title: Charles Rangel

text: Rangel was given the Jackie Robinson Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. In 2006, he received the Distinguished Service Award from the Washington International Trade Association.


title: Charles Rangel

text: Rangel has received a number of honorary degrees, including ones from Hofstra University (1989), Syracuse University (2001), Suffolk University Law School (2002), and Bard College (2008). In 2006 he received a Presidential Medal from Baruch College.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: , also known as Case Closed: The Scarlet Bullet, is a 2021 Japanese animated mystery film directed by Chika Nagaoka. It is the twenty-fourth installment of the "Case Closed" film series based on the manga series of the same name by Gosho Aoyama, following the 2019 film "". This is the first Reiwa-era "Case Closed" movie.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: "Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet" was released in Japan on April 16, 2021. Its release was delayed from an original April 2020 date due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A global release was announced on February 9, 2021 featuring a multi-language trailer in Japanese, English, Korean, German, and Chinese. "The Scarlet Bullet" is listed as 2021's second highest-grossing Japanese film worldwide, below "Jujutsu Kaisen 0".


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: Japan is preparing to commemorate the World Sports Games (WSG), the world's biggest sports games, hosting them in Tokyo. The Hyperlinear bullet train, the pinnacle of Japan's advanced technology, will begin operation to coincide with the WSG's opening ceremony, running at speeds of up to 1,000 km/h between Shin-Nagoya Station and Tokyo's newly built Shibahama Station. As the world watches, disaster suddenly strikes the host venue, where the sponsors of the Games are gathered. A crisis unfolds as several industry leaders are kidnapped in quick succession. In the shadows, Shuichi Akai waits, watching the crisis unfold, as FBI agents await his orders. Conan deduces the connection between the terrible WSG-related kidnappings that occurred in Boston, 15 years earlier, and it is revealed the investigation was handled by the FBI back then.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: "Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet" was released in several territories on opening day, including Hong Kong SAR, Korea, Singapore, Philippines, Brunei, Thailand, Vietnam, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Macao.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: The film was later released in other territories such as Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, France, Mainland China, New Zealand and Luxembourg.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: Due to the poor performance of previous movies outside the Catalan region of Spain, this movie was not dubbed in Spanish at release, instead being played in Spanish theaters with only the subtitled Japanese dub and the Catalan dub.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: The English dub of the film produced by Bang Zoom! Entertainment was scheduled to debut in the United States at Anime NYC on November 21, 2021, but was canceled.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: "Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet" has earned a total of globally. It is 2021's second highest-grossing Japanese film worldwide, below "Jujutsu Kaisen 0".


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: In Japan, the film sold 1,533,054 tickets in its first 3 days and earned ¥2,218,130,800 ($20.5 million), eclipsing the revenue of the previous film by 144% on first day sales alone. It ranked #1 at the Japanese box office, beating out "" and by 15th Weekend, film earned overall gross of 7,479,317,860 yen (about US$67.86 million). The Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan released 2021 box office rankings (for releases up until November 2021) where "The Scarlet Bullet" is the second highest-grossing film in Japan with a gross collection of at the Japanese box office. The film opened with the third highest IMAX opening ever in Japan, grossing $1.2 million.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: In China, the film earned RMB 109.6 million ($16.8 million) in its first 3 days and ranked #1 at the Chinese box office, with a final gross of in China.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: The variety content website "Excite", highlighted the film as positive, marking the development of the character of Shuichi Akai and his relationship with Conan, calling the relationship between the two as "trustful". The review also labelled the movie as "flashy" and highlighted the importance of minor characters, expecting that they be expanded in future films about Detective Conan.


title: Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet

text: The Scarlet Bullet will receive Manga Adaptation by Yutaka Abe and Jirō Maruden revealed in Shogakukan's Shonen Sunday S Magazine 2022 March Issue.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center (VCBC), also known as the Vernon C. Bain Maritime Facility and under the nickname "The Boat", is an 800-bed jail barge used to hold inmates for the New York City Department of Corrections. The barge is anchored off the Bronx's southern shore, across from Rikers Island, near Hunts Point. It was built for $161 million at Avondale Shipyard in Louisiana, along the Mississippi River near New Orleans, and brought to New York in 1992 to reduce overcrowding in the island's land-bound buildings for a lower price. Nicknamed "The Boat" by prison staff and inmates, it is designed to handle inmates from medium- to maximum-security in 16 dormitories and 100 cells.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: Currently the only barge in use, the Vernon C. Bain Center is the third prison barge that the New York Department of Corrections has used. In its history, the prison has served traditional inmates, juvenile inmates and is currently used as a holding and temporary processing center. The added security of the prison being on water has prevented at least four attempted escapes. The barge is named in memorial for warden Vernon C. Bain, who died in an automobile accident. In 2014, the prison barge was named the world's largest prison barge in operation by Guinness World Records.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: In the late 1980s, the New York City Department of Correction experienced overcrowding issues in its prison complexes. The idea of temporarily alleviating the issues of a growing inmate population and dwindling space by outfitting prison ships was conceived under the administration of then Mayor Edward I. Koch. Their solution was to develop usable prison space with maritime cells and avoid complaints about building jails in densely populated neighborhoods. At the time, the prisons at nearby Rikers Island held 22,000 inmates, and with this number increasing consistently, were nearing capacity.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: In 1988, the "Bibby Resolution" and her sister ship "Bibby Venture" were bought by the New York City Department of Correction to serve as the first two prison ships. Both ships were previously used as British troop carriers before being re-purposed into prison ships. The "Bibby Venture" was docked off Manhattan's Greenwich Village, while the "Bibby Resolution" was located off the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They were decommissioned in 1992. In 1994 both ships were sold, leaving the Bain Correctional Center and two converted Staten Island ferries, the Harold A. Wildstein and Walter B. Keane, docked at Rikers Island to be used when overcrowding became an issue.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: The construction of the Vernon C. Bain Center prison barge began in 1989 at Avondale Shipyard by Avondale Industries and was supposed to be finished in 1990 at the price of $125.7 million. Due to unanticipated construction problems including issues with the ventilation system, the finished barge was delivered 18 months late and $35 million over budget. The barge was originally slated to be docked at the Brooklyn Army Terminal or the mayor's mansion. The site ultimately chosen, at Hunts Point, was selected after protests arose over the other proposed sites. On January 26, 1992, the recently outfitted prison barge was brought through Long Island Sound by the tugboat, "Michael Turecamo", after an 1,800 nautical mile trip. The new barge was named for well-liked and respected warden Vernon C. Bain, who had died in an automobile accident.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: One of the first captains of the barge under the Department of Corrections had previously been employed by the same tugboat company and had earlier captained the tugboat that hauled the barge to its current location. The new crew of the prison barge, who were placed in accordance with Coast Guard regulations, worked on the empty barge to learn the vessel operations, including the electrical and fire fighting systems. The barge officially opened for use and began accepting inmates later in 1992.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: From the time the barge was constructed, there has been controversy about its cost. The final price was more than $35 million over budget, which attracted negative attention. The assistant correction commissioner, John H. Shanahan, claimed the price difference was because the Department of Corrections "never designed this kind of passenger vessel before and unfortunately there was a mistake in the original contract." William Booth, the chairman of the Board of Corrections, said at the time that the prison barge would be the last barge the Department of Corrections would build because the process was too expensive and too uncertain. The Board of Corrections is an independent body that monitors city-owned prisons.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: Furthermore, by the time the Bain Center opened, the inmate population of New York City's jail system had started to decline. The prison barge was temporarily closed in August 1995 due to less crowded city jails, caused by a decline in arrests and inmate transfers. In late 1996, the prison was slated for reopening due to the rise in arrests from a campaign targeting drugs and drug dealers. The six-month campaign expected more than seven thousand additional arrests than usual, but the ship was not reopened until 1998 when it was used by the Department of Juvenile Justice. The Bain Center is currently used as a processing facility for inmates in the Department of Corrections system. There are three other processing facilities that each handle specific boroughs.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: In early 2016, New York City government officials began looking into ways to possibly shutter Rikers Island and transfer prisoners to other locations. One plan is to situate a 2,000-bed jail in the parking lot for the Bain Center. Another similar plan includes closing the barge jail. In 2018 the city released plans to phase out Rikers Island over ten years and replace it with borough-based jails. The Bain Center is included in the plan to close Rikers Island, which the New York City Council voted to approve in October 2019. Under the bill, both facilities would have to close by 2026.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: The by flatbed barge has 16 dormitories and 100 cells for inmates. For recreation, there is a full-size gym with basketball court, weight lifting rooms, and an outdoor recreation facility on the roof. There are three worship chapels, a modern medical facility, and a library open to inmate use. The 47,326-ton facility is on the water, and when it opened, 3 or more maritime crews were maintained under Coast Guard regulations. According to John Klumpp, the barge's first captain, in 2002 "the Coast Guard, after years of monitoring the prison barge, finally accepted the reality that that it was, de facto, a jail and not a boat."


