title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Since the beginning of the oil sands development, there have been several leaks into the Athabasca River polluting it with oil and tailing pond water. The close proximity of the tailing ponds to the river drastically increases the likelihood of contamination due to ground water leakages. In 1997, Suncor admitted that their tailing ponds had been leaking of toxic water into the river a day. This water contains naphthenic acid, trace metals such as mercury and other pollutants. The Athabasca River is the largest freshwater delta in the world but with Suncor and Syncrude leaking tail ponds the amount of polluted water will exceed 1 billion cubic meters by 2020.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Natural toxicants derived from bitumen in Northern Alberta pose potential ecological and human health risks to northerners living in the area. Oil sands development contributes arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and other metal elements toxic at low concentrations to the tributaries and rivers of the Athabasca.<ref name="doi: 10.1073/pnas.1008754107"></ref>


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The processing of bitumen into synthetic crude requires energy, which is currently being generated by burning natural gas. In 2007, the oil sands used around of natural gas per day, around 40% of Alberta's total usage. Based on gas purchases, natural gas requirements are given by the Canadian Energy Resource Institute as 2.14 GJ (2.04 thousand cu ft) per barrel for cyclic steam stimulation projects, 1.08 GJ (1.03 thousand cu ft) per barrel for SAGD projects, 0.55 GJ (0.52 thousand cu ft) per barrel for bitumen extraction in mining operations not including upgrading or 1.54 GJ (1.47 thousand cu ft) per barrel for extraction and upgrading in mining operations.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: oil." Author and investigative journalist David Strahan that same year stated that IEA figures show that carbon dioxide emissions from the oil sands are 20% higher than average emissions from oil, explaining the discrepancy as the difference between upstream emissions and life cycle emissions. He goes on to say that a US government report in 2005 suggested with current technology conventional oil releases 40 kg of carbon dioxide per barrel while non-conventional oil releases 80–115 kg of carbon dioxide. Alberta energy suggests lower releases of carbon with improving technology, giving a value of 39% drop in emissions per barrel between 1990 and 2008, however only a 29% reduction between 1990 and 2009.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The forecast growth in synthetic oil production in Alberta also threatens Canada's international commitments. In ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, Canada agreed to reduce, by 2012, its greenhouse gas emissions by 6% with respect to 1990. In 2002, Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions had increased by 24% since 1990.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Ranked as the world's eighth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, Canada is a relatively large emitter given its population and is missing its Kyoto targets. A major Canadian initiative called the Integrated Network (ICO2N) promotes the development of large scale capture, transport and storage of carbon dioxide (CO) as a means of helping Canada to help meet climate change objectives while supporting economic growth. ICO2N members represent a group of industry participants, many oil sands producers, providing a framework for carbon capture and storage development in Canada.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Two separate fraud lawsuits were filed against "ExxonMobil involving Alberta's oilsands" in October. One was in New York and the second was filed in Massachusetts on October 24. The Massachusetts lawsuit says that ExxonMobil misled investors by "falsely" justifying to them "its riskiest long-term investments, including Canadian bitumen oilsands projects." The company did not warn investors "about what climate change measures could cost its operations — especially those in the oilsands."


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In Northern Alberta, oil development activities bring an enormous number of people into a fragile ecosystem. Historically, population figures have been very low for this region. Water is easily polluted because the water table reaches the surface in most areas of muskeg. With the ever-increasing development and extraction of resources, wildlife are recipient to both direct and indirect effects of pollution. Woodland Caribou are particularly sensitive to human activities, and as such are pushed away from their preferred habitat during the time of year when their caloric needs are greatest and food is the most scarce. Humans' effect on the Caribou is compounded by road construction and habitat fragmentation that open the area up to deer and wolves.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Wildlife living near the Athabasca River have been greatly impacted due to pollutants entering the water system. An unknown number of birds die each year. Particularly visible and hard hit are migrating birds that stop to rest at tailing ponds. There have been numerous reports of large flocks of ducks landing in tailing ponds and perishing soon after. Data has been recorded since the 1970s on the number of birds found on tailing ponds.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: There has also been a large impact on the fish that live and spawn in the area. As toxins accumulate in the river due to the oil sands, bizarre mutations, tumors, and deformed fish species have begun to appear. A study commissioned by the region's health authority found that several known toxins and carcinogens were elevated. Aboriginal communities that live around the river are becoming increasingly worried about how the animals they eat and their drinking water are being affected.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: While there has been no link yet made between the oil sands and health issues, Matt Price of Environmental Defense says the connection makes common sense. Deformities in fish and high concentrations of toxic substances in animals have also been identified.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Large volumes of tailings are a byproduct of bitumen extraction from the oil sands and managing these tailings is one of the most difficult environmental challenges facing the oil sands industry. Tailings ponds are engineered dam and dyke systems that contain solvents used in the separation process as well as residual bitumen, salts and soluble organic compounds, fine silts and water. The concentrations of chemicals may be harmful to fish and oil on the surface harmful to birds. These settling basins were meant to be temporary. A major hindrance to the monitoring of oil sands produced waters has been the lack of identification of individual compounds present. By better understanding the nature of the highly complex mixture of compounds, including naphthenic acids, it may be possible to monitor rivers for leachate and also to remove toxic components. Such identification of individual acids has for many years proved to be impossible but a breakthrough in 2011 in analysis began to reveal what is in the oil sands tailings ponds. Ninety percent of the tailings water can be reused for oil extraction. By 2009 as tailing ponds continued to proliferate and volumes of fluid tailings increased, the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board issued Directive 074 to force oil companies to manage tailings based on new aggressive criteria. The Government of Alberta reported in 2013 that tailings ponds in the Alberta oil sands covered an area of about . The Tailings Management Framework for Mineable Oil Sands is part of Alberta's Progressive Reclamation Strategy for the oil sands to ensure that tailings are reclaimed as quickly as possible.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Suncor invested $1.2 billion in their Tailings Reduction Operations (TROTM) method that treats mature fine tails (MFT) from tailings ponds with chemical flocculant, an anionic Polyacrylamide, commonly used in water treatment plants to improve removal of total organic content (TOC), to speed their drying into more easily reclaimable matter. Mature tailings dredged from a pond bottom in suspension were mixed with a polymer flocculant and spread over a "beach" with a shallow grade where the tailings would dewater and dry under ambient conditions. The dried MFT can then be reclaimed in place or moved to another location for final reclamation. Suncor hoped this would reduce the time for water reclamation from tailings to weeks rather than years, with the recovered water being recycled into the oil sands plant. Suncor claimed the mature fines tailings process would reduce the number of tailing ponds and shorten the time to reclaim a tailing pond from 40 years at present to 7–10 years, with land rehabilitation continuously following 7 to 10 years behind the mining operations. For the reporting periods from 2010 to 2012, Suncor had a lower-than-expected fines capture performance from this technology.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Syncrude used the older composite tailings (CT) technology to capture fines at its Mildred Lake project. Syncrude had a lower-than-expected fines capture performance in 2011–2012 but exceeded expectations in 2010–2011. Shell used atmospheric fines drying (AFD) technology combined "fluid tailings and flocculants and deposits the mixture in a sloped area to allow the water to drain and the deposit to dry" and had a lower-than-expected fines capture performance.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: By 2010 Suncor had transformed their first tailings pond, Pond One, into Wapisiw Lookout, the first reclaimed settling basin in the oil sands. In 2007 the area was a 220-hectare pond of toxic effluent but several years later there was firm land planted with black spruce and trembling aspen. Wapisiw Lookout represents only one percent of tailings ponds in 2011 but Pond One was the first effluent pond in the oil sands industry in 1967 and was used until 1997. By 2011 only 65 square kilometres were cleaned up and about one square kilometre was certified by Alberta as a self-sustaining natural environment. Wapisiw Lookout has not yet been certified. Closure operations of Pond One began in 2007. The jello-like mature fine tails (MFT) were pumped and dredged out of the pond and relocated to another tailings pond for long-term storage and treatment. The MFT was then replaced with 30 million tonnes clean sand and then topsoil that had been removed from the site in the 1960s. The of topsoil over the surface, to a depth of , was placed on top of the sand in the form of hummocks and swales. It was then planted with reclamation plants.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In March 2012 an alliance of oil companies called Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) was launched with a mandate to share research and technology to decrease the negative environmental impact of oil sands production focusing on tailings ponds, greenhouse gases, water and land. Almost all the water used to produce crude oil using steam methods of production ends up in tailings ponds. Recent enhancements to this method include Tailings Oil Recovery (TOR) units which recover oil from the tailings, Diluent Recovery Units to recover naphtha from the froth, Inclined Plate Settlers (IPS) and disc centrifuges. These allow the extraction plants to recover well over 90% of the bitumen in the sand.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In January 2013, scientists from Queen's University published a report analyzing lake sediments in the Athabasca region over the past fifty years. They found that levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) had increased as much as 23-fold since bitumen extraction began in the 1960s. Levels of carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic PAHs were substantially higher than guidelines for lake sedimentation set by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment in 1999. The team discovered that the contamination spread farther than previously thought.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Pembina Institute suggested that the huge investments by many companies in Canadian oil sands leading to increased production results in excess bitumen with no place to store it. It added that by 2022 a month's output of waste-water could result in a toxic reservoir the size of New York City's Central Park [840.01 acres (339.94 ha) (3.399 km)].


