title: Test card

text: For rights reasons, much of the music was recorded by light music orchestras in France and Germany, though sometimes by British musicians, or top international session players using pseudonyms, such as The Oscar Brandenburg Orchestra (an amalgamation of Neil Richardson, Alan Moorhouse and Johnny Pearson) or the Stuttgart Studio Orchestra. Other composers and bandleaders commissioned for this type of work included Gordon Langford, Ernest Tomlinson. Roger Roger, Heinz Kiessling, Werner Tautz, Frank Chacksfield and Syd Dale.


title: Test card

text: During the 1980s, the test card was gradually seen less and less - it was pushed out first by Teletext pages, then extended programme hours. The same tapes were used to accompany both the test card and Ceefax on BBC channels, but some fans argue that new tapes introduced after Ceefax became the norm in 1983 were less musically interesting.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Steven Frayne (born 17 December 1982), better known by his stage name Dynamo, is a British magician born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. His television show "" ran from July 2011 to September 2014, and saw him win the Best Entertainment Programme award at the 2012 and 2013 Broadcast Awards. Dynamo has toured the world, and his Seeing Is Believing arena tour was seen by over 750,000 people across the UK, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne was given the name Dynamo in 2001 while performing at Houdini's centenary celebrations at the New York Hilton in front of magic peers including David Blaine and David Copperfield. Impressed by Frayne's magic display, a member of the crowd shouted out: “this kid is an effing dynamo”, and the name stuck.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2003, Frayne was given a loan from the Prince's Trust, allowing him to start his business and invest in camera equipment. Frayne moved to London in 2004 to build a career in magic, and his plan was to create the first ever 'magic mix-tape'. He set out with a small team to film his performances on the streets of London and backstage at events, after he had been permitted entry by impressing doormen and tour managers. Within a year, Frayne had created footage with Coldplay, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg and more. He quickly developed a fanbase after posting the clips on YouTube, helping to boost his profile to a wider audience.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Dynamo's first TV appearances began in 2002 on Channel 4's "Richard & Judy". Bosses at the station were impressed with his magic abilities, and commissioned a one-hour documentary titled "Dynamo's Estate of Mind", which followed Dynamo doing his routines around the London circuit.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: "" is a fly on the wall documentary series that followed the life of Frayne. The series was produced by Frayne's own production company Inner Circle Films and Phil McIntyre Productions for UKTV and Universal Networks International. The series reached over 30 million viewers in the UK and over 250 million viewers worldwide across 193 territories.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: The four-episode first series aired from 7 July 2011 until 28 July 2011. To launch the show, Frayne walked on water across the River Thames outside the Houses of Parliament, in front of a crowd who had gathered on Westminster Bridge. The first series was filmed in London, Miami and Los Angeles, and had 6.69 million viewers in the UK, leading to UKTV renewing the show for a second and third series in February 2012.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Series 2 of premiered on 5 July 2012, and was again four-episodes in duration. The show generated 7.67 million viewers in the UK and won the award for Best Entertainment Programme at the Broadcast Awards, show of the year at the Virgin Media awards and was shortlisted for Best Entertainment Programme at the 17th National Television Awards. This series also received a BAFTA nomination for Best Entertainment Programme.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2013, Frayne travelled to New York City, Ibiza, South Africa and London to film content for the show's third series. The first episode, filmed in New York City, was broadcast on 11 July 2013 and was viewed by 1.35 million people. The series was again nominated for BAFTA's Best Entertainment Programme award, alongside Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Derren Brown: The Great Art Robbery and Strictly Come Dancing.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: A fourth and final series of the show was commissioned by UKTV in 2014, which aired in the September of the same year. In this series, Dynamo performed street magic in California, India, Paris, London, Manchester and Bradford. For the third year running, Dynamo: Magician Impossible was nominated by BAFTA for the Best Entertainment Programme award.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: On 19 December 2013, Watch broadcast "Dynamo Revealed", a documentary in which Frayne spoke to the then BBC Radio 1 presenter Zane Lowe about the steps he took to grow from rough area of Bradford to the magician that he is today.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2016, Watch commissioned an hour-long TV special titled "Dynamo A-Z", which saw Dynamo go on a retrospective, alphabetical journey featuring clips of some of his most memorable magic tricks from "Dynamo: Magician Impossible".


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne continued his work with Watch to bring his live arena tour, Seeing is Believing, to TV screens across the United Kingdom. "Dynamo Live at The O2" followed Frayne as he embarked on the biggest live magic performance in British history. The show was broadcast live across the UK on Watch.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne has appeared and performed on multiple TV shows, including "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross", Snoop Dogg's "Fatherhood", the MTV EMAs and more. He has also featured in advertisements for the likes of Adidas, Samsung and Pepsi, and has appeared on the catwalk for Naomi Campbell's "Fashion for Relief".


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne's media appearances have regularly involved magic stunts with celebrities. In May 2009, Dynamo levitated comedian Matt Lucas four feet off the ground in front of a crowd at the Emirates Stadium in London.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne collaborated with Pepsi Max in 2013, where he levitated next to a London Bus driving through Central London. The stunt attracted media coverage from across the globe, including Good Morning America and Sky News. Later in the year, Frayne worked with Mercedes-Benz to create a video called Dynamo vs Coulthard, featuring Formula One driver David Coulthard.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2014, Frayne worked with Hunter and became an integral part of their London Fashion Week show. Frayne appeared to levitate and then made models, including Suki Waterhouse, vanish in front of the crowd which included Stella McCartney and Anna Wintour.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: 2015 saw Frayne work with Fiat to launch the Fiat 500X. Frayne made the car appear in a beam of light in front of a live audience at the Copper Box Arena in London for the car's pre-launch event. The live performance was a result of three years of work and preparation by Dynamo.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In March 2017, Dynamo worked with Betfair to help the FC Barcelona team bond with a series of unconventional training techniques. Dynamo first appeared at the club's training ground, before working on visualisation exercises with the likes of Luis Suárez, Jordi Alba, Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets and Sergi Roberto.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne has made multiple charitable media appearances for Comic Relief, Sport Relief and Children in Need. In 2010, he appeared on BBC One's coverage of Sport Relief, where he appeared to turn lottery tickets into cash in front of singer Robbie Williams and presenter Davina McCall. He then later performed a levitation in front of comedian James Corden and a live studio audience. The following year, Frayne appeared on Comic Relief, highlighting the work that British Airways had done to raise money.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Dynamo has appeared on networks and shows including ESPN, the BBC's Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Young Apprentice and more. In 2013, Frayne was flown out to Hollywood to film with pop band One Direction, as part of 1D Day. He also opened the semi-final of Strictly Come Dancing with a magic and dance routine.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In February 2018, Dynamo appeared in an episode of Amazon Prime’s The Grand Tour, and in November of the same year, he made an appearance for Prince Charles' 70th birthday, where he performed on ITV's "We Are Most Amused and Amazed".


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2014, Frayne announced his first live tour, Seeing Is Believing. Frayne's ambitions for the show were high, commenting to the press that “[he was] hoping that like [he] did for magic on TV, [he could] reinvent the live magic show and produce something fans have never seen before.”


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Dynamo was initially booked to play a 10-date run of shows in the UK, but following high demand for tickets, the run was extended to three years and 145 dates, where he sold over 750,000 tickets and filled arenas across the UK, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: As part of the tour, Dynamo became the first magician to headline The O2, London. He performed at the London venue three times, with the final show being screened live on TV.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne has written several literary accounts which revolve around his upbringing, his personal story, magic and his relationship with the artform. In 2013, Frayne released his debut book Nothing Is Impossible: My Story, which became a Sunday Times Bestseller and was described as “a terrific read” by TV personality Jonathan Ross.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2017, Frayne released Dynamo: The Book of Secrets, a fully illustrated beginner's guide to modern magic with tips, tricks and some of his best kept secrets for new, aspiring magicians to learn. The Book of Secrets reached number 1 position in The Guardian's Paperback Non-Fiction chart.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne has worked with several charities throughout his career as a magician. As well as his work with the BBC's Children in Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief, where he has appeared on screen performing magic. In 2016 Dynamo worked on a film for Theirworld titled Safe Schools: Children can no longer wait, Directed by Sebastian Thiel. In 2017 he was announced as Theirworld ambassador. Since then, Frayne has worked with the organisation to help promote the education of Syrian refugee children. As part of his work with the charity, Frayne has travelled around the world and to the United Nations to meet world leaders and discuss opportunities to help Syrian refugees.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne was born in Bradford, England, to an English mother and a father of Pakistani ancestry. Frayne is the eldest of four children, and his father was in prison for most of his childhood, where he grew up on the Delph Hill estate in Wyke, one of the most deprived areas in the UK at the time. Frayne suffered from bullying at school, and as a result, his grandfather taught him his first magic trick to make it seem like he was much heavier than he was in reality, so that other children couldn't pick him up. Frayne is a supporter of Bradford City A.F.C.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne was diagnosed with Crohn's disease when he was a teenager, and had part of his intestine removed when he was 17 years old. In 2018, he posted a video on Twitter discussing his struggles with the disease following a severe bout of food poisoning in 2017, which led to him suffering from severe arthritis, weight gain and rashes. In June 2020, Frayne issued a High Court writ for damages in excess of £200,000, against the franchise owners of his local fast food outlet for damages, alleging food poisoning, due to his consumption of uncooked chicken.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2012, Frayne married his partner, whom he met at a music festival. The couple now live in a Grade II cottage in Hampstead, London. During a trip to South Africa in 2018, his London home was raided and robbed of £100,000 worth of watches and jewellery. The thief, a career criminal, was caught and convicted of the theft.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Dynamo was promoted to Associate of the Magic Circle for Performance by the magicians’ society The Magic Circle in 2012, the same year that Dynamo: Magician Impossible won the award for Best Entertainment Programme at the Broadcast Awards. The show also won Show of the Year at the Virgin Media Awards and received nominations for Best Entertainment Programme at the BAFTA TV Awards and the 17th National Television Awards.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Frayne was awarded an honorary degree from Bradford University in 2013, for his commitment to Bradford, improving opportunities for young people and his charity work. 2013 also saw Frayne receive the Grolla d’Oro award at the Masters of Magic Convention in Turin.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2015, Dynamo was named AMA Magician of the Year award at The Academy of Magical Arts 48th Annual Awards Show. He was also given a Fellowship to the Academy by its Board of Trustees. Dynamo was also awarded The Magic Circle's Maskelyne Award in 2016, which is awarded for services to British magic.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: Following series 2 of "Dynamo: Magician Impossible", the show again won the Broadcast Award for Best Entertainment Programme in 2013. Dynamo also won the accolade of TV Show of the Year at the Virgin Media Awards and was nominated for Best Entertainment Programme at the BAFTA TV Awards in the same year.


