title: Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790)

text: The Russian fleet, under command of Admiral Vasily Chichagov, blockaded the Swedish fleets with their 30,000 men in Vyborg Bay. The blockade continued for a month and on 21–23 June, with supplies running out, the Swedes chose to attempt a breakout as soon as favorable winds would allow it. The Swedish coastal squadron under Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Olof Cronstedt arrived at Svensksund on 19 June and supported the ground forces of General Meijerfeldt in driving away Russian forces from its vicinity. However, Cronstedt's squadron could not get past a Russian frigate detachment under Captain Rowan Crown (orig. Robert Cronin) blocking the coastal sea route near modern-day Virolahti and had to return to Svensksund. The Swedish escape from Vyborg Bay started on 3 July and lost several ships when they ran aground due to bad visibility in the treacherous waters. The Swedish battle fleet retired to Sveaborg for repairs while the Swedish coastal fleet made for a strong defensive position at Svensksund. The Russian coastal fleet, led by Karl Heinrich von Nassau-Siegen started its attack against the Swedes on 9 July 1790, in what became known as the second Battle of Svensksund, which ended in a decisive Swedish victory.


title: Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790)

text: Despite recent success, King Gustav III believed that his chances of successfully continuing the war were low. His government was also rapidly suffering from ever-increasing debt caused by the war expenses. On the other hand, Empress Catherine II became convinced that the Swedes would not be easily defeated and was anxious for peace in a war which was not important for her. The Russian Vice-Chancellor Alexander Bezborodko immediately agreed to negotiations, and the war was ended by the Treaty of Värälä on 14 August.


title: Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790)

text: The Russo-Swedish War of 1788–1790 was, overall, mostly insignificant for the parties involved. Catherine II regarded the war against her Swedish cousin as a substantial distraction, as her land troops were tied up in the war against Turkey, and she was likewise concerned with revolutionary events unfolding in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (the Constitution of 3 May 1791) and in France (the French Revolution). The Swedish attack foiled the Russian plans of sending its navy into the Mediterranean Sea to support its forces fighting the Ottomans, as it was needed to protect the capital, Saint Petersburg. The war solved Gustav III's domestic problems only briefly, as he was assassinated at the opera in Stockholm, in 1792.


title: Amrutha Suresh

text: Amrutha Suresh (born 2 August 1990) is an Indian singer, composer, songwriter, and radio jockey. She attained popularity after her stint at the reality television singing competition "Idea Star Singer" on Asianet in 2007. Since then, she has sung and composed in several films and music albums. She has been a celebrity radio jockey on Radio Suno 91.7 with the music show "Suno Melodies". In 2014, she founded the music band Amrutam Gamay


title: Amrutha Suresh

text: Amrutha was born on 2 August 1990 to musician P. R. Suresh and Laila. Her father Suresh is a Hindu and mother Laila is a Christian. She has a sister, singer-composer Abhirami Suresh, who is five years younger. They are from Edappally, Kochi. Living in a family (paternal) of musicians inspired her to pursue music from a young age. Amrutha started singing at age three; Celine Dion and Michael Jackson are the singers who influenced her to become a singer. Amrutha was a topper at schools. Even though, she dropped 12th standard for contesting in the reality television singing competition "Idea Star Singer", later she completed the course in private. She then took graduation in Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) and post-graduation in Master of Business Administration (MBA), and also holds degrees in Carnatic music and Hindustani classical music.


title: Amrutha Suresh

text: Coming from a musician's family, she used to perform at stage shows during her childhood. While studying in eighth standard, she has been a child singer in Nadirshah's stage shows. In 2007, Amrutha contested in the second season of reality television singing competition "Idea Star Singer" on Asianet, she was one of the popular contestants on the show. It helped her foray into film industry. Since then, she has sung playback in a number of Malayalam films. "Pulliman" was her debut film as playback singer, composed by Sharreth. Her rendition of the song "Munthirpoo" from the film "Aagathan" (2010) was well received.


title: Amrutha Suresh

text: She sang "Kannu Karuthu" for music director Sharreth in his album "Strawberry Theyyam" (2014) which was a blend of folk and western orchestration, the song was particularly praised in the 9-track album. In 2014, Amritha founded the music band Amrutam Gamay. Amritha and her sister Abhirami Suresh are the lead vocalists of the band. The band performed internationally at gigs within six months of its formation. The band handles all kinds of genres, including Indian, western, folk, classical, or rock. The band's cover version of Israeli folk song "Hava Nagila" sang by Amritha was popular among the global Jewish community. The song gave her much appreciations. In 2015, Amritha and Abhirami wrote and composed multiple original songs for their band, including "Katturumbu", "Ayyayo", and "Harps of Peace".


title: Amrutha Suresh

text: In 2017, Amrutha released her first single, "Anayathe", which featured herself and was themed at and was a tribute to motherhood and women. The song was positively received and garnered attention for its theme. After its release, Amritha got acting offers from some Tamil films, but she refused as she was not seeing herself as an actress at the time. She was also approached by a Canadian production company for an English film. In the same year, she began presenting the musical talk show "Suno Melodies" on Radio Suno 91.7 as a celebrity radio jockey. Amritha along with Abhirami composed, sang and acted in the title song of the film "Crossroad" that year. It was their debut composition in a film and was composed in a short notice. It was followed by a single in the film "Aadu 2" (2017), titled "Aadu 2 – Success Song".


title: Amrutha Suresh

text: In 2019, she sang "Minni Minni" in the film "June" which was well received. For the song, she was nominated for the Mazhavil Music Award for Best Female Singer. In the same year, Amritha sang the first of the three music videos in DJ Savyo's "Destiny", an experimental album which used Shiva mantra in the backdrop of electronic dance music. That year she also signed a project with Swedish musician Neil Luckz, who contacted her after watching her music video "Ohm Nama Shivaya"; she is working on six English songs for the project. In 2019, she sang a song in the children's film "Sullu" composed by Abhirami.


title: Amrutha Suresh

text: Amrutha is also into modelling. In 2017, she was featured in the cover of lifestyle magazine FWD Life. In the following year, she walked the ramp at Kerala Fashion Runway. She was also featured on the cover page of Vanitha Magazine along with her sister. In 2018, Amrutha started a hashtag campaign on Instagram known as Amazing Me, promoting self-esteem. It received positive response from public. In December 2018, Amrutha and her sister Abhirami started a YouTube channel, "Amrutam Gamay – AG", with the series "AG Vlogs" to publish their creative content. The content is related to their personal lives, travel, food, music, shopping among other things. The series met with positive reception from viewers. In 2020, Amrutha and Abhirami entered as contestants in the second season of Malayalam reality television game show "Bigg Boss" (Malayalam season 2), hosted by actor Mohanlal on Asianet. They entered the Bigg Boss house as wildcard entrants on day-50 and plays as a pair.


title: Amrutha Suresh

text: Amrutha first met her Ex husband Bala at the sets of the film "Venalmaram" in which he was starring and Amrutha was playback singer. Later, they developed a friendship-turned-romance while she was contesting in the reality TV singing competition "Idea Star Singer" in which he was a celebrity judge. They talked to each other's family and got married on 27 August 2010 at a ceremony held in Chennai. They were residing in Palarivattom, Kochi. They are reported to have started living separately in 2015, and got legal divorce in December 2019. They have a daughter named Avanthika (born 2012) who lives with her. She is currently in a relationship with popular music director Gopi Sundar Beside music, she is also a travel enthusiast.


title: The Human Stain

text: The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. It is narrated by 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both "American Pastoral" (1997) and "I Married a Communist" (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with "The Human Stain". Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.


title: The Human Stain

text: A national bestseller, "The Human Stain" was adapted as a film by the same name directed by Robert Benton. Released in 2003, the film starred Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, and Gary Sinise.


title: The Human Stain

text: Coleman Silk is a former professor and dean of the faculty at Athena College, a fictional institution in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where he still lives. The story is narrated by Roth's recurring character Nathan Zuckerman, a writer and a neighbor of Silk.


title: The Human Stain

text: In 1996, two years before the main action of the novel, Silk is accused of racism by two African-American students after he wonders aloud whether the reason they have missed all his classes so far is that they are "spooks". Though Silk has no idea they are black, they and others at the college see the term as a racial epithet. When the uproar is about to die down, in Silk's view, he resigns. Soon afterward, his wife, Iris, dies of a stroke that Silk feels is caused by the stress of defending him.


title: The Human Stain

text: In the summer of 1998, just after Iris dies, the 71-year-old Silk approaches Zuckerman and asks him to write a book on the incident. Ranting about it, Silk blames the widespread condemnation of him on, among other things, anti-semitism. Zuckerman is uninterested, but the two begin a brief friendship and Silk tells him his life story. Zuckerman is surprised to learn that Silk is in a relationship with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old woman who works as a janitor at the college and who everyone including Silk believes (falsely, as it turns out) is illiterate.


