title: Rake (stock character)

text: The libertine philosophy that the scintillating persistent rakes display seems to rebel against the narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy lurking behind the facade of Puritan honesty and bourgeois moral standards. It has been pointed out that the views of the philosophical libertine were strongly influenced by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. But then, Hobbes was not necessarily an unquestioned ideal among the court élite, and Hobbesian ideas certainly did not permeate many comedies. John Dryden, for one, drew on Hobbesian ideas in his tragedies but these ideas are internalised by villains only.


title: Rake (stock character)

text: In his pursuit of pleasure and sensual satisfaction, the philosophical libertine shows hedonistic, Epicurean, and anti-rationalist patterns of thought. In their ideal of life, the libertines of this order may almost be compared to the genius of a somewhat later time: like the genius, the libertine rake is anti-authoritarian, anti-normative, and anti-traditional.


title: Rake (stock character)

text: It is, above all, the emotional distance from the objects of his desire as well as from the havoc he creates, which renders the persistent rake so frightening. Criticism of the libertine was heard not only in the 1670s when "sex comedies" were en vogue but also earlier, whenever the male partner of the "gay couple" was blamed for having indulged in immoral behaviour. One major counter-argument was the call for poetic justice. Shadwell and Dryden, for example, discussed the necessity of poetic justice to punish dissoluteness in their plays. To reintroduce moral standards, the rake, they demanded, had to be reformed towards the end of the play. If a persistent rake was allowed to propagate his philosophical libertinism, "poetische Ungerechtigkeit" ("poetic injustice") was likely to threaten the norm. Shadwell's "Epsom Wells" may be regarded as a chief instigator of an excessive libertinism which is not questioned. The play, significantly, ends with a divorce rather than the standard device of a marriage.


title: Rake (stock character)

text: However, the number of persistent rakes continued to grow, together with an upsurge in cuckolding action, and, between 1672 and 1687, not all persistent rakes are punished satirically. Only towards the end of the century did the increasing criticism of dramatic immorality and obscenity make the authors return to more traditional moral standards. In 1688, Shadwell's "Squire of Alsatia" initiated the return to a Horatian "prodesse" in comedy, which had already been put forth in the Preface to "The Humorist" (1671): "My design was it, to reprehend some of the Vices and Follies of the Age, which I take to be the most proper, and most useful way of writing Comedy" ("The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell", ed. Montague Summers, Vol. I, p. 183).


title: Rake (stock character)

text: As a consequence, future emphasis was no longer on libertine adventures but on the conversion and domestication of the dashing young men. Thomas d'Urfey's "Love for Money" (1691) and Colley Cibber's "Love's Last Shift" (1696) are moralizing plays and pave the way for the sentimental comedy of the early eighteenth century.


title: Republican Party of India

text: The Republican Party of India (RPI, often called the Republican Party or simply Republican) is a political party in India. It has its roots in the Scheduled Castes Federation led by B. R. Ambedkar. The 'Training School for Entrance to Politics' was established by Ambedkar in 1956 which was to serve as an entry point to the Republican Party of India (RPI). The first batch of the school consisted of 15 students. Its first batch turned out to be last batch as the school was closed after Ambedkar's death in 1956.


title: Republican Party of India

text: The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a political Organisation formed under the leadership of B. R. Ambedkar on 15 August 1936. It opposed the brahmanical and capitalist structures in India, supported the Indian working class and sought to dismantle the caste system.


title: Republican Party of India

text: The formation of the ILP was not welcomed or supported by the communist leaders, who argued that it would lead to a split in the working-class votes. Ambedkar replied that communist leaders were working for the rights for the worker but not for the human rights of Dalit workers. In his work "Annihilation of Caste", Ambedkar put forth the idea that caste is not merely the 'division of labour' but 'division of labourers' based upon graded inequality.


title: Republican Party of India

text: In the 1937 Provincial elections, the ILP secured 14 of the 17 seats in which they contested. This included 11 of the 13 contested seats that were reserved for traditionally oppressed communities.


title: Republican Party of India

text: In 1938, the ILP, with the support of the Congress Socialist Party, organised a march of 20,000 tenants from the Konkan region to Bombay, marked the largest pre-independence peasant mobilisation in the region. In the same year, it also joined with Communists to organise Bombay textile labourers in opposition to the Industrial Disputes Bill intended to control strike actions by the labourers. ILP opposed the bill in the Bombay Legislative Assembly.


title: Republican Party of India

text: Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) was an organisation in India founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1942 to campaign for the rights of the Dalit community. An executive body of All India SCF was elected in the convention. N. Sivaraj from Madras State was elected as President and P. N. Rajbhoj from Bombay State was elected as general secretary.


title: Republican Party of India

text: Ambedkar had founded the Depressed Classes Federation (DCF) in 1930 and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1935. Sources vary regarding which of these two bodies was succeeded by the SCF.


title: Republican Party of India

text: There was also a party called Scheduled Caste Federation in Pakistan after Partition. Ramnarayan Rawat stated that the SCF "created the space for an alternative to Congress-type 'nationalist' politics in post- 1947 Uttar Pradesh".


title: Republican Party of India

text: On 30 September 1956, B. R. Ambedkar had announced the establishment of the "Republican Party of India" by dismissing the "Scheduled Castes Federation", but before the formation of the party, he died on 6 December 1956. After that, his followers and activists planned to form this party. A meeting of the Presidency was held at Nagpur on 1 October 1957 to establish the party. At this meeting, N. Sivaraj, Yashwant Ambedkar, P. T. Borale, A. G. Pawar, Datta Katti, Dadasaheb Rupwate were present. The "Republican Party of India" was formed on 3 October 1957. N. Sivaraj was elected as the President of the party.


title: Republican Party of India

text: In 1957, six members of the party were elected to the second Lok Sabha. This is the biggest achievement of Ambedkar's party so far.


title: Republican Party of India

text: During the recent years RPI suffered severe internal strife. Several distinct parties claim the name of RPI. There are more than 50 factions of RPI. In 2009, all factions of RPI except Prakash Ambedkar's Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh reunited to form a united "Republican Party of India (United)". One of the main people responsible for this was Rabbi Madan. Later, Republican Party of India (Gavai) and Republican Party of India (A) led by Ramdas Athawale split again from the united party. Splinter groups of RPI include:


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel (; 24 April 1939 – 5 August 2017) was a German neo-Nazi publisher and pamphleteer of Holocaust denial literature. He was jailed several times: in Canada for publishing literature "likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group", and on charges of being a threat to national security; in the United States, for overstaying his visa; and in Germany for charges of "inciting racial hatred". He lived in Canada from 1958 to 2000.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: In 1977, Zündel founded a small press publishing house called Samisdat Publishers, which issued such neo-Nazi pamphlets as his co-authored "The Hitler We Loved and Why" and Richard Verrall's "Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth At Last", which were both significant documents to the Holocaust denial movement. Verrall's pamphlet should not be confused with Barbara Kulaszka's book "Did Six Million Really Die? Report on the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" Trial of Ernst Zündel, 1988".


title: Ernst Zündel

text: On 5 February 2003, Ernst Zündel was detained by local police in the U.S. and deported to Canada, where he was detained for two years on a security certificate for being a foreign national considered a threat to national security pending a court decision on the validity of the certificate. Once the certificate was upheld, he was deported to Germany and tried in the state court of Mannheim on outstanding charges of incitement of Holocaust denial dating from the early 1990s. On February 15, 2007, he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum term of five years in prison. All these imprisonments and prosecutions were for inciting hatred against an identifiable group. He was released on March 1, 2010.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel was born in Calmbach (now part of Bad Wildbad) in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in 1939 and was raised mostly by his mother, Gertrude. His father, Fritz, a lumberjack, was drafted into the German Army shortly after Ernst's birth and served as a medic on the Eastern Front. His father was captured and incarcerated as a prisoner of war and did not return home until 1947, by which time he had become an alcoholic. Ernst was the fourth in a family of six children consisting of a brother, who later became an attorney in the United States, and four sisters.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: He studied graphic art at trade school, graduating in 1957 and emigrated to Canada in 1958, when he was 19, to avoid conscription by the German military. In 1960, he married French-Canadian Janick Larouche, whom he met in a language class in Toronto, and with whom he had sons Pierre and Hans. The couple moved to Montreal in 1961, where Zündel would eventually come under the tutelage of Canadian fascist politician Adrien Arcand.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Professionally, Zündel worked as a graphic artist, photographer, photo retoucher, and printer. He got his first job in the art department at Simpson-Sears in Toronto before opening his own art studio in Montreal. In 1969, he moved back to Toronto, where he founded Great Ideas Advertising, a commercial art studio. On several occasions in the 1960s he was commissioned to illustrate covers for "Maclean's" magazine. His controversial views were not well known in the 1960s and 1970s, since he published his opinions under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich. At the time, he was also an organizer among immigrants for the Ralliement des créditistes, Quebec's Social Credit party. In 1968, he joined the Liberal Party of Canada and ran in that year's Liberal leadership convention under the anglicized name Ernest Zundel as a self-described "nuisance candidate", running on an "immigrant rights" platform. He used his candidacy to campaign against anti-German attitudes. He dropped out of the contest prior to the election, but not before delivering his campaign speech to the convention.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Under his Friedrich pseudonym, he wrote a preface to Savitri Devi's Nazi-Esoteric book "The Lightning and the Sun".


