An arboretum in a general sense is a botanical collection composed of trees. More a modern arboretum is a botanical garden containing living collections of woody plants and is intended at least in part for scientific study. An arboretum specializing in growing conifers is known as a pinetum. Other specialist arboreta include saliceta and querceta; the term arboretum was first used in an English publication by John Claudius Loudon in 1833 in The Gardener's Magazine but the concept was long-established by then. Related collections include a viticetum. Egyptian Pharaohs cared for them. Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt returned bearing thirty-one live frankincense trees, the roots of which were kept in baskets for the duration of the voyage, it is reported that Hatshepsut had these trees planted in the courts of her Deir el Bahri mortuary temple complex. Arboreta are special places for the cultivation and display of a wide variety of different kinds of trees and shrubs. Many tree collections have been claimed as the first arboretum, in most cases, the term has been applied retrospectively as it did not come into use until the eighteenth century.

Arboreta differ from pieces of woodland or plantations because they are botanically significant collections with a variety of examples rather than just a few kinds. Of course there are many tree collections that are much older than the eighteenth century in different parts of the world; the most important early proponent of the arboretum in the English-speaking transatlantic world was the prolific landscape gardener and writer, John Claudius Loudon who undertook many gardening commissions and published the Gardener's Magazine, Encyclopaedia of Gardening and other major works. Loudon's Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, 8 vols. is the most significant work on the subject in British history and included an account of all trees and shrubs that were hardy in the British climate, an international history of arboriculture, an assessment of the cultural and industrial value of trees and four volumes of plates. Loudon urged that a national arboretum be created and called for arboreta and other systematic collections to be established in public parks, private gardens, country estates and other places.

He regarded the Derby Arboretum as the most important landscape-gardening commission of the latter part of his career because it demonstrated the benefits of a public arboretum. Commenting on Loddiges' famous Hackney Botanic Garden arboretum, begun in 1816, a commercial nursery that subsequently opened free to the public, for educational benefit, every Sunday, Loudon wrote: "The arboretum looks better this season than it has done since it was planted... The more lofty trees suffered from the late high winds, but not materially. We walked round the two outer spirals of this coil of shrubs. There is no garden scene about London so interesting". A plan of Loddiges' arboretum was included in The Encyclopaedia of 1834 edition. Leaves from Loddiges' arboretum and in some instances entire trees, were studiously drawn to illustrate Loudon's encyclopaedic book Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum which incorporated drawings from other early botanic gardens and parklands throughout the United Kingdom. One example of an early European tree collection is the Trsteno Arboretum, near Dubrovnik in Croatia.

The date of its founding is unknown, but it was in existence by 1492, when a 15 m span aqueduct to irrigate the arboretum was constructed. The garden was created by the prominent local Gučetić/Gozze family, it suffered two major disasters in the 1990s but its two unique and ancient Oriental Planes remained standing. Udhagamandalam Arboretum, The Nilgiris, IndiaThe arboretum at Ooty was established in 1992 with an aim of conserving native and indigenous trees, it was established during the year 1992 and maintained by Department of Horticulture with Hill Area Development Programme funds. The micro watershed area leading to Ooty lake where the arboretum is now located, had been neglected and the feeder line feeding water to Ooty was contaminated with urban waste and agricultural chemicals; the area is the natural habitats of both indigenous and migratory birds. During the year 2005-2006, it was rehabilated with funds provided by the Hill Area Development Programme by providing permanent fencing, a footpath, other infrastructure facilities.

Both indigenous and exotic tree species are included. The following tree species were planted: Celtis tetrandra, Dillenia pentagyna, Elaeocarpus ferrugineus, Elaeocarpus oblongus, Evodia lunuankenda, Glochidion neilgherrense, Ligustrum perrotetti, Litsaea ligustrina, Litsaea wightiana, Meliosma arnotiana, Meliosma wightii, Michelia champaca, Michelia nilagirica, Pygeum gardneri, Syzygium amothanum, Syzygium montanum, Alnus nepalensis, Viburnum erubescens, Podocarpus wallichianus, Rhodomyrtus tomentosa, Rapanea wightiana, Ternstroemia japonica, Microtrop

IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte is a family of Web-delivered, Web conferencing and online collaboration services provided by IBM. Its remote services include Lotus Sametime Unyte Share, Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting and Lotus Sametime Unyte Events. Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting and Events are offered as part of LotusLive. WebDialogs, Inc. was founded in 1998. In August 2007, it was acquired by the Lotus division of the IBM Corporation, its product line was renamed IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte; as of November 2009, the Lotus Sametime Unyte Share service is in the process of being discontinued as part of an IBM business decision. All of the Lotus Sametime Unyte services are in the process of being re-branded under the IBM Lotus brand called LotusLive. Current Unyte Share account subscriptions will be honored; however no new Unyte Share accounts or upgrades to current accounts are being accepted. Lotus Sametime Unyte integrates Web and video conferencing for online Web meetings. Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting The IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting service provides integrated Web and video conferencing services for up to 1,000 participants.

