title: Angels of Mons

text: In May 1915 a full-blown controversy was erupting, with the angels being used as proof of the action of divine providence on the side of the Allies in sermons across Britain, and then spreading into newspaper reports published widely across the world. Machen, bemused by all this, attempted to end the rumours by republishing the story in August in book form, with a long preface stating the rumours were false and originated in his story. It became a best-seller, and resulted in a vast series of other publications claiming to provide evidence of the Angels' existence. Machen tried to set the record straight, but any attempt to lessen the impact of such an inspiring story was seen as bordering on treason by some. These new publications included popular songs and artists' renderings of the angels. There were more reports of angels and apparitions from the front including Joan of Arc.


title: Angels of Mons

text: Kevin McClure's study describes two types of accounts circulating: some more clearly based on Machen, others with different details. In a time of intense media interest all these reports allegedly confirming sightings of supernatural activity were second-hand and some of them were hoaxes created by soldiers who were not even at Mons. A careful investigation by the Society for Psychical Research in 1915 said of the first-hand testimony, "We have received none at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon". The SPR went on to say the stories relating to battlefield "visions" which circulated during the spring and summer of 1915, "prove on investigation to be founded on mere rumour, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source.” Given that the Society for Psychical Research believed in the existence of supernatural forces, the conclusions of this report are highly significant.


title: Angels of Mons

text: The sudden spread of the rumours in the spring of 1915, six months after the events and Machen's story was published, is also puzzling. The stories published then often attribute their sources to anonymous British officers. The latest and most detailed examination of the Mons story by David Clarke suggests these men may have been part of a covert attempt by military intelligence to spread morale-boosting propaganda and disinformation. As it was a time of Allied problems with the "Lusitania" sinking, Zeppelin attacks and failure to achieve a breakthrough on the Western Front, the timing would make military sense. Some of the stories conveniently claimed that sources could not be revealed for security reasons.


title: Angels of Mons

text: The only real evidence of visions from actual named serving soldiers provided during the debate stated that they saw visions of phantom cavalrymen, not angels or bowmen, and this occurred during the retreat rather than at the battle itself. Furthermore, these visions did not intervene to attack or deter German forces, a crucial element in Machen's story and in the later tales of angels. Since during the retreat many troops were exhausted and had not slept properly for days, such visions could be hallucinations.


title: Angels of Mons

text: According to the conclusion of the most detailed study of the event it seems that Machen's story provided the genesis for the vast majority of the tales. The stories themselves certainly boosted morale on the home front, as popular enthusiasm was dying down in 1915 and they demonstrate the usefulness of religion in wartime.


title: Angels of Mons

text: After the war the story continued to be frequently repeated, but with little factual evidence to support it from eye-witnesses to the events at the Battle of Mons. The most substantial piece of corroboratory evidence that is known to exist comes from Brigadier-General John Charteris' memoir "At G.H.Q." (published 1931), which implies that the story of an: "Angel of the Lord, clad in white raiment bearing a flaming sword, appearing before the German forces at the Mons battle forbidding their advance", was a popular rumour circulating in September 1914 among the troops of the British Army's II Corps who had fought in the battle. However, General Charteris wasn't serving with II Corps in 1914, and was commenting on it therefore from a second-hand perspective, and an examination of his original war correspondence and notes from which his book's text was drawn makes no contemporary mention of the story at that time. It would appear likely that he retrospectively added it into the book's narrative when writing it post-war, acknowledging in the book's preface that he had 'amplified' the original source material in parts in such a way to supplement the text.


title: Angels of Mons

text: Machen was associated with the story for the rest of his life and grew sick of the connection, as he regarded “The Bowmen” as a poor piece of work. He made little money from the story then or later.


title: Angels of Mons

text: The sudden revival of interest in appearances of angels from the 1980s onwards, especially in the United States, not only among Christians, but those interested in the New Age, has caused uncritical accounts of the story of the angels who saved the British Army to be regularly published in books and magazines. Similarly, the story is also often used by sceptics as a good example of how believers in the supernatural can become convinced of fantastic things by slender evidence. References to the story can be found in novels and films like "" set during World War I. The Friends of Arthur Machen frequently publish articles on developments in the case.


title: Angels of Mons

text: In 2001, an article in "The Sunday Times" claimed that a diary, film and photographic evidence proving the existence of the Angels of Mons from a World War I soldier named William Doidge had been found. The article discussed an involved story in which Doidge was involved with an American GI and an angel seen years later in Woodchester Mansion. It was claimed Marlon Brando and Tony Kaye were going to spend £350,000 to buy the evidence to make a film. Other papers like "Variety" and the "Los Angeles Times" and television programmes soon followed up the story and a website connected to the mystery became very popular. The footage was supposedly found in a trunk in an antique shop by Danny Sullivan in Monmouth, close to Machen's birthplace of Caerleon. In 2002, in a BBC Radio documentary; "The Making of an Urban Myth", Sullivan admitted the story was a hoax created to drum up interest in Woodchester Mansion, and the film footage and soldier were fictional.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: Salami slicing tactics, also known as salami slicing, salami tactics, the salami-slice strategy, or salami attacks, is the practice of using a series of many small actions to produce a much larger action or result that would be difficult or unlawful to perform all at once.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: Politically, the term is used to describe a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition. With it, an aggressor can influence and eventually dominate a landscape, typically political, in piecemeal fashion. Opposition is eliminated "slice by slice" until its members realize, usually too late, that it has been virtually neutralized in its entirety. In some cases, the tactics include the creation of several factions within an opposing political party, followed by its dismantling from the inside, without giving the affected parties the opportunity to protest or react. Salami tactics are most likely to succeed when its perpetrators keep their true long-term motives hidden and maintain a posture of cooperativeness and helpfulness while engaged in gradual subversion.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: Financially, the term "salami attack" is used to describe schemes by which large sums are fraudulently accumulated by repeated transfers of imperceptibly small sums of money.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: It was commonly believed that the term "salami tactics" () was coined in the late 1940s by Stalinist dictator Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party in its ultimately successful drive for complete power in Hungary. Noting that "salami, an expensive food, is not eaten all at once, but is cut one slice at a time," Rákosi claimed he destroyed Hungary's leading, center-right, Smallholders' Party through a "step-by-step approach ... known as the 'Salami tactic,' and thanks to it we were able, day after day, to slice off, to cut up the reactionary forces skulking in the Smallholders' Party." By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), Rákosi was able to get the opposition to slice off its own right wing, then its center, then most of its left wing, so that only sympathizers ("fellow travellers") willing to collaborate with the Communist Party remained in power.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: However, according to historian Norman Stone, the term might have been invented by Hungarian Independence Party leader Zoltán Pfeiffer, a hardline anti-communist opponent of Rákosi.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: Computerized banking systems make it possible to repeatedly divert tiny amounts of money, typically due to rounding off, to a beneficiary's account. This general concept is used in popular automatic-savings apps. It has also been said to be behind fraudulent schemes, whereby bank transactions calculated to the nearest smallest unit of currency leave unaccounted-for fractions of a unit, for fraudsters to divert into other amounts. Snopes in 2001 dismissed the fact of such embezzlement schemes as a legend.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: In Los Angeles, in October 1998, district attorneys charged four men with fraud for allegedly installing computer chips in gasoline pumps that cheated consumers by overstating the amounts pumped.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: In 2008, a man was arrested for fraudulently creating 58,000 accounts which he used to collect money through verification deposits from online brokerage firms, a few cents at a time.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: In 1996, a fare box serviceman in Edmonton, Canada, was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for stealing coins from the city's transit agency fare boxes. Over 13 years, he stole 37 tonnes of coins, with a face value of nearly million, using a magnet to lift the coins (made primarily of steel or nickel at the time) out of the fare boxes one at a time.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: In Buffalo, New York, a fare box serviceman stole more than US$200,000 in quarters from the local transit agency over an eight-year period stretching from 2003 to 2011, and was sentenced to thirty months in prison.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: The European Parliament Think Tank has accused China of using the salami slice strategy to gradually increase its presence in the South China Sea.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: Scientists are often evaluated by a number of papers published and similar criteria. In this context, salami slicing refers to "fragmenting single coherent bodies of research into as many publications as possible". If the fragment is too small it may be too hard to publish, so this includes forming minimal publishable items. It can be harder to collect, digest, understand and evaluate the research when scattered in a number of sources. It also leads to repetitive descriptions of context, bibliography lists and so on. Regarding that it is costly to scientific dissemination process, it is often considered a bad practice or even unethical. Some authors managed to divide the research to the extremal proportions. Salami slicing "can result in a distortion of the literature by leading unsuspecting readers to believe that data presented in each salami slice (i.e., journal article) is derived from a different subject sample".


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: In the 2016 film "Arrival", Agent Halpern mentions a Hungarian word meaning to eliminate your enemies one by one. It is thought that this alludes to "szalámitaktika."


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: Salami slicing has played a key role in the plots of several films, including "Hackers", "Superman III", and "Office Space". In the latter film, the characters reference "Superman III" as inspiration.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: Salami tactics are discussed by the British Chief Scientific Adviser in the "Yes, Prime Minister" episode, "The Grand Design".


