Year 551 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar. The denomination 551 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. After the death of his cousin Germanus, Justinian I appoints Narses new supreme commander and returns to Italy. In Salona on the Adriatic coast, he assembles a Byzantine expeditionary force totaling 20,000 or 30,000 men and a contingent of foreign allies, notably Lombards and Bulgars. Gothic War: Narses arrives in Venetia and discovers that a powerful Gothic-Frank army, under joint command of the kings Totila and Theudebald, has blocked the principal route to the Po Valley. Not wishing to engage such a formidable force and confident that the Franks would avoid a direct confrontation, Narses skirts the lagoons along the Adriatic shore, by using vessels to leapfrog his army from point to point along the coast. In this way he arrives at the capital Ravenna without encountering any opposition.

He crushes a small Gothic force at Ariminum. Autumn – Battle of Sena Gallica: The Byzantine fleet destroys the Gothic naval force under Indulf near Sena Gallica, some 17 miles north of Ancona, it marks the end of the Gothic supremacy in the Mediterranean Sea. July 9 – Beirut is destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami, its epicenter has an estimated magnitude of about 7.2 or 7.6, according to reports of Antoninus of Piacenza, Christian pilgrim, some 30,000 people are killed. Athanagild revolts against the Visigothic king Agila, their armies meet at Seville, Agila is defeated. 12,000 Kutrigurs appear in Europe led by others to assist the Gepids. Spring – Lazic War - Siege of Petra: The Byzantine army and their Sabir allies under Bessas recapture the strategic Byzantine fortress of Petra, located on the coast of the Black Sea, he orders the city walls razed to the ground. Autumn – Xiao Dong, great-nephew of the rebellious general Hou Jing, succeeds Jianwen Di as emperor of the Liang Dynasty. Xiao Dong has no real power and Hou Jing controls the imperial government at the capital Jiankang.

Bumin Qaghan, chieftain of the Göktürks, founds the Turkic Khaganate. He throws off the yoke of the Rouran domination. Jordanes, Roman bureaucrat, publishes "The Origin and Deeds of the Goths". Ashina, empress of Northern Zhou Babai the Great, church father and theologian Germanus, Byzantine pretender Umako Soga, leader of the Soga clan Jianwen Di, emperor of the Liang Dynasty Wen Di, emperor of Western Wei Xiao Daqi, crown prince of Northern Qi

Josef Swickard was a German-born veteran stage and screen character actor, who had toured with stock companies in Europe, South Africa, South America. Swickard emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1882, he was a stage actor several years before entering films with D. W. Griffith in 1912 and by 1914 was playing supporting roles for Mack Sennett, he appeared in Caught in a Cabaret. He remained with Sennett until 1917, when he settled into his prolific career of playing aristocratic characters. Modern audiences are most familiar with his role of Marcelo Desnoyers, the well-intentioned but impractical French upper class father in Rex Ingram's 1921 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, his career in sound films was somewhat limited and he played in low-budget and action serial type films. He played the villainous Prime Minister Kruel in the 1925 film version of The Wizard of Oz. Born in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1866 to Peter Schwecherath and Geniveve Steffens, Swickard was the brother of actor Charles Swickard.

After arriving in the United States in November 1882, Schwecherath changed his name to Swickard and married a Scottish woman named Queeny in 1896. In 1902, Swickard applied for citizenship in the Eastern District of New York under the name Joseph P. Schwickerath. Records show Swickard submitted a petition for naturalization in Los Angeles, California in February 1936 under the name of Peter Joseph Schwickerath. Sometime around 1928 Swickard married Broadway actress Margaret Campbell; that union was short-lived and the couple divorced on January 15, 1929. Swickard's last known residence was the Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles where he lived after his divorce from Campbell. Tragedy befell his ex-wife on June 27, 1939 when she was brutally murdered by her adult son from a previous marriage, Campbell McDonald. Nearly seven months to-the-day after his ex-wife's murder, Swickard died on February 29, 1940, he was 73. Despite rumors that Swickard committed suicide by jumping from the Hollywood sign, his death was from natural causes.

