title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: Delegates to a National Congress elected the members of the National Command, who were eligible for reelection. While the National Command had few "de facto" powers, many of its leading members also held seats in the Iraqi Regional Command and the Revolutionary Command Council. Aflaq was elected Secretary-General of the National Command at the Ninth National Congress, held in February 1968 in Beirut, Lebanon, by the Iraqi-dominated Ba'ath Party. He retained his post until his death in 1989, when he was succeeded by Saddam Hussein. After Saddam was executed on 30 December 2006, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri became "de facto" leader of the Ba'ath Party on 3 January 2007. As Secretary of the Iraqi Regional Command of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, he was the highest-ranked surviving member of the former Ba'ath party. Since November 3 2020, the party is headed by Salah Al-Mukhtar.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The party branch in Algeria, the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party of Algeria ( "Hizb Al-Ba'ath Al-'Arabi Al-Ishtiraki fi Al-Jaza'ir"; French: "Parti Baath arabe socialiste d'Algérie"), is led by Ahmed Choutri (secretary of the Regional Command). The party is banned and Choutri was forced to flee to Iraq during the 1990s because of governmental repression against the Algerian Ba'ath movement. The party sympathises with the Iraqi ba'athist insurgency and supports Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, leader of the Iraqi branch. Following his return to Algeria in 2003, Choutri wrote "The Baathist Faith of President Saddam".


