went to a pub of the same name and after consuming a number of drinks was too drunk to make it to the correct address after he realised his mistake. Wasps were, therefore, not present at the inauguration ceremony and thus forfeited their right to be called foundation members.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps' first home was in Finchley Road, North London. Later, grounds were rented in various parts of London until in 1923 the Wasps found a permanent home at Sudbury, Middlesex, eventually buying the ground outright. The side had somewhat of a renaissance during the 1930s; in the earlier part of the decade they were seen as one of the better English clubs, going unbeaten in the 1930/31 English season. The 1930s also saw the emergence of Neville Compton, who captained the side between 1939 and 1947 and went on to become fixture secretary in 1959 and eventually became the club president in the early 1970s before retiring in 1988.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps went on to host Welsh internationals Vivian Jenkins and Harry Bowcott, in addition to this national representation, numerous Wasps came to play for the England national side, such as Ted Woodward, Bob Stirling, Richard Sharp and Don Rutherford. In 1967, the Wasps club celebrated their centenary. Celebrations took the form of two matches that were held at the Rugby school grounds, where William Webb Ellis is thought to have originated the rugby union game. One match was played against the Barbarian F.C., the other, against another London rugby union club, the Harlequins.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The 1980s saw what was, at that point, an all-time high representation of Wasps players in the England national side. In 1986, Wasps Football Club made their first appearance at the final of the John Player Cup knock-out competition, which originated in 1972. Wasps were defeated by Bath in a close game, where Bath emerged as winners, 25 points to 17. The following year Wasps continued their success in the knock-out competition and they again met Bath in the final. They were however again defeated by Bath in a close game, Bath winning 19 points to 12. Wasp Rob Andrew captained England against Romania in 1989. In 1990, Andrew captained Wasps to their first Courage League title, as they narrowly pipped Orrell R.U.F.C. to be English champions.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In 1995 Wasps lost 16–36 to Bath in the final of the Pilkington Cup. It was their first appearance in the final since 1987 and 1986, when their opponents — and the eventual winners — on both occasions were also Bath.


title: Wasps RFC

text: After winning the title, Wasps regularly finished in the top three of the Courage league title, although they were never quite good enough to overcome Bath, the pre-eminent club of the time. Then in 1995–96, with many pundits predicting Wasps could make a run for the title, Rob Andrew took up a lucrative deal to become Player Manager of Newcastle Falcons. He recruited several other leading Wasps, including, most notably, Club Captain Dean Ryan. For a few weeks Wasps looked like becoming the first casualty of the professional era as the backbone of their team had left. But under newly appointed captain Lawrence Dallaglio, the club steadied the ship, and managed to finish fourth, and secure a place in the following season's Heineken Cup, which English teams were entering for the first time.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The following season, 1996–97, Wasps won their second league championship, and became the first English Champions of the new professional era. It was an equally momentous season off the field. The club split into two parts, with the professional side becoming part of Loftus Road Holdings PLC, who also owned Queens Park Rangers F.C. One element of the deal saw Wasps move from their traditional Sudbury home to share QPR's Loftus Road stadium.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In 1998, the now-professional Wasps again reached the final of the Tetley's Bitter Cup, but lost 18–48 to a strong Saracens side. The following year Wasps again reached the final, they defeated Newcastle Falcons 29–19 to claim their first cup final win. In 2000 Wasps reached the final for the third consecutive year, successfully defending their title in a 31–23 victory over Northampton Saints.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In the summer of 1999, the professional team — which had been operating as Wasps RFC (professional) since the 1996–97 season — was renamed as London Wasps, to differentiate it from Wasps FC, the amateur side of the club. At the same time they adopted a new logo, which was selected as being in keeping with the club's history.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In 2001 ex-Wigan rugby league star Shaun Edwards joined as a coach. He has largely been credited with creating Wasps' famous Blitz Defence that stops teams and is the basis for Wasps' own scoring chances. London Wasps agreed to move out of Queens Park Rangers' Loftus Road stadium


