title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: Some experts, among them Jean Pascal Zanders, initially stated that evidence that sarin was used, as claimed by pro-rebel sources, was still lacking and highlighted the lack of second-hand contaminations typically associated with use of weapons-grade nerve agents: "I remain sceptical that it was a nerve agent like sarin. I would have expected to see more convulsions," he said. "The other thing that seems inconsistent with sarin is that, given the footage of first responders treating victims without proper protective equipment, you would expect to see considerable secondary casualties from contamination – which does not appear to be evident." However, after Zanders saw footage imminently after the attack, he changed his mind, saying: "The video footage and pictures this time are of a far better quality. You can clearly see the typical signs of asphyxiation, including a pinkish blueish tinge to the skin colour. There is one image of an adult woman where you can see the tell-tale blackish mark around her mouth, all of which suggests death from asphyxiation." Zanders however cautioned that these symptoms covered a range of neurotoxicants, including some available for civilian use as pest control agents, and said that until the UN reported its analysis of samples, "I can't make a judgement. I have to keep an open mind."


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: According to a report by "The Daily Telegraph", "videos uploaded to YouTube by activists showed rows of motionless bodies and medics attending to patients apparently in the grip of seizures. In one piece of footage, a young boy appeared to be foaming at the mouth while convulsing."


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander of British Chemical and Biological counterterrorism forces, told BBC that the images were very similar to previous incidents he had witnessed, although he could not verify the footage.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: According to public statements, intelligence agencies in Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Turkey, and Germany concluded that the Syrian government was most likely responsible for the attacks. Western intelligence agencies agreed that video evidence is consistent with the use of a nerve agent, such as sarin. Laboratory tests showed traces of sarin, in blood and hair samples collected from emergency workers who responded to the attacks.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: Russia said there was no evidence tying the Syrian government to the attack and that it was likely carried out by an opposition group.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: On 2 September, the French government published a nine-page intelligence report blaming the Syrian government for the Ghouta attacks. An unnamed French government official said that the analysis was carried out by the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) and Direction du renseignement militaire (DRM) based on satellite and video images, on-the-ground sources, and samples collected from two April attacks. The report said analysis of samples collected from attacks in Saraqeb and Jobar in April 2013 had confirmed the use of sarin.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: "The Guardian" reported that French intelligence had images that showed rocket attacks on opposition neighborhoods from government-controlled areas to the east and west of Damascus. The report said that the government later launched conventional bombing of those neighborhoods in order to destroy evidence of a chemical attack. Based on analysis of 47 videos, the report said at least 281 fatalities occurred. Using other sources and extrapolation a chemical attack model estimated the total number of death at approximately 1,500.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: The Bundesnachrichtendienst said it intercepted a phone call between a Hezbollah official and the Iranian Embassy in which the Hezbollah representative criticised Assad's decision to attack with poison gas, apparently confirming its use by the Syrian government. German newspaper "Der Spiegel" reported on 3 September that BND President Gerhard Schindler told them that based on the agency's evidence, Germany now shared the United Kingdom, United States, and France's view that the attacks were carried out by the Syrian government. However, they also said the attack may have been much more potent than intended, speculating that there may have been an error in mixing the chemical weapons used.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: Without going into detail, Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said on 22 August 2013 that Israel's intelligence assessment was that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in the Damascus area. Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said the Syrian government had already used chemical weapons against the rebels on a smaller scale multiple times prior to the Ghouta attacks. Fox News reported that Unit 8200 helped provide intelligence to the United States, Israel's closest international ally, implicating the Syrian government in the attacks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the General debate of the sixty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly that Syrian government used the chemical weapons against its own people.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: Russian officials said that there was no proof that the government of Syria had a hand in the chemical attacks. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the American, British and French intelligence reports as "unconvincing" and said at a joint news conference with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius after the release of the United Nations report in mid-September that he continued to believe the rebels carried out the attack. Russian President Vladimir Putin said he wanted to see evidence that would make it "obvious" who used chemical weapons in Ghouta.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: In a commentary published in "The New York Times" on 11 September 2013, Putin wrote that "there is every reason to believe [poison gas] was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons,". Lavrov said on 18 September that "new evidence" given to Russia by the Syrian government would be forthcoming.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: The Turkish government-run Anadolu Agency published an unconfirmed report on 30 August 2013, pointing to the Syrian 155th Missile Brigade and the 4th Armored Division as the perpetrators of the two attacks. It said the attack had involved 15 to 20 missiles with chemical warheads at around 02:45 on 21 August, targeting residential areas between Douma and Zamalka in Eastern Ghouta. It claimed that the 155th Missile Brigade had used 9K52 Luna-M missiles, M600 missiles, or both, fired from Kufeyte, while other rockets with a 15- to 70-kilometer range were fired by the 4th Armored Division from Mount Qasioun. The agency did not explain its source.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: A report on the attacks by the United Kingdom's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) was published on 29 August 2013 prior to a vote on intervention by the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The report said at least 350 people were killed and that it was "highly likely" that the attacks had been carried out by the Syrian government, resting in part on the firm view that the Syrian opposition was not capable of carrying out a chemical weapons attack on this scale, and on the JIC view that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war on a small scale on 14 previous occasions. Analysis of the Ghouta attacks themselves was based largely on reviewing video footage and publicly available witness evidence. The report conceded problems with motivation for the attacks, saying there was "no obvious political or military trigger for regime use of CW on an apparently larger scale now." British officials said they believe the Syrian military used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition on at least 14 times prior to the Ghouta attacks and described "a clear pattern of regime use" of the nerve agent since 2012.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: A vote in the House of Commons to approve UK participation in military action against Syria was narrowly rejected, with some MPs arguing that the case for Syrian government culpability was not sufficiently strong to justify approving action. Prime Minister David Cameron himself had been forced to concede that "in the end there is no 100 percent certainty about who is responsible."


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: A controversial "US government assessment of the Ghouta attacks" was published by the White House on 30 August 2013, with a longer classified version made available to members of Congress. The report blamed the chemical attacks on the Syrian government, saying rockets containing a nerve agent were fired from government-held territory into neighborhoods in the early morning, impacting at least 12 locations. It stated 1,429 people were killed, including at least 426 children. It dismissed the possibility that evidence supporting the US government's conclusion could have been manufactured by the opposition, stating it "does not have the capability" to fabricate videos, eyewitness accounts, and other information. The report also said that the US believed Syrian officials directed the attacks, based on "intercepted communications." A major element, as reported by news media, was an intercepted telephone call between a Syrian Ministry of Defense official and a Syrian 155th Brigade chemical weapons unit commander in which the former demanded answers for the attacks. According to some reports, this phone intercept was provided to the U.S. by Israeli Intelligence Corps Unit 8200.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: The U.S. government assessment suggested a motive for the attack, describing it as "a desperate effort to push back rebels from several areas in the capital's densely packed eastern suburbs." The report then states that evidence suggests "the high civilian death toll surprised and panicked senior Syrian officials, who called off the attack and then tried to cover it up." Secretary of State John Kerry later announced that hair, blood, soil, and cloth samples collected from the attack sites had tested positive for sarin or its immediate breakdown products.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: At least three members of Congress, expressed skepticism about the US intelligence report, calling the evidence circumstantial and thin. Obama's request that Congress authorize military force was not put to a vote of either the House of Representatives or the Senate, and the president ultimately admitted that "I wouldn't say I'm confident" that he could convince Congress to support strikes against Syria.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: Democratic Party Representative Alan Grayson offered some details regarding the classified report, which he described as 12 pages long, and criticized both the four-page public summary and the classified report. Grayson said the unclassified summary relied on "intercepted telephone calls, 'social media' postings and the like, but not one of these is actually quoted or attached … (As to whether the classified summary is the same, I couldn't possibly comment, but again, draw your own conclusion.)" Grayson cited as a problematic example the intercepted phone call between a Syrian Ministry of Defense official and the Syrian 155th Brigade, the transcript of which was not provided in the classified report, leaving Grayson unable to judge the accuracy of a report in The Daily Caller that the call's implications had been misrepresented in the report.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: The AP quoted anonymous US intelligence officials as saying that the evidence presented in the report linking Assad to the attack was "not a slam dunk." Jeffrey Goldberg also reported that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, personally told President Obama that the case for the Syrian government's responsibility was strong but not a "slam dunk." The AP later characterized the evidence released by the administration as circumstantial and said the government had denied its requests for more direct evidence, including satellite imagery and communications intercepts cited in the government assessment.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: IPS news analyst Gareth Porter questioned why the report was released by the White House as a "government assessment" as opposed being released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as an "intelligence community assessment." Porter quoted former intelligence officials who said the report was "evidently an administration document" and who also suggested evidence was "cherry-picked" to support the conclusion that the Syrian government carried out the attacks.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: On 8 September 2013, the then White House Chief-of-Staff, Denis McDonough said the administration lacks the "irrefutable, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence", but that a "common-sense test" implicates Assad.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: At the time of the attack, Syria was not a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention. However, Human Rights Watch argues that the Ghouta chemical attack was illegal under a different international agreement:


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: Syria is a party to the 1925 Geneva Gas protocol, which bans the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices. The use of chemical weapons is also prohibited as a matter of customary international humanitarian law, or the laws of war. The prohibition on the use of chemical weapons applies to all armed conflicts, including so-called non-international armed conflicts such as the current fighting in Syria. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in the Tadic case, stated "there undisputedly emerged a general consensus in the international community on the principle that the use of [chemical] weapons is also prohibited in internal armed conflicts."