title: Dynamo (magician)

text: In 2014, "Dynamo: Magician Impossible" was nominated for Best Entertainment Programme at both the BAFTA TV Awards and the Televisual Bulldog Awards.


title: Anita Desai

text: Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar (born 24 June 1937) is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel "Fire on the Mountain", from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for "The Village by the Sea". The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.


title: Anita Desai

text: Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German immigrant mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar. Her Bengali father first met her German mother while he was an engineering student in pre-war Berlin; and they got married during a period when it was still unusual for an Indian man to marry a European woman. Shortly after their marriage, they moved to New Delhi, where Desai was raised with her two elder sisters and brother.


title: Anita Desai

text: She grew up speaking Hindi with her neighbours, and only German at her home. She also spoke Bengali, Urdu and English out of her house. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result, English became her "literary language". She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.


title: Anita Desai

text: She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book "Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos".


title: Anita Desai

text: They have four children, including Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai. Her children were taken to Thul (near Alibagh) for weekends, where Desai set her novel "The Village by the Sea". For that work she won the 1983 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.


title: Anita Desai

text: Desai published her first novel, "Cry The Peacock", in 1963. In 1958 she collaborated with P. Lal and founded the publishing firm Writers Workshop. She considers "Clear Light of Day" (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighborhood in which she grew up.


title: Anita Desai

text: In 1984, she published "In Custody" – about an Urdu poet in his declining days – which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993, she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


title: Anita Desai

text: The 1999 Booker Prize finalist novel "Fasting, Feasting" increased her popularity. Her novel "The Zigzag Way", set in 20th-century Mexico, appeared in 2004 and her latest collection of short stories, "The Artist of Disappearance", was published in 2011.


title: Anita Desai

text: Desai has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Baruch College, and Smith College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of Girton College, Cambridge (to which she dedicated "Baumgartner's Bombay").


title: Anita Desai

text: In 1993, her novel "In Custody" was adapted by Merchant Ivory Productions into an English film by the same name, directed by Ismail Merchant, with a screenplay by Shahrukh Husain. It won the 1994 President of India Gold Medal for Best Picture and stars Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.


title: KFConsole

text: The KFConsole is a Home video game console announced by KFC Gaming and Cooler Master. After its initial announcement in June 2020, it was widely believed to be a hoax, until an official reveal in December. The console boasts various features, including ray tracing, up to 4K resolution, and 240Hz output. The signature feature of the device is a proprietary "Chicken Chamber" that can store and warm chicken.


title: KFConsole

text: The KFConsole's design is inspired by KFC's Bargain Bucket. The console itself is an all-black cylinder with a backlit red power button on the front below the Chicken Chamber, which has the red KFConsole logo on it. The Chicken Chamber is a drawer that opens to reveal a compartment for storing food, which uses the system's heat and airflow system to warm the contents.


title: KFConsole

text: Technically, from what is known of the KFConsole, it is more-closely related to a gaming PC than to a traditional home video game console, as it is not being developed by a video game company to run proprietary software, and is being billed as having upgradable components which most consoles do not feature. The KFConsole is powered by a Intel NUC 9 Extreme Compute Element. The console is capable of harnessing Nvidia's ray tracing and 4K resolution, with support for 240 Hz output. The device also has support for virtual reality. The Asus-powered graphics will apparently be housed in a "first-of-its-kind hot-swappable GPU slot" which, according to KFC, will keep the device as "the most powerful console for generations to come."


title: KFConsole

text: The KFConsole was officially announced on December 22, 2020. No official release date has been announced for the console, and the pricing has also not been revealed.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The Ordnance Quick-Firing 17-pounder (or just 17-pdr) was a 76.2 mm (3 inch) gun developed by the United Kingdom during World War II. It was used as an anti-tank gun on its own carriage, as well as equipping a number of British tanks. Used with the APDS shot, it was capable of defeating all but the thickest armour on German tanks. It was used to 'up-gun' some foreign-built vehicles in British service, notably to produce the Sherman Firefly variant of the US M4 Sherman tank, giving British tank units the ability to hold their own against their German counterparts. In the anti-tank role, it was replaced after the war by the 120 mm BAT recoilless rifle. As a tank gun, it was succeeded by the 84 mm 20 pounder.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: Before the QF 6-pounder had entered service, the British predicted that it would soon be inadequate given the increasing armour of German tanks. In late 1940, the design of a replacement began, and was largely completed by the end of 1941. A prototype production line was set up in spring 1942, and with the appearance of Tiger I tanks in early 1943 in the North African Campaign, the first 100 prototype 17-pounder anti-tank guns were quickly sent to help counter this new threat. So great was the rush that they were sent before proper carriages had been developed, and the guns had to be mounted in the carriages of 25-pounder gun-howitzers. These early weapons were known as 17/25-pounders and given the codename "Pheasant". They first saw action in February 1943.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: Fully developed 17-pounders started production in 1943 and were first used during the Italian Campaign. They became one of the most effective weapons on the battlefield, on both carriages and tanks.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The 17-pounder anti-tank guns also saw action in Korea against tanks and in general support use against bunker positions. After Korea, the gun was largely replaced in the tank role by the 84mm calibre, Ordnance QF 20 pounder, and in the anti-tank role by the BAT, MOBAT and 120 mm L6 WOMBAT series of recoilless rifles.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The 17-pounder outperformed all other Allied armour-piercing guns, and was quickly adapted for use on various tank chassis. However, few tanks were capable of carrying such a large gun due to the size limitations of their turret rings. A new British tank specification, A29, was produced to meet the need for a 17-pounder armed cruiser tank. While the A29 was eventually cancelled without a successful design being produced, an amended specification, A30, reached production in 1943. The A30 specification reduced weight and enabled the use of Cromwell tank components as a design expedient. The resulting Cruiser Mark VIII Challenger had a longer hull and provided a larger turret, allowing the 17-pounder to be mounted along with space for a second loader, thought to be required for the gun's larger ammunition. However, production of the tank took time and few could be completed before the allied invasion of Normandy.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: While developing the Challenger tank, the British devised a conversion for their US-supplied M4 Sherman tanks to mount the 17-pounder. This was applied in sufficient numbers to put them into service in time for D-Day as the Sherman Firefly. The gun was a modified design that was produced specifically for the Firefly, the MkIV. A new horizontal-sliding breech was designed as the usual vertical-sliding breech of the Mks I and II made loading very difficult. An additional box was welded to the back of the turret to take the radio, which was moved to allow for the breech and its recoil. A new recoil mechanism, based on the 6-pounder design, was developed and the thicker section of the gun barrel in contact with the cradle was lengthened to match the new recoil system. The original experimental Sherman mounting at Lulworth was actually rigid with no recoil system. Production of the Challenger was cancelled with only about 200 built, and 2,200 - 2,400 Sherman Is and Vs were converted as Fireflies (sources vary) and deployed in Sherman regiments Italy and NW Europe. The Challengers were deployed with Cromwell regiments.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The British also converted some of their US-produced M10 tank destroyers, replacing the 3-inch (76 mm) M7 gun with the 17-pounder; the resulting vehicles were called 17pdr SP Achilles or just "17-pdr M10C". These served with Royal Artillery as self-propelled guns.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The 17-pounder was also successfully trialled on the Australian-designed Sentinel tank, though no Sentinels equipped with this gun entered service with the Australian Army.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: Efforts to fit the 17pdr on a Cromwell chassis in a better manner than the ungainly Challenger resulted in the Comet tank. However the Comet could still not take the 17pdr. The 75mm High Velocity Gun project was resurrected and redesigned to use a shortened version of the 17pdr barrel and the 17pdr projectiles mated to the cartridge of the 3 inch 30cwt anti-aircraft gun. While often confused with the 17pdr, the 77mm HV, was an entirely separate weapon and was only used on the Comet.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: As the war came to a close, the 17-pdr was fitted to the new Centurion tank, then designated as a "heavy cruiser" tank until ultimately being replaced by the 20-pounder in 1949. The Centurion was the first tank designed around the 17pdr gun.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The United States Army did not use the 17-pdr. Although the gun was offered to them and tested, they chose to stick with their 76 mm gun M1. US forces did however request some Firefly conversions in March 1945 and as many as 18 were converted but the war ended before they were shipped from the UK.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The British started work on developing a gun that was small enough to fit on their tank designs—particularly the Cromwell cruiser tank then at the design stage. It was intended to fire the US 75 mm projectiles (AP shot and HE) at a higher velocity, avoiding a downgrade in armour penetration versus the 6-pounder, which the dual purpose 75 mm was replacing. The new 50-calibre long gun, known as the Vickers HV 75 mm, fired a 75 mm projectile attached to a necked down 3-inch (76.2 mm) 20 cwt AA gun cartridge through a modified breech. The larger 3" cartridge provided a greater propellant charge compared with normal 75 mm shells. Although the 75 mm HV was a promising weapon, it proved to be too big for the Cromwell tank, which was ultimately fitted with the normal QF 75 mm gun in use on other British tanks. To account for this difference, tank squadrons were teamed with Challenger and Sherman Firefly tanks armed with the 17-pounder.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: When the Cromwell's replacement, the Comet, was at the design stage, the 75 mm HV concept was reworked to fire the same projectiles as the 17-pounder through a shortened 17-pounder barrel but retaining the 3-inch cartridge case firing from a standard 3-inch breech. This has the benefit of greater ease of use on tanks, many of which would not have sufficient turret space to accommodate the breech length and recoil distance of the 17-pounder. Similarly, the smaller 3"-based ammunition was easier to store and handle in the tank's cramped interior. This new gun's ammunition was not interchangeable with the 17-pounder and to prevent confusion over ammunition supplies, it was renamed the 77 mm HV—the 'HV' standing for "High Velocity"—although it was the same 76.2 mm calibre as the 17-pounder.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: APCBC ammunition was the standard ammunition for the gun, while APDS shot was used for about 6% of the average load of a 17-pounder-equipped British tank.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: While offering greater penetration, the smaller (sub-calibre) tungsten core of APDS was considered to provide less accurate fire than APCBC ammunition at ranges beyond 500 yards. This was due to the much lesser visible impact of rounds that fell short, making it hard to spot the fall of shot and correct aim. The APDS was also considered to cause less damage to an enemy tank if it did penetrate the armour. After penetration the core usually disintegrated.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The 17-pounder produced a very large muzzle flash due to the large amount of propellant in its cartridges. Muzzle blast was also significant, described by crews of the anti-tank gun variant as resembling a hard slap on the chest.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: EFC = Equivalent full charge. EFC was the basis of calculating the wear effect of propellent charges. Instructions were to examine the barrel for wear after every 40 EFC.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: The 17-pounder was a much bulkier and heavier weapon than its predecessor. As a result, it had to be towed by a gun tractor, such as the Morris Quad, M3 Half-track or the Crusader, as it could not effectively be moved by its gun crew alone, especially on poor ground. After firing on soft ground, the 17-pounder frequently had to be pulled out of the ground due to the gun recoil burying the trail spades. After the Second World War, it was issued to anti-tank units of the Royal Artillery in the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) towed by the M3 Half Track. When the Royal Artillery anti-tank units were disbanded in 1951, it was transferred to Infantry battalions in the BAOR (six per battalion), towed by the Oxford Tracked Carrier. It was later replaced by the 120 mm BAT recoilless rifle anti-tank weapon.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: Also known by the 17/25 pounder designation, a stop-gap measure named "Pheasant" mated the 17 pounder gun with a modified 25 pounder carriage. This enabled the gun to be pressed into service before its own carriage design was ready.