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The Nationalist Democratic Assembly (, ) represents the Iraqi-dominated Ba'ath Party in Bahrain. The group is led by Hassan Ali as Secretary General and Mahmoud Kassab as Deputy Secretary General. It was established by Bahrainis who had studied in Ba'athist Iraq during the 1960s and 1970s. The party boycotted the 2002 parliamentary election, but not the 2006 election. The 2011 parliamentary by-election was boycotted by the party in solidarity with the Bahraini uprising. It is headquartered in Zinj.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The party opposes the government's naturalisation policies and contends that it is unfair for ethnic Bahrainis to compete equally with foreign workers for jobs. The Nationalist Democratic Assembly remains pro-Saddam Hussein and according to its webpage supports the Arab Spring. It opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, considering it an act of brutality against the Iraqi people. The party actively supports the overthrow of the existing monarchy, with a peaceful transition to democracy.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Egypt Region ( "Hizb Al-Ba'ath Al-Arabi Al-Ishtiraki – Misr") is an active branch in Egypt.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The party supports the removing of Bashar al-Assad of Syria, although calls for no foreign intervention in the conflict, whether by Israel, Turkey or Iran, as the party believes all such countries have ulterior motives and seek to undermine Syria.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The party was outlawed in the early 1990s and two Iraqi Intelligence Officials were detained on 14 April 1991 with $38,000 in their possession, money which the Egyptian authorities claimed was to be used to fund sabotage operations in Egypt. Several other Egyptian Ba'athists, including the poet Muhammad Afifi Matar, were also detained in April 1991 on suspicion of involvement in an Iraqi terrorist plot.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: Ba'athist organizations emerged in the leadership of the Eritrean Liberation Front in the 1970s, with pro-Baghdad and pro-Damascus groups competing for political dominance over the front. This split contributed to the downfall of the ELF and the emergence of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front as the dominant liberation movement. A key pro-Iraqi Ba'athist was Abdel Gadir Jeilani, who became the leader of the ELF-PLF-Revolutionary Council in the 1980s.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: In Iraq, the Ba'ath party remained a civilian group and lacked strong support from the military. The party had little impact and the movement split into several factions after 1958 and again in 1966. The movement was reported to have lacked strong popular support, but through the construction of a strong party apparatus the party succeeded in gaining power. The Iraqi-based party was originally committed to pan-Arabism (like its Syrian counterpart). After taking power in 1968, the party adopted Iraqi nationalism and encouraged Iraqis to identify themselves as cultural heirs of Mesopotamia with a medieval-Islamic identity. Saddam Hussein sought to be seen as leader of a great neo-Mesopotamian Iraqi nation by having himself compared to Nebuchadnezzar II and Hammurabi.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: In June 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) banned the Ba'ath party. The additional step the CPA took—banning all members of the top four tiers of the Ba'ath Party from the new government, public schools and colleges—was criticized for blocking too many experienced people from participation in the new government. Thousands were removed from their positions, including doctors, professors, schoolteachers and bureaucrats. Many teachers lost their jobs, sparking protests at schools and universities. Under previous Ba'ath-party rule, one could not reach a high position in the government or a school without becoming a party member and party membership was a prerequisite for university admission. While many Ba'athists joined for ideological reasons, many more were members because it was a way to better their options. Following pressure by the United States, the policy of de-Ba'athification was addressed by the Iraqi government in January 2008 with its controversial Accountability and Justice Act. This purported to ease the policy, but many feared it would lead to further dismissals. The Ba'ath Party was led by Saddam's former deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri until his death in 2020.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: At the time of the 1966 split, the Jordanian branch had an estimated 1,000 members. It was active in the Arab Liberation Front (ALF) and the ALF's first leader was the Jordanian, Zaid Haydar. Munif al-Razzaz, who joined the pro-Iraqi Ba'ath resistance in 1966, eventually became an ALF leader. From there, he climbed the party ladder and became a member of the National Command before he was placed under house arrest by Iraqi authorities. Shahir Abu Shahut became the first leader of the party branch in Jordan after the 1966 split.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: Since the establishment of the authoritarian political systems in Iraq and Syria, the popularity of the Ba'ath Party has largely diminished, but Ba'athist ideology remains popular. The reason being that both Ba'ath parties (the pro-Iraqi and the pro-Syrian) have replaced ideology with blind allegiance to Saddamist discourse or the al-Assad rule. A Jordanian academic, talking to the American embassy in Amman, Jordan, said that "there are far more real Ba'athists outside the party than inside", noting that the present party is downplaying (and even replacing) ideological components to get more followers.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The party was able to gain some support in the 1990s because of its status as a Ba'ath Party branch and it was able to help finance thousands of scholarships to Iraqi universities. However, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq the party was nearly forced into bankruptcy and lost most of its followers when it failed to finance the return of students from Iraq.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The Ba'ath branch was denied legal registration in 1992. The party was legally registered in 1993, but forced to change its name from the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party to the Jordanian Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party ( "Hizb Al-Ba'ath Al-'Arabi Al-Ishtiraki Al-Urduniy"). Khalil Haddadeen, Jordan's former minister of information, was elected to Parliament during the 1993 and 1997 elections on a pro-Iraqi, Saddamist platform. Currently, the Ba'ath branch has no members of parliament.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: In its first regional congress since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Regional Command alleged it would publicize an alleged letter from Saddam Hussein. However, the Jordanian press largely ignored the event. Today, in contrast to Ba'athist ideology both the pro-Iraq and pro-Syrian Ba'ath branches are considered largely irrelevant in the Jordanian political scene. It is suffering from financial problems and it is criticized by religious Jordanians for its secularism, while others are weary of its Arab nationalist ideology.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: In a 1995 poll, 16.8 percent of Jordanians said they were aware that the Iraqi Ba'ath branch existed, making the Ba'ath branch the third-best-known political party in Jordan (surpassing the Ba'ath Arab Progressive Party, the Syrian Ba'athist branch, by over 10 percent in the poll). In 2003 it was estimated that the party had fewer than 200 members. According to a Cablegate document dating back to 2007, the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party figure Ahmed Al Dmour was considered one of the biggest threats to Islamic Action Front dominance on the political scene.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: As of 1983 the branch was led by Faisal al-Sani. The Kuwaiti Ba'ath Party branch collapsed during Gulf War because of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Saleh al-Mutlaq, the leader of the Iraqi National Dialogue Front, has been accused of trying to rebuild the party.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: It is presently known as the Socialist Arab Lebanon Vanguard Party (, ). It is the party branch in Lebanon. The branch held its second congress in October 2011.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: However, the existence of the pro-Iraqi Lebanese branch of the Ba'ath party has much longer roots. Following the 1966 split in the Ba'ath movement with party members split between Syrian and Iraqi allegiances, the Iraqi wing was led by Abd al-Majid Rafei. Other prominent members at the time of the split were Jihad George Karam, Rafiq Nasib Alfaqiya, Karam Mohamed Assahli, Hani Mohamed Shoiab, Ammar Mohamed Shabli, Hassan Khalil Gharib and Asaf Habin Alharakat.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: At first, the pro-Iraqi Ba'ath branch and the pro-Syrian Ba'ath branch worked side by side in the National Front, but with tension increasing between the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'athist factions the two parties were on a war footing. The party was active in 1960s demonstrations and al-Rafei was detained by Lebanese authorities for his political activities, but he was a candidate from Tripoli in the 1968 general election. The party expanded during the first half of the 1970s and in the 1972 general election al-Rafi was elected to parliament from Tripoli. Ali al-Khalil, a former member, was elected from Tyre. The party was active in Southern Lebanon and was built with generous aid from Iraq. During the Lebanese Civil War, the Lebanese parliament formed the National Dialogue Committee in 1975. Assem Qanso of the pro-Syrian Ba'ath Party became a member, but no figures from the pro-Iraqi Ba'ath Party were given a seat on the committee. Tahsein al-Atrash, leader of the Ba'ath branch at the time, was shot dead in November 1981. The party was a member of the Lebanese National Movement, a political organisation led by Walid Jumblatt of the Progressive Socialist Party. Throughout its existence, it has controlled the Palestinian Arab Liberation Front.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: Following the coup d'état of 1969 against King Idris, a new revolutionary government was established, led by Muammar Gaddafi. The government was recognised as Nasserist because the new administration proclaimed its goal as "liberty, socialism and unity", rather than "unity, liberty, socialism" (the Ba'ath Party's slogan). This change in order was important because of the ideological split between the Ba'athists and the Nasserists. Following Gaddafi's revolution, several People's Committees were established. These committees (which at the beginning were led by the people) arrested several ba'athists.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: Amr Taher Deghayes, founder of the Libyan Ba'ath branch, was later arrested by Gaddafi's security forces and died after three days in jail. Deghayes' death allegedly sparked a large anti-government demonstration (which was crushed), followed by the imprisonment of several leading Ba'athists. In 1982, a trial began in which 25 Libyan Ba'athists were charged with membership in an illegal organisation and they were freed after torture. The following year, they were re-tried on the same charge: three were sentenced to death and others to life in prison. The arrests and trials of the 1980s led to the dissolution of the Libyan regional Ba'athist organisation.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The Libyan National Movement (LNM), an Arab-nationalist organisation, was founded by Ba'athist lawyer 'Umran Burweiss. The LNM (still in existence) was originally financed by Iraqi Ba'athists and produced relatively high-quality propaganda materials. For example, it issued audio cassettes which were smuggled into Libya with "Sawt at-Talia" during the 1980s. The organisation also produced broadcasts for Radio Baghdad.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The first pro-Iraqi activities was in 1968, but it was organizationally established in 1972. The Mauritanian Ba'athist divide their history into two phases: founding (1976–1982) and deployment (1982–1990). There is little available information on the 1968–1970 period and Ba'athist activity started in earnest in the early 1970s. The party's first clandestine congress was held in 1976. They opposed the rule of Moktar Ould Daddah and used most of their early years in trying to infiltrate the ruling Mauritanian People's Party and state institutions. In the aftermath of the 1978 coup, the Ba'ath branch took the conscious decision of trying to recruit Haratin people. They started publishing "The Baʿth and the Haratine in Mauritania" to help them in their quest. In the period 1978–1984, the party intensified its effort of recruiting members within the military establishment. The Ba'ath party was one of the most fervent supporters of the Arabization policies in Mauritania. Because of their efforts, Mohammed Yehdih Ould Breideleil, the Ba'ath leader, was appointed Minister of Information for a short period in 1984. Under the rule of Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla, the Ba'ath were harassed and in between 1982 and 1983 55 Ba'athists were arrested by the government. However, by 1986–1987 the Ba'ath had managed to infiltrate the officer corps and the enlisted ranks, making them a threat to Ould Haidalla and his rule. Ould Haidalla, with Saddam Hussein's approval, expelled and banned Ba'athist personnel in the military in 1988. With Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the Ba'ath party lost its popular appeal and the financial aid from the Iraqi embassy dried up. By 1990, there was not much left of the original Ba'ath movement.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: Another party, the National Vanguard Party (, or PAGN), was founded in 1991 and it replaced the old Ba'ath movement which had disintegrated in 1990. The Mauritanian Ba'ath Party remains the largest Arab nationalist political force in the country. The branch has maintained good relations with the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party, even after Saddam Hussein's downfall following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The party was able to field candidates for parliamentary seats during the 1992 parliamentary elections and was the only party (with the exception of the Republican Party for Democracy and Renewal) to field candidates for senate elections. However, the party secured only one percent of the vote nationwide and did not secure a seat in either Parliament or the senate. Kabry Ould Taleb Jiddou, the party's leader, was awarded the office of Secretary of State by the newly elected government because of his electoral campaign.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The branch supports full Arabisation of the country, a view considered racist by critics. Ould Haidalla introduced an anti-ba'athist policy which continued under his successor, Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya. However, the Mauritanian government supported Iraq during the Gulf War and Iraq–Mauritania relations became so close that (inaccurate) rumours circulated internationally that Saddam's family had taken refuge in the country following the American invasion. Repression against the ba'athists has not been reduced. In 2003, several ba'athists were jailed on suspicion of trying to overthrow the government. A reason for the close relationship between Iraq and Mauritania was the strength of the Mauritanian ba'athist party. The party was banned in 1999 following the restoration of bilateral relations with Israel. The National Vanguard Party was accused of developing plans in collaboration with the Iraqi government to foment unrest in the country.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: Mohamed Ould Abdellahi Ould Eyye, the party's leader, was arrested in 2003 after a large anti-government protest demanding that the government break off relations with Israel and the United States and aid Saddam Hussein. He and 13 other ba'athists were arrested by government forces and the party's headquarters were raided in May. Another pro-Iraqi Ba'ath party did take its place, the Party for Work and National Unity (, abbreviated PTUN). However, while PTUN is close to the Iraqi Ba'ath branch, the group is small and largely inactive.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: A disorganised pro-Iraqi Ba'ath guerilla movement existed before the establishment of the Arab Liberation Front (ALF). The ALF was established in 1969 at a National Congress of the Iraqi-dominated Ba'ath Party to weaken the hold al-Sa'iqa, the pro-Syrian Ba'ath organisation in Palestine had over the ba'athist movement. In contrast to al-Sa'iqa, the ALF never had access to a large recruitment pool. There were few Palestinians in Iraq, and the Palestinians living in Iraq were generally well-educated. Because of this, ALF could not and would never have the same degree of influence over the Palestinian movement as al-Sa'iqa did. This caused the ALF to be controlled by the pro-Iraq Ba'ath movement, thus weakening its effectiveness and influence, but saving it from infighting between Palestinianists and Ba'athists (a problem in al-Sa'iqa). However, the ALF's influence weakened periodically during its history due to infighting in the pro-Iraq Ba'ath movement. Because of the control the pro-Iraq Ba'ath movement had over the ALF, the ALF always held a pro-Iraqi position in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The ALF was a founding member of the Rejectionist Front in 1974, rejecting the PLO's Ten Point Program. Abdel-Wahhab Kayyali (a member of the PLO Executive Committee) froze his seat on the committee in protest, instead of following the example (resignation) of the Rejectionist Front.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The invasion of Iraq toppled the Iraqi-dominated Ba'ath Party, headquartered in Baghdad. This weakened the movement and since the Iraqi military coordinated much of the ALF's activities the ALF has also been considerably weakened.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The ALF's first leader was Zaid Haydar from the Jordanian Ba'ath branch. Other leaders include Munif al-Razzaz, Abd al-Rahim Ahmad and Mahmud Isma'il. Most recently, it was led by Rakad Salem and headquartered in Ramallah, West Bank. Israeli Defence Forces arrested Salem in October 2002. Shahir Abu Shahut, former leader of the Jordanian Ba'ath branch, led the Ba'ath branch in Palestine from 1970 to 1975 from Baghdad.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Country of Sudan is the regional branch of the Ba'ath Party in Sudan. Kamal Bolad was the Regional Secretary in 1989 and Taiseer Mutassir was the Regional Secretary in 1990. While the branch has always been small, accounting for an estimated 1,000 members in 2003, it has been able to have a bigger impact than what its meager membership numbers would suggest, mostly due to Iraqi financing of the branch.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: After collaborating with the Arab nationalist Sudanese government for years, the Ba'ath Party broke off relations and became an opposition party in 1990—this would have disturbed Iraq if Sudan had not supported it during the 1991 Gulf crisis. In 1990, the party was composed largely of students who had studied in Ba'athist Iraq. The party, which was small in 1990, was influential in certain sectors, was opposed to the National Islamic Front and was staunchly secularist. Members have historically been torn between the Ba'ath and other secular party movements, such as the Sudanese communists. Because of Saddam Hussein's amicable relationship with the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation, the body ruling Sudan, the Ba'ath branched was oppressed by the authorities. Later in 1990, 26 Ba'athi military officers were executed in Khartoum after a failed military coup. In 2002, a group led by Mohamad Ali Jadein broke away from the branch and established the independent Sudanese Ba'ath Party, which has no affiliation with neither the pro-Iraq Ba'ath movement nor the pro-Syrian Ba'ath movement. The following year, after the invasion of Iraq 80 Sudanese Ba'athists return to Sudan under the condition that they would stay out of politics.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The Syrian branch of the Iraqi-led party supported the Muslim Brotherhood during the Islamist uprising against the Syrian Ba'ath government.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The first Ba'athist branch in Tunisia, then under the unified Ba'ath Party, was established in 1955, but the Ba'ath Party was outlawed under Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Following the Tunisian Revolution, the Tunisian Ba'ath Movement ( "Haraket Al-Ba'ath Al-Tounisi"; French: "Mouvement Baath tunisien") was established at its First Congress on 3–5 June 2011 and legally registered on 22 January 2011. However, ba'athists have been active in underground politics since the 1950s. The Ba'ath Movement celebrated the fifth anniversary of the death of Saddam Hussein. Omar Othman Belhadj, Secretary-General of the executive committee of the Ba'ath Movement, said that "Hussein's execution was symbolic, they did not kill a person but rather the ideas he represented and fought for. Hussein was killed for being against colonization and for being a defender of Arab unity and independence of Arab countries". He further noted that he did not support killing Muammar Gaddafi, saying that Gaddafi had a right to a fair trial like anyone else.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: Omar once told a journalist, "the Syrian regime has turned against the Ba'ath and is no longer Ba'athist one". The party does not support Syria's expulsion from the Arab League and asserts that foreign nations should play a neutral role in the Syrian Civil War. On 4 February 2012, the executive committee of the Ba'ath Movement released a communiqué condemning the provisional Tunisian government's expulsion of the Syrian ambassador. The Ba'ath Movement expressed solidarity with the Syrian protesters and condemned the shooting of unarmed demonstrators. The committee predicted that the Syrian ambassador's expulsion would militarise the conflict, mobilising Arab opinion against the government and leading to military intervention. After the revolution, the Arab Democratic Vanguard Party emerged as second "Iraqi" Baathist Party in Tunisia. Its membership is younger and its political position more at the left of the historically Baath Movement and is headed by Kheireddine Souabni and Ahmed Seddik. The Ba'ath Movement is a member of the Popular Front, a communist-dominated front with strong popular backing.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The National Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Yemen Region ( "Hizb Al-Ba'ath Al-Arabi Al-Ishtiraki Al-Qawmi – Qutr Al-Yaman") is led by Qassem Salam Said as Secretary of the Regional Command while Abdulwahid Hawash serves as Deputy Secretary. It publishes the newspaper "Al-Ehyaa Al-'Arabi" (, English: "Arabic Renaissance").


