title: Lithuanian Air Force

text: The Regional Air Spaces Surveillance Co-ordination Centre (RASSCC), headquarters of the BALTNET project, was established in the LTAF Airspace Control Centre and has been fully functioning since early 2000. Military personnel from all the three Baltic States serve as air surveillance operators at the centre and rotate according to national timetables. The Commander of the centre is appointed for two years and represents one of the Baltic States.


title: Lithuanian Air Force

text: After Lithuania joined NATO organization back in 2004, its (alongside Latvia's and Estonia's) air space is protected by NATO. NATO members provide usually four fighter aircraft, based in Lithuania, to police the Baltic States’ airspace. The deployments rotate between NATO members (that started in March 2004 with Belgium Air Force F-16s) and most NATO members that operate fighters have made a deployment to Lithuania. The Baltic States are considering in the near future to protect their airspace on their own.


title: Lithuanian Air Force

text: In line with the set priorities, the Lithuanian Air Force is implementing modernisation plans. In 2000s, the Air Force has bought three new C-27J Spartan military transport aircraft. In 2013, three Eurocopter AS365 Dauphin search and rescue helicopters were ordered from France for roughly €52 million euros. The deal was financed by the EU and deliveries began in 2015. In October 2020, the Air Force announced the decision to purchase four Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters from the USA.


title: Lithuanian Air Force

text: Previous aircraft operated by the Air Force consisted of the Aero L-39, An-2 Colt, An-26 Curl, PZL-104 Wilga and Mil Mi-2.


title: Earl Browder

text: Earl Russell Browder (May 20, 1891 – June 27, 1973) was an American politician, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Browder was the General Secretary of the CPUSA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s.


title: Earl Browder

text: During World War I, Browder served time in federal prison as a conscientious objector to conscription and the war. Upon his release, Browder became an active member of the American Communist movement, soon working as an organizer on behalf of the Communist International and its Red International of Labor Unions in China and the Pacific region.


title: Earl Browder

text: In 1930, following the removal of a rival political faction from leadership, Browder was made General Secretary of the CPUSA. For the next 15 years thereafter Browder was the most recognizable public figure associated with American Communism, authoring dozens of pamphlets and books, making numerous public speeches before sometimes vast audiences, and twice running for President of the United States. Browder also took part in activities on behalf of Soviet intelligence in America during his period of party leadership, placing those who sought to convey sensitive information to the party into contact with Soviet intelligence.


title: Earl Browder

text: In the wake of public outrage over the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Browder was indicted for passport fraud. He was convicted of two counts early in 1940 and sentenced to four years in prison, remaining free for a time on appeal. In the spring of 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the sentence and Browder began what proved to be a 14-month stint in federal prison. Browder was subsequently released in 1943 as a gesture towards wartime unity.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder was a staunch adherent of close cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II and envisioned continued cooperation between these two military powers in the postwar years. Coming to see the role of American Communists to be that of an organized pressure group within a broad governing coalition, in 1944 he directed the transformation of the CPUSA into a "Communist Political Association". However, following the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Cold War and internal red scare quickly sprouted up. Browder was expelled from the re-established Communist Party early in 1946, due largely to a refusal to modify these views to accord with changing political realities and their associated ideological demands.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity at his home in Yonkers, New York and later in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died in 1973. He wrote numerous books and pamphlets on political issues.


title: Earl Browder

text: Earl Browder was born on May 20, 1891, in Wichita, Kansas, the eighth child of Martha Jane (Hankins) and William Browder, a teacher and farmer. His father was sympathetic to populism.


title: Earl Browder

text: In 1907, Browder, age 16, joined the Socialist Party of America in Wichita and remained in that organization until the party split of 1912, when many of the group's members who supported the syndicalist ideal exited the party after it added an anti-sabotage clause to the party constitution and the recall of National Executive Committeeman William "Big Bill" Haywood. Historian Theodore Draper notes that Browder "was influenced by an offshoot of the syndicalist movement which believed in working in the American Federation of Labor (AFL)." This ideological orientation brought the young Browder into contact with William Z. Foster, founder of an organization called the Syndicalist League of North America which was based upon similar policies and James P. Cannon, an IWW adherent from Kansas.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder moved to Kansas City and was employed as an office worker, entering the union of his trade, the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants union AFL. In 1916, he took a job as manager of the Johnson County Cooperative Association in Olathe, Kansas.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder was aggressively opposed to World War I and publicly spoke out against it, characterizing the fighting as an imperialist conflict. After the United States joined the war in 1917, Browder was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act conspiring to defeat the operation of the draft law and nonregistration. Browder was sentenced to two years in prison for conspiracy and a year for nonregistration, sitting in jail from December 1917 to November 1918.


title: Earl Browder

text: In 1919, Browder, Cannon and their Kansas City associates started a radical newspaper, "The Workers World", with Browder serving as the first editor. However, in June of that year Browder was jailed again on a conspiracy charge, with Cannon taking over as editor. Browder's second prison stint, served at Leavenworth Penitentiary, lasted until November 1920, putting him out of circulation during the critical interval when the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party quit the SPA to form the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party of America. A series of splits and mergers followed, with the two Communist parties formally merging in 1921.


title: Earl Browder

text: Released from prison at last, Browder lost no time in joining the United Communist Party (UCP), as well as the fledgling Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) being launched by his old associate William Z. Foster. Browder found employment as the managing editor of the monthly magazine of TUEL, "The Labor Herald".


title: Earl Browder

text: In 1920 the Communist International (Comintern) headed by Grigory Zinoviev decided to establish an international confederation of Communist trade unions, the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, or "Profintern"). A founding convention was planned to be held in Moscow in July 1921 and an American delegation was gathered, including members of the American Communist Parties and the Industrial Workers of the World. Earl Browder was named to this delegation, ostensibly representing Kansas miners, with the non-party man Foster attending as a journalist representing the Federated Press. This trip to Soviet Russia incidentally proved decisive in bringing the syndicalist Foster over to the Communist movement.


title: Earl Browder

text: Throughout the early 1920s, Browder and Foster worked together closely in the TUEL, trying to win over the support of the Chicago Federation of Labor in the establishment of a new mass Farmer-Labor Party that would be able to challenge the electoral hegemony of the Republican and Democratic parties.


title: Earl Browder

text: In 1928, the estranged Browder and his girlfriend Kitty Harris went to China and lived in Shanghai where Browder served as Secretary of the RILU's Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, a clandestine labor organization working to unify the labor movement of Asia and the nations of the Pacific basin. The pair returned to the United States in January 1929.


title: Earl Browder

text: The year 1929 marked a major turn in the Communist Party of the United States of America. Party leader Jay Lovestone, having won a massive factional victory over the Chicago-based rival group headed by William Z. Foster at the 6th National Convention of the organization, ran afoul of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) and the ultra-radical program which the member organizations of the Comintern were instructed to pursue. Lovestone headed a 10-member delegation to Moscow to appeal his case to the American Commission of ECCI; things did not go well for him and in the squabble over autonomy Lovestone attempted a factional coup involving the seizure of party assets.


title: Earl Browder

text: On May 17, 1929, ECCI ordered the removal of Lovestone. He was replaced on a provisional basis by a five-person secretariat which included former Lovestone associate Max Bedacht as "Acting Secretary" as well as opposition factional leader and trade union chief Bill Foster; two relatively independent figures in the persons of cartoonist-turned-functionary Robert Minor and former Executive Secretary of the underground party Will Weinstone; and Comintern Representative Boris Mikhailov (pseudonym "G. Williams") as the unpublicized power behind the throne.


title: Earl Browder

text: While the center of gravity in the leadership of the CPUSA was rapidly shifted, Browder remained largely outside of the ongoing machinations of power, continuing to function as an employee of the Comintern. In August 1929 Browder was dispatched to Vladivostok, located in the far eastern reaches of Soviet Siberia on the Pacific coastline, to attend the final formal gathering of RILU's Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder returned to the United States again in October 1929, just in time for a critical plenary session of the Central Committee of the American party. Allies in the Comintern had already begun to promote the trusted Browder as the best figure to head the American Communist Party, with Solomon Lozovsky taking up his banner in Moscow while Mikhailov-Williams lent his support from America. Foster's credibility had been badly tarnished in Moscow as a result of his role as a leader of the frequently unprincipled factional war which had paralyzed the American party throughout the decade of the 1920s. Placing Browder — the man responsible for bringing Foster into the Communist movement — in authority was seen as a means for shifting power decisively away from the former Lovestone group without opening a new round of factional warfare which would have inevitably resulted had the mantle been given directly to Foster.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder deferred from the position of party Secretary, however, not feeling himself sufficiently acclimated to the political situation in the CPUSA. The October plenum therefore returned Bedacht and Minor to a collective leadership, dropping Foster and Weinstone. Weinstone was named as the new American Representative to the Comintern, replacing the recently expelled righthand man of Jay Lovestone, Bertram D. Wolfe, in the position. Browder was added to this new three member Secretariat, named head of the party's Agitation and Propaganda department.


title: Earl Browder

text: The 4th quarter of 1929 saw the wheels fall off the wagon, marked by the October 24 Wall Street Crash and the beginning of a massive economic contraction remembered to history as the Great Depression. As head of the CPUSA's Agitprop, Browder was responsible for generating party literature intended to transform the unemployment crisis into a mass movement for revolutionary change. Browder was instrumental in planning American activities relating to International Unemployment Day, March 6, 1930 — an international day of mass protest, set in motion by the Comintern, against unemployment. A network of Unemployed Councils were established under Communist Party auspices.


