title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In 1998, Campbell won re-election to the Senate by what was then the largest margin in Colorado history for a statewide race. After winning re-election, Campbell identified as a moderate Republican saying that "[his re-election] shows the moderate voices within the Republican Party are dominating." During the trial of Bill Clinton, Campbell voted to convict Clinton on both articles of impeachment against him; in his final statement just before the vote, Campbell said "I took a solemn oath...simply speaking, the President did, too. And, so even though I like him personally, I find I can only vote one way. And that is guilty on both articles." Clinton was acquitted on both counts as neither received the necessary two-thirds majority vote of the senators present for conviction and removal from office.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In the 106th Congress, Campbell passed more public laws than any individual member of Congress. During his tenure, Campbell also became the first American Indian to chair the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. While in the senate, Campbell voted to support the Supreme Court's "Roe v. Wade" decision. He became gradually more conservative during his time in the Senate; he reversed his position on late-term abortions, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act while in the Senate and does not support same-sex marriage. However, in 2004, he was one of six Republicans who voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, a constitutional amendment intended to ban same-sex marriage, on the grounds that it should be left to the states.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: The Senate ethics committee investigated accusations that his former chief of staff, Virginia Kontnik, inflated bonuses to an aide in 2002 so he could return the money to her. In subsequent interviews, the chief of staff claimed that Campbell had approved of the deal, which he denied.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: Following the prisoner abuse in Iraq by American military personnel and viewing unpublished abuse images alongside U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's senate testimony, Campbell admonished the administration and military leadership, saying "I don't know how the hell these people got into our army".


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: On March 3, 2004, Senator Campbell announced that he would not seek reelection due to health concerns, having recently been treated for prostate cancer and heartburn. He retired from office in January 2005 after two terms, reflecting later on his decision: "Somewhere along the line, I said 'I'm not gonna die in this place. I want to do what I can, but I'm not dying here.'" He is the last Republican to be elected to the Class 3 Senate seat from Colorado.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: After his retirement, Campbell was a senior policy advisor at the firm of Holland and Knight, LLP in Washington, DC. In July 2012, he left that firm to found Ben Nighthorse Consultants, a new lobbying firm. He also continues to design and craft his Ben Nighthorse line of American Indian jewelry.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: Completed in 2011, Lake Nighthorse, a 120,000-acre-foot reservoir in southwestern Colorado, is named in his honor.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In 2008, during the Cherokee freedmen controversy, Campbell authored a piece in "The Hill" criticizing the efforts of members of the U.S. Congress attempting to terminate recognition of the Cherokee Nation's government, and condemning "paternalistic efforts" of the lawmakers. "In the past, interference with tribal affairs, often justified by a paternalistic 'we know best' mindset, has severely damaged the progress of tribes. Often, Congress not only didn't know best, but it based its decision on lies, mistaken assumptions and prejudice...Congress is again rushing to judgment when it thinks it knows better than the tribe and the courts."


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In July 2016, Campbell spoke to Colorado Public Radio about how he regretted his support of the Iraq War. "I have some misgivings about the way I voted but we were voting on the best information that we had at the time. I think if there was a weakness early on [it] is that the administration had several people in there really pushing for American involvement...In retrospect after seeing that there [were] no weapons of mass destruction and that we did not have really good intelligence on the ground to give us some guidance on how we should proceed, I now look back and think maybe I shouldn't have voted the way I did."


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In late 2018, Campbell joined with several former Republican and Democratic senators in signing a letter supporting the investigation of then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the alleged Russian-collusion in the 2016 election. However, he openly opposed the impeachment of President Donald Trump, defending the president and commenting that it was "a waste of time". He also questioned why the Democrats would move to impeach knowing they would fail to convict in the Senate, stating "The cost of this and what it does to the country, it kind of tears the fabric of the nation apart."


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In late June 2020, Campbell appeared on "Breitbart News" radio to respond to and defend President Trump's use of the Veterans' Memorial Preservation Act (which Campbell had introduced while in the Senate in 2003) to defend American statues during the civil unrest. During the interview he voiced his disgust at the vandalizing of war memorials around the country, and also defended the statue of Andrew Jackson which had previously been targeted by rioters and vandals: "Leave it there, but tell the whole story. I don't think you can rewrite history to only tell your point of view. Seems to me, if we're really going to learn from history so that we don't make the same dumb mistakes, we must look at the bad things that happened at the same time...but to do away with it, I don't think it's the right thing. You know, you can't sanitize history by getting rid of all the symbols of oppression." Campbell compared the destruction of statues to that of the Taliban's destruction of cultural and religious sites, and said the law must be enforced to protect the monuments or otherwise "We're in for a full-fledged insurrection, if we don't stop it." He also condemned the violence in the 2020 protests: "A lot of this is driven by, in my view, people who are basically anarchists. They want to change our whole national structure, and a little bit of white guilt thrown in there, too. There's just a better way to do it if people don't want those statues to remain, because where does it end?" He concluded the interview by stating "I think part of the learning process and teaching our kids is not to totally sanitize things by getting rid of the things that we didn't like from the old days. We need to explain it to our youngsters why the bad things happened."


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In October 2020, Campbell appeared on Indian Country Today to speak on a variety of issues, including his party switch in 1995 and promoting free enterprise for Native Americans. Campbell defended his switch to the Republican Party, and when asked if the GOP's policies were better for Native peoples, he proceeded to list the historical approach of the Democratic Party contrasted to the Republicans to make his point: "The head of the Ku Klux Klan was not a Republican, it was a Democrat. It wasn't a Republican who put 350,000 Japanese Americans in prison without any legal authority to do it, that was a Democrat, Roosevelt. And Andrew Jackson drove the Trail of Tears, of the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, and many other tribes, taking their land by force: that wasn't a Republican that did that. That was a Democrat… so when people say the Democrat Party has been more willing to help Native Americans, I dispute that. That's not true." He went on to say how optimistic he was that more Native people were becoming involved and running for office; he also expressed support for President Trump and his immigration policies, and voiced his concern with the rise of antifa in the United States.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In September 2021, Campbell endorsed Olympic athlete and Air Force veteran Eli Bremer in the Colorado Republican primary for the 2022 senate race to challenge Democrat Michael Bennet. After Bremer was eliminated in the primary, Campbell switched his endorsement to Republican Joe O'Dea in June 2022.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: In 1966, Campbell married the former Linda Price, a public school teacher who was a native of Colorado. The couple have two grown children, Colin (Karen) Campbell and Shanan Campbell. They have four grandchildren.


title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell

text: 2011: Conferral of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon by Japanese Emperor Akihito. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell's award is in recognition of his significant contribution in the promotions and mutual understanding between Japan, the United States.


title: Terry Brooks

text: Terence Dean Brooks (born January 8, 1944) is an American writer of fantasy fiction. He writes mainly epic fantasy, and has also written two film novelizations. He has written 23 "New York Times" bestsellers during his writing career, and has sold over 25 million copies of his books in print. He is one of the biggest-selling living fantasy writers.


title: Terry Brooks

text: Brooks was born in the rural Midwestern town of Sterling, Illinois, and spent a large part of his life living there. He is an alumnus of Hamilton College, earning his B.A. in English literature in 1966. He later obtained a J.D. degree from Washington and Lee University. He was a practising attorney before becoming a full-time author.


title: Terry Brooks

text: Brooks had been a writer since high school, writing mainly in the genres of science fiction, western, fiction, and non-fiction. One day, in his early college life, he was given a copy of J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", which inspired him to write in one genre. While Tolkien inspired the genre, Brooks stated during his TEDxRainier talk "Why I Write about Elves", as well as at the Charlotte Literary Festival that he credits the inspiration of his style of writing to William Faulkner's works. With this inspiration, he then made his debut in 1977 with "The Sword of Shannara".


title: Terry Brooks

text: After finishing two sequels to "The Sword of Shannara", Brooks moved on to the series which would become known as the "Landover" novels. Brooks then wrote a four-book series titled "The Heritage of Shannara". For the next fourteen years, he wrote more "Landover" books, then went on to write "The Word and Void" trilogy. Continuing the "Shannara" series, Brooks wrote the prequel to "The Sword of Shannara", titled "First King of Shannara". He then wrote two series, "The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara" and "High Druid of Shannara" and finished a third, "Genesis of Shannara", a trilogy bridging his "Word and Void" and "Shannara" series. The sixth book in the "Landover" series, "A Princess of Landover", was released in August 2009.


title: Terry Brooks

text: Returning to Shannara, a duology, "Legends of Shannara", taking place after the events of "Genesis of Shannara", was written next. The first book, entitled "Bearers of the Black Staff", was released in August 2010 and the second, "The Measure of the Magic", was released in August 2011.


title: Terry Brooks

text: He next completed a trilogy entitled "The Dark Legacy of Shannara". The three books are; "Wards of Faerie" (Feb 2013), "Bloodfire Quest" (June 2013), and "Witch Wraith" (Dec 2013). He followed this with the trilogy "Defenders of Shannara", which include "The High Druid's Blade" (July 2014), "The Darkling Child" (June 2015), and "The Sorcerer's Daughter" (May 24, 2016).


title: Terry Brooks

text: According to his website, he is currently working on the final and concluding tetralogy of the Shannara series known as "The Fall of Shannara". The first book in the tetralogy is "The Black Elfstone" and was released on June 13, 2017. The second book in the series is "The Skaar Invasion " released on June 19, 2018. The third book in the series is "The Stiehl Assassin" published on May 28, 2019. The fourth and final book in the tetralogy is "The Last Druid", published on October 20, 2020.


