title: Horn (instrument)

text: In 1751, Prince Narishkin, Master of the Hunt to Empress Elizabeth of Russia, had a set of sixteen carefully tuned metal horns made to ensure that his huntsmen would sound a harmonious D-major chord while signalling to each other. He then got the idea of enlisting a Bohemian horn-player, J. A. Mareš, who was in service with the Imperial court in St. Petersburg, to organize these new horns into a band. Maresch had made a second set of thirty-two (or perhaps thirty-seven) horns, each capable of playing a different, single note—the second harmonic of the instrument—from a C-major scale covering several octaves. (Later the size of the band was increased to sixty horns encompassing five octaves.) The instruments were straight or slightly curved horns made of copper or brass, had a wide conical bore, and were played with a cupped trumpet-type mouthpiece. A metal cap fixed to the bell end was used to adjust the tuning. Each man in the band was trained to play his note in turn, similar to the way in which a group of handbell ringers perform melodies by each sounding their bells at a predetermined moment. This horn band, effectively a giant human music-box of the sort only feasible in a slave culture, played its first public concert in 1753 or 1755 and debuted officially at the Grand Hunt concert in 1757, creating a fashion that spread outside of Russia and continued for eighty years. With proper training, such a horn ensemble was capable of playing relatively complex music in full harmony. The Russian nobility developed a taste for horn bands, which were sometimes sold as a body—the performers along with horns—since most of the players were serfs. Some bands toured Europe and the British Isles, playing arrangements of standard concert repertory and Russian folk music, as well as original compositions. Although received with praise for their accomplishment, they were also criticized for "reducing man to the level of a machine". In Eastern Germany, workmen's bands modified the technique of these horns by adding the upper octave to each instrument's note, and the use of hand-stopping for the smaller horns to add one or two lower semitones.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The German horn is the most common type of orchestral horn, and is ordinarily known simply as the "horn". The "double horn in F/B♭" is the version most used by professional bands and orchestras. A musician who plays the German horn is called a horn player (or, less frequently, a hornist). Pitch is controlled through the adjustment of lip tension in the mouthpiece and the operation of valves by the left hand, which route the air into extra tubing. German horns have lever-operated rotary valves. The backward-facing orientation of the bell relates to the perceived desirability to create a subdued sound, in concert situations, in contrast to the more-piercing quality of the trumpet.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: Three valves control the flow of air in the single horn, which is tuned to F or less commonly B. The more common "double horn" is found almost exclusively in the German design, only rarely in the French horn, and never in the Vienna horn. It has a fourth valve, usually operated by the thumb, which routes the air to one set of tubing tuned to F or another tuned to B. Although first developed by Paxman, a British firm, triple horns with five valves are also of the German-horn type, tuned in F, B, and a descant E or F. Also common are "descant" doubles, which typically provide B and alto-F branches. This configuration provides a high-range horn while avoiding the additional complexity and weight of a triple.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The French horn (as distinct from the German and Vienna horns), is also usually referred to simply as the "horn" by orchestral players. The bore of the French horn is small, between 10.8 and 11 mm, compared to 11.5 mm for the German horn, but not as small as the Vienna horn at 10.7 mm. These narrow-bore French instruments are equipped with piston valves (also called Périnet valves, after their inventor), unlike today's more usual orchestral (German) horns, which have rotary valves. A musician who plays the French horn, like the players of the German and Vienna horns (confusingly also sometimes called French horns), is called a horn player (or less frequently, a hornist).


title: Horn (instrument)

text: Three valves control the flow of air in the "single horn", which is tuned to F or less commonly B. Although double French horns do exist, they are rare.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: A crucial element in playing the horn deals with the mouthpiece. Most of the time, the mouthpiece is placed in the exact center of the lips, but, because of differences in the formation of the lips and teeth of different players, some tend to play with the mouthpiece slightly off center. Although the exact side-to-side placement of the mouthpiece varies for most horn players, the up-and-down placement of the mouthpiece is generally two-thirds on the upper lip and one-third on the lower lip. Usually, in order to play higher octave notes, the pressure exerted on the lips from the mouthpiece is increased. But, although some pressure is needed, excessive pressure is not desirable. Playing with excessive pressure makes the playing of the horn sound forced and harsh as well as decreases endurance of the player by about half.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The Vienna horn is a special horn used primarily in Vienna, Austria. Instead of using rotary valves or piston valves, it uses the Pumpenvalve (or Vienna Valve), which is a double-piston operating inside the valve slides, and usually situated on the opposite side of the corpus from the player's left hand, and operated by a long pushrod. Unlike the modern horn, which has grown considerably larger internally (for a bigger, broader, and louder tone), and considerably heavier (with the addition of valves and tubing in the case of the double horn) the Vienna horn very closely mimics the size and weight of the natural horn (although the valves do add some weight, they are lighter than rotary valves), even using crooks in the front of the horn, between the mouthpiece and the instrument. Although instead of the full range of keys, Vienna horn players usually use an F crook and it is looked down upon to use others, though switching to an A or B crook for higher pitched music does happen on occasion. Vienna horns are often used with funnel shaped mouthpieces similar to those used on the natural horn, with very little (if any) backbore and a very thin rim. The Viennese horn requires very specialized technique and can be quite challenging to play, even for accomplished players of modern horns. The Vienna horn has a warmer, softer sound than the modern horn. Its pumpen-valves facilitate a continuous transition between notes (glissando); conversely, a more precise operating of the valves is required to avoid notes that sound out of tune.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: Two instruments are called a "mellophone." The first is an instrument shaped somewhat like a horn, in that it is formed in a circle. It has piston valves and is played with the right hand on the valves. Manufacturing of this instrument sharply decreased in the middle of the twentieth century, and this mellophone (or mellophonium) rarely appears today.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The second instrument is used in modern brass bands and marching bands, and is more accurately called a "marching mellophone" or mellophone. A derivative of the F alto horn, it is keyed in F. It is shaped like a flugelhorn, with piston valves played with the right hand and a forward-pointing bell. These horns are generally considered better marching instruments than regular horns because their position is more stable on the mouth, they project better, and they weigh less. It is primarily used as the middle voice of drum and bugle corps. Though they are usually played with a V-cup cornet-like mouthpiece, their range overlaps the common playing range of the horn. This mouthpiece switch makes the mellophone louder, less mellow, and more brassy and brilliant, making it more appropriate for marching bands.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: As they are pitched in F or G and their range overlaps that of the horn, mellophones can be used in place of the horn in brass and marching band settings. Mellophones are, however, sometimes unpopular with horn players because the mouthpiece change can be difficult and requires a different embouchure. Mouthpiece adapters are available so that a horn mouthpiece can fit into the mellophone lead pipe, but this does not compensate for the many differences that a horn player must adapt to. The bore is generally cylindrical as opposed to the more conical horn; thus, the "feel" of the mellophone can be foreign to a horn player. Another unfamiliar aspect of the mellophone is that it is designed to be played with the right hand instead of the left (although it can be played with the left).


title: Horn (instrument)

text: While horn players may be asked to play the mellophone, it is unlikely that the instrument was ever intended as a substitute for the horn, mainly because of the fundamental differences described. As an instrument it compromises between the ability to sound like a horn, while being used like a trumpet or flugelhorn, a tradeoff that sacrifices acoustic properties for ergonomics.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The marching horn is quite similar to the mellophone in shape and appearance, but is pitched in the key of B (the same as the B side of a regular double horn). It is also available in F alto (one octave above the F side of a regular double horn). The marching horn is also normally played with a horn mouthpiece (unlike the mellophone, which needs an adapter to fit the horn mouthpiece). These instruments are primarily used in marching bands so that the sound comes from a forward-facing bell, as dissipation of the sound from the backward-facing bell becomes a concern in open-air environments. Many college marching bands and drum corps, however, use mellophones instead, which, with many marching bands, better balance the tone of the other brass instruments; additionally, mellophones require less special training of trumpet players, who considerably outnumber horn players.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The saxhorns constitute a family of brass instruments with tapered bores. Pitched in eight alternating sizes in E-flat and B-flat, like saxophones, they were originally designed for army use and revolutionized military and brass bands in Europe and America. Developed during the 1840s and 50s, the saxhorn was first patented in Paris in 1845 by Adolphe Sax, though the validity of his patents was challenged by rival instrument makers during his lifetime. Throughout the mid-1850s, he continued to experiment with the instrument's valve pattern. Later makers, particularly in America, altered the scale and designs sometimes to such an extent as to make it difficult to determine whether the larger sizes of the resulting instruments actually have descended from the saxhorn or the tuba. The tenor and baritone horns, amongst other sizes of instruments used in British brass bands, are members of the saxhorn family.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The Wagner tuba is a rare brass instrument that is essentially a horn modified to have a larger bell throat and a vertical bell. Despite its name, it is generally not considered part of the tuba family. Invented for Richard Wagner specifically for his work Der Ring des Nibelungen, it has since been written for by various other composers, including Bruckner, Stravinsky and Richard Strauss. It uses a horn mouthpiece and is available as a single tuba in B or F, or, more recently, as a double tuba similar to the double horn. Its common range is similar to that of the euphonium, but its possible range is the same as that of the horn, extending from low F, below the bass clef staff to high C above the treble staff when read in F. These low pedals are substantially easier to play on the Wagner tuba than on the horn.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: Amongst the first written records of horn music are hunting-horn signals, which date back to the fourteenth century. The earliest of these is "The Art of Hunting" (1327) by William Twiti, who uses syllables such as "moot", "trout", and "trourourout" to describe a number of calls involved in various stages of the hunt. Hardouin de Fontaines-Guerin's treatise "Le Livre du Trésor de vénerie" (1394) includes fourteen hunting-horn signals using a notation specially designed to the purpose, consisting of a series of black and white squares. Although Dame Juliana Berners’s "Boke of Saint Albans" (ca. 1345)—also known as the "Book of Hawkinge, Hunting and Fysshing"—is cited as an even earlier source of notated horn calls, the copy containing them actually dates from the sixteenth century. As in Hardouin's treatise, the notation of the calls is in a specially designed tablature. The first occurrence of horn calls in standard musical notation is in the hunting treatise "La vénerie" by Jacques du Fouilloux, dated variously as 1561 and 1573, followed soon after in an English translation by George Gascoigne (often misattributed to George Turberville) titled "The Noble Art of Venerie or Hvnting" (1575).