title: The Human Stain

text: Zuckerman's version of the story starts when Coleman Silk is a light-skinned black boy in East Orange, New Jersey. Coleman becomes a straight-A student and, in defiance of his father, a quick and clever boxer. A boxing coach suggests that he pass as a Jew. During World War II he drops out of Howard University and joins the Navy, listing his race as white.


title: The Human Stain

text: After the war he studies at New York University and lives in Greenwich Village. When he introduces a white girlfriend to his family and they realize he is "passing", his brother cuts him off from the family. Silk marries Iris, a non-religious Jewish woman, and has four children. His wife and children are unaware of his ancestry; he invents a Jewish background and tells them he's unable to get in touch with his few living relatives.


title: The Human Stain

text: A successful academic career in classics leads to his position of dean, where he raises the faculty's standards by forcing out less academically accomplished professors. Decades later, he returns to teaching and is accused of racism as described above.


title: The Human Stain

text: Sometime after his approach to Zuckerman, Silk loses most contact with the people other than Faunia who he is on good terms with, including his children and Zuckerman. In November, Silk and Faunia Farley are killed in a car accident, which Zuckerman suspects was caused by Farley's jealous and abusive ex-husband Lester Farley, a Vietnam War veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. At Silk's funeral, his sister Ernestine reveals his secret to Zuckerman. The novel ends with an encounter between Les Farley and Zuckerman, who is en route to New Jersey to have dinner with the Silk family.


title: The Human Stain

text: Especially in the second half of the novel, there are scenes detailing the thoughts and feelings of other characters, notably Faunia, Les Farley, and Delphine Roux, Silk's main antagonist at Athena. Zuckerman gives his sources for some conversations at which he was not present, but he also says, "I imagine. I am forced to imagine. [...] It is my job. It's now all I do."


title: The Human Stain

text: "The Human Stain" is set in 1998 in the United States, during the period of President Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings and scandal over Monica Lewinsky. It is the third of Roth's postwar novels that take on large social themes.


title: The Human Stain

text: Roth described in a 2012 piece for "The New Yorker" how his novel was inspired by an event in the life of his friend Melvin Tumin, a "professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years." Tumin was subject to a "witch hunt" but was ultimately found blameless in a matter involving use of allegedly racial language concerning two African American students.


title: The Human Stain

text: "The Human Stain" is the third in a trilogy, following "American Pastoral" and "I Married a Communist", in which Roth explores American morality and its effects. Here he examines the cut-throat and, at times, petty, atmosphere in American academia, in which "political correctness" was upheld. Roth said he wrote the trilogy to reflect periods in the 20th centurythe McCarthy years, the Vietnam War, and President Bill Clinton's impeachmentthat he thinks are the "historical moments in post-war American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation."


title: The Human Stain

text: Journalist Michiko Kakutani said that in "The Human Stain", Roth "explores issues of identity and self-invention in America which he had long explored in earlier works." She wrote the following interpretation:


title: The Human Stain

text: It is a book that shows how the public Zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life, a book that takes all of Roth's favorite themes of identity and rebellion and generational strife and refracts them not through the narrow prism of the self but through a wide-angle lens that exposes the fissures and discontinuities of 20th-century life. ... When stripped of its racial overtones, Roth's book echoes a story he has told in novel after novel. Indeed, it closely parallels the story of Nathan Zuckerman, himself another dutiful, middle-class boy from New Jersey who rebelled against his family and found himself exiled, 'unbound' as it were, from his roots.


title: The Human Stain

text: Mark Shechner writes in his 2003 study that in the novel, Roth "explores issues in American society that force a man such as Silk to hide his background, to the point of not having a personal history to share with his children or family. He wanted to pursue an independent course unbounded by racial restraints, but became what he once despised. His downfall to some extent is engineered by Delphine Roux, the young, female, elite, French intellectual who is dismayed to find herself in a New England outpost of sorts, and sees Silk as having become deadwood in academia, the very thing he abhorred at the beginning of his own career."


title: The Human Stain

text: In the reviews of the book in both the daily and the Sunday "New York Times" in 2000, Kakutani and Lorrie Moore suggested that the central character of Coleman Silk might have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a well-known New York literary editor of the "Times". Other writers in the academic and mainstream press made the same suggestion. After Broyard's death in 1990, it had been revealed that he racially passed during his many years employed as a critic at "The New York Times". He was of Louisiana Creole ancestry.


title: The Human Stain

text: However, Roth himself dispels this and stated that he had not known of Broyard's ancestry when he started writing the book and only learned of it months later. In Roth's words, written in "An Open Letter to Wikipedia" and published by "The New Yorker": "Neither Broyard nor anyone associated with Broyard had anything to do with my imagining anything in "The Human Stain"." As stated above, Roth clarifies that Coleman Silk was inspired "by an unhappy event in the life of [Roth's] late friend Melvin Tumin."


title: The Human Stain

text: The novel was well received, became a national bestseller, and won numerous awards. In choosing it for its "Editors' Choice" list of 2000, "The New York Times" wrote:


title: The Human Stain

text: When Zuckerman and Silk are together and testing each other, Roth's writing reaches an emotional intensity and a vividness not exceeded in any of his books. The American dream of starting over entirely new has the force of inevitability here, and Roth's judgment clearly is that you can never make it all the way. There is no comfort in this vision, but the tranquility Zuckerman achieves as he tells the story is infectious, and that is a certain reward.


title: The Human Stain

text: After Roth passed, "The New York Times" asked several prominent authors to name their favorite work by him. Thomas Chatterton Williams chose "The Human Stain", writing that "Roth achieves something here that is very difficult to imagine his mostly domesticated descendants even attempting: He steps fully out of his own backyard and dares to imagine what he cannot possibly know by means of his own personal identity. I came to this gem late, as a 33-year-old 'mixed-race' black man who'd just become the father of a blond-haired, blue-eyed 'black' daughter who could pass for Swedish. Flipping through my paperback now, I smile as I reread the dog-eared pages, their margins overflowing with comments to the effect of: "How can he possibly know that?" There are many ways to display brilliance through narrative, but one of the most difficult —and courageous —is to render the I-who-is-not-I as vividly as one can render the self."


title: Mason McTavish

text: Mason McTavish (born January 30, 2003) is a Canadian professional ice hockey centre for the Anaheim Ducks of the National Hockey League (NHL). McTavish was selected third overall by the Ducks in the first round of the 2021 NHL Entry Draft. He made his NHL debut with the Ducks in 2021. Internationally McTavish played for the Canadian national team at the 2022 Winter Olympics.


title: Mason McTavish

text: McTavish played minor ice hockey for the Pembroke Lumber Kings, where he was coached by his father, Dale McTavish, who also owned the team. He was selected fifth overall in the 2019 OHL Draft by the Peterborough Petes, the same junior team his father played for. In his first year of junior hockey, he finished second among under-17 players in goals before the season was shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic. The following season, with the OHL season suspended due to the pandemic, McTavish returned to Switzerland, though he was unable to get a work visa until he turned eighteen, eventually joining second division side EHC Olten in February, where he would play thirteen games before returning home to play in the Under-18 World Championships, where he served as captain and scored eleven points in seven games as Canada won the gold medal.


title: Mason McTavish

text: McTavish was selected third overall by the Anaheim Ducks in the 2021 NHL Entry Draft. He signed a three-year, entry-level contract with the Ducks on August 13, 2021. He was initially scheduled to not play in the team's opening day game against the Winnipeg Jets, but was added to the lineup just hours before the contest. In his NHL debut, McTavish scored his first career goal and recorded an assist in a 4–1 win. At 18 years, 256 days old, he surpassed Oleg Tverdovsky as the youngest Duck to score a goal. McTavish skated in three games before a lower-body injury forced him out of the lineup. He was assigned to the Ducks' American Hockey League (AHL) affiliate, the San Diego Gulls, on a conditioning loan on October 28. He recorded two points in three games for the Gulls whilst with the club. McTavish finished with two goals and one assist in nine games overall for the Ducks before being re-assigned to the Petes on November 20. With not having exceeded the nine-game mark, the Ducks did not burn a year off of McTavish's entry-level contract.


title: Mason McTavish

text: McTavish appeared in 5 games with the Petes, posting 6 goals and 7 points, before he was traded to contending club, the Hamilton Bulldogs, in exchange for two prospects and 6 draft selections on January 9, 2022.


title: Mason McTavish

text: McTavish made his international debut with Canada's U18 team at the 2021 IIHF World U18 Championships in Texas. He tallied five goals and six assists in seven games, while Team Canada won the gold medal. Later in the year he was invited to join the roster for the national junior team in advance of the 2022 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships. However, the tournament was cancelled after Team Canada had played two games, as a result of the spread of the Omicron variant. Shortly afterward, McTavish was selected to play for Team Canada at the 2022 Winter Olympics, the NHL having declined to allow its players to take part. He was part of the team's first line alongside veteran Eric Staal and AHLer Josh Ho-Sang, but Team Canada struggled in the tournament and was eliminated in the quarter-finals. When the International Ice Hockey Federation revived the cancelled 2022 World Junior Championships in August of 2022, McTavish was again on the roster, and this time was named captain of the team in the absence of Kaiden Guhle. In an August 11 group stage game against Team Slovakia, McTavish scored four goals as part of an 11–1 victory, tying a record for most goals scored by a Canadian player in a single World Junior game. Team Canada advanced to the gold medal game against Team Finland, where McTavish had his most significant moment of the tournament in overtime, using his stick to knock Finnish defenceman Topi Niemelä's potential game-winning shot out of midair onto the goal line, preventing a loss. Dubbed "the McTavish Miracle," it was considered an exceptionally skilled defensive play, and facilitated Canada's victory minutes later. McTavish was named the tournament MVP and one of Canada's three best players.