title: Wasps RFC

text: to allow Fulham F.C. to rent for 2 seasons between 2002 and 2004, while their ground, Craven Cottage, was redeveloped. They became tenants to Wycombe Wanderers at Adams Park at the end of the 2001–02 season. The success of Wasps at their new ground meant they did not return to Loftus Road after Fulham left.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In the 2002–03 European Challenge Cup, Wasps made their way to the final, where they met Bath. Though Bath beat them in numerous finals in the 1990s, the Wasps emerged as champions, beating Bath 48 to 30 at Madejski Stadium. Wasps end of season run to glory also included timely wins that saw them defeat the Northampton Saints, in the Premiership semi-final, after finishing second in the league table. This saw them face Gloucester in the final at Twickenham. Wasps' superior fitness saw them waltz past the Cherry and Whites and win their first English title since 1997, by 39 points to 3.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps finished top of their pool in the 2003–04 Heineken Cup, where they went on to defeat Gloucester at the quarter-finals and won a final berth after beating Munster 37–32 in the semi-finals. They met Toulouse in the final at Twickenham, where they became champions, defeating the French side 27–20, winning their first Heineken Cup. Wasps followed up the win the following week, again at Twickenham, by beating Bath to retain the title of England's champion side, and complete a double.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In December 2004 the RFU revealed that the team was to be disqualified from the Powergen Cup for fielding an ineligible player, hooker Jonny Barrett, in a sixth-round game versus Bristol. Wasps went through the season well, after the cup glitch, and retained the English title for a second time, by beating Leicester Tigers in the final at Twickenham. Edwards, however, was not a totally happy man as Wasps conceded their first try of the three Premiership finals in the dying minutes. Warren Gatland signed off at Wasps with a rare smile to continue his coaching with Waikato in New Zealand.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Ian McGeechan became the new Director of Rugby at Wasps from the 2005–06 season, taking over from Gatland. Wasps won the Powergen Anglo-Welsh Cup in the 2005–06 season, beating Llanelli Scarlets in the final at Twickenham. Before the 2006–07 season began, Wasps won the Middlesex 7's in Twickenham, beating Leicester Tigers in the final.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In the 2007 Six Nations Championship, England vs. Wales game at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wasps supplied the back row of the scrum, James Haskell, Joe Worsley and Tom Rees all made an appearance. This was the first time that any club supplied the entire back row. Unfortunately for England, Wales won the encounter 27 to 18.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In the 2006–07 Heineken Cup, Wasps qualified by topping their group for a home quarter-final. They were drawn against Leinster on 31 March. There was a full house at Adams Park, and three players in total were sent to the Sin Bin, Lawrence Dallaglio in the last moments of the first half, Dominic Waldouck of London Wasps and Malcolm O'Kelly of Leinster later spent time there as well. The final score was 35–13 to wasps. In the semi-final at Coventry City's Ricoh Arena on 22 April, Wasps beat Northampton 30–13 and in doing so, gained a place in the Heineken Cup Final against Leicester Tigers at Twickenham.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Leicester Tigers were the favourites, as they had already won the Anglo-Welsh cup and the Guinness Premiership, the latter just the week before. Wasps went ahead early, and while Leicester kept in the match, Wasps won 25–9, thanks to penalties by Alex King and tries by Raphael Ibanez and Eoin Reddan to become 2007 champions.


title: Wasps RFC

text: During the 2007–08 season, Wasps went from 10th in the league during October, to beat Leicester Tigers in the Guinness Premiership Final. This sealed a dream send-off for the retiring Lawrence Dallaglio at Twickenham. Wasps won 26–16 thanks to penalties by Mark van Gisbergen and tries by Josh Lewsey and Tom Rees to become the English 2008 champions. Wasps have now won six league titles in all, equal with Bath and just one behind Leicester.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The 2008–09 season was to see Wasps come unstuck. With their captain having retired, many of the players failed to play to their full potential. Wasps would eventually finish in seventh place, having also failed to reach the knock-out stages of the Heineken Cup and EDF Anglo Welsh Cup. On 12 May 2009 it was announced in the evening standard that Ian McGeechan had been forced to step down and will now take a consultancy role both at London Wasps and London Scottish. This was confirmed by the BBC on 14 May. Tony Hanks, a former coach at the club, was announced as the new Director of Rugby soon after. He had more recently been coaching at Waikato and also been a stand in for McGeechan for the latter part of the 2008/09 season, while he was primarily committed to British and Irish Lions duty. McGeechan had technically been a Lions employee for the whole season and through agreement with Wasps was loaned back to the club.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The 2009–10 season started off with an exodus of key players including James Haskell and Tom Palmer who moved to Stade Français, Riki Flutey who also crossed the channel to join Brive and Eoin Reddan who left to join Leinster in Ireland.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In late February it was announced that Danny Cipriani would be leaving for the Melbourne Rebels in Australia and he was determined to leave on a high.