title: Terry Brooks

text: A television series based on the Shannara works, entitled "The Shannara Chronicles", began showing on MTV in January 2016. The show starts with the second book of the original series, "Elfstones", as there are strong female roles which did not appear in the first book. The second season aired in 2017 on Spike TV. On January 16, 2018, it was announced that the series had been cancelled after two seasons. Producers later announced that the series is being shopped to other networks.


title: Terry Brooks

text: Brooks has written a number of other books, based on movies, science fiction and his own life. Novels include "Hook", based on the movie of the same name, first published November 24, 1991 and republished in 1998. "" was published April 21, 1999 with four differing dust jacket covers. His own writing life is reflected in two stories, "", published February 3, 2004, and "Why I Write About Elves" published in 2005. A science fiction book, "Street Freaks", was released on October 2, 2018. Brooks has written a number of e-book short stories which are published in a book titled "Small Magic" with his other short stories.


title: Terry Brooks

text: After writing "Indomitable", a short story constituting an epilogue to "The Wishsong of Shannara", Terry Brooks declared:


title: Adhyayan Suman

text: Adhyayan Suman (born 13 January 1988) is an Indian actor and singer who appears in Hindi language films. He debuted in 2008 with "Haal–e–dil". His second film was "Raaz – The Mystery Continues" was a semi-hit. Suman's was praised for his performance in the 2009 Mukesh Bhatt film "Jashnn".


title: Adhyayan Suman

text: Suman was born in Mumbai to Bollywood actor Shekhar Suman and Alka Suman. He had an older brother Aayush who died in 1994. His father publicly revealed that Adhyanan went through the phase of depression and he was having suicidal thoughts as Bollywood created a lot of hurdles for him.


title: Adhyayan Suman

text: On 11 March 2021, Suman revealed that he broke up with "Splitsvilla 11" fame Maera Mishra after being in the relationship for two years.


title: Adhyayan Suman

text: Suman debuted in the Bollywood film industry in 2008 with "Haal–e–dil" which was directed by Anil Devgan and produced by Kumar Mangat. His second film was "Raaz – The Mystery Continues", a semi-hit, directed by Mohit Suri and produced by Mukesh Bhatt. His third film "Jashnn" was also with Mukesh Bhatt and his performance in the film was critically acclaimed.


title: Adhyayan Suman

text: A film based on romantic medical thriller and also explored the sensitive topic of anaesthesia and its awareness.


title: Adhyayan Suman

text: Pursuing a singing career, Suman's first single was "Saareyan Nu Chaddeya". His last release was the recreated version of Arjun Kanungo's - "Aaya Na Tu", "Aaya Na Tu 2.0". Suman also announced his own music channel AS Music with the release of "Aaya Na Tu 2.0" and wants to assist talents across the globe in showcasing their talent and providing them with a platform which will guide them in producing their own music and making them reach out to the right target audience.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Daniel Parejo Muñoz (; born 16 April 1989) is a Spanish professional footballer who plays as a central midfielder for Villarreal and the Spain national team.


title: Dani Parejo

text: After starting out at Real Madrid, he first made a name in La Liga with Getafe. Transferring to Valencia in 2011, he went on to appear in 383 official matches for the latter club and win the 2019 Copa del Rey. He also spent four months in England, with Queens Park Rangers.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Across all youth levels, Parejo won 43 caps for Spain and scored nine goals. He made his full debut in 2018, at the age of 28.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Born in Coslada, Community of Madrid, Parejo was a product of Real Madrid's youth academy, joining at the age of 14. He was called on several occasions by first-team coach Bernd Schuster to train with the seniors and, during the 2006–07 season, played four games for Real Madrid Castilla in Segunda División.


title: Dani Parejo

text: On 4 August 2008, Parejo signed a one-year loan deal with Championship club Queens Park Rangers, and made his debut five days later, coming off the bench in a 2–1 win against Barnsley at Loftus Road, going on to total 18 official appearances. On 17 December, Real Madrid officially recalled the player from his loan effective 1 January 2009, after first-team midfielders Rubén de la Red and Mahamadou Diarra were both out for the campaign with various physical problems.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Parejo was given the squad number 17, which had previously been assigned to Ruud van Nistelrooy, who was also out for several months due to a serious injury. He appeared little during the season, his first match being the 4–0 La Liga away victory over Sporting de Gijón on 15 February as he replaced Sergio Ramos for the final ten minutes.


title: Dani Parejo

text: In late July 2009, as Esteban Granero was re-bought from Getafe CF, Parejo went in the opposite direction with Real, as in Granero's case, having a similar option. On 25 March 2010, he scored against his former club after stealing the ball from goalkeeper Iker Casillas, but the hosts lost it 4–2. Having to compete for a starting berth in central midfield with coach Míchel's son, Adrián – a former teammate in Real Madrid B – he nevertheless contributed solidly during the campaign as they qualified for the second time in their history for the UEFA Europa League.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Parejo appeared more in 2010–11 (36 matches), but the Madrid outskirts side only narrowly avoided relegation.


title: Dani Parejo

text: On 14 June 2011, Valencia CF signed Parejo for a reported €6 million, with out-of-favour goalkeeper Miguel Ángel Moyá going to Getafe on a year-long loan as part of the deal. He made his league debut on 15 August, playing 80 minutes in a 1–1 away draw to RCD Mallorca.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Parejo was quickly deemed surplus to requirements at his new club, his situation not improving even after the serious injury suffered by Sergio Canales, who played in his same position. He bounced back, however, for 2012–13, scoring twice in 36 official games in an eventual fifth-place finish.


title: Dani Parejo

text: In the following years, Parejo was an undisputed starter for several managers. In the 2014–15 season, his first as captain, he scored a career-best 12 goals, being one of the best scorers in the competition from the midfielder position. In the process, he also became the first Valencia midfielder to score ten or more goals since Vicente in 2003–04.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Parejo and Paco Alcácer each scored twice in a 5–1 win away to third-place RC Celta de Vigo on 7 November 2015; his first came just before half-time, through a free kick to put the visitors ahead 2–1. However, in January, after a poor run of form, the former was stripped of his captaincy in favour of the latter by manager Gary Neville. He was reinstated in that position by Marcelino García Toral ahead of the 2017–18 campaign.


title: Dani Parejo

text: On 12 August 2020, Parejo joined Villarreal CF on a free transfer and a four-year contract. He moved to the local rivals alongside his teammate Francis Coquelin, a move which caused fury from Valencia's fans towards their chairman Peter Lim.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Parejo won the Europa League in his first season at the Estadio de la Cerámica. In the final, he took the free kick that Gerard Moreno finished for Villarreal's goal in a 1–1 draw against Manchester United, and also scored in the 11–10 penalty shootout victory.


title: Dani Parejo

text: Parejo was named in the Spain under-19 team for the 2007 UEFA European Championship. In the tournament held in Austria, he scored the final winner against Greece (1–0).


title: Dani Parejo

text: Parejo was promoted to the under-21 team the following year, appearing in several qualification matches for the 2009 European Championship. He won his first cap for the senior team on 27 March 2018, replacing Thiago Alcântara late into the 6–1 friendly defeat of Argentina.


title: Buster Edwards

text: Ronald Christopher "Buster" Edwards (27 January 1931 – 28 November 1994) was a British criminal who was a member of the gang that committed the Great Train Robbery. He had also been a boxer, and owned a nightclub and a flower shop.


title: Buster Edwards

text: Edwards was born in Lambeth, the son of a barman. After leaving school, he worked in a sausage factory, where he began his criminal career by stealing meat to sell on the post-war black market. During his National Service in the RAF, he was detained for stealing cigarettes. When he returned to south London, he ran a drinking club and became a professional criminal.


title: Buster Edwards

text: He was involved in the theft of £62,000 (£ today) from Comet House, the headquarters of British Overseas Airways Corporation at Heathrow Airport, in 1962. Many of the gang were captured, but Edwards escaped arrest. Many from the same gang were involved in the Great Train Robbery in August 1963.


title: Buster Edwards

text: The Great Train gang intercepted the Glasgow–London mail train in Buckinghamshire in the early hours of 8 August 1963. After tampering with the track-side signal lights, they stopped the train at Sears Crossing and moved the engine and high-value carriage to Bridego Bridge, near Cheddington, and they escaped with £2,600,000 of used banknotes (£ today). The driver, Jack Mills, was beaten over the head and suffered from related complications for the rest of his life—opinion is divided as to whether the injury was a factor in his death. The gang's temporary hideout at Leatherslade Farm was quickly found. Most of the gang were captured, tried, and imprisoned, but Edwards evaded arrest with his £150,000 share of the stolen money.


title: Buster Edwards

text: Edwards and another gang member, Bruce Reynolds, took their families to Mexico. The money ran out, and Edwards's family became homesick, so he negotiated his return to England in 1966. He was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in jail.


title: Buster Edwards

text: Edwards spent nine years in prison. After his early release in 1975, he ran a flower stall outside Waterloo station in London. He gave interviews to writer Piers Paul Read, persuading him to write in his 1978 book "The Train Robbers" that the robbery was led by German commando Otto Skorzeny, and that Edwards was the person responsible for hitting Jack Mills. Edwards later retracted these claims. "Buster", a film about his role in the Great Train Robbery, was made in 1988, with Edwards played by Phil Collins.