Meetings are available for instance replay. Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting is available as a hosted service and licensed software, as well as for resale by agents. Lotus Sametime Unyte Events Lotus Sametime Unyte Events is an event management service with the following capabilities: event registration, online meeting service, post-event follow up, tracking and analysis. Lotus Sametime Unyte Share Lotus Sametime Unyte Share is a no-charge, one-on-one desktop application sharing service; the Lotus Sametime Unyte service offers its conferencing and collaboration technologies, both as hosted services and licensed software, to communication equipment providers, conferencing providers, application vendors and other resellers. Business partners receive client and server-side APIs, private label branding and product customization options. Lotus Sametime Unyte Lotus Sametime Unyte Share

Not to be confused with the 20th-century Irish writer Tom Maidhc O'Flaherty Tom O'Flaherty is an English rugby union player who plays for Premiership Rugby Exeter Chiefs as a winger. O’Flaherty started playing rugby at Old Alleynians in a successful minis side, before going on to play for Dulwich College winning the Daily Mail Trophy twice and briefly Blackheath before moving to study at Cardiff University where he played for Cardiff RFC towards the end of 2013 and scored four tries in four appearances. A move to Bridgend Ravens followed; that campaign culminated in the Ravens lifting the SWALEC Cup with O’Flaherty scoring the match-winning try against Pontypridd RFC in the final at the Principality Stadium, Cardiff. He spent a season in France, with French Top 14 side Montpellier but returned to Wales after a season where he had joint registration with Bridgend and the Ospreys. After debuting for the Ospreys in 2016 against Harlequins F. C. in the Anglo-Welsh Cup he played against Cardiff Blues and Glasgow and came off the bench versus Bristol Rugby.

He was part of the Ospreys squad for that season's Singha Premiership 7s competition. On 26 January 2017, Flaherty signed for English club Exeter Chiefs in the Aviva Premiership prior to the 2017-18 season, he played on 30 March 2018. SWALEC CupWinner 2014-15 Anglo-Welsh CupWinner 2017-18 Ospreys Player Profile Cardiff RFC Player Profile

Mesa called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source software implementation of OpenGL, other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers, its most important users are two graphics drivers developed and funded by Intel and AMD for their respective hardware. Proprietary graphics drivers replace all of Mesa, providing their own implementation of a graphics API. An open-source effort to write a Mesa Nvidia driver called Nouveau is developed by the community. Besides 3D applications such as games, modern display servers use OpenGL/EGL. Mesa is hosted by freedesktop.org and was initiated in August 1993 by Brian Paul, still active in the project. Mesa was subsequently adopted, now contains numerous contributions from various individuals and corporations worldwide, including from the graphics hardware manufacturers of the Khronos Group that administer the OpenGL specification. For Linux, development has been driven by crowdfunding.

Mesa is known as housing implementation of graphic APIs. The main API that Mesa has implemented is OpenGL, along with other Khronos Group related specifications, but Mesa can implement other APIs and indeed it did with Glide and Direct3D 9. Mesa is not specific to Unix-like operating systems: on Windows for example, Mesa provides an OpenGL API over DirectX. Mesa implements a translation layer between a graphics API such as OpenGL and the graphics hardware drivers in the operating system kernel; the supported version of the different graphic APIs depends on the driver, because each hardware driver has its own implementation. This is specially true for the "classic" drivers, while the Gallium3D drivers share common code that tend to homogenize the supported extensions and versions. Mesa maintains a support matrix with the status of the current OpenGL conformance visualized at mesamatrix.net. Mesa 10 complies for Intel, AMD/ATI and Nvidia GPU hardware. Mesa 11 was announced with some drivers being OpenGL 4.1 compliant.

