Amstrad was a British electronics company, founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar at the age of 21. He started the business when he was only 16; the name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading. It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1980. During the late 1980s, Amstrad had a substantial share of the PC market in the UK. Amstrad was once a FTSE 100 Index constituent but since 2007 is wholly owned by Sky UK; as of 2006, Amstrad's main business was manufacturing Sky UK interactive boxes. In 2010 Sky integrated Amstrad's satellite division as part of Sky so they could make their own set-top boxes in-house; the company had offices in Kings Road, Essex. Amstrad was founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar at the age of 21, the name of the original company being AMS Trading Limited, derived from its founder's initials. Amstrad entered the market in the field of consumer electronics. During the 1970s they were at the forefront of low-priced hi-fi, TV and car stereo cassette technologies. Lower prices were achieved by injection moulding plastic hi-fi turntable covers, undercutting competitors who used the vacuum forming process.

Amstrad expanded to the marketing of low cost and tuners, imported from the Far East and badged with the Amstrad name for the UK market. Their first electrical product was the Amstrad 8000 amplifier. In 1980, Amstrad went public trading on the London Stock Exchange, doubled in size each year during the early'80s. Amstrad began marketing its own home computers in an attempt to capture the market from Commodore and Sinclair, with the Amstrad CPC range in 1984; the CPC 464 was launched in the UK, France, New Zealand, Germany and Italy. It was followed by the CPC CPC 6128 models. "Plus" variants of the 464 and 6128, launched in 1990, increased their functionality slightly. In 1985, the popular Amstrad PCW range was introduced, which were principally word processors, complete with printer, running the LocoScript word processing program, they were capable of running the CP/M operating system. The Amsoft division of Amstrad was set up to provide in-house software and consumables. On 7 April 1986 Amstrad announced it had bought from Sinclair Research "the worldwide rights to sell and manufacture all existing and future Sinclair computers and computer products, together with the Sinclair brand name and those intellectual property rights where they relate to computers and computer related products", which included the ZX Spectrum, for £5 million.

This included Sinclair's unsold stock of Sinclair Spectrums. Amstrad made more than £5 million on selling these surplus machines alone. Amstrad launched two new variants of the Spectrum: the ZX Spectrum +2, based on the ZX Spectrum 128, with a built-in tape drive and, the following year, the ZX Spectrum +3, with a built-in floppy disk drive, taking the 3" disks that many Amstrad machines used. In 1986 Amstrad entered the IBM PC-compatible arena with the PC1512 system. In standard Amstrad livery and priced at £399 it was a success, capturing more than 25% of the European computer market, it was MS-DOS-based, but with the GEM graphics interface, Windows. In 1988 Amstrad attempted to make the first affordable portable personal computer with the PPC512 and 640 models, introduced a year before the Macintosh Portable, they ran MS-DOS on an 8 MHz processor, the built-in screen could emulate the Monochrome Display Adapter or Color Graphics Adapter. Amstrad's final attempts to exploit the Sinclair brand were based on the company's own PCs.

Amstrad's second generation of PCs, the PC2000 series, were launched in 1989. However, due to a problem with the Seagate ST277R hard disk shipped with the PC2386 model, these had to be recalled and fitted with Western Digital controllers. Amstrad successfully sued Seagate, but following bad press over the hard disk problems, Amstrad lost its lead in the European PC market. In the early 1990s, Amstrad began to focus on portable computers rather than desktop computers. In 1990, Amstrad tried to enter the video game console market with the Amstrad GX4000, similar to what Commodore did at the same time with the C64 GS; the console, based on the Amstrad 464 Plus hardware, was a commercial failure, because it used outdated technology, most games available for it were straight ports of CPC games that could be purchased for much less in their original format. In 1993, Amstrad was licensed by Sega to produce a system, similar to the Sega TeraDrive, going by the name of the Amstrad Mega PC, to try to regain their image in the gaming market.