title: Wasps RFC

text: After beating Gloucester 42–26 in the quarter-final of the Amlin Cup scoring five tries (including a hat-trick from winger Tom Varndell), Wasps lost 15–18 at home to Cardiff Blues in the semi-final with Dave Walder kicking all of Wasps points with five penalties. Cardiff subsequently beat French Top 14 side Toulon in the final of the competition at the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps had a poor 2011–12 season, finishing in their lowest position for many seasons in 11th place, narrowly avoiding relegation from the Premiership. The season was notable for a good start where Wasps beat with a 15–20 reigning champions Saracens at Twickenham in the opening match and then runners-up Leicester in the second match with a 35–29. Things went downhill from there on as the worst injury toll known to professional rugby union hit the squad with a combined total of 16 serious and long term injuries and retirements.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Dai Young recruited well through the summer bringing in players such as Andrea Masi (2012 6 Nations Player Of The Tournament) and Stephen Jones. He also welcomed back former Wasps Tom Palmer and James Haskell.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps beat their record of their European highest-scoring margin with a 90–17 win against Viadana on 12 October 2013, beating the 77–17 margin of victory against Toulouse on 26 October 1996.


title: Wasps RFC

text: On 30 June 2014, the club announced that the "London" prefix of the name had been dropped, returning to Wasps for the first time since the re-branding in 1999.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In September 2014, Simon Gilbert, of the "Coventry Telegraph" reported the side were in talks to permanently relocate to the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, from their home at Adams Park, in High Wycombe. In October 2014 Wasps announced that from December 2014 they would play their home games at the Ricoh Arena. On 14 November 2014 Wasps confirmed the purchase of the final 50% of shares in the stadium from the Higgs Charity to become outright owners of the facility.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The 2014–15 season saw Wasps finish 6th. Andy Goode was the Premiership's top scorer, ending the season with 240 points.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Things improved for Wasps in the 2015–16 season, with them finishing 3rd in the league. They lost their play-off semi-final with eventual runners-up Exeter Chiefs.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps finished 1st in the 2016–17 regular season. Despite this success, Wasps went on to lose to Exeter Chiefs in the play-off final, having beaten Leicester in the semi-final.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In the 2017–18 regular season, Wasps finished 3rd. They faced Saracens in the semi-final play-off, but lost 57–33. The 2017–18 season marked 150 years since the foundation of Wasps Rugby Football Club and was celebrated with an anniversary game against Bath Rugby.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The 2018–19 campaign saw Wasps slip to an 8th place finish overall. Across the season, Wasps recorded 10 wins and 12 losses.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The 2019–20 Gallagher Premiership Season saw huge improvement for Wasps who finished 2nd in the table (71 points) behind league leaders Exeter Chiefs (74 points). As a result of finishing 2nd, Wasps earned a home semi-final against Bristol Bears on Saturday 10 October 2020 at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry. Wasps won 47–24 earning a place in the Gallagher Premiership Final on Saturday 24 October 2020 against Exeter Chiefs at Twickenham Stadium. In a repeat of the outcome of the 2016–17 Final, Wasps were defeated by Exeter Chiefs. The result was 19–13.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The 2020–21 season saw another slump for Wasps who fell out of the Top 4 playoff positions, finishing 8th in the table.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In May 2021 it was announced that Wasps' home stadium would be renamed to the Coventry Building Society Arena. On Monday 19 July 2021, Wasps announced a new logo to bring all elements of Wasps including the Netball team, Women and Amateur rugby sides under one new visual identity.


title: Wasps RFC

text: On 15 May 2022, Wasps failed to repay the £35m bond finance they had raised in 2015, however stated they hoped to re-finance by 13 August. On 13 August 2022, Wasps did not refinance the bond, with owner Derek Richardson stating "we are not in administration and we are not going to be" after rumours of administration appeared on the internet.


title: Wasps RFC

text: On 21 September 2022, Wasps Holdings announced their intention to appoint administrators due to ongoing financial difficulty. After a second notice of intention was filed on 4 October, the club were suspended from all tournaments on 12 October due to inability to field a team and Wasps Holdings were placed into administration on 17 October 2022 with all their playing and coaching staff made redundant. The team had their current results removed and were also relegated to the RFU Championship, the second tier of English rugby. The club had debts totalling £95 million.