title: Ordnance QF 17-pounder

text: In the immediate post-war era in the Middle East, Arab national armies - Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq - mainly used British manufactured artillery, including the towed 17-pounder. The Israelis used a number of 17 pounders that they captured from the Arabs in the war of independence


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis (also known as computability thesis, the Turing–Church thesis, the Church–Turing conjecture, Church's thesis, Church's conjecture, and Turing's thesis) is a thesis about the nature of computable functions. It states that a function on the natural numbers can be calculated by an effective method if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine. The thesis is named after American mathematician Alonzo Church and the British mathematician Alan Turing. Before the precise definition of computable function, mathematicians often used the informal term effectively calculable to describe functions that are computable by paper-and-pencil methods. In the 1930s, several independent attempts were made to formalize the notion of computability:


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Church, Kleene, and Turing proved that these three formally defined classes of computable functions coincide: a function is λ-computable if and only if it is Turing computable, and if and only if it is "general recursive". This has led mathematicians and computer scientists to believe that the concept of computability is accurately characterized by these three equivalent processes. Other formal attempts to characterize computability have subsequently strengthened this belief (see below).


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: On the other hand, the Church–Turing thesis states that the above three formally-defined classes of computable functions coincide with the "informal" notion of an effectively calculable function. Although the thesis has near-universal acceptance, it cannot be formally proven, as the concept of effective calculability is only informally defined.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Since its inception, variations on the original thesis have arisen, including statements about what can physically be realized by a computer in our universe (physical Church-Turing thesis) and what can be efficiently computed (Church–Turing thesis (complexity theory)). These variations are not due to Church or Turing, but arise from later work in complexity theory and digital physics. The thesis also has implications for the philosophy of mind (see below).


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: addresses the notion of "effective computability" as follows: "Clearly the existence of CC and RC (Church's and Rosser's proofs) presupposes a precise definition of 'effective'. 'Effective method' is here used in the rather special sense of a method each step of which is precisely predetermined and which is certain to produce the answer in a finite number of steps". Thus the adverb-adjective "effective" is used in a sense of "1a: producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect", and "capable of producing a result".


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: In the following, the words "effectively calculable" will mean "produced by any intuitively 'effective' means whatsoever" and "effectively computable" will mean "produced by a Turing-machine or equivalent mechanical device". Turing's "definitions" given in a footnote in his 1938 Ph.D. thesis "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals", supervised by Church, are virtually the same:


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Church also stated that "No computational procedure will be considered as an algorithm unless it can be represented as a Turing Machine".


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: It was stated ... that "a function is effectively calculable if its values can be found by some purely mechanical process". We may take this literally, understanding that by a purely mechanical process one which could be carried out by a machine. The development ... leads to ... an identification of computability with effective calculability. [ is the footnote quoted above.]


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: One of the important problems for logicians in the 1930s was the Entscheidungsproblem of David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann, which asked whether there was a mechanical procedure for separating mathematical truths from mathematical falsehoods. This quest required that the notion of "algorithm" or "effective calculability" be pinned down, at least well enough for the quest to begin. But from the very outset Alonzo Church's attempts began with a debate that continues to this day. the notion of "effective calculability" to be (i) an "axiom or axioms" in an axiomatic system, (ii) merely a "definition" that "identified" two or more propositions, (iii) an "empirical hypothesis" to be verified by observation of natural events, or (iv) just "a proposal" for the sake of argument (i.e. a "thesis").


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: In the course of studying the problem, Church and his student Stephen Kleene introduced the notion of λ-definable functions, and they were able to prove that several large classes of functions frequently encountered in number theory were λ-definable. The debate began when Church proposed to Gödel that one should define the "effectively computable" functions as the λ-definable functions. Gödel, however, was not convinced and called the proposal "thoroughly unsatisfactory". Rather, in correspondence with Church (c. 1934–1935), Gödel proposed "axiomatizing" the notion of "effective calculability"; indeed, in a 1935 letter to Kleene, Church reported that:


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: But Gödel offered no further guidance. Eventually, he would suggest his recursion, modified by Herbrand's suggestion, that Gödel had detailed in his 1934 lectures in Princeton NJ (Kleene and Rosser transcribed the notes). But he did not think that the two ideas could be satisfactorily identified "except heuristically".


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Next, it was necessary to identify and prove the equivalence of two notions of effective calculability. Equipped with the λ-calculus and "general" recursion, Kleene with help of Church and J. Barkley Rosser produced proofs (1933, 1935) to show that the two calculi are equivalent. Church subsequently modified his methods to include use of Herbrand–Gödel recursion and then proved (1936) that the Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable: there is no algorithm that can determine whether a well formed formula has a beta normal form.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Many years later in a letter to Davis (c. 1965), Gödel said that "he was, at the time of these [1934] lectures, not at all convinced that his concept of recursion comprised all possible recursions". By 1963–1964 Gödel would disavow Herbrand–Gödel recursion and the λ-calculus in favor of the Turing machine as the definition of "algorithm" or "mechanical procedure" or "formal system".