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: In a 1972 episode of the TV series "M*A*S*H", Radar attempts to ship an entire Jeep home from Korea one piece at a time. Hawkeye commented that his mailman "would have a retroactive hernia" if he found out. The 1987 TV movie "Perry Mason: The Case of the Murdered Madam" features a murder trial involving the transfer of fractional cents by bank employees.


title: Salami slicing tactics

text: Johnny Cash's "One Piece at a Time" has a similar plot to the aforementioned "M*A*S*H" episode, but with a Cadillac made up of parts spanning model years 1949 through 1973.


title: Tom Foley

text: Thomas Stephen Foley (March 6, 1929 – October 18, 2013) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 49th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1989 to 1995. A member of the Democratic Party, Foley represented Washington's fifth district for thirty years He was the first Speaker of the House since Galusha Grow in 1862 to be defeated in a re-election campaign.


title: Tom Foley

text: Born in Spokane, Washington, Foley attended Gonzaga University and pursued a legal career, after graduating from the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle. He joined the staff of Senator Henry M. Jackson, after working as a prosecutor and an assistant attorney general. With Jackson's support, Foley won election to the House of Representatives, defeating incumbent Republican Congressman Walt Horan. He served as Majority Whip from 1981 to 1987, and as Majority Leader from 1987 to 1989. After the resignation of Jim Wright, Foley became Speaker of the House.


title: Tom Foley

text: Foley's district had become increasingly conservative during his tenure, but he won re-election throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. In the 1994 election, Foley faced attorney George Nethercutt. Nethercutt mobilized popular anger over Foley's opposition to term limits to defeat the incumbent Speaker. After leaving the House, Foley served as the United States Ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton.


title: Tom Foley

text: Born and raised in Spokane, Washington, Foley was the son of Helen Marie (née Higgins), a school teacher, and Ralph E. Foley a Superior Court judge for 34 years. He was of Irish Catholic descent on both sides of his family; his grandfather Cornelius Foley was a maintenance foreman for the Great Northern railroad in


title: Tom Foley

text: Foley graduated from the Jesuit-run Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane in 1946 and attended Gonzaga University for three years; he completed his bachelor's degree at the University of Washington in Seattle, then attended its School of Law and was awarded a law degree in 1957.


title: Tom Foley

text: Following law school, Foley entered private practice. In 1958, he began working in the Spokane County prosecutor's office as a deputy prosecuting attorney, and later taught at Gonzaga's School of Law (in Spokane) from 1958 to 1959. He joined the state attorney general's office in 1961 as an assistant attorney general.


title: Tom Foley

text: In 1961, Foley moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the staff of Senator Henry Jackson. He left Jackson's office in 1964 to run for


title: Tom Foley

text: In 1964, Foley was unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Washington's 5th congressional seat, which included Spokane. He faced 11-term Republican incumbent Walt Horan in the general election and won by seven points, one of many swept into office in the 1964 Democratic landslide. He was re-elected without significant difficulty until 1978, when in a 3-person race, he won only 48% of the vote. Two years later, he narrowly defeated Republican candidate John Sonneland (52% to 48%). Though the fifth district became increasingly conservative, Foley didn't face serious opposition again until his defeat in 1994. Foley voted in favor of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 (as well as to override President Reagan's veto).


title: Tom Foley

text: During his first term in the House, Foley was appointed to the Agriculture Committee and the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee. He served on the latter committee through 1975, when he became chairman of the Agriculture Committee. In 1981, when Foley was appointed Majority Whip, he left the Agriculture Committee to serve on the House Administration Committee. Six years later, January 1987, he was elected House Majority Leader.


title: Tom Foley

text: In June 1989, Jim Wright of Texas resigned as Speaker of the House of Representatives (only the fourth speaker ever to resign) and from Congress amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into his personal business dealings. In the June 6 election to succeed Wright, Foley was the victor, receiving 251 votes; his Republican opponent, Minority Leader Robert H. Michel, received 164 votes.


title: Tom Foley

text: During the 101st Congress, Foley presided over the House as it passed a landmark update to the 1963 Clean Air Act, measures protecting persons with disabilities, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as well as the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990. The budget act, a part of the massive Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, established the "pay-as-you-go" process for discretionary spending and taxes, and was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush on November 5, 1990, contrary to his 1988 . This became a significant issue during the 1992 presidential campaign.


title: Tom Foley

text: In 1993, the 103rd Congress passed a second omnibus budget act through which the government was able to raise additional revenue and balance the federal budget. Signed into law by President Bill Clinton signed on August 10, 1993, the measure stirred controversy because of the tax increases it imposed. Under Foley's leadership Congress also passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, as well as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act plus legislation that laid the groundwork for the "Don't ask, don't tell" military service policy in 1993 which was then instituted by the Clinton Administration in 1994.


title: Tom Foley

text: During his time in the House, Foley repeatedly opposed efforts to impose term limits on Washington state's elected officials, winning the support of the state's voters to reject term limits in a 1991 referendum; however, in 1992, a term limit ballot initiative was approved by the state's voters.


title: Tom Foley

text: Foley brought suit, challenging the constitutionality of a state law setting eligibility requirements on federal offices. Foley won his suit, with a United States District Court declaring that states did not have the authority under the United States Constitution to limit the terms of federal officeholders.


title: Tom Foley

text: However, in Foley's bid for a 16th term in the House, his Republican opponent, George Nethercutt, used the issue against him, citing the caption of the federal case brought by Foley, "Foley against the People of the State of Washington". Nethercutt vowed that if elected, he would not serve more than three terms in the House (but ultimately served for five terms). Foley lost in a narrow race. While Foley had usually relied on large margins in Spokane to carry him to victory, in 1994 he won Spokane by only 9,000 votes, while Nethercutt did well enough in the rest of the district to win overall by just under 4,000 votes. Since Foley left office, no Democrat has garnered more than 45 percent of the district's vote.


title: Tom Foley

text: Foley became the first incumbent Speaker of the House to lose his bid for re-election since Galusha A. Grow in 1862. He is sometimes viewed as a political casualty of the term limits controversy of the early 1990s. President Bill Clinton attributed Foley's defeat to his support for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994.


title: Tom Foley

text: From 1995 to 1998, Foley was head of the Federal City Council, a group of business, civic, education, and other leaders interested in economic development in Washington, D.C.


title: Tom Foley

text: In 1997, Foley was appointed as the 25th U.S. Ambassador to Japan by President Bill Clinton, and was part of the US government response to the deaths of Japanese schoolchildren caused by a US submarine.


title: Tom Foley

text: Foley was a Washington delegate to the 2004 and 2012 Democratic National Conventions. On July 9, 2003, Governor Gary Locke awarded the Washington Medal of Merit, the state's highest honor, to Foley. He was North American Chairman of the Trilateral Commission.


title: Tom Foley

text: Foley died at his home in Washington, D.C. on October 18, 2013, following months of hospice care after suffering a series of strokes and a bout with pneumonia. He was 84 and is survived by his wife, Heather. He had been experiencing aspiration pneumonia. Services were held at St. Aloysius Church at Gonzaga University, as well as in Washington, D.C. Speaker John Boehner, and Nancy Pelosi, who had also served as Speaker, issued statements honoring Foley. In a White House statement, President Barack Obama called Foley a "legend of the United States Congress" who "represented the people of Washington's 5th district with skill, dedication, and a deep commitment to improving the lives of those he was elected to serve.", going on to praise Foley for his bipartisanship and subsequent ambassadorial service under former President Clinton. Vice President Joe Biden also released an official statement, saying "Tom was a good friend and a dedicated public servant.", citing his work in Congress with Foley in the 1980s on budgetary issues. Washington Governor Jay Inslee also released a statement, acknowledging Foley's efforts to reach consensus and emphasize mutual common ground, and his work in the legal system and in Congress. Former President George H. W. Bush stated that Foley "represented the very best in public service--and our political system" and "never got personal or burned bridges."


title: Secondary data

text: Secondary data refers to data that is collected by someone other than the primary user. Common sources of secondary data for social science include censuses, information collected by government departments, organizational records and data that was originally collected for other research purposes. Primary data, by contrast, are collected by the investigator conducting the research.


title: Secondary data

text: Secondary data analysis can save time that would otherwise be spent collecting data and, particularly in the case of quantitative data, can provide larger and higher-quality databases that would be unfeasible for any individual researcher to collect on their own. In addition, analysts of social and economic change consider secondary data essential, since it is impossible to conduct a new survey that can adequately capture past change and/or developments. However, secondary data analysis can be less useful in marketing research, as data may be outdated or inaccurate.


title: Secondary data

text: Government departments and agencies routinely collect information when registering people or carrying out transactions, or for record keeping – usually when delivering a service. This information is called administrative data.


title: Secondary data

text: A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. It is a type of administrative data, but it is collected for the purpose of research at specific intervals. Most administrative data is collected continuously and for the purpose of delivering a service to the people.


title: Secondary data

text: Secondary data is available from other sources and may already have been used in previous research, making it easier to carry out further research. It is time-saving and cost-efficient: the data was collected by someone other than the researcher. Administrative data and census data may cover both larger and much smaller samples of the population in detail. Information collected by the government will also cover parts of the population that may be less likely to respond to the census (in countries where this is optional).


title: Secondary data

text: A clear benefit of using secondary data is that much of the background work needed has already been carried out, such as literature reviews or case studies. The data may have been used in published texts and statistics elsewhere, and the data could already be promoted in the media or bring in useful personal contacts. Secondary data generally have a pre-established degree of validity and reliability which need not be re-examined by the researcher who is re-using such data. Secondary data is key in the concept of data enrichment, which is where datasets from secondary sources are connected to a research dataset to improve its precision by adding key attributes and values.


title: Secondary data

text: Secondary data can provide a baseline for primary research to compare the collected primary data results to and it can also be helpful in research design.


title: Secondary data

text: However, secondary data can present problems, too. The data may be out of date or inaccurate. If using data collected for different research purposes, it may not cover those samples of the population researchers want to examine, or not in sufficient detail. Administrative data, which is not originally collected for research, may not be available in the usual research formats or may be difficult to get access to.