title: Horn (instrument)

text: Jacques du Fouilloux notates the calls on a single pitch, C, whereas Gascoigne presents them on D. Although it is generally accepted that the horns used on the hunt at this early date were only capable of a single note, or at best a striking of the pitch well below and "whooping up to the true pitch", the objection has been raised against a literal, monotonic interpretation of the notation on grounds that many of the calls would be indistinguishable one from another, whereas the hunt participants would need each call to be distinctive, even if we have no direct evidence of melodic variation.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: Apart from hunting calls, there is no surviving music from before the seventeenth century that specifies use of the horn. However, there are some allusions to horn calls in vocal and keyboard music. In the late fourteenth century, Italian (a word meaning both "canon" and "hunt", and cognate with English "chase") sometimes use lively figures on two notes a fourth apart, such as Gherardello da Firenze's "Tosto che l'alba", after the words "suo corno sonava" (sounded his horn). A less certain association is found in the same alternation of two notes a fourth apart in John Bull's "The King's Hunt" in the "Fitzwilliam Virginal Book", copied at the beginning of the seventeenth century.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The increased tube length of the "cor à plusieurs tours" in the late sixteenth century and with the "trompe de chasse" in the middle of the seventeenth, a larger number of pitches became available for horn calls, and these calls are imitated in programme music from the second quarter of the seventeenth century onward, though scored not for actual horns but for strings only. An early example is found in the "Chiamata a la caccia" in Francesco Cavalli’s opera "Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo" (1639). A few years later, Jean-Baptiste Lully used horn calls in a five-part piece for strings called "Le cors de chasse" in the comédie-ballet "La Princesse d'Élide", itself part of the extravagant entertainment titled "Les plaisirs de l'île enchantée" (1664). According to another opinion, Lully actually meant the scoring of the "Air des valets des chiens et des chasseurs avec Cors de chasse" to include "trompes de chasse", making this the first use of the new instrument in a musical composition, as opposed to hunting signals. An engraving by Israël Silvestre, published ca. 1676, portrays a scene from Lully's work, and is probably the earliest iconographic representation of the hooped horn.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: Soon afterward the hooped "trompe de chasse" began appearing in ballet and opera orchestras in the Empire and German states. The intrada of a ballet by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, performed in Linz on 15 November 1680, was played by violins and hunting horns together, according to the libretto (the music does not survive). Georg Bronner's opera "Echo und Narcissus" (1693) and Agostino Steffani’s opera "I trionfi del fato" (produced in 1695 in Hanover) also used horns. At about this same time the horn began to appear as a solo instrument. An anonymous "Sonata da caccia con un cornu" from before 1680 found in a manuscript in Kroměříž sets a "cor à plusieurs tours" against two violins, two violas, and basso continuo, and a "Sonata venatoria" from 1684 by Pavel Josef Vejvanovský calls for two , which probably also means spiral horns, though hooped horns are not out of the question. A particularly significant composition is a Concerto à 4 in B by Johann Beer, for "corne de chasse", posthorn, two violins, and basso continuo; Beer died in a hunting accident in 1700. His concerto not only combines two different kinds of horn, but the "corne de chasse" part is the earliest solo example of a horn in F (sounding a fifth lower than written), which came to be the "classical" size of the instrument. The F horn appears again soon afterward in an aria from Carlo Agostino Badia's opera "Diana rappacificata" (Vienna, 1700), where two horns play typical triple-time fanfares. By 1705 the horn was also being used in church music, for example by Dieterich Buxtehude In Lübeck, who in that year called for horns in his cantata "Templum honoris".


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The horn officially did not officially enter the Imperial court orchestra in Vienna until 1712, but from there it quickly migrated to the Neapolitan viceroyalty, dominated at that time by the Austrians. In the works of Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Lotti, the horn was quickly adopted into Neapolitan opera, the most fashionable in Europe at the time. It was in the hands of these Italian composers that the horn took on its characteristic "harmonic" orchestral role. One of the first Neapolitan works to use horns was Scarlatti's serenata "Il genio austriaco: Il Sole, Flora, Zefiro, Partenope e Sebeto", performed 28 August 1713 as part of the celebrations for the birthday of Empress Elizabeth Christina. On 19 November of the same year, Lotti's opera "Porsenna" was performed at the Teatro S Bartolomeo in a version "adapted and directed" by Scarlatti, and in almost all of his own subsequent operas Scarlatti used horns in the orchestra. The usual name for the horn in these Neapolitan scores was "tromba da caccia", an Italianization of the French "trompe de chasse". It is thought that the "trombon da caccia" called for by Vivaldi in his opera "Orlando finto pazzo" (1714), and his Concerto in F for violin, two "trombon da caccia", two oboes, and bassoon, RV574, was also a hooped horn.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: In the eighteenth century some outstanding concertos were written for solo horn and orchestra by Telemann, Christoph Förster, Michael and Joseph Haydn, Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Carl Stamitz. Concerti grossi include concertos for two horns by Vivaldi and Bach's First Brandenburg Concerto. At the end of the century Beethoven composed a Sonata for Horn and Piano in F major, Op. 17, for the Bohemian virtuoso Giovanni Punto (Jan Václav Stich), a master of hand-horn technique.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: In the early nineteenth century, Carl Maria von Weber, in addition to giving the horn a prominent orchestral place in the overtures to the operas "Oberon" and "Der Freischütz", composed a spectacularly difficult Concertino in E Minor which, amongst other things, includes an early use of multiphonics, produced by humming into the instrument while playing. Gioachino Rossini exploited the instrument's association with hunting in a piece called "Rendez-vous de chasse" for four "corni da caccia" and orchestra (1828). All of these works were written for the natural horn.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The advent of the valved horn brought new possibilities, which were exploited by Robert Schumann in two works written in 1849: the Adagio and Allegro for horn and piano Op. 70 and the "Concertstück" for four horns and orchestra. Other important works from this era are the concertos by Saverio Mercadante, Franz Strauss, and the First Concerto (1882–83) by his son Richard Strauss. Camille Saint-Saëns did not write a concerto as such, but did compose two Romances for horn (or cello) and orchestra, Op. 67 in E major (1866), and Op. 36 in F major (1874), and a "Morceau de concert" Op. 94 (1887) for horn and orchestra.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The horn is a standard member of the wind quintet and brass quintet, and often appears in other configurations. Notable works from the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries include two quintets by Mozart, one in E major for horn, violin, two violas, and cello (KV407/386c) and the other for piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn (KV452). Beethoven also wrote a Quintet for piano and winds, Op. 16, as well as a Sextet for two horns and strings, Op. 81b, and a Septet in E major, Op. 20, for clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. One of Schubert's last works is the Octet (D803), written in 1824, which adds a second violin to Beethoven's Septet scoring.


title: Horn (instrument)

text: The combination of horn with violin and piano is called a horn trio, and though Brahms's Horn Trio was not the first example, it nevertheless was the first important work in the genre and inspired many later composers to write for the same grouping, notably Lennox Berkeley (ca.1953), Don Banks (1962), and György Ligeti (1982).


title: Germaine Franco

text: Germaine Franco is an American film composer, conductor, songwriter, arranger, record producer, and percussionist. Franco is the first woman to score a Disney animated feature film with "Encanto" (2021), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe, an SCL Award, an Annie Award, and an Academy Award for Best Original Score. She is also the first Latina to be nominated for the latter award, as well as the first to join the music branch of the Academy.


title: Germaine Franco

text: In 2018, Univision named Franco one of the Top 15 Latinas who are changing the world. Other film and television scores Franco has contributed to include "Coco" (2017), "Tag" (2018), "Dope" (2015), "Vida" (2018), "Dora and the Lost City of Gold" (2019), and "Little" (2019). Her work has been performed at concert halls such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall with The Los Angeles Master Chorale, The Puerto Rico Symphony, The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, The National Symphony Orchestra, and The Chicago Philharmonic, among others.