title: Buster Edwards

text: Buster Edwards can be seen making a cameo appearance in the film "Buster" alongside Phil Collins' wife Jill in the scene in which Buster and June land in Mexico, he and Jill walk out of the airport in front of Buster and June Edwards.


title: Buster Edwards

text: In 1991, Edwards was the victim of a theft, albeit of a more mundane nature. On 15 June, at about 3pm, British actor Dexter Fletcher ran along Mepham Street and scooped up two bunches of nasturtiums valued at £5 from Edwards's stall. Edwards declined to chase Fletcher for fear of leaving his stall unattended. Fletcher was seen to run off on to York Road with the flowers. Edwards reported the theft to the police, identifying his assailant as being, "That lad out of "The Rachel Papers"". Fletcher was unlucky in the timing of his theft because Edwards had seen the film for the first time only days before. Fletcher was arrested and charged with theft. The following week Fletcher appeared at Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court and pleaded guilty. He was given a conditional discharge for twelve months and ordered to pay £30 costs. In mitigation, Fletcher said that the flowers were for his girlfriend and "Press Gang" co-star Julia Sawalha, but that he had lost his cash card and was unable to obtain funds to pay for the flowers. Fletcher subsequently apologised to Edwards and compensated him for the flowers.


title: Buster Edwards

text: Edwards died in Lambeth, London, at the age of 63. He was found by his brother, hanging from a steel girder inside a lock-up garage in Leake Street, Lambeth. At the Inquest following Edwards's death, a panel recorded an open verdict, based on testimony that the deceased was too intoxicated to form an intent to kill himself. However, at the time of his death, he was being investigated by the police as part of an inquiry into a suspected large-scale fraud and it is speculated that fear of being re-imprisoned could have led to a suicide attempt.


title: Federal Protective Service (Russia)

text: The Federal Protective Service, or the Federal Guard Service () of the Russian Federation, official name in English Federal Guard Service of the Russian Federation, is a federal government agency concerned with the tasks related to the protection of several high-ranking state officials, mandated by the relevant law, including the President of Russia, as well as certain federal properties. It traces its origin to the USSR's Ninth Chief Directorate of the KGB and later Presidential Security Service (SBP) led by KGB general Alexander Korzhakov.


title: Federal Protective Service (Russia)

text: On May 27, 1996, the law "On State Protection" reorganized the GUO (Glavnoye Upravlenie Okhrani) into the FSO (Federal Protection Service). Under article 7 of the law, "the President of the Russian Federation, while in office, shall not be allowed to forgo state protection."


title: Federal Protective Service (Russia)

text: FSO includes the Russian Presidential Security Service. This president's personal security is directed by Viktor Zolotov who, according to Sergei Tretiakov, also supervises the entire FSO. The FSO includes an estimated 50,000 troops and controls the "black box" that can be used in the event of nuclear war. It reportedly uses advanced domestic technical developments.


title: Federal Protective Service (Russia)

text: Since May 18, 2000 and until May 26, 2016 the agency was headed by General Evgeny Murov; since May 26, 2016 the head of the service is General Dmitry Kochnev. The FSO has roughly 50,000 uniformed personnel plus several thousand plainclothed personnel and controls the Cheget that can be used in the event of global nuclear war. It also operates a secure communications system for senior government officials. The FSO is a powerful institution with a range of rights and powers, including the right to conduct searches and surveillance without warrants, make arrests, and give orders to other state agencies.


title: Federal Protective Service (Russia)

text: One of the FSO units is the Kremlin Regiment. A more recent addition to the FSO infrastructure is the Special Communications Service of Russia (Spetsviaz) which was incorporated as a structural sub unit on August 7, 2004.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: The Valley of Fear is the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle. It is loosely based on the Molly Maguires and Pinkerton agent James McParland. The story was first published in the "Strand Magazine" between September 1914 and May 1915. The first book edition was copyrighted in 1914, and it was first published by George H. Doran Company in New York on 27 February 1915, and illustrated by Arthur I. Keller.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: Sherlock Holmes receives a cipher message from Fred Porlock, a pseudonymous agent of Professor Moriarty. After Porlock sends the message, however, he changes his mind for fear of Moriarty's discovering that he is a traitor. He decides not to send the key to the cipher, but he sends Holmes a note telling of this decision. From the cipher message and the second note, Holmes is able to deduce that it is a book cipher and that the book used for the encryption is a common book, large (with at least 534 pages), printed in two columns per page, and standardised. An almanac fits these conditions exactly.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: Holmes tries the latest edition of "Whitaker's Almanac", which he had only received a few days earlier, and fails; he then tries the previous edition. With this almanac, Holmes is able to decipher the message as a warning of a nefarious plot against one Douglas, a country gentleman residing at Birlstone House. Some minutes later, Inspector MacDonald arrives at 221B Baker Street with news that a Mr. John Douglas of Birlstone Manor House, Birlstone, Sussex, has been murdered. Holmes tells MacDonald of Porlock's warning, suggesting Moriarty's involvement. However, MacDonald does not fully believe that the educated and well-respected Moriarty is a criminal. Holmes, Watson, and MacDonald travel to Birlstone House, an ancient moated manor house, to investigate the crime.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: Douglas had been murdered the evening before. Cecil Barker, a frequent guest at Birlstone House, had been in his room at half-past eleven when he heard the report of a gun, according to his testimony. He had rushed down to find Douglas lying in the centre of the room nearest the front door of the house, a sawn-off shotgun lying across his chest. He had been shot at close range: receiving the full charge of the shotgun in the face, his head was blown 'almost to pieces'. Barker had rushed to the village police station and notified Sergeant Wilson, who was in charge of the station. Wilson followed Barker to the house after notifying the county authorities.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: Wilson had begun investigating immediately. Barker drew his attention to the open window, and to a smudge of blood like the mark of a boot-sole upon the window sill. The drawbridge over the moat had been raised at 6:00 pm. Barker speculated that the murderer had entered by the drawbridge before that time, hid in the room, and left by the window directly after killing Douglas. The moat was only a few feet deep, and could be easily crossed. Wilson found a card beside the corpse with the initials "V.V." and the number 341 beneath them. Muddy boot-prints were found behind the curtains, bearing out Barker's theory. On the murdered man's forearm was a curious design, a triangle within a circle; it was not a tattoo, but a brand. This mark had been noticed many times before upon John Douglas's forearm. Douglas' wedding ring appeared to have been taken from his hand. The chief Sussex detective, White Mason, had arrived at Birlstone House by 3:00 in the morning. By 5:45, he had sent for Scotland Yard. MacDonald took the case, and notified Holmes because he thought Holmes would be interested. By noon, MacDonald, Holmes and Watson meet White Mason in Birlstone.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: Holmes, MacDonald, and White Mason go to the scene of the murder. They discuss the case, agreeing that suicide is out of the question, and that someone from outside the house committed the murder. Barker believes a secret society of men pursued Douglas, and that he retreated to rural England out of fear for his life. Douglas married after arriving in England five years earlier. His first wife had died of typhoid. He had met and worked with Barker in America before departing for Europe. Some episode of Douglas's life in America caused the fear for his life, and Mrs. Douglas said her husband mentioned something called "The Valley of Fear".


title: The Valley of Fear

text: By studying Barker's slippers, Holmes determines Barker's shoe made the mark on the window, to give the appearance that someone exited that way. In their lodgings, Holmes tells Watson that Barker and Mrs. Douglas are certainly lying: the events as they tell them would be impossible. Moreover, Holmes learns that the housekeeper heard a sound, as if of a door slamming, half an hour before the alarm; Holmes believes that this sound was the fatal shot. White Mason and MacDonald track a bicycle found on the grounds of the house to an American staying at a guest house. The American appears to be the murderer, but there is no sign of the man.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: Holmes asks MacDonald to write to Barker, telling him that the police intend to search the moat the next day. That night Holmes, Watson, MacDonald and White Mason lie in wait outside Birlstone Manor and see Barker fish something out of the moat. The four men rush Barker and discover the bundle from the moat contains the clothes of the missing American connected with the bicycle. Barker refuses to explain the situation. At that moment, Douglas appears, alive and well. He hands Watson a written account called "The Valley of Fear", which explains why he feared for his life.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: Douglas explains that he had spotted an enemy of his, Ted Baldwin, in the area and expected an attack. When Baldwin attempted to shoot Douglas in his study, Douglas grabbed the gun and, in the struggle, Baldwin was shot in the face. With Barker's help, Douglas dressed the man in his own clothes, except for Douglas's wedding ring, to deceive the secret society which he and Baldwin had belonged to, since both arms bore the society's mark. Barker and Mrs. Douglas had covered for Douglas, who had been hiding in a secret compartment in the room where the shooting occurred. In an interview with Watson, Douglas explains that his real name was Birdy Edwards and he had been a Pinkerton detective in Chicago. Edwards had infiltrated a murderous gang, known by locals as the Scowrers, in Vermissa Valley (a.k.a. the Valley of Fear) and brought them to justice. Afterwards, the criminals attempted to kill him after being released from jail.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: Hounded, Douglas had run to England, where he met and married his second wife. Holmes urges Douglas to leave England and warns that a new threat now hangs over him. Douglas takes this advice, but, shortly after, Holmes learns from Barker that Douglas was lost overboard on the vessel to Africa. Holmes believes Moriarty was responsible for ending Douglas' life. Holmes wants to bring Moriarty down, but warns Watson and Barker that it will take some time to achieve.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: "The Valley of Fear" was first serialised in "The Strand Magazine" from September 1914 to May 1915. In the "Strand", it was published with thirty-one illustrations by Frank Wiles. It was first published in book form by George H. Doran Company in New York on 27 February 1915, before the serialisation had finished in the "Strand". The first British book edition was published by Smith, Elder & Co. on 3 June 1915. Like the first Holmes novel "A Study in Scarlet", "The Valley of Fear" has two parts. The first part is titled "The Tragedy of Birlstone", and the second is titled "The Scowrers".