title: Secondary data

text: While 'secondary data' is associated with quantitative databases, analysis focused on verbal or visual materials created for another purpose, is a legitimate avenue for the qualitative researcher. Actually one could go as far as claim that qualitative secondary data analysis “can be understood, not so much as the analysis of pre-existing data; rather as involving a process of re-contextualizing, and re-constructing, data.”


title: Secondary data

text: In the analysis of secondary qualitative data, good documentation cannot be underestimated as it provides future researchers with the background and context and allows replication.


title: Loy Krathong

text: Loy Krathong (, , ) is a Thai festival celebrated annually throughout Thailand and in nearby countries with significant South Western Tai cultures (Laos, Shan, Mon, Tanintharyi, Kelantan, Kedah, and Xishuangbanna). The name could be translated as "to float ritual vessel or lamp," and comes from the tradition of making "krathong" or buoyant, decorated baskets, which are then floated on a river. Many Thais use the krathong to thank the Goddess of Water, Phra Mae Khongkha () or to worship the Buddha's hair pagoda in heaven. This festival traces its origin back to India.


title: Loy Krathong

text: Loy Krathong takes place on the evening of the full moon of the 12th month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar, thus the exact date of the festival changes every year. In the Western calendar this usually falls in the month of November. In Chiang Mai, the festival lasts three days, and in 2018, the dates were 21–23 November.


title: Loy Krathong

text: In Thailand, the festival is known as Loi Krathong. Outside Thailand, this festival is celebrated under different names, including Myanmar as the "Tazaungdaing festival", Sri Lanka as "Il Full Moon Poya", China as "Lantern Festival" and Cambodia as Bon Om Touk".


title: Loy Krathong

text: A "krathong" is traditionally a small floating container fashioned of leaves which is made to hold a small portion of goods like a traditional Thai dish (such as "hor mok") or dessert. The traditional krathong used for floating at the festival are made from a slice of a banana tree trunk or a spider lily plant. Modern krathongs are more often made of bread or Styrofoam. A bread krathong will disintegrate after a few days and can be eaten by fish. Banana stalk krathongs are also biodegradable, but Styrofoam krathongs are increasingly banned, as they pollute rivers and oceans. A krathong is decorated with elaborately-folded banana leaves, three incense sticks, and a candle. A small coin is sometimes included as an offering to the river spirits. On the night of the full moon, Thais launch their krathong on a river, canal, or a pond, making a wish as they do so. The floats are thought to have been introduced to Chiang Mai in 1947 and have since been incorporated into Thai culture. Government offices, corporations, and other organizations launch large decorated krathongs. There are competitions for the best of these large krathongs. Beauty contests often accompany the festivities and fireworks also have become common.


title: Loy Krathong

text: Loy Krathong possibly originated from Angkor in Khmer Empire. Walls of Bayon, a temple built by King Jayavarman VII in the 12th century, depicts scenes of Loy Krathong. A bas relief on the upper level depicts a queen residing on the boat to float the "krathong" in the river whereas six other royal concubines are depicted below, some of which are holding the "krathong" and dedicating at the riverbank in a similar tradition practiced in present-day Cambodia, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian countries.


title: Loy Krathong

text: Recently, it has been accepted that Loy Krathong in Thailand is the festival mixed and combined three important cultural festivals from Bondet Bratib of Khmer Empire, Water Lantern of China and the festival of Kartik Purnima celebrated in the eastern state of Odisha in India. This festival is called Boita Bandana which is observed on the Kartik Purnima or full moon day of Kartik month (which corresponds to October–November) in Odia calendar. Loy Krathong festivities are usually celebrated during the period which corresponds to Kartik Purnima. Odisha being part of the ancient Kalinga which had strong maritime trade relations with Southeast Asia, the similarities in all these festivals may not be coincidental.


title: Loy Krathong

text: According to the 1999 Royal Institute Dictionary, "loi" (ลอย) means 'to float', while "krathong" (กระทง) has various meanings, one of which is 'a small vessel made of leaves which can be floated on water during the Loy Krathong festival. Moreover, according to the Royal Society of Thailand, the word "krathong" (กระทง) is derived from Old Chinese word 鐙 or 燈 (/*k-tˤəŋ/) which means ritual vessel or lamp. However, other sources believe "krathong" (กระทง) to be a derivate of the Khmer word "kantong" (កន្ទោង), which has a similar pronunciation and the same meaning.


title: Loy Krathong

text: Loy Krathong is once said to have begun in the Sukhothai Kingdom by a court lady named Nopphamat. However, it is now known that the Nopphamat tale comes from a poem written in the early-Bangkok period. According to King Rama IV, writing in 1863, it was a Hindu festival that was adapted by Thai Buddhists in Thailand to honour the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha Gautama. The candle venerates the Buddha with light, while the krathong's floating away symbolises letting go of all one's hatred, anger, and defilements. People sometimes cut their fingernails or hair and place the clippings on the krathong as a symbol of letting go of past transgressions and negative thoughts. Many Thais use the krathong to thank the Goddess of Water, the Hindu Goddess Ganga, Phra Mae Khongkha ().


title: Loy Krathong

text: Simon de la Loubère led an embassy to Siam (modern Thailand) in 1687 (the "La Loubère-Céberet mission"). Upon his return, La Loubère wrote a description of his travels, as had been requested by Louis XIV, published under the title "Du Royaume de Siam". Loy Krathong festival was mentioned in his book in the sixth chapter of part two called Concerning the Shows, and other Diverſion of the Siameſes: Religious Shows: An Illumination on the Waters, and another on the Land, and in the Palace.


title: Loy Krathong

text: The beauty contests that accompany the festival are known as "Nopphamat Queen Contests" has been promoted since the reign of King Rama III. Since the country became peaceful after getting involved with many wars, King Rama III ordered the palace officers and people to revive and promote the important festivals of the kingdom, such as Loy Krathong. According to legend written on the poem, Nang Nopphamat (; alternatively spelled as "Noppamas" or "Nopamas") was a consort of the 13th century Sukhothai King Sri Indraditya (who is also known as Phra Ruang) and she reputedly was the first to float a decorated raft. However, this tale may have been invented in the early-19th century. There is no evidence that a Nang Nopphamat ever existed. Instead, it is a fact that a woman of this name was the leading character of a novel released at the end of the reign of King Rama III, around 1850 CE. Her character was written as guidance for all women who wished to become civil servants. Kelantan in Malaysia celebrates Loy Krathong similarly, especially in the Tumpat area. The ministry in charge of tourism in Malaysia recognizes it as an attraction for tourists.


title: Loy Krathong

text: Loy Krathong coincides with the Lanna (northern Thai) festival known as "Yi Peng" (). "Yi" means 'two' and "peng" means a 'full moon day'. "Yi Peng" refers to the full moon day in the second month according to the Lanna lunar calendar (the twelfth month of the Thai lunar calendar). The festival is meant as a time to make merit.


title: Loy Krathong

text: Swarms of sky lanterns (; ), literally: 'floating lanterns', are launched into the air. Khom loi are made from a thin fabric, such as rice paper, stretched over a bamboo or wire frame, to which a candle or fuel cell is attached. When the fuel cell is lit, the resulting hot air is trapped inside the lantern and creates enough lift for the khom loi to float into the sky. During the festival, some people also decorate their houses, gardens, and temples with "khom fai" (), intricately shaped paper lanterns which take on different forms. "Khom thue" () are lanterns which are carried around hanging from a stick, "khom khwaen" () are the hanging lanterns, and "khom pariwat" (), which are placed at temples and which revolve due to the heat of the candle inside. The most elaborate "Yi Peng" celebrations can be seen in Chiang Mai, the ancient capital of the former Lanna kingdom, where now both Loy Krathong and Yi Peng are celebrated at the same time resulting in lights floating on the waters, lights hanging from trees/buildings or standing on walls, and lights floating in the sky. The tradition of "Yi Peng" was also adopted by certain parts of Laos during the 16th century.


title: Loy Krathong

text: In 2016, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) cleaned six tonnes of rubbish from the city's waterways on the day after Loy Krathong. The city governor said that 661,935 floats were collected from waterways across Bangkok. Of these, 617,901 (93.7 percent) were made of decomposible natural materials, while 44,034 were non-biodegradable Styrofoam floats. There were 163,679 fewer krathong collected than in 2015. The city mobilized 210 workers and 45 boats to collect floats from the Chao Phraya River and canals.


title: Loy Krathong

text: In 2017, because the sky lanterns are a hazard to passing aircraft and "...can cause damage to important places in the areas such as the Grand Palace [sic], temples and governmental offices..." khom loi are increasingly subject to governmental restrictions. In Chiang Mai, authorities cancelled 78 flights in and out of Chiang Mai Airport on 3–4 November 2017. Another 79 flights were rescheduled. Despite those measures, the remains of more than 100 lanterns were later found on airport premises. In Bangkok, the public are prohibited from using fireworks and sky lanterns entirely. Violators may face three years imprisonment and/or a fine of 60,000 baht. One hundred-ninety piers on the Chao Phraya River will be open to the public to float their krathongs. In 2018, up to 158 flights were cancelled or rescheduled at three airports, and in Bangkok 88 piers were closed.


title: Loy Krathong

text: In 2017, in Nakhon Ratchasima province, 50 workers collected krathong from the moat in the town centre near the Thao Suranaree Monument. In Buriram, more than 200 workers and volunteers in Mueang District cleared at least 20,000 krathong from the town's moat. There, Styrofoam krathong will be banned in 2017. In Lampang, more than 100 students and teachers from the Institute of Physical Education helped municipal workers clean up the Wang River in Mueang District.


title: Loy Krathong

text: In 2018, after the festivities, Bangkok city workers cleared 841,327 krathongs, up from 3.6 percent in 2017, from the Chao Phraya River, local canals, and 30 public parks; 5.3 percent of them were made from styrofoam.