Swickard was buried under a simple headstone at Hollywood Forever Cemetery Josef Swickard on IMDb Josef Swickard at the Internet Broadway Database Josef Swickard at Find a Grave

Bernard Parker is a South African professional association football midfielder/striker playing for Kaizer Chiefs. Parker grew up in Reiger Park, a township next to Boksburg, he was quite good in a variety of sports and excelled in short and long distance running as well as achieving Eastern Gauteng colours in swimming. A product of the School of Excellence, Parker made his debut in the professional ranks for Cape Town's Hellenic FC bought and renamed Benoni Premier United. After the club was once again renamed and moved to Durban he remained with Thanda Royal Zulu F. C. until early 2009 when he obtained a transfer to European Cup Winners Red Star in Serbia. His stay in Belgrade was cut short after reports that the club had cash flow problems and owed its players' salaries, he consequentially signed with FC Twente in July 2009 and was a member of the team that won the Dutch 2009–10 Eredivisie. After Twente Manager Steve Mclaren's move to the German Bundesliga, Parker failed to convince new coach Michel Preud'homme of his qualities and thus spent the first half of the 2010/11 Dutch season on the bench.

He joined Leicester City on trial in December 2010 with a view to a permanent move away from the Dutch club. On 18 January 2011 he moved to Panserraikos F. C. on loan, to secure extra game time and returned to FC Twente after the end of the 2010/11 Greek season. After receiving interest from Swedish clubs Malmö FF and Helsingborgs IF as well as South Africa's Kaizer Chiefs, Parker chose the latter ahead of the other clubs. In the 2012/13 season, Parker scored 12 league goals in 28 matches and finished as runner up to Katlego Mashego who had 13 and helped Chiefs to a league and cup double; the following season, he won the Lesley Manyathela Golden Boot with 10 goals. As of 9 May 2011 Bernard Parker had his national team debut against Malawi in 2007, scoring his first goal in 2008 against the same team. On 17 June 2009, he scored both goals in a 2–0 win over New Zealand in the 2009 Confederations Cup, received the Man of the Match award, he played in 2010 FIFA World Cup representing South Africa but the team was eliminated after group stage.

He played in 2013 African Cup of Nations hosted in South Africa. On 16 June 2013, Parker scored an own goal in a 2–1 defeat to Ethiopia which ended South Africa's chances of qualifying for the 2014 World Cup. Earlier in the match he had given South Africa a 1–0 lead. Parker scored by chipping the ball over Víctor Valdés in the 56th minute in a 1–0 shock win over the then-world and European champions Spain at Soccer City, where it won the World Cup in 2010. Parker won the top goalscorer award at the 2014 African Nations Championship with four goals from three group matches. Scores and results list South Africa's goal tally first. Parker married Wendy Cherry in Ballito, KwaZulu-Natal, on 16 June 2012 at a ceremony attended by 170 guests. Parker said: "I spoke to my wife-to-be about fixing a date for the wedding, it was just a matter of finding the right time on the rare occasion when I wasn't playing a soccer match. The time is now and I know I've made the right choice." FC Twente Eredivisie: 2009–10 Johan Cruijff Schaal: 2010Kaizer Chiefs Premier Soccer League: 2012–13,2014–15 Nedbank Cup: 2012–13 MTN 8: 2015 Lesley Manyathela Golden Boot: 2013–14 CHAN Golden Boot: 2014 Bernard Parker – FIFA competition record Bernard Parker at National-Football-Teams.com

Russell Earl Marker was an American chemist who invented the octane rating system when he was working at the Ethyl Corporation. In his career, he went on to found a steroid industry in Mexico when he made semisynthetic progesterone from chemical constituents found in Mexican yams in a process known as Marker degradation; this led to the development at Syntex of the combined oral contraceptive pill and synthetic cortisone - and to the development of the Mexican barbasco trade. He was born on March 1902 in Hagerstown, Maryland, he received his B. S. in 1923 from the University of Maryland and an M. S. in physical chemistry in 1924 from the same institution. In 1926, he married Mildred Collins and worked as an analytical chemist at the Naval Powder Factory in Indian Head, Maryland, he began work at the Ethyl Corporation where he came up with the concept of the octane rating. In 1938, he proposed a new molecular structure for sarsasapogenin where the side chain was chemically reactive due to the two oxygen atoms connected to the same carbon.