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: A hypothesis leading to a natural law?: In late 1936 Alan Turing's paper (also proving that the Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable) was delivered orally, but had not yet appeared in print. On the other hand, Emil Post's 1936 paper had appeared and was certified independent of Turing's work. Post strongly disagreed with Church's "identification" of effective computability with the λ-calculus and recursion, stating:


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Rather, he regarded the notion of "effective calculability" as merely a "working hypothesis" that might lead by inductive reasoning to a "natural law" rather than by "a definition or an axiom". This idea was "sharply" criticized by Church.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Thus Post in his 1936 paper was also discounting Kurt Gödel's suggestion to Church in 1934–1935 that the thesis might be expressed as an axiom or set of axioms.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Turing adds another definition, Rosser equates all three: Within just a short time, Turing's 1936–1937 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" appeared. In it he stated another notion of "effective computability" with the introduction of his a-machines (now known as the Turing machine abstract computational model). And in a proof-sketch added as an "Appendix" to his 1936–1937 paper, Turing showed that the classes of functions defined by λ-calculus and Turing machines coincided. Church was quick to recognise how compelling Turing's analysis was. In his review of Turing's paper he made clear that Turing's notion made "the identification with effectiveness in the ordinary (not explicitly defined) sense evident immediately".


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: In a few years (1939) Turing would propose, like Church and Kleene before him, that "his" formal definition of mechanical computing agent was the correct one. Thus, by 1939, both Church (1934) and Turing (1939) had individually proposed that their "formal systems" should be "definitions" of "effective calculability"; neither framed their statements as "theses".


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Kleene proposes "Thesis I": This left the overt expression of a "thesis" to Kleene. In 1943 Kleene proposed his "Thesis I":


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: The Church–Turing Thesis: Stephen Kleene, in "Introduction To Metamathematics", finally goes on to formally name "Church's Thesis" and "Turing's Thesis", using his theory of recursive realizability. Kleene having switched from presenting his work in the terminology of Church-Kleene lambda definability, to that of Gödel-Kleene recursiveness (partial recursive functions). In this transition, Kleene modified Gödel's general recursive functions to allow for proofs of the unsolvability of problems in the Intuitionism of E. J. Brouwer. In his graduate textbook on logic, "Church's thesis" is introduced and basic mathematical results are demonstrated to be unrealizable. Next, Kleene proceeds to present "Turing's thesis", where results are shown to be uncomputable, using his simplified derivation of a Turing machine based on the work of Emil Post. Both theses are proven equivalent by use of "Theorem XXX".


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Kleene, finally, uses for the first time the term the "Church-Turing thesis" in a section in which he helps to give clarifications to concepts in Alan Turing's paper "The Word Problem in Semi-Groups with Cancellation", as demanded in a critique from William Boone.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: An attempt to understand the notion of "effective computability" better led Robin Gandy (Turing's student and friend) in 1980 to analyze "machine" computation (as opposed to human-computation acted out by a Turing machine). Gandy's curiosity about, and analysis of, cellular automata (including Conway's game of life), parallelism, and crystalline automata, led him to propose four "principles (or constraints) ... which it is argued, any machine must satisfy". His most-important fourth, "the principle of causality" is based on the "finite velocity of propagation of effects and signals; contemporary physics rejects the possibility of instantaneous action at a distance". From these principles and some additional constraints—(1a) a lower bound on the linear dimensions of any of the parts, (1b) an upper bound on speed of propagation (the velocity of light), (2) discrete progress of the machine, and (3) deterministic behavior—he produces a theorem that "What can be calculated by a device satisfying principles I–IV is computable."


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: In the late 1990s Wilfried Sieg analyzed Turing's and Gandy's notions of "effective calculability" with the intent of "sharpening the informal notion, formulating its general features axiomatically, and investigating the axiomatic framework". In his 1997 and 2002 work Sieg presents a series of constraints on the behavior of a "computor"—"a human computing agent who proceeds mechanically". These constraints reduce to:


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: The thesis can be viewed as nothing but an ordinary mathematical definition. Comments by Gödel on the subject suggest this view, e.g. "the correct definition of mechanical computability was established beyond any doubt by Turing". The case for viewing the thesis as nothing more than a definition is made explicitly by Robert I. Soare, where it is also argued that Turing's definition of computability is no less likely to be correct than the epsilon-delta definition of a continuous function.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Other formalisms (besides recursion, the λ-calculus, and the Turing machine) have been proposed for describing effective calculability/computability. Kleene (1952) adds to the list the functions ""reckonable" in the system S" of Kurt Gödel 1936, and Emil Post's (1943, 1946) ""canonical" [also called "normal"] "systems"". In the 1950s Hao Wang and Martin Davis greatly simplified the one-tape Turing-machine model (see Post–Turing machine). Marvin Minsky expanded the model to two or more tapes and greatly simplified the tapes into "up-down counters", which Melzak and Lambek further evolved into what is now known as the counter machine model. In the late 1960s and early 1970s researchers expanded the counter machine model into the register machine, a close cousin to the modern notion of the computer. Other models include combinatory logic and Markov algorithms. Gurevich adds the pointer machine model of Kolmogorov and Uspensky (1953, 1958): "... they just wanted to ... convince themselves that there is no way to extend the notion of computable function."


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: All these contributions involve proofs that the models are computationally equivalent to the Turing machine; such models are said to be Turing complete. Because all these different attempts at formalizing the concept of "effective calculability/computability" have yielded equivalent results, it is now generally assumed that the Church–Turing thesis is correct. In fact, Gödel (1936) proposed something stronger than this; he observed that there was something "absolute" about the concept of "reckonable in S":


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Proofs in computability theory often invoke the Church–Turing thesis in an informal way to establish the computability of functions while avoiding the (often very long) details which would be involved in a rigorous, formal proof. To establish that a function is computable by Turing machine, it is usually considered sufficient to give an informal English description of how the function can be effectively computed, and then conclude "by the Church–Turing thesis" that the function is Turing computable (equivalently, partial recursive).


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Dirk van Dalen gives the following example for the sake of illustrating this informal use of the Church–Turing thesis:


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: In order to make the above example completely rigorous, one would have to carefully construct a Turing machine, or λ-function, or carefully invoke recursion axioms, or at best, cleverly invoke various theorems of computability theory. But because the computability theorist believes that Turing computability correctly captures what can be computed effectively, and because an effective procedure is spelled out in English for deciding the set B, the computability theorist accepts this as proof that the set is indeed recursive.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: The success of the Church–Turing thesis prompted variations of the thesis to be proposed. For example, the physical Church–Turing thesis states: "All physically computable functions are Turing-computable."


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: The Church–Turing thesis says nothing about the efficiency with which one model of computation can simulate another. It has been proved for instance that a (multi-tape) universal Turing machine only suffers a logarithmic slowdown factor in simulating any Turing machine.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: A variation of the Church–Turing thesis addresses whether an arbitrary but "reasonable" model of computation can be efficiently simulated. This is called the feasibility thesis, also known as the (classical) complexity-theoretic Church–Turing thesis or the extended Church–Turing thesis, which is not due to Church or Turing, but rather was realized gradually in the development of complexity theory. It states: "A probabilistic Turing machine can efficiently simulate any realistic model of computation." The word 'efficiently' here means up to polynomial-time reductions. This thesis was originally called computational complexity-theoretic Church–Turing thesis by Ethan Bernstein and Umesh Vazirani (1997). The complexity-theoretic Church–Turing thesis, then, posits that all 'reasonable' models of computation yield the same class of problems that can be computed in polynomial time. Assuming the conjecture that probabilistic polynomial time (BPP) equals deterministic polynomial time (P), the word 'probabilistic' is optional in the complexity-theoretic Church–Turing thesis. A similar thesis, called the invariance thesis, was introduced by Cees F. Slot and Peter van Emde Boas. It states: Reasonable' machines can simulate each other within a polynomially bounded overhead in time and a constant-factor overhead in space." The thesis originally appeared in a paper at STOC'84, which was the first paper to show that polynomial-time overhead and constant-space overhead could be "simultaneously" achieved for a simulation of a Random Access Machine on a Turing machine.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: If BQP is shown to be a strict superset of BPP, it would invalidate the complexity-theoretic Church–Turing thesis. In other words, there would be efficient quantum algorithms that perform tasks that do not have efficient probabilistic algorithms. This would not however invalidate the original Church–Turing thesis, since a quantum computer can always be simulated by a Turing machine, but it would invalidate the classical complexity-theoretic Church–Turing thesis for efficiency reasons. Consequently, the quantum complexity-theoretic Church–Turing thesis states: "A quantum Turing machine can efficiently simulate any realistic model of computation."


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Eugene Eberbach and Peter Wegner claim that the Church–Turing thesis is sometimes interpreted too broadly,


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: stating "Though [...] Turing machines express the behavior of algorithms, the broader assertion that algorithms precisely capture what can be computed is invalid". They claim that forms of computation not captured by the thesis are relevant today,


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Philosophers have interpreted the Church–Turing thesis as having implications for the philosophy of mind. B. Jack Copeland states that it is an open empirical question whether there are actual deterministic physical processes that, in the long run, elude simulation by a Turing machine; furthermore, he states that it is an open empirical question whether any such processes are involved in the working of the human brain. There are also some important open questions which cover the relationship between the Church–Turing thesis and physics, and the possibility of hypercomputation. When applied to physics, the thesis has several possible meanings:


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: There are many other technical possibilities which fall outside or between these three categories, but these serve to illustrate the range of the concept.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Philosophical aspects of the thesis, regarding both physical and biological computers, are also discussed in Odifreddi's 1989 textbook on recursion theory.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: One can formally define functions that are not computable. A well-known example of such a function is the Busy Beaver function. This function takes an input "n" and returns the largest number of symbols that a Turing machine with "n" states can print before halting, when run with no input. Finding an upper bound on the busy beaver function is equivalent to solving the halting problem, a problem known to be unsolvable by Turing machines. Since the busy beaver function cannot be computed by Turing machines, the Church–Turing thesis states that this function cannot be effectively computed by any method.