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel gained prominence and respectability during the 1970s as spokesman for Concerned Parents of German Descent, a group that claimed German-Canadians and their children were the target of discrimination due to anti-German stereotyping in the media. In the late 1970s, Zündel, as the group's spokesman, issued press releases protesting the NBC "Holocaust" miniseries for its depiction of Germans. In the late 1970s, reporter Mark Bonokoski unmasked Zündel and ended his career as a credible media spokesperson by revealing that he was publishing neo-Nazi and antisemitic pamphlets such as "The Hitler We Loved and Why" under the pseudonym Christof Friedrich.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: In 1994, Zündel campaigned in Canada to ban the movie "Schindler's List" as "hate speech" and celebrated the movie being banned in Malaysia and effectively banned in Lebanon and Jordan.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: On 8 May 1995, his Toronto residence was the target of an arson attack, resulting in $400,000 in damage. A group calling itself the "Jewish Armed Resistance Movement" claimed responsibility for the arson attack; according to the "Toronto Sun", the group had ties to extremist organizations, including the Jewish Defense League and Kahane Chai. The leader of the Toronto wing of the Jewish Defense League, Meir Weinstein (known then as Meir Halevi), denied involvement in the attack; however, five days later, Weinstein and American JDL leader Irv Rubin were caught trying to break into the Zündel property, where they were apprehended by police. No charges were ever filed in the incident. Weeks after the fire, Zündel was targeted with a parcel bomb that was detonated by the Toronto Police bomb squad. The investigation into the parcel bomb attack led to charges being laid against David Barbarash, an animal rights activist based in British Columbia, but they were eventually stayed.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: His publishing company, Samisdat Publishers, disseminated neo-Nazi literature, including Zündel's "The Hitler We Loved and Why", Richard Verrall's "Did Six Million Really Die?", and works by Malcolm Ross.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: By the early 1980s, Samisdat Publishers had grown into a worldwide distributor of Nazi and neo-Nazi posters, audiotapes, and memorabilia, as well as pamphlets and books devoted to Holocaust denial and what he claimed were Allied and Israeli war crimes. He purportedly had a mailing list of 29,000 in the United States alone. Advertisement space for Samisdat Publishers was purchased in well-known reputable American magazines and even comic books. West Germany became another large market, in violation of West German "Volksverhetzung" (incitement of the masses) laws preventing Holocaust denial and dissemination of Nazi and neo-Nazi material, with Samisdat going so far as to send mass mailings to every member of the West German Bundestag (parliament).


title: Ernst Zündel

text: In December 1980, the West German Federal Ministry of Finance told the Bundestag that between January 1978 and December 1979, "200 shipments of right-wing content, including books, periodicals, symbols, decorations, films, cassettes, and records" had been intercepted entering West Germany; these shipments "came overwhelmingly from Canada." On 23 April 1981, the West German government sent a letter to the Canadian Jewish Congress, confirming that the source of the material was Samisdat Publishers.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: From 1981 to 1982, Zündel had his mailing privileges suspended by the Canadian government on the grounds that he had been using the mail to send hate propaganda, a criminal offence in Canada. Zündel then began shipping from a post office box in Niagara Falls, New York, until the ban on his mailing in Canada was lifted in January 1983.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: In 1983, Sabina Citron, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, filed a private complaint against Zündel before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In 1984, the Ontario government joined the criminal proceedings against Zündel based on Citron's complaint. Zündel was charged under the Criminal Code, section 181, of spreading false news by publishing "Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth At Last".


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel underwent two criminal trials in 1985 and 1988. The charge against Zündel alleged that he "did publish a statement or tale, namely, "Did Six Million Really Die?" that he knows is false and that is likely to cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tolerance, contrary to the Criminal Code". After a much publicized trial in 1985, Zündel was found guilty. One of the prosecution witnesses, Auschwitz survivor Arnold Friedman, a Holocaust educator in Toronto, testified that "prisoners marched off to the ovens never returned" to which Zundel's lawyer, Doug Christie, replied "if those who disappeared might not have been led out a nearby gate".


title: Ernst Zündel

text: His conviction was later overturned in an appeal on a legal technicality, leading to a second trial in 1988, in which he was again convicted. Zündel was originally found guilty by two juries but was finally acquitted upon appeal by the Supreme Court of Canada which held in 1992 that section 181 (formerly known as section 177) was a violation of the guarantee of freedom of expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: The 1988 trial relied on testimony from Holocaust deniers David Irving and Fred A. Leuchter, a self-taught execution technician. Leuchter's testimony as an expert witness was accepted by the court, but his accompanying Leuchter report was excluded, based on his lack of engineering credentials. In 1985, key expert testimony against Zündel's Holocaust denial was provided at great lengths by Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who refused to testify at Zündel's 1988 trial. Zündel was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment by an Ontario court; however, in 1992 in "R v Zundel" his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada when the law under which he had been charged, "reporting false news", was ruled unconstitutional.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: In 1997, Zündel's marriage with his second wife, Irene Marcarelli, ended after 18 months. She subsequently testified against him in the late 1990s when he was under investigation by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for promoting hatred against Jews via his website. In January 2000, before the commission had completed its hearings, he left Canada for Sevierville, Tennessee, in the US, where he married his third wife, Ingrid Rimland, and vowed never to return to Canada.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: In 2003, Zündel was arrested by the United States government for violating immigration rules, specifically visa waiver overstay, which he argued was a trumped up charge. After two weeks he was deported. A warrant for his arrest for "Volksverhetzung" (incitement of the masses) had been issued in Germany, where he remained a citizen, in the same year. At his hearing, Zündel described himself as "the Gandhi of the right".


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Although Zündel lived in Canada for more than 40 years prior to moving to the United States, he never gained Canadian citizenship. Applications for citizenship were rejected in 1966 and 1994 for undisclosed reasons. On his return to Canada, he had no status in the country as he was not a citizen and as his landed immigrant status had been forfeited by his prolonged absence from the country. When returning to Canada, Zündel claimed refugee status in hopes of preventing his deportation to Germany. This claim elicited public ridicule; Rex Murphy, a columnist for "The Globe and Mail" and a well-known commentator on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, wrote, "If Ernst Zündel is a refugee, Daffy Duck is Albert Einstein ... Some propositions are so ludicrous that they are a betrayal of common sense and human dignity if allowed a moment's oxygen."


title: Ernst Zündel

text: On May 2, 2003, Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Denis Coderre and Solicitor General Wayne Easter issued a "national security certificate" against Zündel under the provisions of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, indicating that he was a threat to Canada's national security owing to his alleged links with violent neo-Nazi groups, including Aryan Nations leader Richard Girnt Butler, neo-Nazi Christian Worch, and former Canadian Aryan Nations leader Terry Long, as well as Ewald Althans, convicted in a German court in 1995 of charges that included insulting the memory of the dead and insulting the state.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel moved twice to have Canadian Federal Court justice Pierre Blais recuse himself from the case for "badgering and accusing the witness of lying" and exhibiting "open hostility" towards Zündel, and filed two constitutional challenges, one in the Ontario courts and one in the federal courts, both unsuccessful. During the hearing, Zündel characterized his position as "Sometimes I feel like a black man being convicted on Ku Klux Klan news clippings."


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel meanwhile moved to be released from detention on his own recognizance while the legal proceedings were ongoing. His lawyer, Doug Christie, introduced as a "surprise witness" Lorraine Day, a California doctor who practiced alternative cancer treatments, to testify that Zündel's incarceration at Toronto's Toronto West Detention Centre was causing his chest tumor (revealed to the court a few weeks previously) to grow and his blood pressure to rise, that the medication supplied to control his blood pressure was causing side effects such as a slow heart rate and loss of memory, and that he needed "exercise, fresh air, and freedom from stress. The whole point is we need to have his high blood pressure controlled without the drug." On January 21, 2004, after three months of hearings including both public and secret testimony, Justice Blais again ruled against Zündel with a damning statement.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: During his imprisonment, Canadian right-wing leader Paul Fromm attempted to hold numerous rallies in support of Zündel, both in Ontario and in Alberta. The rallies were met with formidable opposition, namely by the Anti-Racist Action group, which heightened its opposition to Fromm's pro-Zündel work in the summer of 2004. The anti-racist efforts included participation by numerous Toronto activist groups and individuals, including Shane Ruttle Martinez and Marcell Rodden, and successfully managed to prevent similar future congregations of the neo-Nazis. Fromm eventually ceased his efforts after being advised by Zündel's attorneys that public clashes between supporters and opponents of Zündel were not assisting the image of their client's case.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: On February 24, 2005, Justice Blais ruled that Canada could deport Zündel back to Germany at any time, and on February 25, Zündel's lawyer, Peter Lindsay, announced that his client would not attempt to obtain a stay against the deportation and that his fight to remain in Canada was over. In his decision, Justice Blais noted that Zündel had had the opportunity to respond to the allegations of the decision of January 21 by explaining the nature of his contacts with the extremists mentioned and/or providing exonerating witnesses, but had failed to do so. Blais found that "Mr. Zündel's activities are not only a threat to Canada's national security, but also a threat to the international community of nations."


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel was deported to Germany on March 1, 2005. Upon his arrival at Frankfurt airport, he was immediately arrested and detained in Mannheim prison awaiting trial for inciting racial hatred. In 2007, Zündel's appeal to the UN Human Rights Committee against deportation was rejected, partly for his failure to exhaust all domestic remedies through a thorough defence as required by its charter, and partly because the committee ruled the case inadmissible as it did not find his rights had been violated.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: German prosecutors charged Zündel on July 19, 2005, with 14 counts of inciting racial hatred, which is punishable under German penal code, Section 130, 2.(3) (Agitation (sedition) of the People) with up to 5 years in prison. The indictment stated Zündel "denied the fate of destruction for the Jews planned by National Socialist powerholders and justified this by saying that the mass destruction in Auschwitz and Treblinka, among others, were an invention of the Jews and served the repression and extortion of the German people."


