Hot Bird
Hot Bird is a group of satellites operated by Eutelsat, located at 13°E over the Equator and with a transmitting footprint over Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. Only digital radio and television channels are transmitted by the Hot Bird constellation, both free-to-air and encrypted. In addition there are a few IP services; the satellites operate at 13° East and are numbered 13B, 13C and 13D. Hot Bird 1 was launched by Ariane 44LP on 28 March 1995; the 13° east slot predates the launch, with Eutelsat 1F1 having been located there as early as 1983, Eutelsat 2F1 having served time at the location. It has reached end-of-life. Hot Bird 3 was launched by Ariane 44LP on 2 September 1997 and intended to be moved to 10°E to become Eurobird 10. During the drift from 13°E to 10°E, the satellite suffered loss of power from one solar array, it was successfully moved to 10°E, but could only operate at a reduced capacity. Since it is operating at 4°E under the name Eurobird 4. At last it was moved to 75°E and renamed to ABS_1B.
It has reached end-of-life. Hot Bird 4 was launched by Ariane 42P on 27 February 1998 and redeployed to 7°W in July 2006, becoming Atlantic Bird 4 / Nilesat 103. Hot Bird 5 was launched by Atlas-2A on 9 October 1998 and re-located to 25.5°E and renamed Eurobird 2. Six transponders are leased to Arabsat under the name Badr 2, after having been called Arabsat 2D. Hot Bird 6 was launched by Atlas V 401 on 21 July 2002. Starting on 12 June 2009, the day of Iranian elections, deliberate interference affecting this satellite was traced to Iran. Hot Bird 6 is the primary carrier for BBC Persian Television; as of 2013, it is replaced with Hot Bird 10 Hot Bird 7 was lost in December 2002 during the Ariane 5 ECA launch. Its replacement, Hot Bird 7A was launched on 11 March 2006. Hot Bird 8 was launched by Proton on 5 August 2006. With a launch mass of 4.9 tonnes, Hot Bird 8 is the largest and the most powerful broadcast satellite serving Europe. Hot Bird 9 was launched by Ariane 5 ECA in December 2008, its entry into service enabled the Hot Bird 7A satellite to be redeployed to 9° East and rebranded Eurobird 9A, increasing capacity to 38 Ku band transponders at this orbital position.
Hot Bird 10 was launched by Ariane 5 ECA in February 2009 with NSS-9, Spirale A and Spirale B. The Eutelat 33E satellite is located at 33° East, Eutelsat’s premium video neighbourhood for cable and satellite broadcasting in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Bis TV Cyfrowy Polsat Eurosport Globecast NC+ NOVA Greece NOVA Cyprus Press TV Sky Italia Tivù Sat Viacom Up to 1000 television and radio channels are available Free-To-Air. Eutelsat Satellites Eutelsat Hot Bird
Venice
Venice is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto region. It is situated on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges; the islands are located in the shallow Venetian Lagoon, an enclosed bay that lies between the mouths of the Po and the Piave rivers. In 2018, 260,897 people resided in the Comune di Venezia, of whom around 55,000 live in the historical city of Venice. Together with Padua and Treviso, the city is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, considered a statistical metropolitan area, with a total population of 2.6 million. The name is derived from the ancient Veneti people who inhabited the region by the 10th century BC; the city was the capital of the Republic of Venice. The 697–1797 Republic of Venice was a major financial and maritime power during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a staging area for the Crusades and the Battle of Lepanto, as well as an important center of commerce and art in the 13th century up to the end of the 17th century.
The city-state of Venice is considered to have been the first real international financial center, emerging in the 9th century and reaching its greatest prominence in the 14th century. This made Venice a wealthy city throughout most of its history. After the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the Republic was annexed by the Austrian Empire, until it became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1866, following a referendum held as a result of the Third Italian War of Independence. Venice has been known as "La Dominante", "La Serenissima", "Queen of the Adriatic", "City of Water", "City of Masks", "City of Bridges", "The Floating City", "City of Canals"; the lagoon and a part of the city are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Parts of Venice are renowned for the beauty of their settings, their architecture, artwork. Venice is known for several important artistic movements—especially during the Renaissance period—has played an important role in the history of symphonic and operatic music, is the birthplace of Antonio Vivaldi.
