Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, mystery novel, police novel: These terms all describe narratives that centre on criminal acts and on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional detective, of a serious crime a murder. It is distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as historical fiction or science fiction, but the boundaries are indistinct. Crime fiction has multiple sub-genres, including detective fiction, courtroom drama, hard-boiled fiction and legal thrillers. Most crime drama does not feature the court room. Suspense and mystery are key elements; the One Thousand and One Nights contains the earliest known examples of crime fiction. An early example of a crime story is the medieval Arabic tale of "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights. In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman, cut into pieces.

Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails his assignment. The story has been described as a "whodunit" murder mystery with multiple plot twists; the story has detective fiction elements. Two other Arabian Nights stories, "The Merchant and the Thief" and "Ali Khwaja", contain two of the earliest fictional detectives, who uncover clues and present evidence to catch or convict a criminal, with the story unfolding in normal chronology and the criminal being known to the audience; the latter involves a climax where the titular detective protagonist Ali Khwaja presents evidence from expert witnesses in a court. "The Hunchback's Tale" is another early courtroom drama, presented as a suspenseful comedy. The earliest known modern crime fiction is E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1819 novella Mademoiselle de Scudéri. There is Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street Officer. Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe.

His brilliant and eccentric detective C. Auguste Dupin, a forerunner of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, appeared in works such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", "The Purloined Letter". With his Dupin stories, Poe provided the framework for the classic detective story; the detective’s unnamed companion is the narrator of the stories and a prototype for the character of Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes stories. Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone is thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective; the evolution of locked room mysteries was one of the landmarks in the history of crime fiction. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle are said to have been singularly responsible for the huge popularity in this genre. A precursor was Paul Féval, whose series Les Habits Noirs features Scotland Yard detectives and criminal conspiracies.

The best-selling crime novel of the nineteenth century was Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in Melbourne, Australia. The evolution of the print mass media in the United Kingdom and the United States in the latter half of the 19th century was crucial in popularising crime fiction and related genres. Literary'variety' magazines like Strand, McClure's, Harper's became central to the overall structure and function of popular fiction in society, providing a mass-produced medium that offered cheap, illustrated publications that were disposable. Like the works of many other important fiction writers of his day—e.g. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens—Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in serial form in the monthly Strand magazine in the United Kingdom; the series attracted a wide and passionate following on both sides of the Atlantic, when Doyle killed off Holmes in The Final Problem, the public outcry was so great, the publishing offers for more stories so attractive, that he was reluctantly forced to resurrect him.

In Italy early translations of English and American stories and local works were published in cheap yellow covers and thus the genre was baptized with the term "Libri gialli" or yellow books. The genre was outlawed by the Fascists during WWII but exploded in popularity after the war influenced by the American hard-boiled school of crime fiction. There emerged a group of mainstream Italian writers who used the detective format to create an anti-detective or postmodern novel in which the detectives are imperfect, the crimes unsolved and clues left for the reader to decipher. Famous writers include Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco, Carlo Emilio Gadda. In Spain, The Nail and other Tales of Mystery and Crime was published by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón in 1853. Crime fiction in Spain took on some special characteristics that reflected the culture of the country; the Spanish writers emphasized the corruption and ineptitude of the police and depicted the authorities and the wealthy in negative terms. In China, modern crime fiction was first developed from translations of foreign works from the 1890s.

Cheng Xiaoqing, considered "The Grand Master" of twentieth-century Chinese detective fiction, translated Sherlock Holmes into classical and vernacular Ch

Lombard is a ghost town in southeastern Broadwater County, United States. The town was located on the east bank of the Missouri River, just north of the mouth of Sixteen Mile Creek. Lombard was established in 1895 as the western terminus of the Montana Railroad, the location of its interchange with the Northern Pacific Railway. In 1908, the Montana Railroad was incorporated into the new transcontinental main line of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad; this lessened Lombard's importance as a railroad operational base, but the town survived as an interchange point between the Milwaukee and the Northern Pacific. Lombard was named for A. G. Lombard, the chief engineer of the Montana Railroad; the town's post office was first opened in 1896, closed in 1957. The population of Lombard declined throughout the first half of the twentieth century, corresponding with its lessening importance as a railroad town. Lombard was deserted by the time the Milwaukee Road line through the area was abandoned in 1980, it remains a ghost town today.