title: Ernst Zündel

text: His trial was scheduled for five days beginning November 8, 2005, but ran into an early delay when Judge Ulrich Meinerzhagen ruled that lawyer Horst Mahler, whose licence to practise as a lawyer was withdrawn in 2004 and who, in January 2005, was sentenced to nine months in prison for inciting racial hatred, could not be part of the defence team. Mahler had been associated with the violent far-left Red Army Faction in the 1970s, but had since become a supporter of far-right and antisemitic groups. Zündel's public defender Sylvia Stolz was also dismissed on the grounds that her written submissions to the court included Mahler's ideas. On November 15, 2005, Meinerzhagen announced that the trial was to be rescheduled to allow new counsel time to prepare.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: The trial resumed on February 9, 2006, for several court sessions but then adjourned on March 9 when the trial judge asked for Sylvia Stolz to be removed as Zündel's defence lawyer after she repeatedly disrupted the trial and had to be dragged out of the court by two bailiffs. Stolz signed "Heil Hitler" on court motions, said the Holocaust was "the biggest lie in world history," and yelled that the judge deserved the death penalty for "offering succour to the enemy". In 2008, Stolz was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison and stripped of her licence to practice law for five years.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: The trial again resumed on June 9, 2006, and continued, intermittently, into early 2007. The prosecution concluded its case on January 26, 2007, calling for Zündel to be handed the maximum sentence of five years' imprisonment with state prosecutor Andreas Grossman calling him a "political con man" from whom the German people needed protection. After quoting extensively from Zündel's writings on the Holocaust, Grossman argued "[you] might as well argue that the sun rises in the West ... But you cannot change that the Holocaust has been proven." In its closing arguments the defence called for Zündel to be acquitted.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: On February 15, 2007, Zündel was sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum sentence possible for violating the "Volksverhetzung" law in the German penal code which bans incitement of hatred against a minority of the population, which is how his Holocaust denial was interpreted by the Federal German court.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: His time in pre-trial confinement in Canada was not taken into account on his sentence, but only the two years he was confined in Germany since 2005. One of his lawyers, Jürgen Rieger, a leading member of Germany's NPD, was forbidden to voice petitions and ruled to put them down in writing; he let another lawyer read them aloud. Another lawyer read parts of "Mein Kampf" and parts of the NS race legislation aloud in his closing speech. Zündel asked for the inception of an expert's commission to examine the Holocaust. The judge in his emotional closing speech called Zündel a """" ("well-poisoner and arsonist, an admirer of this human-despising barbarian Adolf Hitler, of whom he rambles on with brash impertinence"). Holocaust deniers used Zündel trials to claim that freedom of speech was impaired in Germany as that it depended on the ideology of the speaker.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel was released on March 1, 2010, five years after his deportation to Germany. Following the end of his prison term, Canadian Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews reiterated that Zündel would not be permitted to return to Canada. "In 2005, a Federal Court judge confirmed that Zündel is inadmissible on security grounds for being a danger to the security of Canada", Toews said in a written statement, adding that, "The decision reinforced the government of Canada's position that this country will not be a safe haven for individuals who pose a risk to Canada's national security."


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel returned to his childhood home in the Black Forest, which had been vacant since his mother's death in the 1990s, and lived there until his own death.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: On March 31, 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Administrative Appeals Office ruled Zündel inadmissible to the United States, rejecting his application for an immigrant visa which he had sought in order to be reunited with his wife. He was classified as inadmissible, because he has been convicted of foreign crimes for which the sentence was five years or more and a waiver deemed unwarranted due to Zündel's "history of inciting racial, ethnic, and religious hatred". Legal writer and law professor Eugene Volokh expressed the opinion that while his exclusion from the United States on hate speech grounds was not a violation of the First Amendment, it may be an incorrect application of current immigration law.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: When Zündel started Samisdat Publishers in the 1970s, he became interested in ufology when the subject was at its peak of worldwide attention. His main offerings were his own books claiming that flying saucers were secret weapons developed by the Third Reich and now based in Antarctica.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Under the pseudonyms Christof Friedrich and Mattern Friedrich, Zündel also wrote several publications promoting the idea that UFOs were craft developed by German scientists who had fled to New Swabia, Antarctica. These titles include "Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions" (1978) and "Hitler at the South Pole" (1979). He promoted the idea of Nazi secret bases in Antarctica, Nazi UFOs, secret polar bases and Hollow Earth theories.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Along with Willibald Mattern, a German émigré living in Santiago, Chile, Zündel also wrote "UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon?" on Nazi UFOs in German and translated into English.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: It is not clear whether Zündel really believed these theories or whether they were merely speculative fiction.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: In the Samisdat Publishers newsletter of 1978, Zündel advertised an expedition to Antarctica to find these bases and UFOs. A ticket would cost $9,999 for a seat on an exploration team to locate the polar entrance to the hollow earth. This expedition never took place.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: According to Frank Miele, a member of The Skeptics Society in the United States, Zündel told him that his book "UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon?" (which became an underground bestseller, going through several printings) was nothing more than popular fiction to build publicity for Samisdat. Zündel said in a telephone conversation with Miele:


title: Ernst Zündel

text: "I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained. The book was for fun. With a picture of the Führer on the cover and flying saucers coming out of Antarctica it was a chance to get on radio and TV talk shows. For about 15 minutes of an hour program I'd talk about that esoteric stuff. Then I would start talking about all those Jewish scientists in concentration camps, working on these secret weapons. And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about." "In that case," I asked him, "do you still stand by what you wrote in the UFO book?" "Look," he replied, "it has a question mark at the end of the title." Zündel continued to defend these views as late as 2002.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: According to "Toronto Sun" columnist Mark Bonokoski, Zündel's mother was Gertrude Mayer, the daughter of Isadore and Nagal Mayer. Isadore Mayer was a trade union organizer for the garment industry in the Bavarian city of Augsburg.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: According to Bonokoski, Ernst's ex-wife, Irene Zündel, claimed that the possibility of being at least partly Jewish bothered Zündel so much that he returned to Germany in the 1960s in search of his family's "Ariernachweis", a Third Reich certificate of pure Aryan blood, but was unable to find any such document for his family.


title: Ernst Zündel

text: In 1997, Zündel granted an interview to Tsadok Yecheskeli of the Israeli newspaper, "Yedioth Ahronoth", that includes the following exchange:


title: Ernst Zündel

text: Zündel died at his home in Germany, of a suspected heart attack, on August 5, 2017. He was survived by two children, Hans and Pierre; and his widow, Ingrid Rimland Zündel, who died on October 12, 2017.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: The Battle of Sinhagad, also known as Battle of Kondhana, took place during the night of 4 February 1670 at the fort of Sinhagad (then Kondhana), near the city of Pune, Maharashtra, India.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: In the 1650s, Aurangzeb sent Shahiste Khan to subdue Shivaji. Khan captured Poona (Now Pune) and took residence in Lal Mahal. Shivaji and his soldiers made a surprise attack on the Khan, wherein they wounded Khan, and killed one of his sons. However, Khan eventually escaped. Shivaji went on to loot and plunder the wealthy port city of Surat, which at that time was a centre of great riches and wealthy merchants. This greatly increased Aurangzeb's anger against the Marathas. He sent his General Mirza Rajah Jai Singh with a large army to subdue Shivaji. Jai Singh besieged Purandar fort, and blocked entry and exit points. The Maratha tried to break the siege but were not successful. In the meantime Diler Khan defeated the armies at Vajragad, near Purandar. The Mughals plundered villages in the Maratha kingdom. For the welfare of his subjects, Shivaji decided to sign a treaty with Jai Singh. They met and signed the Treaty of Purandar. According to the treaty, Shivaji was to give 23 forts to the Mughals and agree to fight for them whenever needed. He would be allowed to retain control of 12 forts. Later, he agreed to meet Aurangzeb at Agra.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: Upon reaching Agra, Aurangzeb put him under house arrest, but Sivaji managed to escape. Shivaji then kept a low profile for some years until Aurangzeb increased activities in the north. Also, Jai Singh died at Burhanpur, and a weak prince, Muazzam, became governor of Deccan. Considering all these points, Shivaji felt that this was a good opportunity to reclaim what had belonged to the Swarajya. He broke the terms of the treaty and started recapturing the forts that he had previously given the Mughals under the treaty.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: Sinhagad was one of the first forts which chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj recaptured from the Mughals. The capture was made possible by scaling the walls at night with rope ladders. In this battle both Udaybhan Rathore and Tanhaji were killed, but the fort was captured by the Marathas. The battle and Tanhaji's exploits are still a popular subject for Marathi ballads.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: Tanaji Malusare and 300 hand-picked Mavle infantry, assisted by some Koli guides who knew the place well, scaled the hillside one night using rope ladders. They advanced into the fort, slaying the sentinels. The alarm was given and the Mughals took some time to arm themselves and come out, but the Marathas secured their footing.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: During the attack, Malusare scaled a steep cliff that led to the fort with the assistance of a monitor lizard called Yashwanti (also referred to as ghorpad in Marathi language). This type of lizard had been tamed since the 15th century, and Yashwanti was trained to pull the rope up the cliffs for Malusare and wind it around the fort's bastion.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: Climbing up the fort, the Marathas were intercepted by the garrison and combat ensued between the guards and several infiltrators that had managed to climb up. Tanaji and his Mavala infantrymen climbed by Kalyan "darwaza" (), one of the two main gates of the fort. The garrison fought desperately, but the Maratha Mavales with their war cry of "Hara! Hara! Mahadev!" wreaked havoc in their ranks. Tanaji and Udaybhan fought each other intensely. The chiefs fought each other and fell dead after a singles combat. Tanaji's shield broke during the battle.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: The Maratha soldiers set fire to the huts of cavalry lines, and the blaze informed Shivaji at Raigad that Kondhana has been captured.


title: Battle of Sinhagad

text: It is said that when maharaj Shivaji got the information about the victory and the loss of Tanaji's life during the battle, he exclaimed "Gad aala pan sinh gela" (Devnagari: गड आला पण सिंह गेला) (transl. "The fort has been captured but we lost the lion"). A bust of Tanaji Malusare was established on the fort in memory of his contribution and sacrifice. The fort was also renamed Sinhagad to honor his memory.


title: EtherType

text: EtherType is a two-octet field in an Ethernet frame. It is used to indicate which protocol is encapsulated in the payload of the frame and is used at the receiving end by the data link layer to determine how the payload is processed. The same field is also used to indicate the size of some Ethernet frames.


title: EtherType

text: EtherType is also used as the basis of 802.1Q VLAN tagging, encapsulating packets from VLANs for transmission multiplexed with other VLAN traffic over an Ethernet trunk.