title: Wasps RFC

text: On 30 October it was confirmed that the administrators had accepted an offer from a consortium to buy the club, with the RFU expecting a 'decision ahead of Christmas.'


title: Wasps RFC

text: The club confirmed on 16 December that the club had been successfully sold and exited administration. It was also confirmed that they had satisfied all RFU requirements to join the Championship from the 2023–24 season. They will remain in the West Midlands as they have agreed a groundshare with Solihull Moors at the ARMCO Arena.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps' main rival were Harlequins in Twickenham, London. Both clubs were once unified as Hampstead Football Club. Wasps split from Hampstead Football Club (which changed its name to Harlequin F.C. in 1870) over discourse among members in 1867.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Following Wasps' move to Coventry, Wasps tried to kindle rivalries with other clubs in the Midlands region of England. This included the likes of Leicester Tigers and Northampton Saints leading one rugby commentator to state that the games, "lack the history that a derby demands".


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps expanded their sporting brand in 2016 with the addition of Wasps Netball. They play their home games at the Indoor Arena - Coventry located in the Coventry Building Society Arena.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In the 2018 and 2019 Netball Superleague seasons, they finished in top position, with Loughborough Lightning in 2nd place. Both teams proceeded to the Grand Final for a 2017 rematch, with Wasps winning their 2nd consecutive title with a scoreline identical to the 2017 and 2018 finals.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps Netball were also placed into administration on 17 October 2022 with all their playing and coaching staff made redundant.


title: Wasps RFC

text: On 10 November 2022, England Netball announced that Wasps Netball would no longer be eligible to compete in the Netball Super League moving forwards.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps' first home was in Finchley Road, North London although subsequent years saw grounds being rented in various parts of London. In 1923 the club moved to a permanent home at Repton Avenue, Sudbury, Middlesex, eventually buying the ground outright.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In 1996 Wasps moved to play their home games at Queens Park Rangers' home ground, Loftus Road, in West London. The site of the ground at Sudbury was later developed for housing, though the original club house still stands and is used as a community centre.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps made another move in 2002, this time 30 miles west of Greater London, playing their home games at Wycombe Wanderers' ground, Adams Park, in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The attendance figure went up by 31.8% the next season. Between 2004 and 2015 Wasps took part in the London Double Header at Twickenham, this was a designated home match in 2005, 2007, 2010, 2012 and 2013. In 2006 this drew a crowd of 51,950, breaking the record set in 2004.


title: Wasps RFC

text: In 2007 Wasps, Wycombe Wanderers and Wycombe District Council entered a joint venture that would fund a new stadium in the High Wycombe area. The favoured site for the new stadium was at Wycombe Air Park, a site owned by Wycombe District Council and close to the M40 motorway. The planned stadium was of 16–17,000 capacity, and would have been the first new football ground in England with terraced section since the Taylor Report. The development would also have included retail, hotel, conference and other facilities. Wasps and Wanderers funding was primarily from Steve Hayes, who had become a 25% share holder through a £250,000 investment in Wycombe Wanderers in June 2004, when the football club became a plc company; and later became managing director. Hayes bought an 11.6% stake in London Wasps Holdings Ltd in August 2007, and became chairman of Lawrence Dallaglio's benefit committee. In December 2008, Hayes bought Wright's controlling interest and John O'Connell's share holding in Wasps to take complete control. After the stadium plans at Booker Airfield were turned down, Steve Hayes put the club up for sale, with Derek Richardson becoming principal shareholder in April 2013


title: Wasps RFC

text: Wasps' first official home game in Coventry was during the 2007–08 Heineken Cup when they used the then named Ricoh Arena as their home venue against Munster on 10 November 2007 due to its bigger capacity. While commercially the move was seen as a success, with Wasps winning the game 24–23 in front of a crowd of 21,506, the move attracted severe criticism from many of the club's supporters, citing the long distance from London (a round-trip of almost 200 miles for London-based fans). The club argued that they had little choice but to relocate the match as their landlords, Wycombe Wanderers, had a home FA Cup tie the same day.