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Several computational models allow for the computation of (Church-Turing) non-computable functions. These are known as


title: Church–Turing thesis

text: Mark Burgin argues that super-recursive algorithms such as inductive Turing machines disprove the Church–Turing thesis. His argument relies on a definition of algorithm broader than the ordinary one, so that non-computable functions obtained from some inductive Turing machines are called computable. This interpretation of the Church–Turing thesis differs from the interpretation commonly accepted in computability theory, discussed above. The argument that super-recursive algorithms are indeed algorithms in the sense of the Church–Turing thesis has not found broad acceptance within the computability research community.


title: The Reader

text: The Reader () is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States in 1997. The story is a parable, dealing with the difficulties post-war German generations have had comprehending the Holocaust; Ruth Franklin writes that it was aimed specifically at the generation Bertolt Brecht called the "Nachgeborenen", those who came after. Like other novels in the genre of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", the struggle to come to terms with the past, "The Reader" explores how the post-war generations should approach the generation that took part in, or witnessed, the atrocities. These are the questions at the heart of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses die and living memory fades.


title: The Reader

text: Schlink's book was well received in his native country and elsewhere, winning several awards. "Der Spiegel" wrote that it was one of the greatest triumphs of German literature since Günter Grass's "The Tin Drum". It sold 500,000 copies in Germany and was listed 14th of the 100 favorite books of German readers in a television poll in 2007. It won the German Hans Fallada Prize in 1998, and became the first German book to top "The New York Times" bestselling books list. It has been translated into 45 different languages and has been included in the curricula of college-level courses in Holocaust literature and German language and German literature. It was adapted by David Hare into the 2008 film of the same name directed by Stephen Daldry; the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Kate Winslet winning for her portrayal of Hanna Schmitz.


title: The Reader

text: The story is told in three parts by the main character, Michael Berg. Each part takes place in a different time period in the past. Part I begins in a West German city in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely home. He spends the next three months absent from school battling hepatitis. He visits Hanna to thank her for her help and realizes he is attracted to her. Embarrassed after she catches him watching her getting dressed, he runs away, but he returns days later. After she asks him to retrieve coal from her cellar, he is covered in coal dust; she watches him bathe and seduces him. He returns eagerly to her apartment on a regular basis, and they begin a heated affair. They develop a practice of bathing and having sex, before which she frequently has him read aloud to her, especially classical literature, such as "The Odyssey" and Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog". Both remain somewhat distant from each other emotionally, despite their physical closeness. Hanna is at times physically and verbally abusive to Michael. Months into the relationship, she suddenly leaves without a trace. The distance between them had been growing as Michael had been spending more time with his school friends; he feels guilty and believes it was something he did that caused her departure. The memory of her taints all his other relationships with women.


title: The Reader

text: Six years later, while attending law school, Michael is part of a group of students observing a war crimes trial. A group of middle-aged women who had served as SS guards at a satellite of Auschwitz in occupied Poland are being tried for allowing 300 Jewish women under their ostensible "protection" to die in a fire locked in a church that had been bombed during the evacuation of the camp. The incident was chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to the United States after the war; she is the main prosecution witness at the trial.


title: The Reader

text: Michael is stunned to see that Hanna is one of the defendants, sending him on a roller coaster of complex emotions. He feels guilty for having loved a remorseless criminal and at the same time is mystified at Hanna's willingness to accept full responsibility for supervising the other guards despite evidence proving otherwise. She is accused of writing the account of the fire.


title: The Reader

text: At first she denies this, then in a panic admits it in order not to have to provide a sample of her handwriting. Michael, horrified, realizes then that Hanna has a secret that she refuses to reveal at any cost—that she is illiterate. This explains many of Hanna's actions: her refusal of the promotion that would have removed her from the responsibility of supervising these women and also the fear she carried her entire life of being discovered.


title: The Reader

text: During the trial, it transpires that she took in the weak, sickly women and had them read to her before they were sent to the gas chambers. Michael is uncertain if she wanted to make their last days bearable or if she sent them to their death so they would not reveal her secret.


title: The Reader

text: She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison while the other women receive only minor sentences. After much deliberation, he chooses not to reveal her secret for fear of making her situation worse, as their relationship was a forbidden one because he was a minor at the time.


title: The Reader

text: Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter. He is trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna and begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison. Hanna begins to teach herself to read, and then write in a childlike way, by borrowing the books from the prison library and following the tapes along in the text. She writes to Michael, but he cannot bring himself to reply. After 18 years, Hanna is about to be released, so he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. On the day of her release in 1983, she commits suicide, and Michael is heartbroken. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps. The warden, in her anger towards Michael for communicating with Hanna only by audio tapes, expresses Hanna's disappointment. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire.


title: The Reader

text: While in the U.S., Michael travels to New York to visit the Jewish woman who was a witness at the trial, and who wrote the book about the winter death march from Auschwitz. She can see his terrible conflict of emotions and he finally tells of his youthful relationship with Hanna. The unspoken damage she left to the people around her hangs in the air. He describes his short, cold marriage, and his distant relationship with his daughter. The woman understands, but nonetheless refuses to take the savings Hanna had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant." She asks that he donate it as he sees fit; he chooses a Jewish charity for combating illiteracy, in Hanna's name. Having had a caddy stolen from her when she was a child in the camp, the woman does take the old tea caddy in which Hanna had kept her money and mementos. Returning to Germany, and with a letter of thanks for the donation made in Hanna's name, Michael visits Hanna's grave after 10 years for the first and only time.


title: The Reader

text: Schlink's tone is sparse; he writes with an "icy clarity that simultaneously reveals and conceals," as Ruth Franklin puts it, a style exemplified by the bluntness of chapter openings at key turns in the plot, such as the first sentence of chapter seven: "The next night I fell in love with her." His "clear and unadorned language enhances the authenticity of the text," according to S. Lillian Kremer, and the short chapters and streamlined plot recall detective novels and increase the realism. Schlink's main theme is how his generation, and indeed all generations after the Third Reich, have struggled to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis: "the past which brands us and with which we must live." For his cohorts, there was the unique position of being blameless and the sense of duty to call to account their parents' generation:


title: The Reader

text: Hanna and Michael's asymmetrical relationship enacts, in microcosm, the "pas de deux" of older and younger Germans in the postwar years: Michael concludes that "the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate." This idea plays itself out in the scene where the student Michael hitchhikes to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp site during the trial, to get what he hopes will be some sense of the place. The driver who picks him up is an older man who questions him closely about what he believes motivated those who carried out the killings, then offers an answer of his own:


title: The Reader

text: After the man tells an anecdote about a photograph of Jews being shot in Russia, one that he supposedly saw, but which showed an unusual level of insight into what a Nazi officer might have been thinking, Michael suspects him of being that officer and confronts him. The man stops the car and asks him to leave.


title: The Reader

text: Germany had the highest literacy rate in Europe; Franklin suggests that Hanna's illiteracy represented the ignorance that allowed ordinary people to commit atrocities. Nicholas Wroe, in "The Guardian", likewise writes of the relationship between Hanna's illiteracy and the Third Reich's "moral illiteracy," and Ron Rosenbaum of "Slate" says that Hanna is "a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to 'read' the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens."


title: The Reader

text: Michael's relationship with Hanna, partly erotic and partly maternal, stands for the ambivalent relationship of present-day Germany and its Nazi past: the past is "mother" of Michael's generation, and he eventually finds out, like other Germans of his generation, that his "parents" were guilty. "The paralyzing shame, the psychic numbing, the moral failures of the 'lucky late-born' are the novel's central focus," writes Suzanne Ruta in "The New York Times". Only through his relationship with Hanna can Michael get well; Franklin interprets that to mean that "postwar Germany is sick, and it can begin to heal only through its encounter with the Nazi past." Richard Bernstein of the "New York Times" also notes that "In some sense, perhaps, Hanna can be seen to stand in for the larger German quandary of remembrance and atonement," but prefers not to read the novel as an allegory.


title: The Reader

text: That said, the novel is about Michael, not Hanna; the original German title, "Der Vorleser", specifically indicates one who reads aloud, as Michael does for Hanna.


title: The Reader

text: "The Reader" abounds with references to representations of the Holocaust, both external and internal to Michael's narrative, some real and some invented by Schlink. Of the latter, the most important is the book by the death-march survivor that constitutes the basis of the case against Hanna. It is summarized at some length and even briefly quoted, although its title is never given. Michael must read it in English since its German translation has not yet been published: "(It was) an unfamiliar and laborious exercise at the time. And as always, the alien language, unmastered and struggled over, created a strange concatenation of distance and immediacy." On a second reading in later life, he says, "it is the book that creates distance." For Michael, written media alone cannot convey a full impression of the Holocaust: the victims are not sympathetic, and the oppressors are too faceless to be judged. He cannot muster up the empathy to "make the experience part of his internal life," according to Froma Zeitlin. Hanna, however, has the opposite experience upon reading books by Holocaust survivors. She tells Michael:


title: The Reader

text: I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don't even have to have been there, but if they do, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them to or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come.