title: Mason McTavish

text: McTavish was born in Switzerland while his father, Dale, was playing for SC Rapperswil-Jona. He first began playing ice hockey in Zug, before the family returned to Canada when Mason was eight years old following Dale's retirement. The family settled in Carp. He has one older brother, Darian.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: "Thou shalt have no other gods before on my face" () is one, or part of one depending on the numbering tradition used, of the Ten Commandments found in the Hebrew Bible at and . According to the Bible, the commandment was originally given to the ancient Israelites by Yahweh at biblical Mount Sinai after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, as described in the Book of Exodus.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Prohibition of idolatry is the central tenet of the Abrahamic religions and the sin of worshipping another god other than the Lord is called idolatry. Historically, the punishment for idolatry was often death.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The Bible describes how the ancient Israelites, despite being strictly warned not to do so, repeatedly engaged in idolatry and were therefore punished severely by the Lord. Many of the stories in the Bible from the time of Moses to the Babylonian captivity are predicated on the choice between exclusive worship of the Lord and false gods. The Babylonian exile, itself a punishment for idolatry, seems to have been a turning point after which the Jews became committed to monotheism, even when facing martyrdom before worshipping any other god.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The Jewish prayer "Shema Yisrael" and its accompanying blessing/curse reveals the intent of the commandment to include love for the Lord and not only recognition or outward observance. In the Gospels, Jesus quotes the Shema as the first and Greatest Commandment, and the apostles after him preached that those who would follow Christ must turn from worshipping false gods.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Christian theologians teach that the commandment applies in modern times and prohibits the worship of physical idols, the seeking of spiritual activity or guidance from any other source (e.g. magical, astrological, etc.), and the focus on temporal priorities such as self (food, physical pleasures), work, and money, for example. The Catholic Catechism commends those who refuse even to simulate such worship in a cultural context, since “the duty to offer God authentic worship concerns man both as an individual and as a social being.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The Book of Exodus tells the story of how the Israelites escape from Egypt after having been kept as slaves for 400 years. While wandering the desert, the Lord appeared to their leader Moses and made an agreement or covenant with him. The Lord declared that the Israelites were his chosen people and that they must obey his laws. These laws were the Ten Commandments delivered to Moses on two stone tablets. The first and most important commandment was that they must not worship any god other than the Lord. Whoever violated this commandment should be killed and reads "Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the Lord must be destroyed."


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: God's interest in exclusive worship is portrayed as a strong jealousy, like that of a husband for his wife:


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The Biblical prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea referred to Israel's worship of other gods as spiritual adultery: “How I have been grieved by their adulterous hearts, which have turned away from me, and by their eyes, which have lusted after their idols.” This led to a broken covenant between the Lord and Israel, manifested as defeat by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon followed by exile.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The Bible describes how the Israelites until the Babylonian captivity repeatedly violated the first commandment's demand of exclusive worship. Not only did common people substitute Canaanite gods and worship for that of the Lord, polytheism and worship of foreign gods became official in both the northern and southern kingdoms despite repeated warnings from the prophets of God.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: For example, describes how the prophet Elijah tries to convince king Ahab whose land suffers from famine of abandoning worship of Baal and Asherah in favor of the Lord. He assembles all the prophets of Baal and Asherah on Mount Carmel and tells them: "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." He challenges the prophets to a duel. The prophets whose god can burn meat pieces from a bull is the true God. Baal's and Asherah's prophets fail to set fire to the meat, but Elijah's god succeed. But despite this victory for the Lord, Ahab refuses to change the official, polytheistic policy propelled by his wife Jezebel.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The Bible presents Daniel and his companions as distinct, positive examples of individuals refusing to worship another god, even at the price of their lives. During the time of the exile, Nebuchadnezzar erects a gold statue of himself and commands all subjects to worship it. Three Jewish officials – Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – who had been taken to Babylon as youths along with Daniel, refuse to bow to the statue. As they face being burned alive in a furnace, they communicate their faith as well as their resolve:


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: In the later reign of Darius, Daniel's refusal to give up private prayer to God and pray to the king instead results in him receiving a death sentence: being thrown into the lions’ den. According to the Book of Daniel, an angel comes and shuts the mouths of the lions so that Daniel is spared and rescued by the king himself the following morning.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema Yisrael in which the belief in a single god is reaffirmed:


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The prayer is found in printed form in the "mezuzah", the small, tubed case on the doorposts of homes of observant Jews. This form was chosen to fulfill the "mitzvah" (biblical commandment) to inscribe the words of the Shema "on the doorposts of your house.” “Thousands of martyrs did not go to their deaths muttering a numerical truism. When they said that God is one, they meant that … nothing in the universe is comparable to this God or can take the place of this God … that is why they are willing to die rather than abandon [these values].”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The national resolve toward monotheism solidified during the experience of the Babylonian captivity. In the centuries that followed, Jews were willing to suffer death rather than pay the honor due God to any other man or god. During the early days of the Maccabean revolt, for example, many Jews were martyred because they refused to acknowledge the claims of Seleucid deities.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Idolatry is one of three sins (along with adultery and murder) the Mishnah says must be resisted to the point of death. By the time the Talmud was written, the acceptance or rejection of idolatry was a litmus test for Jewish identity: “Whosoever denies idols is called a Jew." "Whosoever recognizes idols has denied the entire Torah; and whosoever denies idols has recognized the entire Torah." The Talmud discusses the subject of the worship of other gods in many passages. An entire tractate, the Avodah Zarah (“strange worship”) details practical guidelines for interacting with surrounding peoples so as to avoid practicing or even indirectly supporting such worship. Although Jews are forbidden in general to mock at anything holy, it is meritorious to deride idols. This apparently originated in ancient times, as some of the several Hebrew words from the Tanakh translated as “idol” are pejorative and even deliberately contemptuous, such as "elilim", “powerless ones,” and "gillulim", “pellets of dung.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Although Jews have characteristically separated themselves from the worship of physical gods and statues or persons claiming divinity, since the Babylonian exile, the tendency toward and practice of magic arts (chants, spells, charms, amulets, healing devices, special foods, lucky and unlucky days, magical numbers and a vast array of secret rituals) has continued to be found among some who claim Judaism as their faith. This has been true since ancient times, when the Israelites, having spent 210 years in Egypt, where magic was pervasive, wrongly thought that carrying the Ark of the Covenant into battle would guarantee victory. Such practices, though forbidden, were not surprising since “the ancient Israelites were not immune to the desire to control God.” However, Maimonides warned that special objects (e.g. a mezuzah) and prayers (e.g. the Shema) in Judaism are meant to remind people of love for God and his precepts and do not in themselves guarantee good fortune.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: According to the gospels, Jesus said the greatest commandment was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” The scripture in Deuteronomy to which he referred is known in modern times as the Shema, a declaration emphasizing the oneness of God and the sole worship of God by Israel. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus contrasted worship of God and running after material possessions and warned, “You cannot serve both God and money.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: According to Acts, Stephen summarizes the spiritual history of Israel and quotes the prophet Amos, who identified the worship of foreign gods as a reason for Israel's defeat by the Babylonians and subsequent exile. Later in Acts, the apostles discussed the issue of what immediate behavioral changes would be required of gentiles who became followers of Jesus Christ. They decided to instruct new converts: “You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: In Athens, Paul was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols, and in the Areopagus, he presented the god of Israel as the creator of everything, as unique and not represented by any idol. He taught:


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: According to Ephesians, Paul incurred the wrath of silversmiths (worried about losing income from decreased sales of idols) when people responded to his preaching and turned away from idol worship. Paul taught that the gods, which the idols represented, were demons and thus, prohibited Christians from worshiping both God and idols:


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Paul warned the Galatians that those who live in idolatry “will not inherit the kingdom of God,” and in the same passage associates witchcraft with idolatry. In his letter to the Philippians, he refers to those whose “god is their stomach.” In several New Testament scriptures, including the Sermon on the Mount, the term idolatry is applied to the love of money. The apostle James rebukes those who focus on material things, using language similar to that of Old Testament prophets: “When you ask [in prayer], you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Paul commended the church in Thessalonica saying, “Your faith in God has become known everywhere … They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Paul identifies the worship of created things (rather than the Creator) as the cause of the disintegration of sexual and social morality in his letter to the Romans. The apostle Peter and the Book of Revelation also refer to the connection between the worship of other gods and sexual sins, whether metaphorically or literally.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Christianity has introduced Trinity, which says that God exists in three persons, God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. This means that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit can be worshipped as God without violating the first commandment.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: The Catholic Church teaches that the first commandment forbids honoring gods other than the one Lord who has revealed Himself, for example, in the introduction to the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery." Through the prophets, God calls Israel and all nations to turn to him, the one and only God: "Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. . . . To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. ‘Only in the LORD, it shall be said of me, are righteousness and strength.' (Isaiah 45:22-24, see also Philippians 2:10-11)”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Because God's identity and transcendent character are described in Scripture as unique, the teaching of the Catholic Church proscribes superstition as well as irreligion and explains the commandment is broken by having images to which divine power is ascribed as well as in divinizing anything that is not God. “Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons … power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc.” The "Catechism" commends those who refuse even to simulate such worship in a cultural context and states that “the duty to offer God authentic worship concerns man both as an individual and as a social being.” The "Catechism of the Catholic Church" notes that this commandment is recalled many times throughout the Bible and quotes passages describing temporal consequences for those who place trust elsewhere than in God:


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: While recognizing that God communicates with people, including prophets, the Catholic Catechism teaches that the first commandment forbids the practice of all attempts to tame occult powers as contradictory to the honor, respect and loving fear that is owed to God alone. Such practices are forbidden even if one has “good” motives, such as seeking to restore someone's health, and “recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Irreligion, in the specific forms of tempting God, sacrilege, and simony, is also considered a violation of the first commandment. The Catechism states that atheism is often based on a “false conception of human autonomy” and all forms of atheism are viewed as violating the first commandment in their common denial of the existence of God. Agnosticism as a way of life is portrayed as a lazy flight from the ultimate question of existence and as “all too often equivalent of practical atheism.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Rev. G. Campbell Morgan emphasized the importance of the first commandment being given after the Lord introduces himself by name, saying, "There is deep significance in the name by which God here declares Himself … to take [the commandment] without the definition of the Person of God is to rob it of its great force."


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Morgan argues that everyone has “a center, a motive, a reason, a shrine, a deity somewhere” to which his or her energy and loyalty is directed. “In every case man demands a god, a king, a lawgiver – one who arranges the programme, utters the commandments and demands obedience. This incontrovertible fact reveals the genesis of idolatry.” Morgan goes on to argue that thus “idolatry” is not defined by geography or culture but by the object(s) of worship that are not God, which may be spiritual or physical.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Martin Luther, Matthew Henry, John Calvin, and John Wesley write in their respective commentaries that in the commandment to have no other gods, God is referring to the heart's allegiance. In Luther's exposition of this commandment, he explains:


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Like the ancient writers and Jewish theologians (see above), Luther considered occult or magic practices to be in violation of this commandment, explaining that those who seek benefit in such ways “make a covenant with the devil, in order that he may give them plenty of money or help them in love-affairs, preserve their cattle, restore to them lost possessions, etc. For all these place their heart and trust elsewhere than in the true God, look for nothing good to Him nor seek it from Him.”


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Like the New Testament writers, Morgan recognized that departing from the worship of God alone is frequently associated with sexual immorality: “’Tis the homage of the man who, losing his God, worships at the shrine of a fallen Venus.” He references Philippians 3:18-19 to support that gluttony and the pursuit of physical pleasure are also widespread, but not new, examples of idolatry.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Calvin recalls Moses’ warning to the people of Israel, “Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you,” and notes that this commandment was given despite the abundant temptation to superstitions in the cultures all around them and the lack of good examples. He explains that it is not enough that God's followers put him first, while giving lesser respect to other superstitions or objects of worship.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: In the first and second of his "Quatre Sermons", Calvin also discouraged believers in Christ from simulating religious acts that are not worship of the true God in order to avoid persecution. He argued that the growth of the Christian church was based on the “seeds sown” by those who were willing to die, if necessary, rather than worship or appear to worship false gods and that without such people there would never have been a Christian church. He said that if one makes choices to suffer nothing for God's word, one changes Jesus Christ to his own image: “Is that not to want to transform Jesus Christ to have him just as our flesh would like him to be?” Pierre Viret, a Swiss Reformed theologian and contemporary of John Calvin, made similar arguments.


title: Thou shalt have no other gods before me

text: Neither Calvin nor Viret advocated reckless martyrdom or purposeful public disturbance, but to the extent possible, to make public choices with “Christian modesty,” even recommending that leaving an area (self-imposed exile) is sometimes the most realistic response to persecution when resources permit.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: F1 is a racing video game series by Codemasters under the EA Sports banner since 2021. The series holds the official license of the FIA Formula One World Championship, with the FIA Formula 2 Championship available since the 2019 game. A total of twenty-one games have been released to date, with the series' latest installment, "F1 22", released in July 2022.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: Electronic Arts' EA Sports division started the series with "F1 2000". Six games have been released between 2000 and 2003, when Image Space Incorporated and Visual Science took charge of the PC and the console versions respectively. Intelligent Games also involved to produce "F1 Manager" for Microsoft Windows in 2000.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: In May 2008, Codemasters acquired the license after the end of Sony's own Formula One video game series, developing by Ego engine. They release each game in the series at an annual pace, one game per season, with the first game being available on Wii, PlayStation Portable and iOS in 2009. Feral Interactive and Sumo Digital were once responsible for platform transplantation. Subsequent sequels were released on contemporary Sony and Microsoft consoles and computers. Following the acquisition of Electronic Arts in 2021, "F1 2019" and "F1 2020" were available on EA Play, among with the "Dirt" series, the "Grid" series and the "Project CARS" series.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: Since EA acquired Codemasters in 2021, EA has recovered rights for the F1 title again, with EA Sports returning to publish the series' new installment, "F1 2021". The game was released in July 2021 and was the first game in the series available for the ninth generation of video game consoles.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: The first video game of the series was developed by Visual Science for the PlayStation and Image Space Incorporated for Microsoft Windows. The game was initially available on 29 February 2000.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: A second video game based on the 2000 Formula One World Championship was initially released by EA Sports for PlayStation, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 and Game Boy Color on 28 September 2000.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: A spin-off game developed by Intelligent Games was available for Microsoft Windows on 6 October 2000. The game features ten-year managing simulation within a Formula One team.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2001" holds the official license of the 2001 Formula One World Championship. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 and Xbox platforms.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: A fifth game of the series, titled "F1 2002", was released for Xbox, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, GameCube and Game Boy Advance.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: The last video game in the series developed by Visual Science, titled as "F1 Career Challenge" or "F1 Challenge '99–'02", was available for GameCube, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, Xbox in June 2003. The game features four Formula One seasons between and .


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2009", the first video game by Codemasters, was announced in May 2008 after Codemasters secured the official Formula One video game licence. The game was developed by Sumo Digital and based on the 2009 Formula One World Championship season. It was initially released on 16 November 2009 and available for Wii and PlayStation Portable platforms.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2010" was based on the 2010 season of the Formula One World Championship. The game was released to three new platforms, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 22 September 2010.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: Based on the 2011 Formula One World Championship, "F1 2011" was initially released on 20 September 2011 as the third game of the franchise. In addition to the platforms on which "F1 2010" launched, the game was also available on Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: A fourth game by Codemasters that titled in the "F1" series was announced on 18 March 2012, coinciding with the first race of the 2012 season. It was available on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 21 September 2012. A Mac OS X version ported by Feral Interactive was released on 20 December 2012.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: A spin-off kart racing game, titled "F1 Race Stars", was initially released on 13 November 2012. It was loosely based on the 2012 Formula One World Championship, featuring loops, jumps and short-cuts in several redesigned Formula One circuits. The game was ported to the Wii U platform under the title "F1 Race Stars: Powered Up Edition", where it was released on 16 January 2014.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2013" is the sixth video game by Codemasters based on the Formula One World Championship that was developed by Codemasters. It was initially released on 4 October 2013 on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with a Mac OS X version by Feral Interactive to follow in early 2014.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2014" features new hybrid-powered cars introduced in the 2014 season. It was the last game in the series released for seventh generation of video game consoles Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2015" is the first game of the franchise that was available for the eighth generation of video game consoles PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It was released on 10 July 2015 and based on the 2015 Formula One World Championship, with the 2014 season as bonus content.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: The ninth video game by Codemasters that carries on the Formula One title was released on 19 August 2016 on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It featured all drivers and teams of the 2016 Formula One World Championship. The game received four more platforms, macOS, iOS, Android and tvOS.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2017" is the tenth video game of the series by Codemasters and is based on the 2017 Formula One World Championship. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 25 August 2017. Following the foundation of the Formula One eSports Series, the game was used in its debut season. The game also features several classic cars. They also edited short circuits in the game.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2018" is the sixteenth official video game of the FIA Formula One World Championship, and the eleventh of the franchise by Codemasters. It was available for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 24 August 2018. In addition to the cars that were competed in the 2018 Formula One World Championship, the game also includes various classic Formula One cars.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: In addition to the 2019 Formula One World Championship, "F1 2019" also holds the official licence of the 2019 FIA Formula 2 Championship, with the 2018 season available from launch. Like its predecessor "F1 2018", the game also contains a number of classic cars. The game also features a DLC that focused on the Prost–Senna rivalry.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 2020" is the official video game of the 2020 Formula 1 and Formula 2 Championships (2019 season from launch with 2020 season being added in an update). The game allows players to create their own team, as well as following its trend of adding extra classic cars to the series. It features the championship as it had originally been intended to be run. The game was released on 10 July 2020 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Stadia.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: Codemasters announced "F1 2021" on 15 April 2021 as the official game of the 2021 Formula One and Formula 2 Championships. The game features a story mode and new circuits including Imola, Portimão and the calendar newcomer Jeddah. However, classic cars have been removed from this iteration of the game. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on 16 July 2021, with EA Sports publishing the game for the first time since "F1 Career Challenge" in 2003.