title: EtherType

text: EtherType was first defined by the Ethernet II framing standard and later adapted for the IEEE 802.3 standard. EtherType values are assigned by the IEEE Registration Authority.


title: EtherType

text: In modern implementations of Ethernet, the field within the Ethernet frame used to describe the EtherType can also be used to represent the size of the payload of the Ethernet Frame. Historically, depending on the type of Ethernet framing that was in use on an Ethernet segment, both interpretations were simultaneously valid, leading to potential ambiguity. Ethernet II framing considered these octets to represent EtherType while the original IEEE 802.3 framing considered these octets to represent the size of the payload in bytes.


title: EtherType

text: In order to allow Ethernet II and IEEE 802.3 framing to be used on the same Ethernet segment, a unifying standard, IEEE 802.3x-1997, was introduced that required that EtherType values be greater than or equal to 1536. That value was chosen because the maximum length (MTU) of the data field of an Ethernet 802.3 frame is 1500 bytes and 1536 is equivalent to the number 600 in the hexadecimal numeral system. Thus, values of 1500 and below for this field indicate that the field is used as the size of the payload of the Ethernet frame while values of 1536 and above indicate that the field is used to represent an EtherType. The interpretation of values 1501–1535, inclusive, is undefined.


title: EtherType

text: The end of a frame is signaled by a valid frame check sequence followed by loss of carrier or by a special symbol or sequence in the line coding scheme for a particular Ethernet physical layer, so the length of the frame does not always need to be encoded as a value in the Ethernet frame. However, as the minimum payload of an Ethernet frame is 46 bytes, a protocol that uses EtherType must include its own length field if that is necessary for the recipient of the frame to determine the length of short packets (if allowed) for that protocol.


title: EtherType

text: 802.1Q VLAN tagging uses an 0x8100 EtherType value. The payload following includes a 16-bit tag control identifier (TCI) followed by an Ethernet frame beginning with a second (original) EtherType field for consumption by end stations. IEEE 802.1ad extends this tagging with further nested EtherType and TCI pairs.


title: EtherType

text: The size of the payload of non-standard jumbo frames, typically ~9000 Bytes long, falls within the range used by EtherType, and cannot be used for indicating the length of such a frame. The proposition to resolve this conflict was to substitute the special EtherType value 0x8870 when a length would otherwise be used. However, the proposition (its use case was bigger packets for IS-IS) was not accepted and it is defunct. The chair of IEEE 802.3 at the time, Geoff Thompson, responded to the draft outlining IEEE 802.3's official position and the reasons behind the position. The draft authors also responded to the chair's letter, but no subsequent answer from the IEEE 802.3 has been recorded.


title: EtherType

text: While defunct, this draft was implemented and is used in Cisco routers in their IS-IS implementation (for IIH Hello packets padding).


title: EtherType

text: With the advent of the IEEE 802 suite of standards, a Subnetwork Access Protocol (SNAP) header combined with an IEEE 802.2 LLC header is used to transmit the EtherType of a payload for IEEE 802 networks other than Ethernet, as well as for non-IEEE networks that use the IEEE 802.2 LLC header, such as FDDI. However, for Ethernet, Ethernet II framing is still used.


title: EtherType

text: EtherTypes are assigned by the IEEE Registration Authority. Not all well-known uses of EtherTypes are recorded in the IEEE list of EtherType values. For example, EtherType 0x0800 (used by IPv4) does not appear in the IEEE list. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority has a separate list of some EtherType registrations, compiled from several sources, including the IEEE Registration Authority's list and some other lists; that list includes 0800.


title: Krumping

text: Krumping is a style of street dance popularized in the United States, described as Afro-diasporic dance, characterized by free, expressive, exaggerated, and highly energetic movement. Dancers who started krumping saw the dance as a means for them to escape gang life and "to express raw emotions in a powerful but non-violent way."


title: Krumping

text: The root word "krump" came from the lyrics of a 1990 song and is sometimes spelled K.R.U.M.P., which is an acronym for Kingdom Radically Uplifted Mighty Praise, and presents krumping as a faith-based artform. Krumping was created by two dancers: Ceasare "Tight Eyez" Willis, and Jo'Artis "Big Mijo" Ratti in South Central, Los Angeles, during the early 2000s. "Clowning" is the less aggressive predecessor to krumping and was created in 1992 by Thomas "Tommy the Clown" Johnson in Compton, California.


title: Krumping

text: In the 1990s, Johnson and his dancers—known as the Hip Hop Clowns—performed clowning for children's’ birthday parties and other general-public functions. In contrast, krumping focuses on highly-energetic battles and dramatic movements which Tommy the Clown describes as intense, fast-paced, and sharp. CBS News compared the intensity of krumping to that of moshing. Although krumping was not directly created by Tommy, it was inspired by his “clowning”. Originally, Willis and Ratti were clown dancers for Tommy, but as their dancing was considered too "rugged" and "raw" for clowning, they left and developed krumping. Tommy eventually opened a clown-dancing academy and started the Battle Zone competition at the Great Western Forum where krump crews and clown crews could come together and battle each other in front of an audience of their peers.


title: Krumping

text: David LaChapelle's documentary, "Rize," explores the clowning and krumping subculture in Los Angeles. He says of the movement: "What Nirvana was to rock-and-roll in the early '90s is what these kids are to hip-hop. It's the alternative to the bling-bling, tie-in-with-a-designer corporate hip-hop thing." LaChapelle was first introduced to krumping when he was directing Christina Aguilera's music video "Dirrty". After deciding to make a documentary about krumping, LaChapelle produced a short film titled "Krumped," which was screened at the 2004 Aspen Shortsfest, and gained more funding to produce a longer version as a result of the positive response. In 2005, the longer version was released as "Rize" and screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Auckland International Film Festival, and several other film festivals outside the United States.


title: Krumping

text: Aside from "Rize", krumping appeared in several music videos including Missy Elliott's "I'm Really Hot”, The Black Eyed Peas' "Hey Mama", Chemical Brothers' "Galvanize" and Madonna's "Hung Up". Krumping is also demonstrated in Skinny Puppy's "Pro-Test" video, and displays several other aspects of krumping.


title: Krumping

text: Krumping has also appeared in the movies "", "Stomp the Yard" and "Climax"; the television series "Community;" and the reality dance competitions "So You Think You Can Dance", "Street Dance of China," and "America's Best Dance Crew". Russell Ferguson. The original web series "The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers" also featured a krump dance in season one during the fifth episode, "The Lettermakers." It has also spawned "Marge Krumping", a 2016 meme taken from "The Simpsons" episode "Little Orphan Millie," where the character Marge tries to cheer up Bart by krumping, albeit unsuccessfully.


title: Krumping

text: There are five basic moves in krumping: stomps, jabs, chest pops, jumps, and arm swings. Krumping is rarely choreographed; it is almost entirely freestyle to a song (improvisational) and is danced most frequently in battles or sessions rather than on a stage. Krump is stylistically different from other hip-hop dance styles such as breaking and turfing. Krumping is very aggressive and is danced upright to upbeat and fast-paced music, but it does not promote aggression or fighting – moves are meant to take up space and challenge other dancers to feed off and return the energy, whereas breaking is more acrobatic and is danced on the floor to break beats. The Oakland dance style turfing is a fusion of popping and miming that incorporates storytelling and illusion. Krump is less precise, and more freestyle, than turfing. Thematically, all these dance styles align under the term street dance as they all share common attributes of their street origins, their freestyle nature and the use of battling.


title: Fredo (rapper)

text: Marvin William Bailey (born March 6, 1994), known professionally as Fredo, is a British rapper and singer from Queen's Park, London. He had a UK number 1 single in 2018 with fellow rapper Dave, called "Funky Friday".


title: Fredo (rapper)

text: Fredo grew up in Queen's Park, London and lived on West London's Mozart Estate where he was surrounded by gang violence and crime.


title: Fredo (rapper)

text: During Fredo's youth, he listened to Giggs and 50 Cent, stating "I remember I used to bang "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" every day".


title: Fredo (rapper)

text: Fredo released his first track "They Ain't 100" in March 2016. Three weeks later he went to prison, on a charge he later beat. Whilst he was in prison, the track gained popularity, with radio play and millions of views. Inspired by its success, and despite a second stint in prison, he persisted in his newfound rapping and recording career, releasing two mixtapes, "Get Rich or Get Recalled" in 2017, and in 2018 "Tables Turn", which reached the Top 10 in the album charts. He also appeared as a featured artist on tracks by Kojo Funds and Young T & Bugsey, as well as on Dave's 2018 hit single "Funky Friday".


title: Fredo (rapper)

text: Fredo's first full-length album, "Third Avenue", was released on 1 February 2019. Produced mostly by JB, it marked Fredo's debut on RCA's Since '93 imprint. It included "Love You for That", a track dedicated to his mother and apologising for not being the perfect son. The album takes its title from the West London housing estate he grew up on.


title: Fredo (rapper)

text: In January 2021, Fredo released his second album "Money Can't Buy Happiness", which contained features from Pop Smoke, Dave, Summer Walker and Young Adz. It peaked at number two on the UK Albums Chart.


title: Fredo (rapper)

text: On 24 June 2021, Fredo announced his third album "Independence Day" which released on 5 August 2021. The album announced that his music would be released independently.


title: Fredo (rapper)

text: Fredo spent time in prison on remand in 2016 and 2017, both times for stabbing-related charges that were dropped before reaching court. He has also been the victim of a stabbing attack, having been stabbed four times on one occasion on his local high street.


title: Stupor

text: Stupor is the lack of critical mental function and a level of consciousness, in which an affected person is almost entirely unresponsive and responds only to intense stimuli such as pain. The word derives from the Latin "stupor" ("numbness, insensibility").


title: Stupor

text: Stupor is characterised by impaired reaction to external stimuli. Those in a stuporous state are rigid, mute and only appear to be conscious, as the eyes are open and follow surrounding objects. If not stimulated externally, a patient with stupor will appear to be in a sleepy state most of the time. In some extreme cases of severe depressive disorders the patient can become motionless, lose their appetite and become mute. Short periods of restricted responsivity can be achieved by intense stimulation (e.g. pain, bright light, loud noise, shock).