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The oil sands industry may build a series of up to thirty lakes by pumping water into old mine pits when they have finished excavation leaving toxic effluent at their bottoms and letting biological processes restore it to health. It is less expensive to fill abandoned open pit mines with water instead of dirt. In 2012 the Cumulative Environmental Management Association (CEMA) described End Pit Lakes (EPL) as


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: CEMA acknowledged that the "main concern is the potential for EPLs to develop a legacy of toxicity and thus reduce the land use value of the oil sands region in the future." Syncrude Canada was planning the first end pit lake in 2013 with the intention of "pumping fresh water over 40 vertical metres of mine effluent that it has deposited in what it calls 'base mine lake.'" David Schindler argued that no further end pit lakes should be approved until we "have some assurance that they will eventually support a healthy ecosystem." There is to date no "evidence to support their viability, or the 'modelled' results suggesting that outflow from the lakes will be non-toxic."


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Oil sands and especially the related projects, like the construction of a new pipeline, also have a social impact. Most of all, the local population groups would suffer from the effects of a new oil pipeline. In addition to the risk of general oil spills, there is now also the danger of gathering food due to the pollution of the fields and waters. Despite the fact that most people in those areas are not well off, the money is still used to build new projects instead of spending it on improving the quality of life there. Furthermore, adding a new pipeline to the already existing oil pipelines would increase our dependence on fossil fuels.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In July 2015, one of the largest leaks in Canada's history spilled 5,000 cubic metres of emulsion — about 5 million litres of bitumen, sand and wastewater — from a Nexen Energy pipeline at a Long Lake oil sands facility, south of Fort McMurray. The subsidiary of China's CNOOC Ltd. automated safety systems had not detected the pipeline fault that caused the spill to cover an area of about 16,000 square metres prior to manual inspection. Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) revealed the number of pipeline "incidents" in Alberta increased 15% last year, despite the regulator's well-publicized efforts to reduce ruptures and spills.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: An explosion left one worker dead and another seriously injured at the Chinese-owned Nexen Energy facility in the Long Lake oil sands near Anzac, south of Fort McMurray The two maintenance workers involved were found near natural gas compression equipment used for a hydrocracker, which turns heavy oil into lighter crude, at the plant's main processing facility, known as an upgrader.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Athabasca oil sands are located in the northeastern portion of the Canadian province of Alberta, near the city of Fort McMurray. The area is only sparsely populated, and in the late 1950s, it was primarily a wilderness outpost of a few hundred people whose main economic activities included fur trapping and salt mining. From a population of 37,222 in 1996, the boomtown of Fort McMurray and the surrounding region (known as the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo) grew to 79,810 people as of 2006, including a "shadow population" of 10,442 living in work camps. The community struggled to provide services and housing for migrant workers, many of them from Eastern Canada, especially Newfoundland. Fort McMurray ceased to be an incorporated city in 1995 and is now an urban service area within Wood Buffalo.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: By 2015, Venezuela accounted for 18%, Saudi Arabia for 16.1%, and Canada for 10.3% of the world's proven oil reserves, according to NRCAN.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Alberta government's Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) estimated in 2007 that about of crude bitumen were economically recoverable from the three Alberta oil sands areas based on then-current technology and price projections from the 2006 market prices of $62 per barrel for benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI), rising to a projected $69 per barrel. This was equivalent to about 10% of the estimated of bitumen-in-place. Alberta estimated that the Athabasca deposits alone contain of surface mineable bitumen and of bitumen recoverable by in-situ methods. These estimates of Canada's reserves were doubted when they were first published but are now largely accepted by the international oil industry. This volume placed Canadian proven reserves second in the world behind those of Saudi Arabia.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Only 3% of the initial established crude bitumen reserves have been produced since commercial production started in 1967. At rate of production projected for 2015, about , the Athabasca oil sands reserves would last over 170 years. However those production levels require an influx of workers into an area that until recently was largely uninhabited. By 2007 this need in northern Alberta drove unemployment rates in Alberta and adjacent British Columbia to the lowest levels in history. As far away as the Atlantic Provinces, where workers were leaving to work in Alberta, unemployment rates fell to levels not seen for over one hundred years.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Venezuelan Orinoco Oil Sands site may contain more oil sands than Athabasca. However, while the Orinoco deposits are less viscous and more easily produced using conventional techniques (the Venezuelan government prefers to call them "extra-heavy oil"), they are too deep to access by surface mining.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Despite the large reserves, the cost of extracting the oil from bituminous sands has historically made production of the oil sands unprofitable—the cost of selling the extracted crude would not cover the direct costs of recovery; labour to mine the sands and fuel to extract the crude.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: In mid-2006, the National Energy Board of Canada estimated the operating cost of a new mining operation in the Athabasca oil sands to be to per barrel, while the cost of an in-situ SAGD operation (using dual horizontal wells) would be to per barrel.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: This compares to operating costs for conventional oil wells which can range from less than one dollar per barrel in Iraq and Saudi Arabia to over six in the United States and Canada's conventional oil reserves.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The capital cost of the equipment required to mine the sands and haul it to processing is a major consideration in starting production. The NEB estimates that capital costs raise the total cost of production to to per barrel for a new mining operation and to per barrel for a SAGD operation. This does not include the cost of upgrading the crude bitumen to synthetic crude oil, which makes the final costs to per barrel for a new mining operation.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Therefore, although high crude prices make the cost of production very attractive, sudden drops in price leaves producers unable to recover their capital costs—although the companies are well financed and can tolerate long periods of low prices since the capital has already been spent and they can typically cover incremental operating costs.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: However, the development of commercial production is made easier by the fact that exploration costs are very low. Such costs are a major factor when assessing the economics of drilling in a traditional oil field. The location of the oil deposits in the oil sands are well known, and an estimate of recovery costs can usually be made easily. There is not another region in the world with energy deposits of comparable magnitude where it would be less likely that the installations would be confiscated by a hostile national government, or be endangered by a war or revolution.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: As a result of the oil price increases since 2003, the economics of oil sands have improved dramatically. At a world price of US$50 per barrel, the NEB estimated an integrated mining operation would make a rate return of 16 to 23%, while a SAGD operation would return 16 to 27%. Prices since 2006 have risen, exceeding US$145 in mid-2008 but falling back to less than 40 US$ as a result of the worldwide financial crisis, the oil price recovered slowly and many of the planned projects (expected to exceed billion between 2006 and 2015) were stopped or scheduled. In 2012 and 2013 the oil price was high again, but the US production is increasing due to new technologies, while the gasoline demand is falling, so there is an overproduction of oil. But recovering economy can change this in a few years.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: At present the area around Fort McMurray has seen the most effect from the increased activity in the oil sands. Although jobs are plentiful, housing is in short supply and expensive. People seeking work often arrive in the area without arranging accommodation, driving up the price of temporary accommodation. The area is isolated, with only a two-lane road, Alberta Highway 63, connecting it to the rest of the province, and there is pressure on the government of Alberta to improve road links as well as hospitals and other infrastructure.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Despite the best efforts of companies to move as much of the construction work as possible out of the Fort McMurray area, and even out of Alberta, the shortage of skilled workers is spreading to the rest of the province. Even without the oil sands, the Alberta economy would be very strong, but development of the oil sands has resulted in the strongest period of economic growth ever recorded by a Canadian province.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Athabasca oil sands are often a topic in international trade talks, with energy rivals China and the United States negotiating with Canada for a bigger share of the rapidly increasing output. Production is expected to quadruple between 2005 and 2015, reaching a day, with increasing political and economic importance. Currently, most of the oil sands production is exported to the United States.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: An agreement has been signed between PetroChina and Enbridge to build a pipeline from Edmonton, Alberta, to the west coast port of Kitimat, British Columbia. If it is built, the pipeline will help export synthetic crude oil from the oil sands to China and elsewhere in the Pacific. However, in 2011, First Nations and environmental groups protested the proposed pipeline, stating that its construction and operation would be destructive to the environment. First Nations groups also claim that the development of the proposed pipeline is in violation of commitments that the Government of Canada has made through various Treaties and the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A smaller pipeline will also be built alongside to import condensate to dilute the bitumen. Sinopec, the largest refining and chemical company in China, and China National Petroleum Corporation have bought or are planning to buy shares in major oil sands development.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: On August 20, 2009, the U.S. State Department issued a presidential permit for an Alberta Clipper Pipeline that will run from Hardisty, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin. The pipeline will be capable of carrying up to of crude oil a day to refineries in the U.S.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Indigenous peoples of the area include the Fort McKay First Nation. The oil sands themselves are located within the boundaries of Treaty 8, signed in 1899, which states:


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Fort McKay First Nation has formed several companies to service the oil sands industry and will be developing a mine on their territory.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Opposition remaining within the First Nation focuses on environmental stewardship, land rights, and health issues, like elevated cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan and deformed fish being found by commercial fishermen in Lake Athabasca.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: The Alberta Cancer Board published research of the cancer rates of those living in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, in 2009. While many companies argue that there are not enough chemicals and toxic material in the water due to the development of the oil sands, this report indicates that there is coincidentally a significantly higher rate of cancer within this community. There have been many speculations as to why there is a higher rate of cancer in this community; some of those speculations are contamination with the river and the oil sands as well as uranium mining that is currently in progress. The world's largest production of uranium is produced in this area as well as along the Athabasca River, allowing for easy contamination of the river.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: From 2010 to 2014, the Tar Sands Healing Walk, founded by Indigenous women, was held annually as a demonstration against oil extraction and the damage it caused to local communities and the environment.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: According to some environmental activists, pipeline development poses risks to the cultural, social, and economic way of life of Canada's Indigenous populations. Historically, some Indigenous groups have opposed pipeline development for two primary reasons: 1) the perception of inherent environmental risks associated with transporting harmful oil and gas products, and 2) failure by the federal government to properly consider and mitigate Indigenous groups' concerns regarding resource development on their lands. For instance, many Indigenous groups rely heavily on local wildlife and vegetation for their survival. Increased oil production in Canada requires greater oil transport through their traditional lands, which, to some, poses the perception of threats to the survival and traditional way of life of Indigenous groups, as well as the safety and preservation of the surrounding ecosystems. First Nations in Alberta have called particular attention to adverse health impacts related to oil sands emissions, asserting that the water quality testing for specific chemicals (heavy metals) has been insufficient.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Aside from environmental concerns, many Indigenous groups have pushed back against pipeline development due to inadequate consultation processes by the federal government. As per Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution Act Indigenous peoples in Canada are guaranteed the right to be meaningfully consulted with and accommodated when the Crown is contemplating resource development on their lands - see Duty to Consult. Through a series of Supreme Court of Canada rulings and political protests from Indigenous peoples (see Haida Nation v. British Columbia [Minister of Forests], Taku River Tlingit First Nation v British Columbia, and Tsilhqot'in Nation v British Columbia), among others, the courts have attempted to further define the Crown's consultation responsibilities and give legal recognition to Indigenous traditional territory and rights regarding resource development.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Contrarily, oil sands development also presents many positive impacts and opportunities for Indigenous groups, particularly in Western Canada. In fact, over the past two decades, First Nations participation in the energy sector has increased dramatically, from employment and business opportunities to project approval processes and environmental evaluation. Increased Indigenous participation has been encouraged by numerous collaboration agreements with industry, typically in the form of impact benefit agreements (IBAs), which provide not only employment and business ventures, but also job training and community benefits. Enhanced participation in the energy sector has empowered many Indigenous groups to push for wider involvement by negotiating ownership stakes in proposed pipelines and bitumen storage projects. Perhaps the best example of such partnering in Alberta is the agreement between Suncor and Fort McKay and Mikisew Cree First Nations. The two First Nations acquired a 49% ownership in Suncor's East Tank Farm Development with shares valued at about $500 million making it the largest business investment to date by a First Nation entity in Canada.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: Support for resource development and desire for direct involvement is further illustrated by the First Nations' led $17-billion Eagle Spirit Energy Holding Ltd. pipeline and energy corridor between Alberta and the northern B.C. coast (with a back-up plan to site its terminal in Alaska to get around the tanker ban in B.C.). The project has secured support from 35 First Nations along the proposed route; the bands are entitled to at least 35% ownership in exchange for the land use.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: There are currently three large oil sands mining operations in the area run by Syncrude Canada Limited, Suncor Energy and Albian Sands owned by Shell Canada, Chevron, and Marathon Oil Corp.


title: Athabasca oil sands

text: For improper diversion of water in 2008–2009, Statoil Canada Ltd. was ordered in 2012 to pay a fine of $5000 and to allocate $185,000 for a training project (The verdict was handed down by the Provincial Court of Alberta, Criminal Division).


title: Mick Doohan

text: Michael Sydney Doohan (born 4 June 1965) is an Australian former Grand Prix motorcycle road racing World Champion, who won five consecutive 500 cc World Championships.


title: Mick Doohan

text: Originally from the Gold Coast, Queensland, Doohan attended St Joseph's College, Gregory Terrace and Aspley State High School, Brisbane. He raced in Australian Superbikes in the late 1980s, and also won both races as Superbike World Championship visited Oran Park in as well as the second leg of the Japanese round held earlier in the year. In a break-out season he also won the final Australian motorcycle Grand Prix to be held in the TT format at Mount Panorama before the race became a round of the World Championship the following year and moved to Phillip Island. He is one of the few 500 cc or MotoGP World Champions to have won a Superbike World Championship race.


title: Mick Doohan

text: He made his Grand Prix debut for Honda on an NSR 500 cc two-stroke motorcycle in 1989. Late in the 1990 season Doohan claimed his first victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix on his way to third in the championship. In 1991, he was paired with his fellow Australian Wayne Gardner on a Honda RVF750 superbike and won the Suzuka 8 Hours endurance race. He competed successfully throughout the early 1990s and appeared to be on his way to winning his first world championship when he was seriously injured in a practice crash before the 1992 Dutch TT. He suffered permanent and serious damage to his right leg due to medical complications and, at one stage, faced amputation of the leg. At the time, Doohan was 65 points in the lead of the championship, but could not compete for eight weeks after the crash. After an arduous recovery, he returned to racing for the final two races but could not prevent Yamaha rider Wayne Rainey from winning his third consecutive title (by four points from Doohan). In 1993 he struggled with the healing of his leg and the ability to race the Honda at elite level, stating later that in that year it was all he could do to just keep his ride at Honda. It was also during this time he switched to a left thumb-operated rear brake, as his right foot is no longer able to perform this function.


title: Mick Doohan

text: In 1994 however, he won his first 500 cc World Championship. Thereafter, until 1998, he dominated the class, winning five consecutive 500 cc World Championships. In 1997, his most successful year, Doohan won 12 out of 15 races, finished second in another two, and crashed out of the final race of the season at his home GP while leading by more than six seconds. In June 1996, Doohan was inducted as a Member of the Order of Australia for his contribution to the sport of motor racing.


title: Mick Doohan

text: Despite up to eight rivals on non-factory HRC Honda motorcycles Doohan's margin of superiority over them was such that in many races Doohan would build a comfortable lead and then ride well within his limits to cruise to victory. Although pure riding skill clearly played a large part in his success, the ability of his chief race engineer, Jeremy Burgess, to perfect the suspension and geometry of a racing motorcycle may have given him an advantage over his rivals. Between 1994 and 1998 the bike was said not to have had many changes, with Honda engineers reportedly becoming frustrated at Doohan's reluctance to try innovations such as electronic shifting (it was only when Rossi came to Honda in 2000 that Honda engineers had their head with Rossi willing to try more innovations).


title: Mick Doohan

text: One notable trait of Doohan's post-crash riding style was the use of a thumb-operated rear brake developed during 1993 owing to the reduced range of motion in his ankle. This was operated by a "nudge" bar similar to a personal water craft throttle, but mounted on the left handlebar. In 1999 Doohan had another accident, this time in a very wet qualifying session for the Spanish Grand Prix. He again broke his leg in several places and subsequently announced his retirement. Jeremy Burgess, Doohan's chief engineer for his entire career, later became Valentino Rossi's chief engineer. After Doohan retired he went to work as a roving adviser to Honda's Grand Prix race effort. At the conclusion of the 2004 season, Doohan and Honda parted company.


title: Mick Doohan

text: In June 2011, Doohan made an appearance at the Isle of Man TT. Doohan completed a parade lap, and was most enamored by the thrill and spectacle of the Snaefell Mountain Course. He then went on to pay tribute to his former Honda racing teammate, Joey Dunlop.


title: Mick Doohan

text: On 8 August 2006, Doohan appeared in Darwin Magistrates Court to face charges over a weekend fracas at a strip club. He was fined $2,500 after pleading guilty to assaulting a bouncer and failing to leave a licensed premise. No conviction was recorded.


title: Mick Doohan

text: Doohan married Selina Sines, who had been his partner for the previous eleven years, on Tuesday 21 March 2006, on Hamilton Island; the couple have two children, including racing driver Jack Doohan.


title: Mick Doohan

text: After his success in Grand Prix motorcycle racing he got a chance to test a Formula One race car, the Williams FW19, at Circuit de Catalunya (in Spain) in April 1998. He found the car difficult to drive and crashed against a guard rail.


title: Mick Doohan

text: In 2001, Doohan drove a Mercedes Benz CLK55 AMG works rally car with his co-driver Mark Stacey in the 2001 Targa Tasmania rally. He was in thirteenth place on day three when he crashed the car; he and Stacey were uninjured after the incident.


title: Mick Doohan

text: Doohan helped design an Intamin Motorbike Launch Roller Coaster, named Mick Doohan's Motocoaster. The ride is located at Dreamworld on the Gold Coast, Queensland.


title: Mick Doohan

text: Doohan's name was removed from the ride's branding in May 2022, and it is now known simply as Motocoaster.


title: Mick Doohan

text: Doohan was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1996 and received an Australian Sports Medal in 2000. He was awarded the "Key to the City" by the City of Gold Coast in 1997. He was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 2009. The first turn at Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit is named after him.


title: Mick Doohan

text: In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations, Doohan was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for his role as a "sports legend".


title: Operation Varsity

text: Operation Varsity (24 March 1945) was a successful airborne forces operation launched by Allied troops that took place toward the end of World War II. Involving more than 16,000 paratroopers and several thousand aircraft, it was the largest airborne operation in history to be conducted on a single day and in one location.


title: Operation Varsity

text: "Varsity" was part of Operation Plunder, the Anglo-American-Canadian assault under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to cross the northern Rhine River and from there enter Northern Germany. "Varsity" was meant to help the surface river assault troops secure a foothold across the Rhine River in Western Germany by landing two airborne divisions on the eastern bank of the Rhine near the village of Hamminkeln and the town of Wesel.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The plans called for the dropping of two divisions from U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps, under Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, to capture key territory and to generally disrupt German defenses to aid the advance of Allied ground forces. The British 6th Airborne Division was ordered to capture the villages of Schnappenberg and Hamminkeln, clear part of the Diersfordter Wald (Diersfordt Forest) of German forces, and secure three bridges over the River Issel. The U.S. 17th Airborne Division was to capture the village of Diersfordt and clear the rest of the Diersfordter Wald of any remaining German forces. The two divisions would hold the territory they had captured until relieved by advancing units of 21st Army Group, and then join in the general advance into northern Germany.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The airborne forces made several mistakes, most notably when pilot error caused paratroopers from the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment, a regiment of the U.S. 17th Airborne Division, to miss their drop zone and land on a British drop zone instead. However, the operation was a success, with both divisions capturing Rhine bridges and securing towns that could have been used by Germany to delay the advance of the British ground forces. The two divisions incurred more than 2,000 casualties, but captured about 3,500 German soldiers. The operation was the last large-scale Allied airborne operation of World War II.