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The party carried out clandestine political activity until 1990 and was registered as the National Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party on 10 February 1997. It had initially sought to register as the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in 1995, but that name was given by the authorities to the pro-Syria Ba'athist party. Politically, the party is allied with the ruling General People's Congress and during the 2011 Arab Spring this position caused an internal split. In March 2011, it was reported that the Hodeidah branch of the party had sided with the uprising after violent attacks on protesters in the city.


title: Ba'ath Party (Iraqi-dominated faction)

text: The party contested the 1993 parliamentary election in alliance with the pro-Syrian Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, winning seven seats. After the election, relations between the two Ba'athist groups soured and they contested further elections separately. The party contested the 1997 parliamentary election (failing to win any seats) and called for a boycott of the 1999 presidential election. Said, the branch leader, was sued by the Ministry of Information in February 2000 over an article criticising Saudi Arabia. In the 2003 parliamentary elections, the party obtained 23,745 votes (0.4 percent of the national vote) and again failed to re-enter parliament. However, it won two district-council seats in the 2006 local council elections.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The Qattara Depression () is a depression in northwestern Egypt, specifically in the Matruh Governorate. The depression is part of the Western Desert of Egypt.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The Qattara Depression lies below sea level, and its bottom is covered with salt pans, sand dunes, and salt marshes. The depression extends between the latitudes of 28°35' and 30°25' north and the longitudes of 26°20' and 29°02' east.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The Qattara Depression was created by the interplay of salt weathering and wind erosion. Some west of the depression lie the oases of Siwa in Egypt and Jaghbub in Libya in smaller but similar depressions.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The Qattara Depression contains the second lowest point in Africa at an elevation of below sea level, the lowest point being Lake Assal in Djibouti. The depression covers about , a size comparable with Lake Ontario or twice as large as Lebanon. Due to its size and proximity to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, studies have been made proposing to flood the area for various usages, such as the potential to generate hydroelectricity there.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The Qattara Depression has the shape of a teardrop, with its point facing east and the broad deep area facing southwest. The northern side of the depression is characterised by steep escarpments up to high, marking the edge of the adjacent El Diffa plateau. To the south the depression slopes gently up to the Great Sand Sea.


title: Qattara Depression

text: Within the Depression are salt marshes, under the northwestern and northern escarpment edges, and extensive dry lake beds that flood occasionally. The marshes occupy approximately , although wind-blown sands are encroaching in some areas. About a quarter of the region is occupied by dry lakes composed of hard crust and sticky mud, and occasionally filled with water.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The depression was initiated by either wind or fluvial erosion in the late Neogene, but during the Quaternary Period the dominant mechanism was a combination of salt weathering and wind erosion working together. First, the salts break up the depression floor, then the wind blows away the resulting sands. This process is less effective in the eastern part of the depression, due to lower salinity groundwater.


title: Qattara Depression

text: Groves of umbrella thorn acacia ("Vachellia tortilis"), growing in shallow sandy depressions, and "Phragmites" swamps represent the only permanent vegetation. The acacia groves vary widely in biodiversity and rely on runoff from rainfall and groundwater to survive. The Moghra Oasis in the northeastern part of the Depression has a brackish lake and a "Phragmites" swamp.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The southwestern corner of the depression is part of the Siwa Protected Area which protects the wild oasis in and around the Siwa Oasis.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The Depression is an important habitat for the cheetah, with the largest number of recent sightings being in areas in the northern, western and northwestern part of the Qattara Depression, including the highly isolated, wild oases of Ain EI Qattara and Ein EI Ghazzalat and numerous acacia groves both inside and outside the depression.


title: Qattara Depression

text: Gazelles ("Gazella dorcas" and "Gazella leptoceros") also inhabit the Qattara Depression, being an important food source for the cheetah. The largest gazelle population exists in the southwestern part of the Qattara Depression within a vast area of wetlands and soft sand. The area of , includes the wild oases of Hatiyat Tabaghbagh and Hatiyat Umm Kitabain, and is a mosaic of lakes, salt marshes, scrubland, wild palm groves and "Desmostachya bipinnata" grassland.


title: Qattara Depression

text: Other common fauna include the Cape hare ("Lepus capensis"), Egyptian jackal ("Canis aureus hupstar"), sand fox ("Vulpes rueppelli") and more rarely the fennec fox ("Vulpes zerda"). Barbary sheep ("Ammotragus lervia") were once common here but now they are few in number.


title: Qattara Depression

text: Extinct species from the area include the scimitar oryx ("Oryx dammah"), addax ("Addax nasomaculatus") and bubal hartebeest ("Alcelaphus buselaphus"). Also the "Droseridites baculatus", an extinct plant known only from fossils of its pollen, was found at the Ghazalat-1 Well.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The climate of the Qattara Depression is highly arid with annual precipitation between on the northern rim to less than in the south of the depression. The average daily temperature varies between during summer and winter months. The prevailing wind forms a largely bimodal regime with most wind coming from north easterly and westerly directions. This causes the linear dune formations in the Western desert between the Qattara Depression and the Nile valley. Wind speeds peak in March at and minimal in December at .


title: Qattara Depression

text: The average wind speed is about . Several days each year in the months March to May khamsin winds blow in from the south and bringing extremely high temperatures as well as sand and dust with them.


title: Qattara Depression

text: There is one permanent settlement in the Qattara Depression, the Qara Oasis. The oasis is located in the westernmost part of the depression and is inhabited by about 300 people. The Depression is also inhabited by the nomadic Bedouin people and their flocks, with the uninhabited Moghra oasis being important in times of water scarcity during the dry seasons.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The Qattara Depression contains many oil concessions, and several operational oil fields. The drilling companies include Royal Dutch Shell and the Apache Corporation.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The elevation of the depression was first measured in 1917 by an officer of the British Army leading a light car patrol into the region. The officer took readings of the height of the terrain with an aneroid barometer on behalf of John Ball, who later would also publish on the region. He discovered that the spring Ain EI Qattara lay about below sea level. Because the barometer got lost and the readings were so unexpected, this find had to be verified. During 1924–25, Ball again organised a survey party, this time with the sole purpose to triangulate the elevation on a westerly line from Wadi El Natrun. The survey was led by G.F. Walpole who had already distinguished himself by triangulating the terrain across from the Nile to Siwa via Bahariya. He confirmed the earlier readings and proved the presence of a huge area below sea level, with places as deep as below sea level.


title: Qattara Depression

text: Knowledge about the geology of the Qattara Depression was greatly extended by Ralph Alger Bagnold, a British military commander and explorer, through numerous journeys in the 1920s and 1930s. Most notable was his 1927 journey during which he crossed the depression east to west and visited the oases of Qara and Siwa. Many of these trips used motor vehicles (Ford Model-Ts) which used special techniques for driving in desert conditions. These techniques were an important asset of the Long Range Desert Group which Bagnold founded in 1940.


title: Qattara Depression

text: After the discovery of the depression, Ball published the triangulation findings about the region in October 1927 in "The Geographical Journal". He also gave the region its name "Qattara" after the spring Ain EI Qattara where the first readings were taken. The name literally means "dripping" in Arabic. Six years later in 1933, Ball was the first to publish a proposal for flooding the region to generate hydroelectric power in his article "The Qattara Depression of the Libyan Desert and the possibility of its utilisation for power-production".


title: Qattara Depression

text: During World War II, the depression's presence shaped the 1st and 2nd Battles of El Alamein. It was considered impassable by tanks and most other military vehicles because of features such as salt lakes, high cliffs and/or escarpments, and fech fech (very fine powdered sand). The cliffs in particular acted as an edge of the El Alamein battlefield, which meant the British Empire's forces could not be outflanked to the south. Both Axis and Allied forces built their defences in a line from the Mediterranean Sea to the Qattara Depression. These defences became known as the Devil's gardens, and they are for the most part still there, especially the extensive minefields.


title: Qattara Depression

text: No large army units entered the Depression, although German Afrika Korps patrols and the British Long Range Desert Group did operate in the area, since these small units had considerable experience in desert travel. The RAF's repair and salvage units (e.g. 58 RSU) used a route through the depression to salvage or recover aircraft that had landed or crashed in the Western desert away from the coastal plain.


title: Qattara Depression

text: The RSUs included six-wheel-drive trucks, Coles cranes, and large trailers, and were particularly active from mid-1941 when Air Vice-Marshal G.G. Dawson arrived in Egypt to address the lack of serviceable aircraft.


title: Qattara Depression

text: A German communications officer stationed in the depression was cited by Gordon Welchman as being unintentionally helpful in the breaking of the Enigma machine code, due to his regular transmissions stating there was "nothing to report".


title: Qattara Depression

text: The large size of the Qattara Depression and the fact that it falls to a depth of below mean sea level has led to several proposals to create a massive hydroelectric power project in northern Egypt rivalling that of the Aswan High Dam. This project is known as the Qattara Depression Project. The proposals call for a large canal or tunnel being excavated from the Qattara due north of depending on the route chosen to the Mediterranean Sea to bring seawater into the area.