title: Stupor

text: Stupor is associated with infectious diseases, complicated toxic states (e.g. heavy metals), severe hypothermia, mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia, major depressive disorder), epilepsy, vascular illnesses (e.g. hypertensive encephalopathy), acute stress reaction(shock), neoplasms (e.g. brain tumors), brain disorders (e.g. alzheimers, dementia, fatal insomnia), B deficiency, major trauma, alcohol poisoning, vitamin D excess, and other conditions.


title: Stupor

text: Lesions of the ascending reticular activation system on height of the pons and metencephalon have been shown to cause stupor. The incidence is higher after left-sided lesions.


title: Stupor

text: Because stupors are caused by another health condition, treatment focuses on uncovering and treating the cause. Doctors may administer IV antibiotics or fluids to treat infections and nutritional deficits, or conduct an MRI to check for lesions on the brain.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Several theories speculate about the origins of the Cossacks. According to one theory, Cossacks have Slavic origins, while another theory states that the Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk of 1710 attests to Khazar origins. Modern scholars believe that Cossacks have both Slavic and Turkic origins. The Academician Ivan Zabelin mentioned that peoples of the prairies and of the woods had always needed "a live frontier", and even ancient Borisphenites (Dniepr Scythians) and Tanaites could be the predecessors of Cossacks, not only the Khazars, who assimilated/included Severians, Goths, Scythians and other ancient inhabitants, as insisted by Cossack folklore, by the Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk, and by numerous Cossack historians. Because of the need of both the Reds and the anti-Bolshevik forces to deny any separate Cossack ethnicity, the traditional post-imperial historiography dates the emergence of Cossacks to the 14th-15th centuries. Non-mainstream theories, however, have borrowed the date 948 from imperial historiography, and ascribe an earlier Cossack existence to the tenth century, but deny Cossack links both to "the old people" (Khazars) and to "the new people" (Russians and Ukrainians; the very terms "old people" and "new people" being coined by the 11th-century Metropolitan Ilarion of Kiev), specifically mentioning 948 as the year when the inhabitants of the steppe under a leader named "Kasak" or "Kazak" routed the Khazars in the area of modern Kuban and organized a state called "Kazakia" or "Cossackia".


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Cossacks were mainly East Slavs, especially Ukrainian people. In the 15th century, the term originally described semi-independent Tatar groups which lived on the Dnipro River, which flows through Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Some historians suggest that the Cossack people had mixed ethnic origins, descending from Russians, Khazars, Ukrainians, Tatars, and others who settled or passed through the vast steppe that stretches from Asia to southern Europe.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Cossacks and their quasi-states such as the Zaporozhian Sich are considered to be responsible for nation-forming processes leading to the establishment of modern Ukrainian nation.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Some Turkologists argue that Cumania's Cossacks descend from Kipchaks, who partly originated near the northern Chinese borders and soon moved to Western Siberia. Afterwards they migrated further west into the trans-Volga region (present-day western Kazakhstan). In the 11th century they finally arrived in the steppe area north of the Black Sea in southwestern Russia and Ukraine. They are closely related to modern Kazakhs.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Early Russian military greatly admired Cossacks for their equestrian skills. Many were hired as cavalry by Russian and Ukrainian warlords, in much the same way that they hired Black Klobuks as personal guards.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: After 1400 the Cossacks emerge as an established and identifiable group in historical accounts. Rulers of the Grand Duchy of Moscow and of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth employed Cossacks as mobile guards against Tatar raids from the south in the territories of present-day southwestern Russia and southern Ukraine. Judging by the records of their names, these early Cossacks seem to have included a significant number of Tatar descendants. From the mid-15th century, Cossacks are mostly mentioned with Slavic names.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: All historical records of that period describe Cossack society as a loose federation of independent communities, often merging into larger units of a military character, entirely separate from, and mostly independent of other nations (such as Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia or the Tatars).


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Numerous historical documents of that period refer to the Don Cossacks in Russia as a sovereign ethno-cultural people with a unique warrior culture. Cossacks conducted raids and pillaging against their neighbours as important sources of income. Already in 1444 Cossacks of Ryazan were mentioned as defenders of Pereslavl-Zalessky against the units of Golden Horde and in a letter of Ivan III of Russia in 1502. The area around the Don River was divided between the Crimean west side and the Nogai east side after the Golden Horde fell in 1480. The vast steppe of the Don region was populated by runaway serfs, by those who longed for freedom, by people who were not satisfied with the existing social order. Over time, the culture of the Don Cossacks was formed into a united community and were called "the Cossacks".


title: History of the Cossacks

text: The Don cossacks known for their attacks on the Ottoman Empire and its vassals (like the Tatars), although they did not shy away from pillaging other neighbouring communities. Their actions exacerbated the tension at the southern border of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Kresy), resulting in almost constant low-level warfare in those territories for almost the entire existence of the Commonwealth.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Their first recorded naval raid into the Black Sea dates to 1538, with an attack on the fortress of Ochakiv. This was followed by more frequent and better-organised raids elsewhere, the freeing of Christian slaves being one of the chief aims, as well as the acquisition of plunder. Their success was such that they attracted the attention of the western European powers, including the Papacy, who made diplomatic overtures in the hope of launching joint ventures against the Turks. In 1539 Grand Prince Vasili III of Russia asked the Ottoman Sultan to curb the Cossacks and the Sultan replied: "The Cossacks do not swear allegiance to me, and they live as they themselves please." In 1549 the Tsar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible, replied to a request of the Turkish Sultan to stop the aggressive actions of the Don Cossacks, stating, "The Cossacks of the Don are not my subjects, and they go to war or live in peace without my knowledge."


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Similar exchanges passed between Russia, the Ottomans and the Commonwealth; each of which often tried to use the Cossacks' warmongering for his own purposes. The Cossacks for their part were happy to plunder everybody more or less equally. Between the 16th to the 17th century, the Zaporoijan Cossacks became subjects first of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later of the Union of Lublin of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Using small, shallow-draft, and highly manoeuvrable galleys known as "chaiky", they moved swiftly across the Black Sea. According to the Cossacks' own records, these vessels, carrying a 50- to 70-man crew, could reach the Anatolian coast of Asia Minor from the mouth of the Dnieper River in forty hours. The "chaiky" were often accompanied by larger galleys that served as command and control centres. The raids also acquired a distinct political purpose after Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny became "hetman" in 1613, intending to turn the host into the nucleus of a Ukrainian nation with the support of the European states.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: By 1618 the Zaporozhians were members of the Anti-Turkish League, as Schaidachny transferred his seat of power to Kiev, the Polish Crown's regional capital.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: The fighting qualities of the sea-going Cossacks were even admired in the Ottoman chronicles: "One can safely say that in the entire world one cannot find a people more careless for their lives or having less fear of death; persons versed in navigation assert that because of their skill and boldness in naval battles these bands are more dangerous than any other enemy."


title: History of the Cossacks

text: In 1615 the raiders even sailed to the walls of Tsarhorod, as they referred to the Turkish capital, plundering the ports of Mizevna and Archioca. An attempt by the Turks to blockade the Berezan Island, and deny Cossacks access to the sea, was defeated in the spring of 1616. The raiders went on to capture Kaffa, which was burned down after all the slaves were freed. That same year Trebizond, in eastern Anatolia, was captured and destroyed. Sultan Ahmed I sent his fleet to the Dneiper in pursuit; but instead of going home the Cossacks once more sailed to Constantinople, where they raided at leisure, even rampaging through the Topkapı Palace, according to one account. The city was raided four more times, once in 1620 and no fewer than three times in 1624.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: After 1624 the Zaporozhian raids gradually died out, as the Cossacks began to devote more and more of their martial energies to land-based campaigns, fighting on one side and then the other during such conflicts as the Thirty Years' War. Their numbers expanded with immigration from Poland proper and Lithuania. Szlachta failure to regard Zaporozhian Cossacks as nobles for inclusion in the registry of professional military cossacks eroded the Cossacks' loyalty towards the Commonwealth. The Cossack attempts to be recognized as equal to the szlachta were rebuffed and plans for transforming the Two-Nations Commonwealth (Polish–Lithuanian) into Three Nations (with Cossacks/Ruthenian people) were limited to a minority view. After the civil war of 1648 (or Rebellion from the Polish viewpoint) the Zaporozhian Host gained control of parts of Ukraine in 1649, although they at various time acknowledged the Polish King over the following decades.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: There were several Cossack uprisings against the Commonwealth in the early 17th century. The largest of them was the Khmelnytsky Uprising, which together with The Deluge is considered as one of the events that brought an end to the Golden Age of the Commonwealth. This uprising distanced Cossacks from the Commonwealth sphere of influence, only to make them subject to the Tsardom of Russia under the Treaty of Pereyaslav (1654), and established their realm as Left-bank Ukraine in 1667 under the Treaty of Andrusovo, and the Eternal Peace Treaty of 1686.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: After this point, the Cossack nation of the Zaporozhian Host was divided into two semi-autonomous republics within the Russian state: the Hetmanate on the Dnieper's left bank, and the more independent Zaporozhia to the south. A Cossack organization was also established in the Russian colony of Sloboda Ukraine.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: These organizations gradually lost their independence, and were abolished by Catherine II by the late 18th century. The Hetmanate became the governorship of Little Russia, and Sloboda Ukraine the Kharkiv province. After having its capital, the Sich, similar to Ukrainian capitals Chigirin and Baturyn destroyed and relocated more than once, Zaporozhia was absorbed into New Russia.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: The Cossacks that wanted to continue their lifestyle moved either to Ottoman and/or Austrian controlled territories on the Danube or after life on Bug and Dniester to the Kuban region, where they live to this date (see Kuban Cossacks)


title: History of the Cossacks

text: In the Russian Empire the Cossacks constituted 11 separate Cossack voiskos, settled along the frontiers: the Don Cossacks, Kuban Cossacks, Terek Cossacks, Astrakhan Cossacks, Ural Cossacks, Orenburg Cossacks, Siberian Cossacks, Semiryechensk Cossacks, Baikal Cossacks, Amur Cossacks, and Ussuri Cossacks. Also, there was a small number of the Cossacks in Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, who would form the Yenisey Cossack Host and Irkutsk Cossack regiment of the Ministry of the Interior in 1917. The "stanitsa", or village formed the primary unit of this organization. Each "stanitsa" held its land as a commune, and might allow non-Cossacks (excepting Jews) to settle on this land for payment of a certain rent. The assembly of all householders in villages of less than 30 households, and of 30 elected men in villages having from 30 to 300 households (one from each 10 households in the more populous ones), constituted the village assembly. This assembly resembled the "mir", but had wider attributes: it assessed the taxes, divided the land, took measures for the opening and support of schools, village grain-stores, communal cultivation, and so on, and elected its ataman (leader) and its judges, who settled all disputes up to an amount that the 1911 "Encyclopædia Britannica" gives as "£10" (or above that sum with the consent of both sides).