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: The prison barge is located in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, about from SUNY Maritime College at Throggs Neck. The Hunts Point Cooperative Market is located nearby. At the time of the barge's opening, the area was difficult to access via public transportation.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: As of 2019, the barge employed 317 workers and had an annual operating cost of $24 million. The barge's rate of "use-of-force by corrections officers" was the third-lowest among the city's corrections facilities.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: A surge in the need for juvenile detention space caused the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice to lease space at the Bain Correction Center in 1998. At the time, there were over five thousand juveniles aged thirteen to eighteen years old in secure detention in New York. The barge had been unused since August 1995 but had been maintained and was ready to house inmates again. The center was used to solve the space problem and to assist in the closure of Spofford Juvenile Center. The temporary space was used for juvenile inmate processing and temporary housing for inmates prior to transfer. The underage inmates were moved out of the Bain Center and back into the Spofford facility in 1999. In January 2000, the Department of Juvenile Justice, after completing renovations to other buildings, moved out of the center.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: The first time a prisoner tried to escape from the Bain was in 1993, when a 38-year-old prisoner was able to escape while he was supposed to be cleaning ice from the parking lot in front of the boat. The guard who was responsible for the inmate was suspended without pay due to the incident.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: Prior to 2002, an inmate tried to escape from the prison's recreation area by climbing the 30-foot fence equipped with razor wire. The guards' uniform boots prevented them from climbing the fence in pursuit, so they threw basketballs at the inmate to stop his escape, but he was able to successfully climb over it. He dove into the East River, where he was promptly picked up and returned by a police watercraft that was dispatched to the scene.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: Another escape occurred in February 2004 when the girlfriend of an inmate gave him a handcuff key. The inmate was handcuffed by one wrist to another inmate, but he was able to, without any prison employee noticing, remove the cuffs and free himself. The inmate was able to cling to the undercarriage of a prisoner transport bus to ride away from the facility. He let go of the bus in the South Bronx and walked away, but was apprehended nearly a month later. Six officers and a captain were given administrative leave due to the incident. The corrections commissioner said the escape was caused by a combination of the inmate's quick thinking and the officers' sloppy work.


title: Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center

text: In early 2013, an inmate charged with petty larceny successfully slipped out of his handcuffs as he arrived at the Bain Center. In 2021 a prisoner used a rope to escape from his cell via a window. He was caught the following day.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: North Korea-Russia relations (; ) are the bilateral relations between Russia and North Korea. The Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR, the predecessor state to the Russian Federation) was the first to recognize North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, DPRK) on October 12, 1948, shortly after the proclamation, as the sole legitimate authority in all of Korea (China was the first country to recognize the Republic of Korea in a divided nation). During the Korean War, the Korean People's Army was supported by the Soviet Armed Forces. North Korea was founded as part of the Communist bloc, and received major Soviet military and political support . The comprehensive personality cult around North Korea's ruling family was heavily influenced by Stalinism. China and the Soviet Union competed for influence in North Korea during the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, as North Korea tried to maintain good relations with both countries.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In 2022, North Korea became the third country (the second being Syria) to recognise the independence of the breakaway states of Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics in Eastern Ukraine. In response to the recognition, Ukraine terminated diplomatic ties with North Korea. In August 2022, North Korea volunteered 100,000 of their own troops to help Donbass. In September 2022, Russia reportedly purchased millions of shells and rockets from North Korea to aid in its invasion of Ukraine.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Relations between the two countries continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The relationship regained importance after Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia in 2000. Kim Jong-un also accepted an invitation to visit Russia in mid-2015. The two states share a border along the lower Tumen River (Туманная ; 두만강), which is long and was formed in 1860 when the Tsar Alexander II acquired territory ceded from Qing dynasty China in the Convention of Peking.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Favorable perceptions of North Korea in Russia have gradually declined in recent years, with only 34% of Russians viewing North Korea as a friendly nation and 60% of Russians believing that North Korea's nuclear arms pose a threat to other countries; only 8% of Russians favor supporting North Korea in a potential conflict. According to a 2014 BBC World Service Poll, 19% of Russians view North Korea's influence positively, with 37% expressing a negative view.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Soviet troops invaded the Japanese colony of Korea in 1945; by agreement with the U.S., the 38th parallel was the dividing line with Moscow in charge to the north and Washington to the South.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: North Korea came under the control of the Soviet Civil Administration and People's Committee of North Korea from 1945 to 1948.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: The Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps took part in the Korean War where they provided North Korea and China with badly needed pilots.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev began to reduce aid to the North after 1985 in favor of reconciliation with South Korea. Military equipment continued to be provided until a last batch of MiG-29s was delivered in 1989. Kim Il-sung visited the USSR five times, with the last time being in 1986 during the early Gorbachev era. He also met with Soviet officials abroad, including with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev during the funeral of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito in May 1980.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: After the dissolution of the USSR, the new Russian government under Boris Yeltsin refused to provide support for North Korea, favoring South Korea instead.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: The first meeting of the Inter-governmental Commission for Trade, Economic, and Scientific-Technical Cooperation between Russia and DPRK was held in the spring of 1996 led by Deputy Premier Vitali Ignatenko. This was the highest- level meeting (at the deputy prime ministerial level) between Moscow and Pyongyang since the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the visit, the two countries agreed to restore bilateral trade and economic cooperation to its 1991 level. The two sides also agreed to restore bilateral inter-governmental commissions and to establish working-level bodies between North Korea and the Russian Far Eastern province for bilateral cooperation in science-technology, forestry, light industry, and transport. Ignatenko carried Yeltsin's personal message to Kim Jong-il. In the message, Yeltsin expressed his hopes for tension reduction on the Korean peninsula and North Korea's continuing observance of the Armistice Agreement. Kim Jong-il, expecting that Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, would win the coming presidential election in June–July 1996, did not even send a letter of reply, nor did he meet with the Russian delegation.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Vladimir Putin's elevation to prime minister in August 1999 and then president in March had critical significance for Pyongyang, which attributed its previous grievances to Yeltsin's government. Kim Jong-il's references to Putin were to the effect that at last Russia had a leader "with whom to do business." However, intensive diplomatic work had to precede a historical breakthrough in Russia–DPRK relations. These efforts began to bear fruit in late 1998, and by March 1999, it became possible to agree completely on the text and the initial Treaty on Friendship, Good-Neighborly Relations and Cooperation. It was signed in February 2000, after Yeltsin left the political arena.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Starting in April 2000, covert preparations for a visit by President Putin to Pyongyang began. The first summit meeting in the history of Russian-Korean relations took place in July 2000 when a Joint Declaration was signed, the first international document signed by Kim Jong-il as leader of the DPRK.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In April 2002, a delegation from the DPRK's Main Department for Atomic Energy, headed by its Chief Lee Choi Saeng, visited Moscow, as well as a delegation from the Academy of Sciences, headed by its Vice-President Kang Dong Kyun, who afterwards visited Novosibirsk.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In 2006 Russia supported United Nations Security Council Resolution 1695 in July, condemning the 2006 North Korean missile test.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In April 2009 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited North Korea and signed a plan with Mun Jae-chol, acting chairman of the Korean Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries on 2009–2010 of cultural and scientific exchange.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: After the North Korean nuclear test on 25 May 2009, North Korea's relations with China and Russia changed. Russia, fearing that North Korea's success could lead to a nuclear war, joined China, France, Japan, South Korea, United Kingdom and the United States in starting a resolution that could include new sanctions. The Russian news agencies were outraged when North Korea threatened to attack neighboring South Korea after it joined a U.S. led plan to check vessels suspected of carrying equipment for weapons of mass destruction. Another concern was that the nuclear test can be a threat to the security of Russia's far east regions which border North Korea. South Korean president Lee Myung-bak had a phone conversation with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, where Medvedev told him that Russia would work with Seoul on a new U.N. Security Council resolution and to revive international talks on the North Korean nuclear issue.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: On 15 June 2009, China and Russia supported the UN sanctions on North Korea. However, the two countries stressed that they did not support the use of force. Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin insisted that any sanctions should be lifted once North Korea cooperates. Also, On 30 March 2010, President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree implementing intensified United Nations Security Council sanctions against Pyongyang's nuclear programs. The presidential decree banned the purchase of weapons and relevant materials from the DPRK by government offices, enterprises, banks, organizations and individuals currently under Russia's jurisdiction. It also prohibited the transit of weapons and relevant materials via Russian territory or their export to the DPRK. Any financial aid and educational training that might facilitate North Korea's nuclear program and proliferation activities were also forbidden.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In December 2010 the North Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs visited Moscow to meet his Russian counterpart, Lavrov, in what was seen as North Korea trying to control criticism about its attack on South Korea's Yeonpyeong island. Lavrov told the North Korean official that Pyongyang's November 23 artillery strike on Yeonpyeong island "resulted in loss of life" and "deserves condemnation".