title: Nirmala Devi

text: Nirmala Devi, also known as Nirmala Arun (7 June 1927 15 June 1996), was an Indian actress in the 1940s and a Hindustani classical vocalist of the Patiala Gharana. She is the mother of Bollywood actor Govinda.


title: Nirmala Devi

text: Nirmala Devi was the wife of the 1940s actor Arun Kumar Ahuja. She has five children, including Indian film actor Govinda and film director Kirti Kumar. She died in 1996.


title: Nirmala Devi

text: Nirmala Devi was born on 7 June 1927, in the holy city of Varanasi (then known as Banares), Uttar Pradesh.


title: Nirmala Devi

text: She was married to actor Arun Kumar Ahuja in 1942. They had 5 children, 3 daughters and 2 sons. The sons are Indian film actor Govinda and film director Kirti Kumar. Nirmala took to acting during the period of her betrothal and her first film to be released was ‘Savera’ (meaning ‘Dawn), with husband Arun as co-star.


title: Nirmala Devi

text: Genre - Hindustani Classical - Music Label - HMV (His Master's Voice Ltd, now known as SAREGAMA, India)


title: City of Gods

text: "City of Gods" is a song by American rapper Fivio Foreign with fellow American rapper Kanye West and American singer Alicia Keys. It was released as the lead single from Fivio's debut studio album "B.I.B.L.E." and the second single from West's eleventh studio album "Donda 2". On the song, Keys interpolates the chorus from "New York City" (2015) by The Chainsmokers. The track was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America, indicating 500,000 units recorded in the US.


title: City of Gods

text: West and Fivio Foreign first worked together for the song "Off the Grid", released on West's album "Donda" in 2021. The collaboration came together after West called Fivio Foreign to record in Mercedes Benz Stadium the night before the listening event for "Donda". According to Fivio Foreign, West praised the verse the rapper recorded for "Off the Grid" and said that he reminds him of Jay-Z. Before "Donda" released, Fivio Foreign told his fans on Twitter that West was executive producing and performing on his upcoming album "B.I.B.L.E". On February 5, 2022, Fivio Foreign tweeted "I ain't gon lie, Ye gave me the feature of the Yr.. He was talking 2 crazy on that verse" [sic]".


title: City of Gods

text: When Fivio Foreign first got the beat for "City of Gods", it featured a sample of the 2015 track "New York City" by The Chainsmokers. When playing it for West, he said "Yo, I see something with this song" and asked Fivio to send the beat so he could change it around. One of the changes West made was taking out the sample and getting Keys to sing the vocals instead. Originally Fivio was rapping "Ain't no king of New York, nobody really in charge", and when he played it for West, he said "You gotta say you're the king of New York". Fivio Foreign then suggested that he should rap " Pop was the king of New York, now I'm the one that's in charge" (thereby paying tribute to late drill rapper Pop Smoke) which West responded to by saying "Yo that's even better!".


title: City of Gods

text: The song is dedicated to late rapper, friend of Fivio Foreign and longtime collaborator TDott Woo, who was shot and killed a week before the release of the song. In a statement put up with the release of the song, Fivio said "T Dot. That's my baby boy. I never thought I'd be doing this without you here with me. You supposed to be here with me but you gon' always be the prince in the City of Gods. Your name will forever live through with me. Long Live Prince T Dot."


title: City of Gods

text: On April 7, 2022, Keys released a solo version of the song with a stripped back production called "City of Gods (Part II)".


title: Jack Harlow discography

text: The discography of American rapper Jack Harlow consists of two studio albums, six mixtapes, two extended plays, and 32 singles (including 6 as the featured artist). On March 13, 2020, his 22nd birthday, he released his second extended play, "Sweet Action". The EP reached number 20 on the "Billboard" 200. It produced the top-10 single, "Whats Poppin", which reached number two on the "Billboard" Hot 100. On December 11, 2020, Harlow released his debut studio album, "Thats What They All Say". The album debuted and peaked at number five on the "Billboard" 200. It produced the top-40 single, "Tyler Herro", which debuted and peaked at number 34 on the Hot 100. "Whats Poppin" is also included on the album, as well as the remix, which features DaBaby, Tory Lanez, and Lil Wayne. In 2021, Harlow released a collaboration with Lil Nas X, "Industry Baby", which became his first number-one single on the Hot 100. On May 6, 2022, Harlow released his second studio album, "Come Home the Kids Miss You". The album debuted and peaked at number three on the "Billboard" 200. It produced his second number-one single, "First Class", which is also his first song to debut atop the Hot 100. It also produced the top-20 single, "Nail Tech", which debuted and peaked at number 18 on the Hot 100.


title: Antiviral (film)

text: Antiviral is a 2012 science fiction horror film written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg. The film competed in the "Un Certain Regard" section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Cronenberg re-edited the film after the festival to make it tighter, trimming nearly six minutes out of the film. The revised film was first shown at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, and was a co-winner, alongside Jason Buxton's "Blackbird", of the festival's Best Canadian First Feature Film award.


title: Antiviral (film)

text: Syd March is employed by the Lucas Clinic, a company which purchases viruses and other pathogens from celebrities who fall ill, in order to inject them into clients who desire a connection with celebrities. In particular, the pathogens supplied by the Lucas Clinic's exclusive celebrity Hannah Geist are extremely popular, and another employee at the clinic, Derek Lessing, is responsible for harvesting them from Hannah directly. To make extra money, Syd uses his own body as an incubator, steals pathogens from the lab, and sells them on the black market. To do so, he uses a stolen console to break the copy protection placed on the virus by the clinic; once injected in a client, the pathogen is rendered incommunicable. He then passes the pathogens to Arvid, who works at Astral Bodies, a celebrity meat market where meat is grown from the cells of celebrities for consumption.


title: Antiviral (film)

text: After Derek is caught smuggling and arrested, Lucas asks Syd to take his place and harvest a pathogen from Hannah, who has recently fallen ill. Once he has taken a blood sample from Hannah, Syd quickly injects himself with some of her blood. He experiences the first symptoms, fever and disorientation, rapidly, and he leaves work early. His attempts to remove the virus' copy protection are unsuccessful, and the console is destroyed during the process. When Syd awakens from severe delirium the next day, he discovers Hannah has died from the unknown disease, and all products harvested from her have skyrocketed in popularity. Desperate to fix his console, he approaches Arvid, who sets up a meeting with Levine, the leader of the piracy group. Levine offers to fix the console in exchange for samples of Syd's blood, but Syd refuses. Levine subdues him and forcibly takes samples from Syd, as the pathogen which killed Hannah is now hotly in demand on the black market, and lethal pathogens are not legal to distribute.


title: Antiviral (film)

text: The next day, a severely ill Syd is approached by two men, who drive him to an undisclosed location where Hannah is actually still alive. Syd learns from Hannah's physician Dr. Abendroth that the virus infecting them both has been intentionally engineered with a security measure to prevent analysis, which explains why Syd's console was destroyed. Hannah's death was fabricated to protect her, but she is shown to be in the extreme stages of the illness, extremely weak and bleeding from her mouth. Dr. Abendroth reveals to Syd that the virus is a modified version of an illness that Hannah has had before, and that he himself has an infatuation with her, having had samples of her skin grafted to his own arm. He further suggests that since Syd unnecessarily injected himself with Hannah's blood, he too is "just another fan." As Syd's condition worsens, he returns to the Lucas Clinic, where he traces the original strain of the virus to Derek, who sold it to a rival company, Vole & Tesser. Dr. Abendroth discovers that Vole & Tesser patented the modified strain, though their motives remain unclear.


title: Antiviral (film)

text: Before Syd can proceed further, he is abducted by Levine and incarcerated in a room where his deterioration and death will be broadcast on reality television to sate Hannah's fans, who could not witness her death. As Syd begins to show the final symptoms, he escapes by spearing Levine in the mouth with a syringe and holding a nurse hostage with his infected blood. After Syd realizes that Vole & Tesser infected Hannah to harvest their own patented pathogen from her, Syd contacts Tesser and negotiates a deal. The film closes with a virtual reality version of Hannah that advertises her "Afterlife" exclusively from Vole & Tesser. Syd is shown working for Vole & Tesser, where Hannah's cells have been replicated to form a distorted cell garden from Astral Bodies' celebrity meat technology. Viruses injected into her system are sold. Syd demonstrates a new virus as he sticks a needle into a genetically created arm. Later, while alone, Syd cuts the arm and drinks the flowing blood; it is revealed the arm is in fact Hannah's, as her deformed face and body are shown to be in the Cell Garden chamber.


title: Antiviral (film)

text: Cronenberg has stated that the genesis of the film was a viral infection he once had. More precisely, the "central idea came to him in a fever dream during a bout of illness," wrote journalist Jill Lawless. Cronenberg said, "I was delirious and was obsessing over the physicality of illness, the fact that there was something in my body and in my cells that had come from someone else's body, and I started to think there was a weird intimacy to that connection. And afterwards I tried to think of a character who would see a disease that way and I thought: a celebrity-obsessed fan. Celebrity culture is completely bodily obsessed - who has the most cellulite, who has fungus feet? Celebrity culture completely fetishizes the body and so I thought the film should also fetishize the body - in a very grotesque way."


title: Antiviral (film)

text: It was further shaped when he saw an interview Sarah Michelle Gellar did on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"; what struck him was when "she said she was sick and if she sneezed she'd infect the whole audience, and everyone just started cheering." Principal photography took place in Hamilton, Ontario and in Toronto.


title: Antiviral (film)

text: Rotten Tomatoes reports that 66% of critics gave the film a positive review with an average score of 5.9/10, based on 93 reviews. The site's consensus reads, ""Antiviral" is a well crafted body horror, packed with interesting - if not entirely subtle - ideas." It holds a score of 55 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic, based on 18 reviews.


title: Antiviral (film)

text: Writing for "The Daily Telegraph", Tim Robey gives the film 4 stars, calling it "an eye-widening delve into conceptual science fiction," with the "gruesome verve" of his father David Cronenberg's early work, "and morbidity to match", and says "there's real muscle in its ideas, a potent kind of satirical despair, and a level of craft you rarely expect from a first-timer."


title: Antiviral (film)

text: Writing for "Empire", Kim Newman called it "a smart, subversive but rather cold debut". "Variety's" Justin Chang stated that Brandon Cronenberg "has his own distinct flair for the grotesque", but that "the film suffers from basic pacing issues" and that ""Antiviral" never builds the sort of character investment or narrative momentum that would allow its visceral horrors to seriously disturb." Stephen Garrett of "The New York Observer" described the film as "stomach-churning" and added that "the production, though impeccably polished and featuring an abundance of blood, spit, mucus, and pus, misses the mark with underdeveloped characters and a schematic plot. But boy, do those gory ideas and notions linger in the mind."


title: Antiviral (film)

text: Peter Bradshaw of "The Guardian" was more negative, stating that "Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome."