title: Germaine Franco

text: Franco began composing as a student at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, where she graduated in 1984. She is of Mexican American descent.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: Elizabeth Ann Eckford (born October 4, 1941) is one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who, in 1957, were the first black students ever to attend classes at the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The integration came as a result of "Brown v. Board of Education". Eckford's public ordeal was captured by press photographers on the morning of September 4, 1957, after she was prevented from entering the school by the Arkansas National Guard. A dramatic snapshot by Will Counts of the "Arkansas Democrat" showed the young girl being followed and threatened by an angry white mob; this and other photos of the day's startling events were circulated around the US and the world by the press.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: Counts's image was the unanimous selection for a 1958 Pulitzer Prize, but since the story had earned then-rival "Arkansas Gazette" two other Pulitzer Prizes already, the Prize was awarded to another photographer for a pleasant photograph of a two-year-old boy in Washington, D.C. A different photo taken by Counts of Alex Wilson, a black reporter for the "Memphis Tri-State Defender" being beaten by the angry mob in Little Rock the same day, was chosen as the "News Picture of the Year" for 1957 by the National Press Photographers Association. This image by Counts prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send federal troops to Little Rock.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: Eckford only spent one year at Little Rock Central High where she and the other black students were tormented throughout. In the years since, she has struggled through life, and twice attempted suicide. She was subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: On September 4, 1957, Eckford and eight other African American students (known as the Little Rock Nine) made an unsuccessful attempt to enter Little Rock Central High School, which had been segregated. An angry mob of about 400 surrounded the school that day, with the complicity of the Arkansas National Guard.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: Fifteen-year-old Eckford tried to enter the school, while soldiers of the National Guard, under orders from Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, stepped in her way to prevent her from entering. Eventually, she gave up and tried to flee to a bus stop through the mob of segregationists who surrounded and threatened to lynch her. Once Eckford got to the bus stop, she couldn't stop crying. A reporter, Benjamin Fine, having in mind his own 15-year-old daughter, sat down next to Eckford. He tried to comfort her and told her, "don't let them see you cry." Soon, she was also protected by a white woman named Grace Lorch who escorted her onto a city bus.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: The original plan was to have the nine children arrive together, but when the meeting place was changed the night before, the Eckford family's lack of a telephone left Elizabeth uninformed of the change. Instructions were given by Daisy Bates, a strong activist for desegregation, for the nine students to wait for her so that they could all walk together to the rear entrance of the school. This last-minute change caused Elizabeth to be the first to take a different route to school, walking up to the front entrance completely alone. Elizabeth Eckford's family was not informed of the meeting and didn't know that the school board asked the parents to accompany her. Also, Eckford rode a public bus alone to the segregated school. That day, Elizabeth wore a starched black-and-white dress, and she covered her face under black sunglasses. Elizabeth also held her school book in her hand. As she walked toward the school, Elizabeth was surrounded by a crowd of armed guards and a mob of people, and she did not see any black faces. The mob included men, women, and teenagers (white students) who opposed integration. The white teenagers chanted "Two, four, six, eight, we ain't gonna integrate." Elizabeth attempted to go into the school through the mob but was denied entrance. Eckford walked to a bus bench at the end of the block. Eckford described her experience:


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: Even though Elizabeth Eckford would one day be known as a member of the Little Rock Nine, at this point in the school day, she was all alone, making her the first African-American student to integrate a white southern high school.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: For the next two weeks, the Little Rock Nine stayed home to study instead of going to the Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was reluctant to do anything about the mob or the rioting. Eisenhower summoned Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas to intervene and asked for the withdrawal of all troops from the High School after Elizabeth Eckford's experience attempting to enter the school the first time.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: On September 23, 1957, the Little Rock Nine approached Central High again, and Elizabeth Eckford along with the other eight students, accompanied by city policemen, were let into the high school through a side door. The reaction from the mob was described as follows:


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: The Arkansas National Guard, under orders from the governor, and an angry mob of about 400 surrounded the school and prevented them from going in. On September 23, 1957, a mob of about 1000 people surrounded the school again as the students attempted to enter. The following day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took control of the Arkansas National Guard from the governor and sent the 101st Airborne Division to accompany the students to school for protection. Both federal troops and federalized National Guardsmen were deployed at the school for the entirety of the school year, although they were unable to prevent incidents of violence against the group inside, such as Eckford being thrown down a flight of stairs.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: All of the city's high schools were closed the following year, so Eckford did not graduate from Central High School. However, she had taken correspondence and night courses garnering enough credits for her high school diploma. In 1958, Eckford and the rest of the Little Rock Nine were awarded the Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as was Ms. Bates.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: Eckford was accepted by Knox College in Illinois, but chose to return to Little Rock to be near her family. She later attended Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, where she earned a BA in history. In 2018, Eckford was awarded an honorary doctorate from Knox College.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: Eckford served in the United States Army for five years, first as a pay clerk, and then as an information specialist. She also wrote for the Fort McClellan (Alabama) and the Fort Benjamin Harrison (Indiana) newspapers. After that, she has worked as a waitress, history teacher, welfare worker, unemployment and employment interviewer, and a military reporter. She is a probation officer in Little Rock.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: In 1997, she shared the Father Joseph Biltz Award—presented by the National Conference for Community and Justice—with Hazel Bryan Massery, a then-segregationist student at Central High School who appeared in several of the 1957 photographs screaming at the young Elizabeth. During the reconciliation rally of 1997, the two women made speeches together. But later their friendship broke up, with Eckford reflecting, "[Hazel] wanted me to be cured and be over it and for this not to go on anymore. She wanted me to be less uncomfortable so that she wouldn't feel responsible." In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented the nation's highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the members of the Little Rock Nine.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: On the morning of January 1, 2003, one of Eckford's two sons, Erin Eckford, age 26, was shot and killed by police in Little Rock. The "Arkansas Democrat-Gazette" reported that the police officers had unsuccessfully tried to disarm him with a beanbag round after he had fired several shots from his rifle. When Eckford pointed his rifle towards them, the police officers shot him. His mother feared that his death was "suicide by police". Erin, she said, had suffered from mental illness but had been off his prescribed medication for several years. The newspaper later reported that prosecutors investigating the fatal shooting had decided that the police officers concerned were justified in shooting Eckford.


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: In 2018, 60 years after leaving Little Rock Central High, Eckford told her story in her first autobiography, "The Worst First Day: Bullied While Desegregating Little Rock Central High." The book was coauthored with Dr. Eurydice Stanley and Grace Stanley of Pensacola, Florida. Grace was 15 years old when she worked on the project, the same age Eckford was when she desegregated Central High. "The Worst First Day" tells Eckford's experiences in verse. It features the graphic artwork of Rachel Gibson and the photography of Will Counts. Eckford traveled to New Zealand in 2019 to teach American civil rights history to more than 4,000 students with Dr. Stanley at the request of high school teacher Roydon Agent, author of "Public Image, Private Shame."


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: On November 19, 2022, Elizabeth Eckford spoke at the keel-laying ceremony of the attack submarine USS Arkansas (SSN-800) at Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia, after she and Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls LaNier and Thelma Mothershed-Wair etched their initials onto metal plates that were then welded onto the keel. The plates will remain affixed to the submarine throughout its life. Melba Pattillo Beals and Minnijean Brown-Trickey were also named sponsors of the ship, and all members of the Little Rock Nine were honored. Eckford said “(Former Navy) Secretary Ray Mabus asked us to be supporters of the ship and its crew. I signed on to be a foster grandmother...President Eisenhower sent 1,000 paratroopers to Little Rock to disperse a mob, bring order, and they made it possible for us to enter Central High School. From that point, I’ve had very high regard for specially trained forces.”


title: Elizabeth Eckford

text: Actress Lisa Marie Russell portrayed Eckford in the Disney Channel movie "The Ernest Green Story" (1993). Amandla Stenberg portrayed Eckford during a segment on the show "Drunk History" (2019).


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: Anne Tracy Morgan (July 25, 1873 – January 29, 1952) was an American philanthropist who provided relief efforts in aid to France during and after World War I and World War II. Morgan was educated privately, traveled frequently and grew up amongst the wealth her father, banker J. P. Morgan, had amassed. She was awarded a medal from the National Institute of Social Science in 1915, the same year she published the story "The American Girl". In 1932 she became the first American woman appointed a commander of the French Legion of Honor.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: Anne Tracy Morgan was born on July 25, 1873, at "Cragston" her family's country estate on the Hudson River at Highland Falls, New York, the youngest of four children born to John Pierpont Morgan and his wife, Frances Louisa ( Tracy) Morgan.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: In 1903, she became part owner of the Villa Trianon near Versailles, France, along with decorator and socialite Elsie De Wolfe and theatrical/literary agent Elisabeth Marbury. Morgan was instrumental in assisting De Wolfe, her close friend, in pioneering a career in interior decoration. The three women, known as "The Versailles Triumvirate", hosted a salon in France and, in 1903, along with Florence Jaffray Harriman, helped organize the Colony Club, the first women's social club in New York City and, later, helped found the exclusive neighborhood of Sutton Place along Manhattan's East River.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: Around 1910, she became a union activist. Anne Morgan actively supported striking female workers in New York's garment industry. She and other wealthy female members of her social circle stood in picket lines with striking shirtwaist workers and contributed financially to their cause. These strikes in New York's garment industry immediately preceded the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: By 1921, Morgan's interest in women's employment and experience founding the Colony Club evolved into the American Woman's Association, where a working woman "with ambition, pluck and energy, which will push her up and up in her profession" could network and develop leadership skills. Morgan was quoted saying that although no women of the time were equipped to head a large corporation, "in time there will be plenty of such women -- it requires only evolution." By 1930 the American Woman's Association had constructed a large building of its own in New York City, now the Hudson Hotel. Along with a roof garden, numerous parlors, meeting rooms, and residential space, this building featured "a sunny gynmnasium equipped with every facility for body-building, including one of the finest swimming pools in America."