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: On October 18, 2011 Russian and North Korean officials marked the 63rd anniversary of the establishment of bilateral diplomatic ties in an event at the North Korean embassy in Moscow. The evening's event was attended by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: A delegation of Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsia) visited Pyongyang from December 12 to 14, 2011. On December 13 (Tuesday) Rosaviatsia director Neradiko Alexandr and Kang Ki-sop, director of General Bureau of Civil Aviation signed an agreement on civilian search and rescue between Russia and the North Korea.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Following the North Korean announcement that it agreed to introduce a moratorium on nuclear tests, long-range missile launches and uranium enrichment, Russia's foreign ministry said, "We welcome North Korea's decision to impose a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons and launching long-range ballistic missiles, and enriching uranium".


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: After Putin won the 2012 Russian presidential election, Kim Jong-un congratulated him, writing in a letter "I wish you achievement in your responsible work for building a powerful Russia", expressing belief that the traditional bilateral relations of friendship and cooperation would grow stronger.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In May 2012 Russia appointed Alexandr Timonin as the new ambassador to North Korea. The latter presented his credentials to Kim Yong-nam at the Mansudae Assembly Hall. On June 27, 2012, during the visit of the Deputy Foreign Minister of the DPRK Kung Seok-ung to Moscow, Foreign Ministries of both countries have signed an inter-ministerial plan of exchanges on 2013–2014. On June 5, 2012, the two sides concluded a Boundary Treaty between the two states.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In September 2012 Russia agreed to write off 90% of North Korea's $11 billion historic debt to Russia as a sign of closer engagement with North Korea's new leader. The $1 billion North Korea has to repay will be used to finance Russian investment in humanitarian and energy projects in North Korea. This agreement removed legal blocks hindering the financing of trade between the two countries. In 2013, Russia supported both resolutions of the UN Security Council against North Korea for its missile and nuclear tests.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In February 2014, during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Krasnodar Krai, a delegation headed by Kim Yong-nam travelled to represent North Korea, even though the latter did not participate in these Olympics. Kim had a meeting with President Putin, and also met a number of Russian parliamentarians and state officials in Moscow en route to the Games in Sochi. These included Valentina Matvienko and Ilyas Umakhanov of the Russian Federation Council, Mikhail Margelov, the chair of the International Affairs Committee of the same body, and Vice Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov. Korean Central Television (KCTV) also introduced the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics on the day it took place, the 8th, focusing on the presence of Kim Yong-nam.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In November 2014 North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's special envoy, Choe Ryong-hae, made a seven-day visit to Russia. During his trip, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, delivering a letter to him from Kim Jong-un, and with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In February 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. On 2 March, North Korea was one of the five countries to vote against a United Nations resolution condemning the invasion.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Following the footsteps of Russia, North Korea became the third country (the second being Syria) to recognise the independence of the breakaway states of Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics in Eastern Ukraine. In response to the recognition, Ukraine terminated diplomatic ties with North Korea. In August, the "New York Post" reported that North Korea had offered 100,000 troops to help Donbass, but the Russian foreign ministry said this speculation was "completely fake".


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In September, the "New York Post" reported that Russia had purchased millions of shells and rockets from North Korea to support its invasion, citing U.S. intelligence officials, but Russia and North Korea both deny this.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said they were "working on political arrangements" to employ North Korean workers in Russia, possibly 20,000 to 50,000 to develop the infrastructure in the Russian Far East.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: More recently, North Korea appears to be trying to manufacture an artificial hegemonic conflict between the US and Russia. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is sparking outrage from Western nations, which has caused varying multilateral alliances to be created on both sides of the spectrum. The modern cold war is an opportunistic chance for North Korea to receive the military and financial support they received during the Soviet Union’s existence. For example, the Soviet Union was directly involved in providing economic assistance to Kim Il Sung’s undeveloped state, refining their ability to wage war with South Korea. Thus, North Korea’s strategic value to China and Russia could be strengthened during cold war hostilities. It is also believed that Kim’s regime senses a worsening relationship between Washington and Beijing as a window to test his weaponry as attention is turned elsewhere. According to Lee Seong-Hyon, a North-Korean expert at the Bush Foundation, the DPRK has “ [been] shooting whatever it wanted to shoot; it has been testing whatever it wanted to test.” In contrast, South Korea and the United States have been limited in how they can respond. Additionally, there has been growing evidence that North Korea has been providing weaponry to Russia amid the Ukraine War. Attempting to keep it under cover, sources have stated that the DPRK has directed weaponry to Russia through North Africa and the Middle East. Ned Price, the state Department spokesperson, would respond by imposing “every tool” through actions such as sanctions to punish North Korea. This comes at a time when China and Russia have previously vetoed proposed sanctions toward North Korea following their use of missile tests. Price has also encouraged other countries that have a diplomatic relationship with North Korea not to provide weaponry to Russia. Even if there is no direct evidence of Kim Jung Un supplying Putin’s military with missiles, there is a similar ideology present in both countries. During the Ukraine war, Putin has shown the adoption of the North Korean foreign policy initiative of “Brinkmanship” with near-constant threats of nuclear conflict. The reliability of these threats is still debated, although it has made Western nations more hesitant about their involvement in the conflict. The diaspora of ideas between Russia and North Korea is the most concerning aspect, as both governments may start to coordinate their international agendas.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: After the Korean War, the Soviet Union emerged as the main trading partner and sponsor of North Korea. Ninety-three North Korean factories were built with Russian technical assistance, forging the country's heavy-industrial backbone. Soviet aid to the DPRK indeed expanded from 1965 to 1968, especially after Sino-North Korean relations soured during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In 1988, at the peak of the bilateral relationship, about 60% of North Korea's trade was with the Soviet Union. Much of the trade was in raw materials and petroleum that Moscow provided to Pyongyang at concessional prices.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In response to the famine-stricken North Korea in the mid-1990s, Russia delivered humanitarian aid to North Korea twice in 1997: food and medicine worth 4.5 billion "old" rubles in the fall, and 370 tonnes of sugar, canned meat, fish and milk worth 3.5 billion rubles, in December.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In 2008, Russia delivered oil and food to North Korea in accordance with its obligations outlined at the six-party talks.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In August 2011, ahead of Kim Jong-il's visit to Russia, the Kremlin said that it was providing food assistance including some 50,000 tons of wheat. A few days after Kim's visit the presidential envoy to Russia's Far East, Viktor Ishayev, said wheat deliveries would begin via the town border of Khasan in September.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: A week later a Russian economic delegation, led by Minister of Regional Development Viktor Basargin, was in North Korea to sign "a protocol of the 5th Meeting of the North Korea-Russia Intergovernmental Committee for Cooperation in Trade, Economy, Science and Technology". Also on same day, the North Korean premier, Choe Yong-rim, met with the Russian economic delegation at the Mansudae Assembly Hall in Pyongyang.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: On 2 February 2012, the Interfax report further quoted the Russian ambassador to North Korea, Valery Sukhinin, as saying that Russia "did not rule out" the possibility of sending more humanitarian aid to North Korea, "depending on the situation there and taking into account our capabilities". Sukhinin went on to say that in 2011 Russia had provided North Korea with 50,000 tonnes of grain on a bilateral basis, as well as with $5 million worth of flour as part of the World Food Programme. In addition, 10,000 tonnes of grain were dispatched to North Korea by Gazprom.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: However, of the overall bilateral economic trade between Russia and North Korea, 80% consists of cooperation and investment between North Korean and Russian regional areas. The most active regions are Siberia and the Far East, mainly the Kemerovo, Magadan and Primorski regions.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In December 2013 Russia joined the sanctions against North Korea, introduced in March by the UN Security Council (Resolution 2087). The corresponding decree signed by President Putin specified that Russian companies were prohibited to provide North Korea any technical assistance and advice in the development and production of ballistic missiles. In addition, North Korean naval vessels to call at Russian ports would be required to undergo inspection. Also, the authorities ordered to be vigilant when dealing with North Korean diplomats.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In June 2014 Russia and North Korea have agreed to settlements in rubles in all trade between the two countries. The first transactions in rubles between Russia and North Korea were carried out in October 2014.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In March 2015, a Russian official said Moscow and Pyongyang have agreed to discuss the creation of advanced development zones () in Russia's Far East and North Korea.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In May 2016 the Central Bank of Russia ordered all Russian banks to halt financial dealings with North Korean agencies, organizations and individuals on the UN Security Council sanctions list. The move was in line with the United Nations Security Council resolution adopted in early March to penalize North Korea for its fourth nuclear test and long-range missile launch and curb its weapons of mass destruction program.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: On 18 September 2012, North Korea and Russia signed a deal on debt owed by Pyongyang to Moscow. It is estimated that North Korea owed about $11 billion. North Korea's debt was established during the existence of the Soviet Union when the Soviets made loans to North Korea. The negotiations concerning debt reduction were held earlier in 2012, while the deal was signed in Moscow.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In 2011, it was reported that Russia would write off 90% of the North Korean debt and in return Russia would be allowed to invest in North Korean projects in the energy, health and education sectors, as reported in 2012. One of the major projects planned by Russia was to build a gas pipeline to energy-hungry South Korea through North Korea. The multi-billion-dollar project is, however, unlikely to be realized as North and South Korea are still "de jure" at war.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: On 5 May 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin ratified an agreement to write off 90% of North Korea's debts after the State Duma passed the law on 18 April 2014 and the Federation Council approved it on 29 April 2014.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: On April 26–28, 2001, North Korean Defense Minister Vice-Marshal Kim Il-chol visited Moscow, and a deal on bilateral cooperation in the defense industry and military equipment was signed between him and Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov. During Kim's visit, the two governments also signed a so-called "framework of intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the military industry" and a deal between the two defense ministries.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In October 2002, a delegation from the DPRK's Ministry of People's Military, headed by the Deputy Chief of the Ministry of People's Military Lee Men-su, visited Russia. At the beginning of November that year a delegation from the Korean People's Air Force, headed by its commander Oh Kum-chul, visited Russia.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In November 2015, the head of the Russian delegation to Pyongyang, Colonel General Nikolay Bogdanovsky, and the Vice Chief of the Korean People's Army O Kum-chol signed an agreement on preventing dangerous military activities.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In September 2022, US intelligence said that Russia was buying millions of artillery shells and rockets from North Korea due to the sanctions caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In March 1994 during the first North Korean nuclear crisis, Russia, emphasizing its position as a member of Northeast Asia, proposed the eight-party talks, which included participants from North and South Korea, Russia, the U.S., China, Japan, the IAEA and the UN Secretary General.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In October 2006 Russia supported United Nations Security Council Resolution 1718 condemning North Korea's nuclear test.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: After North Korea detonated another nuclear weapon on 25 May 2009 the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a sharp note of condemnation; The statement called the test a "violation" of previous Security Council resolutions and a "serious blow" to the nuclear nonproliferation regime. It also complained that "the latest DPRK moves are provoking an escalation of tension in Northeast Asia."