title: Wasps RFC

text: On 7 October 2014, Wasps purchased 50% in Arena Coventry Ltd (the operating company of the Ricoh Arena, with the intention of relocating to the Midlands. After gaining a 100% stake in the company on 14 November 2014, Wasps played their first game in Coventry as owners on 21 December 2014; a 48–16 win against London Irish. While initially the relocation was only for 1st team home games; the club relocated completely ahead of the 2016–17 season.


title: Wasps RFC

text: After the team entered administration in 2022, the Coventry Building Society Arena was purchased by the Frasers Group on 17 November 2022 and Wasps ceased to be based there.


title: Wasps RFC

text: For Wasps' return in 2023 they will play at the ARMCO Arena in Solihull home of football team Solihull Moors.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Irish businessman Derek Richardson became principal shareholder of Wasps group in April 2013, taking the group from the brink of insolvency to administration in October 2022 with over £100m of debt.


title: Wasps RFC

text: On 29 April 2021, Wasps announced a new multi-year deal with Danish sportswear manufacturer Hummel to become 'technical and retail partner'. The contract, commencing the 2021–22 season, would see Wasps become the first British domestic rugby union team to use the company.


title: Wasps RFC

text: Previous manufacturers include Canterbury and Kukri. The first away kit produced by Kukri in 2012 (a hooped blue away shirt) was a change from the white or black and gold hoops traditionally used as a tie in with the clubs chosen charity MIND in a combined effort to help raise the awareness of mental health issues in sport.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The kit is supplied by Under Armour. On the front of the shirt, Vodafone appear at the centre and the top left while Dell EMC appears on the top of their collars. On the back of the shirt, DS Smith appear at the top while Dell EMC appear on top of the squad number. Hottinger Group appear on the top of the right arm. Land Rover appear on the bottom right on the back of their shorts.


title: Wasps RFC

text: The following are players which have represented their countries at the Rugby World Cup, whilst playing for Wasps:


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: The Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine () was adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR on 24 August 1991. The Act reestablished Ukraine's state independence.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: The Act was adopted in the aftermath of the coup attempt in the Soviet Union on 19 August, when hardline Communist leaders attempted to restore central Communist party control over the USSR. In response (during a tense 11-hour extraordinary session), the Supreme Soviet (parliament) of the Ukrainian SSR, in a special Saturday session, overwhelmingly approved the Act of Declaration. The Act passed with 321 votes in favor, 2 votes against, and 6 abstentions (out of 360 attendants). The text was largely composed during the night of 23 August–24 August mainly by Levko Lukyanenko, Serhiy Holovatyi, Mykhailo Horyn, Ivan Zayets and Vyacheslav Chornovil.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: The Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), with the campaigning behind the scenes by its fellow Party member and Ukrainian Supreme Soviet Chairman Leonid Kravchuk, felt compelled to support the Act in order to distance itself from the coup. CPU First Secretary Stanislav Hurenko argued that "it will be a disaster" if the CPU were to fail to support independence. CPU members had been unnerved by the news of former Ukrainian SSR party leader Vladimir Ivashko's arrest in Moscow, the re-subordination of the Soviet Army under the leaders of the Russian SFSR and the sealing of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee's premises.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: The same day (24 August), the parliament called for a referendum on support for the Declaration of Independence. The proposal for calling the national referendum came jointly from opposition leaders Ihor Yukhnovsky and Dmytro Pavlychko. The Parliament also voted for the creation of a national guard of Ukraine and turned jurisdiction over all the armed forces located on Ukrainian territory over to itself.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: Other than a noisy crowd that had gathered at the Parliament building, the streets of Kyiv were quiet that day, with few signs of open celebration.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: In the days that followed, a number of resolutions and decrees were passed: nationalizing all CPU property and handing it over to the Supreme Soviet and local councils; issuing an amnesty for all political prisoners; suspending all CPU activities and freezing CPU assets and bank accounts pending official investigations into possible collaboration with the Moscow coup plotters; setting up a committee of inquiry into official behavior during the coup; and establishing a committee on military matters related to the creation of a Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: On 26 August 1991, the Permanent Representative of the Ukrainian SSR to the United Nations (Soviet Ukraine being a founding member of the United Nations), Hennadiy Udovenko, informed the office of the Secretary General of the United Nations that his permanent mission to this international assembly would officially be designated as representing Ukraine. That same day, the executive committee of Kyiv also voted to remove all the monuments of Communist heroes from public places, including the Lenin monument in the central October Revolution Square. The committee decided that the large square would be renamed Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) as would the central Metro station below it.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: Two days later, more than 200,000 Lviv and Lviv oblast residents declared their readiness to serve in the national guard.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: In the independence referendum on 1 December 1991, the people of Ukraine expressed deep and widespread support for the Act of Declaration of Independence, with more than 90% voting in favor, and 84% of the electorate participating. The referendum took place on the same day as Ukraine's first direct presidential election; all six presidential candidates supported independence and campaigned for a "yes" vote. The referendum's passage ended any realistic chance of the Soviet Union remaining together even on a limited scale; Ukraine had long been second only to Russia in economic and political power in the USSR.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: A week after the election, newly elected president Leonid Kravchuk joined his Russian and Belarusian counterparts (Boris Yeltsin and Stanislav Shushkevich, respectively) in signing the Belovezh Accords, which declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The Soviet Union officially dissolved on 26 December.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: Poland and Canada were the first countries to recognize Ukraine's independence, both on 2 December 1991. On the same day (2 December) it was reported during the late-evening airing of the television news program "Vesti" that the President of the Russian SFSR, Boris Yeltsin, had recognized Ukraine's independence.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: The United States did so on 25 December 1991. That month the independence of Ukraine was recognized by 68 States, and in 1992 it was recognized by another 64 States.