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: In 1912, she started the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving (SPUG) with Eleanor Robson Belmont.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: In 1916, Morgan and De Wolfe largely funded Cole Porter's first Broadway musical, "See America First", produced by Marbury.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: From 1917 to 1921, Morgan took residence near the French front, not far from both Soissons and the "Chemin des Dames" at Blérancourt, and ran a formidable help organisation, The American Friends of France (it employed several hundred people at a time, volunteers from abroad and locally recruited staff), financed partly out of her own deep pockets, partly with the help of an active network in the States. The AFF (aka American Committee for Devastated France) was active in succoring noncombatants, organizing a health service that still exists in Soissons, a workshop to provide basic furniture to bombed-out families, a holiday camp for children, and a mobile library that was taken over by the library in Soissons, and so on. She returned in 1939 to help the Soissons evacuees.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: Anne Murray Dike, a doctor, joined Anne Morgan in France. The estate of Blérancourt was transformed into a museum and inaugurated in 1930, one year after the death of Anne Murray Dike. The two were rewarded for their services, and they later developed a romantic relationship. Dike is buried in the village cemetery at Blérancourt.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: Morgan's friendships included many socialites and celebrities of her day. Her connection to individuals such as Cole Porter, as mentioned above, allowed her to compile a cookbook for charity. Titled the "Spécialités de la Maison" and published in 1940 to benefit the AFF, it offered recipes by cultural icons such as Pearl S. Buck, Salvador Dalí, and Katharine Hepburn.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: She died on January 29, 1952, in Mount Kisco, New York and was interred in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut.


title: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)

text: A four-story townhouse built in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York City for Anne Morgan in 1921 was donated as a gift to the United Nations in 1972. It is now the official residence of the United Nations Secretary-General.


title: Savdhaan India

text: Savdhaan India – India Fights Back ( "Attention India! – India Fights Back") is an Indian Hindi-language crime show aired by Star Bharat. The series is hosted by Ashutosh Rana, Tisca Chopra, Sushant Singh, Gaurav Chopra, Mohnish Behl, Pooja Gaur, Saurabh Raj Jain, Shivani Tomar, Pratyusha Banerjee, Hiten Tejwani, vivek jha Divya Dutta, Sidharth Shukla and Mohit Malik. It provides dramatised versions of real-life crimes in India and the story of struggle of the victims to get justice for their sufferings.


title: Savdhaan India

text: Initially the series aired as "Crime Alert" on Life OK. A rebooted version of the series called "Savdhaan India – India Fights Back" began broadcast on Life OK on 23 July 2012. Versions of the program (focusing on a particular Indian state/city) have also aired as Savdhaan India – Maharashtra Fights Back, hosted by Shreyas Talpade, "Savdhaan India – Mumbai Fights Back", hosted by Atul Kulkarni, "Savdhaan India – Punjab Fights Back" and "Savdhaan India – U.P Fights Back". The show continued to air on replacement channel of Life OK which is STAR Bharat from 28 August.


title: 2018 Nevada gubernatorial election

text: The 2018 Nevada gubernatorial election took place on November 6, 2018, to elect the next Governor of Nevada. Incumbent Republican Governor Brian Sandoval was ineligible to run for re-election, due to the absolute two-term limit established by the Nevada Constitution. Nevada is one of eight U.S. states (or nine U.S. states and territory) that prohibits its governors or any other state and territorial executive branch officials from serving more than two terms, even if they are nonconsecutive.


title: 2018 Nevada gubernatorial election

text: The candidate filing deadline was March 16, 2018 and the primary election was held on June 12, 2018. The Republican nominee was Adam Laxalt and the Democratic nominee was Steve Sisolak. Sisolak won the election, becoming the first Democrat to be elected Governor of Nevada since Bob Miller won his second full term in 1994, and the first non-incumbent Democrat to win since 1982. As of 2022, this is the only time a Democrat was elected Governor of Nevada in the 21st century.


title: 2018 Nevada gubernatorial election

text: While Sisolak only won two of the state’s counties, those two counties account for more than 80% of the total state population. His overwhelming victory in Clark County, home of Las Vegas, and his narrow victory in Washoe County were enough to pull him over the finish line. Sisolak became the first Democrat to be elected Governor of Nevada since Bob Miller’s successful re-election bid in 1994.


title: 2018 Nevada gubernatorial election

text: While Laxalt won 15 of Nevada's county-level jurisdictions (14 counties and the independent city of Carson City), Sisolak carried the two largest, Clark (home to Las Vegas) and Washoe (home to Reno). Sisolak ultimately prevailed by winning his home county, Clark, by over 86,000 votes, double his statewide margin of 39,700 votes.


title: San Clemente Island

text: San Clemente Island (Tongva: "Kinkipar"; Spanish: "Isla de San Clemente") is the southernmost of the Channel Islands of California. It is owned and operated by the United States Navy, and is a part of Los Angeles County. It is administered by Naval Base Coronado. It is long and has of land. The 2018 census estimates 148 military and civilian personnel reside on the island. The city of San Clemente in Orange County, California is named after the island.


title: San Clemente Island

text: Geologically, the island is described as being "the upper part of a tilted and gently arched northwestward-trending block of the earth's crust that has a straight, steep northeastern slope and a more irregular and much gentler southwestern slope" that is composed primarily of volcanic rock, with the northeast boundary of the island having a large fault that parallels most of the major faults on the California mainland. San Clemente Island has some of the best examples of marine terraces, and has trench-like canyons, streams, periodic waterfalls, and pools of fresh water.


title: San Clemente Island

text: This region experiences warm and dry summers and moderate mild falls and winters with no average monthly temperature above 21 °C (69.5 °F). According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, San Clemente Island has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate, abbreviated "Csb" on climate maps.


title: San Clemente Island

text: The San Clemente Island loggerhead shrike is an endangered species that the Navy is taking steps to protect. The San Clemente Island fox is an indigenous species. Feral goats roamed the island for centuries, reaching a population of 11,000 in 1972, when their effect on indigenous species was realized. By 1980 the population had been reduced to 4,000. A plan for shooting remaining goats was blocked in court by the Fund for Animals, so the goats were removed with nets and helicopters. The San Clemente Island goat is a recognized breed of domestic goat.


title: San Clemente Island

text: The coves around the island are visited by snorkelers attracted by the abundant sea life, including sea lions, spiny lobsters, hydrocoral and kelp forests. The island is also home to the endangered San Clemente Island sage sparrow. After decades with no breeding by raptors, because of DDT contamination and Naval activity, there is now at least one breeding pair of bald eagles and more than one pair of peregrine falcons.


title: San Clemente Island

text: Island flora includes 300 native taxa and approximately 135 non-native taxa with distribution of at least 47 of the island’s native taxa being restricted to two or more of the California Islands, 15 plant taxa being only found on San Clemente Island, and one insular endemic of the island thought to be extinct. The flora of the island includes some plant species found nowhere else in the world. These endemic species include the wildflowers San Clemente Island brodiaea, San Clemente Island triteleia, San Clemente Island woodland star, and San Clemente Island Indian paintbrush, and the shrubs San Clemente Island bushmallow and Blair's wirelettuce. A unique subspecies of toyon, ssp. "macrocarpa", also grows here, as do two rare subspecies of the royal larkspur.


title: San Clemente Island

text: Earthworms appear to have been introduced in 2008 in soil from the mainland used in a road construction project. In this earthworm-free region, the worms alter the soil and microbial communities which allows non-native plants to alter the island’s unique ecosystem and threaten biodiversity that exists there.


title: San Clemente Island

text: Archaeologists have found traces of human occupation on San Clemente Island dating back 10,000 years.


title: San Clemente Island

text: Later inhabitants left trade materials from the northern islands and from the mainland, including Coso obsidian from the California desert. It has not been established what tribe the recent inhabitants belonged to,


title: San Clemente Island

text: although the Tongva, who are well attested from Santa Catalina Island, are the most likely candidates. The Chumash, who occupied the northern Channel Islands, may have influenced the inhabitants. Evidence of battles: 'the skeletons of dozens of men piled, one upon another' were also noted on San Clemente and San Nicolas.


title: San Clemente Island

text: The first European to sight the island was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542, who named it "Victoria". It was renamed by Spanish explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno, who spotted it on November 23, 1602, Saint Clement's feast day. It was used by ranchers, fishermen, and smugglers during the 19th century and into the 20th century.


title: San Clemente Island

text: In 1835, the whaleship "Elbe" of Poughkeepsie, New York, under Captain Josiah B. Whippey (or Whipple), hunted sperm whales as far north as "St. Clements Island" (San Clemente Island). The American steamship "Lansing", as well as the steam-schooner "California", both anchored in Pyramid Cove, on the south side of San Clemente Island, to process blue, fin and humpback whales caught by their "killer boats" (steam-driven whale catchers)—the former between 1926 and 1930, and the latter between 1933 and 1937. In 1935, the Norwegian factory ship "Esperanza" caught blue whales as far north as San Clemente Island.


title: San Clemente Island

text: The US Navy acquired the island in 1934. It is the Navy's only remaining ship-to-shore live firing range, and is the center of the integrated air/land/sea San Clemente Island Range Complex covering 2,620 nm (8,990 km).


title: San Clemente Island

text: During World War II, the island was used as a training ground for amphibious landing craft. These small to mid-sized vessels were crucial to the island hopping that was required to attack the islands occupied by the Japanese.