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: Manuel "Manolo" Blahnik Rodríguez (; born 27 November 1942) is a Spanish fashion designer and founder of the eponymous high-end shoe brand.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: Blahnik was born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, in the Canary Islands (Spain), to a Czech father and Spanish mother. His father left Prague in the 1930s to avoid rising fascism; his grandparents disappeared in the 1950s after the Communists took charge. His mother's family owned a banana plantation in the island city of Santa Cruz de la Palma, where he grew up alongside his sister, Evangelina. He was homeschooled as a child before eventually attending a Swiss boarding school. Later, his parents wanted him to be a diplomat and enrolled him at the University of Geneva majoring in Politics and Law. However, Blahnik changed his majors to Literature and Architecture. In 1965, he got his degree and moved to Paris to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts and Stage Set Design at the Louvre Art School, all while working at a vintage clothing shop. In 1969, he moved to London to work as a buyer at fashion boutique "Feathers" and wrote for "L’Uomo Vogue", an Italian men's version of "Vogue".


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: In 1969, Blahnik had a chance to meet Diana Vreeland, the editor-in-chief of "U.S. Vogue," while he was traveling in New York. He then presented his portfolio of fashions and set designs to Vreeland, at which point she looked him straight in the eye and said, "Young man, make things, make accessories, make shoes." She admired his shoe sketches and advised him to concentrate on designing footwear. Blahnik followed her advice and worked on designing shoes.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: In 1971, Ossie Clark invited him to create shoes for his runway show. He also designed shoes for other London fashion designers, such as Jean Muir and Zandra Rhodes. From 1971, Blahnik was selling Manolo Blahnik shoes for Zapata. With a loan of £2,000, Blahnik bought the Zapata Shoe Company from its owner and opened his own boutique. In 1974, Blahnik became the second man ever to be featured on the cover of "U.K. Vogue" (after Helmut Berger).


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: In 1977, Blahnik created his first American collection. These were sold in 1978 through Bloomingdales. Blahnik opened his first boutique in the US in 1979.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: Blahnik's boutiques are located in London, New York, Geneva, Madrid, Barcelona, Moscow, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, and Taipei. Bloomingdales (for which he created his first American collection), Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue carry his line in the United States and newly opened in Dubai Mall. The company has signed a long-term deal with the shoewear retailer Kurt Geiger to operate Manolo Blahnik boutiques.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: In 2000, Blahnik, together with Neiman Marcus, launched the first commercial virtual reality online showroom featuring 3D models of his shoes. The entire collection was sold out online within three weeks.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: Blahnik was elevated to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1987. In 2007, Blahnik was appointed as an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his service to the British fashion industry.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: Blahnik currently resides in Bath, United Kingdom, and was awarded an honorary degree from Bath Spa University in July 2012.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: One of Blahnik's greatest inspirations was his mother. She studied fashion magazines and interpreted the latest fashion trends on her clothing. Blahnik and his family often travelled to Paris and Madrid to order clothes. His mother was always dissatisfied with the shoes from their hometown so she made her own. She learned the rudiments of her craft from a local Canary Island cobbler and, as a boy, Blahnik loved to watch his mother when she made beautiful shoes. He has inherited his mother's love for brocade and satin fabrics and recounted how, as a boy, he found a trunk filled with shoes by the famous Russian, Pierre Yantorny, all made from silks, antique lace and brocades trimmed with delicate buckles. All were light, elegant and feminine, attributes Blahnik later brought to his own designs.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: When Blahnik was attending university he lived with his aunt and uncle. Meanwhile, his aunt deeply influenced his fashion sense and style. He refined his tastes and learned to appreciate the beauty of luxury, art, and happiness and beauty. Blahnik recalled that, according to his aunt, "happiness was having the single most elegant handbag ever made, in every color available."


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: Blahnik never studied shoemaking formally. He learned the skills by visiting shoe factories and talking to pattern cutters, technicians, and machine operators. At first, he designed men's footwear, but he immediately found that men's shoe design limited his imagination and lacked the element of fashion so he focused on women's shoes. When mainstream shoe styles were still dominated by clunky platforms in the 1970s, he revived the sleek stiletto heel, which has since become a classic. Also, he dislikes wedges and believes in the power of heels and the sex appeal they convey.


title: Manolo Blahnik

text: Blahnik is the subject of the 2017 documentary film: "Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards," written and directed by Michael Roberts.


title: Caroline Campbell

text: Caroline Campbell is an American violinist. She is a soloist and chamber musician who performs and records classical, jazz, film and popular music.


title: Caroline Campbell

text: Campbell was born in Albany, New York, and grew up in Hawaii, Nevada, and northern California. She began playing violin in a Suzuki method preschool class at age three. At age eight, she performed solo with the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra. As a senior in high school, she was selected as a Presidential Scholar and performed at the Kennedy Center.


title: Caroline Campbell

text: She completed high school as a student in the Young Artists Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and continued collegiate work at the Cleveland Institute, where she studied with David Cerone and Donald Weilerstein. Campbell transferred to Stanford University in 2000. She studied computer science, logic, linguistics, and psychology. While at Stanford, she studied violin with Gennady Kleyman, the Soviet-born musician who chaired the university's violin department. In 2004, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BS in symbolic systems and an MA in sociology.


title: Caroline Campbell

text: Campbell has appeared as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Houston Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, and Dallas Symphony. She has soloed at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Sydney Opera House, Hollywood Bowl, and Barclays Center. She has performed duets with Andrea Bocelli, Sting, Michael Bublé, Chris Botti, Josh Groban, Rod Stewart, and Julio Iglesias.


title: Caroline Campbell

text: Campbell performs regularly with jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, and is featured in Oblivion on Botti’s latest CD, "Impressions". As a guest artist, she has toured five continents with Botti, and joined Barbra Streisand in her 2012 tour. Campbell was a featured guest artist with Andrea Bocelli on his 2012 U.S. tour and performed duets with him in his PBS Great Performances concert in Portofino, Italy, and in the film "Love in Portofino".


title: Caroline Campbell

text: Campbell is first violinist of the Los Angeles-based Sonus Quartet, a string quartet that fuses diverse musical styles. With the Sonus Quartet, Campbell performed with Stevie Wonder at the Library of Congress, recorded with Norah Jones for her album "Little Broken Hearts", performed "Crazy" with Gnarls Barkley, and recorded film scores such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, , Spider-Man, and The Lone Ranger.


title: Caroline Campbell

text: Campbell is a founding member of Opus X, a classical musical foursome including Russian-Danish pianist , British clarinetist Lone Madsen, and Japanese-American cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper. The group’s first single, "Libertango," was released June 10, 2013. Opus X recorded its debut album with Grammy Award winning producer, Steven Epstein.


title: Caroline Campbell

text: Campbell's debut CD, "Truly, Simply, Deeply", was released in 2011. Her second CD, "With Love from Hollywood", was released in July, 2013.


title: Caroline Campbell

text: Campbell was married to American businessman and attorney, John Miller, with whom she has two children, daughter Violet and son Quest. The couple divorced in November 2018 after 13 years of marriage. In August 2021, Campbell married businessman and competitive distance runner, Christopher Estwanik in Bermuda.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Star Wars: Jedi Knight is a series of first- and third-person shooter video games set in the fictional "Star Wars" expanded universe. The series focuses primarily on Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial officer who becomes a mercenary working for the Rebel Alliance, and later a Jedi and instructor at Luke Skywalker's Jedi Academy. While the first game is set a year after the events of "A New Hope", the sequels take place in the decade following "Return of the Jedi".