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: Human Rights Watch stated that the UN Security Council should refer the Syria situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC) "to ensure accountability for all war crimes and crimes against humanity." Amnesty International also said that the Syria situation should be referred to the ICC because "the best way for the United States to signal its abhorrence for war crimes and crimes against humanity and to promote justice in Syria, would be to reaffirm its support for the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court." However, as the amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court explicitly making it a war crime to use chemical weapons in an internal conflict has not been ratified by most states nor Syria, the legal situation is complex and reliant on the attack being a part of a wider war crime. China and Russia have repeatedly used their status as members of the U.N. Security Council to block any attempt to bring Syria under the jurisdiction of the ICC; by 2017, Russia had used its veto power at least seven times to prevent the U.N. Security Council from taking action.


title: Ghouta chemical attack

text: After Russia and China blocked attempts to set up an international tribunal for Syria, survivors of the attack and human rights organizations have taken legal action in France, Germany, and Sweden. In October 2020, three human rights organizations submitted, on behalf of the victims of the attack, a criminal complaint and a dossier of evidence to Germany's federal public prosecutor in Karlsruhe; the dossier includes testimony from at least 17 survivors of the attack and 50 defectors from the Syrian government with knowledge of the government’s chemical weapons program or plans to carry out chemical attacks in Ghouta and Khan Shaykhun. In February 2021, lawyers representing victims of the attack and two international human rights groups filed with judges at a special war crimes unit in France’s palace of justice a complaint regarding the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons; if accepted, the complaint would trigger a criminal investigation of Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher, and other senior advisers and military officials. The complaint is based on evidence compiled by the Syrian Archive, and includes testimonies from survivors and defectors, an analysis of the Syrian military chain of command, and hundreds of items of documentary evidence, including photos and videos. In April 2021, lawyers representing victims of the attack filed a criminal complaint against members of the Syrian government, including Bashar al-Assad, with Swedish police, setting in motion a possible investigation into the role of Assad and other government officials.


title: Manderlay

text: Manderlay is a 2005 avant-garde drama film written and directed by Lars von Trier, the second and final part of von Trier's projected "" trilogy. It stars Bryce Dallas Howard, who replaces Nicole Kidman in the role of Grace Mulligan. The film co-stars Willem Dafoe, replacing James Caan. Lauren Bacall, Željko Ivanek, Jeremy Davies, and Chloë Sevigny return portraying different characters from those in "Dogville".


title: Manderlay

text: Only John Hurt, Udo Kier, and Jean-Marc Barr reprise their roles. The film was internationally co-produced with seven different European countries.


title: Manderlay

text: The staging is very similar to "Dogville", which was shot on a sparsely dressed sound stage. As in the case of "Dogville", "Manderlay"s action is confined to a small geographic area, in this case a plantation. The film is dedicated in memory of a French film producer, Humbert Balsan (1954-2005).


title: Manderlay

text: Set in 1933, the film takes up the story of Grace and her father after burning the town of Dogville at the end of the previous film. Grace and her father travel in convoy with a number of gunmen through rural Alabama where they stop briefly outside a plantation called Manderlay. As the gangsters converse, a black woman emerges from Manderlay's front gates complaining that someone is about to be whipped for stealing a bottle of wine.


title: Manderlay

text: Grace enters the plantation and learns that within it, slavery persists, roughly 70 years after the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Grace is appalled and insists on staying at the plantation with a small contingent of gunmen and her father's lawyer, Joseph, in order to guarantee the slaves' safe transition to freedom. Shortly after Grace's father and the remaining gangsters depart, Mam, the master of the house, dies, but not before asking Grace to burn a notebook containing "Mam's Law," an exhaustive code of conduct for the entire plantation and all its inhabitants, free and slave. She reads the descriptions of each variety of slave that can be encountered, which include:


title: Manderlay

text: The principal seven divisions are each populated by a single adult slave at Manderlay, who congregate daily and converse on a "parade ground," with Roman numerals of the numbers 1 through 7 designating where each slave stands. "Mam's Law" contains further provisions against the use of cash by slaves, or the felling of trees on the property for timber.


title: Manderlay

text: All of this information disgusts Grace and inspires her to take charge of the plantation in order to punish the slave owners and prepare the slaves for life as free individuals. In order to guarantee that the former slaves will not continue to be exploited as sharecroppers, Grace orders Joseph to draw up contracts for all Manderlay's inhabitants, institutionalizing a form of cooperative living in which the white family works as slaves and the blacks collectively own the plantation and its crops. Throughout this process, Grace lectures all those present about the notions of freedom and democracy, using rhetoric entirely in keeping with the ideology of racial equality which most contemporary Americans had yet to embrace.


title: Manderlay

text: However, as the film progresses, Grace fails to embed these principles in Manderlay's community in a form she considers satisfactory. Furthermore, her suggestions for improving the conditions of the community backfire on several occasions, such as using the surrounding trees for timber, which leaves the crops vulnerable to dust storms. After a year of such tribulations, the community harvests its cotton and successfully sells it, marking the high point of Grace's involvement. Subsequently, she un-enthusiastically has sex with one of the ex-slaves who also steals and gambles away all of the cotton profits. Finally admitting her failure, Grace contacts her father and attempts to leave the plantation only to be stopped by the plantation's blacks. At this point it is revealed that "Mam's Law" was not conceived and enforced by Mam or any of the other whites, but instead by Wilhelm, the community's eldest member, as a means of maintaining the status quo after the abolition of slavery, protecting the blacks from a hostile outside world. As in many von Trier films, the idealistic main character becomes frustrated by the reality he or she encounters.


title: Manderlay

text: Nicole Kidman and James Caan did not return in the film, the former due to scheduling conflicts while the latter disapproves the film, which was subjected by Caan as anti-American culture and slavery.


title: Manderlay

text: In terror over her sex scene, Bryce Dallas Howard said she went through it in a hypnotic state. After the first take she excused herself and went to the bathroom to collect her thoughts. Then she just started to look at it as some sort of comedic scene. "Just in my head. And interestingly enough, Lars kind of felt that. The scene wasn't written funny at all, but there are some really eccentric and absurd moments in that scene that people tend to chuckle at."


title: Manderlay

text: During production, a donkey was slaughtered for dramatic purposes. The scene was cut from the film before it was released.


title: Manderlay

text: "Manderlay" received mixed reviews from critics. , the film holds a 50% approval rating on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 103 reviews with an average rating of 5.70/10. The website's critics consensus reads: ""Manderlay" may work better as a political statement than as a film, making its points at the expense of telling a compelling story." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 46 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Manderlay

text: Anthony Lane of "The New Yorker" said, "Von Trier is not so much a filmmaker as a misanthropic mesmerist, who uses movies to bend the viewer to his humorless will," while Josh Kun of the "Los Angeles Times" added, "Trier gets lost in his own rhetoric."


title: Manderlay

text: Conversely, "The Guardian" film critic Peter Bradshaw and Roger Ebert both gave the film mildly positive reviews. While noting, "Many moviegoers are likely to like the film less than the discussion it drags them into," Ebert opined, "The crucial difference between "Manderlay" and the almost unbearable "Dogville" is not that [von Trier's] politics have changed, but that his sense of mercy for the audience has been awakened." Peter Bradshaw claimed that "Manderlay" "is a wind-up, but an effective wind-up," and wrote of von Trier's Land of Opportunities trilogy, "My guess is you can throw away the first and third movies and keep this one."


title: Manderlay

text: The film did not perform well at the box-office, taking a total of only $674,918. Compared to its production budget of $14.2 million, this makes it a box office bomb.


title: Manderlay

text: The "Manderlay" soundtrack, including songs from the film "Dogville", was arranged by composer Joachim Holbek, and released through Milan Records.


title: Robben Ford

text: Robben Lee Ford (born December 16, 1951) is an American blues, jazz, and rock guitarist. He was a member of the L.A. Express and Yellowjackets and has collaborated with Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, Larry Carlton, Rick Springfield, Little Feat and Kiss. He was named one of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of the 20th Century" by "Musician" magazine.


title: Robben Ford

text: Robben Ford was born in Woodlake, California, United States, and raised in Ukiah, California. He began playing the saxophone at age 10 and the guitar at age 14. Robben and two of his brothers (Patrick and Mark) created the "Charles Ford Blues Band" in honor of and named after their father. A fourth brother died in the Vietnam conflict.


title: Robben Ford

text: At age 18, Ford's band was hired to play with Charlie Musselwhite, and recorded two albums "The Charles Ford Band" and "Discovering the Blues". He recorded two albums with Jimmy Witherspoon called "Live" and "Spoonful". In the 1970s, Ford joined the jazz fusion band, L.A. Express, led by saxophonist Tom Scott. In 1974, the band supported George Harrison on his American tour and played on the Joni Mitchell albums "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" and "Miles of Aisles".


title: Robben Ford

text: After leaving the L.A. Express in 1976, Robben Ford recorded his first solo album, "The Inside Story" with a band that later became the Yellowjackets.


title: Robben Ford

text: In 1977, Ford was one of half a dozen or so session players asked to play the guitar solo for the Steely Dan song "Peg." In the end, the group went with the version by Jay Graydon instead. In 2006, a tribute album to Steely Dan – "The Royal Dan" – was released, with Ford covering "Peg" in his own style.


title: Robben Ford

text: In 1982, Ford was one of several guitarists who appeared on the KISS album "Creatures of the Night", playing lead guitar on the songs "Rock And Roll Hell" and "I Still Love You".


title: Robben Ford

text: Ford worked briefly with Miles Davis in 1986; and can be heard on Davis' Montreux box set. Ford released his second solo album "Talk to Your Daughter" in 1988. He joined Philippe Saisse, Marcus Miller and J.T. Lewis in the cast of The Sunday Night Band for the second and final season of the late-night NBC television program "Sunday Night" in 1989. In the 1990s, he released the albums "Robben Ford and the Blue Line, Mystic Mile, Handful of Blues, Tiger Walk and Supernatural".


title: Robben Ford

text: Robben Ford has received five Grammy Award nominations and was named one of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of the 20th Century" by "Musician" magazine. He credited pianist and arranger Roger Kellaway and saxophonist and arranger Tom Scott, whom he met while playing for Joni Mitchell, as a major influence on his musical development.