title: Earl Browder

text: Another change of the top level leadership of the CPUSA took place at the party's 7th National Convention of June 21–25, 1930. Max Bedacht, formerly a top figure in the hierarchy of the Lovestone faction who had only recanted his views at the 11th hour in front of the American Commission of ECCI in Moscow was removed as Secretary and moved to a less sensitive leadership role as head of the International Workers Order. A new three person Secretariat was appointed, with Browder as Secretary of the political department while Will Weinstone and Bill Foster heading the organizational and trade union departments, respectively. With Weinstone in Moscow as the CPUSA's Comintern Rep and Foster in jail for his connection with the March 6 International Unemployment Day demonstration, which had ended in street fighting in New York City, Browder's position as chief decision-maker of the party was at least temporarily bolstered.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder's status as the de facto first among equals among members of the Secretariat of the American CP was further emphasized at the 11th Plenum of the Comintern, held from March 26 to April 11, 1931. There it was Browder who delivered the main report of the CPUSA, indicative of his prime position in the organization.


title: Earl Browder

text: Tension developed between the trio, with Foster seeing his long-desired place as CPUSA chief foiled by a man who had formerly been his lieutenant at the Trade Union Educational League; both the midwesterners distrusted the ambitious, college-educated New Yorker Weinstone. Browder's considerable administrative skills, his ability to intelligently defend his ideas, and his willingness to yield to others when necessary scored points for his personal cause in Moscow.


title: Earl Browder

text: By the end of 1932 Browder's primary leadership role was consolidated. When Weinstone returned from Moscow anxious to once again pursue party leadership positions, protracted squabbling over party policy threatened to erupt into a 1920s-style factional war. In August the Comintern Representative, sensing such a danger, advised Moscow of "some strong person" to stop the "squabbling". The third member of the Secretariat, William Z. Foster, the party's candidate for President, suffered an attack of angina pectoris and was ordered by doctors to cease campaigning and to undergo bed rest — with visitation and dictation similarly proscribed. With Foster out of the picture and a big majority of the party leadership backing him over Weinstone, Browder appealed to the Comintern to resolve what he called "impossible relations" with Weinstone by assigning one of them for Comintern work abroad.


title: Earl Browder

text: On November 13, 1932, after extensive debate, the Comintern ruled in Browder's favor, determining that Weinstone would be removed from America to once again serve in Moscow as the CPUSA's official representative there. Moscow's vision seems to have been for a joint party leadership between Browder and Foster. The unexpected factor proved to be the chronic and incapacitating nature of Foster's heart ailment, which left Browder in a position of effective unitary leadership.


title: Earl Browder

text: Although Weinstone had been removed from America to break up an incipient factional war, he continued to campaign for the position of party leader. In the spring of 1933 he obtained the final test of strength he had been looking for, in the form of a dozen meetings of the Comintern's Anglo-American Secretariat in Moscow spread out over 29 days. Throughout April, Browder and Weinstone leveled charges and counter-charges against one another, examining the Communist Party's activities in the United States in fine detail. Despite significant criticism of certain of his actions, Browder emerged from the Moscow sessions in a firm position of authority. Weinstone, accepting defeat at last, remained in Moscow as the CPUSA's CI Rep until 1934.


title: Earl Browder

text: While Earl Browder was one of the top leaders of American Communism during the so-called Third Period of the early 1930s, he came into his own during the interval which followed, the era of the Popular Front against fascism. With the rise of Adolf Hitler to Chancellor of Germany at the end of January 1933, the balance of power in Europe was shifted. Formerly home to one of the most powerful Communist organizations, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was quickly suppressed. The failure of the KPD to cooperate with workers adhering to the rival Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was seen by many Comintern officials as a major contributing factor to the disaster. New tactics building a broad alliance in opposition to fascism seemed to be indicated.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder was an enthusiastic supporter of this new party line. By the middle of 1934 the Browder-led Central Committee of the CPUSA was pushing the leaders of its youth section, the Young Communist League, to establish a working alliance with the youth section of the rival Socialist Party, the Young People's Socialist League. In the same vein, Browder himself picked up hints from Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas that joint work between Socialists and Communists might be possible on specific issues, in reply to which Browder issued a letter formally proposing a large scale united front of the two organizations.


title: Earl Browder

text: Still perceiving President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a fascist dictator in the making, Browder and the Communists began to examine their political isolation from the American working class and to envision the establishment of a new labor party which would include both Communists and Socialists within its ranks. In December 1934 Browder won Comintern approval for his scheme, arguing his case in person in Moscow. Browder returned to the United States at the end of the month, revealing his plan to a surprised party membership in a public speech delivered on January 6, 1935. The Socialist Party, for its part, remained skeptical, having been on the receiving end of more than a decade's worth of vilification and violence.


title: Earl Browder

text: In conjunction with its newly found interest in building bridges with non-Communist progressives, the CPUSA launched potent new mass organizations such as the American League Against War and Fascism (September 1933), the American Youth Congress (1935), and the League of American Writers (April 1935). Moreover, as the 1930s progressed and the New Deal policies of the Roosevelt administration became established, the Browder-led Communist Party moved from a position of bitter opposition to critical support.


title: Earl Browder

text: After 1935 the Communist Party maintained only nominal opposition to the Roosevelt administration, with Browder heading the party's 1936 ticket as its candidate for President in the election of 1936. He received 80,195 votes.


title: Earl Browder

text: In practice, progressives of both parties were seen as key constituents in a broad "People's Front" against fascism and a bulwark of the movement for collective security in Europe against German aggression. The Communist Party attenuated its message of the historical inevitability of revolution, emphasizing progressive trends in American history and attempting to cast itself as an indigenous reform movement under the slogan "Communism is 20th Century Americanism". The stark phraseology of Marxism, based upon the inevitability of class struggle, was replaced by a fuzzy critique of capitalism using Rooseveltian terms like "economic royalism".


title: Earl Browder

text: Earl Browder was not only the leading party decision-maker but also the public face of this effort. He was, one historian later noted, a man who "paid lip service to 'proletarian internationalism and who "knew better than to oppose Soviet-imposed policies, however inappropriate they might be for American conditions", but who "wanted to be a leader of a national movement with power and influence of its own."


title: Earl Browder

text: The "Communism is 20th Century Americanism" campaign, during which Communism was portrayed as an integral part of the American democratic tradition, was successful in building the size and scope of the party organization. But with this growth came a correlated expansion of Browder's personal ego. A cult of personality began to be nurtured among the party faithful in miniature reflection of the systemic adulation of Joseph Stalin in the USSR. In the words of Maurice Isserman:


title: Earl Browder

text: The constant praise of his colleagues and the party press, and the adulation in which the membership held him (among his papers Browder saved a letter from a Seattle Communist addressed to the 'Greatest of Living Americans, Earl Browder'), transformed the once unassuming "apparatchik" of the 1920s into an arrogant and uncompromising party dictator.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder's chief rival in the Communist Party leadership in this interval was William Z. Foster. When a new recession struck in 1937, stifling tax revenue, President Roosevelt and Congress responded by cutting funding for its signature Works Progress Administration by 50 percent in an attempt to help bring the budget into balance. Foster sought for the CPUSA to renew a militant stance against capitalism and the government in response to the economic downturn.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder, on the other hand, pushed the party towards moderate criticism of the administration, urging increased expenditures on public works and unemployment relief and lauding Roosevelt's move away from isolationism in foreign policy in the wake of the rising tide of fascism in Europe. A short-lived revival of the Farmer-Labor Party idea was scrapped under Browder's direction, and the New Deal coalition endorsed as the practical base upon which a People's Front could be constructed. Over question of Foster's militance versus Browder's accommodation with New Deal realities, the Comintern ruled decisively in favor of Browder.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder made his final trip to the USSR in October 1938, where he made arrangements with Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov to establish shortwave radio communications in the event that international conflict made direct communication impossible. No communications of this sort were made until late in September 1939, when the CPUSA's political line on the dramatically changed European situation would be specified.


title: Earl Browder

text: European geopolitics were fundamentally altered on August 23, 1939, when the Foreign Ministers of the USSR and Nazi Germany formally signed a mutual non-aggression treaty known to history as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The agreement included secret protocols providing for the Nazi invasion and division of Poland. Germany's September 1 invasion of Poland brought an immediate response from its treaty partners France and United Kingdom, who declared war on Germany on September 3. World War II had begun.


title: Earl Browder

text: The Soviet Union invaded Eastern Poland on September 17, occupying land that otherwise would have been taken over by Germany. The Soviet government went further, however, by signing a joint statement with the Germans characterizing the partition of Poland as a "", calling for an end to hostilities, and placing the onus for any escalation of the European conflict on the governments of Great Britain and France.


title: Earl Browder

text: Virtually overnight the political lines of the Communist parties of the world shifted. Those who were formerly the greatest cheerleaders for collective security against the danger of Germany now became staunch opponents of American intervention in the European military situation—reflective of the newly revised needs of Soviet foreign policy. All anti-fascist propaganda was immediately terminated, overt criticism of German action was minimized, the culpability of the governments of France and Britain was exaggerated. Browder's CPUSA claimed that Hitler's foes intended to escalate the ongoing European conflict into a counterrevolutionary offensive against the USSR.


title: Earl Browder

text: The result of the sudden shift of the party line caused shock and confusion among many members of the Communist Party USA, a goodly number of whom had joined during the period of the Popular Front against fascism. Browder declared at one Philadelphia rally that only "a dozen or so" had left the CPUSA over the change of line; but this was simply untrue. On the contrary, the party's ranks fell by 15% between 1939 and 1940, and recruitment of new members in 1940 fell by 75% from 1938 levels. The public image of the USSR as a main bulwark against fascism and claims of the CPUSA as an indigenous radical organization were severely undermined.