title: Operation Varsity

text: By March 1945, the Allied armies had advanced into Germany and had reached the River Rhine. The Rhine was a formidable natural obstacle to the Allied advance, but if breached would allow the Allies to access the North German Plain and ultimately advance on Berlin and other major cities in Northern Germany. Following the "Broad Front Approach" laid out by General Dwight David Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, it was decided to attempt to breach the Rhine in several areas. Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, commanding the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group, devised a plan, code-named Operation Plunder, that would allow the forces under his command to breach the Rhine, which was subsequently authorized by Eisenhower. Plunder envisioned the British Second Army, under Lieutenant-General Miles C. Dempsey, and the U.S. Ninth Army, under Lieutenant General William Simpson, crossing the Rhine at Rees, Wesel, and an area south of the Lippe Canal.


title: Operation Varsity

text: To ensure that the operation was a success, Montgomery insisted that an airborne component be inserted into the plans for the operation, to support the amphibious assaults that would take place; this was code-named Operation Varsity. Three airborne divisions were initially chosen to participate in the operation, these being the British 6th Airborne Division, the U.S. 13th Airborne Division and the U.S. 17th Airborne Division, all of which were assigned to U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps, commanded by Major General Matthew B. Ridgway. One of these airborne formations, the British 6th Airborne Division, commanded by Major-General Eric Bols, was a veteran division; it had taken part in Operation Overlord, the assault on Normandy in June the previous year. However, the U.S. 17th Airborne Division, under Major General William Miley, had been activated only in April 1943 and had arrived in Britain in August 1944, too late to participate in Operation Overlord. The division did not participate in Operation Market Garden. It did, however, participate in the Ardennes campaign but had yet to take part in a combat drop. The U.S. 13th Airborne Division, under Major General Eldridge Chapman, had been activated in August 1943 and was transferred to France in 1945; the formation itself had never seen action, although one of its regiments, the 517th Parachute Infantry, had fought briefly in Italy, and later in Southern France and the Ardennes campaign.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Operation Varsity was therefore planned with these three airborne divisions in mind, with all three to be dropped behind German lines in support of the 21st Army Group as it conducted its amphibious assaults to breach the Rhine. However, during the earliest planning stages, it became apparent that the 13th Airborne Division would be unable to participate in the operation, as there were only enough combat transport aircraft in the area to transport two divisions effectively. The plan for the operation was therefore altered to accommodate the two remaining airborne divisions, the British 6th and U.S. 17th Airborne Divisions. The two airborne divisions would be dropped behind German lines, with their objective to land around Wesel and disrupt enemy defences in order to aid the advance of the British Second Army towards Wesel.


title: Operation Varsity

text: To achieve this, both divisions would be dropped near the village of Hamminkeln, and were tasked with a number of objectives: they were to seize the Diersfordter Wald, a forest that overlooked the Rhine, including a road linking several towns together; several bridges over a smaller waterway, the River Issel, were to be seized to facilitate the advance; and the village of Hamminkeln was to be captured. The Diersfordter Wald was chosen by Lieutenant-General Dempsey, the British Second Army commander, as the initial objective because its seizure would deny the Germans artillery positions from which they could disrupt Second Army's bridging operations. Once these objectives were taken, the airborne troops would consolidate their positions and await the arrival of Allied ground forces, defending the territory captured against the German forces known to be in the area.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Operation Varsity would be the largest single-lift airborne operation conducted during the conflict; more significantly, it would contradict previous airborne strategy by having the airborne troops drop "after" the initial amphibious landings, in order to minimize the risks to the airborne troops learned from the experiences of Operation Market Garden, the attempt to capture the Rhine bridges in the Netherlands in 1944. Unlike Market Garden, the airborne forces would be dropped only a relatively short distance behind German lines, thereby ensuring that reinforcements in the form of Allied ground forces would be able to link up with them within a short period: this avoided risking the same type of disaster that had befallen the British 1st Airborne Division when it had been isolated and practically annihilated by German infantry and armour at Arnhem. It was also decided by the commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, General Lewis H. Brereton, who commanded all Allied airborne forces, including U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps, that the two airborne divisions participating in Operation Varsity would be dropped simultaneously in a single "lift," instead of being dropped several hours apart, addressing what had also been a problem during Operation Market Garden. Supply drops for the airborne forces would also be made as soon as possible to ensure adequate supplies were available to the airborne troops as they fought.