title: Qattara Depression

text: An alternative plan involved running a pipeline northeast to the freshwater Nile River at Rosetta. Water would flow into a series of water penstocks which would generate electricity by releasing the water at below sea level. Because the Qattara Depression is in a very hot dry region with very little cloud cover, the water released at the level would spread out from the release point across the basin and evaporate from solar influx. Because of evaporation, more water can flow into the depression, thus forming a continual source of power. Eventually this would result in a hypersaline lake or a salt pan as the water would evaporate and leave behind the salt that it contained.


title: Qattara Depression

text: Plans to use the Qattara Depression for the generation of electricity date back to 1912 from Berlin geographer Albrecht Penck. The subject was discussed in more detail by Dr. John Ball in 1927, who estimated a hydroelectric potential of 125 to 200 megawatts. In 1957, the American Central Intelligence Agency proposed to President Dwight Eisenhower that peace in the Middle East could be achieved by flooding the Qattara Depression. The resulting lagoon, according to the CIA, would have four benefits:


title: Qattara Depression

text: In the 1970s and early 1980s, several proposals to flood the area were made by Friedrich Bassler and the "Joint Venture Qattara", a group of mainly German companies. They wanted to make use of peaceful nuclear explosions to construct a tunnel, drastically reducing construction costs compared to conventional methods. This project proposed to use 213 H-bombs, with yields of one to 1.5 megatons, detonated at depths of . That fit within the Atoms for Peace program proposed by US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. The Egyptian government turned down the idea.


title: Qattara Depression

text: Planning experts and scientists intermittently put forward potentially viable options, whether of a tunnel or canal, as an economic, ecological, and energy solution in Egypt, often coupled with the idea of new settlements.


title: Granita

text: Granita (; in Italian also granita siciliana ) is a semi-frozen dessert made from sugar, water and various flavorings. Originally from Sicily, it is available throughout Italy in varying forms. It is related to sorbet and Italian ice; however, in most of Sicily, it has a smoother, more crystalline texture. Food writer Jeffrey Steingarten says that "the desired texture seems to vary from city to city" on the island; on the west coast and in Palermo, it is at its chunkiest, and in the east it is nearly as smooth as sorbet. This is largely the result of different freezing techniques: the smoother types are produced in a gelato machine, while the coarser varieties are frozen with only occasional agitation, then scraped or shaved to produce separated crystals. Although its texture varies from coarse to smooth, it is always different from that of ice cream, which is creamier, and from that of sorbet, which is more compact; this makes granita distinct and unique.


title: Granita

text: Common and traditional flavoring ingredients include lemon juice, mandarin oranges, jasmine, coffee, almonds, mint, and when in season wild strawberries and black mulberries. Chocolate granitas have a tradition in the city of Catania but are also available in other parts of Sicily. The nuances of the Sicilian ingredients are important to the flavor of the finished granita: Sicilian lemons are a less acidic, more floral variety similar to Meyer lemons, while the almonds used contain some number of bitter almonds, crucial to the signature almond flavor. Another popular flavor used in granita is pistachio, also an agricultural product of Sicily.


title: Granita

text: Granita with coffee is very common in the city of Messina, while granita with almonds is popular in the city of Catania. Granita in combination with a warm pastry called "brioche" is a common breakfast in summer time (the Sicilian brioche is generally flatter and wider than the French version).


title: Parade

text: A parade is a procession of people, usually organized along a street, often in costume, and often accompanied by marching bands, floats, or sometimes large balloons. Parades are held for a wide range of reasons, but are usually celebrations of some kind.


title: Parade

text: In British English, the term "parade" is usually reserved for either military parades or other occasions where participants march in formation; for celebratory occasions, the word procession is more usual. The term "parade" may also be used for multiple different subjects; for example, in the Canadian Armed Forces, "parade" is used both to describe the procession and in other informal connotations.


title: Parade

text: Protest demonstrations can also take the form of a parade, but such cases are usually referred to as a march instead.


title: Parade

text: The parade float got its name because the first floats were decorated barges that were towed along the canals with ropes held by parade marchers on the shore. Floats were occasionally propelled from within by concealed oarsmen, but the practice was abandoned because of the high incidence of drowning when the lightweight and unstable frames capsized. Strikingly, among the first uses of grounded floats — towed by horses — was a ceremony in memory of recently drowned parade oarsmen. Today, parade floats are traditionally pulled by motor vehicles or are powered themselves.


title: Parade

text: Multiple grand marshals may often be designated for an iteration of the parade, and may or may not be in actual attendance due to circumstances (including death). A "community grand marshal" or other designations may be selected alongside a "grand marshal" to lead the front or other parts of the parade.


title: Parade

text: Since the advent of such technology, it became possible for aircraft and boats to parade. A flypast is an aerial parade of anything from one to dozens of aircraft, both in commercial context at airshows and also to mark important dates, such as national days or significant anniversaries. They are particularly common in the United Kingdom, where they are often associated with Royal occasions. Similarly, for ships, there may be a sail-past of, e.g., tall ships (as was seen during Trafalgar 200) or other sailing vessels as during the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of World War II.


title: Parade

text: The longest parade in the world is the Hanover Schützenfest that takes place in Hanover every year during the Schützenfest. The parade is long with more than 12,000 participants from all over the world, among them more than 100 bands and around 70 floats and carriages.


title: Parade

text: To celebrate the federal government's victory in the American Civil War, 145,000 Union soldiers marched in a two-day Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C. They passed before the President, the Cabinet, and senior officers from May 23–24, 1865.


title: Parade

text: At the end of hostilities in Europe in 1944–45, "victory parades" were a common feature throughout the recently liberated territories. For example, on 3 September 1944, the personnel of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division marched six abreast to the music of massed regimental pipe and drum bands through the streets of Dieppe, France, to commemorate the liberation of the city from German occupation, as well as commemorate the loss of over 900 soldiers from that formation during the Dieppe Raid two years earlier. On the Moscow Victory Parade of 1945 held in Moscow, Soviet Union in June 1945, the Red Army commemorated Victory in Europe with a parade and the ceremonial destruction of captured Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS standards.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: Godspeed (August Heart) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. He was established as a detective and one of Barry Allen's best friends on the police force. When his mother is murdered and the man he suspects is exonerated, he becomes vengeful and eventually gains speed-based superpowers. Donning the identity of Godspeed, he becomes a vigilante bent on killing criminals instead of incarcerating them, serving as an antithesis to the Flash. He has been portrayed as both a supervillain and an antihero in the comic books and adapted media since his introduction in 2016.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: The character made his live-action debut in "The Flash", voiced by BD Wong in seasons five and six and portrayed by Karan Oberoi in season seven.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: Godspeed first makes an appearance during one of Barry Allen's visions, claiming he would kill them all.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: August Heart is a colleague of Barry Allen from the Central City Police Department. Heart's brother was murdered by a career criminal and his killer was let free due to the evidence being destroyed when Barry and his lab were struck by lightning. When August confronts the Black Hole, a group who had stolen a van containing equipment from S.T.A.R. Labs, he recognizes their symbol as the same one spray-painted near his brother's crime scene. August is shot at but before the bullet could hit him or Barry could save him, August is struck by lightning from a Speed Force storm. Now a speedster, August knocks out his shooter. After Barry reveals himself to be the Flash, August creates his own costume and becomes Barry's partner, also wishing to use his powers to solve his brother's murder. After defeating Black Hole, they witness another Speed Force storm strike more citizens, turning them into speedsters. August helps Barry round up any new speedsters who use their newfound powers as criminals. The two meet Dr. Meena Dhawan, a new speedster who has helped create a Speed Force training center to help the new speedsters control their powers. When Barry and Meena return after recruiting more speedsters, they find an injured August who tells them that a new speedster called Godspeed killed the speedster criminals and took their speed. A recovered August brings two of the recruits with him in order to storm the Speed Force storm-infused Dr. Carver. After Barry and Meena's 'day off', Godspeed arrives at the training center where he is confronted by Meena. As Avery Ho, one of the speedster recruits, escapes to get the Flash, Godspeed kills Meena and two of the recruits and takes their speed.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: When Godspeed kills Billy Parks, the main suspect in August's brother's murder, Barry realizes that August is Godspeed. Barry confronts him and August reveals that he is indeed Godspeed and had given up on the justice system, deciding to become judge, jury and executioner, killing his brother's murderer. August reveals that when he was near the speedster criminals, he could feel the Speed Force within them connecting with him. He decided to take their powers from them, resulting in their deaths and August being injured. After realizing that it was possible to siphon another speedster's speed without killing them (evident when he, Barry, Meena and two recruits took Dr. Carver's speed), August tried it again on Meena and the two recruits. However, it had the same results as the first time. With his increased speed, August Heart reveals he can create a double of himself and be at two places at once, though it takes a physical toll on him. Barry uses this to his advantage and escapes. August proceeds to interrogate the other Black Hole members about his brother's death, but kills them all when he receives no information. When the speedster recruits safely give their speed to Barry and Wally to stop Godspeed, August arrives and is able to take Avery's speed. Barry chases after Godspeed who reveals that he will head to Iron Heights and do the one thing Barry could not, kill his enemies, including Eobard Thawne. However, the new Kid Flash (Wally West II) intervenes and helps the Flash in taking down Godspeed, who is later incarcerated in Iron Heights. It is not known whether August still maintains a connection to the Speed Force, as it was hinted that all who were hit during the Speed Force storm's powers may be temporary.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: August later teams up with the Flash and his nemesis Eobard Thawne to stop the villain Paradox from erasing all of Flash's history. After Paradox is defeated, August asks Thawne if, given the latter's extensive future knowledge of the Flash, he knows who killed August's brother. Thawne gleefully admits that it was Thawne himself and snaps August's neck, killing him.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: In addition to abilities shared with other speedsters, Godspeed has the ability to forcibly take another speedster's speed. This is done by running around a speedster (or speedsters) at extreme speed, resulting in Godspeed gaining their speed, but at the cost of injuring himself and killing any victim or victims not willing to give up their speed. However, Godspeed was able to take Avery's speed without killing her, and Barry and Wally were able to take the speed from several speedsters safely.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: Godspeed also has the ability to create a clone of himself by dividing the Speed Force in him. However, extended use of this clone will result in intense pain, and the copy will then destabilize, with its portion of the Speed Force returning to the original Godspeed. Like other speedsters, Godspeed can run up to 10 times the speed of light by entering the Speed Force.