The newly found reactivity of the side chain can be used to remove most of the atoms in the side chain. After most of the atoms are removed from the side chain, a steroid ring is left. After a few chemical modifications, a steroid ring can lead to the creation of progesterone; this was the first practical synthesis of progesterone. It was a precursor in the preparation of cortisone; when Marker found that there was a similar structure to sarsasapogenin in Beth Roots, a member of the lily family, he began his work to develop the Marker degradation. In March 1944 he formed Syntex, he left the company in May 1945 to found Botanica-Mex. In 1949 he left Botanica-Mex, he died on Friday, March 3, 1995. Emeric Somlo, Federico Lehmann and Russell Marker came together to make a new company in Mexico named Syntex SA; this company used Mexican plant, Cabeza de Negro. Species of the genus Dioscorea contain diosgenin: a saponin similar to the structure of sarsasapogenin found in beth root. In March 1944, the company made the first kilo of progesterone, sold at $50/gram.

After a dispute in the company in 1945, Marker severed ties with Syntex SA. Because Marker was the only person in the company who knew how to do the synthesis of progesterone, they could no longer produce the drug. Marker however went to work with a company based in Texcoco; the company was sold to Gedeon Richter Ltd. where they started using both cabeza de negro and barbasco to make progesterone. Today, progesterone can be used to make oral contraceptives. Mexican Chemical Society at the VI International Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products in Mexico City Chemical Congress of North America Lecture series in astronomy, chemistry, evolutionary biology, genetics and physical sciences are held annually at Penn State in Russell Marker's honor

Fortran is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language, suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, FORTRAN came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continuous use for over six decades in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and computational chemistry, it is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers. Fortran encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while retaining compatibility with prior versions. Successive versions have added support for structured programming and processing of character-based data, array programming, modular programming and generic programming, high performance Fortran, object-oriented programming, concurrent programming, native parallel computing capabilities.

Fortran's design was the basis for many other programming languages. Amongst the better-known is BASIC, based on FORTRAN II with a number of syntax cleanups, notably better logical structures, other changes to work more in an interactive environment; the names of earlier versions of the language through FORTRAN 77 were conventionally spelled in all-capitals. The capitalization has been dropped in referring to newer versions beginning with Fortran 90; the official language standards now refer to the language as "Fortran" rather than all-caps "FORTRAN". In late 1953, John W. Backus submitted a proposal to his superiors at IBM to develop a more practical alternative to assembly language for programming their IBM 704 mainframe computer. Backus' historic FORTRAN team consisted of programmers Richard Goldberg, Sheldon F. Best, Harlan Herrick, Peter Sheridan, Roy Nutt, Robert Nelson, Irving Ziller, Harold Stern, Lois Haibt, David Sayre, its concepts included easier entry of equations into a computer, an idea developed by J. Halcombe Laning and demonstrated in the Laning and Zierler system of 1952.

Some of these programmers were chess players and were chosen to work at IBM with the thought being they had logical minds. A draft specification for The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System was completed by November 1954; the first manual for FORTRAN appeared in October 1956, with the first FORTRAN compiler delivered in April 1957. This was the first optimizing compiler, because customers were reluctant to use a high-level programming language unless its compiler could generate code with performance approaching that of hand-coded assembly language. While the community was skeptical that this new method could outperform hand-coding, it reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20, gained acceptance. John Backus said during a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, "Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."The language was adopted by scientists for writing numerically intensive programs, which encouraged compiler writers to produce compilers that could generate faster and more efficient code.