title: Robben Ford

text: Ford considers his first good electric a Guild Starfire III with a single Florentine (sharp) cutaway. He used a Gibson L-5 when he played with Charlie Musselwhite and the Ford Band, although he never thought it was a great guitar. While playing with Jimmy Witherspoon, Ford traded the L-5 plus $200 for a 1964 Gibson Super 400CES (which he sold in 1986). When Ford began playing with the L.A. Express and Joni Mitchell, he used a 1958 Gibson dot-neck ES-335.


title: Robben Ford

text: After Ford's "Talk to Your Daughter" album was released in 1988, Robben used a Robben Ford Signature model guitar created in a collaboration with Dan Smith of Fender and produced in Japan between 1987 and 1993. That guitar was based on the Fender Master Series Esprit Ultra that was produced from 1983 to 1986 in Japan. In 1987, new management at Fender authorized the first production of the Robben Ford Signature guitar. In 1994, production of the guitar moved from Japan to the Fender Custom Shop. Three models were produced: Ultra FM (with a carved maple top), Ultra SP (with a carved spruce top), and the Elite FM (with a carved flame maple top). The guitar line continued to be produced until 2002 when it was discontinued by Fender.


title: Robben Ford

text: Sometimes he plays a vintage 1960 Fender Telecaster, Gibson Les Pauls, or a 1963 Gibson SG. Ford also owns other guitars including a 1966 Epiphone Riviera (with the original Bigsby tremolo removed and replaced with a stop tailpiece).


title: Robben Ford

text: In a May 1–16, 2017 tour which ended in Niagara Falls NY, Ford debuted a newly acquired 1953 Gibson Les Paul.


title: Robben Ford

text: Robben Ford uses Dumble Amplifiers and Celestion G12-65 speakers. In 1983, Alexander "Howard" Dumble made Robben's first Dumble Overdrive Special (serial #002) for Robben. Dumble himself is the owner of serial #001.


title: Robben Ford

text: When traveling abroad he prefers taking his Dumble, but will sometimes use Fender Super Reverb or Fender Twin amplifiers. More recently Robben has been using Little Walter amplifiers at home and in the studio.


title: Hannes Van Dahl

text: Hannes Van Dahl (born Karl-Hannes Dahl, 18 January 1990) is a Swedish musician. He is best known as the drummer of the heavy metal band Sabaton.


title: Hannes Van Dahl

text: Dahl changed his name to "Hannes Van Dahl" as an adult. His interest in rock and metal music came from the skateboarding scene and a big inspiration was his cousin who played in a local band and his mother playing records to him from young age. At the age of 10 he started playing the bass guitar but quickly lost interest and moved on to the drums. His first band was called "The Motherfuckers".


title: Hannes Van Dahl

text: Later he started the band Downthrust and ended this engagement to join Evergrey in 2009 while replacing Jonas Ekdahl.


title: Hannes Van Dahl

text: Van Dahl's drumming teacher Snowy Shaw, after seeing the potential in him, recommended Van Dahl for Evergrey. During Shaw's engagement as Sabaton drummer, Van Dahl joined Shaw as a drum tech for four shows.


title: Hannes Van Dahl

text: After a rehearsal in The Abyss, he joined Sabaton as an official band member during the Swedish Empire Tour in 2013.


title: Hannes Van Dahl

text: In 2014, Sabaton released the Album "Heroes", which was the first Sabaton album Hannes Van Dahl recorded with the band.


title: Hannes Van Dahl

text: Van Dahl is married to Nightwish lead vocalist Floor Jansen. Their daughter Freja was born on 15 March 2017. He can play the guitar and skateboards during his quality time. Together with Tommy Johansson, Thobbe Englund and Chris Rörland, he is in the band The Last Heroes.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: John Richard Whiteley (28 December 1943 – 26 June 2005) was an English presenter, and journalist, best known for his twenty-three years as host of the game show "Countdown". "Countdown" was the launch programme for Channel 4 at 4:45 pm on 2 November 1982, and Whiteley was the first person to be seen on the channel (not counting a programme montage). Despite his intelligence, Whiteley enjoyed projecting the image of an absent-minded eccentric. His trademarks were his jolly, avuncular manner, fondness for puns, and his bold, sometimes garish wardrobe.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: Thanks to over twenty years' worth of nightly instalments of "Countdown" as well as his work on the Yorkshire magazine programme "Calendar" and various other television projects, at the time of his death Whiteley was believed to have clocked more hours on British television screens—and more than 10,000 appearances—than anyone else alive, apart from Carole Hersee, the young girl who appeared on the BBC's Test Card F.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: John Richard Whiteley was born 28 December 1943 in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, and spent his childhood in Baildon: his family owned a long-established textile mill, Thomas Whiteley and Co of Eccleshill, which went out of business in the 1960s. At 13, he won a scholarship to Giggleswick School, Yorkshire, where his English teacher was Russell Harty. He later became a governor of the school. Leaving school with seven O-levels and three A-levels, from 1962 he read English at Christ's College, Cambridge.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: On leaving Cambridge in July 1965, Whiteley served three years as a trainee at ITN but left to join the newly created Yorkshire Television in July 1968.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: In 1973 Whiteley and Woodrow Wyatt presented the Anglia Television documentary "The Red Under the Bed", about the trial of the Shrewsbury Two (Des Warren and Ricky Tomlinson), which was broadcast on the day that the trial jury retired to consider their verdict. The programme, which was heavily critical of the trade union movement, is now considered to have swayed jurors into returning a guilty verdict and was later cited by the Criminal Cases Review Commission as evidence that the verdicts were unsound. Warren and Tomlinson's convictions were overturned in 2021. Speaking in 2017 about the documentary, Tomlinson claimed to be in possession of confidential documents proving that it had been funded and written by British intelligence services and that Whiteley had been employed by MI5 at the time of broadcast.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: Whiteley was bitten by a ferret on an edition of "Calendar" in 1977. The animal bit his finger for half a minute before its owner, Brian Plummer, prised it free. The clip is often repeated on programmes showing television out-takes, and Whiteley once joked that when he died, the headlines would read, ""Ferret man dies"". He said, "It's made a lot of people laugh, and it's been shown all over the world. It's 30-odd years since it happened, and I think I've been a great PR man for the ferret industry. Ferrets have a lot to be grateful for; to me, you see, they've become acceptable because one of them bit me."


title: Richard Whiteley

text: In 1982, Yorkshire Television began to produce "Countdown", copying a French quiz show format, "Des chiffres et des lettres". Whiteley was chosen as host and continued with the show when Jeremy Isaacs brought it to Channel 4 as the first programme broadcast by the new station. Its first broadcast received over 3.5 million viewers, but the programme lost 3 million viewers for its second show.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: However, it gradually rebuilt its audience over the following weeks. It was as the host of "Countdown" that Whiteley became known to a wider audience in the United Kingdom outside the Yorkshire region. He was nicknamed "Twice Nightly Whiteley", in reference to the time when he would present the "Calendar" news programme and "Countdown" in the same evening, from 1982 to 1995. (In a self-deprecating joke, he often countered this with "Once Yearly, Nearly".)


title: Richard Whiteley

text: As the presenter of "Countdown", Whiteley developed a reputation for wearing garish suits and ties, and it was common for Carol Vorderman to comment on this. Whiteley also told many anecdotes and puns, which were often met by groans from other presenters and audience members. He was granted the honorary title of "Mayor of Wetwang" in 1998 and was known for his amusement at the village's name.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: "Countdown" was not intended to be a long-lasting format. Still, it quickly became a durable programme for Channel 4, at its peak enjoying a sizeable afternoon audience of almost five million. At the time of Whiteley's death, it still regularly attracted over a million viewers.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: Whiteley had a cameo appearance role as himself, presenting "Countdown", in the film "About a Boy". From series 54, broadcast in 2005, the series champion has received the "Richard Whiteley Memorial Trophy" in his honour. Following his death, Whiteley was replaced by Des Lynam.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: Whiteley also had his own chatshow, "Richard Whiteley Unbriefed", on the BBC. His guests were unknown to him beforehand, so before he could interview them, he had to guess who they were.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: Whiteley was one of the first people to report on the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing, as he was staying in the hotel at the time. He was the subject of "This Is Your Life" in March 1997 when he was surprised by Michael Aspel on the set of the ITV soap opera, "Emmerdale".


title: Richard Whiteley

text: On 15 June 2003, Whiteley appeared on the BBC show, "Top Gear" and set the slowest time in the Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car segment with a time of 2:06.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: In May 2005, Whiteley was taken into hospital with pneumonia. He made a slow recovery from the illness, but doctors discovered problems with his heart and carried out an emergency operation for endocarditis on 24 June. This operation was not successful and, two days later on 26 June, Whiteley died at Leeds General Infirmary. He was buried at St John the Evangelist Church at East Witton.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: He had suffered from asthma since he was very young and also had diabetes. The edition of "Countdown" that was due to be broadcast on 27 June was postponed as a mark of respect. Carol Vorderman gave an emotional tribute to him on 28 June when "Countdown" returned, stating that "The clock stopped too soon". Several shows had already been recorded before he went into the hospital. His final show was broadcast on 1 July 2005, which was the grand finale of the 53rd series.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: On 10 November 2005, five months after his death, thousands of friends and admirers gathered at York Minster for a memorial service to celebrate Whiteley's life. Guests included Vorderman, who paid tribute to him, saying, "If he were here, he would have welcomed you one-by-one, greeting every one of you by the hand and would have wanted a photograph taken".


title: Richard Whiteley

text: In 2007, Channel 4 announced its creation of the Richard Whiteley Memorial Bursary, a nine-month work experience placement at Yorkshire Television, working with True North Productions.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: Three pairs of Whiteley's spectacles were donated by Kathryn Apanowicz, his longtime partner, to optical charity Vision Aid Overseas (VAO). Sent with a team of optical professionals to Ethiopia, the VAO team found three Ethiopians whose eyes fitted Whiteley's prescription. The BBC followed this story on their "Inside Out" programme which was broadcast on 19 September 2007.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: In 2008, three years after Whiteley's death, Giggleswick School announced its plans to raise £1.3m to build a theatre in his honour. The 288-seat theatre has been built at the school where Whiteley was a pupil and governor and provided a resource for the whole local community. Crews completed work on the second phase of the theatre in autumn 2010. The theatre now hosts a range of public performances.