title: Godspeed (character)

text: August Heart / Godspeed appears in "The Flash" live-action television series, portrayed by Kindall Charters in season five and Karan Oberoi in season seven, with BD Wong providing his disguised voice. Introduced in his self-titled season five episode, this version is a Mercury Labs intern from the year 2049 who uses science to imbue himself with powers after replicating tachyon technology and Zoom's Velocity drug. He becomes a costumed thief and murderer to raid chemical facilities in order to make his powers permanent, only to be defeated by Nora West-Allen and incarcerated. In season seven, Godspeed is the arch-nemesis of Bart Allen. Due to a "Godspeed War" taking place and after locating Godspeed in the present, Barry Allen / Flash uses a neural hypercollider to enter his mind and uncover the war's origins. Godspeed desires "organic speed" from the Speed Force, imbued with its energy by Barry. Godspeed attempts to become a god, only to be defeated by the younger Flash and Eobard Thawne / Reverse-Flash and incarcerated at Iron Heights Penitentiary with his memory removed.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: Haplogroup J-M304, also known as J, is a human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup. It is believed to have evolved in Western Asia. The clade spread from there during the Neolithic, primarily into North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Socotra Archipelago, the Caucasus, Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: Haplogroup J-M304 is believed to have split from the haplogroup I-M170 roughly 43,000 years ago in Western Asia, as both lineages are haplogroup IJ subclades. Haplogroup IJ and haplogroup K derive from haplogroup IJK, and only at this level of classification does haplogroup IJK join with Haplogroup G-M201 and Haplogroup H as immediate descendants of Haplogroup F-M89. J-M304 is defined by the M304 genetic marker, or the equivalent 12f2.1 marker. The main current subgroups J-M267 and J-M172, which now comprise between them almost all of the haplogroup's descendant lineages, are both believed to have arisen very early, at least 10,000 years ago. Nonetheless, Y-chromosomes F-M89* and IJ-M429* were reported to have been observed in the Iranian plateau (Grugni et al. 2012).


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: On the other hand, it would seem to be that different episodes of populace movement had impacted southeast Europe, as well as the role of the Balkans as a long-standing corridor to Europe from the Near East is shown by the phylogenetic unification of Hgs I and J by the basal M429 mutation. This proof of common ancestry suggests that ancestral Hgs IJ-M429* probably would have entered Europe through the Balkan track sometime before the LGM. They then subsequently split into Hg J and Hg I in Middle East and Europe in a typical disjunctive phylogeographic pattern. Such a geographic hall is prone to have encountered extra consequent gene streams, including the horticultural settlers. Moreover, the unification of haplogroups IJK creates evolutionary distance from F–H delegates, as well as supporting the inference that both IJ-M429 and KT-M9 arose closer to the Middle East than Central or East Asia.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: Haplogroup J has also been found among two ancient Egyptian mummies excavated at the Abusir el-Meleq archaeological site in Middle Egypt, which date from a period between the late New Kingdom and the Roman era.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: Haplogroup J-M304 is found in its greatest concentration in the Arabian peninsula. Outside of this region, haplogroup J-M304 has a significant presence in other parts of the Middle East as well as in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Caucasus. It also has a moderate occurrence in Southern Europe, especially in central and southern Italy, Malta, Greece and Albania. The J-M410 subclade is mostly distributed in Anatolia, Greece and southern Italy. Additionally, J-M304 is observed in Central Asia and South Asia, particularly in the form of its subclade J-M172. J-12f2 and J-P19 are also found among the Herero (8%).


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: Paragroup J-M304* includes all of J-M304 except for J-M267, J-M172 and their subclades. J-M304* is rarely found outside of the island of Socotra, belonging to Yemen, where it is extremely frequent at 71.4%. Haplogroup J-M304* also has been found with lower frequency in Oman , Ashkenazi Jews, Saudi Arabia , Greece , the Czech Republic ( and ), Uygurs and several Turkic peoples. ( and ).


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: YFull and FTDNA have however failed to find J* people anywhere in the world although there are 2 J2-Y130506 persons and 1 J1 person from Soqotra.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: The following gives a summary of most of the studies which specifically tested for J-M267 and J-M172, showing its distribution in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: Haplogroup J-M267 defined by the M267 SNP is in modern times most frequent in the Arabian Peninsula: Yemen (up to 76%), Saudi (up to 64%) , Qatar (58%), and Dagestan (up to 56%). J-M267 is generally frequent among Arab Bedouins (62%), Ashkenazi Jews (20%) , Algeria (up to 35%) , Iraq (28%) , Tunisia (up to 31%), Syria (up to 30%), Egypt (up to 20%) , and the Sinai Peninsula. To some extent, the frequency of Haplogroup J-M267 collapses at the borders of Arabic/Semitic-speaking territories with mainly non-Arabic/Semitic speaking territories, such as Turkey (9%), Iran (5%), Sunni Indian Muslims (2.3%) and Northern Indian Shia (11%) (). Some figures above tend to be the larger ones obtained in some studies, while the smaller figures obtained in other studies are omitted. It is also highly frequent among Jews, Lemba especially the Kohanim line (46%) .


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: ISOGG states that J-M267 originated in the Middle East. It is found in parts of the Near East, Anatolia and North Africa, with a much sparser distribution in the southern Mediterranean flank of Europe, and in Ethiopia.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: But not all studies agree on the point of origin. The Levant has been proposed but a 2010 study concluded that the haplogroup had a more northern origin, possibly Anatolia.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: The origin of the J-P58 subclade is likely in the more northerly populations and then spreads southward into the Arabian Peninsula. The high Y-STR variance of J-P58 in ethnic groups in Turkey, as well as northern regions in Syria and Iraq, supports the inference of an origin of J-P58 in nearby eastern Anatolia. Moreover, the network analysis of J-P58 haplotypes shows that some of the populations with low diversity, such as Bedouins from Israel, Qatar, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, are tightly clustered near high-frequency haplotypes. This suggests that founder effects with star burst expansion into the Arabian Desert .


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: Haplogroup J-M172 is found in the highest concentrations in the Caucasus and the Fertile Crescent/Iraq and is found throughout the Mediterranean (including the Italian, Balkan, Anatolian and Iberian peninsulas and North Africa) .


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: The highest ever reported concentration of J-M172 was 72% in Northeastern Georgia . Other high reports include Ingush 32% , Cypriots 30-37% (Capelli 2005), Lebanese 30% (Wells et al. 2001), Assyrian, Mandean and Arab Iraqis 29.7% (Sanchez et al. 2005), Syrians and Syriacs 22.5%, Kurds 24%-28%, Pashtuns Lemba 20-30%,Iranians 23% , Ashkenazi Jews 24%, Palestinian Arabs 16.8%-25%, Sephardic Jews 29% and North Indian Shia Muslim 18%, Chechens 26%, Balkars 24%, Yaghnobis 32%, Armenians 21-24%, and Azerbaijanis 24%-48%.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: In South Asia, J2-M172 was found to be significantly higher among Dravidian castes at 19% than among Indo-European castes at 11%. J2-M172 and J-M410 is found 21% among Dravidian middle castes, followed by upper castes, 18.6%, and lower castes 14%. Subclades of M172 such as M67 and M92 were not found in either Indian or Pakistani samples which also might hint at a partial common origin.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: According to a genetic study in China by Shou et al., J2-M172 is found with high frequency among Uygurs (17/50 = 34%) and Uzbeks (7/23 = 30.4%), moderate frequency among Pamiris (5/31 = 16.1%), and also found J-M172 in Han Chinese (10%) and low frequency among Yugurs (2/32 = 6.3%) and Monguors (1/50 = 2.0%). The authors also found J-M304(xJ2-M172) with low frequency among the Russians (1/19 = 5.3%), Uzbeks (1/23 = 4.3%), Sibe people (1/32 = 3.1%), Dongxiangs (1/35 = 2.9%), and Kazakhs (1/41 = 2.4%) in Northwest China. Only far northwestern ethnic minorities had haplogroup J in Xinjiang, China. Uzbeks in the sample had 30.4% J2-M172 and Tajiks of Xinjiang and Uyghurs also had it.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: In Y-chromosome phylogenetics, subclades are the branches of haplogroups. These subclades are also defined by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or unique event polymorphisms (UEPs).