Mesa 12 contains Intel Vulkan 1.0 support. Mesa 13 brought Intel support for OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 and experimental AMD Vulkan 1.0 support through the community driver RADV. OpenGL ES 3.2 is possible with Intel Skylake.1st stable version of 2017 is 17.0. Ready features are certified OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL 4.5 for Intel Haswell, OpenGL 4.3 for NVidia Maxwell and Pascal. Huge performance gain was measured with Maxwell 1. Maxwell-2-Cards are underclocked without NVidia information; the Khronos CTS test suite for OpenGL 4.4, 4.5 and OpenGL ES 3.0+ is in now Open Source and all tests for Mesa 13 and 17 are now possible without costs.2nd stable version of 2017, 17.1.0, came out on 10 May 2017 with some interesting improvements. OpenGL 4.2+ for Intel Ivy Bridge and OpenGL 3.3+ for Intel Open SWR Rasterizer are 2 of the highlights. Note that due to the modularized nature of OpenGL, Mesa can support extensions from newer versions of OpenGL without claiming full support for such versions. For example, in July 2016, Mesa supported OpenGL ES 3.1 but all OpenGL ES 3.2 extensions except for five, as well as a number of extensions not part of any OpenGL or OpenGL ES version.

An open question for Mesa and Linux is High Dynamic Range. Many problems and open points are in pipe for a clean and basic implementation.3rd Version 17.2 is available since September 2017 with some new OpenGL 4.6 features and velocity improvements in 3D for Intel and AMD. Only 1.4% of Tests fail for OpenGL 4.5 in Nouveau for Kepler.4th Version 17.3 is ready since December 2017. Many improvements in many drivers are available. OpenGL 4.6 is nearly available. AMD Vulkan Driver RADV is now conformant in Khronos-Test.1st version of 2018 is 18.0 and available since March 2018 by same scheme in 2017. Full OpenGL 4.6 support is not ready, but many features and improvements were tested in RC3. 10-bit support for Intel i965 in Colors is a Highlight. New is support for Intel Cannon AMD Vega with actual Linux Version. AMD Evergreen Chips are near OpenGL 4.5 support. Old AMD R600 or RV700 Chips can only support OpenGL 3.3 with some features of OpenGL 4.x. Freedreno is the Driver near OpenGL 3.3 support. 2nd version of 2018 is available since May.

Target is Vulkan 1.1.72 in AMD RADV driver. OpenGL 4.6 with spir-V is main target. Permanent work is possible completion of Features and Optimization of drivers for older hardware like AMD R600/Evergreen, Nvidia Tesla and before, Kepler or Intel Sandybridge, Haswell or Broadwell. ARM Architecture made great improvements in Adreno 3xx/4xx/5xx and Broadwell VC4/VC5 for Raspi with main target OpenGL ES. 3rd version of 2018 is available in calendar stable in September. OpenGL 4.6 with spir-V and Vulkan 1.1.80 are in WIP. The soft Driver for virtual machines VIRGL is ready for OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES 3.2. RadeonSI is ready for OpenGL ES 3.2. ASTC Texture Compression Support and Compatibility Modus Support for OpenGL 4.4 are other highlights in RadeonSI for AMD GCN Cards. New Vulkan 1.1 and more

The Soviet–Afghan War was a conflict wherein insurgent groups known collectively as the mujahideen, as well as smaller Maoist groups, fought a guerrilla war against the Soviet Army and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government. It was fought over nine years, from December 1979 to February 1989 in the Afghan countryside; the mujahideen groups were backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, making it a Cold War proxy war. Between 562,000 and 2,000,000 civilians were killed and millions of Afghans fled the country as refugees to Pakistan and Iran; the war derives from a 1978 coup when Afghanistan's communist party took power, initiating a series of radical modernization reforms throughout the country. These reforms were unpopular among the more traditional rural population and established power structures; the repressive nature of Soviet Afghanistan, which vigorously suppressed opposition including the execution of thousands of political prisoners, led to the rise of anti-government armed groups and by April 1979 large parts of the country were in open rebellion.

The ruling party itself experienced deep rivalries, in September 1979 the President, Nur Mohammad Taraki, was murdered under orders of the second-in-command, Hafizullah Amin, which soured relations with the Soviet Union. The Soviet government, under leader Leonid Brezhnev, decided to deploy the 40th Army on December 24, 1979. Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup, killing president Amin and installing Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal from a rival faction; the deployment had been variously called an "invasion" or a legitimate supporting intervention on the basis of the Brezhnev Doctrine. In January 1980, foreign ministers from 34 nations of the Islamic Conference adopted a resolution demanding "the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops" from Afghanistan; the UN General Assembly passed a resolution protesting the Soviet intervention by a vote of 104 to 18, with 18 abstentions and 12 members of the 152-nation Assembly absent or not participating in the vote. Afghan insurgents began to receive massive amounts of aid and military training in neighboring Pakistan and China, paid for by the United States and Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