title: History of the Cossacks

text: All Cossack males had to perform military service for 20 years, beginning at the age of 18. They spent their first three years in the preliminary division, the next 12 in active service, and the last five years in the reserve. Every Cossack had to procure his own uniform, equipment and horse (if mounted), the government supplying only the arms.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Cossacks on active service were divided into three equal parts according to age, and only the first third (approximately age 18–26) normally performed active service, while the rest effectively functioned as reserves, based at home but bound to march out at short notice. The officers came from the military schools, in which all Cossack voiskos had their own vacancies, or were non-commissioned Cossack officers, with officers' grades. In return for this service the Cossacks received from the state considerable grants of land for each voisko separately.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: In 1893 the Cossacks had a total population of 2,648,049 (including 1,331,470 women), and they owned nearly 146,500,000 acres (593,000 km) of land, including 105,000,000 acres (425,000 km) of arable land and 9,400,000 acres (38,000 km) under forests. Each "stanitsa" controlled a share of the land, divided up at the rate of 81 acres (328,000 m) per each soul, with special grants to officers (personal to some of them, "in lieu" of pensions), and leaving about one-third of the land as a reserve for the future. The income which the Cossack voiskos received from the lands (which they rented to different persons), also from various sources (trade patents, rents of shops, fisheries, permits for gold-digging, etc.), as also from the subsidies they received from the government (about £712,500 in 1893), went to cover all the expenses of state and local administration. They had, besides, a special reserve capital of about £2,600,000. Village taxes covered the expenditure of the village administration. Each voisko had a separate general administration, and administrative structures differed within the different voiskos. The central administration, at the Ministry of War, comprising representatives of each voisko, discussed the proposals of all new laws affecting the Cossacks.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: In time of war the ten Cossack voiskos had to supply 890 mounted sotnias or squadrons (of 125 men each), 108 infantry sotnias or companies (also 125 men each), and 236 guns, representing 4267 officers and 177,100 men, with 170,695 horses. In time of peace they kept 314 squadrons, 54 infantry sotnias, and 20 batteries containing 108 guns (2574 officers, 60,532 men, 50,054 horses). Altogether, on the eve of World War I the Cossacks had 328,705 men ready to take up arms.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: As a rule, popular education amongst the Cossacks stood at a higher level than in the remainder of Imperial Russia. They had more schools and a greater proportion of their children went to school. In addition to agriculture, which (with the exception of the Ussuri Cossacks) sufficed to supply their needs and usually to leave a certain surplus, they carried on extensive cattle and horse breeding, vine culture in the Caucasus, fishing on the Don, the Ural, and the Caspian Sea, hunting, beekeeping etc. The Cossacks mostly rented out rights to extract coal, gold and other minerals found on their territories to strangers, who also owned most factories.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: The Tsarist authorities also introduced a military organization similar to that of the Cossacks into certain non-Cossack districts, which supplied a number of mounted infantry sotnias ("hundreds"). Their peace-footing on the eve of World War I comprised:


title: History of the Cossacks

text: In the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution, the Cossacks found themselves on both sides of the conflict. Many officers and experienced Cossacks fought for the White Army, and some of the poorer ones joined the Red Army. Following the defeat of the White Army, a policy of Decossackization ("Raskazachivaniye") took place on the surviving Cossacks and their homelands since they were viewed as a potential threat to the new regime. This involved dividing their territory amongst other divisions and giving it to new autonomous republics of minorities, and then actively encouraging settlement of these territories with those peoples, but there were also arrests and violent repressions. This policy of resettlement was especially true for the Terek Cossacks land. The Cossack homelands were often very fertile, and during the collectivisation campaign many Cossacks shared the fate of kulaks. The famine of 1933 hit the Don and Kuban territory the hardest. According to Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 3 million, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Cossacks", including 45,000Terek Cossacks.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: When the war broke out the Cossacks found themselves on both sides of the conflict. Most fought for the Soviet Union; however, some chose to settle old scores by collaborating with the Germans, especially after the Soviet Union's initial series of defeats, including the loss of much of the army of Ivan Kononov, a former Soviet major who defected to the Germans on the first day of war with some of his 436th regiment, and served around the German-occupied city of Mogilev, guarding lines of communications against Soviet partisans.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: In the summer of 1942 the German armies entered territories inhabited by the Cossacks. There in the open steppe resistance was futile, but nevertheless many, despite their hatred of Communism, refused to collaborate with the invaders of their country. While collaboration was inevitable, most of the leaders were former Tsarist officers who wanted to avenge their defeat by the Communists, but many recruits came from prisoner-of-war camps. On some occasions relatives separated by the Russian Civil War met each other again on different sides of the conflict and killed ruthlessly.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: During the Battle of Stalingrad, Cossacks attacks, some led by Semyon Budyonny, were able to keep the Germans from entering the Caucausus, where particularly the Terek and the Kuban Cossacks were able to prevent the Germans from taking the mountains. Not only was the region rich in oil, but it was also the key to Iran and Iraq.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: From 1943 the Cossacks were kept mostly in the southern part of the front, where their use in reconnaissance and logistics proved invaluable. Many went on through Romania and into the Balkans during the final stages of the war.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Most of the collaborators, who some say numbered over 250,000 (although current figures claim the true number was not even a third of that) were the Don Cossacks, who, formerly the largest and strongest host, suffered the worst under Soviet collectivization policies. Kuban and Terek Cossacks, on the other hand, fought almost exclusively for the Red Army, and even in most desperate situations their heroism was evident. Being the largest Red Army Cossack host, the Kuban Cossacks in 1945 triumphantly marched on Red Square in the famous Victory Parade.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Many of the collaborators fled the Soviet advance (often chased by Soviet Cossacks) but under Soviet-Allied agreements thousands of them were handed back to the USSR. Following the death of Joseph Stalin, large numbers of the repatriated were allowed to return to their native lands, under a promise of secrecy. Only after 1991, with the collapse of the Communist regime in the USSR, could they openly mourn the lost members of their communities.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: The division of the Cossacks in the Russian Civil War and the Second World War continues to be a controversial issue today.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in Russia emerged numerous cossack communities all over the country. In Russia, both registered and unregistered communities identify with cossackism. The Cossack communities in Russia cooperate with each other as well as with the Russian Orthodox Church. End of 2018 the Cossacks have set up an All-Russian Cossack Community to coordinate cultural work and strengthen the Cossack roots (such as to introduce the original Cossack costumes again).


title: History of the Cossacks

text: During the 2018 FIFA World Cup Cossack groups were incorporated into Russian police forces in order to suppress anti-Putin protests.


title: History of the Cossacks

text: The organization "The Ukrainian Registered Cossacks" (URC) was established on March 29, 2002 by the decision of the "Grand Rada" of All-Ukrainian public organization "Ukrainian Registered Cossacks" (URC) and was registered in the Ministry of Justice on 8 July 2002.


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: Both Asuna and Kirito have become popular characters in anime and manga fandom, frequently appearing on lists of the most popular anime characters. Additionally, Asuna has featured in numerous official "Sword Art Online" merchandise, and has been the subject of mixed to mostly positive critical reception, with focus on her relationship with Kirito, attractiveness, and role in the series.


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: In an interview with series creator Reki Kawahara, the author noted that the female characters in "Sword Art Online" were not based on anyone he knew in the real world, with him stating "I don’t usually make a character, setting, or anything before I start writing. As I write the story, the girls become what they are now. So, somehow, I don’t know exactly, but somehow, my subliminal idea or some hidden emotion creates the characters to be strong and capable." Kawahara also added that he wrote the series to demonstrate that he views online gaming not as a social ill or escape from real life, and thus decided to show games in a more positive light in his light novels. In another interview with Anime News Network, interviewer Lynzee Loveridge noted that Asuna is a "very strong, capable female character", likening her to Genji's mother in "The Tale of Genji", to which Kawahara agreed.


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: At Sakura-Con 2013, Kawahara noted that "the character of Asuna I might have created a little too perfectly for "Sword Art Online". When teamed up with Kirito, there were hardly any problems the two as a pair could not overcome", in response to whether Asuna was a "tricky character" to develop. In an interview with Haruka Tomatsu, Asuna's voice actor, she said that "rather than having something similar to her, I feel that to me, she is the ideal person that I would want to become. After all, she can cook, she's smart... I think that she's the type of woman I wanted to become and admired. Leaving aside if I can cook well, though, I really like to cook. I don't really know if I can say if we are alike because of that, though."


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: is Asuna's signature one-handed rapier. She continued to use it as her main weapon of choice until the fateful battle on the 75th Floor. Kirito used this rapier to stab and defeat Heathcliff in the final battle, thus clearing the game. Her rapier, combined with her speed, earned her the nickname "Lightning Flash.”