title: San Clemente Island

text: There is a US Navy rocket-test facility on San Clemente. Some Polaris-program test rockets were launched from San Clemente between 1957 and 1960. The SEALAB III project took place off San Clemente in February 1969.


title: San Clemente Island

text: The US Navy uses the island as an auxiliary naval airfield, Naval Auxiliary Landing Field San Clemente Island. The main runway 24/06 is used for carrier training by the Navy. Other branches also use this airfield, including the United States Coast Guard.


title: San Clemente Island

text: As of 2014, San Clemente is home to an auxiliary Air Force base responsible for locating Air Force fighter pilots near the California coast.


title: San Clemente Island

text: Seven marines and one Navy sailor were presumed to have died when their amphibious assault vehicle (AAV) sank during a training exercise off the island's northwest coast on July 30, 2020. One of eight marines died after being rescued from the vehicle. Names of all nine people killed were identified on August 3. Fifteen Marines and a sailor were on the AAV as it returned to USS Somerset.


title: San Clemente Island

text: The USMC released a statement on 3 August 2020, saying the AAV had been found. The landing craft sank in nearly 400 feet of water.


title: San Clemente Island

text: On 27 August 2020, two soldiers were killed and three were injured when their Black Hawk helicopter crashed on San Clemente Island.


title: San Clemente Island

text: The island is owned and operated by the United States Navy, and is a part of Los Angeles County. It is administered by Naval Base Coronado. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) operates the Avalon Station in Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, serving San Clemente Island.


title: Shah Jahan III

text: Shah Jahan III (; b. 1711 – d. 1772), also known as Muhi-ul-millat, was the sixteenth Mughal Emperor, albeit briefly. He was the son of Muhi us-Sunnat, the eldest son of Muhammad Kam Bakhsh who was the youngest son of Aurangzeb. He was placed on the Mughal throne in December 1759 as a result of the intricacies in Delhi with the help of Imad-ul-Mulk. He was later deposed by Maratha chiefs, acting in the name of the exiled Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), was a British organisation that was at the centre of the international movement opposing the South African apartheid system and supporting South Africa's non-White population who were persecuted by the policies of apartheid. The AAM changed its name to in 1994, when South Africa achieved majority rule through free and fair elections, in which all races could vote.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: In response to an appeal by Albert Luthuli, the Boycott Movement was founded in London on 26 June 1959 at a meeting of South African exiles and their supporters. Nelson Mandela was an important person among the many that were anti apartheid. Members included Vella Pillay, Ros Ainslie, Abdul Minty and Nanda Naidoo. Julius Nyerere would summarise its purpose:


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: We are not asking you, the British people, for anything special. We are just asking you to withdraw your support from apartheid by not buying South African goods.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The boycott attracted widespread support from students, trade unions and the Labour, Liberal and Communist parties. On 28 February 1960, the movement launched a March Month, Boycott Action at a rally in Trafalgar Square. Speakers at the rally included Labour Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell, Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe, Conservative peer John Grigg, 2nd Baron Altrincham, and Tennyson Makiwane of the African National Congress.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The Sharpeville massacre occurred on 21 March 1960, when 69 unarmed protesters were shot dead by the South African police, triggered an intensification of action. The organisation was renamed the "Anti-Apartheid Movement" and instead of just a consumer boycott the group would now "co-ordinate all the anti-apartheid work and keep South Africa's apartheid policy in the forefront of British politics", and campaign for the total isolation of apartheid South Africa, including economic sanctions.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: At the time, the United Kingdom was South Africa's largest foreign investor and South Africa was the UK's third biggest export market. The ANC was still committed to peaceful resistance: armed struggle through Umkhonto we Sizwe would only begin a year later.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The AAM scored its first major victory when South Africa was forced to leave the Commonwealth in 1961. It held a 72-hour vigil outside the Commonwealth Secretariat venue, Marlborough House, and found willing allies in Canada, India and the newly independent Afro-Asian Commonwealth member states. In 1962, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling on all member states to impose a trade boycott against South Africa. In 1963, the UN Security Council called for a partial arms ban against South Africa, but this was not mandatory under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: Abdul Minty, who took over from Rosalynde Ainslie as the AAM's Hon. Secretary in 1962, also represented the South African Sports Association, a non-racial body set up in South Africa by Dennis Brutus. In the same year, he presented a letter to the International Olympic Committee meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany about racism in South African sports. The result was a ruling that suspended South Africa from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. South Africa was finally expelled from the Olympics in 1970.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: In November 1962, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 1761, a non-binding resolution establishing the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid and called for imposing economic and other sanctions on South Africa. All Western nations refused to join the committee as members. This boycott of a committee, the first such boycott, happened because it was created by the same General Assembly resolution that called for economic and other sanctions on South Africa, which at the time the West strongly opposed.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: Following this passage of this resolution, the Anti-Apartheid Movement spearheaded the arrangements for international conference on sanctions to be held in London in April 1964. According to Lisson, "The aim of the Conference was to work out the practicability of economic sanctions and their implications on the economies of South Africa, the UK, the US and the Protectorates. Knowing that the strongest opposition to the application of sanctions came from the West (and within the West, the UK), the Committee made every effort to attract as wide and varied a number of speakers and participants as possible so that the Conference findings would be regarded as objective."


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The conference was named the "International Conference for Economic Sanctions Against South Africa". Lisson writes:


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The Conference established the necessity, the legality and the practicability of internationally organised sanctions against South Africa, whose policies were seen to have become a direct threat to peace and security in Africa and the world. Its findings also pointed out that in order to be effective, a programme of sanctions would need the active participation of Britain and the US, who were also the main obstacle to the implementation of such a policy.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The AAM was enthusiastic with the results of the conference for two key reasons. First, because of "the new seriousness with which the use of economic sanctions is viewed." Second, because the AAM was able to meet for the first time with the "UN Special Committee on Apartheid", a meeting that established a long-lasting working relationship between the two parties.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: However, the conference was not successful in persuading the UK to take up economic sanctions against South Africa. Rather, the British government "remained firm in its view that the imposition of sanctions would be unconstitutional "because we do not accept that this situation in South Africa constitutes a threat to international peace and security and we do not in any case believe that sanctions would have the effect of persuading the South African Government to change its policies"."


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The Anti-Apartheid Movement tried to make sanctions an election issue for the 1964 general election. Candidates were asked to state their position on economic sanctions and other punitive measures against the South African government. Most candidates who responded answered in the affirmative. After the Labour Party's victory at the 1964 general election after thirteen years in opposition; commitment to the anti-apartheid cause dissipated. In short order, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson told the press that his Labour Party was "not in favour of trade sanctions partly because, even if fully effective, they would harm the people we are most concerned about; the Africans and those White South Africans who are having to maintain some standard of decency there." Even so, Lisson writes that the "AAM still hoped that the new Labour Government would be more sensitive to the demands of public opinion than the previous Government." But by the end of 1964, it was clear that the election of the Labour Party had made little difference in the governments overall unwillingness to impose sanctions.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: At the UN, Britain consistently refused to accept that the situation in South Africa fell under Chapter VII of the [United Nations] Charter. Instead, in collaboration with the US, it worked for a carefully worded appeal on the Rivonia Trial and other political trials to try to appease Afro-Asian countries and public opinion at home and abroad; by early 1965 the issue of sanctions had lost momentum.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The Anti-Apartheid Movement was instrumental in initiating an academic boycott of South Africa in 1965. The declaration was signed by 496 university professors and lecturers from 34 British universities to protest against apartheid and associated violations of academic freedom. They made a special reference to the issue of banning orders against two South African academics named Jack Simons and Eddie Roux, who were two well-known progressive academics.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: Faced with the failure to persuade the West to impose economic sanctions, in 1966 the AAM formulated a strategy whereby they would shift toward spearheading "an international campaign against apartheid under the auspices of the United Nations." AAM's proposed strategy was approved by the UN Special Committee on Apartheid and then by the General Assembly. This new partnership formed the basis for all future action against apartheid. The man originally responsible for the new strategy gives this summary:


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: The strategy was to press for a range of measures to isolate the regime, support the liberation movement and inform world public opinion; to continue pressing for effective sanctions as the only means for a peaceful solution, and at the same time to obtain action on other measures which could be decided by a majority vote in the General Assembly; to isolate the major trading partners of South Africa by persuading other Western countries to co-operate in action to the greatest feasible extent; and to find ways to promote public opinion and public action against apartheid, especially in the countries which were the main collaborators with the South African regime. This also meant that we built the broadest support for each measure, thereby welcoming co-operation rather than alienating governments and organisations which were not yet prepared to support sanctions or armed struggle.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: In the 1980s, the international campaign to free Nelson Mandela from prison became a global cause. In close co-operation with the exiled leaders of the ANC, the British Anti-Apartheid Movement increasingly personalised the liberation struggle, with Mandela as its symbolic figurehead. The Anti-Apartheid Movement worked with a range of organisations in Britain, such as the International Defence and Aid Fund, local council authorities, churches, and trade unions, to demand Mandela’s release from prison and campaign for the end of apartheid in South Africa. A notable feature of the campaign across Britain was the renaming of buildings and streets after Nelson Mandela, which resulted in the UK having more streets named after him than anywhere outside of South Africa. The Free Nelson Mandela Campaign gained prominence when Glasgow's local authority gave Mandela the Freedom of the City in 1981, and a further eight cities and councils including Aberdeen, Dundee, and Sheffield followed this lead during the 1980s.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: A major part of the campaign revolved around music, which helped publicise Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle to the British public. In 1984, The Special A.K.A released the hit single 'Free Nelson Mandela' which reached number 9 in the UK music charts. In 1986, Artists Against Apartheid organised the Freedom Festival at Clapham Common in London, in which 250,000 people attended. The most famous event was The Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute which hoped to secure his release in time for his 70th birthday in June 1988. There were four elements to ‘Freedom at 70’: the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert held at Wembley Stadium on 11 June; a rally in Glasgow to launch the Nelson Mandela Freedom March on 12 June; and the five-week long Freedom March from Glasgow to London, which finished with a rally in Hyde Park on 17 July 1988. These events attracted an unprecedented level of interest in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the struggle against apartheid. For example, the Wembley Stadium concert was attended by around 100,000 people and an estimated 600 million people in over 60 countries watched the event.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: As a direct consequence of the 70th Birthday Tribute, the Anti-Apartheid Movement membership doubled to nearly 18,000 in 1988.