title: Earl Browder

text: Moreover, the CPUSA's new propaganda offensive against United States participation in the so-called "Imperialist War" brought it into political conflict with the Roosevelt administration, which had begun to question the wisdom of isolationism. In the summer of 1939, Texas Congressman Martin Dies, Jr. (D), chairman of the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), learned that the U.S. Department of Justice had begun to investigate old charges that Earl Browder had traveled abroad under assumed names, making use of false documents, during the 1920s. Dies proceeded to subpoena Browder to appear before the committee to give testimony on the matter. On September 5, 1939, days after the German invasion of Poland, Browder appeared before HUAC, providing exhaustive testimony over the course of two days.


title: Earl Browder

text: Midway through the first day of testimony, Browder was asked in passing whether he had ever traveled abroad under a false passport. Before party attorney Joseph Brodsky could stop him, Browder answered, "I have." Although he subsequently refused to answer follow-up questions about the matter, citing the protection against self-incrimination offered by the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the damage caused by Browder's admission under oath had been done. Conservative politicians such as Congressman J. Parnell Thomas (R) of New Jersey attempted to make political capital out of Browder's admission, by intimating that the Roosevelt administration had coddled the country's leading Communist. Parnell Thomas maintained that Browder was "swaggering [and] apparently untouchable" despite being Stalin's "number one stooge in this country."


title: Earl Browder

text: With popular feeling against Communism raging in the wake of European events and political heat rising in Washington, the Justice Department moved to action. On October 23 a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Browder for passport fraud, a felony. The formal charge against him specified that Browder had made multiple returns to the United States using a passport bearing his own name, but which had been obtained on the basis of a falsely sworn statement. Indictments of CPUSA treasurer Wiliam Wiener and Young Communist League leader Harry Gannes on passport charges followed in December, and the Communist Party sent several of its top leaders into hiding in anticipation of a broader crackdown.


title: Earl Browder

text: On January 17, 1940, Browder's trial for passport fraud began at federal court in New York City. Browder faced a two-count indictment, upon which conviction would have carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $4,000 fine. Owing to expiration of the statute of limitations on earlier passport offenses, the government was able to prosecute Browder solely for his passport use during the years 1937 and 1938. To aid dramatic effect, recently convicted Soviet spy Nicholas Dozenberg was placed on the stand to identify Browder's photograph on papers obtained in Dozenberg's name. After the court refused a long series of motions by Browder's attorney, G. Gordon Battle, Browder took control of his own defense in the courtroom. He reminded jurors that the trial did not concern false documents from the distant past and proclaimed that the actual charges against him were based upon a "web of technicalities".


title: Earl Browder

text: Jury deliberations in the Browder case lasted less than an hour, with a guilty verdict returned. Browder was sentenced to 4 years in prison and a $2,000 fine — a result less than the maximum but in excess of sentences given to others in similar circumstances. The conviction was unanimously affirmed on appeal on June 24, 1940, and the United States Supreme Court concurred on February 17, 1941. On March 25, 1941, Browder surrendered to U.S. marshals, who transported him by rail to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.


title: Earl Browder

text: Two days later, with his face masked behind a pillowcase to hinder photographers, Browder was led into the penitentiary to begin serving his four-year term. He would not emerge again for 14 months.


title: Earl Browder

text: While Browder was imprisoned, the war continued, with major events in Europe and the Pacific. On June 22, 1941, some 3.9 million Axis troops, led by Nazi Germany, launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive and bloody invasion of the Soviet Union. Immediately the political line of the entire world communist movement shifted from one of anti-intervention in the so-called "imperialist war" to one of intense advocacy for anti-fascist intervention; the slogan was "Defend the Soviet Union". On July 12 the governments of Great Britain and the USSR exchanged pledges of mutual aid, setting the stage for military cooperation between the capitalist nations of the West and their historic Bolshevik foe.


title: Earl Browder

text: On December 7, 1941, the air force of imperial Japan launched a sudden and devastating attack upon the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. A German declaration of war on the United States followed, and direct American participation in the Second World War was begun. The interests of the American government, the Soviet government, and the American Communist Party became aligned.


title: Earl Browder

text: In the Atlanta prison, treatment of Browder was relaxed, and he began to be allowed regular visits from acting CPUSA leader Robert Minor. The Communist Party had previously conducted a "Free Earl Browder" campaign on behalf of its jailed leader but with little success, owing to bitter public sentiment over the USSR's pact with Nazi Germany and the CPUSA's kowtowing to Moscow's policy shift. By early 1942, however the party's pleas on behalf of Browder began to gain traction among government officials.


title: Earl Browder

text: On May 16, 1942, just prior to a visit to the United States by Vyacheslav Molotov, Foreign Minister of the USSR, President Roosevelt decided to remove a minor impediment to the closest possible wartime relations between the two powers by commuting Browder's sentence to time served. In a statement to the press, the Roosevelt administration said that Browder's early release would "have a tendency to promote national unity and allay any feeling...that the unusually long sentence in Browder's case was by way of penalty upon him because of his political views."


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder discreetly returned to New York City, where he resumed his place as General Secretary of the Communist Party, USA. Throughout the early years of the war, the CPUSA agitated for the establishment of a second military front in Europe to alleviate pressure exerted by Axis forces upon the Soviets in the east. The Communists proved to be enthusiastic supporters of the war effort, and the party press worked to mobilize public sentiment by printing accounts of Nazi atrocities in Germany and abroad. Browder directed Communist Party members to concentrate upon "problems of a centralized war economy and production for the war", using their place in the labor movement to help ameliorate labor discord.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder did not personally devise the wartime policies of the CPUSA; the main elements of party policy, such as advocacy of an immediate second front, opposition to strikes, an end to racial discrimination in job hiring, and total support of Roosevelt's internal policy initiatives, were already well established by the time of his release in May 1942. Nevertheless, Browder became the public spokesman for these policies, and published a book in the fall of 1942, called "Victory and After", which was frank in promoting class collaboration as essential to the cause of victory.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder postulated that the cooperation between America and the Soviet Union would continue into the postwar period. A victory of the "United Nations" would "make possible the solution of reconstruction problems with a minimum of social disorder and civil violence in the various countries most concerned." This belief in longterm cooperation between the Allied powers abroad and civil peace at home were the hallmarks of what was later known as "Browderism".


title: Earl Browder

text: By the end of 1943 the tide of the war in Europe had shifted, and there was no doubt either about the survival of the USSR or the ultimate outcome of the Second World War. With the Red Army moving inexorably westward, the possibility of a Communist Europe seemed within reach to the party faithful. Cooperation between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union was at its zenith following the conclusion of the Tehran Conference, held November 28 to December 1, 1943.


title: Earl Browder

text: On January 7, 1944, the 28 members of the governing National Committee of the CPUSA were called into session in New York City. Although they usually conducted their business in closed executive session, the members of the National Committee were surprised to learn that their session was to be held in a large room in front of about 200 invited guests. In his keynote report to the gathering, General Secretary Browder revisited the close cooperation indicated at the Tehran Conference and declared that "Capitalism and Socialism have begun to find their way to peaceful coexistence and collaboration in the same world."


title: Earl Browder

text: The Communist Party was advancing its policy initiatives through political cooperation with New Deal supporters, Browder indicated, and he declared that "Communist organization in the United States should adjust its name to correspond more exactly to the American political tradition and its own practical political role." Consequently, the name of the Communist Party USA would be changed to the "Communist Political Association", Browder noted — advising those gathered of a decision which had already been made by the Political Bureau of the party. The speakers following Browder lent individual support to the predetermined change of party name and shift in conception of the organization's role in the American political firmament.


title: Earl Browder

text: The National Committee voted unanimously in support of Browder's proposals. They established committees to draft a new constitution for the organization and to prepare for a May 1944 convention to ratify the changes. Factional opposition to Browder's change took the form of a letter to the party leadership by Browder's nemesis William Z. Foster and Foster's friend, Philadelphia District Organizer Sam Darcy, signed only by the former. The pair disagreed with Browder's view that the bourgeoisie would continue its wartime coordination with the Roosevelt administration after the war, and predicted a breakdown that would require an aggressive response by American Communists.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder allowed the Foster-Darcy letter to be circulated only to a handful of top party leaders, who at a February 1944 meeting of the Politburo voted to reject the letter. Foster's objection was muted when Browder emphasized that open criticism would have been regarded as a punishable breach of party discipline. Darcy refused to submit to party discipline on this matter, however, viewing it as a matter of fundamental principle. He was subsequently expelled from the CPA by a committee headed by Foster himself.


title: Earl Browder

text: With the end of the Great Power alliance at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, so-called "Browderism" was attacked by the rest of the international Communist movement. They particularly criticized the restructuring of the American party in 1944. In April 1945 the French Communist Party's theoretical magazine, "Les Cahiers du communisme", published an article by French party leader Jacques Duclos that declared that Browder's beliefs about a harmonious post-war world were "erroneous conclusions in no wise flowing from a Marxist analysis of the situation." Duclos held that Browder's "liquidation of the independent political party of the working class" constituted a "notorious revision of Marxism".


title: Earl Browder

text: American Communists realized that the Duclos letter was initiated by Moscow, which had been largely out of contact since it had liquidated the Communist International in 1943 as its own gesture to wartime harmony. Duclos otherwise had no reason to criticize the activity of a fraternal party, American Communists maintained. Moreover, Duclos quoted directly from the Foster-Darcy letter — a document known to only a handful of top American party leaders, with a copy dispatched to Moscow.


title: Earl Browder

text: An interview with Gil Green by Anders Stephanson was published in the 1993 anthology "New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism", edited by Michael F. Brown, Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, and George Snedeker. This exchange was included: <poem> </poem> After the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Kyrill Anderson discovered a letter in the Soviet Archives showing that the "Duclos Letter" had actually been written in Russian and published in Moscow in early 1945, while the war with Germany was still in progress. The timing of the original showed that the USSR had already decided post-war relations with the U.S. would not be friendly. The Russian-language original was translated into French and given to Duclos after the Japanese surrender, with instructions for him to publish it under his own name.