title: Declaration of Independence of Ukraine

text: In January 1992, U.S. President George H. W. Bush approved a program of American humanitarian support for Ukraine and the rest of the former USSR, supervised by the Secretary of Defense.


title: Solvay Conference

text: The Solvay Conferences () have been devoted to outstanding preeminent open problems in both physics and chemistry. They began with the historic invitation-only 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics, considered a turning point in the world of physics, and continue to the present day.


title: Solvay Conference

text: Following the initial success of 1911, they have since been organised by the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry, founded by the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay in 1912 and 1913, and located in Brussels. The institutes coordinate conferences, workshops, seminars, and colloquia. Recent Solvay Conferences usually go through a three year cycle: the Solvay Conference on Physics, followed by a gap year, followed by the Solvay Conference on Chemistry.


title: Solvay Conference

text: Hendrik Lorentz was chairman of the first Solvay Conference on Physics, held in Brussels from 30 October to 3 November 1911. The subject was "Radiation and the Quanta". This conference looked at the problems of having two approaches, namely classical physics and quantum theory. Albert Einstein was the second youngest physicist present (the youngest one was Lindemann). Other members of the "Solvay Congress" were experts including Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford and Henri Poincaré (see image for attendee list).


title: Solvay Conference

text: The third Solvay Conference on Physics was held in April 1921, soon after World War I. Most German scientists were barred from attending. In protest at this action, Albert Einstein, although he had renounced German citizenship in 1901 and become a Swiss citizen, declined his invitation to attend the conference and publicly renounced any German citizenship again. Because anti-Semitism had been on the rise, Einstein accepted the invitation by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization, for a trip to the United States to raise money.


title: Solvay Conference

text: Perhaps the most famous conference was the fifth Solvay Conference on Physics, which was held from 24 to 29 October 1927; the subject was "Electrons and Photons" and the world's most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Seventeen of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners, including Marie Curie who, alone among them, had won Nobel Prizes in two separate scientific disciplines. Attendees Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Erwin Schrödinger would be listed among the top ten greatest physicists of all-time, in a 1999 poll of leading physicists for "Physics World" magazine.


title: Schön scandal

text: The Schön scandal concerns German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön (born August 1970 in Verden an der Aller, Lower Saxony, Germany) who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs with semiconductors that were later discovered to be fraudulent. Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001, as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, all of which were later rescinded.


title: Schön scandal

text: The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific articles. The debate centered on whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of articles, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud.


title: Schön scandal

text: Schön's field of research was condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1997. In late 1997, he was hired by Bell Labs, where he worked on electronics in which conventional semiconducting elements (such as silicon) were replaced by crystalline organic (meaning carbon-based) materials. Schön, however, claimed spectacular ability in changing the conductivity of the organic materials, far beyond anything achieved thus far. His measurements in most cases confirmed various theoretical predictions, notably that the organic materials could be made to display superconductivity or be used in lasers. The findings were published in prominent scientific publications, including the journals "Science" and "Nature", and gained worldwide attention. However, no research group anywhere in the world succeeded in reproducing the results claimed by Schön.