title: Richard Whiteley

text: Whiteley was honoured with the Mayoralty of Wetwang in 1998, became a Deputy Lieutenant of West Yorkshire in 2003, and was appointed OBE in the June 2004 Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to broadcasting.


title: Water chlorination

text: Water chlorination is the process of adding chlorine or chlorine compounds such as sodium hypochlorite to water. This method is used to kill bacteria, viruses and other microbes in water. In particular, chlorination is used to prevent the spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid.


title: Water chlorination

text: In a paper published in 1894, it was formally proposed to add chlorine to water to render it "germ-free". Two other authorities endorsed this proposal and published it in many other papers in 1895. Early attempts at implementing water chlorination at a water treatment plant were made in 1893 in Hamburg, Germany. In 1897 the town of Maidstone, England was the first to have its entire water supply treated with chlorine.


title: Water chlorination

text: Permanent water chlorination began in 1905, when a faulty slow sand filter and a contaminated water supply caused a serious typhoid fever epidemic in Lincoln, England. Alexander Cruickshank Houston used chlorination of the water to stop the epidemic. His installation fed a concentrated solution of so-called "chloride of lime" to the water being treated. This was not simply modern calcium chloride, but contained chlorine gas dissolved in lime-water (dilute calcium hydroxide) to form calcium hypochlorite (chlorinated lime). The chlorination of the water supply helped stop the epidemic and as a precaution, the chlorination was continued until 1911 when a new water supply was commissioned.


title: Water chlorination

text: The first continuous use of chlorine in the United States for disinfection took place in 1908 at Boonton Reservoir (on the Rockaway River), which served as the supply for Jersey City, New Jersey. Chlorination was achieved by controlled additions of dilute solutions of chloride of lime (calcium hypochlorite) at doses of 0.2 to 0.35 ppm. The treatment process was conceived by John L. Leal, and the chlorination plant was designed by George Warren Fuller. Over the next few years, chlorine disinfection using chloride of lime (calcium hypochlorite) was rapidly implemented in drinking water systems around the world.


title: Water chlorination

text: The technique of purification of drinking water by use of compressed liquefied chlorine gas was developed by a British officer in the Indian Medical Service, Vincent B. Nesfield, in 1903. According to his own account, "It occurred to me that chlorine gas might be found satisfactory ... if suitable means could be found for using it... The next important question was how to render the gas portable. This might be accomplished in two ways: by liquefying it, and storing it in lead-lined iron vessels, having a jet with a very fine capillary canal, and fitted with a tap or a screw cap. The tap is turned on, and the cylinder placed in the amount of water required. The chlorine bubbles out, and in ten to fifteen minutes the water is absolutely safe. This method would be of use on a large scale, as for service water carts."


title: Water chlorination

text: Major Carl Rogers Darnall, Professor of Chemistry at the Army Medical School, gave the first practical demonstration of this in 1910. This work became the basis for present day systems of municipal water "purification". Shortly after Darnall's demonstration, Major William J. L. Lyster of the Army Medical Department used a solution of calcium hypochlorite in a linen bag to treat water.


title: Water chlorination

text: For many decades, Lyster's method remained the standard for U.S. ground forces in the field and in camps, implemented in the form of the familiar Lyster Bag (also spelled Lister Bag). The canvas "bag, water, sterilizing" was a common component of field kitchens, issued one per 100 persons, of a standard 36-gallon capacity that hung from an often-improvised tripod in the field. In use from World War I through the Vietnam War, it has been replaced by reverse osmosis systems that produce potable water by pressure straining local water through microscopic-level filters: the Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Unit (1980) and the Tactical Water Purification System (2007) for large-scale production, and the Light Water Purifier unit for smaller-scale needs that includes ultrafiltration technology to produce potable water from any source and uses automated backwash cycles every 15 minutes to simplify cleaning operations.


title: Water chlorination

text: Chlorine gas was first used on a continuing basis to disinfect the water supply at the Belmont filter plant, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by using a machine invented by Charles Frederick Wallace who dubbed it the Chlorinator. It was manufactured by the Wallace & Tiernan company beginning in 1913. By 1941, disinfection of U.S. drinking water by chlorine gas had largely replaced the use of chloride of lime.


title: Water chlorination

text: As a halogen, chlorine is a highly efficient disinfectant, and is added to public water supplies to kill disease-causing pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses, and protozoans, that commonly grow in water supply reservoirs, on the walls of water mains and in storage tanks. The microscopic agents of many diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery killed countless people annually before disinfection methods were employed routinely.


title: Water chlorination

text: By far most chlorine is manufactured from table salt (NaCl) by electrolysis in the chlor-alkali process. The resulting gas at atmospheric pressures is liquified at high pressure. The liquefied gas is transported and used as such.


title: Water chlorination

text: As a strong oxidizing agent, chlorine kills via the oxidation of organic molecules. Chlorine and the hydrolysis product hypochlorous acid are not charged and therefore easily penetrate the negatively charged surface of pathogens. It is able to disintegrate the lipids that compose the cell wall and react with intracellular enzymes and proteins, making them nonfunctional. Microorganisms then either die or are no longer able to multiply.


title: Water chlorination

text: When dissolved in water, chlorine converts to an equilibrium mixture of chlorine, hypochlorous acid (HOCl), and hydrochloric acid (HCl):


title: Water chlorination

text: In acidic solution, the major species are and HOCl, whereas in alkaline solution, effectively only ClO (hypochlorite ion) is present. Very small concentrations of ClO, ClO, ClO are also found.


title: Water chlorination

text: Shock chlorination is a process used in many swimming pools, water wells, springs, and other water sources to reduce the bacterial and algal residue in the water. Shock chlorination is performed by mixing a large amount of hypochlorite into the water. The hypochlorite can be in the form of a powder or a liquid such as chlorine bleach (solution of sodium hypochlorite or calcium hypochlorite in water). Water that is being shock chlorinated should not be swum in or drunk until the sodium hypochlorite count in the water goes down to three parts per million (PPM) or until the calcium hypochlorite count goes down to 0.2 to 0.35 PPM.


title: Water chlorination

text: As an alternative to shock chlorination, some swimming pools are chlorinated by use of a chlorine-generating filter that electrolyzes common salt. Pools chlorinated by this method generally have lower levels of chlorine and, in the surrounding air, less gaseous chloramine than directly chlorinated pools and so may benefit the asthmatic. Such pools are called saltwater pools.


title: Water chlorination

text: Disinfection by chlorination can be problematic in some circumstances. Chlorine can react with naturally occurring organic compounds found in the water supply to produce compounds known as disinfection by-products (DBPs). The most common DBPs are trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetic acids (HAAs). Trihalomethanes are the main disinfectant by-products created from chlorination with two different types, bromoform and dibromochloromethane, which are mainly responsible for health hazards. Their effects depend strictly on the duration of their exposure to the chemicals and the amount ingested into the body. In high doses, bromoform mainly slows down regular brain activity, which is manifested by symptoms such as sleepiness or sedation. Chronic exposure of both bromoform and dibromochloromethane can cause liver and kidney cancer, as well as heart disease, unconsciousness, or death in high doses. Due to the potential carcinogenicity of these compounds, drinking water regulations across the developed world require regular monitoring of the concentration of these compounds in the distribution systems of municipal water systems. The World Health Organization has stated that "the risks to health from these by-products are extremely small in comparison with the risks associated with inadequate disinfection".


title: Water chlorination

text: There are also other concerns regarding chlorine, including its volatile nature which causes it to disappear too quickly from the water system, and organoleptic concerns such as taste and odor.


title: Water chlorination

text: A dechlorinator is a chemical additive that removes chlorine or chloramine from water. Where tap water is chlorinated, it should be dechlorinated before use in an aquarium, since chlorine can harm aquatic life in the same way it kills micro-organisms. Chlorine will kill fish and cause damage to an aquarium's biological filter. Chemicals that serve this function are reducing agents which reduce chlorine species to chloride, which is less harmful to fish.


title: Water chlorination

text: Some compounds employed in commercial dechlorinators are sodium thiosulfate, sodium hydroxymethanesulfonate, and sodium hydroxymethane sulfinic acid.


title: S. S. Kresge

text: Sebastian Spering Kresge (July 31, 1867 – October 18, 1966) was an American businessman. He created and owned two chains of department stores, the S. S. Kresge Company, one of the 20th century's largest discount retail organizations, and the Kresge-Newark traditional department store chain. The discounter was renamed the Kmart Corporation in 1977.


title: S. S. Kresge

text: Kresge was born near Allentown, Pennsylvania, the son of Sebastian Kresge and the former Catherine Kunkle. Living on the family farm in Kresgeville (named for his ancestors) until he was 21 years old, he was educated in the local public schools, the Fairview Academy, in Brodheadsville, Pennsylvania, and at the Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, from which he graduated in March 1889.


title: S. S. Kresge

text: Following his graduation, he clerked in a hardware store for two years, then worked as a traveling salesman from 1892 to 1897. On March 20, 1897, Kresge began working for James G. McCrory, the founder of J.G. McCrory's, at a five and ten cent store in Memphis, Tennessee. He continued there for two years.


title: S. S. Kresge

text: In 1899 he founded his own company, with Charles J. Wilson, with an $8,000 investment in two five-and-ten-cent stores; one was in downtown Detroit, Michigan, for which he traded ownership in McCrory's. In 1912, he incorporated the S.S. Kresge Company with 85 stores. The company was first listed on the New York Stock Exchange on May 23, 1918. During World War I, Kresge experimented with raising the limit on prices in his stores to $1.