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: North Korea under the third-generation leader Kim Jong-Un continues to defy the international community in relation to its nuclear and rocket programme. It has recently advised foreign embassies that the North Korean government could not guarantee their safety in an event of conflict and advised the foreign embassies to reconsider their evacuation plans.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: In March 2016, following the January 2016 North Korean nuclear test, Russia supported a U.N. Security Council resolution regarding the introduction of further sanctions against North Korea. Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said "the Kremlin is concerned over North Korea's statements about its readiness to use nuclear forces and urges all states to display restraint", in response to Kim Jong-un's orders to the military to deploy the nuclear warheads so they can be fired at "any moment" and be prepared to launch preemptive attacks against its enemies.


title: North Korea–Russia relations

text: The border area is mostly plain, with few mountains. An important natural landmark is Lake Khasan, which was the location of the Battle of Lake Khasan. Other landmarks include Zaozyornaya Hill (Russian: сопка Заозёрная), and Gora Priozernaya (Russian: Гора Приозерная). On the Russian side stands a building called "Korean-Russian House of Friendship" (Russian: Дом корейско-российской дружбы). Furugelm Island, the southernmost point in Asian Russia, is located close to the maritime border.


title: Object storage

text: Object storage (also known as object-based storage) is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Each object typically includes the data itself, a variable amount of metadata, and a globally unique identifier. Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device level (object-storage device), the system level, and the interface level. In each case, object storage seeks to enable capabilities not addressed by other storage architectures, like interfaces that are directly programmable by the application, a namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware, and data-management functions like data replication and data distribution at object-level granularity.


title: Object storage

text: Object storage systems allow retention of massive amounts of unstructured data in which data is written once and read once (or many times). Object storage is used for purposes such as storing objects like videos and photos on Facebook, songs on Spotify, or files in online collaboration services, such as Dropbox. One of the limitations with object storage is that it is not intended for transactional data, as object storage was not designed to replace NAS file access and sharing; it does not support the locking and sharing mechanisms needed to maintain a single, accurately updated version of a file.


title: Object storage

text: In 1995, research led by Garth Gibson on Network-Attached Secure Disks first promoted the concept of splitting less common operations, like namespace manipulations, from common operations, like reads and writes, to optimize the performance and scale of both. In the same year, a Belgian company - FilePool - was established to build the basis for archiving functions. Object storage was proposed at Gibson's Carnegie Mellon University lab as a research project in 1996. Another key concept was abstracting the writes and reads of data to more flexible data containers (objects). Fine grained access control through object storage architecture was further described by one of the NASD team, Howard Gobioff, who later was one of the inventors of the Google File System. Other related work includes the Coda filesystem project at Carnegie Mellon, which started in 1987, and spawned the Lustre file system. There is also the OceanStore project at UC Berkeley, which started in 1999 and the Logistical Networking project at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, which started in 1998. In 1999, Gibson founded Panasas to commercialize the concepts developed by the NASD team.


title: Object storage

text: Seagate Technology played a central role in the development of object storage. According to the Storage Networking Industry Association SNIA, “Object storage originated in the late 1990s: Seagate specifications from 1999 Introduced some of the first commands and how operating system effectively removed from consumption of the storage.”


title: Object storage

text: A preliminary version of the “OBJECT BASED STORAGE DEVICES Command Set Proposal” dated 10/25/1999 was submitted by Seagate as edited by Seagate’s Dave Anderson and was the product of work by the National Storage Industry Consortium (NSIC) including contributions by Carnegie Mellon University, Seagate, IBM, Quantum, and StorageTek. This paper was proposed to INCITS T-10 (International Committee for Information Technology Standards) with a goal to form a committee and design a specification based on the SCSI interface protocol.  This defined objects as abstracted data, with unique identifiers and metadata, how objects related to file systems, along with many other innovative concepts. Anderson presented many of these ideas at the SNIA conference in October 1999.  The presentation revealed an IP Agreement that had been signed in February 1997 between the original collaborators (with Seagate represented by Anderson and Chris Malakapalli) and covered the benefits of object storage, scalable computing, platform independence, and storage management.


title: Object storage

text: One of the design principles of object storage is to abstract some of the lower layers of storage away from the administrators and applications. Thus, data is exposed and managed as objects instead of blocks or (exclusively) files. Objects contain additional descriptive properties which can be used for better indexing or management. Administrators do not have to perform lower-level storage functions like constructing and managing logical volumes to utilize disk capacity or setting RAID levels to deal with disk failure.


title: Object storage

text: Object storage also allows the addressing and identification of individual objects by more than just file name and file path. Object storage adds a unique identifier within a bucket, or across the entire system, to support much larger namespaces and eliminate name collisions.


title: Object storage

text: As opposed to fixed metadata in file systems (filename, creation date, type, etc.), object storage provides for full function, custom, object-level metadata in order to:


title: Object storage

text: Object-based storage devices (OSD) as well as some software implementations (e.g., DataCore Swarm) manage metadata and data at the storage device level:


title: Object storage

text: Object storage provides programmatic interfaces to allow applications to manipulate data. At the base level, this includes Create, read, update and delete (CRUD) functions for basic read, write and delete operations. Some object storage implementations go further, supporting additional functionality like object/file versioning, object replication, life-cycle management and movement of objects between different tiers and types of storage. Most API implementations are REST-based, allowing the use of many standard HTTP calls.


title: Object storage

text: The vast majority of cloud storage available in the market leverages is an object-storage architecture. Some notable examples are Amazon Web Services S3, which debuted in March 2006, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Rackspace Files (whose code was donated in 2010 to Openstack project and released as OpenStack Swift), and Google Cloud Storage released in May 2010.


title: Object storage

text: Some distributed file systems use an object-based architecture, where file metadata is stored in metadata servers and file data is stored in object storage servers. File system client software interacts with the distinct servers, and abstracts them to present a full file system to users and applications.


title: Object storage

text: Some early incarnations of object storage were used for archiving, as implementations were optimized for data services like immutability, not performance. EMC Centera and Hitachi HCP (formerly known as HCAP) are two commonly cited object storage products for archiving. Another example is Quantum ActiveScale Object Storage Platform.


title: Object storage

text: More general-purpose object-storage systems came to market around 2008. Lured by the incredible growth of "captive" storage systems within web applications like Yahoo Mail and the early success of cloud storage, object-storage systems promised the scale and capabilities of cloud storage, with the ability to deploy the system within an enterprise, or at an aspiring cloud-storage service provider.


title: Object storage

text: A few object-storage systems support Unified File and Object storage, allowing clients to store objects on a storage system while simultaneously other clients store files on the same storage system. Other vendors in the area of Hybrid cloud storage are using Cloud storage gateways to provide a file access layer over object storage, implementing file access protocols such as SMB and NFS.


title: Object storage

text: Some large Internet companies developed their own software when object-storage products were not commercially available or use cases were very specific. Facebook famously invented their own object-storage software, code-named Haystack, to address their particular massive-scale photo management needs efficiently.