title: Earl Browder

text: The American Communists quickly reversed Browder's political line, stripping him of executive power in June 1945 and reconstituting itself as the Communist Party of the United States of America at a snap convention held in July. Predictably, Bill Foster, elevated in stature by being quoted in the "Duclos letter", led the opposition to Browder and "Browderism". He was named to replace "the man from Kansas" as party Chairman in 1945. Eugene Dennis, an individual held in high esteem by Moscow, was named Browder's successor to the more important position of General Secretary.


title: Earl Browder

text: In January 1946 Browder began publishing a mimeographed weekly newsletter of economic analysis called "Distributors Guide: Economic Analysis: A Service for Policy Makers". The subscription price was hefty—$100 per year; he wanted to gain a readership among business executives and political decision-makers. Browder produced a total of 16 issues, each based on his vision of Soviet-American cooperation, as opposed to the unfolding Cold War between the powers. The Communist Party regarded his independent publication as further evidence of a serious breach of party discipline. On February 5, 1946, Earl Browder was expelled from the CPUSA.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder applied for a visa to travel to Moscow to appeal his expulsion, but he was forced to wait two months for its approval. In the meantime he continued to issue his "Distributors Guide", which became explicitly more pro-Stalin and pro-Soviet in later issues. With his visa finally approved, Browder ended publication of his newsletter at the end of April 1946. The former American party leader departed for the Soviet Union to determine whether his expulsion could be overturned. Browder arrived in Moscow on May 3 and met with old friends, including Solomon Lozovsky, former head of the Profintern, as well as Stalin's right-hand man, Viacheslav Molotov.


title: Earl Browder

text: Molotov was unable to intercede on Browder's behalf to reintegrate him into an American Communist Party. By then its leaders regarded him as an undisciplined opportunist and unreliable leader. However, his past service was rewarded with an appointment as "American Representative of the State Publishing House" for publication of Soviet books in the United States. Upon his return, Browder registered with the United States Department of Justice as a foreign agent, as required by law. He acted as a sort of literary agent for the Soviet government, receiving English translations of various books and articles and attempting to gain placement for them with American publishers. While generally unsuccessful at gaining such publication, Browder met monthly with the second secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. He provided him with written memoranda on the situation in the United States in general and the Communist Party of the United States of America, in particular — effectively providing analysis on behalf of Soviet intelligence.


title: Earl Browder

text: In April 1950, Browder was called to testify before a Senate Committee investigating Communist activity. Questioned by Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis), Browder openly criticized the American Communist Party but refused to answer questions that would incriminate former comrades. He also claimed under oath that he had never been involved in espionage activities. Browder was charged with contempt of Congress, but Judge F. Dickinson Letts ordered his acquittal because he felt the committee had not acted legally. Browder was never prosecuted for his perjury before the committee nor for his spying on behalf of the Soviet Union.


title: Earl Browder

text: In March 1950, Browder shared a platform with Max Shachtman, the dissident Trotskyist, in which the pair debated Socialism. Browder defended the Soviet Union while Shachtman acted as a prosecutor. Reportedly at one point in the debate, Shachtman listed a series of leaders of various Communist parties and noted that each had died at the hands of Stalin. At the end of this speech, he noted that Browder, too, had been a leader of a Communist Party and, pointing at him, said: "There-there but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!"


title: Earl Browder

text: Following the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, a period in which some within the American Communist Party briefly sought to exert its independence from Moscow, another effort was made to reintegrate Browder into the CPUSA. This effort at liberalization was soon defeated, however.


title: Earl Browder

text: Although remaining committed to the cause of socialism, Browder never belonged to the Communist Party again.


title: Earl Browder

text: On June 2, 1957, Browder appeared on the television program "The Mike Wallace Interview", where he was grilled for 30 minutes about his past in the Communist Party. Host Mike Wallace quoted Browder as having recently said, "Getting thrown out of the Communist Party was the best thing that ever happened to me."


title: Earl Browder

text: When asked to elaborate, Browder replied:That's right. I meant that the Communist Party and the whole communist movement was changing its character, and in 1945, when I was kicked out, the parting of the ways had come, and if I hadn't been kicked out I would have had the difficult task of disengaging myself from a movement that I could no longer agree with and no longer help. "I was involved in no conspiracies", Browder adamantly declared to Wallace and his television audience.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder repeatedly connected Jacob Golos, a longtime Communist Party activist and Soviet agent, with CPUSA members who had offered to share sensitive information that they thought the party should know. While initially most of these would-be informants were employees of private industry, party members who were employees of the federal government were later also brought into Golos' circle of contacts. Browder was also periodically given access to important information by Golos before its transmission to his superiors in Moscow.


title: Earl Browder

text: Browder's public protestations against accusations of spying were contradicted by the 1995 release of the so-called Venona documents. This secretly decoded material confirmed that Browder was engaged in recruiting potential espionage agents for Soviet intelligence during the 1940s.


title: Earl Browder

text: In 1938 Rudy Baker (Venona code name: SON) had been appointed to head the CPUSA underground apparatus to replace J. Peters, after the defection of Whittaker Chambers, allegedly at the request of Browder (Venona code name: FATHER). According to self-confessed NKVD recruiter Louis Budenz, he and Browder participated in discussions with Soviet intelligence officials to plan the assassination of Leon Trotsky.


title: Earl Browder

text: While in federal custody in the US, Browder never revealed his status as an agent recruiter. He was never prosecuted for espionage. Venona decrypt #588 April 29, 1944, from the KGB New York office states, "for more than a year Zubilin (station chief) and I tried to get in touch with Victor Perlo and Charles Flato. For some reason Browder did not come to the meeting and just decided to put Bentley in touch with the whole group. All occupy responsible positions in Washington, D.C." Soviet intelligence thought highly of Browder's recruitment work: in a 1946 OGPU memorandum, Browder was personally credited with hiring eighteen intelligence agents for the Soviet Union.


title: Earl Browder

text: Members of Browder's family were also involved in work for Soviet intelligence. According to a 1938 letter from Browder to Georgi Dimitrov, then General Secretary of the Comintern, Browder's younger sister Marguerite was an agent working in various European countries for the NKVD. (The letter was found in the Comintern archives after the fall of the Soviet Union.) Browder expressed concern over the effect on the American public if his sister's secret work for Soviet intelligence were to be exposed: "In view of my increasing involvement in national political affairs and growing connections in Washington political circles ... it might become dangerous to this political work if hostile circles in America should obtain knowledge of my sister's work." He requested she be released from her European duties and returned to America to serve "in other fields of activity". Dimitrov forwarded Browder's request to Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD, requesting Marguerite Browder's transfer. Browder's half-niece, Helen Lowry ("aka" Elza Akhmerova, also Elsa Akhmerova), worked with Iskhak Akhmerov, a Soviet NKVD espionage controller, from 1936–1939 under the code name "ADA" (later changed to "ELZA")). In 1939, Helen Lowry married Akhmerov. Lowry was named by Soviet intelligence agent Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts. Lowry, Akhmerov and their actions on behalf of Soviet intelligence are referred to in several Venona project decryptions as well as Soviet KGB archives.


title: Earl Browder

text: His three sons, Felix, William, and Andrew, all distinguished research mathematicians, have been leaders in the American mathematical community.


title: Earl Browder

text: Grandchild Bill Browder (son of Felix) was co-founder and head of the investment group Hermitage Capital Management, which operated for more than 10 years in Moscow during a wave of privatization after the fall of the Soviet Union. Browder became a British citizen in 1998. Great-grandchild Joshua Browder is a British-American entrepreneur, consumer rights activist, and public figure.


title: Google Brain

text: Google Brain is a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, Google Brain combines open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources. The team has created tools such as TensorFlow, which allow for neural networks to be used by the public, with multiple internal AI research projects. The team aims to create research opportunities in machine learning and natural language processing.


title: Google Brain

text: The Google Brain project began in 2011 as a part-time research collaboration between Google fellow Jeff Dean, Google Researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng. Ng had been interested in using deep learning techniques to crack the problem of artificial intelligence since 2006, and in 2011 began collaborating with Dean and Corrado to build a large-scale deep learning software system, DistBelief, on top of Google's cloud computing infrastructure. Google Brain started as a Google X project and became so successful that it was graduated back to Google: Astro Teller has said that Google Brain paid for the entire cost of Google X.


title: Google Brain

text: In June 2012, the "New York Times" reported that a cluster of 16,000 processors in 1,000 computers dedicated to mimicking some aspects of human brain activity had successfully trained itself to recognize a cat based on 10 million digital images taken from YouTube videos. The story was also covered by National Public Radio.


title: Google Brain

text: In March 2013, Google hired Geoffrey Hinton, a leading researcher in the deep learning field, and acquired the company DNNResearch Inc. headed by Hinton. Hinton said that he would be dividing his future time between his university research and his work at Google.


title: Google Brain

text: Google Brain was initially established by Google Fellow Jeff Dean and visiting Stanford professor Andrew Ng. In 2014, the team included Jeff Dean, Quoc Le, Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, Samy Bengio, and Vincent Vanhoucke. In 2017, team members included Anelia Angelova, Samy Bengio, Greg Corrado, George Dahl, Michael Isard, Anjuli Kannan, Hugo Larochelle, Chris Olah, Salih Edneer, Benoit Steiner, Vincent Vanhoucke, Vijay Vasudevan, and Fernanda Viegas. Chris Lattner, who created Apple's programming language Swift and then ran Tesla's autonomy team for six months, joined Google Brain's team in August 2017. Lattner left the team in January 2020 and joined SiFive.