title: S. S. Kresge

text: In 1923, he again started a new company, buying out L.S. Plaut & Co., a large traditional department store in Newark, New Jersey. He renamed the store Kresge-Newark, expanded it, and started branch stores. The new department store company was completely independent from the S.S. Kresge discount department store company. By 1924, Kresge was worth approximately $375,000,000 ($ in 2009 dollars) and owned real estate of the approximate value of $100,000,000.


title: S. S. Kresge

text: He was married and divorced at least twice by 1928. Kresge and his family were members of Detroit's North Methodist Episcopal Church. He held membership in numerous organizations including four Masonic lodges and the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, YMCA, the Detroit Athletic, Boat, and Golf Clubs, Rotary, and various commercial and automobiling societies.


title: S. S. Kresge

text: The first Kmart opened in 1962 in Garden City, Michigan. Kresge died in 1966. In 1977, the S. S. Kresge Corporation changed its name to the Kmart Corporation. In 2005, Sears Holdings Corporation became the parent of Kmart and Sears, after Kmart bought Sears, and formed the new parent.


title: S. S. Kresge

text: In 1924, Kresge established The Kresge Foundation, a non-profit organization whose income he specified simply "to promote the well-being of mankind". By the time of his death, Kresge had given the foundation over $60,000,000. A strongly committed prohibitionist, he organized the National Vigilance Committee for Prohibition enforcement and also heavily supported the Anti-Saloon League financially, though he later stopped contributions. By 2018, the Foundation's endowment had grown to $3.6 billion.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: The Old Curiosity Shop is one of two novels (the other being "Barnaby Rudge") which Charles Dickens published along with short stories in his weekly serial "Master Humphrey's Clock", from 1840 to 1841. It was so popular that New York readers stormed the wharf when the ship bearing the final instalment arrived in 1841. "The Old Curiosity Shop" was printed in book form in 1841.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: The plot follows the life of Nell Trent and her grandfather, both residents of The Old Curiosity Shop in London.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: The events of the book seem to take place around 1825. In Chapter 29, Miss Monflathers refers to the death of Lord Byron, who died on 19 April 1824. When the inquest rules (incorrectly) that Quilp committed suicide, his corpse is ordered to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart, a practice banned in 1823. Nell's grandfather, after his breakdown, fears that he shall be sent to a madhouse, and there chained to a wall and whipped; these practices went out of use after about 1830. In Chapter 13, the lawyer Mr. Brass is described as "one of Her Majesty's attornies" , putting him in the reign of Queen Victoria, which began in 1837, but given all the other evidence, and the fact that Kit, at his trial, is charged with acting "against the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King" (referring to William IV), this must be a slip of the pen.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: "The Old Curiosity Shop" tells the story of Nell Trent, a beautiful and virtuous young girl of "not quite fourteen". An orphan, she lives with her maternal grandfather (whose name is never revealed) in his shop of odds and ends. Her grandfather loves her dearly, and Nell does not complain, but she lives a lonely existence with almost no friends her own age. Her only friend is Kit, an honest boy employed at the shop, whom she is teaching to write. Secretly obsessed with ensuring that Nell does not die in poverty as her parents did, her grandfather attempts to provide Nell with a good inheritance through gambling at cards. He keeps his nocturnal games a secret, but borrows heavily from the evil Daniel Quilp, a malicious, grotesquely deformed, hunchbacked dwarf moneylender. In the end, he gambles away what little money they have, and Quilp seizes the opportunity to take possession of the shop and evict Nell and her grandfather. Her grandfather suffers a breakdown that leaves him bereft of his wits, and Nell takes him away to the Midlands of England, to live as beggars.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: Convinced that the old man has stored up a large and prosperous fortune for Nell, her wastrel older brother, Frederick, convinces the good-natured but easily led Dick Swiveller to help him track Nell down, so that Swiveller can marry Nell and share her supposed inheritance with Frederick. To this end, they join forces with Quilp, who knows full well that there is no fortune, but sadistically chooses to 'help' them to enjoy the misery it will inflict on all concerned. Quilp begins to try to track Nell down, but the fugitives are not easily discovered. To keep Dick Swiveller under his eye, Quilp arranges for him to be taken as a clerk by Quilp's lawyer, Mr. Brass. At the Brass firm, Dick befriends the mistreated maidservant and nicknames her 'the Marchioness'. Nell, having fallen in with a number of characters, some villainous and some kind, succeeds in leading her grandfather to safety in a far-off village (identified by Dickens as Tong, Shropshire), but this comes at a considerable cost to Nell's health.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: Meanwhile, Kit, having lost his job at the curiosity shop, has found new employment with the kind Mr and Mrs Garland. Here he is contacted by a mysterious 'single gentleman' who is looking for news of Nell and her grandfather. The 'single gentleman' and Kit's mother go after them unsuccessfully, and encounter Quilp, who is also hunting for the runaways. Quilp forms a grudge against Kit and has him framed as a thief. Kit is sentenced to transportation. However, Dick Swiveller proves Kit's innocence with the help of his friend the Marchioness. Quilp is hunted down and dies trying to escape his pursuers. At the same time, a coincidence leads Mr Garland to knowledge of Nell's whereabouts, and he, Kit, and the single gentleman (who turns out to be the younger brother of Nell's grandfather) go to find her. Sadly, by the time they arrive, Nell has died as a result of her arduous journey. Her grandfather, already mentally infirm, refuses to admit she is dead and sits every day by her grave waiting for her to come back until, a few months later, he dies himself.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: "Master Humphrey's Clock" was a weekly serial that contained both short stories and two novels ("The Old Curiosity Shop" and "Barnaby Rudge"). Some of the short stories act as frame stories to the novels.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: Originally the conceit of the story was that Master Humphrey was reading it aloud to a group of his friends, gathered at his house around the grandfather clock in which he eccentrically kept his manuscripts. Consequently, when the novel begins, it is told in the first person, with Master Humphrey as the narrator. However, Dickens soon changed his mind about how best to tell the story, and abandoned the first-person narrator after chapter three. Once the novel was ended, "Master Humphrey's Clock" added a concluding scene, where Master Humphrey's friends (after he has finished reading the novel to them) complain that the 'single gentleman' is never given a name; Master Humphrey tells them that the novel was a true story, that the 'single gentleman' was in fact Master Humphrey himself, and that the events of the first three chapters were fictitious, intended only to introduce the characters. This was Dickens's after-the-fact explanation of why the narrator disappeared and why (if he was their near relation) he gave no sign in the first three chapters of knowing who they were. At least one editor thinks this device "need not be taken seriously."


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: Dickens's original artistic intent was to keep the short stories and the novels together, and the short stories and the novels were published in 1840 in three bound volumes under the title "Master Humphrey's Clock", which retains the original full and correct ordering of texts. However, Dickens himself cancelled "Master Humphrey's Clock" before 1848, and describes in a preface to "The Old Curiosity Shop" that he wishes the story to not be tied down to the miscellany within which it began. Most later anthologies published the short stories and the novels separately.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: Probably the most widely repeated criticism of Dickens is the remark reputedly made by Oscar Wilde that "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter". Nell's deathbed is not actually described, however. Of a similar opinion was the poet Algernon Swinburne, who commented that "a child whom nothing can ever irritate, whom nothing can even baffle, whom nothing can ever misguide, whom nothing can ever delude, and whom nothing can ever dismay, is a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads".


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: The Irish leader Daniel O'Connell famously burst into tears at the finale, and threw the book out of the window of the train in which he was travelling.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: The excitement surrounding the conclusion of the series was unprecedented. (However, stories that Dickens fans stormed the docks in New York City, eager for the latest installment of the novel, or news of it, are apocryphal.) In 2007, many newspapers claimed that the excitement at the release of the last instalment of "The Old Curiosity Shop" was the only historical comparison that could be made to the excitement at the release of the last Harry Potter novel, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: The Norwegian author Ingeborg Refling Hagen is said to have buried a copy of the book in her youth, stating that nobody deserved to read about Nell, because nobody would ever understand her pain. She compared herself to Nell, because of her own miserable situation at the time.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: A shop named 'The Old Curiosity Shop' can be found at 13–14 Portsmouth Street, Holborn, London, WC2A 2ES, and is now owned by the London School of Economics. The building dates back to the sixteenth century (1567) in an area known as Clare Market, but the shop name was added after the novel was released, as it was thought to be the inspiration for Dickens's description of the antique shop. At one time it functioned as a dairy on an estate given by King Charles II to one of his many mistresses. It was built using timber from old ships, and survived the bombs of the Second World War.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: Nell and her grandfather meet Codlin and Short in a churchyard in Aylesbury. The horse races where Nell and her grandfather go with the show people are at Banbury. The village where they first meet the schoolmaster is Warmington, Warwickshire. They meet Mrs. Jarley near the village of Gaydon, Warwickshire. The town where they work at Jarley's Waxworks is Warwick. The heavily industrialised town where Nell spends the night by the furnace is Birmingham (after they have travelled on the Warwick and Birmingham Canal). The town in which Nell faints and is rescued by the school master is Wolverhampton in the Black Country. The village where they finally find peace and rest and where Nell dies is Tong, Shropshire.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: Other real locations used in the novel include London Bridge, Bevis Marks, Finchley, and Minster-on-Sea.


title: The Old Curiosity Shop

text: It is reported by local Coventry historian David McGrory that Charles Dickens used Coventry's Whitefriers gatehouse in "The Old Curiosity Shop". This gatehouse building still exists in Much Park Street.<br>


title: Brandenburgers

text: The Brandenburgers () were members of the Brandenburg German special forces unit during World War II.


title: Brandenburgers

text: Originally, the unit was formed by and operated as an extension of the military's intelligence organ, the "Abwehr". Members of this unit took part in seizing operationally important targets by way of sabotage and infiltration. Being foreign German nationals who were convinced Nazi volunteers, constituent members had lived abroad and were proficient in foreign languages as well as being familiar with the way of life in the area of operations where they were deployed.