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: The main heroine of "Sword Art Online" and main protagonist of the seventh volume, Asuna is a friend and later to be wife of Kirito and a sub-leader of the "Knights of the Blood Oath", a medium-sized guild acknowledged as the strongest guild in Aincrad. Being one of the few girls that play "SAO" and extremely attractive, she receives many invitations and proposals. Asuna is a strong-willed, accomplished player known in-game as the "Flash" for her extraordinary fast sword skill. Later, she falls in love with Kirito and they marry in-game. Towards the end of the "SAO" arc, she saves Kirito from a killing blow by Heathcliff at the cost of her life. However, her death was only in-game and she is shortly reunited with Kirito shortly after the death of Heathcliff.


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: Despite the completion of "SAO", Asuna remains unconscious and is instead detained in another virtual reality called "Alfheim Online". She is forced to play the role of "Titania the Queen of Fairies", with Nobuyuki Sugō, the man responsible for imprisoning her, playing as Oberon the Fairy King. This is done so that Sugō could marry Asuna in the real world, while she is unconscious and thus take over RCT Progress Inc. She attempts to escape the World Tree where she is imprisoned and manages to steal a GM card which she throws out of the window when she hears Yui's voice. Upon being released she creates two avatars for "Alfheim", Asuna (being the healer of the team) and Erika (a battle-type avatar), and went on to continue living together with Kirito. She enrolls at the SAO Survivor School with Kazuto Kirigaya in the real world after everything ended. In the real world, Asuna's parents want her to follow in their footsteps. However, after living in "SAO" and meeting Kirito, she gains a different perspective and looks back on her past with disgust. She officially becomes Kazuto's real-life girlfriend and dreams of marrying him and having a family with him in the future.


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: In a review, Richard Eisenbeis of Kotaku hailed "Sword Art Online" as the smartest series in recent years; Eisenbeis particularly noted how the romance between Kirito and Asuna is explored bringing "definition to exactly what love is like in a virtual world." However, in the second half of the novels, criticism was levied at the aspect of turning Asuna into a damsel in distress trope, stating that a strong female lead was "reduced to nothing but the quest item the male lead is hunting for." Eisenbeis further complained that "in the first arc of "Sword Art Online", Asuna was a strong fighter and one of the leaders who thousands depended on to get them through the death game alive. In the second arc, she was powerless, locked in a literal bird cage and molested by her captor while waiting for her hero to rescue her. In "Gun Gale Online", she was little more than a spectator cheering on her man. And even in "Calibre", she was just another member of the ensemble cast."


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: Responding to this criticism, Karen Mead of Japanator.com disagreed, writing that "in Asuna's case, her actions are instrumental to her own rescue; if she hadn't broken out of her cell and gone exploring late in the show, Kirito wouldn't have gotten the card he needed to get to where she was and rescue her", thus invalidating her role as a damsel in distress technically, though the criticism itself was still seen as valid. The claim that Kirito serves as a "Gary Stu" type character was also contested, citing his relationship with Asuna. Nevertheless, Eisenbeis praised the fourth arc of "Sword Art Online" as it focuses primarily on Asuna's point of view – an "excellent choice" in his opinion, as it "allows Asuna, who suddenly went from strong female lead to weak damsel in distress in the series’ second arc, to once again come into her own and develop as a character." The arc as a whole was called "both heartbreaking and beautiful."


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: Asuna is one of the most popular characters in "Sword Art Online". In a fan poll by anime website Charapedia, 10,000 respondents voted on their favourite couples in anime, with Asuna and Kirito topping the list. Kirito's confession to Asuna also placed third in a list of the top twenty "anime and manga love confessions" by the same website. A third Charapedia poll, which asked fans to list their favourite "cool" women in anime, had Asuna placed second with 525 votes. A fourth, which users listed the "top 20 female anime/manga characters not to provoke", had Asuna listed in third place. A fifth, where respondents ranked the "top 30 [anime] characters they’d like to work for", had Kirito placed twenty-ninth and Asuna twenty-sixth. Yet in another Charapedia poll, "Asuna" was first on a list of the "top 20 anime characters Japanese fans would name their children after"; "Kazuto" (Kirito) placed fourth. A Chinese website, bilibili, took a reader poll to find the most "moe" characters of 2015; Asuna winning the female third place and Kirito listed in the male top 8. Asuna and Kirito were awarded first and second respectively in a character poll by Dengeki Bunko (the publisher of "Sword Art Online") for their light novels. Additionally, Asuna scored first place in a Tokyo Otaku Mode survey where users polled which anime characters they most want to date, where 2,845 respondents from 100 countries participated.


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: Kirito and Asuna again made a list of the "[Top] 7 Couples Who Make Love and War" by Anime News Network, writing "love blossoms on the virtual battlefield and the two wed before taking on the game's creator together. Otamart, a popular Japanese app that specializes in anime, manga and idol products, polled users in which characters look best in swimsuits and yukatas, with Asuna placing 13th (for swimsuits) and 15th (for yukatas) respectively. Another Otamart poll asking users to rank the anime characters they would want to give chocolates to for Valentine's Day had Asuna placed both 10th on characters men wish to give chocolates to and men wish to receive chocolates from. The August 2014 issue of "Newtype" published results of a recent character popularity poll, with Asuna placing 4th for all female characters (Kirito placed 1st in the male character category). Asuna was ranked the eighth "Top 25 Hottest Anime Babes [of] 2013." Italian restaurant La Ricetta in Zama, Kanagawa features pancakes prepared with anime and video game character art, including Kirito and Asuna.


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: The character has received positive critical reception, and her popularity has led to her being featured in several promotional efforts or merchandise of the series. This includes two swimsuit figures of Asuna and Leafa, another character from "Sword Art Online". There is also a "cooking version" figurine of Asuna, which is set for a May 2016 release. She also features in promotional advertisements for a series of Umaibo puffed corn snacks by Namco. An interactive digital assistant app titled "Wake Me Up Asuna", in which Asuna provides the user with information such as wake-up calls, current weather, fortune, and appointments, was released in June 2015 in Japan, followed by an international release in English. In the app, Asuna herself appears in multiple costumes, including her Knights of the Blood uniform and a yellow sweater. The app itself is free though users have to pay for English voice recognition and subtitles.


title: Asuna (Sword Art Online)

text: "Sword Art Online" girls (including Asuna) feature in a merchandise lottery by Bandai, with Anime News Network humorously noting that "the girls of "Sword Art Online" have brought in a pretty penny for the franchise's creators, whether the characters are lounging under parasols or starring in their own manga spin-off." Replicas of Asuna's "Wind Fleuret" and Kirito's "Elucidator" rapiers have been built. There are also Kirito, Asuna, and Sinon "Sword Art Online"-branded perfumes for sale; "Asuna" is described as " a sweet, irresistibly refreshing scent of galbanum and jasmine." "Sword Art Online" glasses based on the characters had a "Fairy Dance Asuna" model "inspired by [her] time in Yggdrasil, the World Tree", and "these glasses have pale pink frames with a red ribbon and flowing hair depicted on each arm." There are also earphone jack figures of Asuna (in both regular and Titania versions), Leafa, and Suguha. Asuna has featured in several "Sword Art Online"-related video games. This includes "", in which several characters appearing under the "Dengeki Bunko" imprint are featured. Asuna, Kirito and Leafa appeared in a campaign by the "Manga Anime Guardians" project in combating anime and manga piracy, with the being project supported by 15 anime production studios and manga publishers.


title: Rover SD1

text: The Rover SD1 is both the code name and eventual production name given to a series of executive cars built by the Specialist Division (later the "Jaguar-Rover-Triumph" division) of British Leyland (BL), under the Rover marque. It was produced through its Specialist, Rover Triumph and Austin Rover divisions from 1976 until 1986, when it was replaced by the Rover 800. The SD1 was marketed under various names. In 1977 it won the European Car of the Year title.


title: Rover SD1

text: In "SD1", the "SD" refers to "Specialist Division" and "1" is the first car to come from the in-house design team.


title: Rover SD1

text: The SD1 was the final Rover-badged vehicle to be produced at Solihull. Future Rover models would be built at the former British Motor Corporation factories at Longbridge and Cowley.


title: Rover SD1

text: In 1971, Rover, at that time a part of the British Leyland (BL) group, began developing a new car to replace both the Rover P6 and the Triumph 2000/2500. The designers of both Triumph and Rover submitted proposals for the new car known as the Triumph Puma and Rover P10 respectively, of which the latter was chosen. David Bache was to head the design team, inspired by exotic machinery such as the Ferrari Daytona and 365 GTC/4, and the late 1960s design study by Pininfarina for the BMC 1800, which also guided the design of the Citroën CX. Spen King was responsible for the engineering. The two had previously collaborated on the Range Rover. The project was first code-named RT1 (for Rover Triumph Number 1) but then soon changed to SD1 (for Specialist Division Number 1) as Rover and Triumph were put in the new "Specialist Division" of British Leyland.


title: Rover SD1

text: The new car was designed with simplicity of manufacture in mind in contrast to the P6, the design of which was rather complicated in areas such as the De Dion-type rear suspension. The SD1 used a well-known live rear axle instead. This different approach was chosen because surveys showed that although the automotive press was impressed by sophisticated and revolutionary designs the general buying public was not unless the results were good. However, with the live rear axle came another retrograde step – the car was fitted with drum brakes at the rear.


title: Rover SD1

text: Rover's plans to use a new 2.2-litre DOHC 16-valve Slant-Four engine with Bosch L-Jetronic fuel injection were soon abandoned as BL management ruled that substantially redesigned versions of Triumph's six-cylinder engine were to power the car instead. The Rover V8 engine was fitted in the engine bay. The three-speed automatic gearbox was the BorgWarner 65 model.


title: Rover SD1

text: The dashboard of the SD1 features an air vent, unusually, directly facing the passenger. The display binnacle sits on top of the dashboard in front of the driver to aid production in left-hand drive markets, since it avoided the expense of producing two different dashboard mouldings for LHD and RHD versions. The air vent doubles as a passage for the steering-wheel column, and the "podular" display binnacle can be easily fitted on top of the dashboard on either the left or right-hand side of the car. This concept was not entirely new; it had also been used on the Range Rover and was used again on the Mk.1 Austin Metro, both of which were also designed by David Bache. The interior of the Series 1 was notable for its lack of wood embellishment in comparison to previous Rover saloons, with an extensive use instead of modern soft-feel plastics, and a new "skeletal" version of the Rover badge would appear on the bonnet - Bache was keen that the SD1 should make use of the latest industrial design trends and be a clean break from the past.