title: Operation Varsity

text: By this period of the conflict, the number of German divisions remaining on the Western Front was rapidly declining, both in numbers and quality, a fact in the Allies' favour. By the night of 23 March, Montgomery had the equivalent of more than 30 divisions under his command, while the Germans fielded around 10 divisions, all weakened from constant fighting. The best German formation the Allied airborne troops would face was the 1st Parachute Army, although even this formation had been weakened from the losses it had sustained in earlier fighting, particularly when it had engaged Allied forces in the Reichswald Forest in February. First Parachute Army had three corps stationed along the river; 2nd Parachute Corps to the north, 86th Corps in the centre, and 63rd Corps in the south. Of these formations, 2nd Parachute Corps and 86th Corps had a shared boundary that ran through the proposed landing zones for the Allied airborne divisions, meaning that the leading formation of each corps — these being 7th Parachute Division and 84th Infantry Division — would face the airborne assault. After their retreat to the Rhine both divisions were under-strength and did not number more than 4,000 men each, with 84th Infantry Division supported by only 50 or so medium artillery pieces.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The seven divisions that formed the 1st Parachute Army were short of manpower and munitions, and although farms and villages were well prepared for defensive purposes, there were few mobile reserves, ensuring that the defenders had little way to concentrate their forces against the Allied bridgehead when the assault began. The mobile reserves that the Germans did possess consisted of some 150 armoured fighting vehicles under the command of 1st Parachute Army, the majority of which belonged to XLVII Panzer Corps. Allied intelligence believed that of the two divisions that formed XLVII Panzer Corps, 116th Panzer Division had up to 70 tanks, and 15th Panzergrenadier Division 15 tanks and between 20–30 assault guns. Intelligence also pointed to the possibility of a heavy anti-tank battalion being stationed in the area. Also, the Germans possessed a great number of antiaircraft weapons; on 17 March Allied intelligence estimated that the Germans had 103 heavy and 153 light anti-aircraft guns, a number which was drastically revised a week later to 114 heavy and 712 light anti-aircraft guns. The situation of the German defenders, and their ability to counter any assault effectively, was worsened when the Allies launched a large-scale air attack one week prior to Operation Varsity. The air attack involved more than 10,000 Allied sorties and concentrated primarily on Luftwaffe airfields and the German transportation system. The German defenders were also hampered by the fact that they had no reliable intelligence as to where the actual assault would be launched; although German forces along the Rhine had been alerted as to the general possibility of an Allied airborne attack, it was only when British engineers began to set up smoke generators opposite Emmerich and began laying a long smokescreen that the Germans knew where the assault would come.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Operation Plunder began at 9 pm on the evening of 23 March, and by the early hours of the morning of 24 March Allied ground units had secured a number of crossings on the eastern bank of the Rhine. In the first few hours of the day, the transport aircraft carrying the two airborne divisions that formed Operation Varsity began to take off from airbases in England and France and began to rendezvous over Brussels, before turning northeast for the Rhine dropping zones. The airlift consisted of 541 transport aircraft containing airborne troops, and a further 1,050 troop-carriers towing 1,350 gliders. The U.S. 17th Airborne Division consisted of 9,387 personnel, who were transported in 836 C-47 Skytrain transports, 72 C-46 Commando transports, and more than 900 Waco CG-4A gliders. The British 6th Airborne Division consisted of 7,220 personnel transported by 42 Douglas C-54 and 752 C-47 Dakota transport aircraft, as well as 420 Airspeed Horsa and General Aircraft Hamilcar gliders. This immense armada stretched more than in the sky and took 2 hours and 37 minutes to pass any given point, and was protected by some 2,153 Allied fighters from the U.S. Ninth Air Force and the Royal Air Force. The combination of the two divisions in one lift made this the largest single day airborne drop in history. At 10 am British and American airborne troops belonging to the 6th Airborne Division and 17th Airborne Division began landing on German soil, some 13 hours after the Allied ground assault began.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The first element of the British 6th Airborne Division to land was the 8th Parachute Battalion, part of the 3rd Parachute Brigade under Brigadier James Hill. The brigade actually dropped nine minutes earlier than scheduled, but successfully landed in drop zone A, while facing significant small-arms and 20 mm anti-aircraft fire. The brigade suffered a number of casualties as it engaged the German forces in the Diersfordter Wald, but by 11:00 hours the drop zone was all but completely clear of enemy forces and all battalions of the brigade had formed up. The key place of Schnappenberg was captured by the 9th Parachute Battalion in conjunction with the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, the latter unit having lost its Commanding Officer (CO), Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Nicklin, to German small-arms fire only moments after he had landed. Despite taking casualties the brigade cleared the area of German forces, and by 13:45 Brigadier Hill could report that the brigade had secured all of its objectives. Canadian medical orderly Corporal Frederick George Topham was awarded the Victoria Cross for his efforts to recover casualties and take them for treatment, despite his own wounds, and great personal danger.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The next British airborne unit to land was the 5th Parachute Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Nigel Poett. The brigade was designated to land on drop zone B and achieved this, although not as accurately as 3rd Parachute Brigade due to poor visibility around the drop zone, which also made it more difficult for paratroopers of the brigade to rally. The drop zone came under heavy fire from German troops stationed nearby, and was subjected to shellfire and mortaring which inflicted casualties in the battalion rendezvous areas. However, the 7th Parachute Battalion soon cleared the DZ of German troops, many of whom were situated in farms and houses, and the 12th Parachute Battalion and 13th Parachute Battalion rapidly secured the rest of the brigade's objectives. The brigade was then ordered to move due east and clear an area near Schnappenberg, as well as to engage German forces gathered to the west of the farmhouse where the 6th Airborne Division Headquarters was established. By 15:30 Brigadier Poett reported that the brigade had secured all of its objectives and linked up with other British airborne units.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The third airborne unit that formed a part of the 6th Airborne Division was the 6th Airlanding Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Hugh Bellamy. The brigade was tasked with landing in company-sized groups and capturing several objectives, including the town of Hamminkeln. The gliders containing the airborne troops of the brigade landed in landing zones P, O, U and R under considerable antiaircraft fire, the landing being made even more difficult due to the presence of a great deal of haze and smoke. This resulted in a number of glider pilots being unable to identify their landing areas and losing their bearings; a number of gliders landed in the wrong areas or crashed. However, the majority of the gliders survived, allowing the battalions of the brigade to secure intact the three bridges over the River Issel that they had been tasked with capturing, as well as the village of Hamminkeln with the aid of American paratroopers of the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which had been dropped by mistake nearby. The brigade secured all of its objectives shortly after capturing Hamminkeln.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, under the command of Colonel Edson Raff, was the lead assault formation for the 17th Airborne Division, and was consequently the first American airborne unit to land as part of Operation Varsity. The entire regiment was meant to be dropped in drop zone W, a clearing north of Wesel; however, excessive ground haze confused the pilots of the transport aircraft carrying the regiment, and as such when the 507th dropped it split into two halves. Colonel Raff and approximately 690 of his paratroopers landed northwest of the drop zone near the town of Diersfordt, with the rest of the regiment successfully landing in drop zone W. The colonel rallied his separated paratroopers and led them to drop zone W, engaging a battery of German artillery en route, killing or capturing the artillery crews before reuniting with the rest of the regiment. By 2 pm, the 507th PIR had secured all of its objectives and cleared the area around Diersfordt, having engaged numerous German troops and also destroying a German tank. The actions of the 507th Parachute Infantry during the initial landing also gained the division its second Medal of Honor, when Private George Peters posthumously received the award after charging a German machine gun nest and eliminating it with rifle fire and grenades, allowing his fellow paratroopers to gather their equipment and capture the regiment's first objective.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment was the second American airborne unit to land after the 507th, under the command of Colonel James Coutts. En route to the drop zone, the transport aircraft carrying the 513th had the misfortune to pass through a belt of German antiaircraft weapons, losing 22 of the C-46 transport aircraft and damaging a further 38. Just as the 507th had, the 513th also suffered from pilot error due to the ground haze, and as such the regiment actually missed its designated drop zone, DZ X, and was dropped on one of the landing zones designated for the British 6th Airlanding Brigade. Despite this inaccuracy the paratroopers swiftly rallied and aided the British glider-borne troops who were landing simultaneously, eliminating several German artillery batteries that were covering the area. Once the German troops in the area had been eliminated, a combined force of American and British airborne troops stormed Hamminkeln and secured the town. By 2 pm, Colonel Coutts reported to Divisional Headquarters that the 513th Parachute Infantry had secured all of its objectives, having knocked out two tanks and two complete regiments of artillery during their assault. During its attempts to secure its objectives, the regiment also gained a third Medal of Honor for the 17th Airborne Division when Private First Class Stuart Stryker posthumously received the award after leading a charge against a German machine-gun nest, creating a distraction to allow the rest of his platoon to capture the fortified position in which the machine-gun was situated.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The third component of the 17th Airborne Division to take part in the operation was the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment (GIR), under the command of Colonel James Pierce. Troopers of the 194th GIR landed accurately in landing zone S, but their gliders and tow aircraft took heavy casualties; 12 C-47 transports were lost due to anti-aircraft fire, and a further 140 were damaged by the same fire. The regiment landed in the midst of a number of German artillery batteries that were engaging Allied ground forces crossing the Rhine, and as such many of the gliders were engaged by German artillery pieces that had their barrels lowered for direct-fire. However, these artillery batteries and their crews were defeated by the glider-borne troops, and the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment was soon able to report that its objectives had been secured, having destroyed 42 artillery pieces, 10 tanks, 2 self-propelled anti-aircraft vehicles and 5 self-propelled guns.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The Office of Strategic Services sent four teams of two (codename "Algonquin", teams Alsace, Poissy, S&S and Student), with Operation Varsity to infiltrate and report from behind enemy lines, but none succeeded. Team S&S had two agents in Wehrmacht uniforms and a captured Kϋbelwagon; to report by radio. But the Kϋbelwagon was put out of action while in the glider; three tires and the long-range radio were shot up (German gunners were told to attack the gliders not the tow planes).


title: Operation Varsity

text: Operation Varsity was a successful large-scale airborne operation. All of the objectives that the airborne troops had been tasked with had been captured and held, usually within only a few hours of the operation beginning. The bridges over the Issel had been successfully captured, although one later had to be destroyed to prevent its capture by counter-attacking German forces. The Diersfordter Forest had been cleared of enemy troops, and the roads through which the Germans might have routed reinforcements against the advance had been cut by airborne troops. Finally, Hamminkeln, the village that dominated the area and through which any advance would be made, had been secured by air-lifted units. By nightfall of 24 March, 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division had joined up with elements of 6th Airborne, and by midnight the first light bridge was across the Rhine. By 27 March, twelve bridges suitable for heavy armour had been installed over the Rhine and the Allies had 14 divisions on the east bank of the river, penetrating up to . According to "Generalmajor" Heinz Fiebig, commanding officer of one of the defending German formations, 84 Infantry Division, the German forces defending the area had been greatly surprised by the speed with which the two airborne divisions had landed their troops, explaining that their sudden appearance had had a "shattering effect" on the greatly outnumbered defenders. He revealed during his interrogation that his division had been badly depleted and could muster barely 4,000 soldiers.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The U.S. 17th Airborne Division gained its fourth Medal of Honor in the days following the operation, when Technical Sergeant Clinton M. Hedrick of the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment received the award posthumously after aiding in the capture of , which had been turned into a fortified position by the Germans.


title: Operation Varsity

text: The casualties taken by both airborne formations were quite heavy, although lighter than had been expected. By nightfall of 24 March, the 6th Airborne Division had suffered around 1,400 personnel killed, wounded or missing in action out of the 7,220 personnel who were landed in the operation. The division also claimed to have secured around 1,500 prisoners of war. The 17th Airborne Division suffered a similar casualty rate, reporting around 1,300 casualties out of 9,650 personnel who took part in the operation, while the division claimed to have taken 2,000 POWs, a number similar to those taken by 6th Airborne. This made a total of around 3,500 POWs taken by both airborne formations during the operation. Between 24 and 29 March, the 17th Airborne had taken a total of 1,346 casualties. The air forces involved in the operation also suffered casualties; 56 aircraft in total were lost during the 24th, 21 out of the 144 transport aircraft transporting the 17th Airborne were shot down and 59 were damaged by antiaircraft fire, and 16 bombers from the Eighth Air Force were also shot down during supply drops.


title: Operation Varsity

text: In the British and Commonwealth system of battle honours, there was no distinct award for service in Operation Varsity. Instead, units that participated in the operation were included in the awards made between 1956 and 1959 to all units that participated in the Rhine crossing between 23 March and 1 April 1945: "Rhine", or "The Rhine" to Canadian units, later translated to "Le Rhin" for French Canadian units.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Contemporary observers and historians generally agree that Operation Varsity was successful. General Eisenhower called it "the most successful airborne operation carried out to date", and an observer later wrote that the operation showed "the highest state of development attained by troop-carrier and airborne units". In the official summary of the operation, Major General Ridgway wrote that the operation had been flawless, and that the two airborne divisions involved had destroyed enemy defences that might otherwise have taken days to reduce, ensuring the operation was successful.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Several modern historians have also praised the operation and the improvements that were made for Varsity. G. G. Norton argued that the operation benefited from the lessons learned from previous operations, and Brian Jewell agrees, arguing that the lessons of "Market Garden" had been learned as the airborne forces were concentrated and quickly dropped, giving the defenders little time to recover. Norton also argues that improvements were made for supporting the airborne troops; he notes that a large number of artillery pieces were available to cover the landings and that observers were dropped with the airborne forces, thus augmenting the firepower and flexibility of the airborne troops. He also highlights the development of a technique that allowed entire brigades to be landed in tactical groups, giving them greater flexibility. Dropping the airborne forces after the ground forces had breached the Rhine also ensured that the airborne troops would not have to fight for long before being relieved, a major improvement on the manner in which the previous large-scale airborne operation, "Market Garden", had been conducted.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Historian Peter Allen states that while the airborne forces took heavy casualties, "Varsity" diverted German attention from the Rhine crossing onto themselves. Thus, the troops fighting to create a bridgehead, across the Rhine, suffered relatively few casualties, and were able to "break out from the Rhine in hours rather than days".