title: The Reader

text: When she asks the judge at her trial, "What would you have done?" about whether she should have left her job at Siemens and taken the guard position, her question indicates that she does not know that she could have acted differently, and her statement that there was "no alternative" claims a lack of moral responsibility. As a result of her shame at being illiterate, she has not only let the bulk of the crime be pinned on her, she has let those with a greater share of responsibility escape full accountability. Franklin writes that this is the moral center of the novel—that Hanna, as Michael puts it, chooses exposure as a criminal over exposure as an illiterate—and in Franklin's view the novel cannot recover from the weakness of this position. Franklin regards it not only as implausible, but the implication that Hanna chose the job and acted as she did because of her illiteracy appears intended to exonerate her. Her Nazism was accidental, and Franklin writes that Schlink offers no guidance about how to punish a brutality of convenience, rather than of ideology.


title: The Reader

text: Michael is aware that all his attempts to visualize what Hanna might have been like back then, what happened, are colored by what he has read and seen in movies. He feels a difficult identification with the victims when he learns that Hanna often picked one prisoner to read to her, as she chose him later on, only to send that girl to Auschwitz and the gas chamber after several months. Did she do it to make the last months of the condemned more bearable, or to keep her secret safe? Michael's inability to both condemn and understand springs from this. He asks himself and the reader:


title: The Reader

text: What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?


title: The Reader

text: The books read in the novel, both by Michael to Hanna and by Hanna herself, are significant. Michael selects texts from the Enlightenment, "with its emphasis on moral and ethical absolutes," and German classics by which means he tries to reclaim German heritage. The texts include Friedrich Schiller's "Intrigue and Love" and Gotthold Lessing's "Emilia Galotti".


title: The Reader

text: Katharina Hall writes that the novel itself relies on intertextual knowledge: it "reworks the ‘Väterliteratur’ model of the 1970s and 1980s," which depicts the relationship between the first and second generations; here, however, the relationship is sexual rather than parent-child. She also notes the invoking of tropes present in mass-market romance fiction, though the gender roles are inverted.


title: The Reader

text: "The Reader" takes readers back into history through the lens of young man who falls in love with the mystery of an older woman. The setting of this love story takes places in postwar Germany, specifically the 1960s, right when children started asking, "Daddy, what'd you do in the war?". An era compiled with many different memories and perspective that were absorbed into what one refers to as history. Through the study of history and memory comparison the German term, ""Vergangenheitsbewältigung (VGB)"," has emerged in literary publishings and is defined as "overcoming the past". The protagonist, Michael Berg, is faced with the predicament where it comes to light that the woman he once loved had an intimate role in the horrid actions of the Holocaust and struggles with his post memory. Questioning morality, comparability, silence, guilt, and shame; the author writes,At the same time I ask myself, as I had already begun to ask myself back then: What should our second generation have done, what should I do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead  of accepting them as something the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?.Schlink puts readers into Michael's shoes and questions influence memories hold in the remembrance of history. Reflecting upon the responsibilities of the next generation and their interpretation of how things should be remembered and memorialized. An additional form of historical remembrance is the Lieux de mémoire project. A concept that considers the study of remembrance either through memorials and monuments or cities, symbols, and novels like this one and considers their effect on how history is viewed today.


title: The Reader

text: "The Reader" sold 500,000 copies in Germany. It received several literary awards and many favorable reviews. In 2004, when the television network ZDF published a list of the 100 favorite books of German readers, it was 14th, the second-highest ranking for any contemporary German novel on the list. Critic Rainer Moritz of "Die Welt" wrote that it took "the artistic contrast between private and public to the absurd." Werner Fuld wrote in "Focus" that "one must not let great themes roll away, when one can truly write about them." In 1998 "The Reader" was awarded the Hans Fallada Prize, a German literary award.


title: The Reader

text: As of 2002 the novel had been translated into 25 languages. Writing in "The New York Times", Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex." While finding the ending too abrupt Suzanne Ruta said in the "New York Times Book Review" that "daring fusion of 19th-century post-romantic, post-fairy-tale models with the awful history of the 20th century makes for a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work." It went on to sell two million copies in the United States (many of them after it was featured in "Oprah's Book Club" in 1999) 200,000 copies in the UK, 100,000 in France, and in South Africa it was awarded the 1999 Boeke Prize.


title: The Reader

text: Schlink's approach toward Hanna's culpability in the Final Solution has been a frequent complaint about the book. Early on he was accused of revising or falsifying history. In the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", Jeremy Adler accused him of "cultural pornography" and said the novel simplifies history and compels its readers to identify with the perpetrators. In the English-speaking world, Frederic Raphael wrote that no one could recommend the book "without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil." Ron Rosenbaum, criticizing the film adaptation of "The Reader", wrote that even if Germans like Hanna were metaphorically "illiterate", "they could have heard it from Hitler's mouth in his infamous 1939 radio broadcast to Germany and the world, threatening extermination of the Jews if war started. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind, not merely illiterate… You'd have to be exceedingly stupid." (This refers to the January 30, 1939 statement to the Reichstag, later deliberately misdated to 1 September 1939)


title: The Reader

text: Cynthia Ozick in "Commentary Magazine" called it a "product, conscious or not, of a desire to divert (attention) from the culpability of a normally educated population in a nation famed for "Kultur"." Ozick's reading of the novel was challenged by Richard H. Weisberg, who highlighted a passage in the novel where Hanna strikes Michael repeatedly with a leather strap drawing blood and splitting his lip. In Weisberg's view, Schlink has Hanna revert to concentration-camp mode, the split lip reminding us of the bloodletting of millions. Jeffrey I. Roth replied that Ozick had misread the novel, confusing the perspective of the immature and impressionable narrator, Michael Berg, who loves Hanna and cannot condemn her entirely, with the point of view of the author, Bernhard Schlink, who writes of Hanna, "That woman was truly brutal." Roth found in Hanna an unsympathetic character who behaves brutally and never fully accepts her criminal responsibility, making Ozick's suggestion, that Schlink wants us to sympathize with Hanna and by extension her Nazi cohorts, implausible.


title: The Reader

text: As critics of "The Reader" argued increasingly on historical grounds, pointing out that everybody in Germany could and should have known about Hitler's intentions towards the Jews, there has not been a great deal of discussion about the character "Hanna" having been born not in Germany proper, but in the City of Hermannstadt (modern-day Sibiu), a long-standing centre of German culture in Transylvania, Romania. The first study on the reasons Germans from Transylvania entered the SS painted a complex picture. It appeared only in 2007, 12 years after the novel was published; in general, discussions on "The Reader" have solidly placed Hanna in the context of Germany.


title: The Reader

text: Schlink wrote that "in Israel and New York the older generation liked the book," but those of his own generation were more likely to criticize Michael (and his) inability to fully condemn Hanna. He added, "I've heard that criticism several times but never from the older generation, people who have lived through it."


title: The Reader

text: The film version, adapted by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, was released in December 2008. Kate Winslet played Hanna, with David Kross as the young Michael and Ralph Fiennes as the older man. Bruno Ganz and Lena Olin played supporting roles. It was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture. Winslet won the Oscar for leading actress.


title: Naragasooran

text: Naragasooran is an unreleased Indian Tamil-language supernatural thriller film written and directed by Karthick Naren. Produced by Badri Kasthuri, it features an ensemble cast led by Aravind Swamy, Shriya Saran, Sundeep Kishan, Aathmika and Indrajith Sukumaran. It is the second film in Naren's "thriller trilogy", with the first one being "Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru", and it also stands as a spin-off of the former.


title: Naragasooran

text: In February 2017, Karthik Naren announced their second project, a spin off to his "thriller trilogy" which began with "Dhuruvangal Pathinaaru". In a report from "The Times of India", Naren stated that the film is an "intense suspense drama that is set against the backdrop of a mountain range". The very same day, Gautham Vasudev Menon announced their collaboration with Naren, by funding the project in his Ondraga Entertainment banner along with Badri Kasthuri.


title: Naragasooran

text: Initially Arvind Swami and Naga Chaitanya were reported to appear in the film as parallel leads, with the latter making his Tamil debut. but Chaitanya opted out of the project due to schedule conflicts, and Sundeep Kishan being brought on board for the project. In May 2017, Shriya Saran and Indrajith Sukumaran were reported to appear in pivotal roles. Aathmika was reported to play another female lead in the project, bagging her second film in Tamil, after her debut in "Meesaya Murukku" (2017). Sukumaran was reported to appear the role of a cop, while Kishen's character is reported to have negative shades.


title: Naragasooran

text: The film's first look poster, featuring the names of the lead cast was released on 18 June 2017. Naren eventually planned to start the shoot the film in June or July 2017. However, the film began production on 16 September 2017. Shooting was filmed extensively in and around Ooty, and was wrapped up in November 2017, within a span of 41 days.