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: Prior to 2002, there were in academic literature at least seven naming systems for the Y-Chromosome Phylogenetic tree. This led to considerable confusion. In 2002, the major research groups came together and formed the Y-Chromosome Consortium (YCC). They published a joint paper that created a single new tree that all agreed to use. Later, a group of citizen scientists with an interest in population genetics and genetic genealogy formed a working group to create an amateur tree aiming at being above all timely. The table below brings together all of these works at the point of the landmark 2002 YCC Tree. This allows a researcher reviewing older published literature to quickly move between nomenclatures.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: The following research teams per their publications were represented in the creation of the YCC tree.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: There are several confirmed and proposed phylogenetic trees available for haplogroup J-M304. The scientifically accepted one is the Y-Chromosome Consortium (YCC) one published in Karafet 2008 and subsequently updated. A draft tree that shows emerging science is provided by Thomas Krahn at the Genomic Research Center in Houston, Texas. The International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) also provides an amateur tree.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: This is Thomas Krahn at the Genomic Research Center's Draft tree Proposed Tree for haplogroup J-P209 . For brevity, only the first three levels of subclades are shown.


title: Haplogroup J (Y-DNA)

text: This is the official scientific tree produced by the Y-Chromosome Consortium (YCC). The last major update was in 2008 . Subsequent updates have been quarterly and biannual. The current (2022) version is of the 2019/2020 update.


title: Breadbasket

text: The breadbasket of a country or of a region is an area which, because of the richness of the soil and/or advantageous climate, produces large quantities of wheat or other grain. Rice bowl is a similar term used to refer to Southeast Asia; and California's Salinas Valley is sometimes referred to as America’s salad bowl. Such regions may be the subject of fierce political disputes, which may even escalate into full military conflicts.


title: Breadbasket

text: Breadbaskets have become important within the global food system by concentrating global food-production in a small number of countries and, in countries such as India, in small geographic regions. As climate change increases weather variability around the world, the likelihood of multiple breadbaskets failing at a time increases dramatically. The 2022 food crises has been in part facilitated by a series of failures in key breadbasket regions, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has created significant potential disruption of the respective breadbasket regions that are important for global wheat and oil seed production.


title: Breadbasket

text: Sicily and Africa were considered the breadbaskets of the Roman Republic. Later on, Egypt was considered the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Crimea was the source of a huge quantity of grain supplied to Greek city-states, especially Athens. Similarly in both India and China, each empire had a significant source of grain concentrated in certain geographies. The fall of the Roman Empire was in part precipitated by a decline in safe grain trade from Egypt.


title: Breadbasket

text: In South Africa, the Free State province is often considered the country's breadbasket due to its wheat, sunflower, and maize fields. The Overberg region in the Western Cape is also known as the breadbasket of South Africa due to its large wheat fields, as well as fruit growing.


title: Breadbasket

text: Zimbabwe, formerly known as Rhodesia, was known as the breadbasket of Africa until 2000, exporting wheat, tobacco, and corn to the wider world, especially to other African nations. However today, Zimbabwe, is a net importer of foodstuffs from the Western World.


title: Breadbasket

text: There seems to be more of a debate if Zimbabwe was the bread basket of Africa, as over a 55-year period Zimbabwe never topped a 10% share of maize on the continent. From 1960 to 1980 it only hit 6% lower than Kenyas' contribution and on par with Nigeria.


title: Breadbasket

text: Since subsistence agriculture was the dominant economic system in most of Morocco's history, it's difficult to speak of a breadbasket region. All regions produced their own wheat and barley to feed themselves and their livestock. With the European commercial penetration in the second half of the 19th century, Morocco started to export wheat to Europe despite the objection of the ulama (religious establishment). The Chaouia and Doukkala plains became the most important suppliers of wheat for export. This is logical given their proximity to the coast. The ports of Casablanca and Feddala, today's Mohammedia, serviced the Chaouia Plain while the port of Mazagan serviced Doukkala.


title: Breadbasket

text: After Morocco's independence, agriculture in Doukkala became geared toward irrigation so less area has been devoted to wheat, whereas Chaouia maintained its status as a major wheat-producing region thanks to its dark soil called "tirs" and relatively abundant rainfall (avg. 400 mm/year).


title: Breadbasket

text: In Canada, a major grain-growing area is called the Canadian prairies. Sometimes the province of Saskatchewan, also known for producing a huge supplement of potash, is further singled out from within this region as the main breadbasket of Canada.


title: Breadbasket

text: In the United States, an important region is the Corn Belt, where maize and soybeans are major crops, which generally extends from the Great Lakes south through Missouri. Further to the west in both the United States and Canada, east of the Rocky Mountains, is the Wheat Belt, where the climate is too severe for maize or soybeans.


title: Breadbasket

text: Additionally, the San Joaquin Valley in California has also been called the breadbasket of the world. The San Joaquin Valley produces the majority of the 12.8% of the United States' agricultural production (as measured by dollar value) that comes from California. Grapes—table, raisin, and, to a lesser extent, wine—are perhaps the valley's highest-profile product, but equally (if not more) important are cotton, nuts (especially almonds and pistachios), citrus, and vegetables. 70% of the world's and 100% of the U.S. supply of almonds comes from the valley. Oranges, peaches, garlic, tangerines, tomatoes, kiwis, hay, alfalfa and numerous other crops have been harvested with great success. According to the 2002 Census of Agriculture's ranking of market value of agricultural products sold, nine of the nation's top 10, and 12 of the top 20, producing counties are in California.


title: Breadbasket

text: During the 19th and 20th centuries, Argentina was known as the "breadbasket of the world", due to the importance that agriculture had, and still has, in the country. Argentina's cereal cultivation is found in the Pampas region, which encompasses the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba and La Pampa. Within this region, many cities, such as Pergamino, Venado Tuerto and Rosario, are one of the most fertile areas in the continent. Some of the plantations include soybeans, maize, wheat, barley, sunflower and peanut, among others.


title: Breadbasket

text: In the 19th century, access to the Californian and Australian markets made wheat export a very lucrative activity, leading to the Chilean wheat cycle. In the mid-19th century, those countries experienced large gold rushes, which created a large demand for wheat. Chile was at the time the "only wheat producer of some importance in the Pacific".


title: Breadbasket

text: Brazil is also seen as a breadbasket, as it is the world's largest supplier of coffee and contains vast tracts of arable land.


title: Breadbasket

text: The Murray-Darling Basin is seen as Australia's breadbasket, being the source of 40% of the nation's agricultural income, a third of the wheat harvest, 95 percent of the rice crop and other products such as fruit, wine and cotton.


title: Breadbasket

text: When New Zealand became a British colony, the fertile lands produced food that would be shipped back to England, causing New Zealand to become colloquially known (occasionally along with Australia) as Britain's breadbasket, subsequently leading to the "Dunedin" being the first ship to complete a truly successful transport of refrigerated meat. She was refitted with a refrigeration machine with which she took the first load of frozen meat from New Zealand to the United Kingdom.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: Stephen C. Meyer (; born 1958) is an American author and former educator. He is an advocate of the pseudoscience of intelligent design and helped found the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) of the Discovery Institute (DI), which is the main organization behind the intelligent design movement. Before joining the DI, Meyer was a professor at Whitworth College. Meyer is a senior fellow of the DI and director of the CSC.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: In 1981, Meyer graduated from Whitworth College before being employed at Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) in Dallas from November 1981 to December 1985. Meyer then took up a scholarship from the Rotary Club of Dallas, where he obtained a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University in 1991.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: In Fall 1990 he became an assistant professor of philosophy at Whitworth, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1995, and gained tenure in 1996. In Fall 2002 he moved to the position of professor, Conceptual Foundations of Science, at the Christian Palm Beach Atlantic University. He continued there to Spring 2005, then ceased teaching to devote his time to the intelligent design movement.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: As an undergraduate, Meyer had been "quite comfortable accepting the standard evolutionary story, although I put a bit of a theistic spin on it – that (evolution) is how God operated", but during his work with ARCO in Dallas, he was influenced by a conference: "I remember being especially fascinated with the origins debate at this conference. It impressed me to see that scientists who had always accepted the standard evolutionary story were now defending a theistic belief, not on the basis that it makes them feel good or provides some form of subjective contentment, but because the scientific evidence suggests an activity of mind that is beyond nature. I was really taken with this." Charles Thaxton organised the conference held in Dallas on 9–10 February 1985, featuring Antony Flew, and Dean H. Kenyon who spoke on "Going Beyond the Naturalistic Mindset: Origin of Life Studies".


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: Meyer became part of Thaxton's circle, and joined the debate with two articles published in March 1986: in one, he discussed "The Mystery of Life's Origin" which Thaxton had recently co-authored, commenting that the book had "done well to intimate that 'we are not alone.' Only revelation can now identify the Who that is with us." The other article discussed the 1981 "McLean v. Arkansas" and 1985 "Aguillard v. Treen" district court case rulings that teaching creation science in public schools was unconstitutional as creationism originated in religious conviction, and its reliance on "tenets of faith" implied it was not scientific. Meyer argued that modern scientific method equally relied on "foundational assumptions" based on faith in naturalism, which "assumed all events to be exclusively the result of physical or natural causes", so on the definition used in the court cases "science itself does not qualify as legitimate science". He proposed that "scientists and philosophers" could turn to Biblical presupposition to explain "the ultimate source of human reason, the existence of a real and uniformly ordered universe, and the ability present in a creative and ordered human intellect to know that universe. Both the Old and New Testaments define these relationships such that the presuppositional base necessary to modern science is not only explicable but also meaningful." Meyer's argument on epistemological presuppositions and accusation that evolution is based on an assumption of naturalism became central to the design movement.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: At the university of Cambridge in England, he met theology student Mark Labberton. In the Fall of 1987 Labberton introduced Meyer to Phillip E. Johnson who was on a sabbatical at University College London, and having become "obsessed with evolution" had begun writing a book on what he saw as its problems. Meyer says "We walked around Cambridge kicking the pea gravel and talking over all the issues."