The system didn't succeed as well as expected due to its high initial retail price of £999. In that same year, Amstrad released the PenPad, a PDA similar to the Apple Newton, released only weeks before it, it was a commercial failure, had several technical and usability problems. It lacked most features that the Apple Newton included, but had a lower price at $450; as Amstrad began to concentrate less on computers and more in communication, they purchased several telecommunications businesses including Betacom, Dancall Telecom, Viglen Computers and Dataflex Design Communications during the early 1990s. Amstrad has been a major supplier of set top boxes to UK satellite TV provider Sky since its launch in 1989. Amstrad was key to the introduction of Sky, as the company was responsible for finding methods to produce the requisite equipment at an attractive price for the consumer - Alan Sugar famously approached "someone who bashes out dustbin lids", to manufacture satellite dishes cheaply, it was the o

The 2009–10 B Group was the 55th season of the Bulgarian B Football Group, the second tier of the Bulgarian football league system. The season started on 8 August 2009 and finished on 23 May 2010 with the A Group promotion play-off between the runners-up from both divisions. 1Only 15 teams will compete in the East B PFG this season due to no team from the Bulgarian North-East V AFG being promoted. Both the champions FC Orlovets Pobeda and runners-up FC Benkovski Bjala refused to participate in the Second Division and chose instead to continue to compete in the Third Division. Source: 12 goals Borislav Ivanov 8 goals Emil Todorov Martin Stefanov Todor Hristov 7 goals Aleksandar Stoychev Ivan Petkov 6 goals Emil Petkov 15 goals Veselin Stoykov Rumen Rangelov 10 goals Angel Rusev 9 goals Ivan Redovski Todorov Vladislav Zlatinov 8 goals Asparuh Vasilev Valentin Valentinov 7 goals Daniel Genov Angel Toshev Bulgaria B PFG at Soccerway Bulgarian League- season 2009/10 at RSSSF

A Rat's Mass is a poetic, magical-realist one-act play by Adrienne Kennedy, a 20th-century African-American playwright. The play portrays the negative aspects of the black experience in the United States by depicting two African-American children longing for a white child; the play was, like many of Kennedy's plays, not aligned with the Black Arts movement, with a focus on dislocation and femaleness rather than the ideology of blackness. Like many of Kennedy's plays, A Rat's Mass doesn't follow a standard chronological plot, it follows Kay and Blake, black siblings who commit a sexual act on the playground at the insistence of Rosemary, a white child who Blake loves. The play takes place in Sister Rat's house, which they refer to as a cathedral. Sister Rat explains that her mother sent her away to Georgia when she became pregnant with her brother's baby, the play is Brother Rat and Sister Rat's commiseration on their circumstances; the two siblings discuss Rosemary's beauty and how their house was once a religious place that now runs red with blood.

The plot must be ascertained from the non-chronological and absurdist dialogue between the characters. A 1969 New York Times review wrote, "The action is nothing but Brother and Sister Rat equating their love for each other with their former adoration for Rosemary - the white and beautiful'descendant of the Pope and Julius Caesar and the Virgin Mary'." The play was written during the civil rights movement. Kennedy stated that the characters were taken from a vivid dream she had when she was on a train with her seven-year-old son from Paris to Rome, where she was moving for a few months: "It was a difficult thing for me to do because I'm not that adventurous. I had never tried to do something like this. In a way, I just wanted to go back. I had this dream in which I was being pursued by bloodied rats, it was a powerful dream, when I woke up the train had stopped in the Alps. It was at night. I had never felt that way, it was a crucial night in my life. So, I was just haunted by that image for years, about being pursued by these big, red rats."Kennedy was inspired by the black experience in the United States, A Rat's Mass, along with most of her work, deals with the dichotomy between blacks and whites in America.

The struggle for power and identity is the main focus of this play, because it was a main focuses of the African American community at that time. A scholar wrote, "Her writing is in many ways an expression of her psychological frustrations; these frustrations deal with cultural conflicts stemming from her experiences as a black woman and her international travels to Europe and Africa. She is known for extensive use of symbols and metaphors to convey a deeper message to her audience, she draws on her own experiences as well as those of her friends and families to create rich characters and vivid story lines." On August 17, 1969, A Rat's Mass / Procession in Shout was performed at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. This version featured music by Lamar Alford. La MaMa took the show to London's Royal Court Theatre, where it was met with a positive response. A Rat's Mass was produced at La MaMa multiple times during early 1970s. Mary Alice performed as Sister Rat in the September and October 1969 productions and the January 1971 production.