title: Schön scandal

text: In 2001, he was listed as an author on an average of one newly published research paper every eight days. In the same year, he announced in "Nature" that he had produced a transistor on the molecular scale. Schön claimed to have used a thin layer of organic dye molecules to assemble an electric circuit that, when acted on by an electric current, behaved as a transistor. The implications of his work were significant. It would have been the beginning of a move away from silicon-based electronics and towards organic electronics. It would have allowed transistors to continue shrinking past the point at which silicon breaks down, and therefore continue Moore's law for much longer than was then predicted. It also would have drastically reduced the cost of electronics.


title: Schön scandal

text: A key element in Schön's work claimed successful observation of various physical phenomena in organic materials was dependent on the transistor setup. Specifically, Schön claimed to use a thin layer of aluminium oxide which he incorporated into his transistors using lab facilities at the University of Konstanz. However, while the equipment and materials used were common in laboratories all over the world, none succeeded in preparing aluminium oxide layers of similar quality to the ones claimed by Schön.


title: Schön scandal

text: Soon after Schön published his work on single-molecule semiconductors, others in the physics community alleged that his data contained anomalies. Julia Hsu and Lynn Loo originally noticed problems with Schön's paper describing the assembly of molecular transistors whilst attempting to patent research on lithography, realizing that Schön had duplicated figures. Hsu and Loo had attempted initial experiments to gather evidence for their patent but relied on the scientific outcomes of Schön's work. It was not until April 19, 2002 when Loo and Hsu were meeting with their patent lawyer John McCabe that they noticed the duplicated data. Lydia Sohn, then of Princeton University, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise. When the editors of "Nature" pointed this out to Schön, he claimed to have accidentally submitted the same graph twice. Paul McEuen of Cornell University then found the same noise in a paper describing a third experiment. More research by McEuen, Sohn, Lynn Loo, and other physicists uncovered a number of examples of duplicate data in Schön's work. This triggered a series of reactions that quickly led Lucent Technologies (which ran Bell Labs) to start a formal investigation.


title: Schön scandal

text: In May 2002, Bell Labs set up a committee to investigate, with Malcolm Beasley from Stanford University as chair. The committee obtained information from all of Schön's coauthors and interviewed the three principal ones (Zhenan Bao, Bertram Batlogg and Christian Kloc). It examined electronic drafts of the disputed articles, which included processed numeric data. The committee requested copies of the raw data, but found that Schön had kept no laboratory notebooks. His raw data files had been erased from his computer. According to Schön, the files were erased because his computer had limited hard drive space. In addition, all of his experimental samples had been discarded or damaged beyond repair.


title: Schön scandal

text: On September 25, 2002, the committee publicly released its report. The report contained details of 24 allegations of misconduct on Schön's part. They found evidence of scientific misconduct in at least 16 of them while the remaining 8 were unrelated to publications or troubling but lacked compelling evidence of misconduct. They found that whole data sets had been reused in a number of different experiments. They also found that some of his graphs, which purportedly had been plotted from experimental data, had instead been produced using mathematical functions.


title: Schön scandal

text: The report found that all of the misdeeds had been performed by Schön alone. All of the coauthors (including Bertram Batlogg, who was the head of the team) were exonerated of scientific misconduct. This sparked widespread debate in the scientific community on how the blame for misconduct should be distributed among co-authors, particularly when they share a significant part of the credit.


title: Schön scandal

text: Schön acknowledged that the data were incorrect in many of these articles. He claimed that the substitutions could have occurred by honest mistake. He omitted some data and stated that he did so to show more convincing evidence for behavior that he observed.


title: Schön scandal

text: Researchers at Delft University of Technology and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center have since performed experiments similar to Schön's, without achieving similar results. Even before the allegations had become public, several research groups had tried to reproduce most of his spectacular results in the field of the physics of organic molecular materials without success.