Although the city is facing some major challenges, Venice remains a popular tourist destination, an iconic Italian city, has been ranked the most beautiful city in the world. The name of the city, deriving from Latin forms Venetia and Venetiae, is most taken from "Venetia et Histria", the Roman name of Regio X of Roman Italy, but applied to the coastal part of the region that remained under Roman Empire outside of Gothic and Frankish control; the name Venetia, derives from the Roman name for the people known as the Veneti, called by the Greeks Enetoi. The meaning of the word is uncertain, although there are other Indo-European tribes with similar-sounding names, such as the Celtic Veneti and the Slavic Vistula Veneti. Linguists suggest that the name is based on an Indo-European root *wen, so that *wenetoi would mean "beloved", "lovable", or "friendly". A connection with the Latin word venetus, meaning the color'sea-blue', is possible. Supposed connections of Venetia with the Latin verb venire, such as Marin Sanudo's veni etiam, the supposed cry of the first refugees to the Venetian lagoon from the mainland, or with venia are fanciful.
The alternative obsolete form is Vinegia. Although no surviving historical records deal directly with the founding of Venice and the available evidence have led several historians to agree that the original population of Venice consisted of refugees—from nearby Roman cities such as Padua, Treviso and Concordia, as well as from the undefended countryside—who were fleeing successive waves of Germanic and Hun invasions; this is further supported by the documentation on the so-called "apostolic families", the twelve founding families of Venice who elected the first doge, who in most cases trace their lineage back to Roman families. Some late Roman sources reveal the existence of fishermen, on the islands in the original marshy lagoons, who were referred to as incolae lacunae; the traditional founding is identified with the dedication of the first church, that of San Giacomo on the islet of Rialto —said to have taken place at the stroke of noon on 25 March 421. Beginning as early as AD 166–168, the Quadi and Marcomanni destroyed the main Roman town in the area, present-day Oderzo.
This part of Roman Italy was again overrun in the early 5th century by the Visigoths and, some 50 years by the Huns led by Attila. The last and most enduring immigration into the north of the Italian peninsula, that of the Lombards in 568, left the Eastern Roman Empire only a small strip of coastline in the current Veneto, including Venice; the Roman/Byzantine territory was organized as the Exarchate of Ravenna, administered from that ancient port and overseen by a viceroy appointed by the Emperor in Constantinople. Ravenna and Venice were connected only by sea routes, with the Venetians' isolated position came increasing autonomy. New ports were built, including those at Torcello in the Venetian lagoon; the tribuni maiores formed the earliest central standing governing committee of the islands in the lagoon, dating from c. 568. The traditional first doge of Venice, Paolo Lucio A
Tajiks
Tajiks are a Persian-speaking Iranian ethnic group native to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, the second largest in Afghanistan which constitutes over half of the global Tajik population, they speak varieties of a Western Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group; as a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians, has become acceptable during the last several decades as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Eastern Persian, Fārsīwān, Dīhgān which translates to "farmer or settled villager", in a wider sense "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and was used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as "Persian of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs and Romans during the Sassanid and early Islamic period.
The Tajiks are an Iranian people, speaking a variety of Persian, concentrated in the Oxus Basin, the Farḡāna valley and on both banks of the upper Oxus, i.e. the Pamir Mountains and northeastern Afghanistan and western Afghanistan. The ancient Tajiks were chiefly agriculturalists before the Arab Conquest of Iran. While agriculture remained a stronghold, the Islamization of Iran resulted in the rapid urbanization of historical Khorasan and Transoxiana that lasted until the devastating Mongolian invasion. Several surviving ancient urban centers of the Tajik people include Herat, Bukhara, Khujand and Kabul. Contemporary Tajiks are the descendants of ancient Eastern Iranian inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular, the Sogdians and the Bactrians, other groups, with an admixture of Western Iranian Persians and non-Iranian peoples. According to Richard Nelson Frye, a leading historian of Iranian and Central Asian history, the Persian migration to Central Asia may be considered the beginning of the modern Tajik nation, ethnic Persians, along with some elements of East-Iranian Bactrians and Sogdians, as the main ancestors of modern Tajiks.
In works, Frye expands on the complexity of the historical origins of the Tajiks. In a 1996 publication, Frye explains that many "factors must be taken into account in explaining the evolution of the peoples whose remnants are the Tajiks in Central Asia" and that "the peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them." Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:The Tajiks are the direct descendants of the Iranian peoples whose continuous presence in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan is attested from the middle of the 1st millennium bc. The ancestors of the Tajiks constituted the core of the ancient population of Khwārezm and Bactria, which formed part of Transoxania. Over the course of time, the eastern Iranian dialect, used by the ancient Tajiks gave way to Farsi, a western dialect spoken in Iran and Afghanistan; the geographical division between the eastern and western Iranians is considered and to be the desert Dasht-e Kavir, situated in the center of the Iranian plateau.