title: Object storage

text: Object storage at the protocol and device layer was proposed 20 years ago and approved for the SCSI command set nearly 10 years ago as "Object-based Storage Device Commands" (OSD), however, it had not been put into production until the development of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform. The SCSI command set for Object Storage Devices was developed by a working group of the SNIA for the T10 committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS). T10 is responsible for all SCSI standards.


title: Object storage

text: One of the first object-storage products, Lustre, is used in 70% of the Top 100 supercomputers and ~50% of the Top 500. As of June 16, 2013, this includes 7 of the top 10, including the current fourth fastest system on the list - China's Tianhe-2 and the seventh fastest, the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.


title: Object storage

text: Object-storage systems had good adoption in the early 2000s as an archive platform, particularly in the wake of compliance laws like Sarbanes-Oxley. After five years in the market, EMC's Centera product claimed over 3,500 customers and 150 petabytes shipped by 2007. Hitachi's HCP product also claims many petabyte-scale customers. Newer object storage systems have also gotten some traction, particularly around very large custom applications like eBay's auction site, where EMC Atmos is used to manage over 500 million objects a day. As of March 3, 2014, EMC claims to have sold over 1.5 exabytes of Atmos storage. On July 1, 2014, Los Alamos National Lab chose the Scality RING as the basis for a 500-petabyte storage environment, which would be among the largest ever.


title: Object storage

text: "Captive" object storage systems like Facebook's Haystack have scaled impressively. In April 2009, Haystack was managing 60 billion photos and 1.5 petabytes of storage, adding 220 million photos and 25 terabytes a week. Facebook more recently stated that they were adding 350 million photos a day and were storing 240 billion photos. This could equal as much as 357 petabytes.


title: Object storage

text: Cloud storage has become pervasive as many new web and mobile applications choose it as a common way to store binary data. As the storage back-end to many popular applications like Smugmug and Dropbox, Amazon S3 has grown to massive scale, citing over 2-trillion objects stored in April 2013. Two months later, Microsoft claimed that they stored even more objects in Azure at 8.5 trillion. By April 2014, Azure claimed over 20-trillion objects stored. Windows Azure Storage manages Blobs (user files), Tables (structured storage), and Queues (message delivery) and counts them all as objects.


title: Object storage

text: IDC has begun to assess the object-based-storage market annually using its MarketScape methodology. IDC describes the MarketScape as: "...a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the characteristics that assess a vendor's current and future success in the said market or market segment and provide a measure of their ascendancy to become a Leader or maintain a leadership. IDC MarketScape assessments are particularly helpful in emerging markets that are often fragmented, have several players, and lack clear leaders."


title: Object storage

text: In the first version of the OSD standard, objects are specified with a 64-bit partition ID and a 64-bit object ID. Partitions are created and deleted within an OSD, and objects are created and deleted within partitions. There are no fixed sizes associated with partitions or objects; they are allowed to grow subject to physical size limitations of the device or logical quota constraints on a partition.


title: Object storage

text: An extensible set of attributes describe objects. Some attributes are implemented directly by the OSD, such as the number of bytes in an object and the modification time of an object. There is a special policy tag attribute that is part of the security mechanism. Other attributes are uninterpreted by the OSD. These are set on objects by the higher-level storage systems that use the OSD for persistent storage. For example, attributes might be used to classify objects, or to capture relationships among different objects stored on different OSDs.


title: Object storage

text: A list command returns a list of identifiers for objects within a partition, optionally filtered by matches against their attribute values. A list command can also return selected attributes of the listed objects.


title: Object storage

text: Read and write commands can be combined, or piggy-backed, with commands to get and set attributes. This ability reduces the number of times a high-level storage system has to cross the interface to the OSD, which can improve overall efficiency.


title: Object storage

text: A second generation of the SCSI command set, "Object-Based Storage Devices - 2" (OSD-2) added support for snapshots, collections of objects, and improved error handling.


title: Object storage

text: A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of all the objects in a partition into a new partition. The OSD can implement a space-efficient copy using copy-on-write techniques so that the two partitions share objects that are unchanged between the snapshots, or the OSD might physically copy the data to the new partition. The standard defines clones, which are writeable, and snapshots, which are read-only.


title: Object storage

text: A collection is a special kind of object that contains the identifiers of other objects. There are operations to add and delete from collections, and there are operations to get or set attributes for all the objects in a collection. Collections are also used for error reporting. If an object becomes damaged by the occurrence of a media defect (i.e., a bad spot on the disk) or by a software error within the OSD implementation, its identifier is put into a special error collection. The higher-level storage system that uses the OSD can query this collection and take corrective action as necessary.


title: Object storage

text: The border between an object store and a key-value store is blurred, with key-value stores being sometimes loosely referred to as object stores.


title: Object storage

text: A traditional block storage interface uses a series of fixed size blocks which are numbered starting at 0. Data must be that exact fixed size and can be stored in a particular block which is identified by its logical block number (LBN). Later, one can retrieve that block of data by specifying its unique LBN.


title: Object storage

text: With a key-value store, data is identified by a key rather than a LBN. A key might be "cat" or "olive" or "42". It can be an arbitrary sequence of bytes of arbitrary length. Data (called a value in this parlance) does not need to be a fixed size and also can be an arbitrary sequence of bytes of arbitrary length. One stores data by presenting the key and data (value) to the data store and can later retrieve the data by presenting the key. This concept is seen in programming languages. Python calls them dictionaries, Perl calls them hashes, Java and C++ call them maps, etc. Several data stores also implement key-value stores such as Memcached, Redis and CouchDB.


title: Object storage

text: Object stores are similar to key-value stores in two respects. First, the object identifier or URL (the equivalent of the key) can be an arbitrary string. Second, data may be of an arbitrary size.


title: Object storage

text: There are, however, a few key differences between key-value stores and object stores. First, object stores also allow one to associate a limited set of attributes (metadata) with each piece of data. The combination of a key, value, and set of attributes is referred to as an object. Second, object stores are optimized for large amounts of data (hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes), whereas for key-value stores the value is expected to be relatively small (kilobytes). Finally, object stores usually offer weaker consistency guarantees such as eventual consistency, whereas key-value stores offer strong consistency.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology (particularly on issues involving epistemic justification), and logic.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: From 1963 to 1982, Plantinga taught at Calvin University before accepting an appointment as the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He later returned to Calvin University to become the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: A prominent Christian philosopher, Plantinga served as president of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1983 to 1986. He has delivered the Gifford Lectures two times and was described by "Time" magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God". In 2014, Plantinga was the 30th most-cited contemporary author in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2017.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Some of Plantinga's most influential works include "God and Other Minds" (1967), "The Nature of Necessity" (1974), and a trilogy of books on epistemology, culminating in "Warranted Christian Belief" (2000) that was simplified in "Knowledge and Christian Belief" (2015).


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908–1994) and Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908–2007). Plantinga's father was a first-generation immigrant, born in the Netherlands. His family is from the Dutch province of Friesland; they lived on a relatively low income until he secured a teaching job in Michigan in 1941.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga's father earned a PhD in philosophy from Duke University and a master's degree in psychology, and taught several academic subjects at different colleges over the years.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga married Kathleen De Boer in 1955. They have four children: Carl, Jane, Harry, and Ann. Both of his sons are professors at Calvin University, Carl in film studies and Harry in computer science. Harry is also the director of the college's Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Plantinga's older daughter, Jane Plantinga Pauw, is a pastor at Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Seattle, Washington, and his younger daughter, Ann Kapteyn, is a missionary in Cameroon working for Wycliffe Bible Translators.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: One of Plantinga's brothers, Cornelius "Neal" Plantinga Jr., is a theologian and the former president of Calvin Theological Seminary. Another of his brothers, Leon, is an emeritus professor of musicology at Yale University. His brother Terrell worked for CBS News.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: After Plantinga completed 11th grade, his father urged him to skip his last year of high school and immediately enroll in college. Plantinga reluctantly followed his father's advice and in 1949, a few months before his 17th birthday, he enrolled in Jamestown College, in Jamestown, North Dakota. During that same year, his father accepted a teaching job at Calvin University, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In January 1950, Plantinga moved to Grand Rapids with his family and enrolled in Calvin University. During his first semester at Calvin, Plantinga was awarded a scholarship to attend Harvard University.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Beginning in the fall of 1950, Plantinga spent two semesters at Harvard. In 1951, during Harvard's spring recess, Plantinga attended a few philosophy classes at Calvin University, and was so impressed with Calvin philosophy professor William Harry Jellema that he returned in 1951 to study philosophy under him. In 1954, Plantinga began his graduate studies at the University of Michigan where he studied under William Alston, William Frankena, and Richard Cartwright, among others. A year later, in 1955, he transferred to Yale University where he received his PhD in 1958.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga began his career as an instructor in the philosophy department at Yale in 1957, and then in 1958, he became a professor of philosophy at Wayne State University during its heyday as a major center for analytic philosophy. In 1963, he accepted a teaching job at Calvin University, where he replaced the retiring Jellema. He then spent the next 19 years at Calvin before moving to the University of Notre Dame in 1982. He retired from the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and returned to Calvin University, where he serves as the first holder of the William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy. He has trained many prominent philosophers working in metaphysics and epistemology including Michael Bergmann at Purdue and Michael Rea at Notre Dame, and Trenton Merricks working at University of Virginia.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division, from 1981 to 1982. and as President of the Society of Christian Philosophers from 1983 to 1986.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: He has honorary degrees from Glasgow University (1982), Calvin University (1986), North Park College (1994), the Free University of Amsterdam (1995), Brigham Young University (1996), and Valparaiso University (1999). He was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971–72, and elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: In 2006, the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion renamed its Distinguished Scholar Fellowship as the Alvin Plantinga Fellowship. The fellowship includes an annual lecture by the current Plantinga Fellow.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh's Philosophy Department, History and Philosophy of Science Department, and the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science co-awarded Plantinga the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy, which he received with a talk titled, "Religion and Science: Where the Conflict Really Lies".