title: Anti-Apartheid Movement

text: Mandela was released in February 1990, which started the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa. For the Anti-Apartheid Movement, Nelson Mandela's release was a moment of celebration, but it also started an enormously challenging period in which they struggled to maintain the momentum of the 1980s, and sustain public interest in South Africa. Historians Matt Graham and Christopher Fevre have argued that South Africa's transition proved to be the most challenging period in the Anti-Apartheid Movement's existence due to a decline in public interest, a reduction of its membership base, questions about its long-term future as an organisation, a poor financial situation, and the difficulty of explaining the fast-paced negotiations and the political violence to the British public. The Anti-Apartheid Movement did overcome these issues by 1993, and they assisted the ANC's election campaign through fundraising, lobbying, and public rallies. These activities were part of the international support provided for the ANC's victory in South Africa's first democratic elections in April 1994.


title: Benelli M3

text: The Benelli M3 is a dual-mode (hybrid pump-action and semi-automatic) shotgun designed and manufactured by Italian firearms manufacturer Benelli Armi SpA, and one of the "Benelli Super 90" series of semi-auto shotguns. The M3 holds a maximum of seven rounds and uses Benelli's proprietary Inertia-driven action system first showcased in the M1. The M3 is notable for allowing the user to choose between semi-automatic or pump-action operation.


title: Benelli M3

text: Pump-action operation is employed when shooting less powerful shells, such as rubber bullets, that do not generate enough recoil to operate the semi-automatic mechanism. Conversely, the semi-automatic mode can be employed with more powerful shells, absorbing some of the recoil. Switching between the two modes is done by manipulating the ring located at the front of the forend grip.


title: Benelli M3

text: The Benelli M3 also features a removable stock allowing the user to choose one of two styles, the traditional shotgun stock or a stock with a pistol grip.


title: Benelli M3

text: The Benelli M3 is an updated version of the Benelli M1 shotgun. The M3 uses the same inertia recoil semi-automatic system as the earlier Benelli M1, but adds another Benelli-patented feature, which allows the shooter to lock the semi-automatic action and switch to the manually operated pump-action mode and back in the matter of seconds. The action type switch is located at the forward end of the forearm, and is formed as an annular knurled ring. Rotation of this ring either engages the action rods of the pump system and locks the semi-automatic recoil system, or disengages the action bars, locks the forearm and allows the inertia recoil system to operate the action automatically. This improves the versatility of the shotgun, allowing it to fire low-powered ammunition (mostly of special purpose, such as less-lethal rubber or tear-gas projectiles) in the manually operated pump action mode, and to fire full power combat loads with slugs or buckshot in semi-automatic mode. An underbarrel tubular magazine usually holds 8 rounds for police or military versions, or less in some civilian models.


title: Benelli M3

text: The M3 Super 90 is available with various barrel lengths and stock options, with fixed butt and semi-pistol or pistol grips, or with top-folding butts and pistol grips. Sight options include shotgun-type open sights, rifle type open sights, ghost ring (diopter) sights and various mounts for reflex or low magnification telescope sights and tactical flashlights and laser pointers.


title: Benelli M3

text: The Benelli M3 comes in several variations, most notably the M3 Super 90, which features a smaller body. There is also a shorter version, which is easier to transport, used by law enforcement officers and military personnel.


title: Benelli M3

text: While other Benelli self-loading shotguns have the recoil spring inside a tube in butt-stock, in the M3 the recoil spring is placed around the magazine tube. This is an interesting feature for weapon modification, since other shotguns (such as M1, M2 and M4) attach the butt-stock to the recoil spring tube. The M3 has a dummy tube just for stock attachment.


title: Benelli M3

text: Benelli's M3T is an OEM variant, where the butt-stock and dummy tube have been replaced with a pistol grip and up-folding skeleton butt-stock.


title: Benelli M3

text: Benelli's SuperNova pump-shotgun and MR1 self-loading rifle have similar butt-stock attachment to the M3, so this adds two new butt-stock options to M3.


title: Benelli M3

text: The M3 butt-stock and dummy rod can be replaced with a "Benelli SuperNova Tactical Collapsible Stock". The collapsible stock allows 5-position draw length adjustment, so a shooter can compensate the effects of thick winter clothes or body armor by adjusting the stock length. The required spare parts are: Adjustment rod, pistol grip and collapsible butt-stock.


title: Benelli M3

text: A rare modification is to replace the M3 butt-stock and dummy rod with a "Benelli SuperNova Handle Grip". The "handle grip" is just the pistol grip attached to the receiver with a screw.


title: Alex Mallari Jr.

text: Alex Mallari Jr. (born 19 February 1988) is a Canadian actor of Filipino ancestry. He is known for his performances in the Syfy television series "Dark Matter" (2015–2017), Netflix feature film "The Adam Project", and the Netflix series "Ginny & Georgia" (2021–present).


title: Alex Mallari Jr.

text: Mallari was born on February 19, 1988, in the Philippines, but was raised in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. Mallari was competitive at a national level in Taekwondo, for which he has a third degree black belt. He was twice a Junior Canadian National Taekwondo champion. However, he gave that up when he was at the age of 13. He then took up basketball with the intention of turning professional but an injury prevented him from pursuing that profession.


title: Alex Mallari Jr.

text: While attending the University of Toronto, Mallari decided to pursue acting. His first notable acting role was as Four in the Syfy television series "Dark Matter", based on the comic book series of the same name. He starred on the series from 2015 to 2017, for three seasons.


title: Alex Mallari Jr.

text: He has since starred in several films and televisions series, including the Netflix feature film "The Adam Project", and the Netflix series "Ginny & Georgia" (2021–present).


title: BharatBenz

text: BharatBenz is a brand of Daimler India Commercial Vehicles (DICV), itself a wholly owned subsidiary of the German manufacturer Daimler Truck AG. The brand is known for its trucks and buses. The headquarters of BharatBenz is at Oragadam, Chennai, India.


title: BharatBenz

text: In 2008, Daimler AG planned to enter the Indian market in a joint venture with Hero MotoCorp to build medium and heavy commercial vehicles. A joint venture named Daimler Hero Commercial Vehicles (DHCV) was formed under a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in July 2008 with 60% holding of Daimler AG and 40% holding of Hero Group.


title: BharatBenz

text: Daimler AG and Hero Group announced they dissolve the Daimler Hero Commercial Vehicles Ltd. joint venture on 15 April 2009 because of an economic downturn in India. Hero group decided to focus on core operation and return the 40% stake in DHCV joint venture to Daimler AG. With 100% stake, Daimler AG renamed DHCV as Daimler India Commercial Vehicles (DICV).


title: BharatBenz

text: The launch of the BharatBenz brand was announced on 17 February 2011 at Chennai by Daimler AG Chairman Dieter Zetsche and the first BharatBenz truck was unveiled on 4 January 2012 at the Delhi Auto Expo. The decision to launch the brand was prompted by Daimler's determination to compete in the fast-growing Indian truck market against existing Indian brands such as Ashok Leyland, Tata Motors and Indian ventures of other leading global truck manufacturers like VE Commercial Vehicles (Volvo-Eicher Motors-Joint Venture). The entire proposed truck line-up in the 9 to 49-tonne range was unveiled on 2 March 2012.


title: BharatBenz

text: Early 2014 BharatBenz launched the tractor trailer models and a construction model making itself a full range player in the segment above 9T category spanning across medium and heavy-duty truck segments.


title: BharatBenz

text: In May 2015, BharatBenz inaugurated its new bus manufacturing facility in Oragadam, Chennai and unveiled its second wave of products – BharatBenz and Mercedes-Benz buses as well as a new range of BharatBenz trucks and BharatBenz heavy-duty tractors.


title: BharatBenz

text: The BharatBenz heavy-duty trucks are built on the Mercedes-Benz Axor platform, and the medium-duty trucks on the Fuso Canter and Fuso Fighter series. The entire product line meets BSIII standards (comparable to Euro III). All BharatBenz (17 models) trucks are slated to be up to 9% more expensive but be 10% more fuel efficient than the competition.


title: BharatBenz

text: The Fuso medium and heavy-duty trucks produced in Chennai are also being exported to markets of Africa and Asia, under Daimler's Asia Business Model.