title: Naragasooran

text: In March 2018, sources claimed that the film will be released in May 2018. However, the financial constraints of Menon's production house, Ondraga Entertainment, resulted the delay of his other projects, had implemented disputes between Naren and Menon with both parties posted cryptic tweets in social media. Subsequently, Menon backed out producing the film, and Badri Kasthuri took care of the rights. The film was sent to the censor board officials in July 2018, where it received U/A certificate without any cuts. The film's official trailer which released in August 2018 received positive response, and Karthick Naren announced that the film will be released on 31 August 2018, after getting approval from Tamil Film Producers Council. However, the release was pushed to 13 September 2018, to coincide the occasion of Vinayagar Chathurthi, which did not happen. The makers released the first look of its dubbed Telugu version in February 2019, titled as "Narakasurudu" and Satyanarayana Koneru acquired the rights of the film.


title: Naragasooran

text: During the time of delay, Naren started working on another project, which was the Arun Vijay-starrer "" (2020). In December 2019, Naren announced that the film will be scheduled for theatrical release on 27 March 2020, which further delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The makers then explored the options of releasing the film directly through OTT platforms, as the uncertainty prevailing over the reopening of theatres due to the pandemic. However, plans for a digital release also failed and the film remained unreleased. On 28 May 2021, it was announced that Sony LIV bought the direct digital streaming rights for the film. The release date is yet to be announced.


title: Robert Rayford

text: Robert Lee Rayford (February 3, 1953 – May 15 1969), sometimes identified as Robert R. due to his age, was an American teenager from Missouri who has been suggested to represent the earliest confirmed case of HIV/AIDS in North America based on evidence which was published in 1988 in which the authors claimed that medical evidence indicated that he was "infected with a virus closely related or identical to human immunodeficiency virus type 1." Rayford died of pneumonia, but his other symptoms baffled the doctors who treated him. A study published in 1988 reported the detection of antibodies against HIV. Results of testing for HIV genetic material were reported once at a scientific conference in Australia in 1999; however, the data has never been published in a peer-reviewed medical or scientific journal.


title: Robert Rayford

text: Robert Rayford was born on February 3, 1953, in St. Louis, Missouri to Constance Rayford (September 12, 1931 – April 3, 2011) and Joseph Benny Bell (March 24, 1924 – March 17, 1960). He had an older brother named George L. (November 20, 1951 – December 24, 2007). As a single parent, Constance had to raise both children by herself. The Rayfords lived in the Old North neighborhood of St. Louis, where the 19th-century brick homes provided affordable housing for several working class African-American families such as their own. Not much of Rayford's personal life was disclosed, other than he would be referred to as "Bobbie" and that he was described as being "painfully shy, mentally slow, maybe even intellectually disabled."


title: Robert Rayford

text: In early 1968, Rayford, then 15 years old, admitted himself to the City Hospital in St. Louis. His legs and genitals were covered in warts and sores. He also had severe swelling of the testicles and pelvic region, which later spread to his legs, causing a misdiagnosis of lymphedema. He had grown thin and pale and suffered from shortness of breath. Rayford told the doctors that he had experienced these symptoms since at least late 1966. Tests discovered a severe chlamydia infection which had, unusually, spread throughout his body. Rayford declined a rectal examination request from hospital personnel, and was described as uncommunicative and withdrawn. Dr. Memory Elvin-Lewis, who was assigned to his case, would recall of his shy and somewhat hesitant personality: "He was the typical 15-year-old who is not going to talk to adults, especially when I'm white and he's black. He was not a communicative individual. He knew the minute I walked into the room that I wanted something more from him—more blood, more lymph fluid, more something." He had a tendency to contradict his statements regarding his sexual history; at one point boasting himself as "the stud of all time" and at another point claiming to have only had sexual intercourse once, that being with a young woman from his neighborhood, whom he attributed as the source of his illness.


title: Robert Rayford

text: Doctors treating Rayford suspected that he was an underage sex worker and the recipient of receptive anal intercourse, but never considered the possibility of him being a victim of child molestation. Eventually, he was moved to Barnes-Jewish Hospital (then called Barnes Hospital).


title: Robert Rayford

text: In late 1968 Rayford's condition seemed to stabilize, but by March 1969 his symptoms reappeared and worsened. He had increased difficulty breathing, and his white blood cell count had plummeted. The doctors found that his immune system was dysfunctional. He developed a fever and died of pneumonia at 11:20 pm on May 15, 1969.


title: Robert Rayford

text: An autopsy of Rayford's body, which was led by William Drake, uncovered several abnormalities. Small purplish lesions were discovered on Rayford's left thigh along with soft tissue. Drake concluded that the lesions were Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare type of cancer which mostly affected elderly men of Mediterranean or Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, but was almost unheard of among black teenagers. Kaposi's sarcoma was later designated an AIDS-defining illness.


title: Robert Rayford

text: These findings baffled the attending doctors, and a review of the case was published in the medical journal "Lymphology" in 1973.


title: Robert Rayford

text: In 1984, HIV (originally called "lymphadenopathy-associated virus", or LAV) was first discovered and at the time of its discovery, it was rapidly spreading in the gay male communities of New York City and Los Angeles. Marlys Witte, one of the doctors who, like Elvin-Lewis, had cared for Rayford before his death and also assisted in the autopsy, thawed and tested tissue samples that were preserved after Rayford's autopsy, and the test results came back negative. Three years later, in June 1987, Witte decided to test the tissue samples again using Western blot, the most sensitive test then available. The Western blot test found that antibodies against all nine detectable HIV proteins were present in Rayford's blood. An antigen capture assay was also reported to have identified HIV antigens in tissue samples, but not in serum. In a letter to the scientific journal "Nature" in 1990, Robert F. Garry stated that efforts to directly detect HIV DNA were under way:


title: Robert Rayford

text: "Proviral DNA has recently been detected in his tissues by PCR in collaboration with J. Sninsky and S. Kwok (Cetus Corporation, Emeryville, California) but nucleotide sequence analysis is not yet complete."


title: Robert Rayford

text: A study which reported the results of testing for HIV DNA was eventually presented nearly a decade later, as a conference abstract in 1999. The abstract reports the detection of HIV genes in Rayford's samples which were very similar to the HIV IIIB isolate which was discovered in France in the 1980s, and became widely used as a laboratory reference isolate (this study has never been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal). Neither John Sninsky nor Shirley Kwok was listed as an author on the abstract. The abstract argues that laboratory contamination by the HIV IIIB isolate was unlikely because the DNA testing was done on Rayford's samples without being cultured.


title: Robert Rayford

text: The last known tissue samples of Rayford were in a New Orleans lab and inadvertently destroyed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, preventing further testing.


title: Robert Rayford

text: Rayford never traveled outside the Midwestern United States and told doctors that he had never received a blood transfusion. If Rayford was indeed infected with HIV, as one group of researchers claims, the mode of acquisition is assumed to have been through sexual contact. Having never left the country, the researchers who claim that Rayford represented an early case of HIV infection presume that AIDS may have been present in North America before Rayford began to show symptoms of it in 1966. Rayford never ventured into cosmopolitan cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, where the HIV-AIDS epidemic was first observed in the United States. The only notable international connection to St. Louis is that it was TWA's main airline hub. Doctors and others who investigated the case in the early 1980s speculated that Rayford may have been sexually abused or a victim of child prostitution.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 11)

text: The eleventh season of the American television sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" premiered on CBS on Monday, September 25, 2017. The season returned to its regular Thursday night timeslot on November 2, 2017, after "Thursday Night Football on CBS" ended. The season concluded on May 10, 2018.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 11)

text: In March 2017, CBS renewed the series for two additional seasons, bringing its total to twelve, and running through the 2018–19 television season.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 11)

text: Like the previous three seasons, the first five episodes aired on Mondays due to CBS' contractual rights to air the "Thursday Night Football" games. After "Thursday Night Football" ended, the series returned to a Thursday schedule starting on November 2, 2017. Filming for the eleventh season began on August 15, 2017; it was also announced with the taping report that the premiere for the eleventh season would be titled "The Proposal Proposal". Before the season premiered, five episodes were filmed from August 15 to September 19, 2017.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 11)

text: According to "TV Guide", Steve Holland announced on September 22, 2017, that both Bob Newhart and Wil Wheaton would return this season after their absences during Season 10.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: The Empire of Vietnam (; Literary Chinese and Contemporary Japanese: ; Modern Japanese: ) was a short-lived puppet state of Imperial Japan governing the former French protectorates of Annam and Tonkin between March 11 and August 25, 1945. At the end of its rule, the empire also successfully reclaimed Cochinchina as part of Vietnam.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: During World War II, after the fall of France and establishment of Vichy France, the French had lost practical control in French Indochina to the Japanese, but Japan stayed in the background while giving the Vichy French administrators nominal control. This changed on 9 March 1945 when Japan officially took over. To gain the support of the Vietnamese people, Imperial Japan declared that it would return sovereignty to Vietnam. On 11 March 1945, Bảo Đại was permitted to announce the Vietnamese "independence", this declaration had been prepared by Yokoyama Seiko, Minister for Economic Affairs of the Japanese diplomatic mission in Indochina and later advisor to Bảo Đại


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: Emperor Bảo Đại declared the Treaty of Huế made with France in 1884 void. Trần Trọng Kim, a renowned historian and scholar, was chosen to lead the government as prime minister.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: Kim and his ministers spent a substantial amount of time on constitutional matters at their first meeting in Huế on 4 May 1945. One of their first resolutions was to alter the national name to Việt Nam. This was seen as a significant and urgent task. It implied territorial unity; "Việt Nam" had been Emperor Gia Long's choice for the name of the country since he unified the modern territory of Việt Nam in 1802. Furthermore, this was the first time that Vietnamese nationalists in the northern, central and southern regions of the country officially recognized this name. In March, activists in the North always mentioned "Đại Việt" (Great Việt), the name used before the 15th century by the Lê Dynasty and its predecessors, while those in the South used Vietnam, and the central leaders used "An Nam" (Peaceful South) or "Đại Nam" (Great South, which was used by the Nguyễn Lords).