According to John Perry The most plausible and accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk'Arab', or an Iranian cognate word. The Muslim armies that invaded Transoxiana early in the eighth century, conquering the Sogdian principalities and clashing with the Qarluq Turks consisted not only of Arabs, but of Persian converts from Fārs and the central Zagros region. Hence the Turks of Central Asia adopted a variant of the Iranian word, täžik, to designate their Muslim adversaries in general. For example, the rulers of the south Indian Chalukya dynasty and Rashtrakuta dynasty referred to the Arabs as "Tajika" in the 8th and 9th century. By the eleventh century, the Qarakhanid Turks applied this term more to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models and subjects. Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, Seljuq and Atābak periods adopted the term and extended its use to cover Persians in the rest of Greater Iran, now under Turkish rule, as early as the poet ʿOnṣori, ca.
1025. Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks"; the distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy. According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the oldest known usage of the word Tajik as a reference to Persians in Persian literature can be found in the writings of the Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi; the 15th century Turkic-speaking poet Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī used Tajik as a reference to Persians. An exampl
Afghanistan
Afghanistan the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in South-Central Asia. Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan in the south and east, its territory covers 652,000 square kilometers and much of it is covered by the Hindu Kush mountain range, which experiences cold winters. The north consists of fertile plains, while the south-west consists of deserts where temperatures can get hot in summers. Kabul serves as its largest city. Human habitation in Afghanistan dates back to the Middle Paleolithic Era, the country's strategic location along the Silk Road connected it to the cultures of the Middle East and other parts of Asia; the land has been home to various peoples and has witnessed numerous military campaigns, including those by Alexander the Great, Muslim Arabs, British and since 2001 by the United States with NATO-allied countries. It has been called "unconquerable" and nicknamed the "graveyard of empires"; the land served as the source from which the Kushans, Samanids, Ghaznavids, Khaljis, Hotaks and others have risen to form major empires.
The political history of the modern state of Afghanistan began with the Hotak and Durrani dynasties in the 18th century. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan became a buffer state in the "Great Game" between British India and the Russian Empire, its border with British India, the Durand Line, was formed in 1893 but it is not recognized by the Afghan government and it has led to strained relations with Pakistan since the latter's independence in 1947. Following the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919 the country was free of foreign influence becoming a monarchy under King Amanullah, until 50 years when Zahir Shah was overthrown and a republic was established. In 1978, after a second coup Afghanistan first became a socialist state and a Soviet Union protectorate; this evoked the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s against mujahideen rebels. By 1996 most of Afghanistan was captured by the Islamic fundamentalist group the Taliban, who ruled most of the country as a totalitarian regime for over five years.
The Taliban were forcibly removed by the NATO-led coalition, a new democratically-elected government political structure was formed, but they still control a significant portion of the country. Afghanistan is a unitary presidential Islamic republic with a population of 31 million composed of ethnic Pashtuns, Tajiks and Uzbeks, it is a member of the United Nations, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Group of 77, the Economic Cooperation Organization, the Non-Aligned Movement. Afghanistan's economy is the world's 108th largest, with a GDP of $64.08 billion. The name Afghānistān is believed to be as old as the ethnonym Afghan, documented in the 10th-century geography book Hudud ul-'alam; the root name "Afghan" was used in reference to a member of the ethnic Pashtuns, the suffix "-stan" means "place of" in Persian. Therefore, Afghanistan translates to land of the Afghans or, more in a historical sense, to land of the Pashtuns. However, the modern Constitution of Afghanistan states that "he word Afghan shall apply to every citizen of Afghanistan."
Excavations of prehistoric sites by Louis Dupree and others suggest that humans were living in what is now Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago, that farming communities in the area were among the earliest in the world. An important site of early historical activities, many believe that Afghanistan compares to Egypt in terms of the historical value of its archaeological sites; the country sits at a unique nexus point where numerous civilizations have interacted and fought. It has been home to various peoples through the ages, among them the ancient Iranian peoples who established the dominant role of Indo-Iranian languages in the region. At multiple points, the land has been incorporated within large regional empires, among them the Achaemenid Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Indian Maurya Empire, the Islamic Empire. Many empires and kingdoms have risen to power in Afghanistan, such as the Greco-Bactrians, Hephthalites, Kabul Shahis, Samanids, Ghurids, Kartids, Timurids and the Hotak and Durrani dynasties that marked the political origins of the modern state.