title: The Valley of Fear

text: The novel has a number of major themes, including "problems of ethical ambiguity", and attempts to comment seriously on terrorist activity as profiled by American union struggles. Critics have shown how the American union struggles deal with similar issues in the contemporary political situation in Ireland.


title: The Valley of Fear

text: "The Valley of Fear" was the only Sherlock Holmes story not adapted for the 1930s radio series "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", and was not adapted for radio until 1960. Radio adaptations of the story include:


The All England Open Badminton Championships is the world's oldest badminton tournament, held annually in England. With the introduction of the BWF's latest grading system, it was given Super Series status in 2007, upgraded to Super Series Premier status in 2011.


title: All England Open Badminton Championships

text: The world's first open tournament was held in the English town of Guildford in 1898, the success of which paved the way for the All England's inaugural edition, which was held at London's Horticultural Halls in 1899. Although the inaugural edition consisted of just the doubles format, the singles were introduced from the second edition onward. It was eventually considered – especially after the first Thomas Cup series in 1949 – the unofficial world championship of the sport until 1977, when the International Badminton Federation launched its official championships.


text: There were two instances when it was halted – from 1915 to 1919 (due to World War I) and from 1940 to 1946 (due to World War II).


text: In the modern era players are less able to compete in multiple disciplines due to the differentiation of required skills and the physical demands of the game. Some men's and women's doubles players are able to compete successfully in mixed doubles. The last player to win in both singles and a doubles discipline was Li Lingwei of China who won women's doubles in 1985 then in women's singles in 1989.


text: Many female badminton players change their surname after marriage. Below are some of the former names or latest names as noted in the table above:


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Shifting cultivation is an agricultural system in which plots of land are cultivated temporarily, then abandoned while post-disturbance fallow vegetation is allowed to freely grow while the cultivator moves on to another plot. The period of cultivation is usually terminated when the soil shows signs of exhaustion or, more commonly, when the field is overrun by weeds. The period of time during which the field is cultivated is usually shorter than the period over which the land is allowed to regenerate by lying fallow.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: This technique is often used in LEDCs (Less Economically Developed Countries) or LICs (Low Income Countries). In some areas, cultivators use a practice of slash-and-burn as one element of their farming cycle. Others employ land clearing without any burning, and some cultivators are purely migratory and do not use any cyclical method on a given plot. Sometimes no slashing at all is needed where regrowth is purely of grasses, an outcome not uncommon when soils are near exhaustion and need to lie fallow.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: In shifting agriculture, after two or three years of producing vegetable and grain crops on cleared land, the migrants abandon it for another plot. Land is often cleared by slash-and-burn methods—trees, bushes and forests are cleared by slashing, and the remaining vegetation is burnt. The ashes add potash to the soil. Then the seeds are sown after the rains.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Shifting cultivation is a form of agriculture or a cultivation system, in which, at any particular point in time, a minority of 'fields' are in cultivation and a majority are in various stages of natural re-growth. Over time, fields are cultivated for a relatively short time, and allowed to recover, or are fallowed, for a relatively long time. Eventually a previously cultivated field will be cleared of the natural vegetation and planted in crops again. Fields in established and stable shifting cultivation systems are cultivated and fallowed cyclically. This type of farming is called jhumming in India.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Fallow fields are not unproductive. During the fallow period, shifting cultivators use the successive vegetation species widely for timber for fencing and construction, firewood, thatching, ropes, clothing, tools, carrying devices and medicines. It is common for fruit and nut trees to be planted in fallow fields to the extent that parts of some fallows are in fact orchards. Soil-enhancing shrub or tree species may be planted or protected from slashing or burning in fallows. Many of these species have been shown to fix nitrogen. Fallows commonly contain plants that attract birds and animals and are important for hunting. But perhaps most importantly, tree fallows protect soil against physical erosion and draw nutrients to the surface from deep in the soil profile.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The relationship between the time the land is cultivated and the time it is fallowed are critical to the stability of shifting cultivation systems. These parameters determine whether or not the shifting cultivation system as a whole suffers a net loss of nutrients over time. A system in which there is a net loss of nutrients with each cycle will eventually lead to a degradation of resources unless actions are taken to arrest the losses. In some cases soil can be irreversibly exhausted (including erosion as well as nutrient loss) in less than a decade.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The longer a field is cropped, the greater the loss of soil organic matter, cation-exchange-capacity and in nitrogen and phosphorus, the greater the increase in acidity, the more likely soil porosity and infiltration capacity is reduced and the greater the loss of seeds of naturally occurring plant species from soil seed banks. In a stable shifting cultivation system, the fallow is long enough for the natural vegetation to recover to the state that it was in before it was cleared, and for the soil to recover to the condition it was in before cropping began. During fallow periods soil temperatures are lower, wind and water erosion is much reduced, nutrient cycling becomes closed again, nutrients are extracted from the subsoil, soil fauna decreases, acidity is reduced, soil structure, texture and moisture characteristics improve and seed banks are replenished.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The secondary forests created by shifting cultivation are commonly richer in plant and animal resources useful to humans than primary forests, even though they are much less bio-diverse. Shifting cultivators view the forest as an agricultural landscape of fields at various stages in a regular cycle. People unused to living in forests cannot see the fields for the trees. Rather they perceive an apparently chaotic landscape in which trees are cut and burned randomly and so they characterise shifting cultivation as ephemeral or 'pre-agricultural', as 'primitive' and as a stage to be progressed beyond. Shifting agriculture is none of these things. Stable shifting cultivation systems are highly variable, closely adapted to micro-environments and are carefully managed by farmers during both the cropping and fallow stages. Shifting cultivators may possess a highly developed knowledge and understanding of their local environments and of the crops and native plant species they exploit. Complex and highly adaptive land tenure systems sometimes exist under shifting cultivation. Introduced crops for food and as cash have been skillfully integrated into some shifting cultivation systems. Its disadvantages include the high initial cost, as manual labour is required.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Shifting cultivation was still being practised as a viable and stable form of agriculture in many parts of Europe and east into Siberia at the end of the 19th century and in some places well into the 20th century. In the Ruhr in the late 1860s a forest-field rotation system known as was using a 16-year cycle of clearing, cropping and fallowing with trees to produce bark for tanneries, wood for charcoal and rye for flour (Darby 1956, 200). Swidden farming was practised in Siberia at least until the 1930s, using specially selected varieties of "swidden-rye" (Steensberg 1993, 98). In Eastern Europe and Northern Russia the main swidden crops were turnips, barley, flax, rye, wheat, oats, radishes and millet. Cropping periods were usually one year, but were extended to two or three years on very favourable soils. Fallow periods were between 20 and 40 years (Linnard 1970, 195). In Finland in 1949, Steensberg (1993, 111) observed the clearing and burning of a swidden 440 km north of Helsinki. Birch and pine trees had been cleared over a period of a year and the logs sold for cash. A fallow of alder (Alnus) was encouraged to improve soil conditions. After the burn, turnip was sown for sale and for cattle feed. Shifting cultivation was disappearing in this part of Finland because of a loss of agricultural labour to the industries of the towns. Steensberg (1993, 110-152) provides eye-witness descriptions of shifting cultivation being practised in Sweden in the 20th century, and in Estonia, Poland, the Caucasus, Serbia, Bosnia, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria and Germany in the 1930s to the 1950s.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: That these agricultural practices survived from the Neolithic into the middle of the 20th century amidst the sweeping changes that occurred in Europe over that period, suggests they were adaptive and in themselves, were not massively destructive of the environments in which they were practiced.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The earliest written accounts of deforestation in Southern Europe begin around 1000 BC in the histories of Homer, Thucydides and Plato and in Strabo's "Geography". Forests were exploited for ship building, and urban development, the manufacture of casks, pitch and charcoal, as well as being cleared for agriculture. The intensification of trade and as a result of warfare, increased the demand for ships which were manufactured completely from forest products. Although goat herding is singled out as an important cause of environmental degradation, a more important cause of forest destruction was the practice in some places of granting ownership rights to those who clear felled forests and brought the land into permanent cultivation. Evidence that circumstances other than agriculture were the major causes for forest destruction was the recovery of tree cover in many parts of the Roman empire from 400 BC to around 500 AD following the collapse of Roman economy and industry. Darby observes that by 400 AD "land that had once been tilled became derelict and overgrown" and quotes Lactantius who wrote that in many places "cultivated land became forest" (Darby 1956, 186). The other major cause of forest destruction in the Mediterranean environment with its hot dry summers were wild fires that became more common following human interference in the forests.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: In Central and Northern Europe the use of stone tools and fire in agriculture is well established in the palynological and archaeological record from the Neolithic. Here, just as in Southern Europe, the demands of more intensive agriculture and the invention of the plough, trading, mining and smelting, tanning, building and construction in the growing towns and constant warfare, including the demands of naval shipbuilding, were more important forces behind the destruction of the forests than was shifting cultivation.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: By the Middle Ages in Europe, large areas of forest were being cleared and converted into arable land in association with the development of feudal tenurial practices. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, the demands of iron smelters for charcoal, increasing industrial developments and the discovery and expansion of colonial empires as well as incessant warfare that increased the demand for shipping to levels never previously reached, all combined to deforest Europe. With the loss of the forest, so shifting cultivation became restricted to the peripheral places of Europe, where permanent agriculture was uneconomic, transport costs constrained logging or terrain prevented the use of draught animals or tractors. It has disappeared from even these areas since 1945, as agriculture has become increasingly capital intensive, rural areas have become depopulated and the remnant European forests themselves have been revalued economically and socially.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Classical authors mentioned large forests, with Homer writing about "wooded Samothrace", Zakynthos, Sicily, and other woodlands. These authors indicated that the Mediterranean area once had more forest; much had already been lost, and the remainder was primarily in the mountains.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Although parts of Europe remained wooded, by the late Iron Age and early Viking Ages, forests were drastically reduced and settlements regularly moved. The reasons for this pattern of mobility, the transition to stable settlements from the late Viking period on, or the transition from shifting cultivation to stationary farming are unknown. From this period, plows are found in graves. Early agricultural peoples preferred good forests on hillsides with good drainage, and traces of cattle enclosures are evident there.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: In Italy, shifting cultivation was no longer used by the common era. Tacitus describes it as a strange cultivation method, practiced by the Germans. In 98 CE, he wrote about the Germans that their fields were proportional to the participating cultivators but their crops were shared according to status. Distribution was simple, because of wide availability; they changed fields annually, with much to spare because they were producing grain rather than other crops. A W Liljenstrand wrote in his 1857 doctoral dissertation, "About Changing of Soil" (pp. 5 ff.), that Tacitus discusses shifting cultivation: "arva per annos mutant". This is the practice of shifting cultivation.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: During the Migration Period in Europe, after the Roman Empire and before the Viking Age, the peoples of Central Europe moved to new forests after exhausting old parcels. Forests were quickly exhausted; the practice had ended in the Mediterranean, where forests were less resilient than the sturdier coniferous forests of Central Europe. Deforestation had been partially caused by burning to create pasture. Reduced timber delivery led to higher prices and more stone construction in the Roman Empire (Stewart 1956, p. 123). Although forests gradually decreased in northern Europe, they have survived in the Nordic countries.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Many Italic peoples saw benefits in allying with Rome. When the Romans built the "Via Amerina" in 241 BCE, the Falisci settled in cities on the plains and aided the Romans in road construction; the Roman Senate gradually acquired representatives from Faliscan and Etruscan families, and the Italic tribes became settled farmers.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Classical writers described peoples who practiced shifting cultivation, which characterized the Migration Period in Europe. The exploitation of forests demanded displacement as areas were deforested. Julius Caesar wrote about the Suebi in "Commentarii de Bello Gallico" 4.1, "They have no private and secluded fields (""privati ac separati agri apud eos nihil est"") ... They cannot stay more than one year in a place for cultivation’s sake" (""neque longius anno remanere uno in loco colendi causa licet""). The Suebi lived between the Rhine and the Elbe. About the Germani, Caesar wrote: "No one has a particular field or area for himself, for the magistrates and chiefs give year by year to the people and the clans, who have gathered together, as much land and in such places as seem good to them and then make them move on after a year" (""Neque quisquam agri modum certum aut fines habet proprios, sed magistratus ac principes in annos singulos gentibus cognationibusque hominum, qui tum una coierunt, a quantum et quo loco visum est agri attribuunt atque anno post alio transire cogunt"" [Book 6.22]).