title: Brandenburgers

text: The Brandenburg Division was generally subordinated to the army groups in individual commands and operated throughout Eastern Europe, in northern Africa, Afghanistan, the Middle East and in the Caucasus. In the later course of the war, parts of the special unit were used in "Bandenbekämpfung" operations against partisans in Yugoslavia before the division was reclassified and merged into one of the Panzergrenadier divisions in the last months of the war. They committed various atrocities in the course of their operations.


title: Brandenburgers

text: The unit was the brainchild of "Hauptmann" (captain) Theodor von Hippel, who, after having his idea rejected by the "Reichswehr", approached Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, commander of the German Intelligence Service, the "Abwehr". Hippel proposed that small units, trained in sabotage and fluent in foreign languages, could operate behind enemy lines and wreak havoc with the enemy's command, communication and logistical tails. Canaris was at first against the proposal as he viewed such measures similar to what the Bolsheviks had done and was suspicious of Hippel's motives. Still determined to form the unit, Hippel looked to his section chief, Helmuth Groscurth, who supported the unit's formation and the two men conferred on the matter on 27 September 1939. Just a few days after their meeting, the Army General Staff put forth a directive authorizing the creation of "a company of saboteurs for the West." As part of the "Abwehr's" 2nd Department, Hippel was tasked with creating the unit.


title: Brandenburgers

text: Originally, the unit Hippel assembled was named the "Deutsche Kompagnie", then later on 25 October it became the "Baulehr-kompagnie 800" and then again on 10 January 1940, the unit was called the "Bau-Lehr-Bataillon z.b.V. 800" (800th Special Duties Construction Training Battalion); but its later more widely known epithet, "the Brandenburgers", stemmed from the name of the unit's first permanent quarters.


title: Brandenburgers

text: Training for the men in the Brandenburg Division ranged from five to seven months and included course instruction on reconnaissance, swimming, hand-to-hand combat, demolitions, marksmanship in both German and Allied weapons, conventional infantry tactics, and other specialized training. Brandenburg units were deployed as small commando outfits to penetrate into enemy territory and conduct both sabotage and anti-sabotage operations. Despite their demonstrated successes while incurring minimum casualties, many traditionally-minded German officers still found their use abhorrent. Most of the personnel were fluent in other languages, which allowed them, for example, to penetrate the Netherlands in 1940 disguised as Dutch barge crews just before the start of the invasion. In 1941, they preceded the invasion of Yugoslavia undercover as Serbian workers. During the night before Operation Barbarossa began, Brandenburger units crossed the Soviet border disguised as Soviet workers and Red Army soldiers. Others even adorned themselves in Arab garments to conduct surveillance on Allied warships traversing between the Straits of Gibraltar and North Africa ahead of the Wehrmacht deployment there. Correspondingly, Department II of the "Abwehr", under which the Brandenburgers were subsumed, had a distinct sub-component for army, navy, and air force operations.


title: Brandenburgers

text: Many of the Brandenburgers were misfits who could hardly be characterized as conventional soldiers, due in large part to the nature of their operations. They would mingle with enemy soldiers, secretly countermand orders, redirect military convoys, and disrupt communications—all the while collecting intelligence along the way. Ahead of the primary invasion forces in the USSR, operatives from the Brandenburg Division seized bridges and strategically important installations in clandestine missions lasting for weeks before they linked up with advancing forces.


title: Brandenburgers

text: The predecessor formation to the Brandenburg Division was the "Freikorps Ebbinghaus", which originated before the invasion of Poland in 1939. Colonel Erwin von Lahousen (and the defense groups of military districts VIII and XVII) from within Department II of the "Abwehr", put together small "K-Trupps" (fighting squads), which consisted of Polish-speaking Silesians and ethnic Germans, whose job it was to occupy key positions and hold them until the arrival of regular Wehrmacht units. The first members of the "K-Trupps" were German nationals. Generally, these men were civilians who had never served in the army but were briefly trained by the "Abwehr" and were led by army officers. After the Polish campaign, this changed as these commandos became members of the Wehrmacht. Despite their seeming lack of prior experience, the demands placed on these newly formed commandos were high. It was mandatory that they be volunteers for this duty. They were also expected to be agile, capable of improvising, endowed with initiative and team spirit, highly competent in foreign languages and in their dealings with foreign nationals, and capable of the most demanding physical performance. Eventually, the early guiding principle that required members of the Division Brandenburg to be volunteers ended with their increasing use and integration with the regular army.


title: Brandenburgers

text: The night before the Invasion of Poland (Plan White) in September 1939, small groups of German special forces dressed in civilian clothes crossed the Polish border to seize key strategic points before dawn on the day of the invasion. This made them the first special operations unit to see action in the Second World War. "Freikorps Ebbinghaus" engaged in atrocities against Poland's population and its captured PoWs. On 4 September, members of the "Freikorps Ebbinghaus" executed 17 people at Pszczyna, among them Boy Scouts from the town's secondary schools. They also tortured 29 citizens of Orzesze before executing them. On 8 September 1939, in the upper Silesian city, Siemanowice, they executed 6 Poles and then on 1 October 1939, shot 18 people in Nowy Bytom. Larger massacres were carried out in Katowice, where hundreds of people were executed. Within two weeks of the invasion of Poland, "Ebbinghaus" had "left a trail of murder in more than thirteen Polish towns and villages".


title: Brandenburgers

text: On 15 December 1939 the company was expanded and re-designated as the "Brandenburg Battalion". After its formation, the soldiers of the new special unit were initially employed to protect the Romanian oil fields and later chrome ore supplies from Turkey. The battalion consisted of four companies, organised along linguistic lines:


title: Brandenburgers

text: A platoon of Brandenburgers took part in Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Scandinavia in April 1940, during which they secured strategic properties in Denmark and Norway.


title: Brandenburgers

text: During the spring 1940 , the Brandenburg units proved essential in seizing "vital points ahead of Guderian's panzers." Chronicling Brandenburger No. 3 Company's penetration into Belgium, Lahousen was gratified to report that, "forty-two out of sixty-one objectives were secured and handed over to the units following behind." For their exploits in Belgium and the Netherlands, the Brandenburgers were among the most decorated units marching with the invading German armies, which earned them the admiration of the "Abwehr" Chief, Wilhelm Canaris. On 27 May 1940, chief-of-staff of the High Command of the German armed forces, Wilhelm Keitel, wrote to Canaris that the Brandenburgers had "fought outstandingly well" which was further validated when Hitler presented Iron Cross commendations to 75% of the 600 men who participated. By October 1940, the Brandenburgers constituted an entire regiment-sized unit. The rest of the Brandenburgers were assigned to Panzer Corps "Grossdeutschland" along with its old training partner from 1940 to 1941, the "Grossdeutschland" Division.


title: Brandenburgers

text: The unit was again deployed in Operation Marita, the invasion of the Balkans. On 6 April 1941, during Operation Marita, the Brandenburgers managed to take the strategically important bridge over the Vardar and they also secured the gorge on the River Danube which forms part of the boundary between Serbia and Romania known otherwise as the Iron Gates. Shortly after this, they captured the island of Euboea. Additional operations were demanded of the Brandenburgers during the opening phase for the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, as they were the first to sweep across the border, destroying power facilities, cutting communication lines, spreading disinformation, and activating "sleeper" agents. Their most notable mission was taking the bridges over the Daugava in Daugavpils on 28 June 1941, during which members of the 8th Company of the Brandenburg Kommandos crossed the bridge in a commandeered Soviet truck, overpowered the guards and held the position for two hours against significant Soviet counterattacks. From June 1942 through February 1943, the Brandenburgers carried out commando operations against Allied supply lines in North Africa by way of clandestine missions in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.


title: Brandenburgers

text: In early August 1942, a Brandenburg unit of 62 Baltic and Sudeten Germans led by Adrian von Fölkersam penetrated farther into enemy territory than any other German unit. They had been ordered to seize and secure the vital Maikop oilfields. Disguised as NKVD men, and driving Soviet trucks, Fölkersam's unit passed through the Soviet front lines and moved deep into hostile territory. The Brandenburgers ran into a large group of Red Army soldiers fleeing from the front. Fölkersam saw an opportunity to use them to the unit's advantage. By persuading them to return to the Soviet cause, he was able to join with them and move almost at will through the Soviet lines.


title: Brandenburgers

text: On 26 December 1942, the men of Parachute Company of the Brandenburg Regiment were transported by gliders in an operation to destroy bridges and supply routes used by the British in North Africa. It was a disaster. Some of the gliders were shot down while flying over enemy lines and others were destroyed approaching their targets. Most of the paratroopers were killed in the operation.


title: Brandenburgers

text: In mid 1943, many Brandenburger units were moved from the Balkans, and took part in actions to disarm Italian soldiers. One vital area was the island of Kos, in the Dodecanese island chain off the coast of Turkey. Kos had been secured by British troops in September 1943, and a large garrison of allied Italian troops was also present. Along with Luftwaffe paratroop forces, Brandenburgers took part in the recapture of the island. On 25 May 1944, members of the division, attached to "SS-Fallschirmjäger-Bataillon 500", took part in the unsuccessful Operation Rösselsprung, an airborne operation to capture Yugoslav Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito.


title: Brandenburgers

text: In September 1944 it was decided that special operations units were no longer necessary. The Brandenburg Division became the Infantry Division Brandenburg and transferred to the Eastern front. Approximately 1,800 men (including von Fölkersam) were transferred to SS-"Standartenführer" Otto Skorzeny's "SS-Jäger-Bataillon 502" operating within "SS-Jagdverband Mitte", but mostly to the "SS-Jagdverband Ost" until the end of the war. Only the Kurfürst Regiment retained its original role as a commando unit.