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: An article co-authored by Meyer and Thaxton published on 27 December 1987 asserted that "human rights depend upon the Creator who made man with dignity, not upon the state." They contrasted this with "purely material, scientific" ideas which equated humans to animals, and restated their central thesis that "Only if man is (in fact) a product of special Divine purposes can his claim to distinctive or intrinsic dignity be sustained." The terminology and concepts later featured in the Wedge strategy and theistic realism.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: After the 1987 "Edwards v. Aguillard" Supreme Court ruling affirmed the "Aguillard v. Treen" decision against teaching creation science, Thaxton as academic editor of "Of Pandas and People" adopted intelligent design wording. Meyer recalls the term coming up at a June 1988 conference in Tacoma organised by Thaxton, who "referred to a theory that the presence of DNA in a living cell is evidence of a designing intelligence." Phillip E. Johnson was drafting a book arguing against naturalism as the basis for evolutionary science, and Meyer brought a copy of the manuscript to the conference. He met Paul A. Nelson who found it exciting to read, and the two collaborated on a joint project. Needing a mathematician, they contacted Dembski in 1991. Thaxton has described Meyer as "kind of like" a Johnny Appleseed, bringing others into the movement.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: Meyer became one of a group of prominent young intelligent design (ID) advocates with academic degrees: Mayer, Nelson, Dembski and Jonathan Wells. Meyer participated in the "Ad Hoc Origins Committee" defending Johnson's "Darwin on Trial" in 1992 or 1993 (in response to Stephen Jay Gould's review of it in the July 1992 issue of "Scientific American"), while with the Philosophy department at Whitworth College. He was later a participant in the first formal meeting devoted to ID, hosted at Southern Methodist University in 1992.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: In December 1993, Bruce Chapman, president and founder of the Discovery Institute, noticed an essay in the "Wall Street Journal" by Meyer about a dispute when biology lecturer Dean H. Kenyon taught intelligent design in introductory classes. Kenyon had co-authored "Of Pandas and People", and in 1993 Meyer had contributed to the teacher's notes for the second edition of "Pandas". Meyer was an old friend of Discovery Institute co-founder George Gilder, and over dinner about a year later they formed the idea of a think tank opposed to materialism. In the summer of 1995 Chapman and Meyer met a representative of Howard Ahmanson, Jr. Meyer, who had previously tutored Ahmanson's son in science, recalls being asked "What could you do if you had some financial backing?" He was a co-author of the "Wedge strategy", which put forth the Discovery Institute's manifesto for the intelligent design movement.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: In 1999, Meyer with David DeWolf and Mark DeForrest laid out a legal strategy for introducing intelligent design into public schools in their book "Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curriculum". Meyer has co-edited "Darwinism, Design, and Public Education" (Michigan State University Press, 2000) with John Angus Campbell and co-edited "Science and Evidence of Design in the Universe" (Ignatius Press, 2000) with Michael J. Behe and William A. Dembski. In 2009, his book "Signature in the Cell" was released and in December of that year.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: Meyer has been described as "the person who brought ID (intelligent design) to DI (Discovery Institute)" by historian Edward Larson, who was a fellow at the Discovery Institute prior to it becoming the center of the intelligent design movement. In 2004, the DI helped introduce ID to the Dover Area School District, which resulted in the "Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District" case where ID was ruled to be based on religious beliefs rather than scientific evidence. Discussing ID in relation to Dover, on May 6, 2005 Meyer debated Eugenie Scott, on "The Big Story" with John Gibson. During the debate, Meyer argued that intelligent design is critical of more than just evolutionary mechanisms like natural selection that lead to diversification, but of common descent itself.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: He has appeared on television and in public forums advocating intelligent design. Notably he wrote and appeared in the Discovery Institute's 2002 film "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" and was interviewed in the 2008 "" movie. He has also been an active debater such as in April 2006 with Peter Ward, a paleontologist from the University of Washington held an open online discussion on the topic of intelligent design in the Talk of the Times forum in Seattle, WA. Meyer has also debated atheists Peter Atkins, Eugenie Scott and Michael Shermer.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: In March 2002, following a presentation to the Ohio State Board of Education, Meyer announced a "teach the controversy" strategy, which falsely claims that the theory of evolution is controversial within scientific circles. The presentation included submission of an annotated bibliography of 44 peer-reviewed scientific articles that he claimed raise significant challenges to key tenets of "Darwinian evolution". In response to this claim, the National Center for Science Education (an organisation that works in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the National Science Teachers Association to support the teaching of evolution in public schools) contacted the authors of the 44 papers listed, and 26 of them, representing 34 of the papers, responded. None of the authors considered that their research challenged any of the tenets of the theory of evolution. On March 11, 2002, during a panel discussion on evolution, Meyer publicly told the Ohio Board of Education that the in fact not approved "Santorum Amendment" was part of the No Child Left Behind Act and that the State of Ohio was therefore required to require the teaching of alternative theories of evolution as part of the biology curriculum. The professor of biology Kenneth R. Miller replied that comments and not approved amendments in conference committee reports do not carry the weight of law and that Meyer had misled the board of education in implying that they do.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: On 4 August 2004, an article by Meyer appeared in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, "Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington". On September 7, the publisher of the journal, the Council of the Biological Society of Washington, released a statement retracting the article as not having met its scientific standards and saying that the article had been published at the discretion of the former editor Richard Sternberg "without review by any associate editor". Critics believe that Sternberg's personal and ideological connections to Meyer suggest at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in his approval of Meyer's article.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: The journal's reasons for disavowing the article were rebutted by Sternberg, who says the paper underwent the standard peer-review process and that he was encouraged to publish it by a member of the Council of the BSW.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: A critical review of the article is available on the Panda's Thumb website. In January 2005, the Discovery Institute posted its response to the critique on their website.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: Meyer claims that those who oppose the essentially unanimous international scientific consensus on evolution are persecuted by the scientific community and prevented from publishing their views. In 2001, he signed the statement "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism", coinciding with the launch of the PBS TV series "Evolution", saying in part:


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: The numbers of scientists who question Darwinism is a minority, but it is growing fast. This is happening in the face of fierce attempts to intimidate and suppress legitimate dissent. Young scientists are threatened with deprivation of tenure. Others have seen a consistent pattern of answering scientific arguments with ad hominem attacks. In particular, the series' attempt to stigmatize all critics – including scientists – as religious "creationists" is an excellent example of viewpoint discrimination.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: A wide range of scholarly, science education, and legislative sources have denied, refuted, or off-handedly dismissed these allegations. In a 2006 article published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, a group of writers that included historian of science Ronald L. Numbers (author of "The Creationists"), philosopher of biology Elliott Sober, Wisconsin State Assembly representative Terese Berceau, and four members of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison characterized such claims as being a hoax. On their website refuting the claims in the film "" (which featured Meyer), the National Center for Science Education states that "Intelligent design advocates ... have no research and no evidence, and have repeatedly shown themselves unwilling to formulate testable hypotheses; yet they complain about an imagined exclusion, even after having flunked the basics." In analysing an Academic Freedom bill that was based upon a Discovery Institute model statute, the Florida Senate found that "According to the Department of Education, there has never been a case in Florida where a public school teacher or public school student has claimed that they have been discriminated against based on their science teaching or science course work."


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: On June 23, 2009, HarperOne released Meyer's "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design". The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who generally argues in opposition to the philosophical position of physicalist reductionism specifically and materialism more generally, submitted the book as his contribution to the "2009 Books of the Year" supplement for "The Times", writing "Signature in the Cell...is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin ... Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem."


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: Stephen Fletcher, chemist at Loughborough University, responded in "The Times Literary Supplement" that Nagel was "promot[ing] the book to the rest of us using statements that are factually incorrect." Fletcher explained "Natural selection is in fact a chemical process as well as a biological process, and it was operating for about half a billion years before the earliest cellular life forms appear in the fossil record." In another publication, Fletcher wrote: "I am afraid that reality has overtaken Meyer's book and its flawed reasoning", pointing out scientific problems with Meyer's work by citing how RNA "survived and evolved into our own human protein-making factory, and continues to make our fingers and toes."


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: Darrel Falk, former president of the BioLogos Foundation and a biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, reviewed the book, saying it illustrates why he does not support the intelligent design movement. Falk is critical of Meyer's declaration of scientists being wrong, such as Michael Lynch about genetic drift, without Meyer having done any experiment or calculation to disprove Lynch's assertion. Falk writes, "the book is supposed to be a science book and the ID movement is purported to be primarily a scientific movementnot primarily a philosophical, religious, or even popular movement", but concludes "If the object of the book is to show that the Intelligent Design movement is a scientific movement, it has not succeeded. In fact, what it has succeeded in showing is that it is a popular movement grounded primarily in the hopes and dreams of those in philosophy, in religion, and especially those in the general public."


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: On 18 June 2013, HarperOne released "Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design". In this book, Meyer proposed that the Cambrian explosion contradicts Darwin's evolutionary process and is best explained by intelligent design.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: In a review published by The Skeptics Society titled "Stephen Meyer's Fumbling Bumbling Amateur Cambrian Follies", paleontologist Donald Prothero gave a highly negative review of Meyer's book. Prothero pointed out that the "Cambrian Explosion" concept itself has been deemed an outdated concept after recent decades of fossil discovery and he points out that 'Cambrian diversification' is a more consensual term now used in paleontology to describe the 80 million-year time frame where the fossil record shows the gradual and stepwise evolution of more and more complicated animal life. Prothero criticizes Meyer for ignoring much of the fossil record and instead focusing on a later stage to give the impression that all Cambrian life forms appeared abruptly without predecessors. In contrast, Prothero cites paleontologist BS Lieberman that the rates of evolution during the 'Cambrian explosion' were typical of any adaptive radiation in life's history. He quotes another prominent paleontologist Andrew Knoll that '20 million years is a long time for organisms that produce a new generation every year or two' without the need to invoke any unknown processes. Going through a list of topics in modern evolutionary biology Meyer used to bolster his idea in the book, Prothero asserts that Meyer, not a paleontologist nor a molecular biologist, does not understand these scientific disciplines, therefore he misinterprets, distorts and confuses the data, all for the purpose of promoting the 'God of the gaps' argument: 'anything that is currently not easily explained by science is automatically attributed to supernatural causes', i.e. intelligent design.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: In his article "Doubting 'Darwin's Doubt'" published in "The New Yorker", Gareth Cook says that this book is another attempt by the creationist to rekindle the intelligent design movement. Decades of fossil discovery around the world, aided by new computational analytical techniques enable scientists to construct a more complete portrait of the tree of life which was not available to Darwin (hence his "doubt" in Meyer's words). The contemporary scientific consensus is that there was no "explosion". Cook cites Nick Matzke's analysis that the major gaps identified by Meyer are derived from his lack of understanding of the field's key statistical techniques (among other things) and his misleading rearrangement of the tree of life. Cook references scientific literature to refute Meyer's argument that the genetic machinery of life is incapable of big leaps therefore any major biological advancement must be the result of intervention by the 'intelligent designer'. Like Prothero, Cook also criticizes Meyer's proposal that if something cannot be fully explained by today's science, it must be the work of a supreme deity. Calling it a 'masterwork of pseudoscience', Cook warns that the influence of this book should not be underestimated. Cook opines that the book, with Meyer sewing skillfully together the trappings of science, wielding his credential of a PhD (in history of science) from the University of Cambridge, writing in a seemingly serious and reasonable manner, will appeal to a large audience who is hungry for material evidence of God or considers science a conspiracy against spirituality.