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: The "Jedi Knight" series began in 1995 with the release of "" for DOS, Macintosh, and PlayStation. This was followed in 1997 by "" for Microsoft Windows, in which Katarn learns the ways of a Jedi. In 1998, "" was released as an expansion pack for "Dark Forces II", this time giving the player control of Mara Jade as well as Katarn. In 2002, "" was released. "Jedi Outcast" was developed by Raven Software and powered by the id Tech 3 game engine. It was released for Windows, Mac, Xbox and GameCube. "" followed in 2003 on Windows, Mac and Xbox. It was powered by the same game engine as its predecessor. "Jedi Academy" was the first game in the series where the player does not control Katarn at any point, although he is featured prominently in the storyline.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: The games in the "Jedi Knight" series have received generally favorable reviews. Multiple publications have commented on the quality of the series as a whole. The use of the lightsaber in the series, a prominent gameplay element in all but the first game, has received specific praise for its implementation.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: The "Jedi Knight" series is composed primarily of first/third-person shooter gameplay elements, with a number of variation on the norms of the genre within each game. All of the games use a level based system which contains a series of objectives that must be completed before the player can continue. From "Dark Forces II" onwards, the games have included lightsaber combat and the use of Force powers, which have been tweaked and modified as the series has progressed.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: In the first game, "Dark Forces", the focus is on combat against various creatures and characters from the "Star Wars" universe, and includes environmental puzzles and hazards, whilst following a central storyline outlined in mission briefings and cutscenes. For combat, the player may use fists, explosive land mines and thermal detonators, as well as blasters and other ranged weapons, with the gameplay leaning more towards ranged combat.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: In "Dark Forces II", the player has the option of a third-person view, plus an option to switch automatically to third-person when the lightsaber is the selected weapon. Three types of Force powers are introduced in this game: Light powers provide non violent advantages, Dark powers provide violent ones, while Neutral powers enhance athletic abilities. The game has two endings, depending on whether the player chooses to focus on the Light Side or the Dark Side.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Unlike its predecessor, "Mysteries of the Sith" has a single, morally positive course, as the player progresses through the game in a linear fashion. The game includes most of the enemies featured in "Dark Forces II", plus some new monsters. The player has access to Force powers and projectile weapons such as a blaster or railgun, as well as a lightsaber.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: "Jedi Outcast"s gameplay is similar to that of its predecessors, with some small additions, such as access to gun turrets, or the use of combos unique to each of the three lightsaber styles in the game; fast, medium and strong. As with "Dark Forces II" and "Mysteries of the Sith", the use of Force powers is restricted by a "Force Meter", which depletes when the powers are used.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: "Jedi Academy" features very similar gameplay to "Jedi Outcast", although one new feature is that the player may customize their lightsaber at the outset of the game. Later, the player has the option of choosing dual sabers, or a "saber staff", similar to Darth Maul's double ended lightsaber in "". Instead of moving linearly from one level to the next, the player chooses from a selection of different missions which can be played in any order. The game also introduces player-controllable vehicles and vehicle-based levels.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Starting with "Jedi Knight", a multiplayer mode has been included in every game, in which up to eight people can compete with one another via a LAN or up to four people online. In "Jedi Knight", the player creates an avatar, and then selects a ranking, with higher rankings having access to more Force powers. There are two types of multiplayer game available; "Capture the flag" and "Jedi Training". "Mysteries of the Sith" includes fifteen multiplayer maps, four of which only allow players to battle with lightsabers, and a ranking system that tracks the player's experience. The multiplayer mode allows the use of pre-set characters featured in both "Jedi Knight" and "Mysteries of the Sith", as well as characters from the "Star Wars" films, such as Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and Boba Fett. In "Mysteries", the "Capture the flag" mode is altered, with the gradual reduction of the Force powers of the player who is carrying the flag.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: "Jedi Outcast" features several multiplayer modes, which, in the PC and Mac versions, can be played over a LAN or the internet. Multiplayer mode is limited to two players on the Xbox and GameCube versions of the game. Game modes include "Free-For-All", "Team Deathmatch", "Capture the Flag", "Power Duel" and "Siege", all of which can be played with other players, bots, or both. "Jedi Academy" introduces several multiplayer modifications, such as "Movie Battles II" which allows players to take part in lightsaber duels that featured in the "Star Wars" films. "Movie Battles" also lets players choose different classes of character, ranging from Jedi Knight to Wookiee. Another popular modification, "Evolution of Combat", allows players to use more movie-realistic saber combat along with other additions such as a movie accurate class system featuring tens of new characters.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: The "Jedi Knight" video games are set in the "Star Wars" universe. For the majority of the series, the player controls Kyle Katarn, who begins as a mercenary, eventually learning the ways of The Force, becoming a Jedi Master and teaching at the Jedi Academy.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Prior to the events of "Dark Forces", Katarn was a student studying to follow in his father's career of agricultural mechanics. However, while at an academy, he was told by officials that the Rebel Alliance had killed his parents. His anger led him to enlist in the Imperial army, where he soon met Jan Ors, an undercover double agent working for the Alliance. Ors uncovered the real information about Katarn's parents; they had actually been killed by the Empire. Shortly thereafter, Ors' cover was blown, and she was taken prisoner. Katarn helped her escape, thus ending his career with the Empire. He then became a mercenary, and due to his hatred for the Empire, regularly took on jobs for the Alliance.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: In the first level of "Dark Forces", which is set prior to "A New Hope", Katarn recovers the plans to the Death Star, a heavily armed space station capable of destroying entire planets. The Rebel Alliance uses the plans to find a weakness in and then destroy the Death Star. Katarn then aids the Rebels in stopping the threat of the Imperial "Dark Trooper" project. Despite the successful missions on behalf of the Alliance, however, Katarn does not join their cause. "Dark Forces II" begins several years after the destruction of the second Death Star in "Return of the Jedi", when Katarn is informed of the exact details of his father's death. His father, Morgan Katarn, had discovered the location of "The Valley of the Jedi", a source of great Force power, but a Dark Jedi named Jerec murdered Morgan in an attempt to find the location. Katarn travels to the Valley of the Jedi while learning the ways of the Jedi himself. Eventually, he confronts and defeats Jerec, avenging his father's death. However, Katarn still does not join the Jedi Order, instead using his powers for the New Republic, and taking on an apprentice with a similar history to himself; Mara Jade. During this time, Katarn learns of a Sith temple on the planet Dromund Kaas. There, Katarn is corrupted by the Dark Side of the Force. However, Jade is able to convince him to return to the Light and they leave together.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: This incident causes Katarn to distance himself from the Force and return to mercenary missions with Jan Ors. In "Jedi Outcast", Ors is captured by Desann, a former pupil of Luke Skywalker who has turned to the Dark Side. Katarn believes Desann to have killed Ors, and so he returns to the Valley of the Jedi in an attempt to reconnect to the Force so as to stop Desann. Eventually, it is revealed that Ors' death is a ruse by Desann for the express purpose of having Katarn return to the Valley, so Desann may learn of its location. Desann, in league with the Imperial Remnant, uses the power of the Valley to endow his troops with Force power, before using them to launch an attack on the Jedi Academy. However, Katarn defeats Desann and discovers his true path, becoming a tutor at the Academy. In "Jedi Academy", Katarn takes on two students: Jaden Korr and Rosh Penin. The protagonist of the game is Jaden, who is dispatched on various peace-keeping missions across the galaxy, sometimes with Katarn, sometimes alone. Jaden eventually encounters a Sith cult led by Tavion (Desann's former apprentice) who plans to restore the Sith to power by using stolen Force energy to resurrect an ancient Sith Lord, Marka Ragnos. After learning that Rosh has betrayed the Jedi and joined Tavion, Jaden may either kill him and turn to the Dark Side or let him live and remain on the Light Side. If Jaden chooses the Dark Side, he/she kills Tavion, defeats Katarn, and flees with Tavion's staff, which is capable of absorbing the Force. The game ends with Katarn setting out in pursuit of Jaden. If Jaden chooses to spare Rosh, he/she ultimately defeats both Tavion and the spirit of Ragnos, and is lauded for his/her actions by Katarn and Luke.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Production of "Star Wars: Dark Forces" began in September 1993, with Daron Stinnett as project leader and Justin Chin as lead writer. The developers wanted to adapt the first-person shooter format to include strategy and puzzles, which at the time, had never been done. "Dark Forces" thus features numerous logic puzzles and parts of the game requires a strategic method to progress, often involving manipulation of the environment. This style of gameplay has remained constant in all "Jedi Knight" games. Another aspect that has remained the same since "Dark Forces" is the use of John Williams' soundtrack from the "Star Wars" films. In "Dark Forces" the music was implemented using iMuse, software that alters the music depending on what is happening at any given moment in the game. Lucasarts developed the Jedi game engine to power "Dark Forces", adding features to the first-person shooter genre that were uncommon at the time, such as multi-level floors and free look, as well as athletic abilities such as running, jumping, ducking and swimming. Original plans for the game had Luke Skywalker as the main character, but due to the limitations this would impose on the story, the developers designed a new character, Kyle Katarn.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Even before the release of "Dark Forces", Justin Chin had planned out Katarn's role in "Dark Forces II", indicating that Katarn would face a "big trial" in a game that would be a "rite of passage." Chin became project leader for "Dark Forces II". In the game, the digital audio from "Dark Forces" was replaced with CD audio. "Dark Forces II" adds two "Jedi" aspects to the series; the use of The Force and the lightsaber. The Force plays an integral role in how the player plays the game. The method of allocating credits to Force powers was designed with an RPG style in mind, allowing the player the choice of which powers to improve. Chin said in an early interview that progress through the game is based upon the abilities the player develops. A new game engine, the Sith engine, was developed for "Dark Forces II", which uses both 3D graphics and sound. It was one of the first games to adopt the use of 3D graphics hardware acceleration using Microsoft Direct3D. Another development was that "Dark Forces II" moved on from the static images between levels used in "Dark Forces" to full motion video cutscenes. The characters are represented by live actors while the backgrounds are pre-rendered. The cutscenes included the first lightsaber footage filmed since "Return of the Jedi" in 1983. "Dark Forces II" also introduced multiplayer gaming to the series, allowing players to play online or via a LAN.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Nearly four years after the release of "Dark Forces II", LucasArts announced at E3 2001 that "Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast" would be released in 2002. Unlike previous games in the series, "Jedi Outcast" was not developed in-house by LucasArts, but by Raven Software. The subsequent success of "Outcast" led LucasArts to continue the partnership with Raven, leading to the development of "Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy" a year later; "With the overwhelming success and critical acclaim of "Star Wars: Jedi Outcast", continuing an alliance with Activision and Raven Software was a clear and very easy decision," said then-president of LucasArts, Simon Jeffery. "Jedi Outcast" and "Jedi Academy" are both powered by the "Quake III: Team Arena" game engine, with modifications for the use of a lightsaber and The Force. "Jedi Academy" is the only game in the "Jedi Knight" series that does not give the player control of Katarn at any point. Instead the focus is on Jaden Korr, a student of the Force under Katarn. The decision to change protagonist was made by the developers for gameplay reasons.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: The "Jedi Knight" series as a whole has been well received. The series itself has been described as "highly acclaimed," and has been noted by IGN as one of few "Star Wars" themed video game franchises that is of consistently high quality on the PC. GamersMark.com called the series "rather entertaining," whilst "GameNOW" rated it as "consistently great."