title: F1 (video game series)

text: "F1 22" was announced on 21 April 2022 as the official game of the 2022 Formula One and Formula 2 championships. The game features a series of track updates and new car models following the introduction of the new regulation. The game was released on 1 July 2022 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: The Hell Gate Bridge, originally the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge or the East River Arch Bridge, is a steel through arch railroad bridge in New York City. Originally built for four tracks, the bridge currently carries two tracks of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and one freight track across the Hell Gate, a strait of the East River, between Astoria in Queens and Randalls and Wards Islands in Manhattan.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: The arch across the Hell Gate is the largest of three bridges that form the Hell Gate railroad viaduct. An inverted bowstring truss bridge with four spans crosses the Little Hell Gate, a former strait that is now filled in, and a fixed truss bridge crosses the Bronx Kill, a strait now narrowed by fill. Together with approaches, the bridges are more than long. The designs of the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, England and the Sydney Harbour Bridge in New South Wales, Australia were derived from the Hell Gate Bridge.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: The bridge was conceived in the early 1900s to link New York and the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) with New England and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad (NH). As part of the plan, the Hell Gate Bridge would carry four tracks, which would connect to the NH's four-track lines on either side of the Hell Gate.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: Construction was overseen by Gustav Lindenthal, whose original design left a gap of between the steel arch and the masonry towers. Fearing that the public assumed that the towers were structurally integral to the bridge, Lindenthal added aesthetic girders between the upper chord of the arch and the towers to make the structure appear more robust. The original plans for the piers on the long approach ramps called for a steel lattice structure. The design was changed to smooth concrete to soothe concerns that asylum inmates on Wards and Randall's islands would climb the piers to escape.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: The engineering was so precise that when the last section of the main span was lifted into place, the final adjustment needed to join everything together was just . Construction of the Hell Gate Bridge began on March 1, 1912 and ended on September 30, 1916. The bridge was dedicated and opened to rail traffic on March 9, 1917, with Washington–Boston through trains first running on April 1. It was the world's longest steel arch bridge until the Bayonne Bridge opened in 1931.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: During World War II, its economic value made it a target of the Nazi sabotage plan known as Operation Pastorius.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: In the 1990s, the bridge was repainted for the first time since it opened. It was painted a deep red called "Hell Gate Red". Due to a flaw in the paint, the red color began to fade before the work was completed, leading to the bridge's currently faded, splotchy appearance.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: The bridge could last for at least a millennium, according to the February 2005 issue of "Discover" magazine. Most other bridges would fall in about 300 years.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: The bridge originally carried four tracks, two each for passenger and freight, but one freight track was abandoned in the mid-1970s. At one time, all tracks were electrified with the 11 kV, 25 Hz overhead catenary, the standard of NH and PRR. The passenger tracks have been electrified since 1917, and the freight tracks from 1927 to 1969, using Amtrak's 25 Hz traction power system.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: Some passengers paid to use the bridge; some fares over the bridge were higher than the usual fares for the same mileage. In September 1940, coach fares were two cents per mile, so the trip from Boston to either Grand Central Terminal or New York Penn Station was the same amount, at $4.60, even though only trains to Penn Station used Hell Gate. However, the trip from Boston to Washington, D.C. was $10.00 instead of the expected $9.10; for a few decades after 1920, 90 cents was added to all fares via Hell Gate except tickets to New York itself. In April 1962, New Haven to New York cost $3.43, New York to Philadelphia cost $3.91, and New Haven to Philadelphia was $8.24. (1962 fares do not include federal tax, then 10 percent.)


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: The bridge and structure are owned by Amtrak and lies in the New York Terminal District, part of its Boston to Washington, D.C. electrified main line known as the Northeast Corridor. The bridge's two western tracks are part of the Hell Gate Line and are electrified with 12.5 kV 60 Hz overhead power and are used by Amtrak for "Acela Express" and "Northeast Regional" service between New York and Boston. In September 2009, the Metro-North Railroad's "Train to the Game" services, operated by New Jersey Transit from key stations on the New Haven Line to Secaucus Junction, started using the bridge during every Sunday Giants or Jets NFL game at MetLife Stadium. However, this service was suspended in 2017.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: The bridge is also part of the New York Connecting Railroad, a rail line that links New York City and Long Island to the North American mainland. The third track forms part of the CSX Fremont Secondary and carries CSX, Canadian Pacific and Providence & Worcester Railroad freight trains between Oak Point Yard in the Bronx and Fresh Pond Yard in Queens, where it connects with the New York and Atlantic Railway.


title: Hell Gate Bridge

text: In September 2009, Metro-North revived its planning efforts for its Penn Station Access project, which would use the Hell Gate Bridge to connect the New Haven Line to Penn Station. Such a service would terminate at Penn Station on platforms freed up by the planned completion of the Long Island Rail Road's East Side Access tunnel to Grand Central Terminal, which is scheduled for completion in late 2022. If the plan is implemented, through-running between the New Haven Line and New Jersey Transit would be possible, linking business centers in Connecticut and New Jersey while providing access to Newark Liberty International Airport. The draft Environmental Assessment was originally expected to be available for public review in late 2018. Subsequently, in January 2019, it was announced that Amtrak and the MTA had reached an agreement regarding track usage rights, and $35 million was approved for initial engineering design work. The MTA was expected to begin service on the line by 2023. This was later delayed to 2027.


title: Autonomism

text: Autonomism, also known as autonomist Marxism is an anti-capitalist left-wing political and social movement and theory. As a theoretical system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism (). Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of as well as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.


title: Autonomism

text: George Katsiaficas summarizes the forms of autonomous movements saying that "In contrast to the centralized decisions and hierarchical authority structures of modern institutions, autonomous social movements involve people directly in decisions affecting their everyday lives, seeking to expand democracy and help individuals break free of political structures and behavior patterns imposed from the outside". This has involved a call for the independence of social movements from political parties in a revolutionary perspective which seeks to create a practical political alternative to both authoritarian/state socialism and contemporary representative democracy.


title: Autonomism

text: Autonomism influenced the German and Dutch /, the worldwide social centre movement and today is influential in Italy, France and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to anarchists.


title: Autonomism

text: The term "autonomia" or "Autonome" is composed out of two Greek words (, , "self"; , "law"), hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's own law". Autonomy in this sense is not independence. While independence refers to an autarchic kind of life, separated from the community, autonomy refers to life in society but by one's own rule. Though the notion of "autonomism" was alien to the ancient Greeks, the concept is indirectly endorsed by Aristotle, who stated that only beasts or gods could be independent and live apart from the "polis" ("community"), while Kant defined the Enlightenment by autonomy of thought and the famous ""Sapere aude"" ("dare to know").


title: Autonomism

text: Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organization of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party political organization than other Marxists, focusing instead on self-organized action outside of traditional organizational structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a "bottom-up" theory: it advocates for grassroots direct democracy and draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working-class resistance to capitalism, such as absenteeism, slow working, socialization in the workplace, sabotage, and other subversive activities.


title: Autonomism

text: Like other Marxists, autonomists see class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class than do other Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white collar and blue collar), autonomists also include in this category the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers, etc.), who are traditionally deprived of any form of union representation.


title: Autonomism

text: Early theorists such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna and Paolo Virno developed notions of "immaterial" and "social labour" that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that modern society's wealth was produced by unaccountable collective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. Other Italian autonomists—particularly feminists, such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici—emphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour to capitalist society. Micheal Ryan, a scholar of the movement, writes:


title: Autonomism

text: Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that network power constructs are the most effective methods of organization against the neoliberal regime of accumulation and predict a massive shift in the dynamics of capital into a 21st century empire.


title: Autonomism

text: In France, the Marxist group , led by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, could be said to be one of the first autonomist groups. drew upon the activist research of the American Johnson-Forest Tendency inside US auto plants and carried out their own investigations into rank-and-file workers struggles, struggles that were autonomous of union or party leadership. Also parallel to the work of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, harshly criticised the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, which it considered a form of "bureaucratic capitalism" and not at all the socialism it claimed to be. Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard was also part of this movement. However, the Italian influence of the movement was more directly felt in the creation of the review (1972–73) by Yann Moulier-Boutang, a French economist close to Toni Negri. This led in turn to the creation of the Camarades group (1974–78) who published a magazine of the same name. Along with others, Moulier-Boutang joined the (CINEL), founded three years earlier by Félix Guattari, and assisted Italian activists accused of terrorism, of whom at least 300 fled to France.