In 1976, La MaMa's Annex performed the show with music by Cecil Taylor. A New York Times review wrote that the "plangency of the music echoes the doom-filled sentences of the text."

Miranda Nicole Dodson is an American Christian musician and folk singer-songwriter, who plays an alternative country, roots rock, a worshipful style of music. She has released one studio album, Change a Thing, in 2010, an extended play, Ascend, in 2014. Dodson was born Miranda Nicole Skaggs, on December 5, 1980, in Midland, the daughter of Timothy Bruce Skaggs and Jamie Leann Skaggs, while she went to college at the University of North Texas, graduating with her baccalaureate in Art Teacher Education, she resides in Austin, with her husband, Luke Dodson, their three children, where they attend City Life Church, pastored by her brother-in-law. Her music recording career started in 2010, by releasing a studio album, Change a Thing, on June 15, 2010; the subsequent release, an extended play, was released on March 25, 2014. Studio albumsChange a Thing EPsAscend Official website

Father Arthur O'Leary, O. F. M. Cap was an Irish Capuchin polemical writer. O'Leary was born at County Cork, Ireland, he was educated with the Capuchins of Saint Malo, where he was ordained and acted as prison chaplain till 1777. He returned to Cork to engage in missionary work, he is charged by James Froude with having received secret-service money from the Government, but other historians consider this unproven. In 1786-88 he argued the Catholic case in the so-called "Paper War" between conservative Protestants and moderates that sought further legal reform of the Penal Laws, leading towards Catholic Emancipation. O'Leary's arguments helped Henry Grattan with his proposal in 1788 to remove the tithe paid by Roman Catholics to the Church of Ireland, but this was voted down by the Parliament of Ireland. From 1789 till his death he was chaplain to the Spanish embassy in London, he was a wit, acquainted with the circle of Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan, Charles James Fox. In the 1790s he built the original St Patrick's Church, Soho Square for the poor London Irish living around St Giles.

He was buried in Old St Pancras Churchyard. His name is listed on the Burdett-Coutts Memorial to the eminent graves lost from the graveyard, he published tracts characterized by learning, religious feeling and allegiance to the Crown. His work for reform of the anti-Catholic penal laws was too heterodox for some Catholics, but not in his own day. Catholics had been loyal to the Jacobite movement, some felt that O'Leary was being too friendly to the Hanoverian dynasty, he realised that an engagement with Protestants was necessary to ensure reforms from the British and Irish parliaments, whose members were all Protestant at that time. Reforms had just started with the Papists Act 1778 and the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791. During the 1790s he was, like many Catholics, horrified at the Dechristianisation of France during the French Revolution. At the time when the penal laws were being reformed, his aim was for Catholics in Britain and Ireland to achieve legal equality with Anglicans, he was a precursor of those who obtained Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

Among his writings are: A Defence of the Divinity of Christ and the Immortality of the Soul Loyalty Asserted, or the Test Oath Vindicated An Address to the Roman Catholics Concerning the Apprehended Invasion of the French Essay on Toleration A Reply to John Wesley Attribution This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed.. "Arthur O'Leary". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton; the entry cites: Fr. O'Leary in Jonah Barrington's memoirs, chapter 43. Buckley, Life of Rev. Arthur O'Leary James Froude, The English in Ireland in the eighteenth century Life and times of Henry Grattan Dictionary of British and American Authors Historical and Archeological Journal Works by or about Arthur O'Leary in libraries

Folk Session Inside is an album by the bluegrass band Country Gentlemen, recorded in 1963. This album proved to be the last for bassist Tom Gray; the Bluebirds Are Singing for Me 2:14 Sad and Lonesome Day 2:37 The Girl Behind the Bar 3:05 Can't You Hear Me Callin' 2:26 The School House Fire 4:00 Nightwalk 2:40 The Galveston Flood 3:08 The Young Fisherwoman 4:34 This Morning at Nine 2:27 I Am Weary 2:35 Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party 2:52 Heartaches 3:03 Dark as a Dungeon Bonus Track 4:21 Charlie Waller - guitar, vocals John Duffey - mandolin, vocals Eddie Adcock - banjo, vocals Tom Gray - bass, vocals