title: Brandenburgers

text: In late 1944, the division was equipped with a Panzer Regiment and redesignated "Panzergrenadier-Division Brandenburg" and returned to the Eastern front. The Brandenburgers were involved in heavy fighting near Memel, until their withdrawal, along with the "Großdeutschland", via ferry to Pillau. The division was all but annihilated during the heavy fighting near Pillau and only 800 men escaped to the thin strip of land at Frische Nehrung. While some survivors surrendered to the British in Schleswig-Holstein in May, others enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and fought in the First Indochina War where their skills proved an asset.


title: Brandenburgers

text: The Bergmann battalion (meaning "miner") was a military unit of the German Abwehr during World War II, composed of five German-officered companies of volunteers from the Caucasus region of the Soviet Union. The battalion was formed of the émigrés and Soviet POWs from the Caucasian republics at Neuhammer in October 1941. Subordinated to the German commando battalion Brandenburgers and placed under the command of "Oberleutnant" Theodor Oberländer, the unit received training at Neuhammer and Mittenwald (Bavaria) with the "Gebirgsjäger". Later a special 130-men-strong Georgian contingent of Abwehr codenamed "Tamara-II" was incorporated into Bergmann. By March 1942, there were five companies of some 300 Germans and 900 Caucasians.


title: Brandenburgers

text: In August 1942, Bergmann went to the Eastern Front, where it saw its first action in the North Caucasus campaign in August 1942. The unit engaged in anti-partisan actions in the Mozdok-Nalchik-Mineralnye Vody area and conducted reconnaissance and subversion in the Grozny area. At the end of 1942, Bergmann conducted a successful sortie through the Soviet lines, bringing with them some 300 Red Army defectors, and covered the German retreat from the Caucasus. Bergmann went through a series of engagements with the Soviet partisans and regular forces in the Crimea in February 1943 and was dissolved—like other "Ostlegionen" units—at the end of 1943. The significantly shrunken ex-Bergmann companies were dispatched to conduct police functions in Greece and Poland.


title: Brandenburgers

text: The Nachtigall Battalion, officially known as Special Group Nachtigall, and the Roland Battalion, officially known as Special Group Roland, were the subunits under command of the "Abwehr" special operation unit Brandenburgers (1st Brandenberg Battalion). They were the two military units formed 25 February 1941 by head of the "Abwehr" Wilhelm Franz Canaris, which sanctioned the creation of the "Ukrainian Legion" under German command. They were manned primarily by occupied Polish citizens of Ukrainian ethnicity directed to unit by Bandera's OUN orders.


title: Brandenburgers

text: In May 1941, the German command decided to split a 700-strong Ukrainian Legion into two battalions: Nachtigall ("Nightingale") and Roland Battalion. Training for Nachtigall took place in Neuhammer near Schlessig. On the Ukrainian side, the commander was Roman Shukhevych and on the German, Theodor Oberländer. (Oberländer was later to become Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims in the Federal Republic of Germany.) Ex-Brandenburger "Oberleutnant" Dr. Hans-Albrecht Herzner was placed in military command of the Battalion. The Nachtigall unit was outfitted in the standard Wehrmacht uniforms. Before entering Lviv, they placed blue and yellow ribbons on their shoulders. In comparison to Nachtigall – which used ordinary Wehrmacht uniform – the Roland Battalion was outfitted in the Czechoslovakian uniform with yellow armband with text ""Im Dienst der Deutschen Wehrmacht"" (In the service of the German Wehrmacht). They were given Austrian helmets from World War I.


title: Brandenburgers

text: The Battalion was set up by the "Abwehr" and organized by Richard Yary of the OUN(b) in March 1941, prior the German invasion to Soviet Union. Approximately 350 Bandera's OUN followers were trained at the "Abwehr" training centre at the Seibersdorf under command of the former Poland Army major Yevhen Pobiguschiy. In Germany, in November 1941 the Ukrainian personnel of the Legion were reorganized into the 201st Schutzmannschaft Battalion. It numbered 650 persons which served for one year at Belarus before disbanding. Many of its members, especially the commanding officers, went on to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and 14 of its members joined 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) "SS-Freiwilligen-Schützen-Division Galizien" in spring 1943.


title: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

text: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead is a 2009 slasher film directed by Declan O'Brien and starring Tom Frederic, Janet Montgomery, and Tamer Hassan. It is a sequel to "" (2007) and the third installment in the "Wrong Turn" film series. The film grossed $5.9 million in home sales.


title: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

text: Four college students – Alex, Brent, Sophie and Trey – go to the West Virginia backcountry on a rafting trip. As they are camping by the riverside, the inbred cannibal Three Finger appears and murders the teens except Alex, who escapes after witnessing her friends' deaths.


title: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

text: Two days later, three prison guards: Nate Wilson, Walter and Preslow are assigned, along with undercover prisoner and U.S. Marshal William "Willy" Juarez, to oversee the transportation of Carlo Chavez, a leader of a crime organization, to a distant prison in Hazleton with three other prisoners: Floyd, a neo-Nazi serial killer; Crawford, a car thief, and Brandon, a former U.S. Marine. En route, they take the road to the through Greenbrier County when their bus tires are tangled with barbed wire from Three Finger's truck and crashes into the woods, forcing them to continue on foot as Three Finger attacks them from the distance and kills Preslow. Nate and Walter are now held hostage by the prisoners when they find Alex, who was hiding out in the woods from Three Finger and his nephew Three Toes. As they follow her, they find an abandoned armored truck containing bags of money. Nate finds a gun in the truck and gives it to Walter who uses it to shoot Chavez but the weapon is not loaded, and the latter kills Walter in retaliation. Chavez forces those left alive to carry the money and walk to the campsite so the criminals can use the rafts for their escape with the loot. Along the trail, they stumble upon a trap set by Three Toes that they are able to evade. Chavez and Floyd subdue the young cannibal and behead him, leaving a trophy on the spent booby trap for Three Finger to find as a deterrent. After Nate disrupts the prisoners' escape to the river, Chavez unwittingly releases a trap set by Three Finger that kills Willy. The prisoners find Three Finger's truck and when Crawford attempts to hijack the vehicle, he is lured into another trap by Three Finger who ensnares him with a netting of razor wire and drives off, dragging him down the road.


title: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

text: Local town Sheriff Calvin Carver discovers the crashed prison bus and contacts the U.S. Marshal team while he looks for Nate's group along with his deputy Ally Lane. Nate and Alex, with Brandon's help by distracting Floyd to attack Chavez, attempt to escape but the latter recaptures the two after beating down Floyd and leaving him behind. After they find the location where the watch tower once stood that was burned down years ago, Carver finds the group but he is killed by Three Finger. When Chavez attempts to reclaim the money, Floyd takes the bags as Chavez chases after him only to see Three Finger lobbing a molotov cocktail at Floyd, killing him and burning all the money. Now enraged at the mutant cannibal, Chavez tosses Alex to Three Finger to improve his chances of survival and she is taken captive. Infuriating the others by his actions, Chavez is knocked unconscious by Brandon allowing Nate to go back and rescue Alex. Chavez is then killed by Three Finger after the mutant overpowers him during their fight.


title: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

text: Alex awakens in Three Finger's cabin and sees Deputy Lane dying from a razor wire net. Nate finds the cabin and frees Alex, but they are attacked by Three Finger as they escape. Three Finger chases after them as they drive away in his tow truck, causing them to crash into a tree. As the truck is about to explode, Brandon appears and pulls Alex out. While Brandon helps Nate, Three Finger attacks them but Nate manages to kill him by stabbing him in the head with his meat hook. After Nate releases Brandon in return for his help, the Marshal team arrives the next morning to rescue Nate and Alex.


title: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

text: Sometime later, Nate returns to the forest to take the remaining money from the armored truck but Brandon appears and kills him. As he takes the money, an unknown cannibal appears and kills Brandon.


title: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

text: Shooting took place in Sofia, Bulgaria. The only returning character was Three Finger; however he was played by a different actor, the third in as many films.


title: Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead

text: All four of the reviews reported by Rotten Tomatoes are counted as towards negative. Bloody Disgusting said, "If "WT2" raised the bar, then "WT3" lowers it right back down to where it was, and possibly a notch or two lower."


title: Stacy Haiduk

text: Stacy Haiduk (born April 24, 1968) is an American actress. Her best-known roles include Lana Lang on "Superboy", Katherine Hitchcock on "seaQuest DSV", Hannah Nichols on "All My Children", as Patty Williams and Emily Peterson on "The Young and the Restless", and as Kristen DiMera and Susan Banks on "Days of Our Lives".


title: Stacy Haiduk

text: Haiduk first achieved national fame when she was cast in the role of Lana Lang in the live-action "Superboy" TV series of 1988. After the series ended, she appeared in the direct to video "Luther the Geek" for Troma Entertainment. After "Superboy" Haiduk portrayed Rhea McPherson, an aspiring FBI agent, in the short-lived Spelling series "The Round Table".


title: Stacy Haiduk

text: Haiduk's next significant role was on "seaQuest DSV", in which she played Lt. Cmdr. Katherine Hitchcock, the chief engineer, and third in command of the high-tech submarine.


title: Stacy Haiduk

text: Haiduk appeared in the 1994 TV movie "A Perfect Stranger" (based on the novel of the same name by Danielle Steel). Haiduk went on to play a female vampire in the short-lived series "". After this stint, much of her acting consists of smaller films, such as "Gabriela" where she appeared alongside Jaime Gomez and Zach Galligan, and guest star roles on television shows such as "Charmed", "The X-Files", "", "", "Cold Case", "Due South", "Crossing Jordan", "NCIS", "Heroes", "Prison Break", and "Burn Notice".


title: Stacy Haiduk

text: In 2006, Haiduk appeared in new supplemental material for the "Superboy: The Complete First Season" DVD release. She also appeared regularly on the ABC soap opera "All My Children" as Hannah Nichols from January 2007 through January 2008. From February 2009 to August 2010, she appeared on the CBS soap opera "The Young and the Restless" as Patty Williams, and also played Emily Peterson on the series. In July 2010, Haiduk was cast to play a prison warden on "Days of Our Lives"; she was subsequently dismissed and recast with former "Santa Barbara" actress Gina Gallego after three episodes, due to a scheduling conflict with "The Chicago Code". Haiduk's appearances as Warden Smith aired in September 2010. In 2018, it was announced that Haiduk had again been cast on "Days of Our Lives", this time in the roles of Kristen DiMera and lookalike Susan Banks. In early 2019, she returned to the show, signing contract this time.


title: Stacy Haiduk

text: In June 2010, an issue of "Soap Opera Digest" reported that Haiduk has been married to Bradford Tatum since November 11, 1997. The couple met on the set of "seaQuest DSV." They have one daughter, actress Sophia Tatum. In 2009, Haiduk was the subject of an online boycott petition for apparently wearing a stuffed cat as a purse during the Daytime Emmy Awards. The cat was actually a prop used in her role on "The Young and the Restless" and not a purse.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Edwin Thomas Layton (April 7, 1903 – April 12, 1984) was a rear admiral in the United States Navy. Layton is most noted for his work as an intelligence officer before and during World War II.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Edwin Thomas Layton was born on April 7, 1903 in Nauvoo, Illinois as a son of George E. Layton and his wife Mary C. Layton. Layton attended the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland and graduated in 1924. Layton spent the next five years with the Pacific Fleet aboard the battleship and destroyer .