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Individually, each game in the series has been generally well received. In 1995, "Dark Forces" became LucasArts' highest sell-in with more than 300,000 copies accounted for at launch. Games in the series have achieved consistently favorable review scores from most publications, and hold high aggregate scores on both Metacritic and GameRankings. The only exceptions are the PlayStation version of "Dark Forces", which was perceived to have graphical problems and the GameCube version of "Jedi Outcast", which was seen as considerably inferior to the PC and Xbox versions.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Games in the "Jedi Knight" series have also received specific commendation and awards. "Dark Forces II" was judged the best game of the year for 1997 by five publications, and was number one in "PC Gamer"s "50 best games ever" list in 1998. "Jedi Outcast" was a finalist in the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences "Interactive Achievement Awards" in the 2002 Computer Action/Adventure Game of the Year category. The game also received commendations from "PC Gamer" and "Computer Gaming World".


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Gameplay aspects of the series have also been well received. The lightsaber charted at number 7 in UGO Networks's countdown of the 50 best weapons in video games. The publication commented that using such a weapon in a game was "extremely satisfying," and stated that lightsaber usage had been refined as the series continued.


title: Star Wars: Jedi Knight

text: Kyle Katarn has also received a positive reception. IGN placed him as their 22nd top "Star Wars" character, praising him as "a gamer's reliable blank state," a feature which they felt made him one of the most "human" "Star Wars" characters. They also stated that Katarn's endearence with fans was because of his "mishmash of quirks and dispositions." In GameSpot's vote for the all-time greatest videogame hero, Katarn was eliminated in round two when faced against Lara Croft, garnering 27.5% of the votes. In round one he defeated Dig Dug, with 67.6% of the votes.


title: Redskin

text: Redskin is a slang term for Native Americans in the United States and First Nations in Canada. The term "redskin" underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries and in contemporary dictionaries of American English it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting.


title: Redskin

text: Although the term has almost disappeared from contemporary use, it remains as the name of many sports teams. The most prominent was the Washington NFL team. After decades of resistance to change by the owners, management and fans; major sponsors responded to calls to end systemic racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by advocating a name change. The new name Washington Commanders was announced on February 2, 2022. While the usage by other teams has been declining steadily, 37 high schools in the United States continue to be "Redskins". School administrators and alumni assert that their use of the name is honoring their local tradition and not insulting to Native Americans.


title: Redskin

text: The origin of the choice of red to describe Native Americans in English is debated. While related terms were used in anthropological literature as early as the 17th century, labels based on skin color entered everyday speech around the middle of the 18th century. "At the start of the eighteenth century, Indians and Europeans rarely mentioned the color of each other's skins. By midcentury, remarks about skin color and the categorization of peoples by simple color-coded labels (red, white, black) had become commonplace."


title: Redskin

text: Documents from the colonial period indicate that the use of "red" as an identifier by Native Americans for themselves emerged in the context of Indian-European diplomacy in the southeastern region of North America, becoming common usage in the 1720s. Subsequently, variations of "red men" were adopted by Europeans, becoming a generic label for all Native Americans.


title: Redskin

text: Linguistic evidence indicates that, while some tribes may have used "red" to refer to themselves during the pre-Columbian era based upon their origin stories, the general use of the term was in response to meeting people who called themselves "white" and their slaves "black". The choice of red rather than other colors may have been due to cultural associations, rather than skin color. Red and white were a dichotomy that had pervasive symbolic meanings in southeastern Native cultures which was less prevalent among northern tribes. While there was occasional use of "red" in Indian-European diplomacy in the northeast, it was still rare there even after it had become common in the southeast. Instead, "Indian" was translated into the native languages there as "men", "real people", or "original people". Usage in the northeast region by Europeans may have been largely limited to descriptions of tribes such as the Beothuk of Newfoundland, whose practice of painting their bodies and possessions with red ochre led Europeans to refer to them as "Red Indians".


title: Redskin

text: Early ethnographic writers used a variety of terms; "olivastre" (olive) by François Bernier (1684), "rufus" (reddish, ruddy) by Linnaeus (1758), "kupferroth" ("copper-red") by Blumenbach (1779), and eventually simply "red" by René Lesson (1847). Early explorers and later Anglo-Americans termed Native Americans "light-skinned", "brown", "tawny", or "russet", but not "red" prior to the 19th century. Many did not view Natives as distinctly different in color from themselves, and thus could be assimilated into colonial society, beginning with conversion to Christianity.


title: Redskin

text: In the modern debate over sports teams with the name, it is sometimes asserted that translates from Choctaw as 'red people' ( 'people' + 'red'). However, has a number of possible meanings in Choctaw, one of which is "humma, an addition to a man's name which gives him some distinction, calling on him for courage and honor." The alternative meaning of Oklahoma becomes 'honorable/courageous nation' or 'a brave people'.


title: Redskin

text: The first combination of "red" with "skin", to form the term "redskin", is dated to 1769 by Ives Goddard, linguist and curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Goddard begins by pointed out that what had previously been considered the earliest English use of the term, a letter purported to have been written to an Englishman living in Hadley, Massachusetts in 1699, was spurious.


title: Redskin

text: Goddard's alternative etymology is that the term emerged from the speech of Native Americans themselves, and that the origin and use of the term in the late 18th and early 19th century was benign. When it first appeared "it came in the most respectful context and at the highest level. ... These are white people and Indians talking together, with the white people trying to ingratiate themselves". The word later underwent a process of pejoration, by which it gained a negative connotation. Goddard suggests that "redskin" emerged from French translations of Native American speech in Illinois and Missouri territories in the 18th century. He cites as the earliest example a 1769 set of "talks", or letters, from chiefs of the Piankeshaw to Col. John Wilkins an English officer at Fort de Chartres. One letter included "", which was translated as 'if any redskins', and the second included "", which was translated as 'all the redskins'. The term here refers to warriors specifically. The term "redskin" enters wider English usage only in the first half of the 19th century. However, in an interview, Goddard admitted that it is impossible to verify whether the French translations of the Miami-Illinois language were accurate.


title: Redskin

text: The term was used in an August 22, 1812, meeting between President James Madison and a delegation of chiefs from western tribes. There, the response of Osage chief "No Ears" (Osage: ) to Madison's speech included the statement, "I know the manners of the whites and the red skins," while French Crow, principal chief of the Wahpekute band of Santee Sioux, was recorded as having said, "I am a red-skin, but what I say is the truth, and notwithstanding I came a long way I am content, but wish to return from here." However, while these usages may have been earliest, they may not have been disseminated widely. While the 1812 meeting with President Madison was contemporaneously recorded, the records were not published until 2004.


title: Redskin

text: The earliest known appearance of the term in print occurred in 1813, in an article in the Weekly Register quoting a letter dated August 27, 1813. It concerned an expedition during the War of 1812 led by General Benjamin Howard against Indians in the Illinois and Mississippi territories: "The expedition will be 40 days out, and there is no doubt but we shall have to contend with powerful hordes of red skins ..."


title: Redskin

text: Goddard suggests that a key usage was in a 20 July 1815 speech by Meskwaki Chief Black Thunder at the treaty council at Portage des Sioux, in which he is recorded as stating, "My Father – Restrain your feelings, and hear ca[l]mly what I shall say. I shall tell it to you plainly, I shall not speak with fear and trembling. I feel no fear. I have no cause to fear. I have never injured you, and innocence can feel no fear. I turn to all, red skins and white skins, and challenge an accusation against me." This speech was published widely, and Goddard speculates that it reached James Fenimore Cooper. In Cooper's novels "The Pioneers" (published in 1823) and "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826), both Native American and white characters use the term. These novels were widely distributed, and can be credited with bringing the term to "universal notice". The first time the term appears in Bartlett's "Dictionary of Americanisms" (in 1858), Goddard notes, the illustrative reference is to "Last of the Mohicans".


title: Redskin

text: Johnathan Buffalo, historic preservation director of the Meskwaki, said that in the 1800s "redskins" was used by the tribe for self-identification. Similarly, they identified others as "whiteskins" or "blackskins". Goddard's evidence for indigenous usage includes a 1914 phonetic transcription of the Meskwaki language in which both 'one with brown skin' and 'one with red skin' were used to refer to Indians, while 'one with white skin, white person' was used to refer to Europeans. However, the pre-contact Meskwaki use of "red" in identifying themselves did not refer to skin color, but to their origin stories as the "red-earth" people.


title: Redskin

text: Historian Darren Reid of Coventry University states it is difficult for historians to document anything with certainty since Native Americans, as a non-literate society, did not produce the written sources upon which historians rely. Instead, what is cited as Native American usage was generally attributed to them by European writers. Any use of "red" in its various forms, including redskin, by Native Americans to refer to themselves reflected their need to use the language of the times in order to be understood by Europeans.


title: Redskin

text: Sociologist James V. Fenelon makes a more explicit statement that Goddard's article is poor scholarship, given that the conclusion of the origin and usage by Natives as "entirely benign" is divorced from the socio-historical realities of hostility and racism from which it emerged.