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: In 2017, Baylor University's Center for Christian Philosophy inaugurated the Alvin Plantinga Award for Excellence in Christian Philosophy. Awardees deliver a lecture at Baylor University and their name is put on a plaque with Plantinga's image in the Institute for Studies in Religion. He was named the first fellow of the center as well.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga has argued that some people can know that God exists as a basic belief, requiring no argument. He developed this argument in two different fashions: firstly, in "God and Other Minds" (1967), by drawing an equivalence between the teleological argument and the common sense view that people have of other minds existing by analogy with their own minds. Plantinga has also developed a more comprehensive epistemological account of the nature of warrant which allows for the existence of God as a basic belief.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga has also argued that there is no logical inconsistency between the existence of evil and the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly good God.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga proposed a "free-will defense" in a volume edited by Max Black in 1965, which attempts to refute the logical problem of evil, the argument that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God. Plantinga's argument (in a truncated form) states that "It is possible that God, even being omnipotent, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures."


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: However, the argument's handling of natural evil has been disputed. According to the "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy", the argument also "conflicts with important theistic doctrines" such as the notion of a heaven where free saved souls reside without doing evil, and the idea that God has free will yet is wholly good. Critics thus maintain that, if we take such doctrines to be (as Christians usually have), God could have created free creatures that always do right, contra Plantinga's claim. J. L. Mackie saw Plantinga's free-will defense as incoherent.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga's well-received book "God, Freedom and Evil", written in 1974, gave his response to what he saw as the incomplete and uncritical view of theism's criticism of theodicy. Plantinga's contribution stated that when the issue of a comprehensive doctrine of freedom is added to the discussion of the goodness of God and the omnipotence of God then it is not possible to exclude the presence of evil in the world after introducing freedom into the discussion. Plantinga's own summary occurs in his discussion titled "Could God Have Created a World Containing Moral Good but No Moral Evil", where he states his conclusion that, "... the price for creating a world in which they produce moral good is creating one in which they also produce moral evil."


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga's contributions to epistemology include an argument which he dubs "Reformed epistemology". According to Reformed epistemology, belief in God can be rational and justified even without arguments or evidence for the existence of God. More specifically, Plantinga argues that belief in God is properly basic, and due to a religious externalist epistemology, he claims belief in God could be justified independently of evidence. His externalist epistemology, called "proper functionalism", is a form of epistemological reliabilism.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga discusses his view of Reformed epistemology and proper functionalism in a three-volume series. In the first book of the trilogy, "", Plantinga introduces, analyzes, and criticizes 20th-century developments in analytic epistemology, particularly the works of Chisholm, BonJour, Alston, Goldman, and others. In the book, Plantinga argues specifically that the theories of what he calls "warrant"-what many others have called justification (Plantinga draws out a difference: justification is a property of a person holding a belief while warrant is a property of a belief)—put forth by these epistemologists have systematically failed to capture in full what is required for knowledge.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: In the second book, "Warrant and Proper Function", he introduces the notion of warrant as an alternative to justification and discusses topics like self-knowledge, memories, perception, and probability. Plantinga's "proper function" account argues that as a necessary condition of having warrant, one's "belief-forming and belief-maintaining apparatus of powers" are functioning properly—"working the way it ought to work". Plantinga explains his argument for proper function with reference to a "design plan", as well as an environment in which one's cognitive equipment is optimal for use. Plantinga asserts that the design plan does not require a designer: "it is perhaps possible that evolution (undirected by God or anyone else) has somehow furnished us with our design plans", but the paradigm case of a design plan is like a technological product designed by a human being (like a radio or a wheel). Ultimately, Plantinga argues that epistemological naturalism- i.e. epistemology that holds that warrant is dependent on natural faculties—is best supported by supernaturalist metaphysics—in this case, the belief in a creator God or designer who has laid out a design plan that includes cognitive faculties conducive to attaining knowledge.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: (1) the cognitive faculties involved in the production of B are functioning properly…; (2) your cognitive environment is sufficiently similar to the one for which your cognitive faculties are designed; (3) … the design plan governing the production of the belief in question involves, as purpose or function, the production of true beliefs…; and (4) the design plan is a good one: that is, there is a high statistical or objective probability that a belief produced in accordance with the relevant segment of the design plan in that sort of environment is true.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga seeks to defend this view of proper function against alternative views of proper function proposed by other philosophers which he groups together as "naturalistic", including the "functional generalization" view of John Pollock, the evolutionary/etiological account provided by Ruth Millikan, and a dispositional view held by John Bigelow and Robert Pargetter. Plantinga also discusses his evolutionary argument against naturalism in the later chapters of "Warrant and Proper Function".


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: In 2000, the third book of the trilogy, "Warranted Christian Belief", was published. In this volume, Plantinga's warrant theory is the basis for his theological end: providing a philosophical basis for Christian belief, an argument for why Christian theistic belief can enjoy warrant. In the book, he develops two models for such beliefs, the "A/C" (Aquinas/Calvin) model, and the "Extended A/C" model. The former attempts to show that a belief in God can be justified, warranted and rational, while the Extended model tries to show that specifically Christian theological beliefs including the Trinity, the Incarnation, the resurrection of Christ, the atonement, salvation etc. Under this model, Christians are justified in their beliefs because of the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing those beliefs about in the believer.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: James Beilby has argued that the purpose of Plantinga's "Warrant" trilogy, and specifically of his "Warranted Christian Belief", is firstly to make a form of argument against religion impossible—namely, the argument that whether or not Christianity is true, it is irrational—so "the skeptic would have to shoulder the formidable task of demonstrating the falsity of Christian belief" rather than simply dismiss it as irrational. In addition, Plantinga is attempting to provide a philosophical explanation of how Christians should think about their own Christian belief.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga has expressed a modal logic version of the ontological argument in which he uses modal logic to develop, in a more rigorous and formal way, Norman Malcolm's and Charles Hartshorne's modal ontological arguments.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga criticized Malcolm's and Hartshorne's arguments, and offered an alternative. He argued that, if Malcolm does prove the necessary existence of the greatest possible being, it follows that there is a being which exists in all worlds whose greatness in "some" worlds is not surpassed. It does not, he argued, demonstrate that such a being has unsurpassed greatness in this world.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: In an attempt to resolve this problem, Plantinga differentiated between "greatness" and "excellence". A being's excellence in a particular world depends only on its properties in that world; a being's greatness depends on its properties in all worlds. Therefore, the greatest possible being must have maximal excellence in every possible world. Plantinga then restated Malcolm's argument, using the concept of "maximal greatness". He argued that it is possible for a being with maximal greatness to exist, so a being with maximal greatness exists in a possible world. If this is the case, then a being with maximal greatness exists in every world, and therefore in this world.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: The conclusion relies on a form of modal axiom S5, which states that if something is possibly true, then its possibility is necessary (it is possibly true in all worlds). Plantinga's version of S5 suggests that "To say that p is possibly necessarily true is to say that, with regard to one world, it is true at all worlds; but in that case it is true at all worlds, and so it is simply necessary." A version of his argument is as follows:


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga argued that, although the first premise is not rationally established, it is not contrary to reason. Michael Martin argued that, if certain components of perfection are contradictory, such as omnipotence and omniscience, then the first premise is contrary to reason. Martin also proposed parodies of the argument, suggesting that the existence of anything can be demonstrated with Plantinga's argument, provided it is defined as perfect or special in every possible world.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Another Christian philosopher, William Lane Craig, characterizes Plantinga's argument in a slightly different way:


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: According to Craig, premises (2)–(5) are relatively uncontroversial among philosophers, but "the epistemic entertainability of premise (1) (or its denial) does not guarantee its metaphysical possibility." Furthermore, Richard M. Gale argued that premise three, the "possibility premise", begs the question. He stated that one only has the epistemic right to accept the premise if one understands the nested modal operators, and that if one understands them within the system S5—without which the argument fails—then one understands that "possibly necessarily" is in essence the same as "necessarily". Thus the premise begs the question because the conclusion is embedded within it.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: On S5 systems in general, James Garson writes that "the words 'necessarily' and 'possibly', have many different uses. So the acceptability of axioms for modal logic depends on which of these uses we have in mind."