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: In 1929, Layton was one of a small number of naval officers selected to go to Japan for language training. Significantly, on his voyage to Japan he met another young naval officer, Joseph J. Rochefort, assigned to the same duty. Both became intelligence officers, Rochefort specializing in decryption efforts, Layton in using intelligence information in war planning. Layton and Rochefort, both of whom were in Pearl Harbor, worked closely together in the months before the attack, among other things trying to work out aspects of the larger international context which Washington had decided would be handled by Washington alone, and even more closely after the war began, especially in the month before the Battle of Midway. They both made significant contributions to that victory.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Layton was assigned to the American Embassy in Tokyo as a naval attaché, where he remained for three years. While in Japan, he met Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on several occasions. The last four months he spent in Beijing as assistant naval attaché at the American Legation. His linguistic ability and fluency in Japanese proved to be assets as his career progressed, even more so as World War II began in Europe.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: During the 1930s, Layton served two tours of duty in the Navy Department's Office of Naval Intelligence, in 1933 and again from 1936 to 1937, but he also saw sea duty. He had a three-year stint in the battleship , where he received commendations for gunnery excellence. In 1937, he returned to Tokyo for two years as assistant naval attaché at the American Embassy. This was followed by a one-year tour of duty as commanding officer of .


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Exactly one year to the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Layton became Combat Intelligence Officer on the staff of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, which had recently been moved from its base in San Diego, California to Pearl Harbor — over the objections of Admiral James O. Richardson, whom Kimmel replaced. Layton was in charge of all intelligence in the Pacific Ocean area.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Layton was a champion of using code-breaking information in war planning operations and had strong supporters in both Admiral Kimmel and Admiral Nimitz.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Layton's book "And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway — Breaking the Secrets" describes how Kimmel and his army counterpart at Pearl Harbor, General Walter C. Short, the commanders there, were scapegoats for failures by higher-ups in Washington, D.C. Layton blamed Admiral Richmond K. Turner in particular for monopolizing naval intelligence in Washington that would have alerted Kimmel and his staff to the imminence of attack and to the fact that Pearl Harbor could be a target of that attack.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Layton's argument is detailed and comprehensive, but in general, he maintains that although Washington was reading the highest level Japanese diplomatic code, Purple, little of this was ever made available to the field commanders, other than to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, who failed to act, not only on the Purple data, but even after he knew that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. The diplomatic information that they were denied not only contained data about the imminence of war, but also included messages sent from Honolulu to Tokyo by Takeo Yoshikawa, the spy sent to observe and report daily on the exact positions of ships in the harbor, using a grid system that was obviously designed for the purpose of targeting torpedoes and bombs. Those above Turner, including his boss, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Rainsford Stark, and even General George Marshall, also come in for blame, though some details are still missing from the official record.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Forrest Biard, another naval linguist, one who was in the last group to be sent to Japan for language studies, worked for the Rochefort HYPO team as soon as he left Japan in 1941. HYPO was located in a basement, called "The Dungeon" by team members. In a speech to the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation, Biard describes Layton as the sixth member of the five-member team (Joseph J. Rochefort, Joe Finnegan, Alva B. Lasswell, Wesley A. Wright, Thomas Dyer) who produced the information that was vital to winning the Battle of Midway, following the Battle of the Coral Sea. He gives the following description of Layton:


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: During May 1942, in particular, Layton and the Rochefort team were battling Washington as much as the Japanese – both as to where the next attack would occur and as to when it would occur. Washington said Port Moresby or the Aleutians in mid-June; Rochefort/Layton said Midway, first week in June. The story of how Rochefort's team prevailed is told in the Rochefort article, and in much greater detail in Layton's book. Nimitz deserves the highest praise for realizing that their analysis was sounder, something for which Layton deserves a very great deal of credit, and for risking the wrath of his boss in Washington, Admiral King, something for which Nimitz alone deserves a very great deal of credit. (Selecting Admiral Raymond Spruance to replace the hospitalized Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. was also the right move, as was the earlier decision to retain Kimmel's intelligence officers.)


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Layton remained on the staff of the Pacific Fleet until February 1945, followed by a three-year tour of duty as Commander of the U.S. Naval Net Depot at Tiburon, California. During this time, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, as a mark of his recognition of Layton's contributions, invited him to Tokyo Bay when the Japanese formally surrendered on September 2, 1945.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Intelligence work occupied Layton again, in the form of a two-year assignment as the first Director of the Naval Intelligence School in Washington D.C.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Starting in 1950, Layton spent six months as Intelligence Officer on the staff of the Commandant, Fourteenth Naval District in Hawaii. His evaluative skills and keen interpretation of events were vital during the early stages of the conflict. In 1951, for a two-year period, he assumed his old position of Fleet Intelligence Officer on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: In 1953, with the war over, Layton was assigned to the staff of the Joint Chiefs where he was Assistant Director for Intelligence, then Deputy Director. His last duty before retirement was Director of the Naval Intelligence School at the Naval Receiving Station, Washington, D.C.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Layton retired in 1959. He went to work for the Northrop Corporation as Director of Far East Operations in Tokyo, Japan, 1959 to 1963. He retired from Northrop in 1964 and moved to Carmel, California. Not until the 1980s were many of the documents about Pearl Harbor and Midway declassified. His book, "And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway — Breaking the Secrets", was written with co-authors Roger Pineau and John Costello and was published in 1985, the year after Layton died. As appears in the books' acknowledgments, his wife, Miriam, assisted the publication of the book by not only encouraging the admiral to bring his story to print, but also by giving his collaborators access to his research notes and papers after his death.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: Layton's deeds inspired the character of Matthew Garth in the 1976 movie "Midway". Garth's vital role in translating raw decrypted radio intercepts into meaningful intelligence clearly reflects actual Layton's contribution. In the 2019 film "Midway", he was portrayed by actor Patrick Wilson. In the 1986 film Top Gun at 1 hr 27 min, the character Stinger begins a pilots' briefing saying, "The communication ship SS Layton has become disabled, and has wandered into foreign territory." The ship isn't mentioned again.


title: Edwin T. Layton

text: The Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, honored Layton in the 1960s by naming the Chair of Naval Intelligence after him.


title: Jaire Alexander

text: Jaire Zakar Alexander (born February 9, 1997) is an American football cornerback for the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at Louisville, and was selected by the Packers in the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft.


title: Jaire Alexander

text: Alexander attended Rocky River High School in Mint Hill, North Carolina. While there, he played high school football for the Ravens. He originally committed to the University of South Carolina to play college football but changed his commitment to the University of Louisville.


title: Jaire Alexander

text: Alexander played at Louisville from 2015 to 2017 under head coach Bobby Petrino. During his career, he had 77 tackles and seven interceptions. For the 2016 season, he was named Second-team All-ACC. After his junior season in 2017, he decided to forgo his senior year and enter the draft. He decided not to play in the 2017 TaxSlayer Bowl with the rest of the Louisville team due to persistent injury issues during the season.


title: Jaire Alexander

text: On December 22, 2017, Alexander announced his decision to forgo his remaining eligibility and enter the 2018 NFL Draft. As a result of his decision, he chose not to play in the TaxSlayer Bowl. He attended the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis and completed all of the combine and positional drills. Among cornerbacks, Alexander finished third in the short shuttle, finished fifth in the three-cone drill, finished sixth in the 40-yard dash, and tied for fourth in the broad jump. On March 29, 2018, Alexander participated at Louisville's pro day, but opted to stand on his combine numbers and only performed positional drills. At the conclusion of the pre-draft process, Alexander was projected to be a first round pick by NFL draft experts and scouts. He was ranked as the top cornerback prospect in the draft by NFL analyst Mike Mayock and was ranked the third best cornerback by DraftScout.com.


title: Jaire Alexander

text: The Green Bay Packers selected Alexander in the first round (18th overall) of the 2018 NFL Draft. The Packers traded their first (27th overall), third (76th overall), and sixth round picks (186th overall) to the Seattle Seahawks in exchange for their first (18th overall) and seventh round picks (248th overall) in order to draft Alexander 18th overall.


title: Jaire Alexander

text: On May 15, 2018, the Green Bay Packers signed Alexander to a fully guaranteed four-year, $12.05 million contract that includes a signing bonus of $6.84 million.


title: Jaire Alexander

text: Throughout training camp, Alexander competed to be a starting cornerback against Davon House, Tramon Williams, Kevin King, and Josh Jackson. Head coach Mike McCarthy named Alexander the fourth cornerback on the depth chart to start the regular season, behind House, King, and Williams.