title: Redskin

text: The pejoration of the term "redskin" arguably begins as soon as its introduction in the early 19th century. A linguistic analysis of 42 books published between 1875 and 1930 found that negative contexts for the use of "redskin" were significantly more frequent than positive ones. However, the use of the word "Indian" in a similarly selected set of books was nearly the same, with more frequent negative than positive contexts, indicating that it was not the term "redskin" that was loaded pejoratively, but that its usage represents a generally negative attitude towards its referent. The word was first listed in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary in 1898 as "often contemptuous."


title: Redskin

text: Sociologist Irving Lewis Allen suggests that slang identifiers for ethnic groups based upon physical characteristics, including "redskin", are by nature derogatory, emphasizing the difference between the speaker and the target. However, Luvell Anderson of the University of Memphis, in his paper "Slurring Words", argues that for a word to be a slur, the word must communicate ideas beyond identifying a target group, and that slurs are offensive because the additional data contained in those words differentiates those individuals from otherwise accepted groups.


title: Redskin

text: Some Native American activists in the 21st century, in contradiction of the etymological evidence discussed above, assert that "redskin" refers directly to the bloody, red scalp or other body part collected for bounty. While this claim is associated in the media with litigants in the Washington Redskins trademark dispute; Amanda Blackhorse and Suzan Shown Harjo, the National Congress of American Indians' support indicates that the belief is widespread. Goddard denies any direct connection to scalping, and says there is a lack of evidence for the claim. C. Richard King argues that the lack of direct evidence for the assertion does not mean that those making the claim are "wrong to draw an association between a term that empathizes an identity based upon skin color and a history that commodified Native American body parts".


title: Redskin

text: The term "red-skin" was, in fact used in conjunction with scalp hunting in the 19th century. In 1863 a Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, the "Daily Republican", printed an announcement: "The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth." A news story published by the "Atchison Daily Champion" in Atchison, Kansas, on October 9, 1885, tells of the settlers' "hunt for redskins, with a view of obtaining their scalps", worth $250. In his early career as the owner of a newspaper in South Dakota, L. Frank Baum wrote an editorial upon the death of Chief Sitting Bull in which he advocates the annihilation of all remaining "redskins" in order to secure the safety of white settlers, and because "better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."


title: Redskin

text: When Hollywood westerns were most popular, roughly 1920–1970, the term "redskins" was often used to refer to Native Americans when war was imminent or in progress. In the Washington Redskins trademark dispute, the main issue was the meaning of the term in the period when the trademark registrations were issued, 1967–1990. The linguistic expert for the petitioner, Geoffrey Nunberg, successfully argued that whatever its origins, "redskins" was a slur at that time based upon passages from books and newspapers and movie clips, in which the word is inevitably associated with contempt, derision, condescension, or sentimental paeans to the noble savage. John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, had compared the evolution of the name into a slur to that of other racial terms such as "Oriental" which also acquired implied meanings associated with contempt.


title: Redskin

text: In the United States, "redskin" is regarded as a racial epithet by some, but as neutral by others, including some Native Americans. The "American Heritage" style guide advises that "the term redskin evokes an even more objectionable stereotype" than the use of red as a racial adjective by outsiders, while others urge writers to use the term only in a historical context. In modern dictionaries of American English it is labeled "usually offensive", "disparaging", "insulting", or "taboo".


title: Redskin

text: Three predominantly Native American schools use the name for their athletic teams, two of which serve reservations: Red Mesa High School in Teec Nos Pos, Arizona where the student body is 99% Navajo. and Wellpinit High School in Wellpinit, Washington on the Spokane Indian Reservation. The principal of Red Mesa said in 2014 that use of the word outside American Indian communities should be avoided because it could perpetuate "the legacy of negativity that the term has created." In 2014, Wellpinit High School voted to keep the Redskins name. Native American writer and attorney Gyasi Ross compares Native American use of variations of the word "Redskin" with African-American use of variations of the word "nigger". Use of these terms by some members of minority communities does not mean that these words may be used by outsiders. Ross also notes that while activism on the issue may be from a minority of Native Americans, this is due to most being concerned with more immediate issues, but also says "The presentation of the name 'Redskins' is problematic for many Native Americans because it identifies Natives in a way that the vast majority of Natives simply don't identity ourselves."


title: Redskin

text: Numerous civil rights, educational, athletic, and academic organizations consider any use of native names/symbols by non-native sports teams to be a harmful form of ethnic stereotyping which should be eliminated.


title: Redskin

text: The controversy regarding Native mascots in general, and use of the name Redskins, was most prominent in the name used by the Washington National Football League team from 1933 to 2020. Public protest of the name began in 1968, with a resolution by the National Congress of American Indians. Native American groups and their supporters argue that since they view the word "redskin" as offensive, it is inappropriate for an NFL team to continue to use it, regardless of whether any offense is intended.


title: Redskin

text: After decades of opposition to the name of the team by Native Americans, major sponsors responded to opponents of systemic racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. FedEx, Nike, and PepsiCo advocated changing the name. On July 3, 2020, Washington owner Daniel Snyder and team management announced a process of review of the name. On July 13, 2020, the team made an official statement that their review would result in the retirement of the Redskins name and logo. The new name, Washington Commanders was announced on February 2, 2022.


title: Redskin

text: The meaning of the term "redskin" was directly relevant to the controversy, with supporters pointing to public opinion polls. Both a 2004 poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and a May 2016 poll by "The Washington Post" produced the same results, that 90% of the self-identified Native American respondents were "not bothered" by the team's name. However, in a commentary published soon after the 2004 poll, fifteen Native American scholars collaborated on a critique that stated that there were so many flaws in the Annenberg study that rather than being a measure of Native American opinion, it was an expression of white privilege and colonialism. Similar objections were made after the 2016 poll, mainly with regard to the use of self-identification to select Native American respondents.


title: Redskin

text: A 2020 study at UC Berkeley which found that 49% of self-identified Native Americans responded that the Washington Redskins name was offensive or very offensive, while only 38% were not bothered by it. In addition, for study participants who were heavily engaged in their native or tribal cultures, 67% said they were offended, for young people 60%, and those with tribal affiliations 52%. These results are similar to that found in a study by the Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. A survey of 400 individuals, with 98 individuals positively identified as Native Americans, found that 67% agreed with the statement that "redskins" is offensive and racist. The response from non-natives was almost the opposite, with 68% responding that the name is not offensive.


title: Redskin

text: On June 18, 2014, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) cancelled the six trademarks held by the team in a two-to-one decision that held that the term "redskins" is disparaging to a "substantial composite of Native Americans", and this is demonstrated "by the near complete drop-off in usage of 'redskins' as a reference to Native Americans beginning in the 1960s". Evidence of disparagement submitted by the petitioners in the TTAB case include the frequent references to "scalping" made by sportswriters for sixty years when reporting the Redskins loss of a game, and passages from movies made from the 1940s to the 1960s using "redskin" to refer to Native Americans as a savage enemy. A linguistics expert for the team unsuccessfully argued that the name is merely a descriptive term no different than other uses of color to differentiate people by race. The linguistic expert for the petitioners, Geoffrey Nunberg, argued that whatever its origins, "redskins" was a slur at the time of the trademark registrations, based upon the passages from books and newspapers and movie clips, in which the word is inevitably associated with contempt, derision, condescension, or sentimental paeans to the noble savage. Although the USPTO decision was upheld upon appeal, on June 19, 2017, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in another case, Matal v. Tam, that the disparagement clause of the Lanham Act violated the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause. Both the Native American petitioners and the Justice Department withdrew from any further litigation, the legal issue being moot.


title: Redskin

text: College teams that formerly used the name changed voluntarily; the University of Utah became the Utah Utes in 1972, Miami University (of Ohio) became the RedHawks in 1997 and Southern Nazarene University became the Crimson Storm in 1998.


title: Redskin

text: The number of high schools using the Redskins name has been in steady decline (some of which closed or merged), with 37 remaining. In a survey conducted in 2013, 40% had local efforts to change the name, while 28 high schools in 18 states had done so. By December 2017, the number of high school "Redskins" had continued to decline from 62 to 49, including four affected by a 2015 California law. In 2019, Teton High School in Idaho and in March 2020 Paw Paw High School in Michigan retired the name. The rate of change increased following the decision by the Washington Football Team, Anderson High School in Ohio and Clinton Community Schools in Michigan changing immediately, followed by La Veta High School in Colorado., Union High School (Tulsa, Oklahoma), Wichita North High School, Cuyahoga Heights High School in Ohio and Saranac High School in Saranac, Michigan. In April, 2022 the Sandusky Community Schools Board of Education voted to retire its mascot at the end of the school year.


title: Redskin

text: Some communities have been sharply divided, with long-term residents seeking to keep the mascot while newcomers being open to change. In Driggs, Idaho, the deciding factor was the participation of local tribes advocating change. Other school districts made changes with little opposition. The school board for Cuyahoga Heights Ohio voted unanimously to retire their mascot following the decision by the Cleveland Indians to become the Guardians. The Wichita school board followed the recommendations of a committee appointed to examine the issue.


title: Music of My Mind

text: Music of My Mind is the fourteenth studio album by American soul musician Stevie Wonder. It was released on March 3, 1972, by Tamla Records, and was Wonder's first to be recorded under a new contract with Motown that allowed him full artistic control over his music. For the album, Wonder recruited electronic music pioneers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff as associate producers, employing their custom TONTO synthesizer on several tracks. The album was a modest commercial success, but critics found it representative of Wonder's artistic growth, and it is generally considered by modern critics to be the first album of Wonder's classic period.