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Strabo (63 BCE—c. 20 CE) also writes about the Suebi in his "Geography" (VII, 1, 3): "Common to all the people in this area is that they can easily change residence because of their sordid way of life; they do not cultivate fields or collect property, but live in temporary huts. They get their nourishment from their livestock for the most part, and like nomads, pack all their goods in wagons and go on to wherever they want". Horace writes in 17 BCE ("Carmen Saeculare", 3, 24, 9ff.) about the people of Macedonia: "The proud Getae also live happily, growing free food and cereal for themselves on land they do not want to cultivate for more than a year" (""Vivunt et rigidi Getae, / immetata quibus iugera liberas / fruges et Cererem ferunt, / nec cultura placet longior annua"").


title: Shifting cultivation

text: A growing body of palynological evidence finds that simple human societies brought about extensive changes to their environments before the establishment of any sort of state, feudal or capitalist, and before the development of large scale mining, smelting or shipbuilding industries. In these societies agriculture was the driving force in the economy and shifting cultivation was the most common type of agriculture practiced. By examining the relationships between social and economic change and agricultural change in these societies, insights can be gained on contemporary social and economic change and global environment change, and the place of shifting cultivation in those relationships.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: As early as 1930 questions about relationships between the rise and fall of the Mayan civilization of the Yucatán Peninsula and shifting cultivation were raised and continue to be debated today. Archaeological evidence suggests the development of Mayan society and economy began around 250 AD. A mere 700 years later it reached its apogee, by which time the population may have reached 2,000,000 people. There followed a precipitous decline that left the great cities and ceremonial centres vacant and overgrown with jungle vegetation. The causes of this decline are uncertain; but warfare and the exhaustion of agricultural land are commonly cited (Meggers 1954; Dumond 1961; Turner 1974). More recent work suggests the Maya may have, in suitable places, developed irrigation systems and more intensive agricultural practices (Humphries 1993).


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Similar paths appear to have been followed by Polynesian settlers in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, who within 500 years of their arrival around 1100 AD turned substantial areas from forest into scrub and fern and in the process caused the elimination of numerous species of birds and animals (Kirch and Hunt 1997). In the restricted environments of the Pacific islands, including Fiji and Hawaii, early extensive erosion and change of vegetation is presumed to have been caused by shifting cultivation on slopes. Soils washed from slopes were deposited in valley bottoms as a rich, swampy alluvium. These new environments were then exploited to develop intensive, irrigated fields. The change from shifting cultivation to intensive irrigated fields occurred in association with a rapid growth in population and the development of elaborate and highly stratified chiefdoms (Kirch 1984). In the larger, temperate latitude, islands of New Zealand the presumed course of events took a different path. There the stimulus for population growth was the hunting of large birds to extinction, during which time forests in drier areas were destroyed by burning, followed the development of intensive agriculture in favorable environments, based mainly on sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and a reliance on the gathering of two main wild plant species in less favorable environments. These changes, as in the smaller islands, were accompanied by population growth, the competition for the occupation of the best environments, complexity in social organization, and endemic warfare (Anderson 1997).


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The record of humanly induced changes in environments is longer in New Guinea than in most places. Agricultural activities probably began 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. However, the most spectacular changes, in both societies and environments, are believed to have occurred in the central highlands of the island within the last 1,000 years, in association with the introduction of a crop new to New Guinea, the sweet potato (Golson 1982a; 1982b). One of the most striking signals of the relatively recent intensification of agriculture is the sudden increase in sedimentation rates in small lakes.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The root question posed by these and the numerous other examples that could be cited of simple societies that have intensified their agricultural systems in association with increases in population and social complexity is not whether or how shifting cultivation was responsible for the extensive changes to landscapes and environments. Rather it is why simple societies of shifting cultivators in the tropical forest of Yucatán, or the highlands of New Guinea, began to grow in numbers and to develop stratified and sometimes complex social hierarchies?