Archaeological exploration done in the 20th century suggests that the geographical area of Afghanistan has been connected by culture and trade with its neighbors to the east and north. Artifacts typical of the Paleolithic, Neolithic and Iron ages have been found in Afghanistan. Urban civilization is believed to have begun as early as 3000 BCE, the early city of Mundigak may have been a colony of the nearby Indus Valley Civilization. More recent findings established that the Indus Valley Civilisation stretched up towards modern-day Afghanistan, making the ancient civilisation today part of Pakistan and India. In more detail, it extended from what today is northwest Pakistan to northwest India and northeast Afghanistan. An Indus Valley site has been found on the Oxus River at Shortugai in northern Afghanistan. There are several smaller IVC colonies to be found in Afghanistan as well. After 2000 BCE, successive waves of semi-nomadic
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia, received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb "to stream" refers to the process of obtaining media in this manner. A client end-user can use their media player to start playing digital video or digital audio content before the entire file has been transmitted. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies to telecommunications networks, as most of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming or inherently non-streaming. For example, in the 1930s, elevator music was among the earliest popular music available as streaming media; the term "streaming media" can apply to media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, real-time text, which are all considered "streaming text". Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live television broadcasts content over the airwaves via a television signal. Live internet streaming requires a form of source media, an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content.
Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it is. There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. If the user does not have enough bandwidth in their Internet connection, they may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the content; some users may not be able to stream certain content due to not having compatible computer or software systems. Some popular streaming services include the video sharing website YouTube and Mixer, which live stream the playing of video games. Netflix and Amazon Video stream movies and TV shows, Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL stream music. In the early 1920s, George O. Squier was granted patents for a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over electrical lines, the technical basis for what became Muzak, a technology streaming continuous music to commercial customers without the use of radio. Attempts to display media on computers date back to the earliest days of computing in the mid-20th century.
However, little progress was made for several decades due to the high cost and limited capabilities of computer hardware. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, consumer-grade personal computers became powerful enough to display various media; the primary technical issues related to streaming were having enough CPU power bus bandwidth to support the required data rates, creating low-latency interrupt paths in the operating system to prevent buffer underrun, enabling skip-free streaming of the content. However, computer networks were still limited in the mid-1990s, audio and video media were delivered over non-streaming channels, such as by downloading a digital file from a remote server and saving it to a local drive on the end user's computer or storing it as a digital file and playing it back from CD-ROMs. In 1991 the first commercial Ethernet Switch was introduced, which enabled more powerful computer networks leading to the first streaming video solutions used by schools and corporations such as expanding Bloomberg Television worldwide.
In the mid 1990s the World Wide Web was established, but streaming audio would not be practical until years later. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, users had increased access to computer networks the Internet. During the early 2000s, users had access to increased network bandwidth in the "last mile"; these technological improvements facilitated the streaming of audio and video content to computer users in their homes and workplaces. There was an increasing use of standard protocols and formats, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML as the Internet became commercialized, which led to an infusion of investment into the sector; the band Severe Tire Damage was the first group to perform live on the Internet. On June 24, 1993, the band was playing a gig at Xerox PARC while elsewhere in the building, scientists were discussing new technology for broadcasting on the Internet using multicasting; as proof of PARC's technology, the band's performance was broadcast and could be seen live in Australia and elsewhere.
In a March 2017 interview, band member Russ Haines stated that the band had used "half of the total bandwidth of the internet" to stream the performance, a 152-by-76 pixel video, updated eight to twelve times per second, with audio quality, "at best, a bad telephone connection". Microsoft Research developed a Microsoft TV application, compiled under MS Windows Studio Suite and tested in conjunction with Connectix QuickCam. RealNetworks was a pioneer in the streaming media markets, when it broadcast a baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Seattle Mariners over the Internet in 1995; the first symphonic concert on the Internet took place at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, Washington on November 10, 1995. The concert was a collaboration between The Seattle Symphony and various guest musicians such as Slash, Matt Cameron, Barrett Martin; when Word Magazine launched in 1995, they featured the first-ever streaming soundtracks on the Internet. Metro
Hussein-Ali Montazeri
Hussein-Ali Montazeri was an Iranian Shia Islamic theologian, Islamic democracy advocate and human rights activist. He was one of the leaders of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he was once the designated successor to the revolution's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, with whom he had a falling-out in 1989 over government policies that Montazeri claimed infringed on people's freedom and denied them their rights. Montazeri spent his years in Qom, remained politically influential in Iran to the reformist movement, he was known as the most knowledgeable senior Islamic scholar in Iran and a Grand Marja of Shia Islam. For more than two decades, Hussein-Ali Montazeri was one of the main critics of the Islamic Republic's domestic and foreign policy, he had been an active advocate of Baha'i rights, civil rights and women's rights in Iran. Montazeri was a prolific writer of articles, he was a staunch proponent of an Islamic state, he argued that post-revolutionary Iran was not being ruled as an Islamic state.