title: Schön scandal

text: In June 2004 the University of Konstanz issued a press release stating that Schön's doctoral degree had been revoked due to "dishonourable conduct". Department of Physics spokesman Wolfgang Dieterich called the affair the "biggest fraud in physics in the last 50 years" and said that the "credibility of science had been brought into disrepute". Schön appealed the ruling, but on October 28, 2009, it was upheld by the university. In response, Schön sued the university and appeared in court to testify on September 23, 2010. The court overturned the university's decision on September 27, 2010. However, in November 2010 the university moved to appeal the court's ruling. The state court ruled in September 2011 that the university was correct in revoking his doctorate. The Federal Administrative Court upheld the state court's decision in July 2013, and the Federal Constitutional Court confirmed it in September 2014.


title: Schön scandal

text: In October 2004, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German Research Foundation) Joint Committee announced sanctions against him. The former DFG post-doctorate fellow was deprived of his active right to vote in DFG elections or serve on DFG committees for an eight-year period. During that period, Schön was also unable to serve as a peer reviewer or apply for DFG funds.


title: Schön scandal

text: The retraction notices from February 24, 2003 in "Applied Physics Letters" relayed concerns about seven articles written by Schön and published in the "Applied Physics Letters":


title: Schön scandal

text: The retraction notice from March 20, 2003 in "Advanced Materials" mentions concerns about another article written by Schön:


title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

text: The sexuality of William Shakespeare has been the subject of recurring debate. It is known from public records that he married Anne Hathaway and had three children with her; scholars have analysed their relationship through these documents, and particularly through the bequests to her in his will. Some historians have speculated Shakespeare had affairs with other women, based on contemporaries' written anecdotes of such affairs and sometimes on the "Dark Lady" figure in his sonnets. Some scholars have argued he was bisexual, based on analysis of the sonnets; many, including Sonnet 18, are love poems addressed to a man (the "Fair Youth"), and contain puns relating to homosexuality.


title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

text: At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. Two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds the next day as surety that there were no impediments to the marriage. The couple may have arranged the ceremony in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times. Hathaway's pregnancy could have been the reason for this. Six months after the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later.


title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

text: Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare probably initially loved Hathaway, supporting this by referring to the theory that a passage in one of his sonnets (Sonnet 145) plays off Anne Hathaway's name, saying she saved his life (writing "I hate from hate away she threw/And saved my life, saying 'not you.'"). Nevertheless, after only three years of marriage Shakespeare left his family and moved to London. Greenblatt suggests that this may imply that he felt trapped by Hathaway. Other evidence to support this belief is that he and Anne were buried in separate (but adjoining) graves and, as has often been noted, Shakespeare's will makes no specific bequest to his wife aside from "the second best bed with the furniture". This may seem like a slight, but many historians contend that the second best bed was typically the marital bed, while the best bed was reserved for guests. The poem "Anne Hathaway" by Carol Ann Duffy endorses this view of the second best bed, having Anne say: "The bed we loved in was a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas where we would dive for pearls." On the other hand, "In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on, dribbling their prose". A bed missing from an inventory of Anne's brother's possessions (removed in contravention of their father's will) allows the explanation that the item was an heirloom from the Hathaway family that had to be returned. The law at the time also stated that the widow of a man was automatically entitled to a third of his estate, so Shakespeare did not need to mention specific bequests in the will.


title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

text: While in London, Shakespeare may have had affairs with different women. One anecdote along these lines is provided by a lawyer named John Manningham, who wrote in his diary that Shakespeare had a brief affair with a woman during a performance of "Richard III."


title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

text: Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.


title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

text: The Burbage referred to is Richard Burbage, the star of Shakespeare's company, who is known to have played the title role in "Richard III". While this is one of the few surviving contemporary anecdotes about Shakespeare—it was made in March 1602, a month after Manningham had seen the play—some scholars are sceptical of its validity. Still, the anecdote suggests that at least one of Shakespeare's contemporaries (Manningham) believed that Shakespeare was attracted to women, even if he was not 'averse to an occasional infidelity to his marriage vows'. Indeed, its significance has been developed to affording Shakespeare a preference for "promiscuous women of little beauty and no breeding" in his honest acknowledgement that well-born women are beyond his reach.


title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

text: An even less certain reference to an affair is a passage in the poem "Willobie His Avisa", by Henry Willobie, which refers to Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece" in the line "Shake-speare paints poor Lucrece' rape". Later in the poem there is a section in which "H.W." (Henry Willobie) and "W.S." discuss Willobie's love for "Avisa" in a verse conversation. This is introduced with a short explanatory passage:


title: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

text: W.S., who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recovered ... he [Willobie] determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, than it did for the old player.