title: Shifting cultivation

text: At first sight, the greatest stimulus to the intensification of a shifting cultivation system is a growth in population. If no other changes occur within the system, for each extra person to be fed from the system, a small extra amount of land must be cultivated. The total amount of land available is the land being presently cropped and all of the land in fallow. If the area occupied by the system is not expanded into previously unused land, then either the cropping period must be extended or the fallow period shortened.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: At least two problems exist with the population growth hypothesis. First, population growth in most pre-industrial shifting cultivator societies has been shown to be very low over the long term. Second, no human societies are known where people work only to eat. People engage in social relations with each other and agricultural produce is used in the conduct of these relationships.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: These relationships are the focus of two attempts to understand the nexus between human societies and their environments, one an explanation of a particular situation and the other a general exploration of the problem.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: In a study of the Duna in the Southern Highlands of New Guinea, a group in the process of moving from shifting cultivation into permanent field agriculture post sweet potato, Modjeska (1982) argued for the development of two "self amplifying feed back loops" of ecological and social causation. The trigger to the changes were very slow population growth and the slow expansion of agriculture to meet the demands of this growth. This set in motion the first feedback loop, the "use-value" loop. As more forest was cleared there was a decline in wild food resources and protein produced from hunting, which was substituted for by an increase in domestic pig raising. An increase in domestic pigs required a further expansion in agriculture. The greater protein available from the larger number of pigs increased human fertility and survival rates and resulted in faster population growth.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The outcome of the operation of the two loops, one bringing about ecological change and the other social and economic change, is an expanding and intensifying agricultural system, the conversion of forest to grassland, a population growing at an increasing rate and expanding geographically and a society that is increasing in complexity and stratification.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The second attempt to explain the relationships between simple agricultural societies and their environments is that of Ellen (1982, 252–270). Ellen does not attempt to separate use-values from social production. He argues that almost all of the materials required by humans to live (with perhaps the exception of air) are obtained through social relations of production and that these relations proliferate and are modified in numerous ways. The values that humans attribute to items produced from the environment arise out of cultural arrangements and not from the objects themselves, a restatement of Carl Sauer's dictum that "resources are cultural appraisals". Humans frequently translate actual objects into culturally conceived forms, an example being the translation by the Duna of the pig into an item of compensation and redemption. As a result, two fundamental processes underlie the ecology of human social systems: First, the obtaining of materials from the environment and their alteration and circulation through social relations, and second, giving the material a value which will affect how important it is to obtain it, circulate it or alter it. Environmental pressures are thus mediated through social relations.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Transitions in ecological systems and in social systems do not proceed at the same rate. The rate of phylogenetic change is determined mainly by natural selection and partly by human interference and adaptation, such as for example, the domestication of a wild species. Humans however have the ability to learn and to communicate their knowledge to each other and across generations. If most social systems have the tendency to increase in complexity they will, sooner or later, come into conflict with, or into "contradiction" (Friedman 1979, 1982) with their environments. What happens around the point of "contradiction" will determine the extent of the environmental degradation that will occur. Of particular importance is the ability of the society to change, to invent or to innovate technologically and sociologically, in order to overcome the "contradiction" without incurring continuing environmental degradation, or social disintegration.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: An economic study of what occurs at the points of conflict with specific reference to shifting cultivation is that of Esther Boserup (1965). Boserup argues that low intensity farming, extensive shifting cultivation for example, has lower labor costs than more intensive farming systems. This assertion remains controversial. She also argues that given a choice, a human group will always choose the technique which has the lowest absolute labor cost rather than the highest yield. But at the point of conflict, yields will have become unsatisfactory. Boserup argues, contra Malthus, that rather than population always overwhelming resources, that humans will invent a new agricultural technique or adopt an existing innovation that will boost yields and that is adapted to the new environmental conditions created by the degradation which has occurred already, even though they will pay for the increases in higher labor costs. Examples of such changes are the adoption of new higher yielding crops, the exchanging of a digging stick for a hoe, or a hoe for a plough, or the development of irrigation systems. The controversy over Boserup's proposal is in part over whether intensive systems are more costly in labor terms, and whether humans will bring about change in their agricultural systems before environmental degradation forces them to.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The estimated rate of deforestation in Southeast Asia in 1990 was 34,000 km² per year (FAO 1990, quoted in Potter 1993). In Indonesia alone it was estimated 13,100 km² per year were being lost, 3,680 km² per year from Sumatra and 3,770 km² from Kalimantan, of which 1,440 km² were due to the fires of 1982 to 1983. Since those estimates were made huge fires have ravaged Indonesian forests during the 1997 to 1998 El Niño associated drought.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Shifting cultivation was assessed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to be one of the causes of deforestation while logging was not. The apparent discrimination against shifting cultivators caused a confrontation between FAO and environmental groups, who saw the FAO supporting commercial logging interests against the rights of indigenous people (Potter 1993, 108). Other independent studies of the problem note that despite lack of government control over forests and the dominance of a political elite in the logging industry, the causes of deforestation are more complex. The loggers have provided paid employment to former subsistence farmers. One of the outcomes of cash incomes has been rapid population growth among indigenous groups of former shifting cultivators that has placed pressure on their traditional long fallow farming systems. Many farmers have taken advantage of the improved road access to urban areas by planting cash crops, such as rubber or pepper as noted above. Increased cash incomes often are spent on chain saws, which have enabled larger areas to be cleared for cultivation. Fallow periods have been reduced and cropping periods extended. Serious poverty elsewhere in the country has brought thousands of land-hungry settlers into the cut-over forests along the logging roads. The settlers practice what appears to be shifting cultivation but which is in fact a one-cycle slash and burn followed by continuous cropping, with no intention to long fallow. Clearing of trees and the permanent cultivation of fragile soils in a tropical environment with little attempt to replace lost nutrients may cause rapid degradation of the fragile soils.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: The loss of forest in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines during the 1990s was preceded by major ecosystem disruptions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1970s and 1980s caused by warfare. Forests were sprayed with defoliants, thousands of rural forest dwelling people were uprooted from their homes and moved driven into previously isolated areas. The loss of the tropical forests of Southeast Asia is the particular outcome of the general possible outcomes described by Ellen (see above) when small local ecological and social systems become part of a larger system. When the previous relatively stable ecological relationships are destabilized, degradation can occur rapidly. Similar descriptions of the loss of forest and destruction of fragile ecosystems could be provided from the Amazon Basin, by large scale state sponsored colonization forest land (Becker 1995, 61) or from the Central Africa where what endemic armed conflict is destabilizing rural settlement and farming communities on a massive scale.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: In the tropical developing world, shifting cultivation in its many diverse forms, remains a pervasive practice. Shifting cultivation was one of the first forms of agriculture practiced by humans and its survival into the modern world suggests that it is a flexible and highly adaptive means of production. However, it is also a grossly misunderstood practice. Many casual observers cannot see past the clearing and burning of standing forest and do not perceive often ecologically stable cycles of cropping and fallowing. Nevertheless, shifting cultivation systems are particularly susceptible to rapid increases in population and to economic and social change in the larger world around them. The blame for the destruction of forest resources is often laid on shifting cultivators. But the forces bringing about the rapid loss of tropical forests at the end of the 20th century are the same forces that led to the destruction of the forests of Europe, urbanization, industrialization, increased affluence, populational growth and geographical expansion and the application the latest technology to extract ever more resources from the environment in pursuit of wealth and political power by competing groups. However we must know that those who practice Agriculture are at the receiving end of the social stratum.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Studies of small, isolated and pre-capitalist groups and their relationships with their environments suggests that the roots of the contemporary problem lie deep in human behavioral patterns, for even in these simple societies, competition and conflict can be identified as the main force driving them into contradiction with their environments.


title: Shifting cultivation

text: Slash-and-char, as opposed to slash-and-burn, may create self-perpetuating soil fertility that supports sedentary agriculture, but the society so sustained may still be overturned, as above ("see" article at Terra preta).


title: Punt gun

text: A punt gun is a type of extremely large shotgun used in the 19th and early 20th centuries for shooting large numbers of waterfowl for commercial harvesting operations. These weapons are characteristically too large for an individual to fire from the shoulder or often carry alone, but unlike artillery pieces, punt guns are able to be aimed and fired by a single person from a mount. In this case, the mount is typically a small watercraft (e.g. a punt). Many early models appear similar to over-sized versions of shoulder weapons of the time with full-length wooden stocks with a normal-sized shoulder stock. Most later variations do away with the full-length stock — especially more modern models — and have mounting hardware fixed to the gun to allow them to be fitted to a pintle.


title: Punt gun

text: Punt guns were usually custom-designed and varied widely, but could have bore diameters exceeding and fire over a pound (≈ 0.45 kg) of shot at a time. A single shot could kill over 50 waterfowl resting on the water's surface. They were too big to hold and the recoil was so large that they had to be mounted directly on punts used for hunting, hence their name. Hunters would manoeuvre their punts quietly into line and range of the flock using poles or oars to avoid startling them. Generally, the gun was fixed to the punt; thus the hunter would manoeuvre the entire boat in order to aim the gun. The guns were sufficiently powerful, and the punts sufficiently small, that firing the gun often propelled the punt backwards several inches or more. To improve efficiency, hunters could work in fleets of up to around ten punts.


title: Punt gun

text: Punt guns are usually muzzle-loaded with a lock similar to muskets or rifles of the day including flintlock, percussion, and more modern types. Holland & Holland offered models using breech loading and standardized shotgun shells in both brass and combined paper and brass base in the 1890s via custom order. Double-barreled models also existed, typically in the smaller 8-gauge loadings. In most cases, these guns were work-guns with little additional adornment in surviving examples. Many appearing in modern auctions have signs of being repaired or upgraded in some fashion, such as upgrading a flintlock action to a more modern percussion system or refinishing by rebluing the piece.


title: Punt gun

text: In the United States, this practice depleted stocks of wild waterfowl and by the 1860s most states had banned the practice. The Lacey Act of 1900 banned the transport of wild game across state lines, and the practice of market hunting was outlawed by a series of federal laws in 1918. While use and possession of punt guns is still legal in the United States, Federal regulations prohibit their use in migratory waterfowl hunting.


title: Punt gun

text: According to Eunan O'Halpin's book "Defending Ireland", a Local Defence Force unit of the Irish Army in Co. Louth was equipped in 1941 with a number of flintlock weapons that had been gifted to them. Among these guns was a weapon described as being a "nine-foot [long] blunderbuss", which could be more commonly understood to be a punt gun.


title: Punt gun

text: In the United Kingdom, a 1995 survey showed fewer than 50 active punt guns still in use. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 limits punt guns in England and Wales, and in Scotland, to a bore diameter of (1 1/8-pounder). Since Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 there has been a punt gun salute every Coronation and Jubilee over Cowbit Wash in Cowbit, Lincolnshire, England. During the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II, 21 punt gun rounds were fired separately, followed by the guns all being fired simultaneously.


title: Punt gun

text: Desmond Bagley's 1973 thriller, "The Tightrope Men," features a percussion-fired punt gun. Although the book is set in northern Finland, punt guns were never used in the country.


title: Punt gun

text: In his 1978 novel "Chesapeake", author James A. Michener details the historical use of various punt guns (described by him as "long guns") and their impact on waterfowl numbers. One, called "The Twombly", was described as 11 feet 6 inches long, 110 pounds (with a load of 3/4 lbs of black powder and over 1.5 lbs of number 6 shot), which was used to hunt geese and ducks by the highlighted watermen of the Chesapeake Bay.