Soviet troops occupied the cities and main arteries of communication, while the mujahideen waged guerrilla war in small groups operating in the 80 percent of the country, outside government and Soviet control exclusively being the rural countryside. The Soviets used their air power to deal harshly with both rebels and civilians, levelling villages to deny safe haven to the mujahideen, destroying vital irrigation ditches, laying millions of land mines; the international community imposed numerous sanctions and embargoes against the Soviet Union, the U. S. led a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow. The boycott and sanctions exacerbated Cold War tensions and enraged the Soviet government, which led a revenge boycott of the 1984 Olympics held in Los Angeles; the Soviets planned to secure towns and roads, stabilize the government under new leader Karmal, withdraw within six months or a year. But they were met with fierce resistance from the guerillas, were stuck in a bloody war that lasted nine years.

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet contingent was increased to 108,800 and fighting increased, but the military and diplomatic cost of the war to the USSR was high. By mid-1987 the Soviet Union, now under reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev, announced it would start withdrawing its forces after meetings with the Afghan government; the final troop withdrawal started on May 15, 1988, ended on February 15, 1989, leaving the government forces alone in the battle against the insurgents, which continued until 1992 when the former Soviet-backed government collapsed. Due to its length, it has sometimes been referred to as the "Soviet Union's Vietnam War" or the "Bear Trap" by the Western media; the Soviets' failure in the war is thought to be a contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1885, Russian forces seized the disputed oasis at Panjdeh south of the Oxus River from Afghan forces, which became known as the Panjdeh Incident; the border was agreed by the joint Anglo-Russian Afghan Boundary Commission of 1885–87.

The Russian interest in the region continued on through the Soviet era, with billions in economic and military aid sent to Afghanistan between 1955 and 1978. In 1947, Prime Minister of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daoud Khan, had rejected the Durrand Line, accepted as international border by successive Afghan governments for over a half a century; the British Raj came to an end and British Crown colony of India was partitioned into the new nations of India and Pakistan, the latter which inherited the Durrand Line as its frontier with Afghanistan. Daoud Khan's irredentist foreign policy to reunite the Pashtun homeland caused much tension with Pakistan, a nation that allied itself with the United States. Daoud Khan's irredentist policy was fueled by his desire to unite his divided country. To unite his divided country, Daoud Khan started emulating policies of Emir Abdur Rahman Khan and for that he needed a popular cause to unite the Afghan people divided along the tribal lines and a modern, well equipped Afghan army which would be used to surpass anyone who would oppose the Afghan government.

Daoud Khan's policy to annex Pashtun areas of Pakistan had angered Non-Pashtun population of Afghanistan. Pashtun population in Pakistan were not interested in having their areas being

Kourtney Horner, known by her stage name Kourtney Hansen is an American entrepreneur, dancer, on-air radio personality who had a recurring role as Emily on the television series Nashville. She is married to Jeremy McComb, she was raised in Des Moines, Iowa. As Kourtney Horner, she was a 2003 graduate of Drake University in theatre, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Upon graduation, she co-founded Paw Pro's, an in home pet care business, with her childhood friend Kristin Duax, she has experience as a morning radio onair sidekick for Hatfield and McCoy on Des Moines' KJJY. She worked in professional theatre, she moved to Nashville in 2008. After moving to Nashville, Hansen founded Paw Pro's Tennessee there and turned over her Paw Pro's Iowa business to her mother, she is dance team captain for the Nashville Predators and has performed in music videos such as Keith Urban's 2008 "Sweet Thing", Luke Bryan's 2009 "Do I" and Jeremy McComb's 2008 "This Town Needs a Bar". "Do I" won the USA Weekend Breakthrough Video of the Year at the 2010 CMT Music Awards.

She joined CMT in 2010. She is a broadcast personality for the Predators, she landed her role on Nashville, where she plays the assistant to Hayden Panettiere's Juliette Barnes, through her Nashville talent agent Mark Block. At The Block Agency website, Hansen is listed as a 5-foot-5-inch talent, she has starred in commercials for 1-800-PetMeds. In September 2012, she was engaged to Jeremy McComb; the couple wed on May 4, 2013. Kourtney has son name, she has two half brothers. Her grandfather owned the Iowa School of Beauty, her mother's name is Kathy. Kourtney Hansen on IMDb Hansen at TV.com