title: Rover SD1

text: An estate body had been envisaged, but it did not get beyond the prototype stage. Two similarly specified estates have survived, and are exhibited at the Heritage Motor Centre and the Haynes International Motor Museum respectively. One was used by BL chairman Sir Michael Edwardes as personal transport in the late 1970s. The two cars as befit prototypes differ in the detail of and around the tailgate. One car has a recessed tailgate, while the other has a clamshell arrangement, where the whole tailgate is visible when closed.


title: Rover SD1

text: The SD1 was intended to be produced in a state-of-the-art extension to Rover's historic Solihull factory alongside the TR7. It was largely funded by the British government, who had bailed BL out from bankruptcy in 1975. Unfortunately, this did nothing to improve the patchy build quality that then plagued all of British Leyland. That, along with quick-wearing interior materials and poor detailing ensured that initial enthusiasm soon turned to disappointment.


title: Rover SD1

text: This car was launched on its home market in June 1976 in hatchback/fastback form only, as the V8-engined Rover 3500: SOHC 2.3 L and 2.6 L sixes followed in November 1977, when the Rover P6 and Triumph 2000 were finally discontinued. Although there was no four-cylinder version of the SD1 at this point, British Leyland produced 1.8, 2.0 and 2.2 versions of the smaller Princess in order to compete with the entry-level versions of the Ford Granada, as well as more expensive versions of the Ford Cortina.


title: Rover SD1

text: The car was warmly received by the press and even received the European Car of the Year award for 1977. Its launch on the European mainland coincided with its appearance at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1977, some three months after the Car of the Year announcement. Dealers had no left-hand drive cars for sale, however, since production had been blocked by a tool makers' strike affecting several British Leyland plants and a "bodyshell dispute" at the company's Castle Bromwich plant. Closer to home, the car and its design team received The Midlander of the Year Award for 1976, because they had between them done most in the year to increase the prestige of the (English) Midlands region.


title: Rover SD1

text: Poor construction quality was apparent even in the company's press department fleet. The British magazine "Motor" published a road test of an automatic 3500 in January 1977, and while keen to highlight the Rover's general excellence, they also reported that the test car suffered from poor door seals, with daylight visible from inside past the rear door window frame's edge on the left side of the car, and a curious steering vibration at speed which might (or might not) have resulted from the car's front wheels not having been correctly balanced. Disappointment was recorded that the ventilation outlet directly in front of the driver appeared to be blocked, delivering barely a breeze even when fully open; the writer had encountered this problem on one other Rover 3500, although he had also driven other cars of the same type with an abundant output of fresh air through the vent in question. Nevertheless, in March 1977, Britain's "Autocar" was able to publish an article by Raymond Mays – a famous racing driver and team manager during (in particular) the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s – in which Mays explained why, after driving it for 12,000 miles, he considered his Rover 3500 was "the best car he [had] ever had", both for its many qualities as a driver's car and for its excellent fuel economy even when driven hard. Similar ventilation problems persisted until 1980 and were reported in tests of the V8-S version.


title: Rover SD1

text: Another area of concern was flaking paint on early models, forcing British Leyland to spend a lot of money on repainting cars.


title: Rover SD1

text: In television shows John Steed in "The New Avengers" and George Cowley in "The Professionals" both used yellow Rover 3500 models.


title: Rover SD1

text: Between 1976 and 1981 there were some very minor updates to the car including new badging (front and rear) and chrome backed door mirrors - the traditional-style Rover Longship emblem returned for the 1981 model year, thus replacing the 'skeletal' version, although the latter continued to be used on the hubcaps, and indeed a variant of this Rover logo was later used as a hubcap emblem on both the later SD3 Rover 200 and Rover 800 models as late as 1989. 1979 also saw the introduction of the then range-topping V8-S model with no mechanical alterations, available in a rather bright metallic "Triton" green amongst others with either gold or silver-painted alloy wheels depending on the body color. Interior specification included air-conditioning, thick luxurious carpets, velour seats and a headlamp wash/wipe system. This now very rare model was replaced in late 1980 with the Vanden Plas (VDP) model, which came with a leather interior as standard.


title: Rover SD1

text: In 1980 Rover obtained US type approval for the SD1 and re-entered the American market after a ten-year absence. The car was only made available as a single variant, using a modified version of the V8 engine and badged simply as "Rover 3500". The equipment and trim levels were similar to that of the UK market's then top-of-the-range V8-S model. The main differences were a smaller steering wheel, the manually operated sunroof being a cost option and rear passenger head restraints were not available at all. Small Union Jack badges were fixed to the lower section of each front wing, just ahead of the doors, to promote the car's British origins. Canadian market cars had V8 badges instead of the Union Jack.


title: Rover SD1

text: The five-speed manual gearbox was supplied as standard, with the three-speed automatic version being a cost option.


title: Rover SD1

text: US safety legislation (that first applied to the Citroën DS) demanded that the headlamp arrangement excluded the front glass panels. Also larger, heavier bumpers were required, increasing the overall length to .


title: Rover SD1

text: American emissions regulations necessitated replacing the carburetors with Lucas' L-Jetronic fuel injection system, using dual catalytic converters, using a modified exhaust manifold and adding antismog equipment. The engine's compression ratio was modified to 8.13:1.


title: Rover SD1

text: Beginning in the 1980 model year, the American version of the 3528 cc V8 used in the Triumph TR8 produced 133 hp with carburetors, except in California where it produced 137 hp with fuel injection.


title: Rover SD1

text: Beginning in June 1980, the American version of the Rover 3500 produced 148 hp with fuel injection, while the European version of the Rover SD1 produced 155 hp with carburetors.


title: Rover SD1

text: For the 1981 model year, both the Rover 3500 and Triumph TR8 produced 148 hp with fuel injection, and 1981 would be the last year for both models in the United States.


title: Rover SD1

text: Fuel injection for the 3528 cc V8 Rover engine was first introduced in the Triumph TR8 (137 hp) intended for California, and then introduced in the Rover 3500 (148 hp) later in the year when it was launched in America.


title: Rover SD1

text: Fuel injection for the Rover V8 was introduced in Europe, along with other modifications such as having a hotter camshaft, when the 1982 Rover SD1 Vitesse was launched with 192 hp.


title: Rover SD1

text: strike: [Publicity material claimed it was capable of reaching 148 hp (SAE) at 5100 rpm but the car as sold actually peaked at 133 hp (at 5000 rpm). ]


title: Rover SD1

text: Since August 1978, a carbureted engine, with antismog equipment, had already been on sale in Australia with . Beginning in the 1981 model year, Australia received a version of the fuel injected federalized engine with .


title: Rover SD1

text: Despite the necessary modifications, Rover chose not to set up an assembly plant in the US but built and shipped the cars from the Solihull factory.


title: Rover SD1

text: The SD1 gained positive reviews in the American press and was competitively priced against rivals such as the BMW 5 Series and corresponding Mercedes-Benzes. Nevertheless, the car achieved just 480 sales between its launch in June 1980 and the end of that year. The whole of 1981 attracted 774 sales, although most of these cars had actually been built and stockpiled the previous year.


title: Rover SD1

text: Rover ceased the supply of American market SD1s at the end of 1981, although unsold cars remained available from dealers well into the following year.


title: Rover SD1

text: Reasons for the commercial failure of the SD1 in the US are open to speculation. The weak value of the American dollar against European currencies at the time rendered imports relatively expensive in comparison to a home-built product. A significant rise in oil prices during 1979 led to many motorists opting for more fuel-efficient cars. Public awareness of the SD1 may have been low as the dealership network across America was small, while Rover's expenditure on the aforementioned modifications, testing, and approval for the US market left limited budget for publicity and advertising. (To save money the official press launch was combined with that of the Triumph TR8.)


title: Rover SD1

text: Major restructuring of BL following the Ryder Report resulted in the SD1 production line being moved to the former Morris plant in Cowley in 1981. The Solihull plant was turned over to produce Land Rover models, following on from that marque's separation from Rover in 1978. The hugely expensive extension to Solihull, which had been built specifically for the SD1 and Triumph TR7, was mothballed, and was finally brought back into use in 1997 for the Land Rover Freelander and in 2016 for the Jaguar XE and F-PACE.


title: Rover SD1

text: 1981 also saw the beginning of "Project XX" – a venture between BL and Honda for a new executive car expected to replace the SD1, although it was not anticipated for production until the mid-1980s. Project XX ultimately emerged as the Rover 800 Series in 1986 and would be the replacement for the SD1.


title: Rover SD1

text: Early in 1982, Rover unveiled the Cowley-built, facelifted line to the public (although the final Series 1s were also built at Cowley). These cars benefited mostly from small cosmetic changes on the exterior as well as a quite extensively redesigned interior. The biggest interior change was to the instrument binnacle, which was made both flatter and longer than the original, with the ancillary gauges and digital clock moved out of the driver's line of sight almost over the centre of the dashboard, whilst the dials themselves followed modern practice being under a glass hood instead of being deeply recessed as before. Wood trim on both the dashboard and the door cards were included after criticism that the original interior looked downmarket. Car spotters can distinguish the two series by the headlights, which were chrome-rimmed and flush fitting on the Series 2, recessed on the Series 1, the deeper rear window, now fitted with a rear wash wipe, and the new plastic wrap around bumpers which replaced the three-piece rubber and stainless steel ones. Other details, which are not as easy to assign include the full-width rear badge strip under the tail lights, engine size badges on front wings, and a range of new wheel trims and alloy wheels. The automatic gearbox was now a French built GM Turbo-Hydramatic 180 model ( TH180 ), still offering three speeds but better ratios. The electric window switch pack moved from the centre console to the driver's door (and is well remembered for lacking edge finishing trim around the recesses), and a fully automatic choke appeared – eliminating the manual choke lever which had a tendency to break.