title: Punt gun

text: The 2004 film "" featured a punt gun used in combat. This punt gun was custom-built for the film and was long, weighed , and had a bore (classified as "A" gauge by the Gun Barrel Proof Act of 1868 in Schedule B). The weapon was not actually of this bore, instead being a large prop shell concealing a 12 gauge shotgun firing triple-loaded black powder blanks, with the barrel sprayed with WD-40 water displacer to produce a large smoke cloud on firing.


title: Punt gun

text: In the novel Outer Dark, by Cormac McCarthy, the use of a four-gauge punt gun for hunting ducks is described.


title: Punt gun

text: In the Discworld novel Pyramids, mention is made of a "Puntbow", essentially a combination of this weapon and a crossbow.


title: Confucius Institute

text: Confucius Institutes (CI; ) are public educational and cultural promotion programs funded and arranged currently by the , a government-organized non-governmental organization (GONGO) under the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. The Confucius Institute program was formerly under Hanban, an organization affiliated with the Chinese government. The stated aim of the program is to promote Chinese language and culture, support local Chinese teaching internationally, and facilitate cultural exchanges.


title: Confucius Institute

text: The Confucius Institute program began in 2004 and was supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education-affiliated Hanban (officially the Office of Chinese Language Council International, which changed its name to Center for Language Education and Cooperation in 2020), overseen by individual universities. The institutes operate in co-operation with local affiliate colleges and universities around the world, and financing is shared between Hanban and the host institutions. The related Confucius Classroom program partners with local secondary schools or school districts to provide teachers and instructional materials.


title: Confucius Institute

text: Officials from China have compared Confucius Institutes to language and culture promotion organizations such as Portugal's Instituto Camões, Britain's British Council, France's Alliance Française, Italy's Società Dante Alighieri, Spain's Instituto Cervantes and Germany's Goethe-Institut—several of them named for an iconic cultural figure identified with that country, as Confucius is identified with China. Some commentators argue, unlike these organizations, many Confucius Institutes operate directly on university campuses, thus giving rise to what they see as unique concerns related to academic freedom and political influence.


title: Confucius Institute

text: Confucius Institutes are used as a form of "soft power" by the Chinese government in which it spends approximately $10 billion a year on CIs and related programs to exercise these initiatives. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping in 2013 stated that the intentions are to "give a good Chinese narrative". Being affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education, CIs have received increasing skepticism over its censorship of content taught, such as topics related to individual freedoms and democracy, Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.


title: Confucius Institute

text: There have been a number of reports pointing to controversial incidents in the past, including a former senior CCP official, Li Changchun's comment that Confucius Institutes are "an important part of China's overseas propaganda set-up". In July 2020, Hanban announced its renaming to the Center for Language Education and Cooperation, stating that The Confucius Institute was handed over to , a self-described "non-governmental private organization". On 13 August 2020, the United States Department of State designated the headquarters of the Confucius Institute in the U.S. as a foreign mission of the Chinese government. This designation has been protested by the Center in an open letter to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.


title: Confucius Institute

text: The first Confucius Institute opened on 21 November 2004 in Seoul, South Korea, after establishing a pilot institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in June 2004. The CI in South Korea is no longer active. The second Confucius Institute was opened on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park, also in November 2004. In 2006, the goal of 1,000 Confucius Institutes by 2020 was being discussed.


title: Confucius Institute

text: In April 2007, the first research-based Confucius Institute opened in Waseda University in Japan. In partnership with Peking University, the program promotes research activities of graduate students studying Chinese. In 2007, China's Ministry of Education estimated that 100 million people overseas would be learning Chinese by 2010.


title: Confucius Institute

text: From 2006 to 2019, the Chinese government spent more than $150 million on institutes in the U.S. The number of institutes in the U.S. peaked in 2018, at around 100, with the total around the world being about 550.


title: Confucius Institute

text: The Confucius Institute is named after the noted Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC). Throughout the 20th century, CCP leaders criticized and denounced Confucius as the personification of China's "feudal" traditions, with anti-Confucianism ranging from the 1912 New Culture Movement to the 1973 Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign during the Cultural Revolution. However, in recent decades, interest in pre-modern Chinese culture has grown in the country, and Confucius in particular has seen a resurgence in popularity. Outside of China, Confucius is a generally recognizable symbol of Chinese culture, removed from the negative associations of other prominent Chinese figures such as chairman Mao Zedong.


title: Confucius Institute

text: "Confucius Institute" is a trademarked brand name, which according to a spokesman for the organisation, "Those who enjoy more brand names will enjoy higher popularity, reputation, more social influence, and will therefore be able to generate more support from local communities." A 2011 crackdown protected "Confucius Institute" from preregistration infringement in Costa Rica.


title: Confucius Institute

text: A "China Post" article reported in 2014 that "Certainly, China would have made little headway if it had named these Mao Institutes, or even Deng Xiaoping Institutes. But by borrowing the name Confucius, it created a brand that was instantly recognized as a symbol of Chinese culture, radically different from the image of the Communist Party."


title: Confucius Institute

text: Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney, notes the irony that the CCP now lionizing Confucius had vilified him just four decades previously for his association with patriarchal, hierarchical, and conservative values.


title: Confucius Institute

text: The stated purpose of Confucius Institutes (CIs) is to promote and teach Chinese culture and language around the world. CIs develop Chinese language courses, train teachers, hold the HSK Examination (Chinese proficiency test), host cultural and artistic presentations, and provide information about contemporary China. The director of the CI program, Xu Lin, stated that CIs were started to cater to the sudden uptick in interest of the Chinese language around the world. They also provide Chinese language teaching staff from Mainland China. As of 2011, there were 200 such teachers working in the United States. In the Middle East 14 institute, and the main purpose for the local population to participate in the institute activities are learning Chinese to find a job in the local market or to find a job in the growing Chinese market.


title: Confucius Institute

text: Hanban is a non-profit government organization, though it is connected with the Ministry of Education and has close ties to a number of senior CCP officials. The Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing establishes the guidelines which the separate Confucius Institutes worldwide follows. The headquarters is governed by a council with fifteen members, ten of whom are directors of overseas institutes. The institutes themselves are individually managed under the leadership of their own board of directors, which should include members of the host institution. The current chair of the Confucius Institute Headquarters council is Liu Yandong, a Chinese vice premier and member of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party who formerly headed the United Front Work Department. Other leaders of the council are similarly drawn from the CCP and central government agencies, such as the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education, and the State Council Information Office (also known as the Office of Overseas Propaganda). The council sets the agenda for the Confucius Institutes and makes changes to the bylaws while other tasks and ongoing management of the Confucius Institute Headquarters are handled by the professional executive leadership headed by the director-general.


title: Confucius Institute

text: The Chinese Government shares the burden of funding Confucius Institutes with host universities, and takes a hands-off approach to management. The institutes function independently within the guidelines established by Hanban and the Confucius Institute Headquarters. Each institute is responsible for drawing up and managing their own budget, which is subject to approval by the headquarters. The Confucius Institute Headquarters provides various restrictions on how their funds may be used, including earmarking funds for specific purposes. Institutes in the United States are generally provided with $100,000 annually from Hanban, with the local university required to match funding.


title: Confucius Institute

text: In addition to their local-partner university, Confucius Institutes operate in co-operation with a Chinese partner university. Many institutes are governed by a board which is composed of several members from the Chinese partner school, with the remaining members affiliated with the local-partner university. At most institutes, the director is appointed by the local partner university.


title: Confucius Institute

text: In July 2020, Hanban announced its renaming to Center for Language Education and Cooperation, stating that The Confucius Institute was fully handed over to , a self-described "non-governmental private organization".


title: Confucius Institute

text: The curriculum of Confucius Institutes is based on the institute's role as a language center. School officials, researchers, and other people interviewed by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) offered mixed experiences in their autonomy over the curriculum. According to the GAO report, "officials from multiple case study schools noted that U.S. school faculty members make all decisions regarding conference themes, guest speakers, and topics for events at their institute." Further, some schools were able to host conferences and programs that are critical of the CCP. At other schools, officials have raised concerns that the Confucius Institute espouses a sanitized view of Chinese society that avoids contentious topics like human rights abuses and Tibet, and they also express concerns regarding whether the Hanban would sponsor events that discuss views contrary to those of the CCP. At one school, the Confucius Institute Chinese director allegedly removed literature material about Taiwan. At another school, a Hanban representative attempted to exclude information on Taiwan from the program provided to attendees at a conference.


title: Confucius Institute

text: In the short time-frame of their rapid expansion, the institutes have been the subject of much controversy. Criticisms of the institutes have included administrative concerns about finance, academic viability, legal issues, and relations with the Chinese partner university, as well as broader concerns about improper influence over teaching and research, industrial and military espionage, surveillance of Chinese abroad, and undermining Taiwanese influence. There has also been organized opposition to the establishment of a Confucius Institute at University of Melbourne, University of Manitoba, Stockholm University, University of Chicago and many others. More significantly, some universities that hosted Confucius Institutes decided to terminate their contracts. These include Japan's Osaka Sangyo University in 2010; Canada's McMaster University and Université de Sherbrooke, and France's University of Lyon in 2013; the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, and the Toronto District School Board in 2014, the German Stuttgart Media University and University of Hohenheim in 2015, and Vrije Universiteit Brussel and University of Kansas in 2019.