title: Operation Varsity

text: Despite a great deal of official accolade and praise over the success of the operation, a number of criticisms have been made of the operation and the errors that were made. Several military historians have been critical of the need for the operation, with one historian, Barry Gregory, arguing that "Operation Varsity was not entirely necessary..." Another historian, James A. Huston, argues that "...had the same resources been employed on the ground, it is conceivable that the advance to the east might have been even more rapid than it was". In "The Last Offensive" the US Army official history by Charles B. MacDonald (1990) he asked "whether under the prevailing circumstances an airborne attack (was) necessary or .. even justified".


title: Operation Varsity

text: One specific failure in the massive operation was the critical lack of transport aircraft for the operation, an unsolved flaw that had dogged every large-scale airborne operation the Allies had conducted. In the original planning for "Varsity", an extra airborne division, the 13th, had been included; however, a lack of transport aircraft to drop this division led to it being excluded from the final plan. Thus, the unsolved problem of a shortage of transport aircraft meant that a third of the planned troops to be used were discarded, weakening the fighting power of the airborne formation. In the event, the airborne troops actually employed were sufficient to overwhelm the defenders.


title: Operation Varsity

text: There was also a shortage of gliders, although Brereton eventually got the 906 CG-4As he needed for Varsity and 926 for Operation Choker II , an American crossing of the Rhine at Worms planned for March. New gliders were shipped crated from America for assembly in Europe. Some were recovered from the Netherlands despite pilfering for fabric and instruments and a storm which destroyed over a hundred; after two months only 281 of the 2000 gliders there were retrieved. There was little recovery of gliders from Normandy.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Some historians have commented on this failure; Gerard Devlin argues that because of this lack of aircraft the remaining two divisions were forced to shoulder the operation by themselves.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Losses of airborne troops were high. The cause of this high casualty rate can most likely be traced to the fact that the operation was launched in full daylight, rather than a night-assault. The airborne landings were conducted during the day primarily because the planners believed that a daytime operation had a better chance of success than at night, the troops being less scattered.


title: Operation Varsity

text: However, landing paratroopers, and especially gliders, without the cover of darkness left them exceedingly vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. The official history of the British Airborne Divisions highlights the cost of this trade-off, stating that of the 416 gliders that landed, only 88 remained undamaged by enemy fire, and that between 20–30 percent of the glider pilots were casualties. Another historian argues that the gliders landing in daylight was a calamity, with the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment having two-thirds of their gliders hit by ground fire and suffering heavy casualties as they landed. The casualty rates were worsened by the slow rates of release and descent of the gliders themselves, and the fact that each aircraft towed two gliders, slowing them even further; as the time to release a glider unit was 3–4 times longer than a parachute unit, the gliders were vulnerable to flak.


title: Operation Varsity

text: A large number of paratroop drop aircraft were hit and lost as well. This was largely due to the hostile conditions encountered by the drop aircraft. Operation Varsity's paratroop drop phase was flown in daylight at slow speeds at very low altitudes, using unarmed cargo aircraft, over heavy concentrations of German 20 mm, 37 mm, and larger calibre antiaircraft (AA) cannon utilizing explosive, incendiary, and armor-piercing incendiary ammunition. By that stage of the war, German AA crews had trained to a high state of readiness; many batteries had considerable combat experience in firing on and destroying high speed, well-armed fighter and fighter-bomber aircraft while under fire themselves. Finally, while many if not all of the C-47s used in Operation Varsity had been retrofitted with self-sealing fuel tanks, the much larger C-46 Commando aircraft employed in the drop received no such modification. This was exacerbated by the C-46's unvented wings, which tended to pool leaked gasoline at the wing root where it could be ignited by flak or a stray spark. Although 19 of 72 C-46 aircraft were destroyed during Operation Varsity, losses of other aircraft types from AA fire during the same operation were also significant, including 13 gliders shot down, 14 crashed, and 126 damaged; 15 Consolidated B-24 bombers shot down, and 104 damaged; and 30 C-47s shot down and 339 damaged.


title: Operation Varsity

text: Lieutenant-Colonel Otway, who wrote an official history of the British airborne forces during World War II, stated that Operation Varsity highlighted the vulnerability of glider-borne units. While they arrived in complete sub-units and were able to move off more quickly than airborne troops dropped by parachute, the gliders were easy targets for anti-aircraft fire and short-range small-arms fire once landed; Otway concluded that in any future operations, troops dropped by parachute should secure landing zones prior to the arrival of glider-borne units. Thus, by having the landings conducted during daylight to ensure greater accuracy, the Allied planners incurred a far greater casualty rate, particularly amongst the glider-borne elements. The operation also suffered from poor piloting. Although the piloting was of a better quality than in the Sicilian and Normandy operations, there were still significant failures on the part of the pilots, especially when it is considered that the drop was conducted in daylight. A significant error occurred when the pilots of the transports carrying 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment dropped much of the regiment several miles from their designated drop zones, with the mis-dropped units actually landing in the British landing zones.


title: Coir

text: Coir (), also called coconut fibre, is a natural fibre extracted from the outer husk of coconut and used in products such as floor mats, doormats, brushes, and mattresses. Coir is the fibrous material found between the hard, internal shell and the outer coat of a coconut. Other uses of brown coir (made from ripe coconut) are in upholstery padding, sacking and horticulture. White coir, harvested from unripe coconuts, is used for making finer brushes, string, rope and fishing nets. It has the advantage of not sinking, so can be used in long lengths in deep water without the added weight dragging down boats and buoys.


title: Coir

text: Coir must not be confused with coir pith, which is the powdery and spongy material resulting from the processing of the coir fibre. Coir fibre is locally named 'coprah' in some countries, adding to confusion. Pith is chemically similar to coir, but contains much shorter fibers. The name coco peat may refer either to coir or the pith or a mixture, as both have good water-retaining properties as a substitute for peat.


title: Coir

text: The name "coir" comes from கயிறு ("kayiru"), കയർ ("kayar"), the Tamil and Malayalam words respectively for cord or rope (traditionally, a kind of rope is made from the coconut fibre). Ropes and cordage have been made from coconut fibre since ancient times. The Austronesian peoples, who first domesticated coconuts, used coconut fibre extensively for ropes and sennit in building houses and lashed-lug plank boats in their voyages in both the Pacific and the Indian Oceans.


title: Coir

text: Later Indian and Arab navigators who sailed the seas to Malaya, China, and the Persian Gulf centuries ago also used coir for their ship ropes. Arab writers of the 11th century AD referred to the extensive use of coir for ship ropes and rigging.


title: Coir

text: A coir industry in the UK was recorded before the second half of the 19th century. During 1840, Captain Widely, in co-operation with Captain Logan and Thomas Treloar, founded the known carpet firms of Treloar and Sons in Ludgate Hill, England, for the manufacture of coir into various fabrics suitable for floor coverings.


title: Coir

text: Coir fibres are found between the hard, internal shell and the outer coat of a coconut. The individual fibre cells are narrow and hollow, with thick walls made of cellulose. They are pale when immature, but later become hardened and yellowed as a layer of lignin is deposited on their walls. Each cell is about long and in diameter. Fibres are typically long. The two varieties of coir are brown and white. Brown coir harvested from fully ripened coconuts is thick, strong and has high abrasion resistance. It is typically used in mats, brushes and sacking. Mature brown coir fibres contain more lignin and less cellulose than fibres such as flax and cotton, so are stronger but less flexible. White coir fibres harvested from coconuts before they are ripe are white or light brown in color and are smoother and finer, but also weaker. They are generally spun to make yarn used in mats or rope.


title: Coir

text: The coir fibre is relatively waterproof, and is one of the few natural fibres resistant to damage by saltwater. Fresh water is used to process brown coir, while seawater and fresh water are both used in the production of white coir.


title: Coir

text: Green coconuts, harvested after about six to 12 months on the palm, contain pliable white fibres. Brown fibre is instead obtained by harvesting fully mature coconuts when the nutritious layer surrounding the seed is ready to be processed into copra and desiccated coconut. The fibrous layer of the fruit is then separated from the hard shell (manually) by driving the fruit down onto a spike to split it (dehusking). A well-seasoned husker can manually separate 2,000 coconuts per day. Machines are now available which crush the whole fruit to give the loose fibres. These machines can process up to 2,000 coconuts per hour.


title: Coir

text: The fibrous husks are soaked in pits or in nets in a slow-moving body of water to swell and soften the fibres. The long bristle fibres are separated from the shorter mattress fibres underneath the skin of the nut, a process known as wet-milling.


title: Coir

text: The mattress fibres are sifted to remove dirt and other rubbish, dried in the sun and packed into bales. Some mattress fibre is allowed to retain more moisture so it retains its elasticity for twisted fibre production. The coir fibre is elastic enough to twist without breaking and it holds a curl as though permanently waved. Twisting is done by simply making a rope of the hank of fibre and twisting it using a machine or by hand.


title: Coir

text: The longer bristle fibre is washed in clean water and then dried before being tied into bundles or hanks. It may then be cleaned and 'hackled' by steel combs to straighten the fibres and remove any shorter fibre pieces. Coir bristle fibre can also be bleached and dyed to obtain hanks of different colours.


title: Coir

text: The immature husks are suspended in a river or water-filled pit for up to ten months. During this time, micro-organisms break down the plant tissues surrounding the fibres to loosen them — a process known as retting. The segments of the husk are then beaten with iron rods to separate out the long fibres which are subsequently dried and cleaned. Cleaned fibre is ready for spinning into yarn using a simple one-handed system or a spinning wheel.