title: BharatBenz

text: From November 2015, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles started delivery of its first set of made-in-india buses. The front engine buses are branded as BharatBenz and are based on the Mitsubishi Fuso Canter platform. These are available in school, staff and tourist variants. The rear engine buses are branded as Mercedes-Benz and are based on the Mercedes-Benz O-500 series. Daimler India Commercial Vehicles have tied-up with Ireland-based organisation WrightBus for bus body building. WrightBus is known for their unique patented aluminique alloy structure, which is lighter and stronger than conventional steel, increasing fuel efficiency and making the buses safer.


title: BharatBenz

text: Daimler is also exporting these buses under the brand of Mercedes-Benz to African and South-Asian markets.


title: BharatBenz

text: DICV set up a manufacturing plant for the BharatBenz trucks in Oragadam, near Chennai in Tamil Nadu at an investment of over €700 million (44 billion). This is its biggest investment outside Europe. Construction area for plant is 400 acres, out of which 47 acres are dedicated to 3-lane 1.55 kilometer test track. Test track include a bump track, pothole testing and articulation sections, a water trough, an inspection ramp and a control tower. Initial production capacity at the plant was 36000 units per year for 2012 and was to be expanded to 70,000 units per year by the start of 2013 with an additional investment of 3.5 billion. Series production started in June 2012 with the 2523R truck; sales began in September 2012.


title: BharatBenz

text: Currently, BharatBenz has over, 3500 employees including both Indian and German staff. Localization rate for BharatBenz truck is 85% with more than 450 local suppliers out of which 41 per cent are based in Tamil Nadu and 44 per cent are in rest of the country, with an aim to exceed 90%.


title: BharatBenz

text: Daimler has test driven its trucks a distance of 4.5 million km in various conditions at its test track in Oragadam.


title: BharatBenz

text: DICV set up a research and development facility at Oragadam manufacturing plant with an initial investment of 12 billion.


title: BharatBenz

text: On 27 May 2015, DICV inaugurated its new bus manufacturing facility in Oragadam, Chennai. The new state-of-the-art bus manufacturing plant, constructed within the existing premises of DICV spread across an area of 27.91 acres, will manufacture and assemble buses under two brands: Mercedes-Benz and BharatBenz. With an investment of Rs 425 crore, the bus plant is set up for an initial capacity of 1,500 units which can be further expanded to 4,000 units subsequently.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Between 2004 and 2018, the United States government attacked thousands of targets in northwest Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) operated by the United States Air Force under the operational control of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division. Most of these attacks were on targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (now part of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province) along the Afghan border in northwest Pakistan. These strikes began during the administration of United States President George W. Bush, and increased substantially under his successor Barack Obama. Some in the media referred to the attacks as a "drone war". The George W. Bush administration officially denied the extent of its policy; in May 2013, the Obama administration acknowledged for the first time that four US citizens had been killed in the strikes. In December 2013, the National Assembly of Pakistan unanimously approved a resolution against US drone strikes in Pakistan, calling them a violation of "the charter of the United Nations, international laws and humanitarian norms."


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, had repeatedly demanded an end to the strikes, stating: "The use of drones is not only a continual violation of our territorial integrity but also detrimental to our resolve and efforts at eliminating terrorism from our country". However, despite the public opposition of Pakistani officials, multiple former Prime Ministers gave covert permission to the United States to carry out these attacks. The Peshawar High Court has ruled that the attacks are illegal, inhumane, violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and constitute a war crime. The Obama administration disagreed, contending that the attacks did not violate international law and that the method of attack was precise and effective. Notable targets of the strikes included Fazlullah, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban (killed in a strike on 14 June 2018 on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border), Baitullah Mehsud, the former leader of the Pakistani Taliban (killed in a strike in South Waziristan on 5 August 2009), Hakimullah Mehsud, Mehsud's successor (killed in a strike on 1 November 2013), Hafiz Saeed Khan, the leader (emir) of ISIS-K (killed in a strike on the border of the Achin District), and Akhtar Mansour, leader of the Afghan Taliban (killed in a strike on 21 May 2016 in Ahmad Wal, Pakistan).


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: The operations in Pakistan were closely tied to a related drone campaign in Afghanistan, along the same border area. These strikes have killed 3,798–5,059 militants and 161–473 civilians. Among the militant deaths are hundreds of high-level leaders of the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and other organizations, with 70 Taliban leaders killed in one ten-day period of May 2017 alone.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Pakistan's government publicly condemned these attacks. However, it also allegedly allowed the drones to operate from Shamsi Airfield in Pakistan until 21 April 2011. According to secret diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks, Pakistan's Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani not only tacitly agreed to the drone flights, but in 2008 requested that Americans increase them. However, Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik said, "drone missiles cause collateral damage. A few militants are killed, but the majority of victims are innocent citizens." The strikes are often linked to anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and the growing questionability of the scope and extent of CIA activities in Pakistan.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Reports of the number of militant versus civilian casualties differ. In general, the CIA and other American agencies have claimed a high rate of militant killings, relying in part on a disputed estimation method that "counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent". For instance, the CIA has claimed that strikes conducted between May 2010 and August 2011 killed over 600 militants without any civilian fatalities, a claim that many have disputed. The New America Foundation has estimated that 80 percent of those killed in the attacks were militants. On the other hand, several experts have stated that in reality, far fewer militants and many more civilians have been killed. In a 2009 opinion article, Daniel L. Byman of the Brookings Institution wrote that drone strikes may have killed "10 or so civilians" for every militant that they killed. The Pakistani military has stated that most of those killed were Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 423 to 965 civilians were killed out of a total of 2,497 to 3,999 including 172 to 207 children. The Bureau also claimed that since Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in strikes on funerals and mourners, a practice condemned by legal experts.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Barbara Elias-Sanborn has also claimed that, "as much of the literature on drones suggests, such killings usually harden militants' determination to fight, stalling any potential negotiations and settlement." However, analysis by the RAND Corporation suggests that "drone strikes are associated with decreases in the incidence and lethality of terrorist attacks" in Pakistan.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: A motive that the 2010 Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad stated was the repeated CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, his native country.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Drone strikes were halted in November 2011 after NATO forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in the Salala incident. Shamsi Airfield was evacuated of Americans and taken over by the Pakistanis December 2011. The incident prompted an approximately two-month stop to the drone strikes, which resumed on 10 January 2012.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: In March 2013, Ben Emmerson, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, led a U.N. team that looked into civilian casualties from the U.S. drone attacks, and stated that the attacks are a violation of the sovereignty of Pakistan. Emmerson said government officials from the country clearly stated Pakistan does not agree to the drone attacks, which is contradicted by U.S. officials. In October 2013, Amnesty International brought out a detailed study of the impact of drone strikes that strongly condemned the strikes. The report stated that the number of arbitrary civilian deaths, the tactics used (such as follow-up attacks targeting individuals helping the wounded) and the violation of Pakistani sovereignty meant that some of the strikes could be considered as unlawful executions and war crimes.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: In May 2014, the targeted killing program was described as "basically over," with no attack having occurred since December 2013. The lull in attacks coincided with a new Obama Administration policy requiring a "near certainty" that civilians would not be harmed, requests from lawmakers that the drone program be brought under operational control of the Department of Defense (for better congressional oversight), a reduced US military and CIA presence in Afghanistan, a reduced al-Qaida presence in Pakistan, and an increased military role (at the expense of the CIA) in the execution of drone strikes.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates the following cumulative statistics about U.S. drone strikes (as of 17 September 2017):


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: A formerly classified Pakistani government report obtained in July 2013 by the BIJ shows details of 75 drone strikes that occurred between 2006 and 2009. According to the 12-page report, in this period, 176 of the 746 reported dead were civilians. According to the Long War Journal, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the New America Foundation, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 had some of the highest civilian casualty ratios of any years.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: U.S. President George W. Bush vastly accelerated the drone strikes during the final year of his presidency. A list of the high-ranking victims of the drones was provided to Pakistan in 2009. Bush's successor, President Obama, broadened attacks to include targets against groups considered to be seeking to destabilize Pakistani civilian government; the attacks of 14 and 16 February 2009 were against training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud. On 25 February 2009 Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, indicated the strikes will continue. On 4 March 2009 "The Washington Times" reported that the drones were targeting Baitullah Mehsud. Obama was reported in March 2009 as considering expanding these strikes to include Balochistan.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: The US government cited the inability of states to control and keep track of terrorist activities as a characteristic of a failed state, represented by the lack of military and governmental control in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and was operating within the states' right of self-defense according to Article 51 in Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. In President Obama's 2013 speech at the National Defense University, he stated "we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat".