Born in 1922, Montazeri was from a peasant family in Najafabad, a city in Isfahan Province, 250 miles south of Tehran. His early theological education was in Isfahan. After Khomeini was forced into exile by the Shah, Montazeri "sat at the center of the clerical network" which Khomeini had established to fight the Pahlavi rule, he became a teacher at the Faiziyeh Theological School. While there he answered Khomeini's call to protest the White Revolution of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in June 1963 and was active in anti-Shah clerical circles, he was released in 1978 in time to be active during the revolution. Montazeri went to Qom where he studied theology. Montazeri was famous as an Islamic jurist, made to pay for his liberal-leaning beliefs, he supported a democratic republic as the best form of government. He was the author of Dirasāt fī wilāyah al-faqīh, a scholarly book advocating the supervision of the administration by Islamic jurists, he believed in the independence of the government and did not accept any executive and policy making role for the Islamic jurist.
Montazeri asserted. In 1979, following the overthrow of the Shah, he played a pivotal role in instituting Iran's new constitution, he was one of the leaders of the movement to replace the democratic and secular draft constitution proposed for the Islamic Republic with one where the supervision of Islamic jurists was recognized. He distributed "a detailed commentary and alternate draft" for Iran's new constitution, it included proposals to specify that Twelver Shi'ism—and not Islam in general—was the official religion of the state and to state that Islamic jurists should appoint judges with the right of veto over all laws and actions that are against the Islamic principles. He served on the Assembly of Experts that wrote the constitution and that implemented many of his proposals. During this time, Montazeri served as Friday prayer leader of Qom, as a member of the Revolutionary Council and as deputy to Supreme Leader Khomeini. Khomeini began "to transfer some of his power" to Montazeri, in 1980.
By 1983 "all government offices hung a small picture" of Montazeri next to that of Khomeini. In 1984, Montazeri became a grand ayatollah. Montazeri rejected Khomeini's proposal to make him his successor, insisting that the choice of successor be left to the democratically elected Assembly of Experts Later, Montazeri relented, following a session of the Assembly of Experts in November 1985, he was appointed Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader; some observers believe Khomeini chose him for this role because of his support for Khomeini's principle of theocratic rule by Islamic jurists. Khomeini's proposed form of administration called for the most learned, or one of the most learned, Islamic jurists to "rule", of all those who might be considered a leading Islamic jurist, only Montazeri supported theocracy. In Montazeri's opinion, however the jurist would not act as an absolute ruler, instead, he would act as an advisor and consultant.... Montazeri fell short of the theological requirements of the supreme Faqih.
He could not claim descent from the Prophet nor did he possess all the credentials of a revered scholar of Islamic law. His religious followers were few, and he lacked the all-important charisma. His selection had happened for one reason—he was the only one among the candidates for Faqih who endorsed Khomeini's vision of Islamic government. In addition, traditionalists did not approve Montazeri's designation as successor due to several reasons, including his problematic persona in Shiite seminaries during the reign of the Shah and his support for Ali Shariati’s and for Nematollah Salehi Najaf Abadi's works. Montazeri's leadership qualifications were further hurt by not being a seyyed, or descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, traditionally wearing the black turban in Shiite Islam, like Khomeini and Khomeini's successor Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the early years of the revolution, he was not as popular as he was in the last two decades of his life; the middle class and elites would mock him in those early years.
Mehdi Karrubi claims that the tensions between Montazeri and Khomenei began in around October 1986 when Montazeri sent a letter to the latter and questioning the foundation of the state. Montazeri's troubl
Jamaluddin Mousavi
Jamaluddin Mousavi is a BBC Persian TV presenter. He started working for the BBC in 2001 as a journalist when he joined the BBC's Central Asia magazine in Iran and Afghanistan. Before joining the BBC, Jamal was the editor of a weekly publication for Afghan refugees living in Mashhad, the province capital of Iran's Khorasan province where he managed a UNHCR project to train young Afghan journalists. Jamal comes from Afghanistan although he grew up and studied in Iran