The inclusion of a complex number data type in the language made Fortran suited to technical applications such as electrical engineering. By 1960, versions of FORTRAN were available for the IBM 709, 650, 1620, 7090 computers; the increasing popularity of FORTRAN spurred competing computer manufacturers to provide FORTRAN compilers for their machines, so that by 1963 over 40 FORTRAN compilers existed. For these reasons, FORTRAN is considered to be the first used cross-platform programming language; the development of Fortran paralleled the early evolution of compiler technology, many advances in the theory and design of compilers were motivated by the need to generate efficient code for Fortran programs. The most comprehensive account of Fortran history in a single document is given by Lorenzo in the book listed below; the initial release of FORTRAN for the IBM 704 contained 32 statements, including: DIMENSION and EQUIVALENCE statements Assignment statements Three-way arithmetic IF statement, which passed control to one of three locations in the program depending on whether the result of the arithmetic statement was negative, zero, or positive IF statements for checking exceptions.

The arithmetic IF statement was reminiscent of a three-way comparison instruction available on the 704. The statement provided the only way to compare numbers—by testing their difference, with an attendant risk of overflow; this deficiency was overcome by "logical" facilities introduced in FORTRAN IV. The FREQUENCY statement was used (

Statistics of Japanese Regional Leagues for the 2010 season. 2010 was the 33rd season of Hokkaido League. The season started on May 16 and ended on September 19, it was contested by six teams and Sapporo University GP won the tournament for the second consecutive year. After the season, Blackpecker Hakodate and Sapporo Winds were to be relegated to the Block Leagues, however only Sapporo Winds was relegated because the number of teams was expanded to 8 from 2011 season. 2010 was the 34th season of Tohoku League. The season started on April 11 and ended on October 17, it was contested by eight teams and Grulla Morioka won the championship for the fourth consecutive year. In the repetition of the previous season, they outstripped Fukushima United only by the goal difference. Cobaltore Onagawa were relegated and D2 play-off winner Fuji Club 2003 took their place. 2009 was the 14th season of Tohoku League Division 2. North and South groups were won by Fuji Club 2003 and Scheinen Fukushima and in post-season playoff series the former earned promotion to Division 1.

In order to decide the direct exchange between two divisions, two D2 winners played against each other in two-legged series. Fuji Club 2003 defeated Scheinen Fukushima and received direct promotion to Division 1, replacing the bottom-placed Cobaltore Onagawa, while Scheinen Fukushima faced seventh-placed D1 Shiogama Wiese in another two-legged series. Shiogama Wiese won them 6–4 on aggregate and remained their place in D1. 2010 was the 44th season of Kanto League. The season started on April 4 and ended on August 1, it was contested by eight teams and YSCC Yokohama won the championship for the second consecutive year. After the season, Club Dragons and AC Almaleza were relegated to the second division; because of the relegation of Ryutsu Keizai University from Japan Football League, only the champions of D2, Toho Titanium, were promoted. 2010 was the 8th season of Kanto League Division 2. It was won by Toho Titanium who earned promotion to Division 1. On the other end of the table, Honda Luminozo Sayama were relegated to prefectural leagues.

2010 was the 36th season of Hokushin'etsu League. The season started on April 11 and ended on September 19, it was contested by eight teams and Nagano Parceiro won the championship for the third time in their history after one-year pause. After the season they won the promotion to Japan Football League; because of Parceiro being promoted to JFL, only Antelope Shiojiri were relegated. They were replaced by Artista Tomi and Fukui KSC respectively. 2010 was the 7th season of Hokushin'etsu League Division 2. It was won by the rookies Artista Tomi who thus have won back-to-back promotion along with the runners-up Fukui KSC; because only one team was relegated from D1, only the bottom-placed Ohara Gakuen HS were relegated to Prefectural leagues. They were replaced by Toyama Shinjo Club and AS Jamineiro