title: Google Brain

text: As of 2021, Google Brain was led by Jeff Dean, Geoffrey Hinton, and Zoubin Ghahramani. Other members include Katherine Heller, Pi-Chuan Chang, Ian Simon, Jean-Philippe Vert, Nevena Lazic, Anelia Angelova, Lukasz Kaiser, Carrie Jun Cai, Eric Breck, Ruoming Pang, Carlos Riquelme, Hugo Larochelle, and David Ha. Samy Bengio left the team in April 2021, and Zoubin Ghahramani took on his responsibilities.


title: Google Brain

text: Google Research includes Google Brain and is based in Mountain View, California. It also has satellite groups in Accra, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Beijing, Berlin, Cambridge (Massachusetts), Israel, Los Angeles, London, Montreal, Munich, New York City, Paris, Pittsburgh, Princeton, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, Toronto, and Zurich.


title: Google Brain

text: In October 2016, Google Brain designed an experiment to determine that neural networks are capable of learning secure symmetric encryption. In this experiment, three neural networks were created: Alice, Bob and Eve. Adhering to the idea of a generative adversarial network (GAN), the goal of the experiment was for Alice to send an encrypted message to Bob that Bob could decrypt, but the adversary, Eve, could not. Alice and Bob maintained an advantage over Eve, in that they shared a key used for encryption and decryption. In doing so, Google Brain demonstrated the capability of neural networks to learn secure encryption.


title: Google Brain

text: In February 2017, Google Brain determined a probabilistic method for converting pictures with 8x8 resolution to a resolution of 32x32. The method built upon an already existing probabilistic model called pixelCNN to generate pixel translations.


title: Google Brain

text: The proposed software utilizes two neural networks to make approximations for the pixel makeup of translated images. The first network, known as the “conditioning network,” downsizes high-resolution images to 8x8 and attempts to create mappings from the original 8x8 image to these higher-resolution ones. The other network, known as the “prior network,” uses the mappings from the previous network to add more detail to the original image. The resulting translated image is not the same image in higher resolution, but rather a 32x32 resolution estimation based on other existing high-resolution images. Google Brain's results indicate the possibility for neural networks to enhance images.


title: Google Brain

text: The Google Brain team contributed to the Google Translate project by employing a new deep learning system that combines artificial neural networks with vast databases of multilingual texts. In September 2016, Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) was launched, an end-to-end learning framework, able to learn from a large number of examples. Previously, Google Translate's Phrase-Based Machine Translation (PBMT) approach would statistically analyze word by word and try to match corresponding words in other languages without considering the surrounding phrases in the sentence. But rather than choosing a replacement for each individual word in the desired language, GNMT evaluates word segments in the context of the rest of the sentence to choose more accurate replacements. Compared to older PBMT models, the GNMT model scored a 24% improvement in similarity to human translation, with a 60% reduction in errors. The GNMT has also shown significant improvement for notoriously difficult translations, like Chinese to English.


title: Google Brain

text: While the introduction of the GNMT has increased the quality of Google Translate's translations for the pilot languages, it was very difficult to create such improvements for all of its 103 languages. Addressing this problem, the Google Brain Team was able to develop a Multilingual GNMT system, which extended the previous one by enabling translations between multiple languages. Furthermore, it allows for Zero-Shot Translations, which are translations between two languages that the system has never explicitly seen before. Google announced that Google Translate can now also translate without transcribing, using neural networks. This means that it is possible to translate speech in one language directly into text in another language, without first transcribing it to text. According to the Researchers at Google Brain, this intermediate step can be avoided using neural networks. In order for the system to learn this, they exposed it to many hours of Spanish audio together with the corresponding English text. The different layers of neural networks, replicating the human brain, were able to link the corresponding parts and subsequently manipulate the audio waveform until it was transformed to English text. Another drawback of the GNMT model is that it causes the time of translation to increase exponentially with the number of words in the sentence. This caused the Google Brain Team to add 2000 more processors to ensure the new translation process would still be fast and reliable.


title: Google Brain

text: Aiming to improve traditional robotics control algorithms where new skills of a robot need to be hand-programmed, robotics researchers at Google Brain are developing machine learning techniques to allow robots to learn new skills on their own. They also attempt to develop ways for information sharing between robots so that robots can learn from each other during their learning process, also known as cloud robotics. As a result, Google has launched the Google Cloud Robotics Platform for developers in 2019, an effort to combine robotics, AI, and the cloud to enable efficient robotic automation through cloud-connected collaborative robots.


title: Google Brain

text: Robotics research at Google Brain has focused mostly on improving and applying deep learning algorithms to enable robots to complete tasks by learning from experience, simulation, human demonstrations, and/or visual representations. For example, Google Brain researchers showed that robots can learn to pick and throw rigid objects into selected boxes by experimenting in an environment without being pre-programmed to do so. In another research, researchers trained robots to learn behaviors such as pouring liquid from a cup; robots learned from videos of human demonstrations recorded from multiple viewpoints.


title: Google Brain

text: Google Brain researchers have collaborated with other companies and academic institutions on robotics research. In 2016, the Google Brain Team collaborated with researchers at X in a research on learning hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping. Their method allowed real-time robot control for grasping novel objects with self-correction. In 2020, researchers from Google Brain, Intel AI Lab, and UC Berkeley created an AI model for robots to learn surgery-related tasks such as suturing from training with surgery videos.


title: Google Brain

text: In 2020, Google Brain Team and University of Lille presented a model for automatic speaker recognition which they called Interactive Speaker Recognition. The ISR module recognizes a speaker from a given list of speakers only by requesting a few user specific words. The model can be altered to choose speech segments in the context of Text-To-Speech Training. It can also prevent malicious voice generators from accessing the data.


title: Google Brain

text: TensorFlow is an open source software library powered by Google Brain that allows anyone to utilize machine learning by providing the tools to train one's own neural network. The tool has been used by farmers to reduce the amount of manual labor required to sort their yield, by training it with a data set of human-sorted images.


title: Google Brain

text: Magenta is a project that uses Google Brain to create new information in the form of art and music rather than classify and sort existing data. TensorFlow was updated with a suite of tools for users to guide the neural network to create images and music. However, the team from Valdosta State University found that the AI struggles to perfectly replicate human intention in artistry, similar to the issues faced in translation.


title: Google Brain

text: The image sorting capabilities of Google Brain have been used to help detect certain medical conditions by seeking out patterns that human doctors may not notice to provide an earlier diagnosis. During screening for breast cancer, this method was found to have one quarter the false positive rate of human pathologists, who require more time to look over each photo and cannot spend their entire focus on this one task. Due to the neural network's very specific training for a single task, it cannot identify other afflictions present in a photo that a human could easily spot.


title: Google Brain

text: Google Brain announced in 2022 that it created two different types of text-to-image models called Imagen and Parti that compete with OpenAI's DALL-E.


title: Google Brain

text: The Google Brain projects’ technology is currently used in various other Google products such as the Android Operating System’s speech recognition system, photo search for Google Photos, smart reply in Gmail, and video recommendations in YouTube.


title: Google Brain

text: Google Brain has received coverage in "Wired Magazine", National Public Radio, and Big Think. These articles have contained interviews with key team members Ray Kurzweil and Andrew Ng, and focus on explanations of the project’s goals and applications.


title: Google Brain

text: In December 2020, AI ethicist Timnit Gebru left Google. While the exact nature of her quitting or being fired is disputed, the cause of the departure was her refusal to retract a paper entitled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models be Too Big?” This paper explored potential risks of the growth of AI such as Google Brain, including environmental impact, biases in training data, and the ability to deceive the public. The request to retract the paper was made by Megan Kacholia, vice president of Google Brain. As of April 2021, nearly 7000 current or former Google employees and industry supporters have signed an open letter accusing Google of “research censorship” and condemning Gebru's treatment at the company.


title: Google Brain

text: In February 2021, Google fired one of the leaders of the company's AI ethics team, Margaret Mitchell. The company's statement alleged that Mitchell had broken company policy by using automated tools to find support for Gebru. In the same month, engineers outside the ethics team began to quit, citing the “wrongful” termination of Gebru as the reason why. In April 2021, Google Brain co-founder Samy Bengio announced his resignation from the company. Despite being Gebru's manager, Bengio was not notified before her termination, and he posted online in support of both her and Mitchell. While Bengio's announcement focused on personal growth as his reason for leaving, anonymous sources indicated to Reuters that the turmoil within the AI ethics team played a role in his considerations.


title: Google Brain

text: In March 2022, Google fired AI researcher, Satrajit Chatterjee, after he questioned the findings of a paper published in Nature, by Google's AI team members, Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, about their findings on the ability of computers to design computer chip components.


title: Centre-Val de Loire

text: Centre-Val de Loire (, , , ) or Centre Region (, ), as it was known until 2015, is one of the eighteen administrative regions of France. It straddles the middle Loire Valley in the interior of the country, with a population of 2,572,853 as of 2018. Its prefecture is Orléans, and its largest city is Tours.


title: Centre-Val de Loire

text: Like many contemporary regions of France, the region of Centre-Val de Loire was created from parts of historical provinces: , and . First, the name was chosen by the government purely on the basis of geography, in reference to its location in northwest-central France (the central part of the original French language area).


title: Centre-Val de Loire

text: However, Centre is not situated in the geographical centre of France (except the Cher department); the name was criticised as being too dull and nondescript. Proposed names for the region included after the Loire Valley (the main feature of the region) or (Heart of Loire). On 17 January 2015, as part of the reorganisation of French regions, the region's official name was changed to . is associated with positive images of the Loire Valley, such as the , the gentle and refined lifestyle, wine, as well as the mild and temperate climate, all of which attract many tourists to the region. A new logo was also created.