title: Coir

text: In 2009, researchers at CSIR's National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram developed a biological process for the extraction of coir fibre from coconut husk without polluting the environment. The technology uses enzymes to separate the fibres by converting and solubilizing plant compounds to curb the pollution of waters caused by retting of husks.


title: Coir

text: Because coir pith is high in sodium and potassium, it is treated before use as a growth medium for plants or fungi by soaking in a calcium buffering solution; most coir sold for growing purposes is said to be pre-treated. Once any remaining salts have been leached out of the coir pith, it and the cocochips become suitable substrates for cultivating fungi. Coir is naturally rich in potassium, which can lead to magnesium and calcium deficiencies in soilless horticultural media. Coir fiber is rarely used as a potting material, except for orchids, and does not need buffering, as it has a very low cation-exchange capacity (CEC) capacity, hence not retaining salts.


title: Coir

text: Coir does provide a suitable substrate for horticultural use as a soilless potting medium. The material's high lignin content is longer-lasting, holds more water, and does not shrink off the sides of the pot when dry allowing for easier rewetting. This light media has advantages and disadvantages that can be corrected with the addition of the proper amendment such as coarse sand for weight in interior plants like Draceana. Nutritive amendments should also be considered. Calcium and magnesium will be lacking in coir potting mixes, so a naturally good source of these nutrients is dolomitic lime which contains both. pH is of utmost importance as coir pith tends to have a high pH after some months of use, resulting in plant stunting and multiple deficiencies. Coir also has the disadvantage of being extremely sensitive to the Leucocoprinus greenhouse fungus. The addition of beneficial microbes to the coir media have been successful in tropical green house conditions and interior spaces as well. However, it is important to note that the fungi will engage in growth and reproduction under moist atmospheres producing fruiting bodies (mushrooms).


title: Coir

text: Bristle coir is the longest variety of coir fibre. It is manufactured from retted coconut husks through a process called defibering. The coir fibre thus extracted is then combed using steel combs to make the fibre clean and to remove short fibres. Bristle coir fibre is used as bristles in brushes for domestic and industrial applications.


title: Coir

text: Red coir is used in floor mats and doormats, brushes, mattresses, floor tiles and sacking. A small amount is also made into twine. Pads of curled brown coir fibre, made by needle-felting (a machine technique that mats the fibres together), are shaped and cut to fill mattresses and for use in erosion control on river banks and hillsides. A major proportion of brown coir pads are sprayed with rubber latex which bonds the fibres together (rubberised coir) to be used as upholstery padding for the automobile industry in Europe. The material is also used for packaging.


title: Coir

text: The major use of white coir is in rope manufacture. Mats of woven coir fibre are made from the finer grades of bristle and white fibre using hand or mechanical looms. White coir also is used to make fishing nets due to its strong resistance to saltwater.


title: Coir

text: In agriculture and horticulture, coir is used as an organic and decorative component in soil and potting mixes. Due to the increasing concern regarding the sustainability of producing sphagnum (peat moss) and peat from peatlands, usage of alternative substrates has been on the rise; the byproduct coir is one commonly used substitute. Many sources of coir however are heavily contaminated with pathogenic fungi, and the choice of the source is important. Coir is also useful to deter snails from delicate plantings, and as a growing medium in intensive glasshouse (greenhouse) horticulture.


title: Coir

text: Coir is also used as a substrate to grow mushrooms. The coir is usually mixed with vermiculite and pasteurised with boiling water. After the coir/vermiculite mix has cooled to room temperature, it is placed in a larger container, usually a plastic box. Previously prepared spawn jars, usually grown using substrates such as rye grains or wild bird seed, are then added. This spawn is the mushrooms mycelium and will colonize the coir/vermiculite mix eventually fruiting mushrooms.


title: Coir

text: Coir fibre pith or coir dust can hold large quantities of water, just like a sponge. It is used as a replacement for traditional peat in soil mixtures, or, as a soil-less substrate for plant cultivation. It has been called "coco peat" because it is to fresh coco fibre somewhat like what peat is to peat moss, although it is not true peat.


title: Coir

text: Coir waste from coir fibre industries is washed, heat-treated, screened and graded before being processed into coco peat products of various granularity and denseness, which are then used for horticultural and agricultural applications and as industrial absorbent.


title: Coir

text: Usually shipped in the form of compressed bales, briquettes, slabs or discs, the end user usually expands and aerates the compressed coco peat by the addition of water. A single kilogramme of dry coco peat will expand to 15 litres of moist coco peat.


title: Coir

text: Coco peat is used as a soil conditioner. Due to low levels of nutrients in its composition, coco peat is usually not the sole component in the medium used to grow plants. When plants are grown exclusively in coco peat, it is important to add nutrients according to the specific plants' needs. Coco peat from Philippines, Sri Lanka and India contains several macro- and micro-plant nutrients, including substantial quantities of potassium. This extra potassium can interfere with magnesium availability. Adding extra magnesium through the addition of magnesium sulphates can correct this issue.


title: Coir

text: Some coco peat is not fully decomposed when it arrives and will use up available nitrogen as it does so (known as drawdown), competing with the plant if there is not enough. This is called nitrogen robbery; it can cause nitrogen deficiency in the plants. Poorly sourced coco fibre can have excess salts in it and needs washing (check electrical conductivity of run-off water, flush if high). It holds water well and holds around 1,000 times more air than soil. Adding slow release fertilizers or organic fertilizers are highly advised when growing with coco fibre.


title: Coir

text: Coco fibre can be re-used up to three times with little loss of yield. Coco fibre from diseased plants should not be re-used unless sterilization is thorough.


title: Coir

text: Due to its superior absorption capabilities when compared to products made of clay, silica and diatomaceous earth-based absorbents, dry coconut coir pith is gaining popularity as an oil and fluid absorbent. Many other absorbents have to be mined, whereas coconut coir pith is a waste product in abundance in countries where coconut is a major agriculture product.


title: Coir

text: Coconut coir pith is also used as a bedding in litter boxes, animal farms and pet houses to absorb animal waste.


title: Coir

text: Coconut fiber (coir) is used as a construction material because the natural fibers are eco-friendly. Additionally, coconut fiber (CF) is resistant to thermal conductivity, is very tough, ductile, durable, renewable and inexpensive. It was observed in an experimental study that by partially replacing 2% of cement with CF, the compressive strength of the concrete is increased.


title: Coir

text: Trichoderma coir pith cake (TCPC) has been prepared and successfully used for control of plant diseases. The dry product TCPC has a long shelf life.


title: Coir

text: Coir is an allergen, as well as the latex and other materials used frequently in the treatment of coir.


title: Coir

text: Coco fibre can harbor organisms that pose a threat to the biosecurity of countries into which it is imported. Coco peat has been imported into New Zealand since about 1989 with a marked increase since 2004. By 2009 a total of 25 new weed species have been found in imported coco peat. The regulations relating to importing coco peat into New Zealand have been amended to improve the biosecurity measures.


title: Coir

text: On the other hand, coir can also contain beneficial life-forms. Coconut coir from Mexico has been found to contain large numbers of colonies of the beneficial fungus "Aspergillus terreus", which acts as a biological control against plant pathogenic fungi. "Trichoderma" is a naturally occurring fungus in coco peat; it works in symbiosis with plant roots to protect them from pathogenic fungi such as "Pythium".


title: Coir

text: Coco peat may be sterilized to remove potential pathogens and weeds along with beneficial life. This may be done to remove contaminants in fresh material or to reuse old coir. Both heat (boiling or baking) and chemical means can be used.


title: Coir

text: Total world coir fibre production is . India, mainly in Pollachi and the coastal region of Kerala State, produces 60% of the total world supply of white coir fibre. Sri Lanka produces 36% of the total brown fibre output. Over 50% of the coir fibre produced annually throughout the world is consumed in the countries of origin, mainly India. Together, India and Sri Lanka produced 59% of the coir produced in 2020. Sri Lanka remains the world's largest exporter of coir fibre and coir fibre based products.


title: Superuser

text: In computing, the superuser is a special user account used for system administration. Depending on the operating system (OS), the actual name of this account might be root, administrator, admin or supervisor. In some cases, the actual name of the account is not the determining factor; on Unix-like systems, for example, the user with a user identifier (UID) of zero is the superuser, regardless of the name of that account; and in systems which implement a role based security model, any user with the role of superuser (or its synonyms) can carry out all actions of the superuser account.


title: Superuser

text: The principle of least privilege recommends that most users and applications run under an ordinary account to perform their work, as a superuser account is capable of making unrestricted, potentially adverse, system-wide changes.


title: Superuser

text: In Unix-like computer OSes (such as Linux), "root" is the conventional name of the user who has all rights or permissions (to all files and programs) in all modes (single- or multi-user). Alternative names include "baron" in BeOS and "avatar" on some Unix variants. BSD often provides a "toor" ("root" written backward) account in addition to a root account. Regardless of the name, the superuser always has a user ID of 0. The root user can do many things an ordinary user cannot, such as changing the ownership of files and binding to network ports numbered below 1024.


title: Superuser

text: The name "root" may have originated because "root" is the only user account with permission to modify the root directory of a Unix system. This directory was originally considered to be root's home directory, but the UNIX Filesystem Hierarchy Standard now recommends that root's home be at ."" The first process bootstrapped in a Unix-like system, usually called , runs with root privileges. It spawns all other processes directly or indirectly, which inherit their parents' privileges. Only a process running as root is allowed to change its user ID to that of another user; once it has done so, there is no way back. Doing so is sometimes called "dropping root privileges" and is often done as a security measure to limit the damage from possible contamination of the process. Another case is and other programs that ask users for credentials and in case of successful authentication allow them to run programs with privileges of their accounts.