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: In Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, he argues that if evolution is true, it undermines naturalism. His basic argument is that if evolution and naturalism are both true, human cognitive faculties evolved to produce beliefs that have survival value (maximizing one's success at the four Fs: "feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing"), not necessarily to produce beliefs that are true. Thus, since human cognitive faculties are tuned to survival rather than truth in the naturalism-evolution model, there is reason to doubt the veracity of the products of those same faculties, including naturalism and evolution themselves. On the other hand, if God created man "in his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means), then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: The argument does not assume any necessary correlation (or uncorrelation) between true beliefs and survival. Making the contrary assumption—that there is, in fact, a relatively strong correlation between truth and survival—if human belief-forming apparatus evolved giving a survival advantage, then it ought to yield truth since true beliefs confer a survival advantage. Plantinga counters that, while there may be overlap between true beliefs and beliefs that contribute to survival, the two kinds of beliefs are not the same, and he gives the following example with a man named Paul:


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: The argument has received favorable notice from Thomas Nagel and William Lane Craig, but has also been criticized as seriously flawed, for example, by Elliott Sober.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Even though Alvin Plantinga believes that God could have used Darwinian processes to create the world, he stands firm against philosophical naturalism. He said in an interview on the relationship between science and religion that:


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Religion and science share more common ground than you might think, though science can't prove, it presupposes that there has been a past for example, science does not cover the whole of the knowledge enterprise.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Plantinga participated of groups that support the Intelligent Design Movement, and was a member of the 'Ad Hoc Origins Committee' that supported Philip E. Johnson's 1991 book "Darwin on Trial", he also provided a back-cover endorsement of Johnson's book: "Shows how Darwinian evolution has become an idol."


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: He was a Fellow of the (now defunct) pro-intelligent design International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, and has presented at a number of intelligent design conferences. In a March 2010 article in "The Chronicle of Higher Education", philosopher of science Michael Ruse labeled Plantinga as an "open enthusiast of intelligent design". In a letter to the editor, Plantinga made the following response:


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: Like any Christian (and indeed any theist), I believe that the world has been created by God, and hence "intelligently designed". The hallmark of intelligent design, however, is the claim that this can be shown scientifically; I'm dubious about that.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: ...As far as I can see, God certainly could have used Darwinian processes to create the living world and direct it as he wanted to go; hence evolution as such does not imply that there is no direction in the history of life. What does have that implication is not evolutionary theory itself, but "unguided" evolution, the idea that neither God nor any other person has taken a hand in guiding, directing or orchestrating the course of evolution. But the scientific theory of evolution, sensibly enough, says nothing one way or the other about divine guidance. It doesn't say that evolution is divinely guided; it also doesn't say that it isn't. Like almost any theist, I reject unguided evolution; but the contemporary scientific theory of evolution just as such—apart from philosophical or theological add-ons—doesn't say that evolution is unguided. Like science in general, it makes no pronouncements on the existence or activity of God.


title: Alvin Plantinga

text: The attitude that he proposes and elaborates upon in "Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism" is that there is no tension between religion and science, that the two go hand in hand, and that the actual conflict lies between naturalism and science.


title: Aaru

text: In ancient Egyptian mythology, Aaru (; "Reeds, rushes"), known also as "sḫt-jꜣrw" or the Field of Reeds, is the heavenly paradise where Osiris rules. It has been described as the "ka" (a part of the soul) of the Nile Delta.


title: Aaru

text: The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul resides in the heart and so, upon death, the Weighing of the Heart occurred. Each human heart is weighed on a giant scale against an ostrich feather, which represents the concept of Maat. Those souls which balance the scales are allowed to start a long and perilous journey to the Field of Reeds, where they will exist in pleasure for all eternity. Hearts heavy with evil tip and fall into the crocodilian jaws of the demon Ammit. After this "second death", the soul is doomed to restlessness in Duat.


title: Aaru

text: The souls who qualify undergo a long journey and face many perils before reaching Aaru. Once they arrive, they enter through a series of gates. The exact number of gates varies according to sources; some say 15, some 21. They are uniformly described as guarded by evil demons armed with knives.


title: Aaru

text: Aaru usually was placed in the east where the Sun rises and described as boundless reed fields, like those of the earthly Nile Delta. This ideal hunting and farming ground allowed the souls here to live for eternity. More precisely, Aaru was envisaged as a series of islands covered in fields of rushes. The part where Osiris later dwelt is sometimes known as the "field of offerings", "sḫt-ḥtpt" in Egyptian.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Edwin Meese III (born December 2, 1931) is an American attorney, law professor, author and member of the Republican Party who served in official capacities within the Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial administration (1967–1974), the Reagan presidential transition team (1980–81) and the Reagan administration (1981–1985). Following the 1984 election, he was considered for the position of White House Chief of Staff by President Reagan, but James Baker was chosen instead. Meese eventually rose to hold the position of the 75th United States Attorney General (1985–1988), a position from which he resigned following the Wedtech scandal.


title: Edwin Meese

text: He currently holds fellowships and chairmanships with several public policy councils and think-tanks, including the Constitution Project and the Heritage Foundation. He was also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He currently sits on the National Advisory Board of Center for Urban Renewal and Education. He is on the board of directors of The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. He has served on the board of Cornerstone closed end funds.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese was born in Oakland, California, the eldest of four sons born to Leone (née Feldman) and Edwin Meese, Jr. He was raised in a practicing Lutheran family, of German descent. His father was an Oakland city government official, president of the Zion Lutheran Church, and served 24 years in the non-partisan office of Treasurer of Alameda County.


title: Edwin Meese

text: At age 10, Meese published along with his brothers a mimeographed neighborhood newspaper, the "Weekly Herald", and used the proceeds to buy a war bond. The young Meese also rode a bicycle on a paper route and worked in a drugstore. At Oakland High School, Meese was involved in the Junior State of America and led his high school debate team to statewide championships. He was recognized as valedictorian, class of 1949.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Two weeks prior to graduation, he was accepted to Yale University and granted a scholarship. Meese served as president of the Yale Political Union, chairman of the Conservative Party, and chairman of the Yale Debating Association. Meese made the dean's list, and graduated with a bachelor of arts of political science in 1953.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese became a member of ROTC upon enrollment at Yale, and upon graduation he obtained a commission in the United States Army as a Second Lieutenant. He spent 24 months at Fort Sill near Lawton, Oklahoma. Meese gained experience in logistics, conducting installation and operations of the 240 mm howitzer M1. Meese completed active duty in 1956 and continued in the United States Army Reserve, specializing in military intelligence. Meese retired from the Army Reserve as a colonel in 1984.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese returned to California, obtaining a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he was a state Moot Court champion. He graduated in 1958 and accepted a position with the district attorney's office of Alameda County as a law clerk. While there, he worked under District Attorney J. Frank Coakley. He also worked with future DA Delwen Lowell Jensen. Jensen was engaged in developing a case-management software program known as Dalite. Meese prosecuted felony cases while maintaining a private practice on nights and weekends, focusing on civil law. During this service, he first drew the attention of Republican State Senator Donald Grunsky, who would later recommend him to governor-elect Ronald Reagan.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese joined Ronald Reagan's staff in 1967. He served as legal affairs secretary from 1967 to 1968 and as executive assistant and chief of staff to Governor Reagan from 1969 to 1974. Despite his later well-known fondness for Reagan, Meese was initially reluctant to accept the appointment because he thought of himself as non-partisan: "I was not particularly interested."