title: Centre-Val de Loire

text: Bordering six other regions, Centre-Val-de-Loire borders the most of all eighteen regions in France. The bordering regions are Normandy on the northwest, Île-de-France on the northeast, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté on the east, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes on the southeast, Nouvelle-Aquitaine on the southwest and Pays de la Loire on the west.


title: Centre-Val de Loire

text: Centre-Val de Loire comprises six departments: Cher, Eure-et-Loir, Indre, Indre-et-Loire, Loir-et-Cher and Loiret.


title: Centre-Val de Loire

text: The gross domestic product (GDP) of the region was 72.4 billion euros in 2018, accounting for 3.1% of French economic output. GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power was 25,200 euros or 84% of the EU27 average in the same year. The GDP per employee was 99% of the EU average.


title: Centre-Val de Loire

text: An economic development agency, called Centréco, was created in 1994 by the Regional Council of Centre to promote the inflow of investments and the establishment setting-up of new businesses French and foreign companies in the Centre region. This ensures a mission of economic promotion, international support to regional companies and enhancement promotion of regional agrofood products via a regional signature, du Centre.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Jacoby McCabe Ellsbury ( ; born September 11, 1983) is an American former professional baseball center fielder. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Boston Red Sox from 2007 through 2013 and then played for the New York Yankees from 2014 to 2017. An enrolled member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, Ellsbury is the first Native American of Navajo descent to play Major League Baseball.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury was drafted by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in the 23rd round of the 2002 MLB draft, but did not sign. After having played college baseball for three years at Oregon State University, he was selected by the Red Sox as the 23rd overall pick in the 2005 draft. He made his major league debut for the Red Sox in 2007. In 2011, Ellsbury was named American League Comeback Player of the Year, was named to the American League All-Star team, won a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger Award, became the first Red Sox player in history to be a member of the 30–30 club, and was the runner-up to Justin Verlander for the American League Most Valuable Player Award. He led the American League in stolen bases three times (in 2008, 2009, and 2013) and won World Series championships as a member of the Red Sox in 2007 and 2013.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: After the 2013 season, Ellsbury signed a seven-year, $153 million contract with the Yankees. He played for the Yankees from 2014 to 2017, but was unable to play in 2018 or 2019 due to injury. Ellsbury was released by the Yankees on November 20, 2019.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury was born on September 11, 1983 to Jim and Margie Ellsbury. He is the eldest of four children. The Ellsburys lived on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation until they moved to Madras, Oregon when Jacoby was in kindergarten. He was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury is an enrolled member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes. Margie Ellsbury is a full-blooded Navajo and a descendant of 19th-century tribal leader Ganado Mucho. Her father, Franklin McCabe, was a silversmith, and her mother was a traditional rug weaver. Jim Ellsbury is of English and German descent.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: In Little League, Ellsbury often played with teammates up to three years older than him. At Madras High School, he lettered in five sports. In his senior year in baseball, he hit .537 with 65 stolen bases. In basketball, he averaged 23.6 points and 4.4 blocks per game. He finished his football career with nine interceptions and six kickoff returns for touchdowns. He went to Oregon State University where he was a Baseball America first-team All-American and Pac-10 Conference Co-Player of the year, with Trevor Crowe. In 2002, he played collegiate summer baseball with the Bend Elks of the West Coast League. In 2004, he played collegiate summer baseball with the Falmouth Commodores of the Cape Cod Baseball League. He was drafted in the first round of the 2005 MLB draft by the Boston Red Sox as a compensation pick from the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim for the signing of Orlando Cabrera.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury began his professional career on July 14, 2005 with the Lowell Spinners in the Class A-Short Season New York–Penn League. On September 7, he tied a Lowell team record with three stolen bases in a single game. For the 2005 season, he batted .317 with 23 stolen bases in 35 games.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury began the 2006 season ranked by "Baseball America" as the sixth-best prospect in the Red Sox' organization. He started the season with the Wilmington Blue Rocks of the Class A-Advanced Carolina League. On July 3, he tied a Wilmington franchise record by stealing four bases in a game. After batting .299 with 25 steals in 61 games and being named to the 2006 Carolina League All-Star team, Ellsbury was promoted to the Portland Sea Dogs of the Class AA Eastern League on July 12, 2006. Soon after his promotion to Portland, Ellsbury was named Eastern League Player of the Week for August 6–13. Ellsbury finished the season in Portland with .308 batting average and 16 steals in 50 games. The Red Sox selected him as their Minor League Defensive Player of the Year and Baserunner of the Year. The team assigned him to the Peoria Javelinas of the Arizona Fall League (AFL), an off-season developmental league for top prospects. In the AFL, Ellsbury hit .276 in 25 games. His defensive skills earned him a spot in the AFL Rising Stars All-Star game.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury participated in the Red Sox' 2007 spring training camp in Fort Myers, Florida, as a non-roster invitee and was assigned to the minor league camp on March 9. He was rated the best prospect in the Red Sox' organization and the 33rd-best prospect in baseball for 2007 by "Baseball America", while "Sports Illustrated" ranked Ellsbury as the 43rd-best prospect in baseball. Ellsbury began the 2007 season as the starting center fielder for the Sea Dogs and was promoted to the Pawtucket Red Sox of the Class AAA International League on May 4 after batting .452 in 17 games at Portland and being named the Eastern League Player of the Month for April. He was chosen to play in the 2007 All-Star Futures Game as part of the MLB All-Star festivities at AT&T Park in San Francisco. On August 24, Ellsbury set a new consecutive-game hitting streak record for Pawtucket with 25, besting the consecutive-game mark of 19 previously shared by Dave Stapleton and Dave Berg.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury finished the season with 33 stolen bases for Pawtucket, which tied him for second in the International League. For the second consecutive season, the Red Sox selected him as their minor league Defensive Player of the Year and Baserunner of the Year.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: The 2007 Baseball America Prospect Handbook compared Ellsbury to former Red Sox center fielder Johnny Damon, lauding his speed, hitting and fielding while noting his below-average throwing arm. After Coco Crisp was injured, the Red Sox purchased Ellsbury's contract and he received a call-up on June 30, in which he made his MLB debut in center field and hit ninth against the Texas Rangers at Fenway Park wearing number 46. Ellsbury is the first American Indian of Navajo descent to reach the major leagues. He recorded his first major league hit, an infield single off Robinson Tejeda, in the bottom of the third inning of that game. Ellsbury's first career stolen base came off pitcher Brandon McCarthy and catcher Gerald Laird of the Rangers on July 2. He also scored from second base in that game on a wild pitch. Johnny Pesky described the play as "the greatest single play I've ever seen in all my years in baseball". Ellsbury was optioned back to Pawtucket on July 5 after playing six games for the Red Sox.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: On August 17, the Red Sox recalled Ellsbury from Pawtucket for the second game of a doubleheader, in which he led off and played center field. He was optioned back to Pawtucket after the game. When major league rosters expanded to 40 players on September 1, he was a September call-up by the Red Sox. On September 2, he hit his first major league home run, a solo shot which landed in the Red Sox bullpen, in the bottom of the fourth inning run off Daniel Cabrera of the Baltimore Orioles. A September 2007 article in "The New York Times" described him as a "cult hero" who brings "speed, improved defense, and unbridled enthusiasm." Ellsbury was named MLB's American League Rookie of the Month for September 2007. With fewer than 130 major league at-bats, he still qualified as a rookie for the 2008 season.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: During the 2007 postseason, with Crisp struggling, Ellsbury started in center field for Game 6 of the 2007 American League Championship Series (ALCS) against the Cleveland Indians, and started the remainder of the postseason for the Red Sox. In 11 postseason games, he hit .360 in 25 at-bats with two stolen bases. With his two doubles off Josh Fogg in the top of the third inning of Game 3 of the 2007 World Series on October 27, Ellsbury became the first rookie to hit two doubles in the same inning of a World Series game. After hitting another double, off Brian Fuentes in the eighth inning, he became the fourth rookie ever to hit three doubles in a World Series game. Ellsbury's four hits, including a single in the first inning, made him only the third rookie to ever accomplish the feat in the World Series, after Freddie Lindstrom in the 1924 World Series and Joe Garagiola in the 1946 World Series. He batted .438 with four doubles and a stolen base for the World Series. The Red Sox eventually won the World Series in a four-game sweep over the Rockies, giving Ellsbury his first career championship title.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Heading into the 2008 season, Ellsbury was ranked the 13th-best prospect in baseball by "Baseball America", the 16th-best prospect by "Baseball Prospectus", and the 19th-best prospect by "ESPN Scouts Inc". Ellsbury hit .224, with .291 on-base percentage (OBP), and a .347 slugging percentage in 16 spring training games and started in center field on Opening Day of the 2008 Major League Baseball season against the Oakland Athletics on March 25 at the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, Japan. Ellsbury had his first career multi-home run game against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim on April 22. Ellsbury stole 25 consecutive bases without being caught, until he was caught stealing in a game on May 18. He was two stolen bases shy of the major league record held by Tim Raines in 1979. With three stolen bases against the Baltimore Orioles on May 30, he became the first Red Sox player to steal more than two bases in a game since Jerry Remy stole four in 1980. Ellsbury stole his 32nd base of the season on June 15, breaking the Red Sox' rookie record, set 100 years earlier by Amby McConnell. He finished the season with 50 steals to lead the American League, putting him third on the list of Red Sox all-time stolen base leaders for a single season, behind Tommy Harper (54) in 1973 and Tris Speaker (52) in 1912. Ellsbury finished third in the AL Rookie of the Year voting, behind Evan Longoria of Tampa Bay and Alexei Ramírez of the Chicago White Sox.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury hit .333, with a .400 OBP and a .567 slugging percentage, and three stolen bases in the 2008 American League Division Series (ALDS), in which the Red Sox defeated the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, 3–1, in the best-of-five series. In the second inning of Game 3 of the ALDS, he hit the first three-run single in postseason history when Howie Kendrick and Torii Hunter let a pop-up fall to the ground between them. After going 0–for-14 in the first three games of the 2008 ALCS against the Tampa Bay Rays, Ellsbury was benched in favor of Crisp with only a pinch hitting at-bat in game 4. He did not play in the final three games of the series, and the Sox eventually lost the series 4–3.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: In 2008, Ellsbury was one of three active non-Hispanic Native American players in Major League Baseball, along with Kyle Lohse and Joba Chamberlain.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury played his 179th straight regular-season game without an error on April 12, 2009, breaking the franchise record for outfielders held by Mike Greenwell. On April 15, with six errorless chances, Ellsbury passed Coco Crisp for most errorless total chances by a center fielder, setting a new Red Sox franchise record of 433. Ellsbury tied a major league record for outfielders with 12 putouts in a nine-inning game on May 20, tying Earl Clark of the Boston Braves, who accomplished the feat in 1929, and Lyman Bostock of the Minnesota Twins, who did it in 1977. Ellsbury's streak of errorless games ended at 232, with 554 errorless chances, when he committed an error on June 17.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury tied Tommy Harper's franchise single season record for stolen bases (54) on August 21. Ellsbury then broke the record with his 55th steal on August 25, against the Chicago White Sox. He finished the season with 70 stolen bases, the most in the American League, and he also led the league in triples with 10. He won Defensive Player of the Year in MLB.com's annual This Year in Baseball Awards 2009.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: During the offseason, Ellsbury changed his uniform number from 46 to 2, which had belonged to the Red Sox' former bench coach, Brad Mills, who left the organization to become the manager of the Houston Astros. With the Red Sox signing free agent center fielder Mike Cameron and not re-signing left fielder Jason Bay, Ellsbury became the Red Sox' starting left fielder. The move was made as the result of Cameron's experience in center and inexperience in left. Manager Terry Francona expressed excitement over the prospect of playing a true center fielder in left field, creating a larger fielding range and more aggressive style.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: On April 11, Ellsbury collided with Red Sox third baseman Adrián Beltré in a game against the Kansas City Royals, and the collision resulted in hairline fractures to four of his left ribs. He was put on the 15-day disabled list on April 20, and he returned to the Red Sox on May 22. He returned to the 15-day DL on May 28 after playing in only three games due to residual soreness in his ribs from the collision with Beltré. He met with a thoracic specialist who advised him that his ribs should be further along in the healing process before he would be able to play. He started a rehab assignment with Lowell on July 26, and rejoined the Red Sox on August 4. Ellsbury returned to the 15-day disabled list on August 14 after re-injuring his ribs in a game against the Texas Rangers. He did not play again in 2010.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: During games on August 2 and 3, Ellsbury had walk-off hits in the back-to-back games against the Cleveland Indians; a single off Vinnie Pestano and a home run off Joe Smith. On August 6, he hit a three-run home run and drove in a career-high six runs in Boston's 10–4 win over the New York Yankees. On September 25, he hit two home runs during the first game of a doubleheader against the Yankees to become the first member of the Boston Red Sox to join the 30–30 club.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury finished the season with career highs in home runs (32), hits (212), RBIs (105), runs (119), and batting average (.321). He also led the American League in power-speed number (35.2), total bases (364), and extra-base hits (83). He won his first Gold Glove Award, and finished as one of only two qualifying players to complete the season with a 1.000 fielding percentage. Jacoby was awarded a Silver Slugger Award for his hitting, joining teammate Adrián González as the only American League players to win both the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger Awards in 2011. Ellsbury was voted the American League Comeback Player of the Year and finished second in the 2011 American League Most Valuable Player Award balloting with 242 points, losing to Justin Verlander (280).