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: Kim also renamed the three regions of the country—the northern (former Tonkin or Bắc Kỳ) became Bắc Bộ, the central region (former Annam or Trung Kỳ) became Trung Bộ, and the southern areas (former Cochinchina or Nam Kỳ) became Nam Bộ. Kim did this even though at the time the Japanese had only given him direct authority over the northern and central regions of Vietnam. When France had finished its conquest of Vietnam in 1885, only southern Vietnam was made a direct colony under the name of Cochinchina. The northern and central regions were designated as protectorates as Tonkin and Annam. When the Empire of Vietnam was proclaimed, the Japanese retained direct control of Cochinchina, in the same way as their French predecessors.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: Thuận Hóa, the pre-colonial name for Huế, was restored. Kim's officials worked to find a French substitute for the word "Annamite", which was used to denote Vietnamese people and their characteristics as described in French literature and official use. "Annamite" was considered derogatory, and it was replaced with "Vietnamien" (Vietnamese). Apart from Thuận Hóa, these terms have been internationally accepted since Kim ordered the changes. Given that the French colonial authorities emphatically distinguished the three regions of "Tonkin", "Annam", and "Cochinchina" as separate entities, implying a lack of national culture or political integration, Kim's first acts were seen as symbolic and the end of generations of frustration among Vietnamese intelligentsia and revolutionaries.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: On 12 June 1945, Kim selected a new national flag—a yellow, rectangular banner with four horizontal red stripes modeled after the "quẻ Ly" (☲, one of bagua) in the "Book of Changes"—and a new national anthem, the old hymn "Đăng đàn cung" ("The King Mounts His Throne"). This decision ended three months of speculation concerning a new flag for Vietnam.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: Kim's government strongly emphasised educational reform, focusing on the development of technical training, particularly the use of Vietnamese alphabet (chữ Quốc Ngữ) as the primary language of instruction. After less than two months in power, Kim organized the first primary examinations in Vietnamese, the language he intended to use in the advanced tests. Education minister Hoàng Xuân Hãn strove to Vietnamise public secondary education. His reforms took more than four months to achieve their results, and have been regarded as a stepping stone for the successor Viet Minh government's launch of compulsory mass education. In July, when the Japanese decided to grant Vietnam full independence and territorial unification, Kim's government was about to begin a new round of reform, by naming a committee to create a new national education system.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: The Justice minister Trịnh Đình Thảo launched an attempt at judicial reform. In May 1945, he created the Committee for the Reform and Unification of Laws in Huế, which he headed. His ministry reevaluated the sentences of political prisoners, releasing a number of anti-French activists and restoring the civil rights of others. This led to the release of a number of Communist cadres who returned to their former cells, and actively participated in the destruction of Kim's government.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: One of the most notable changes implemented by Kim's government was the encouragement of mass political participation. In memorial ceremonies, Kim honoured all national heroes, ranging from the legendary national founders, the Hùng kings to slain anti-French revolutionaries such as Nguyễn Thái Học, the leader of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng) who was executed with twelve comrades in 1930 in the aftermath of the Yên Bái mutiny.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: A committee was organised to select a list of national heroes for induction into the Temple of Martyrs ("Nghĩa Liệt Tử"). City streets were renamed. In Huế, Jules Ferry was replaced on the signboards of a main thoroughfare by Lê Lợi, the founder of the Lê Dynasty who expelled the Chinese in 1427. General Trần Hưng Đạo, who twice repelled Mongol invasions in the 13th century, replaced Paul Bert. On August 1, the new mayor of Hanoi, Trần Văn Lai, ordered the demolition of French built statues in the city parks in his campaign to "Wipe Out Humiliating Remnants". Similar campaigns were enacted in southern Vietnam in late August. Meanwhile, the freedom of the press was instituted, resulting in the publication of the pieces of anti-French movements and critical essays on French collaborators. Heavy criticism was even extended to Nguyễn Hữu Độ, the great-grandfather of Bảo Đại who was notable in assisting the French conquest of Đại Nam in the 1880s. Kim put particular emphasis on the mobilisation of youth. Youth Minister Phan Anh, attempted to centralise and heavily regulate all youth organizations, which had proliferated immediately after the Japanese coup. On May 25, an imperial order decreed an inclusive, hierarchical structure for youth organizations. At the apex was the National Youth Council, a consultative body, which advised the minister. Similar councils were to be organised down to the district level. Meanwhile, young people were asked to join the local squads or groups, from provincial to communal levels. They were given physical training and were charged with maintaining security in their communes. Each provincial town had a training centre, where month-long paramilitary courses were on offer.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: The government also established a national center for the Advanced Front Youth ("Thanh niên tiền tuyến") in Huế. It was inaugurated on June 2, with the intention of being the centrepiece for future officer training. In late July, regional social youth centers were established in Hanoi, Huế, and Saigon. In Hanoi, the General Association of Students and Youth ("Tổng hội Sinh viên và Thanh niên") was animated by the fervor of independence. The City University in Hanoi became a focal point of political agitation. By May and June, there was evidence that communist Cadres of the Viet Minh front, had infiltrated the university's youth and famine relief associations. In the face of the rising Viet Minh front, the Japanese attempted to contact its leaders, but their messengers were killed by the Viet Minh. The Kempeitai (Japanese MP and also secret police) retaliated, arresting hundreds of pro-communist Vietnamese youths in late June.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: The most notable achievement of Kim's Empire of Vietnam was the successful negotiation with Japan for the territorial unification of the nation. The French had subdivided Vietnam into three separate regions: Cochinchina (in 1862), and Annam and Tonkin (both in 1884). Cochinchina was placed under direct rule while the latter two were officially designated as protectorates. Immediately after terminating French rule, the Japanese authorities were not enthusiastic about the territorial unification of Vietnam. However, after the formation of Kim's cabinet in April, Japan quickly agreed to transfer what was then Tonkin and Annam to Kim's authority, although it retained control of the cities of Hanoi, Hải Phòng, and Đà Nẵng. Meanwhile, southern Vietnam remained under direct Japanese control, just as Cochinchina had been under French rule.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: Beginning in May 1945, Foreign Minister Trần Văn Chương negotiated with the Japanese in Hanoi for the transfer of the three cities to Vietnamese rule, but the Japanese stalled because Hanoi and Haiphong were seen as strategic points in their war effort. It was only in June and July that the Japanese allowed the process of national unification to take place. On June 16, Bảo Đại issued a decree proclaiming the impending reunification of Vietnam. On June 29, General Yuitsu Tsuchihashi signed a series of decrees transferring some of the duties of the government (including customs, information, youth, and sports) to the governments of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, effective July 1. Bảo Đại then issued imperial orders establishing four committees to work on a new regime: the National Consultative Committee ("Hội đồng Tư vấn Quốc gia"); a committee of fifteen to work on the creation of a constitution; a committee of fifteen to examine administrative reform, legislation, and finance; and a committee for educational reform. For the first time, leaders from southern regions were invited to join these committees.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: Other developments in southern Vietnam in early July were seen as preparatory Japanese steps towards granting territorial reunification to Vietnam. In early July, when southern Vietnam was abuzz with the spirit of independence and mass political participation due to the creation of the Vanguard Youth organizations in Saigon and other regional centres, Governor Minoda announced the organization of the "Hội nghị Nam" (Council of "the South", i.e. Cochinchina) to facilitate his governance. This council was charged with advising the Japanese based on questions submitted to it by the Japanese and for overseeing provincial affairs. Minoda underlined that its primary aim was to make the Vietnamese population believe that they had to collaborate with the Japanese, because "if the Japanese lose the war, the independence of Indochina would not become complete." At the inauguration of the Council of the South on July 21, Minoda implicitly referred to the unification of Vietnam. Trần Văn An was appointed as the president of the council, and "Kha Vạng Cân", a leader of the Vanguard Youth, was appointed to be his deputy.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: On July 13, Kim arrived in Hanoi to negotiate directly with Governor-General Tsuchihashi. Tsuchihashi agreed to transfer control of Hanoi, Hải Phòng, and Đà Nẵng to Kim's government, taking effect on July 20. After protracted negotiation, Tsuchihashi agreed that the south (Cochinchina) would be united with the Empire of Vietnam and that Kim would attend the unification ceremonies on August 8 in Saigon.


title: Empire of Vietnam

text: After the creation of the puppet Empire of Vietnam, the Japanese began raising an army to help police the local population. The Vietnamese Imperial Army was officially established by the IJA 38th Army to maintain order in the new country. The Vietnamese Imperial Army was under the control of Japanese lieutenant general Yuitsu Tsuchihashi, who served as adviser to the Empire of Vietnam.