title: Superuser

text: It is often recommended that "root" is never used as a normal user account, since simple typographical errors in entering commands can cause major damage to the system. Instead, a normal user account should be used, and then either the (substitute user) or (substitute user do) command is used. The approach requires the user to know the root password, while the method requires that the user be set up with the power to run "as root" within the file, typically indirectly by being made a member of the "wheel", "adm", "admin", or "sudo" group.


title: Superuser

text: For a number of reasons, the approach is now generally preferred – for example it leaves an audit trail of who has used the command and what administrative operations they performed.


title: Superuser

text: Some OSes, such as macOS and some Linux distributions (most notably Ubuntu), automatically give the initial user created the ability to run as root via – but this is configured to ask them for their password before doing administrative actions. In some cases the actual "root" account is disabled by default, so it can't be directly used. In mobile platform-oriented OSs such as Apple iOS and Android, superuser access is inaccessible by design, but generally the security system can be exploited in order to obtain it. In a few systems, such as Plan 9, there is no superuser at all.


title: Superuser

text: In Windows NT and later systems derived from it (such as Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista/7/8/10/11), there must be at least one administrator account (Windows XP and earlier) or one able to elevate privileges to superuser (Windows Vista/7/8/10/11 via User Account Control). In Windows XP and earlier systems, there is a built-in administrator account that remains hidden when a user administrator-equivalent account exists. This built-in administrator account is created with a blank password. This poses security risks as local users would be able to access the computer via the built-in administrator account if the password is left blank, so the account is disabled by default in Windows Vista and later systems due to the introduction of User Account Control (UAC). Remote users are unable to access the built-in administrator account.


title: Superuser

text: A Windows administrator account is not an exact analogue of the Unix root account – Administrator, the built-in administrator account, and a user administrator account have the same level of privileges. The default user account created in Windows systems is an administrator account. Unlike macOS, Linux, and Windows Vista/7/8/10 administrator accounts, administrator accounts in Windows systems without UAC do not insulate the system from most of the pitfalls of full root access. One of these pitfalls includes decreased resilience to malware infections. To avoid this and maintain optimal system security on pre-UAC Windows systems, it is recommended to simply authenticate when necessary from a standard user account, either via a password set to the built-in administrator account, or another administrator account.


title: Superuser

text: In Windows Vista/7/8/10/11 administrator accounts, a prompt will appear to authenticate running a process with elevated privileges. Usually, no user credentials are required to authenticate the UAC prompt in administrator accounts but authenticating the UAC prompt requires entering the username and password of an administrator in standard user accounts. In Windows XP (and earlier systems) administrator accounts, authentication is not required to run a process with elevated privileges and this poses another security risk that led to the development of UAC. Users can set a process to run with elevated privileges from standard accounts by setting the process to "run as administrator" or using the command and authenticating the prompt with credentials (username and password) of an administrator account. Much of the benefit of authenticating from a standard account is negated if the administrator account's credentials being used has a blank password (as in the built-in administrator account in Windows XP and earlier systems), hence why it is recommended to set a password for the built-in administrator account.


title: Superuser

text: On many older OSes on computers intended for personal and home use, anyone using the system had full privileges. Many such systems, such as DOS, did not have the concept of multiple accounts, and although others such as Windows 95 did allow multiple accounts, this was only so that each could have its own preferences profile – all users still had full administrative control over the machine.


title: Academic grading in India

text: The national board Central Board of Secondary Education uses a percentage system coupled with a positional grade that indicates the student's performance with respect to their peers. The Indian Certificate of Secondary Education board doesn't and gives only the mark obtained. State boards may give either or both marks and grades; if grades are given, most grade students linearly (e.g.: A+ for >90, A for 80–90 for Kerala state).


title: Academic grading in India

text: Many colleges outside India favour CBSE and ICSE; those colleges either outright disallow students from other boards (e.g.: University of Oxford) or require them to write additional examinations (e.g.: National University of Singapore).


title: Academic grading in India

text: Generally, at the school level percentages of 75–85 are considered average while above 95 is exceptional. At the university level however percentages between 60–79 are considered excellent and are difficult to obtain. The direct comparison of the percentage of marks obtained at one university with that at another is difficult. Indeed, the differential between universities in terms of marking scale can be as much as 20%, with some requiring an 85% plus for the award of Distinction, an approximate equivalent of the Latin honor "summa-cum-laude", while yet others would award Distinction at above of 70%.


title: Academic grading in India

text: In some instances, a score close to 90% is very rare and is virtually impossible. Much of this can be reconciled in the backdrop of the minimum pass score. In a university with a 90% plus for Distinction, 60% may be the minimum passing mark. The university awarding distinction at 70% may have a passing mark of 45%. Thus the comparison of GPA (grade-point average) is quite difficult for Indian students elsewhere. A student having 95% will be close to 3.9 on the GPA scale, as would a student with a 75% from a 70% cut-off-for-distinction institution.


title: Academic grading in India

text: In India, many universities and institutes rank their students in percentage of marks they get from the examinations and credits. Many universities have their ranking on point system. Though there are exceptions to standard system such as MBA Courses, the following table will summarize the grading system and conversions for normal graduation and post graduation in universities and institutes, unless otherwise declared by the institute.


title: FireHouse

text: FireHouse (also Firehouse) is an American hard rock band that formed in Richmond, Virginia, and then moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they were signed to Epic Records in 1989. The band reached stardom during the early 1990s with hit singles like "Reach for the Sky", "Don't Treat Me Bad" and "All She Wrote", as well as their signature power ballads "I Live My Life for You", "Love of a Lifetime" and "When I Look Into Your Eyes". At the 1992 American Music Awards, FireHouse won the award for "Favorite New Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Artist".


title: FireHouse

text: As the 1990s progressed, the band remained very popular in Asia, mainly in Southeast Asian countries such as Japan, Thailand, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. They also maintained popularity in South America and Europe. FireHouse continued to release new material throughout the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, most of which successfully charted in Japan. The band has also continued to tour internationally, having participated twice in the annual Rock Never Stops Tour with other bands from the same genre. FireHouse is estimated to have sold over 7 million albums worldwide since their debut.


title: FireHouse

text: Originally composed of vocalist/keyboardist C. J. Snare, guitarist Bill Leverty, drummer Michael Foster and bassist Perry Richardson, the band has maintained its original members with the exception of Richardson, who departed in 2000. Richardson was replaced two times before current bassist, Allen McKenzie, was given the position in 2004.


title: FireHouse

text: The history of FireHouse can be traced back to 1984, when Leverty's band White Heat needed a drummer. After over 20 auditions, current FireHouse drummer Michael Foster answered the ad and when Leverty was impressed by his skill, he quickly hired him. When the band wasn't on tour, Leverty and Foster would visit rock clubs, and it was at one of these clubs where they caught sight of a band called Maxx Warrior. Singing for the band was C. J. Snare, and the band's bassist was Perry Richardson. Leverty and Foster were impressed with Snare's vocal ability, and became determined to unite the bands. As soon as Maxx Warrior broke up, Leverty sent Snare some of his songs and asked him to sing on his tape. Foster and Leverty were again impressed, so they brought Snare in to be the band's lead singer for a show in Virginia several weeks later.


title: FireHouse

text: The three-member group took their tape to Perry Richardson, the ex-bassist for Maxx Warrior, who said he liked it but had made a six-month commitment to the band that he was a member of at the time. When the commitment was fulfilled, Richardson and his new bandmates moved to Charlotte, North Carolina and began recording demos in Leverty's bedroom. The band would record all day and play hotel shows at night to earn income. Since Leverty and Foster's band name of White Heat was trademarked, the band chose "FireHouse" instead. In December 1989, Michael Caplan of Epic Records flew to Charlotte, NC to see a FireHouse show, and told the band immediately following the performance that they were ready for a record deal. The band went into the studio with David Prater as producer. Prater, who later produced bands such as Dream Theater and having drummed with Santana, produced the band's first two albums.


title: FireHouse

text: The band's self-titled debut in 1990, "FireHouse", was met with much critical acclaim. The band won the American Music Award for Best New Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Band of 1991, Metal Edge Magazine's Best New Band of 1991, Young Guitar Magazine's Best Newcomer of 1991, and Music Life Magazine's reader's pop poll Best Newcomer of the Year 1992. The band's first album sold over two million copies in the United States, and was certified double platinum by the RIAA. The band's third and most successful single, "Love of a Lifetime", reached No. 3 selling over 500,000 copies. Other singles also charted including the harder-rocking "Don't Treat Me Bad" at No. 14. The first single from the album, "Shake & Tumble" enjoyed success on the radio and brought attention to the band, but it failed to chart on the Pop charts, although it did at Metal radio. The album went on to become certified Gold in Canada, Singapore, and Japan.


title: FireHouse

text: The band followed their impressive debut with "Hold Your Fire" in 1992. Although not as successful as its predecessor due to the recent explosion of Grunge and Alternative rock, "Hold Your Fire" produced three more hit singles and was certified Gold in the USA. To date, "Hold Your Fire" has soundscanned over 873,000 copies in the United States alone. Singles from Hold Your Fire included "Sleeping with You", "Reach for the Sky", and the ballad "When I Look into Your Eyes". The latter single became a Top 10 hit in the United States.