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: On April 13, 2012, while attempting to slide under Tampa Bay Rays shortstop Reid Brignac in an attempt to break up a double play, Ellsbury collided with the shortstop. His right shoulder was injured when Brignac fell on top of his exposed shoulder. He was placed on the disabled list with a subluxation of the shoulder on April 14. He was activated from the DL and returned to the Red Sox lineup on July 13, and finished the season with a .271 batting average, four home runs, 26 RBI, and 14 stolen bases in only 74 games played.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: In the August 28 game against the Orioles, Ellsbury suffered a compression fracture by fouling a ball off his right foot. He was taken to the Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colo., for treatment from Dr. Thomas Clanton, who cleared him to rejoin the Red Sox lineup on September 25, well ahead of the preliminary prognosis.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury turned in a strong performance in the 2013 postseason, batting .500 in the 2013 ALDS and .318 in the 2013 ALCS. In the 2013 World Series, Ellsbury started the eventual series-winning rally in Game 6 with a single and earned his second World Series ring as a member of the Red Sox. Ellsbury's contract expired on October 31, 2013, and he became a free agent for the first time in his career.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: On December 3, 2013, Ellsbury and the New York Yankees agreed in principle to a seven-year, $153 million deal, including an option for an eighth year that could increase the value of the contract to $169 million. The contract became official on December 7.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: On April 22, 2014, Ellsbury played his first game at Fenway Park since leaving the Red Sox to join the Yankees. He received an ovation of boos from Red Sox fans. In his first season with the Yankees, Ellsbury hit .271 with 16 home runs and 39 stolen bases. He remained healthy for most of the season, playing in 149 games, the third-most games he has ever played in one season. Ellsbury's home run count was the second-highest of his career next to his 2011 season. He also led the American League in power-speed number (22.7).


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury had a hot start to 2015, batting .363 up to May 7. On May 20, 2015, Ellsbury was placed on the 15-day disabled list due to a right knee sprain. Prior to the injury, he compiled a .324 batting average in 148 at-bats. After missing nearly two months, Ellsbury returned on July 8, 2015 and had an extremely rough end to the season. He batted .224 in 74 games after he returned from the disabled list and did not start in the 2015 American League Wild Card Game, losing his job in favor of Chris Young. He ended the underwhelming season hitting .257/.318/.345 with seven home runs and 21 stolen bases in 111 games.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: On April 22, 2016, Ellsbury executed a straight steal of home against Matt Moore of the Tampa Bay Rays during a full count, tying the game at 3. It marked the first time a Yankee successfully stole home since Chris Young did so in 2014 as part of a double steal, and the first straight steal of home since Derek Jeter in 2001. It was Ellsbury's second career steal of home; the first occurred in 2009 against Andy Pettitte and the Yankees. On June 8, Ellsbury hit the highest home run of the MLB season against the Los Angeles Angels, reaching a recorded 151 feet in the air. On July 20, Ellsbury reached base via catcher's interference for the ninth time in the season, setting a new single-season MLB record. The record had previously belonged to Roberto Kelly, who reached base eight times on catcher's interference in 1992. Ellsbury would end the season with 12 catcher's interferences. Ellsbury played in 148 games in 2016. While he remained fully healthy, the 2016 season was another underwhelming one for Ellsbury offensively, as he hit .263/.330/.374 with nine home runs and 20 stolen bases, the latter being his lowest in a healthy season.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: On April 28, 2017, Ellsbury hit his first career grand slam against the Baltimore Orioles in a 14-11 Yankees comeback win. It was also the 100th home run of his career. On May 24, Ellsbury made a superb catch at the center field wall, but also banged his head at the wall, causing him to suffer a concussion. He was placed on the 7-day disabled list the next day. On June 10, Joe Girardi stated that Ellsbury had lost his job as the Yankees' starting center fielder to Aaron Hicks, who would continue to start even when Ellsbury is healthy. Ellsbury was activated from the disabled list on June 26 after missing 29 games, the same day that Hicks was placed on the 10-day disabled list with an oblique injury. With the rise of rookie outfielder Clint Frazier, Ellsbury lost his job again and was relegated to the bench. On his 34th birthday on September 11, Ellsbury reached via catcher's interference for the 30th time in his career, which broke Pete Rose's career record of 29. In 2017, he batted .264/.348/.402 with seven home runs and 22 stolen bases.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: On March 19, 2018, the Yankees announced that Ellsbury would not be ready for Opening Day due to a right oblique strain. On April 3, it was revealed that Ellsbury had been diagnosed with a hip ailment. On August 6, he had surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left hip and was declared to be out for the rest of the 2018 season.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury began the 2019 year on the 10-day injured list due to a foot injury. On April 20, he was transferred to the 60-day injured list. It was revealed that he was dealing with plantar fasciitis and a shoulder injury. On September 8, the Yankees ruled Ellsbury out for the season.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury was released by the Yankees on November 20, 2019. The team owed Ellsbury's $21 million 2020 salary, together with a $5 million buyout for the 2021 season. The Yankees planned not to pay Ellsbury the money as they claimed that he received unauthorized medical care. The players association was not pleased about this hearing and filed a grievance. Arbiters sided with Ellsbury and the Yankees paid the remaining owed money on his contract. Following Ellsbury's release, sportswriters described his contract as among the worst in Yankees history.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but he and his three brothers stopped attending services when Jacoby was a teenager; as reported in "The Boston Globe" in 2008, Ellsbury said, "I try not to get [God] too involved in baseball. What I wish for is good health."