title: Autonomism

text: The French autonome mouvement organised itself in the APGA (Assemblée Parisienne des Groupes Autonomes, "Parisian Assembly of Autonome Groups"; 1977–78). Many tendencies were present in it, including the Camarades group led by Moulier-Boutang, members of the Organisation communiste libertaire, some people referring themselves to the "Desiring Autonomy" of Bob Nadoulek, but also squatters and street-wise people (including the groupe Marge). French autonomes supported captured Red Army Faction former members. Jean-Paul Sartre also intervened on the conditions for the detention of RAF detainees. The militant group Action directe appeared in 1979 and carried out several violent direct actions. Action Directe claimed responsibility for the murders of Renault's CEO Georges Besse and General Audran. George Besse had been CEO of nuclear company Eurodif. Action Directe was dissolved in 1987.


title: Autonomism

text: In the 1980s, the autonomist movement underwent a deep crisis in Italy because of effective prosecution by the State, and was stronger in Germany than in France. It remained present in Parisian squats and in some riots (for example in 1980 near the Jussieu Campus in Paris, or in 1982 in the Ardennes department during anti-nuclear demonstrations). From 1986 to 1994 the French group occupied several buildings of the French national social housing authority to denounce the cruel lack of lodging for workers, they were several hundred and took their decisions in democratic assembly, with support from all autonomous groups of Paris, many of them were worked on the anti prison . In the 1980s, the French autonomists published the periodicals "CAT Pages" (1981–82), (1981–93), (1982–85), (1984), , (1984–85), and (1987–89). In the 1990s, the French autonomist movement was present in struggles led by unemployed people, with (TCP, "Angry Workers, Unemployed, and Marginalised people") and ("General Assembly of Jussieu's unemployed people"). It was also involved in the alter-globalisation movement and above all in the solidarity with illegal foreigners (Collective Des Papiers pour tous ("Permits for all", 1996) and Collectif Anti-Expulsion (1998–2005)). Several autonomist journals date from this time: "Quilombo" (1988–93), "Apache" (1990–98), "Tic-Tac" (1995–97), "Karoshi" (1998–99), and "Tiqqun" (1999–2001).


title: Autonomism

text: From 19 to 28 July 2002, a no borders camp was made in Strasbourg to protest against anti-immigration policies, in particular inside the Schengen European space. In 2003, Autonomists came into conflict with the French Socialist Party (PS) during a demonstration that took place in the frame of the European Social Forum in Saint-Denis (Paris). At the end of December, hundreds of unemployed people helped themselves in the "Bon Marché" supermarket to be able to celebrate Christmas (an action called "" (of prices) in French). French riot police (CRS) physically opposed the unemployed people inside the shop. Autonomes rioted during the spring 2006 protests against the CPE, and again after the 2007 presidential election when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected. On 11 November 2008, the French police arrested ten people, including five living in a farmhouse on a hill overlooking Tarnac, and accused them of associating with a "terrorist enterprise" by sabotaging TGV's overhead lines. Nine out of ten were let go and only Julien Coupat, the alleged leader, remained in custody for about a year, charged with "directing a terrorist group" by the Paris Prosecutor's office.


title: Autonomism

text: In West Germany, was used during the late 1970s to depict the most radical part of the political left. These individuals participated in practically all actions of the social movements at the time, especially in demonstrations against nuclear energy plants (Brokdorf 1981, Wackersdorf 1986) and in actions against the construction of airport runways (Frankfurt 1976–86). The defense of squats against the police such as in Hamburg's was also a major "task" for the movement. The Dutch anarchist movement from the 1960s also concentrated on squatting.


title: Autonomism

text: Tactics of the "Autonome" were usually militant, including the construction of barricades or throwing stones or molotov cocktails at the police. During their most powerful times in the early 1980s, on at least one occasion the police had to take flight. Because of their outfit (heavy black clothing, ski masks, helmets), the "Autonome" were dubbed by the German media, and in these tactics were similar to modern black blocs. In 1989, laws regarding demonstrations in Germany were changed, prohibiting the use of so-called "passive weaponry" such as helmets or padding and covering your face. Today, the "autonome" scene in Germany is greatly reduced and concentrates mainly on anti-fascist actions, ecology, solidarity with refugees, and feminism. There are larger and more militant groups still in operation, such as in Switzerland or Italy.


title: Autonomism

text: Autonomist Marxism—referred to in Italy as "Operaismo", which translates literally as "workerism"—first appeared in Italy in the early 1960s. Arguably, the emergence of early autonomism can be traced to the dissatisfaction of automotive workers in Turin with their union, which reached an agreement with FIAT. The disillusionment of these workers with their organised representation, along with the resultant riots (in particular the 1962 riots by FIAT workers in Turin, ""), were critical factors in the development of a theory of self-organised labour representation outside the scope of traditional representatives such as trade unions.


title: Autonomism

text: In 1969, the approach was active mainly in two different groups: "Lotta Continua", led by Adriano Sofri (which had a very significant Roman Catholic cultural matrix), and , led by Antonio Negri, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, and Valerio Morucci. Mario Capanna was the charismatic leader of the Milan student movement, which had a more classical Marxist-Leninist approach.


title: Autonomism

text: Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous activist research in the United States by the Johnson–Forest Tendency and in France by the group . The Johnson-Forest Tendency had studied working-class life and struggles within the US auto industry, publishing pamphlets such as "The American Worker" (1947), "Punching Out" (1952), and "Union Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes" (1955). That work was translated into French by and published, serially, in their journal. They too began investigating and writing about what was going on inside workplaces, in their case inside both auto factories and insurance offices.


title: Autonomism

text: The journal ("Red Notebooks"), produced between 1961 and 1965, and its successor ("Working Class"), produced between 1963 and 1966, were also influential in the development of early autonomism. Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, and Toni Negri were some primary collaborators. Pirate radio stations also were a factor in spreading autonomist ideas. Bologna's Radio Alice was an example of such a station.


title: Autonomism

text: The Italian student movement, including the Indiani Metropolitani (Metropolitan Indians), starting from 1966 with the murder of student Paolo Rossi by neo-fascists at Rome University, engaged in various direct action operations, including riots and occupations, along with more peaceful activities such as self-reduction, in which individuals refused to pay for such services and goods as public transport, electricity, gas, rent, and food. Several clashes occurred between students and the police during the occupations of universities in the winter of 1967–68, during the Fiat occupations, and in March 1968 in Rome during the Battle of Valle Giulia.


title: Autonomism

text: Indiani Metropolitani were a small faction active in the Italian far-left protest movement during 1976 and 1977, in the so-called "Years of Lead". The Indiani Metropolitani were the so-called 'creative' wing of the movement. Its adherents wore face-paint like the war-paint of Native Americans and dressed like hippies. The emphasis was on "stare insieme" (being together), spontaneity and the arts, especially music. The group was active in Rome, during the occupation of the university La Sapienza in 1977.


title: Autonomism

text: On 11 March 1977, riots took place in Bologna following the killing of student Francesco Lorusso by police. Beginning in 1979, the state effectively prosecuted the autonomist movement, accusing it of protecting the Red Brigades, which had kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro. 12,000 far-left activists were detained; 600 fled the country, including 300 to France and 200 to South America.


title: Autonomism

text: Tute Bianche was a militant Italian social movement, active from 1994 to 2001. Activists covered their bodies with padding so as to resist the blows of police, to push through police lines, and to march together in large blocks for mutual protection during demonstrations. The tute bianche movement reached its apex during the anti-G8 protests in Genoa, in July 2001, with a turn-out of an estimated 10,000 protesters in a single "padded block", ironically after a collective decision to go without the white overalls. Shortly after Genoa the Ya Basta Association disbanded, with certain segments reforming into the "Disobbedienti" which literally means "Disobedients". This philosophy includes the occupation and creation of squatted self-managed social centers, anti-sexist activism, support for immigrant's rights and refugees seeking political asylum, as well as the process of walking together in large formations during demonstrations held in the streets, by force if necessary in case of clashes with police.


title: Autonomism

text: Central to the tute bianche movement was the Italian Ya Basta Association, a network of groups throughout Italy that was inspired by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation uprising in Chiapas in 1994. Ya Basta primarily originated in the "autonomist" social centers of Milan, particularly Centro Sociale Leoncavallo. These social centers grew out of the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970 and 80s. The tute bianche movements have had international variations of one sort or another. For instance, in Britain a group calling itself WOMBLES adopted the tactics, even though the political orientation of WOMBLES differed from the Italian movement. In Spain, "Mono Blanco" was the preferred identifier. The first North American variant of the tute bianche, the NYC Ya Basta Collective (based in NYC) wore yellow overalls, rather than white.