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: On 25 March 2010 US State Department legal advisor Harold Koh stated that the drone strikes were legal because of the right to self-defense. According to Koh, the US is involved in an armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their affiliates and therefore may use force consistent with self-defense under international law.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Former CIA officials state that the agency uses a careful screening process in making decisions on which individuals to kill via drone strikes. The process, carried out at the agency's counterterrorist center, involves up to 10 lawyers who write briefs justifying the targeting of specific individuals. According to the former officials, if a brief's argument is weak, the request to target the individual is denied. Since 2008 the CIA has relied less on its list of individuals and increasingly targeted "signatures," or suspect behavior. This change in tactics has resulted in fewer deaths of high-value targets and in more deaths of lower-level fighters, or "mere foot soldiers" as the one senior Pakistani official told "The Washington Post". Signature strikes there must be supported by two sources of corroborating intelligence. Sources of intelligence include information from a communication intercept, a sighting of militant training camps or intelligence from CIA assets on the ground. "Signature targeting" has been the source of controversy. Drone critics argue that regular citizen behaviors can easily be mistaken for militant signatures.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: US officials stated in March 2009 that the Predator strikes had killed nine of al Qaeda's 20 top commanders. The officials added that many top Taliban and al Qaeda leaders, as a result of the strikes, had fled to Quetta or even further to Karachi.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Some US politicians and academics have condemned the drone strikes. US Congressman Dennis Kucinich asserted that the United States was violating international law by carrying out strikes against a country that never attacked the United States. Georgetown University professor Gary D. Solis asserts that since the drone operators at the CIA are civilians directly engaged in armed conflict, this makes them "unlawful combatants" and possibly subject to prosecution.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: US military reports asserted that al Qaeda is being slowly but systematically routed because of these attacks, and that they have served to sow the seeds of uncertainty and discord among their ranks. They also claimed that the drone attacks have addled and confused the Taliban, and have led them to turn against each other. In July 2009 it was reported that (according to US officials) Osama Bin Laden's son Saad bin Laden was believed to have been killed in a drone attack earlier in the year.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: During a protest against drone attacks, in an event sponsored by Nevada Desert Experience, Father Louie Vitale, Kathy Kelly, Stephen Kelly (SJ), Eve Tetaz, John Dear, and others were arrested outside Creech Air Force Base on Wednesday 9 April 2009.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: In May 2009 it was reported that the US was sharing drone intelligence with Pakistan. Leon Panetta reiterated on 19 May 2009 that the US intended to continue the drone attacks.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: In December 2009 expansion of the drone attacks was authorized by Barack Obama to parallel the decision to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Senior US officials are reportedly pushing for extending the strikes into Quetta in Balochistan against the Quetta Shura. Speaking at a news conference in Islamabad on 7 January 2010 Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman stated the drone attacks were effective and would continue but stated that US would make greater efforts to prevent collateral damage. In an effort to strengthen trust with Pakistan "US sharing drone surveillance data with Pakistan", said Mike Mullen.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: The Associated Press (AP) noted that Barack Obama apparently expanded the scope and increased the aggressiveness of the drone campaign against militants in Pakistan after taking office. According to the news agency, the US increased strikes against the Pakistani Taliban, which earned favor from the Pakistani government, resulting in increased cooperation from Pakistani intelligence services. Also, the Obama administration toned down the US government's public rhetoric against Islamic terrorism, garnering better cooperation from other Islamic governments. Furthermore, with the drawdown of the war in Iraq, more drones, support personnel, and intelligence assets became available for the campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since Obama took office, according to the AP, the number of drones operated by the CIA over Afghanistan and Pakistan doubled.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: According to some current and former counterterrorism officials, the Obama administration's increase in the use of drone strikes is an unintended consequence of the president's executive orders banning secret CIA detention centers and his attempt to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and capturing prisoners has become a "less viable option". Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia alleged that, "Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets ... They are not going to advertise that, but that's what they are doing." Obama's aides argued that it is often impossible to capture targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen, and that other targets are in foreign custody thanks to American tips. Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, said that, "The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. persons' lives", and continued, "It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, don't like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things." In response to the concerns about the number of killings, Jeh C. Johnson stated, "We have to be vigilant to avoid a no-quarter, or take-no-prisoners policy."


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: A study called "The Year of the Drone" published in February 2010 by the New America Foundation found that from a total of 114 drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004 and early 2010, between 834 and 1,216 individuals had been killed. About two thirds of these were thought to be militants and one third were civilians.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: On 28 April 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama appointed General David Petraeus as director of the CIA overseeing the drone attacks. According to Pakistani and American officials this could further inflame relations between the two nations.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: According to "The Washington Post", as of September 2011, around 30 Predator and Reaper drones were operating under CIA direction in the Afghanistan/Pakistan area of operations. The drones are flown by United States Air Force pilots located at an unnamed base in the United States. US Department of Defense armed drones, which also sometimes take part in strikes on terrorist targets, are flown by US Air Force pilots located at Creech Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base. The CIA drones are operated by an office called the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department, which operates under the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC), based at CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. As of September 2011, the CTC had about 2,000 people on staff.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: US President Obama affirmed on 30 January 2012 that the US was conducting drone strikes in Pakistan. He stressed that civilian casualties in the strikes were low. In a February 2012 poll of 1,000 US adults, 83% of them (77% of the liberal Democrats) replied they support the drone strikes. The Obama administration offered its first extensive explanation on drone-strike policy in April 2012, concluding that it was "legal, ethical and wise". The CIA's general counsel, Stephen Preston, in a speech entitled "CIA and the Rule of Law" at Harvard Law School on 10 April 2012, claimed the agency was not bound by the laws of war; in response, Human Rights Watch called for the strike program to be brought under the control of the US military. In May, the US began stepping up drone attacks after talks at the NATO summit in Chicago did not lead to the progress it desired regarding Pakistan's continued closure of its Afghan borders to the alliance's supply convoys.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: In 2013, the sustained and growing criticism of his drone policy forced Obama to announce stricter conditions on executing drone strikes abroad, including an unspoken plan to partly shift the program from the CIA to the ostensibly more accountable Pentagon, In anticipation of his speech, Obama instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to divulge that four U.S. citizens had been killed by drones since 2009, and that only one of those men had been intentionally targeted. Following Obama's announcement, the United Nations' drone investigator, British lawyer Ben Emmerson, made clear his expectation of a "significant reduction" in the number of strikes over the 18 months to follow, although the period immediately after Obama's speech was "business as usual". Six months later, the CIA was still carrying out the "vast majority" of drone strikes. However, no attack has occurred since December 2013, and the drone war was described as "basically over" in May 2014.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: At Senator Dianne Feinstein's insistence, beginning in early 2010 staffs of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have begun reviewing each CIA drone strike. The staff members hold monthly meetings with CIA personnel involved with the drone campaign, review videos of each strike, and attempt to confirm that the strike was executed properly.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: One of the leading critics of drones in the US Congress is Senator Rand Paul. In 2013, he performed a thirteen-hour filibuster to try to achieve a public admission from U.S. President Obama that he could not kill an American citizen with a drone on American soil, who was not actively engaged in combat. Attorney General Eric Holder responded soon after, confirming that the president had no authority to use drones for this purpose.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Eric M. Blanchard, assistant professor of political science at Columbia University, notes that, "the use of drones reflects several on-going historical military developments that, in turn, reflect the culture and values of American society." In this, he alludes to technological idealism (the pursuit of a "decisive" technology to end war) and the need to seize the moral high ground, by delivering more "humane" approaches to warfare. Military support for the drones remains strong for a host of reasons: expansion of battlespace, extension of an individual soldiers capabilities, and a reduction of American casualties. Support has also been noted across the political spectrum as focus in the Middle East shifted from stabilization in Afghanistan to antiterrorist strikes aimed at al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Blanchard also points to a shift in how gender is viewed in terms of warfare with the advent of technology in place of human soldiers. Fighters often represent an idealized masculinity, portraying strength, bravery, and chivalry, but during the Gulf War of 1990–91 the focus had changed. The computer programmers, missile technologists, high-tech pilots, and other servicemen who were centred around technology were now the focal point of news coverage, removing the warrior-soldier from the conversation.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: For at least some of the initial drone strikes, in 2004 and 2005, the U.S. operated with the approval and cooperation of Pakistan's ISI. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told "The New Yorker" in 2014 that he allowed the CIA to fly drones within Pakistan and that in exchange the U.S. supplied helicopters and night-vision equipment to the Pakistanis. Musharraf wanted the drones to operate under Pakistani control, but the U.S. wouldn't allow it.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: Pakistan has repeatedly protested these attacks as an infringement of its sovereignty and because civilian deaths have also resulted, including women and children, which has further angered the Pakistani government and people. General David Petraeus was told in November 2008 that these strikes were unhelpful. However, on 4 October 2008 "The Washington Post" reported that there was a secret deal between the U.S. and Pakistan allowing these drone attacks. US Senator Dianne Feinstein said in February 2009: "As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base." Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi denied that this was true.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: The drone attacks continue, despite repeated requests made by ex-Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari through different channels. Baitullah Mehsud of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, while claiming responsibility for the 2009 Lahore police academy attacks, stated that they were acting in retaliation for the drone attacks. According to "The Daily Telegraph", Pakistani intelligence has agreed to secretly provide information to the United States on Mehsud's and his militants' whereabouts while publicly the Pakistani government will continue to condemn the attacks.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: On 28 April 2009 Pakistan's consul general to the US, Aqil Nadeem, asked the US to hand over control of its drones in Pakistan to his government. "Do we want to lose the war on terror or do we want to keep those weapons classified? If the American government insists on our true cooperation, then they should also be helping us in fighting those terrorists", said Said Nadeem. Pakistan President Zardari has also requested that Pakistan be given control over the drones, but this has been rejected by the US who are worried that Pakistanis will leak information about targets to militants. In December 2009 Pakistan's Defence minister Ahmad Mukhtar acknowledged that Americans were using Shamsi Airfield but stated that Pakistan was not satisfied with payments for using the facility.


title: Drone strikes in Pakistan

text: In December 2010 the CIA's Station Chief in Islamabad operating under the alias Jonathan Banks was hastily pulled from the country. Lawsuits filed by families of victims of drone strikes had named Banks as a defendant, he had been receiving death threats, and a Pakistani journalist whose brother and son died in a drone strike called for prosecuting Banks for murder.