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: Ellsbury was one of the victims of the $8 billion fraud perpetrated by wealth manager Allen Stanford; although he had some assets frozen, it did not cause him any significant hardship akin to those suffered by Johnny Damon and Xavier Nady.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: In 2010, Ellsbury released a Zinfandel wine called ZinfandEllsbury through Charity Wines, with 100% of his proceeds donated among three charities: The Navajo Relief Fund, Project Bread: The Walk for Hunger, and Ellsbury Read Project. The wine launched alongside a charity wine by former Boston Red Sox teammate Josh Beckett, called Chardon-K.


title: Jacoby Ellsbury

text: In June 2014, Ellsbury donated $1 million to his alma mater Oregon State University as part of a $3 million renovation project at Goss Stadium. The Beavers' new home locker room was named the Jacoby Ellsbury Locker Room in his honor.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: Ruth Wendy Holmes (née; Langsford; born 17 March 1960) is an English television presenter. She has presented various television shows, including "This Morning" (1999–present) in which she is the longest serving presenter, "Gift Wrapped" (2014), "" (2015–present), and "Ruth Langsford’s Fashion Edit" (2017–present). Since 1999, Langsford has been a regular panellist on the ITV talk show "Loose Women", becoming a presenter in 2013. In 2017, she took part in the fifteenth series of "Strictly Come Dancing", in which she finished in ninth place.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: Ruth Langsford was born in Singapore, to Dennis and Joan Langsford. She lived in five countries before the age of ten, including West Germany and four countries in North Africa. Langsford attended Saltash School in Cornwall from 1977 to 1978.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: Langsford began her career as a continuity announcer and newscaster with ITV regional station Television South West (TSW) in Plymouth, England. She left TSW when Westcountry Television took over the franchise on 1 January 1993, closing down the station with fellow announcer, Ian Stirling.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: From 1999 until 2002, Langsford was a regular panellist on ITV's daytime chat show "Loose Women". In 2010, she returned to the show as a stand-in anchor until 2013. Langsford rejoined "Loose Women" on 8 January 2014 as a regular anchor. She anchors the show in rotation with Jane Moore, Charlene White, Christine Lampard and Kaye Adams.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: In 2000, Langsford became a guest presenter on "This Morning", and was made a regular presenter in 2006 where she co-hosted alongside Phillip Schofield, making her the longest serving presenter of the programme. Later that year, the show introduced Eamonn Holmes to co-host with Langsford every Friday.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: Langsford was one of the main presenters on the now defunct "TV Travel Shop" which was on air from April 1998 until March 2005. She also hosted "The Answer Lies in the Soil" (1999), "The Great British Garden Show", "Langsford Late" (1999), "The Really Useful Show" (1997), "Mysterious West" (1995) and "Gardens of the Millennium" (1999).


title: Ruth Langsford

text: In 2004, Langsford narrated the television series "Zoo Story". She guest presented five episodes of "GMTV with Lorraine" in 2010. Langsford was a contestant on "Marco's Kitchen Burnout" in 2010 and competed in "Born to Shine" in 2011.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: In 2014, Langsford and Eamonn Holmes co-hosted ten episodes of the ITV teatime quiz show "Gift Wrapped".


title: Ruth Langsford

text: In February 2017, Langsford began co-presenting "Ruth Langsford's Fashion Edit" alongside Jackie Kabler for QVC.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: On 9 August 2017, Langsford was the third celebrity announced to be taking part in the fifteenth series of "Strictly Come Dancing". Her professional partner was Anton du Beke. She was the seventh celebrity to be eliminated, and left the show on 12 November.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: In 2019 and again in 2020, Langsford co-presented the Channel 5 dieting series "Lose a Stone in Four Weeks for Summer", alongside GP Amir Khan.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: In 2013, Langsford became brand ambassador for Clarivu refractive lens exchange procedure sold by Optegra.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: Langsford has written columns for Woman Magazine and Tesco Magazine. She was an ambassador for two Tesco food campaigns.


title: Ruth Langsford

text: In 1996, Langsford began dating Eamonn Holmes, though the two kept their relationship secret for years out of respect for Holmes' first wife, Gabrielle, from whom he was separated at the time. In 2002, Langsford gave birth to their son, Jack Alexander Holmes. They were married on 26 June 2010.


title: F-segment

text: The F-segment is the 6th category and largest of the European segments for passenger cars, and always belongs to "luxury cars".


title: F-segment

text: The equivalent categories are full-size luxury sedan (or "large luxury sedan") in the United States, luxury saloon (or "luxury limousine") in the United Kingdom, and Oberklasse in Germany. Extended-wheelbase limousines and armored sedans are also considered as F-segment.


title: F-segment

text: F-segment is a niche of the European market (approximately 0.2–0.3% in the 2010s) and the range is limited to only a few models.


title: F-segment

text: Most F-segment cars use a sedan body style, however some have been produced as wagons/estates or have a hatchback rear door.


title: F-segment

text: Extended wheelbase variants of these cars are common, as many of the luxury features are placed for the rear-seat occupants. In some markets (depending on the manufacturer), short wheelbase models are excluded completely, and only long wheelbase variants are sold.


title: F-segment

text: In 2020, the highest selling F-segment cars in Europe were the BMW 8 Series, BMW 7 Series, Mercedes-Benz S-Class, Porsche Panamera and Audi A8 / S8.


title: F-segment

text: 2019 - Sales of limousines in Europe were down 6% in 2019 to just over 41,000 sales which makes this the second consecutive year of decline for the segment.


title: F-segment

text: 2020 - European sales of limousines and upper class vehicles were down 29% in 2020, to just over 29,000 deliveries. This trials the overall market and drops their share to 0.2% of the total European car market, down from 0.3% last year.


title: F-segment

text: The first F-segment car from an Asian manufacturer for an outside market was the 1989 Lexus LS400. Before the debut of luxury orientated Japanese manufacturers such as Lexus or Infiniti, most flagship models were limited for Japan only. Examples included the Toyota Century and Nissan President.


title: F-segment

text: In South Korea, early F-segment cars were the result of partnerships with long-established manufacturers, for example the 1994 Daewoo Arcadia (a re-badged Honda Legend), the 1997 SsangYong Chairman (based on the Mercedes-Benz E-Class) and the 1999 Hyundai Equus (based on the Mitsubishi Proudia/Dignity). More recent F-segment cars from South Korea include the Genesis G90.


title: F-segment

text: The lineage of Mercedes-Benz's current F-segment car begins with the 1951 Mercedes-Benz W187. The W187 was replaced by the Mercedes-Benz W180 (nicknamed "Ponton") in 1954, which was replaced by the Mercedes-Benz W111 in 1959, which was replaced by the Mercedes-Benz W108 in 1965. The W108 was replaced by the Mercedes-Benz S-Class in 1972, which has been produced for six generations and remains in production today.


title: F-segment

text: Jaguar's first F-segment car was the 1951 Jaguar Mark VII. The Mark VII was replaced by the 1956 Jaguar Mark VIII, then the 1959 Jaguar Mark IX and the 1961 Jaguar Mark X, which was renamed the "Jaguar 420G" in 1966. The 420G was replaced by the Jaguar XJ in 1968, which has been produced for four generations and has just ceased production in 2020.


title: F-segment

text: The 1952–1963 BMW 501/502 sedans are predecessors to BMW's current line of F-segment cars. The successor to the 501/502 was the BMW New Six (also known as E3), introduced in 1977. The E3 was replaced by the BMW 7 Series in 1978, which has been produced for six generations and remains in production today.


title: F-segment

text: The first F-segment car from Audi was the 1988 Audi V8. The Audi V8 was replaced by the Audi A8 in 1994, which has been produced for four generations and remains in production today.


title: F-segment

text: F-segment cars are known as "full-size luxury cars" in the United States, and form part of the full-size car category (along with non-luxury large cars and the smaller E-segment cars).


title: Galactosemia

text: Galactosemia (British galactosaemia, from Greek γαλακτόζη + αίμα, meaning galactose + blood, accumulation of galactose in blood) is a rare genetic metabolic disorder that affects an individual's ability to metabolize the sugar galactose properly. Galactosemia follows an autosomal recessive mode of inheritance that confers a deficiency in an enzyme responsible for adequate galactose degradation.


title: Galactosemia

text: Friedrich Goppert (1870–1927), a German physician, first described the disease in 1917, with its cause as a defect in galactose metabolism being identified by a group led by Herman Kalckar in 1956. Galactosemia was the second disorder found to be detectable through newborn screening methods by Robert Guthrie.


title: Galactosemia

text: Its incidence is about 1 per 60,000 births for people of European ancestry. In other populations the incidence rate differs. Galactosaemia is about one hundred times more common (1:480 births) in the Irish Traveller population.


title: Galactosemia

text: Infants may appear asymptomatic at birth, however, upon ingestion of galactose a few days later (via breast and/or formula feeding), children start to experience life-threatening symptoms, which include:


title: Galactosemia

text: Progression of this acute neonatal toxicity syndrome may include the development of sepsis, cataracts, and even "pseudotumor cerebri" (which may cause a bulging of fontanelle).


title: Galactosemia

text: Lactose in food (such as dairy products) is broken down by the enzyme lactase into glucose and galactose. In individuals with galactosemia, the enzymes needed for further metabolism of galactose (Galactokinase and galactose-1-phosphate uridyltransferase) are severely diminished or missing entirely, leading to toxic levels of galactose or galactose 1-phosphate (depending on which enzyme is missing) in various tissues as in the case of classic galactosemia, resulting in hepatomegaly (an enlarged liver), cirrhosis, kidney failure, cataracts, vomiting, seizure, low blood sugar (hypoglycemia), lethargy, brain damage, and ovarian failure. Without treatment, mortality in infants with galactosemia is about 75%.


title: Galactosemia

text: Galactosemia is inherited in an autosomal recessive manner, meaning a child must inherit one defective gene from each parent to show the disease. Heterozygotes are carriers, because they inherit one normal gene and one defective gene. Carriers show no symptoms of galactosemia.