title: Autonomism

text: The autonomist Marxist and movements provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English-speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted autonomist tactics. The Italian movement also influenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright and Nick Dyer-Witheford. In Denmark and Sweden, the word is used as a catch-all phrase for anarchists and the extra-parliamentary left in general, as was seen in the media coverage of the eviction of the squat in Copenhagen in March 2007.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: The Transamerica Corporation is an American holding company for various life insurance companies and investment firms operating primarily in the United States, offering life and supplemental health insurance, investments, and retirement services. The company has major offices located in Baltimore, Maryland; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Denver, Colorado; Norwood, Massachusetts; Exton, Pennsylvania; Harrison, New York; Johns Creek, Georgia; Plano, Texas; and St. Petersburg, Florida. Additional affiliated offices are located throughout the United States. In 1999, it became an independent subsidiary of multinational company Aegon.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: Transamerica funds the Transamerica Institute, a nonprofit foundation which comprises the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies and the Transamerica Center for Health Studies.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: In October 1904, A.P. Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco. In October 1928, Giannini created a holding company that he named the Trans-America Corporation, which owned Bank of America, Bank of Italy, Bancitaly Corporation, National Bankitaly Company, California Joint Stock Land Bank, and , which gave it assets in excess of $1.5billion (equivalent to $billion in ). The Trans-America Corporation original headquarters was located at 4 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. The Bank of Italy later merged with Bank of America, Los Angeles in 1928, which was then renamed Bank of America in 1930.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: In March 1930, Transamerica acquired Occidental Life Insurance Company, founded in 1906. At the time, Occidental had over $25million in assets and over $150million in life insurance policies in force. Giannini said the purchase of the West Coast-based life insurance company was part of a plan for Transamerica to control every type of financial service. Following the acquisition, Occidental was renamed Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance Company.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: Over time, the company became a more diversified conglomerate that included the film distributor United Artists, Transamerica Airlines and Budget Rent a Car.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: In 1972, the company completed construction of the Transamerica Pyramid skyscraper in San Francisco which served as its headquarters for many years. Although the company currently retains only a few offices in the building, the pyramid is still depicted in the company's logo and marketing materials.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: In the 1980s, Transamerica began to divest and focused exclusively on financial services. It was eventually reduced to three main product divisions: insurance, investments, and retirement planning. In July 1999, Transamerica CEO Frank C. Herringer announced that Aegon, the Netherlands-based insurer, would acquire the company. Transamerica Occidental merged into Transamerica Life Insurance Company on October 1, 2008.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: Transamerica primarily offers insurance and financial services. Types of life and health insurance policies offered include term life, whole life, universal life, variable universal life, accidental death, Medicare supplement, and long-term care. Transamerica companies also offer a variety of mutual funds and annuities. Transamerica has over 15,000 licensed insurance agents just in the state of California.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: Transamerica's retirement division offers defined benefit pension plans and defined contribution retirement plans, including 401(k) and 403(b), 457, profit sharing, money purchase, cash balance, Taft-Hartley, multiple employer plans, nonqualified deferred compensation, and rollover individual retirement accounts. Other services include plan-level record keeping and administrative services, participant communications and education services, fiduciary risk mitigation services, open investment architecture, and compliance guidance and regulatory support.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: In December 2020, Transamerica announced it would no longer sell variable annuities with benefit riders and fixed index annuities and is also exiting the standalone long-term care market.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: Transamerica is a long-time sponsor of Cedar Rapids native and 12-time PGA Tour winner Zach Johnson. Transamerica also sponsors Kyle Stanley, 2009 Open Championship winner Stewart Cink, and Azahara Munoz, in addition to the American Junior Golf Association and its annual Transamerica Scholastic Junior All-America teams.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: With a large employee presence in Denver, Transamerica in 2015 became the shirt sponsor of the Colorado Rapids, winners of the 2010 MLS Cup. Transamerica has an additional sponsorship agreement with Rapids and United States national team goalkeeper Tim Howard.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: Transamerica currently collaborates with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, as well as the American Heart Association.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: Transamerica funds two foundations: the Aegon Transamerica Foundation and the Transamerica Institute. It created the Aegon Transamerica Foundation in 1994 to provide financial grants to community non-profit organizations. Transamerica employees also volunteer services to these organizations. The foundation received the Corporate Citizenship Award in 2013 for creating the first urban farm in Iowa.


title: Transamerica Corporation

text: The Transamerica Institute consists of two divisions: the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies and the Transamerica Center for Health Studies. The Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies researches and provides education on trends, issues, and opportunities related to saving and planning for retirement. The Transamerica Center for Health Studies focuses on identifying, researching, and analyzing health care issues facing consumers and employers. The Transamerica Institute is funded by contributions from Transamerica Life Insurance Company.


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: Avalanche is a decentralized, open-source proof of stake blockchain with smart contract functionality. AVAX is the native cryptocurrency of the platform.


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: Avalanche began as a protocol for solving for consensus in a network of unreliable machines, where failures may be crash-fault or Byzantine. The protocol's fundamentals were first shared on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) in May 2018 by a pseudonymous group of enthusiasts going by the name "Team Rocket”.


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: Avalanche was later developed by a dedicated team of researchers from Cornell University. The research was led by Emin Gün Sirer, a professor of computer science and software engineer, assisted by doctoral students Maofan "Ted" Yin and Kevin Sekniqi. Following the research stage, a startup technology company was founded to develop a blockchain network that would meet complex finance industry requirements. As a number of sources indicate, "the project was in the realm of academic circles interested in exploring consensus protocols that serve the same purpose of proof-of-work — securing transactions — but are more energy-efficient and have the potential to provide a basis for democratic development and the inclusion of more users in the consensus process". In March, 2020, the AVA codebase (Developer Accelerator Program or AVA DAP) for the Avalanche consensus protocol was released as open-source and became available to the public.


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: The protocol has four basic interrelated mechanisms that compose structural support of the consensus tool. These four mechanisms are Slush, Snowflake, Snowball, and Avalanche. By using randomized sampling and metastability to ascertain and persist transactions, It represents a new protocol family. Although the original paper focused on a single protocol, namely Avalanche, it implicitly introduced a broad spectrum of voting-based, or quorum-based consensus protocols, called the Snow family. While Avalanche is a single instantiation, the Snow family seems to be able to generalize all quorum-based voting protocols for replica control. Unlike prior quorum-based work, the Snow family enables arbitrarily parametrizable failure probability at the quorum intersection level. Standard quorum-based protocols define this failure probability to be precisely zero, but by introducing errors in the quorum intersection, a larger set of consensus protocol design is available.


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: Consensus protocols are the basis for the state machine replication problem, which aims to enable a set of machines to achieve agreement over a network even when a subset of the machines are corrupted. There are two major families of consensus protocols to date - classical consensus and Nakamoto consensus protocols. The first achieves consensus through quorums, thus requires voting. Famous instantiations of this are Paxos (in the crash-fault-tolerant environment) and PBFT in the Byzantine-fault tolerant case. These protocols achieve agreement in a similar operation to a parliament: a proposal (transaction) is proposed and voted on to be accepted or rejected. If sufficient votes cast by the various replicas are accumulated (typically collected through elected leader replica), then a quorum is achieved, and thus agreement.


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: The second family, pioneered by Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin is that of Nakamoto consensus. Unlike quorum-based protocols, machines operating an instance of Nakamoto consensus achieve agreement on transactions by downloading the longest chain (typically called a fork). In Bitcoin, the longest chain is verified by ensuring that it is the one with the highest degree of work (or proof of work).


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: Snow, while quorum-based, seems to be a universal generalization of all quorum-based protocols. Unlike prior work which requires that quorums be deterministic, i.e. the failure probability is precisely zero, Avalanche loosens this requirement, thus enabling quorum-based protocols to estimate global network state "with errors".


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: While the Snow family can be theoretically generalized to all classes of assumptions that quorum-based protocols have previously made, the formalization paper analyzes Avalanche under an asynchronous network in the Byzantine setting. The assumptions are as follows:


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: The Snow family generalizes the typical definitions of safety and liveness encountered in quorum-based protocols. For Avalanche specifically, these properties are:


title: Avalanche (blockchain platform)

text: Avalanche, like other asynchronous networks, is not guaranteed to terminate and thus does not have the liveness property, during asynchrony. Like Paxos, Avalanche's goal is to ensure fault tolerance and it guarantees safety under asynchrony, but not liveness. This is in contrast to Nakamoto consensus, which guarantees liveness, and not safety under asynchrony.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: The Sagamihara stabbings were committed on 26 July 2016 in Midori Ward, Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan. Nineteen people were killed and twenty-six others were injured, thirteen severely, at a care home for disabled people. The crimes were committed by a 26-year-old man, identified as , a former employee of the care facility. Uematsu surrendered at a nearby police station with a bag of knives and was subsequently arrested. Justin McCurry of "The Guardian" described the attack as one of the worst crimes committed on Japanese soil in modern history. Uematsu was sentenced to death on 16 March 2020 after the prosecution sought the maximum penalty for murder in his trial; , he is on death row awaiting execution.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: is a residential care center run by , a social welfare organization. Established by the local government, the facility was built in a area of woodland on the bank of the Sagami River. , the facility housed 149 residents between the ages of 19 and 75, all of whom had an intellectual disability but many with various physical disabilities as well. Some were capable of engaging in physical activities outdoors, while others were bedridden. The facility was located in a remote location about from Sagamiko Station on the Chūō Main Line.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: At about 02:10, Satoshi Uematsu allegedly used a hammer to break into the care centre through a glass window on the first floor. He tied up a staff member, took their keys, and then went from room to room, stabbing the victims in their necks as they slept. Police were called to the care center by staff members at around 02:30 local time, reporting a man with a knife breaking into the building. However, Uematsu left the premises before being apprehended; he was recorded leaving the facility at 02:50 in security camera footage.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: Armed police entered the building at around 03:00 where they discovered the crime scene. Twenty-nine ambulances were sent to the facility. The suspect turned himself in at the Tsukui Police Station two hours after the incident with a bag containing kitchen knives and other bloodstained sharp tools. A knife was reportedly found in his car outside the police station.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: (born 20 January 1990), a 26-year-old (at the time of the incident) man, used to work at the care home Tsukui Yamayuri En. His father was an elementary school art teacher, and Uematsu had trained and worked as an elementary school teacher as well. He had lived in his house with his parents, but they moved away at some point and he remained there alone. He resigned from working at the facility in February 2016 after having been employed there for over three years.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: Neighbors expressed surprise that he had allegedly committed the murders; he was described as a friendly, outgoing and good man. However, some reported that his personality had undergone a change at some point during his employment at the facility.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: In February 2016, Uematsu attempted to hand-deliver a letter to Tadamori Ōshima, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Japan, at Ōshima's home in Tokyo but was prevented from doing so by security. He returned the following day and this time left the letter with the security guards. Uematsu's letter appealed for the legalization of ending the lives of those with multiple disabilities in cases where it was requested by their guardians, and asked for Ōshima's assistance in delivering his message to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. In it, he wrote, "I envision a world where a person with multiple disabilities can be euthanised, with an agreement from the guardians, when it is difficult for the person to carry out household and social activities." He also wrote that the killings of disabled people would be "for the sake of Japan and world peace" as well as to benefit the global economy and prevent World War III.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: After signing his name, the letter proceeded to detail an offer to target two facilities housing disabled people (possibly a reference to the two residential buildings in which he later committed the crime), and went on to appeal for certain conditions in exchange for committing the act. In the first half of the message, Uematsu said he could kill 460 people; however, in the second half, the number he gave was 260. He added that staff would be tied up to keep them from interfering but that they would not be harmed, the act would be swift, and that afterwards he would turn himself in. At the end of the latter half of the letter, he signed his name again, this time with his address, telephone number, and the name of his employer.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: Later that month, after his letter was brought to the attention of Sagamihara's authorities, he was arrested, detained, questioned, and then involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. However, he was released on 2 March after doctors deemed that he was not a threat.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: In his letter and in statements made after turning himself in, Uematsu explained that he was "saving from unhappiness" both the severely disabled and those who he believed were burdened with maintaining their lives.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: On 20 February 2017, Uematsu was found mentally competent to stand trial. On 24 February 2019, Uematsu was charged with 19 counts of murder, 24 counts of attempted murder, two counts of illegal confinement causing injury, three counts of illegal confinement, one count of unlawful entry, and one count of violating the Firearm and Sword Possession Control Law.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: Uematsu's defense team said they planned to argue that he was mentally incompetent at the time of the crime, due to the effects of marijuana. On 23 December 2019, Uematsu said he would admit to the crime during the trial, saying that denying the charges against him "would be quibbling and make the trial too complex."


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: On 8 January 2020, Uematsu pleaded not guilty to the stabbings. On 17 February 2020, the prosecution announced that the death penalty was officially sought against Uematsu saying the rampage was "inhumane" and left "no room for leniency."


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: On 16 March 2020, Uematsu was sentenced to death by the Yokohama District Court, having previously said he would not challenge any verdict or sentence.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: On 30 March 2020, Uematsu's death sentence was finalized as he withdrew automatic appeal to the upper courts.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: In April 2022, two years after his sentencing, Uematsu appealed for a re-trial for his case, and the petition is pending in the courts .


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: Yoshihide Suga, the Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary at the time, acknowledged that the attack was "a very heart-wrenching and shocking incident in which many innocent people became victims". He also said that the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare would investigate ways to prevent a similar incident from occurring again.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: A number of Japanese news outlets ran editorials calling the stabbings a hate crime. By September 2016, little information had been released about the victims of the attack. Reuters wrote that this was due to Japanese culture and stigma, being less accepting of physically and cognitively impaired persons.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: The care home facility has been demolished. Nearby structures where no one was attacked, such as the administration building and gymnasium, remain. On 13 September 2016, the governor of Kanagawa Prefecture, Yūji Kuroiwa, said the facility would be rebuilt. The new facility of two buildings opened in July 2021.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: The 26th of July is considered a significant date in disability history. In addition to being the date of the Sagamihara stabbings, 26 July 1990 saw the enactment of the world's first national legislation outlawing disability discrimination: the Americans with Disabilities Act.


title: Sagamihara stabbings

text: One year after the stabbings, on July 26, 2017, a documentary was released entitled "Nineteen Paper Cranes" by filmmaker Michael Joseph McDonald. The film follows a deaf Japanese papermaker with Kibuki Syndrome as she memorializes the nineteen victims of the Sagamihara stabbings.


title: Australia in the Eurovision Song Contest

text: Australia has participated in the Eurovision Song Contest seven times since its debut in and has been in the top ten four times. It is the second country outside of the Eurasia region to take part in the contest since Morocco competed in . The country's best result in the contest is a second-place finish for Dami Im in . Australia also finished in the top ten in three of its other appearances in the contest, with Guy Sebastian finishing fifth in 2015, and both Isaiah and Kate Miller-Heidke finishing ninth in and .


text: Initially, Australia's participation in the 2015 contest was set to be a one-off event, the plan being only to perform again the following year had it won, but it was confirmed in November 2015 by SVT that it would participate in the . Australia's participation in the contest has been confirmed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) until 2023.


text: Australian broadcaster Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) first broadcast the Eurovision Song Contest in and has continued to do so every year since. The contest has attracted a strong viewing audience in Australia. Early broadcasts of the contest in Australia either featured no commentary or used the 's commentary as transmitted by the BBC. In , actress and comedian Mary Coustas provided commentary for the contest performing as her comedic character Effie. In and , SBS presenter Des Mangan provided commentary for the Australian audience. From , Julia Zemiro and Sam Pang were assigned as commentators for the competition by SBS. saw SBS replace the commentators with comedian Joel Creasey and TV and radio personality Myf Warhurst. In addition to broadcasting the contest, SBS also broadcast the and 60th anniversary programmes.


text: From 2010 to 2014, SBS allowed Australian viewers to participate in their own televote for the Grand Finals. However, these votes were not counted at the actual contest and did not affect the overall result. The SBS commentary team and Australian delegation were awarded a commentary booth of their own at the 2012 contest in Baku. They have been allocated a commentary booth every year since.


text: Australia's first appearance in the international broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest occurred on 14 May 2013 during the first semi-final in Malmö, Sweden. A short pre-recorded video titled "Greetings from Australia" (also referred to as "Why Australia Loves Eurovision"), submitted by SBS and hosted by Julia Zemiro, was broadcast during the interval acts. This presentation marked 30 years of broadcasting the Eurovision Song Contest in Australia, and was preceded the week leading up to the contest by a locally broadcast documentary, also hosted by Zemiro, titled "The Heart of Eurovision". On 24 March 2014, the Danish host broadcaster DR gave SBS permission to perform as an interval act in the second semi-final of the contest. One day later, on 25 March, Jessica Mauboy was internally selected to perform. On 8 May 2014, Mauboy sang her song "Sea of Flags".


text: Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) made the country's debut at the 2015 contest with the song "Tonight Again", performed by Guy Sebastian. Although Australia is outside the European Broadcasting Area, the EBU and Austrian host broadcaster ORF decided to permit an Australian entry to commemorate the 60th contest. The special circumstances surrounding Australia's entry and "to not reduce the chances" of the semi-final participants led the organisers to allow Australia to compete directly in the final, without going through a semi-final. In the event that Australia should win the contest, the EBU had confirmed that in accordance with the rules, Australia would not host the event in the Southern Hemisphere, and instead would co-host the contest within a country in the EBU. Further to the EBU's statement, it was confirmed that 's participating broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) would be the first choice, and the 's broadcaster British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) would be the back-up should Germany decline.


text: Although Australia's participation in 2015 was announced as a one-off event, it was confirmed on 17 November 2015 that Australia would participate in the 2016 contest. Unlike in 2015, Australia did not receive automatic qualification. On 7 October 2015, it was announced that Australia would make its debut in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2015 after SBS was invited to perform in the contest. The Australian entry for the 2016 contest was Dami Im with her song "Sound of Silence", which won the second semi-final before finishing second overall behind Ukraine.