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese was known for his "unique ability" to explain complex ideas to Reagan in a way that often mirrored Reagan's own speaking style and mannerisms. That made Reagan biographer Lou Cannon refer to Meese as "Reagan's geographer".


title: Edwin Meese

text: After being named Reagan's chief of staff, Meese convinced his predecessor's deputy, Mike Deaver, to stay on with him, beginning a partnership that would last more than two decades. For his role in Reagan's office, Meese earned reluctant praise from across the aisle. Bob Moretti, a Democrat and former Democratic Speaker of the Assembly, said, "Were I in the governor's seat, I would want someone like [Ed Meese] on my side."


title: Edwin Meese

text: As Reagan's chief of staff, Meese was instrumental in the decision to crack down on student protesters at People's Park in Berkeley, California, on May 15, 1969. Meese was widely criticized for escalating the official response to the People's Park protest, during which law enforcement officers killed one student, on his way to class, who was not a protester and injured hundreds of others, including bystanders. Meese advised Reagan to declare a state of emergency in Berkeley, contrary to the recommendation of the Berkeley City Council. That resulted in a two-week occupation of People's Park by National Guard troops.


title: Edwin Meese

text: The first governor to turn to Meese for advice on riot control was Democrat Edmund (Pat) Brown, who first telephoned Meese seeking advice on how to best handle the situation. "I told him," Meese said, "that the people in that building should be arrested and taken out of there. I told him that if they were allowed to stay, there would be another mob scene, even bigger, the next day." Meese and Deputy District Attorney Lowell Jensen later served as co-counsels in the trial of Berkeley demonstrators. Meese was recognized as one of five "Outstanding Young Men of California" by the California Junior Chamber of Commerce for his role in countering the Berkeley demonstrators. Meese's role in quelling the riots at UC Berkeley has been identified by critics and supporters as an example of a conservative law-enforcement philosophy at work.


title: Edwin Meese

text: From January 1975 to May 1976, Meese served as vice president for administration of Rohr Industries in Chula Vista, California. He left Rohr to enter private law practice in San Diego County, California.


title: Edwin Meese

text: After receiving a grant from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Meese developed what he called "a plan for a law school center for criminal justice policy and management". The plan was accepted by the University of San Diego, a private Catholic school. From the fall of 1977 to January 1981, Meese served as professor of law at the university, where he also directed the Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Management. During the same time, Meese served as vice chairman of California's Organized Crime Control Commission and participated in the California Bar Association's criminal law section.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Following the Iowa caucuses, Meese joined the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign full-time as chief of staff in charge of day-to-day campaign operations and senior issues adviser. After the 1980 election, Meese headed Reagan's transition effort.


title: Edwin Meese

text: At the advice of Meese, Reagan secretly allowed his campaign to establish a transition office to avoid difficulties similar to those faced by the Nixon administration in its own transition. "Ed had an uncanny ability to look down the road," said Pen James, Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel. Meese's presidential transition team employed more than 1,000 individuals, with 311 being paid in federal funds, 331 working for a "token" $1, and the rest serving as volunteers. When accounting for inflation, the Reagan transition team spent less money than the Carter transition team, $1.75 million versus $1.78 million.


title: Edwin Meese

text: On November 17, 1980, Meese and James Baker held a meeting to divide their list of White House responsibilities, since both saw the potential for future conflict because of their positions being somewhat similar in nature. The one-page memorandum listed Meese's responsibilities as:


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese became Counselor to the President, who appointed him as a member of both his Cabinet and the National Security Council from 1981 to 1985. On Monday, September 14, 1981, Meese chaired the first White House discussion of what would become Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the missile defense program.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese served as a liaison to the conservative evangelical community, arranging for meetings between social-conservative leaders and the president. Meese was lauded by social conservatives for his address to the Congress on the Bible in March 1982, when he said, "Someone has estimated that throughout the course of history man has adopted over four billion laws. It seems to me, with all that effort, we haven't improved one iota on the Ten Commandments."


title: Edwin Meese

text: Near the end of Reagan's presidency, Meese's involvement in the Iran–Contra affair as a "counselor" and "friend" to Reagan was scrutinized by the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, which stated in its official report that Meese's knowledge of the 1985 HAWK transaction "raised serious legal questions".


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese was considered a powerful and influential figure inside the White House. Former Reagan advisor and journalist David Gergen said, "He's a tremendously influential and highly valued adviser to the President who advises on issues all across the board. He's one of the men who has known [the President] so long and so well he's become almost an alter ego of Ronald Reagan."


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese created a "storm of controversy" in December 1983 after his responses to questions about hunger in America. In response to a question about balancing spending cuts against the need to feed hungry children, he said that he had seen no "authoritative" evidence that children in America were going hungry and that some of the allegations "are purely political." When asked about soup kitchens, he said that "some people are going to soup kitchens voluntarily... I know we've had considerable information that people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that that's easier than paying for it." Democratic leaders and social welfare activists called his comments "disgraceful," "an outrage," "unkind," "mean-spirited," and "absolutely ridiculous". Tip O'Neill, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, compared Meese to Ebenezer Scrooge. Shortly after, Meese offered a tongue-in-cheek defense of Scrooge, saying that he "had his faults, but he wasn't unfair to anyone" and that he suffered from "a bad press".


title: Edwin Meese

text: Reagan nominated Meese to be William French Smith's successor as Attorney General on January 23, 1984. For more than a year, Democrats repeatedly charged Meese with unethical conduct to bar his confirmation as attorney general, including a report by Archibald Cox to the Senate on Meese's "lack of ethical sensitivity" and "blindness to abuse of position".


title: Edwin Meese

text: However, he was finally confirmed by a vote of 63–31, with more opposition than any other Attorney General nominee had received since the 1920s. Meese became Attorney General in February 1985.


title: Edwin Meese

text: In 1985, Meese received "Government Executive magazine"'s annual award for excellence in management for his service in this role.


title: Edwin Meese

text: In the mid-1980s, there was a federal investigation into Meese's connections and alleged financial improprieties related to his efforts to help the Bechtel Corporation build an Iraqi pipeline. The pipeline was to extend from Iraq to Jordan and was negotiated by Meese, Shimon Peres, Bruce Rappaport, Robert C. McFarlane, and others. The report of special prosecutor James C. McKay cleared Meese of criminal wrongdoing but criticized him for ethical lapses, especially regarding bribes to Israel not to attack an Iraqi oil pipeline that benefited associates of the Attorney General.


title: Edwin Meese

text: In the late-1980s, Meese was investigated for his role in covering up the Iran-Contra Affair to limit damage to President Ronald Reagan. Although evidence supporting this accusation came to light, Meese was ultimately not charged with any obstruction.


title: Edwin Meese

text: In February 1987, James C. McKay was named independent counsel in the Wedtech case. The investigation centered on actions Meese took that benefited him and his longtime friend and former lawyer, E. Robert Wallach. McKay looked into Meese's involvement, while Attorney General, in negotiations involving the company Wedtech. (E. Robert Wallach worked as a lobbyist for the company and sought help from Meese on Wedtech contract matters.)


title: Edwin Meese

text: McKay never prosecuted or sought indictment of Meese, but in his official report, which is still confidential, he was highly critical of Meese's ethics and urged further investigation of Meese's role in that scandal and others such as Meese's efforts to help Bechtel Corporation. Meese described it as a "full vindication". While Meese was never convicted of any wrongdoing, he resigned in 1988 when the independent counsel delivered the report on Wedtech.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Prior to his resignation, several top Justice Department officials resigned in protest of what they and others viewed as improper acts by the Attorney General.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Reagan publicly voiced support for Meese in his role as Attorney General, during a press conference: "If Ed Meese is not a good man, there are no good men." That was in response to questions about his actions at the Justice Department.


title: Edwin Meese

text: On May 21, 1984, Reagan announced his intention to appoint the Attorney General to study the effect of pornography on society. The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, often called the Meese report, convened in the spring of 1985 and published its findings in July 1986. The Meese Report advised that pornography was in varying degrees harmful. Following the release of the report, guidelines of the Meese-led Department of Justice were modified to enable the government to file multiple cases in various jurisdictions at the same time which eroded some of the markets for pornography.


title: Edwin Meese

text: As Attorney General, Meese chaired the National Drug Policy Board, which coordinated with Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No," national anti-drug educational campaign. One of Meese's innovations was to seek the cooperation of drug-producing countries.


title: Edwin Meese

text: "One of our most effective weapons against drug traffickers," Meese wrote in his autobiography, "was to confiscate the assets of their criminal activity, such as expensive autos, yachts, businesses and homes... To make this technique even more effective, we shared the proceeds with cooperating local law enforcement agencies to enhance their drug-fighting activities."


title: Edwin Meese

text: In 1985 Meese delivered a speech calling for a "jurisprudence of original intent" and criticizing the Supreme Court for straying from the original intention of the U.S. Constitution. Justices William J. Brennan and John Paul Stevens disagreed with Meese publicly later that year. The dispute foreshadowed the contentious Robert Bork hearings of 1987.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese was well known for his opposition to the Miranda Warning ruling by the Supreme Court requiring a suspect's rights to be read to him before he is questioned by authorities.


title: Edwin Meese

text: In May 2006 Meese was named a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group by group co-chairmen James Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, commissioned to assess and report on the contemporary status of the Iraq War. Meese co-authored the group's final December 2006 report.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese serves on the boards of several institutions. Meese has held the Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation since 1988, when he joined the think tank. It is the only policy chair in the United States officially named for the 40th president. He is also chairman of Heritage's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, founded in 2001 to advance conservative views about the Constitution, legal principles and their impact on public policy.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese is currently the Second Vice Chairman of Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative non-profit legal group.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese serves as an Adjunct Fellow at the Discovery Institute and serves on the board of directors of the Junior State of America Meese is also on the board of directors for the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank devoted to the research of non-profit groups.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese served on the executive committee (1994) and as president (1996) of the Council for National Policy (CNP), and he served as co-chairman of the Constitution Project's bipartisan Sentencing Committee.


title: Edwin Meese

text: Meese served two terms as a member of the Board of Visitors of George Mason University from 1996 to 2004. From 1998 to 2004, he served as rector (chairman) of the board.