title: Stephen C. Meyer

text: From a different perspective, paleontologist Charles Marshall wrote in his review "When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship" published in Science that while trying to build the scientific case for intelligent design, Meyer allows his deep belief to steer his understanding and interpretation of the scientific data and fossil records collected for the Cambrian period. The result (this book) is selective knowledge (scholarship) that is plagued with misrepresentation, omission, and dismissal of the scientific consensus; exacerbated by Meyer's lack of scientific knowledge and superficial understanding in the relevant fields, especially molecular phylogenetics and morphogenesis. The main argument of Meyer is the mathematically impossible time scale that is needed to support emergence of new genes which drive the explosion of new species during the Cambrian period. Marshall points out that the relatively fast appearance of new animal species in this period is not driven by new genes, but rather by evolving from existing genes through "rewiring" of the gene regulatory networks (GRNs). This basis of morphogenesis is dismissed by Meyer due to his fixation on novel genes and new protein folds as prerequisite of emergence of new species. The root of his bias is his "God of the gaps" approach to knowledge and the sentimental quest to "provide solace to those who feel their faith undermined by secular society and by science in particular".


title: Imperial and US customary measurement systems

text: The imperial and US customary measurement systems are both derived from an earlier English system of measurement which in turn can be traced back to Ancient Roman units of measurement, and Carolingian and Saxon units of measure.


text: The US Customary system of units was developed and used in the United States after the American Revolution, based on a subset of the English units used in the Thirteen Colonies; it is the predominant system of units in the United States. The imperial system of units was developed and used in the United Kingdom and its empire beginning in 1826. The metric system has, to varying degrees, replaced the imperial system in the countries that once used it.


text: Most of the units of measure have been adapted in one way or another since the Norman Conquest (1066). The units of linear measure have changed the least – the yard (which replaced the ell) and the chain were measures derived in England. The foot used by craftsman supplanted the longer foot used in agriculture. The agricultural foot was reduced to of its former size, causing the rod, pole or perch to become (rather than the older 15) agricultural feet. The furlong and the acre, once it became a measure of the size of a piece of land rather than its value, remained relatively unchanged. In the last thousand years, three principal pounds were used in England. The troy pound (5760 grains) was used for precious metals, the apothecaries' pound, (also 5760 grains) was used by pharmacists and the avoirdupois pound (7000 grains) was used for general purposes. The apothecaries and troy pounds are divided into 12 ounces (of 480 grains) while the avoirdupois pound has 16 ounces (of 437.5 grains). The unit of volume, the gallon, has different values in the United States and in the United Kingdom – the US fluid gallon being about 0.83 imperial gallons and the US dry gallon being about 0.97 imperial gallons. The US fluid gallon was based on the wine gallon used in England prior to 1826.


text: After the United States Declaration of Independence the units of measurement in the United States developed into what is now known as customary units. The United Kingdom overhauled its system of measurement in 1826, when it introduced the imperial system of units. This resulted in the two countries having different gallons. Later in the century, efforts were made to align the definition of the pound and the yard in the two countries by using copies of the standards adopted by the British Parliament in 1855. However, these standards were of poor quality compared with those produced for the Convention of the Metre. In 1960 the two countries agreed to common definitions of the yard and the pound based on definitions of the metre and the kilogram. This change, which amounted to a few parts per million, had little effect in the United Kingdom, but resulted in the United States having two slightly different systems of linear measure – the international system, and the surveyors system.


text: English units of measure, were derived from a combination of Roman, Carolingian and Saxon units of measure. They were a precursor to both the imperial system of units (first defined in 1824, to take effect in 1826) and United States customary units which evolved from English Units from 1776 onwards.


text: The earliest records of English units of measure involve the weight (and therefore the value) of Saxon coins. The penny introduced by Offa was about 20 grains (1.296 g). Edward the Elder increased the weight of the English penny to 26 grains (1.685 g), thereby aligning it with the penny of Charlemagne. By the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), it had decreased to 24 grains (1.555 g). This value was subsequently called the "pennyweight" and formed the basis of the Troy units of weight—the troy ounce used to this day for weighting precious metals. Edward I (1272–1307) broke the link between a coin's value and its weight when he debased the English coinage by introducing a groat (four pence) which weighed of 89 grains rather than the expected 96 grains. The groat was further devalued in the 1350s when its weight was reduced to 72 grains.


text: During Saxon times land was measured both in terms of its economic value and in terms of its size. The Domesday Book used the hide, an economic unit of measure. In other references the furlong and the rood appear to be units related to ploughing procedures. Of particular interest was the rood which was 15 North German feet in length, the North German foot being equivalent to 335 mm (13.2 inches). Craftsmen, on the other hand used a shorter Roman foot.


text: Standardization of weights and measures was a recurring issue for monarchs. In 965 AD, King Edgar decreed "that only one weight and one measure should pass throughout the King's dominion".


text: In 1197 Richard I decreed that the measures of corn and pulse, and of wine and ale should be the same throughout all England. The Magna Carta, signed by King John in 1215 extended this to include cloth. Some time between 1266 and 1303 the weights and measures of England were radically revised by a law known as the "Composition of Yards and Perches" ("Compositio ulnarum et perticarum") often known as the "Compositio" for short. This law, attributed to either Henry III or his successor Edward I, instituted a new foot that was exactly the length of the old foot, with corresponding reductions in the size of the yard, ell, inch, and barleycorn. (Furlongs remained the same, but the rod changed from 15 old feet to 16 new feet.)


text: In 1324 Edward II systematized units of length by defining the inch as 3 barleycorns, the foot as 12 inches, the yard as 3 feet, the perch as 5 yards, and the acre as an area 4 by 40 perches. Apart from the ell (45 inches or 114.3 cm, which continued to be used in the cloth trade) and the chain (introduced by Edmund Gunter in 1620, and used in land surveying), these units formed the basis of the units of length of the English system of measurement. The units were however redefined many times – during Henry VIII's time standard yards and ells made of brass were manufactured, during Elizabeth I's time these were replaced with standards made of bronze and in 1742, after scientific comparisons showed a variation of up to 0.2% from the mean, a definitive standard yard was proposed (but not manufactured).


text: During the medieval era, agricultural products other than wool were mostly sold by volume, with various bushels and gallons being introduced over the years for different commodities. In the early fourteenth century the wool trade traditionally used the avoirdupois system of weights, a process that was formalized by Edward III in 1340. At the same time, the stone, when used to weigh wool, was formalized as being 14 pounds.


text: During the Tudor period, numerous reforms were made to English weights and measures. In 1496 Henry VII ordered that reference copies of the yard, pound and gallon should be made of brass and distributed to specified towns and cities throughout the kingdom. Many weights and measures that had crept into use were banned: in 1527 Henry VIII banned the Tower pound (5400 grains against the 5760 grains of the apothecaries and troy pounds) and the mercantile pound (6750 grains against the 7000 grains of the pound avoirdupois) and in 1592 Elizabeth I ordered the use of the "statute mile" (5280 feet against the 5000 feet of the London or Old English mile).


text: Under the Act of Union of 1707, Scotland, which had developed its own system of weights and measures independently of England, abandoned them in favour of English weights and measures. The Acts of Union 1800 which united Ireland with Great Britain had less of an effect on weights and measures—Irish weights and measures having been based on the English foot and pound avoirdupois since 1351, though the Irish acre and mile were based on a perch of 7 yards, not yards as in England.


text: By the early nineteenth century many commodities had their own set of units, the units of measure for the wool and cloth industries had units of measure specific to those commodities, albeit derived on the pound avoirdupois or the foot while wine and beer used units with the same names but different sizes – the wine gallon being 231 cubic inches and the beer or ale gallon being 282 cubic inches. Agricultural produce was sold by the bushel which was based on yet another gallon – the dry gallon of 268.8 cubic inches. Even though not explicitly permitted by statute, many markets used bushels based on weight rather than volume when selling wheat and barley.


text: The British Weights and Measures Act of 1824 repealed all existing British weights and measures legislation, some dating back to the 1300s, and redefined existing units of measure. In particular, a new standard yard and troy pound were manufactured as the standards for length and weight respectively. A new measure, the imperial gallon, which replaced the many gallons in use, was defined as being the volume of 10 pounds of water at which, after the authorized experiments, was found to be 277.274 cubic inches. The bushel, which like the gallon, had definitions reflecting the various gallons, was defined as 8 imperial gallons.


text: The 1824 Act also introduced some changes to the administration of the standards of weights and measures: previously Parliament had been given the custody of the standards but the act passed this responsibility on to the Exchequer. The act also set up an inspectorate for weights and measures.