title: Confucius Institute

text: Controversy regarding Confucius Institutes in the US, Australian, and Canadian press includes criticism that unlike other governments' language and culture promotion organizations, the Confucius Institutes operate within established universities, colleges, and secondary schools around the world, providing funding, teachers and educational materials. This has raised concerns over their influence on academic freedom, the possibility of industrial espionage, and concerns that the institutes present a selective and politicized view of China as a means of advancing the country's soft power internationally.


title: Confucius Institute

text: Underlying such opposition is concern by professors and students that a Confucius Institute would interfere with academic freedom and be able to pressure the university to censor speech on topics the CCP objects to. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education asserts that there is little evidence of meddling from China, although the same article did go on to say the institutes were "distinct in the degree to which they were financed and managed by a foreign government." After interviewing China scholars, journalists and CI directors, a writer for "The Diplomat", a publication covering politics, society, and culture in the Indo-Pacific region, also found little support for the concern that CIs would serve as propaganda vehicles, though some of her sources did note that they would face constraints in their curriculum on matters such as Tibet and human rights. An article in "The New York Times" quotes Arthur Waldron, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, saying that the key issue is academic independence. "Once you have a Confucius Institute on campus, you have a second source of opinions and authority that is ultimately answerable to the Chinese Communist Party and which is not subject to scholarly review."


title: Confucius Institute

text: In October 2013, University of Chicago professor Marshall Sahlins published an extensive investigative article criticizing the Confucius Institutes and the universities hosting them. Later, more than 100 faculty members signed a protest against the Confucius Institute at the University of Chicago. In September 2014, the University of Chicago suspended its negotiation for renewal of the agreement with Hanban. Two months later, the Canadian Association of University Teachers urged Canadian universities and colleges to end ties with the Confucius Institute.


title: Confucius Institute

text: In June 2014, the American Association of University Professors issued a statement urging American universities to cease their collaboration with the Confucius Institute unless the universities can have unilateral control of the academia affairs, that the teachers in Confucius Institutes can have the same academic freedom enjoyed by other university faculty members, and that the agreements between universities and Confucius Institutes are available to the community. The AAUP statement was widely noticed by US media and prompted extensive further debate in the US.


title: Confucius Institute

text: Two months later, in August 2014, Xu Lin, Director-General of the Hanban and Chief Executive of the CIs worldwide, became embroiled in an incident in Braga, Portugal, when Xu ordered her staff to rip pages referring to Taiwanese academic institutions from the published program for the European Association for Chinese Studies conference in Braga, claiming the materials were "contrary to Chinese regulations". When Roger Greatrex, president of the EACS, learned of this censorship, he ordered that 500 copies of the original program immediately be printed and distributed to participants. He later wrote, "The seizure of the materials in such an unauthorized manner, after the conference had already begun, was extremely injudicious, and has promoted a negative view of the Confucius Institute Headquarters". The EACS letter of protest said this had been "the first occasion in the history of the EACS that its conference materials have been censored." It concluded, "Such interference in the internal organization of the international conference of an independent and democratically organized non-profitable academic organization is totally unacceptable." "The Wall Street Journal" described Xu's attempted censorship as the "bullying approach to academic freedom".


title: Confucius Institute

text: In September 2014, the University of Chicago closed their CI after pressure from faculty members, blaming Xu's comments that her threatening letter and phone call forced the university to continue hosting the institute. The "Business Spectator" concludes that the Xu Lin's hardline behavior highlights one of the biggest problems for Beijing's charm offensive. "It still relies on officials like Xu, who still think and act like party ideologues who like to assert their authority and bully people into submission." Less than a week later, Pennsylvania State University also cut ties with the Confucius Institute after coming to the conclusion that "its objectives were not in line with the Institute's".


title: Confucius Institute

text: In December 2014, Stockholm University, the first university in Europe to host a Confucius Institute, announced it was terminating the program. Press coverage of the Braga incident in the Swedish press was said to have influenced the decision. "Generally it is questionable to have, within the framework of the university, institutes that are financed by another country," said the university's chancellor.


title: Confucius Institute

text: In the same month, the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations held a hearing entitled "Is Academic Freedom Threatened by China's Influence on U.S. Universities?". Chairman Chris Smith said, "U.S. colleges and universities should not be outsourcing academic control, faculty and student oversight or curriculum to a foreign government", and called for a GAO study into agreements between American universities and China. On 5 December 2014, PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying denied the House testimony and said "We have assisted with supplying teachers and textbooks at the request of the U.S. side but have never interfered with academic freedom."


title: Confucius Institute

text: Controversy continued in 2018 as U.S. Congress members from Texas wrote a letter to four universities in that state urging them to close their Confucius Institutes. Texas A&M did so shortly after receiving the letter. Throughout 2018 and 2019, all of the institutes in Florida were closed: the University of West Florida, the University of North Florida, the University of South Florida, and Miami Dade College.


title: Confucius Institute

text: A U.S. law passed in 2019 that prohibits universities hosting Confucius Institutes from receiving funding for Chinese language studies from the Department of Defense led to more closures of Confucius Institutes. Unable to obtain a waiver from the Department of Defense, Indiana University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Rhode Island, San Francisco State University, the University of Oregon, Western Kentucky University, Arizona State University, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and San Diego State University closed their programs in 2019. In 2020, the University of Maryland also announced the closure of its Confucius Institute, the oldest one in the U.S.


title: Confucius Institute

text: On 19 February 2019, Leiden University in The Netherlands promised to end its agreement with Confucius Institute in August 2019. On June 30, 2021, Baruch College - The City University of New York - ended its agreement with the Confucius Institute.


title: Confucius Institute

text: In 2020, Sweden ended agreements with all Confucius Institutes in the country. Management consultant Ross Feingold said the closure of the Confucius Institutes was the result of Sweden taking a much tougher view of China, as a result of Swedish national Gui Minhai being imprisoned for 10 years, and also comments by China's ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, who threatened Sweden during an interview with broadcaster Swedish PEN in November 2019 saying that "We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we got shotguns." over the decision to award Gui Minhai with the Tucholsky Prize, the ambassador later clarified saying that China would impose trade restrictions on Sweden for this award. The embassy has systematically worked to influence the reporting on China by Swedish journalists.


title: Confucius Institute

text: On May 13 2020, the College Democrats of America and the College Republicans National Committee released a joint-letter calling for "the immediate and permanent closure of all Confucius Institutes in the United States" based on the Human Rights Watch 12 Point Code of Conduct for academic freedom. The Confucius Institute U.S. Center later issued a statement criticizing the letter as well as the Athenai Institute, the student-organized NGO largely attributed to have organized the letter.


title: Confucius Institute

text: On 13 August 2020, U.S. Department of State designated the Confucius Institute U.S. Center as a foreign mission of the PRC. On 8 March 2021, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would restrict colleges hosting Confucius Institutes from receiving some federal funding.


title: Confucius Institute

text: According to the Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine report on July 3, 2021, the Göttingen Young Union (Junge Union) City Association is striving for the University of Hannover and the University of Göttingen to terminate their cooperation with the Confucius Institute. The Youth League promoted a motion on the grounds that the Confucius Institute is under the control of the CCP and "is aimed at strengthening the propaganda of Beijing's totalitarian ideology and exerting harmful influence on German universities." Yuhan Huang from Kunming, Yunnan Province of China wrote the motion proposal. He came to Germany in 2018 and is a member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), a main German political party, and a member of the Young Union youth organization. He introduced the situation of the Confucius Institute to the members of the organization, and organized related activities in Germany to request the termination of the cooperation between the Confucius Institute and German universities.


title: Confucius Institute

text: On August 4, 2021, the Human Rights Foundation published a report stating that Confucius Institutes "cultivated a climate of intimidation and surveillance within American classrooms." and "Both information censorship and self-censorship are especially prevalent, as educators, researchers, administrators, and students alike are steered away from learning and critically thinking about topics that may be deemed sensitive to the Chinese government such as democracy, “the three T’s,” Hong Kong, the Uyghur genocide, and the CCP's other prevailing human rights infringements."


title: Confucius Institute

text: As of 2022, all of the Confucius Institutes located on SUNY campuses were closed because federal research funding was jeopardized. The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act is the act that could restrict federal research funding to universities that host Confucius Institutes.


title: Confucius Institute

text: The Confucius Institute has non-academic goals. Li Changchun, the former 5th-highest-ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party said in 2007 that the Confucius Institutes were "an important part of China's overseas propaganda set-up". Some foreign scholars have characterized the CI program as an exercise in soft power, expanding China's economic, cultural, and diplomatic reach through the promotion of Chinese language and culture, while others have suggested a possible role in intelligence collection. The soft power goals also include assuaging concerns of a "China threat" in the context of the country's increasingly powerful economy and military.


title: Confucius Institute

text: Retired British diplomat and China expert Roger Garside concludes in his submission to the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission that academic freedom is "inherently compromised by permitting a state agency controlled by the Communist Party of China to establish a teaching operation in any school or university".


title: Confucius Institute

text: While Chinese authorities have been cautious not to have CIs act as direct promoters of the party's political viewpoints, a few critics suggest that the Confucius Institutes function in this way. Officials say that one important goal of the institutes is to influence other countries' understanding of China. Peng Ming-min, a Taiwan independence activist and politician, claims that colleges and universities where a Confucius Institute is established have to sign a contract in which they declare their support for Beijing's "One China" policy. As a result, both Taiwan and Tibet become taboos at the institutes.