Baker, Don B.. The Montana Railroad: Alias: The Jawbone. Boulder, Colorado: Fred Pruett Books. ISBN 978-0-9623868-1-7. Lutz, Dennis J.. Montana Post Postmasters. Rochester, Minnesota: Johnson Printing Co

Evolutionary taxonomy, evolutionary systematics or Darwinian classification is a branch of biological classification that seeks to classify organisms using a combination of phylogenetic relationship, progenitor-descendant relationship, degree of evolutionary change. This type of taxonomy may consider whole taxa rather than single species, so that groups of species can be inferred as giving rise to new groups; the concept found its most well-known form in the modern evolutionary synthesis of the early 1940s. Evolutionary taxonomy differs from strict pre-Darwinian Linnaean taxonomy, in that it builds evolutionary trees. While in phylogenetic nomenclature each taxon must consist of a single ancestral node and all its descendants, evolutionary taxonomy allows for groups to be excluded from their parent taxa, thus permitting paraphyletic taxa. Evolutionary taxonomy arose as a result of the influence of the theory of evolution on Linnaean taxonomy; the idea of translating Linnaean taxonomy into a sort of dendrogram of the Animal and Plant Kingdoms was formulated toward the end of the 18th century, well before Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species was published.

The first to suggest that organisms had common descent was Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis in his 1751 Essai de Cosmologie, Transmutation of species entered wider scientific circles with Erasmus Darwin's 1796 Zoönomia and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's 1809 Philosophie Zoologique. The idea was popularised in the English-speaking world by the speculative but read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously by Robert Chambers in 1844. Following the appearance of On the Origin of Species, Tree of Life representations became popular in scientific works. In On the Origin of Species, the ancestor remained a hypothetical species. In contrast, Chambers had proposed specific hypotheses, the evolution of placental mammals from marsupials, for example. Following Darwin's publication, Thomas Henry Huxley used the fossils of Archaeopteryx and Hesperornis to argue that the birds are descendants of the dinosaurs. Thus, a group of extant animals could be tied to a fossil group; the resulting description, that of dinosaurs "giving rise to" or being "the ancestors of" birds, exhibits the essential hallmark of evolutionary taxonomic thinking.

The past three decades have seen a dramatic increase in the use of DNA sequences for reconstructing phylogeny and a parallel shift in emphasis from evolutionary taxonomy towards Hennig's'phylogenetic systematics'. Today, with the advent of modern genomics, scientists in every branch of biology make use of molecular phylogeny to guide their research. One common method is multiple sequence alignment. Cavalier-Smith, G. G. Simpson and Ernst Mayr are some representative evolutionary taxonomists. Efforts in combining modern methods of cladistics, DNA analysis with classical views of taxonomy have appeared. Certain authors have found that phylogenetic analysis is acceptable scientifically as long as paraphyly at least for certain groups is allowable; such a stance is promoted in papers by others. A strict form of evolutionary systematics has been presented by Richard H. Zander in a number of papers, but summarized in his "Framework for Post-Phylogenetic Systematics". Zander's pluralistic systematics is based on the incompleteness of each of the theories: A method that cannot falsify a hypothesis is as unscientific as a hypothesis that cannot be falsified.

Cladistics generates only trees of shared ancestry, not serial ancestry. Taxa evolving seriatim cannot be dealt with by analyzing shared ancestry with cladistic methods. Hypotheses such as adaptive radiation from a single ancestral taxon cannot be falsified with cladistics. Cladistics offers a way to cluster by trait transformations but no evolutionary tree can be dichotomous. Phylogenetics posits shared ancestral taxa as causal agents for dichotomies yet there is no evidence for the existence of such taxa. Molecular systematics uses DNA sequence data for tracking evolutionary changes, thus paraphyly and sometimes phylogenetic polyphyly signal ancestor-descendant transformations at the taxon level, but otherwise molecular phylogenetics makes no provision for extinct paraphyly. Additional transformational analysis is needed to infer serial descent; the Besseyan cactus or commagram is the best evolutionary tree for showing both shared and serial ancestry. First, a cladogram or natural key is generated.

Generalized ancestral taxa are identified and specialized descendant taxa are noted as coming off the lineage with a line of one color representing the progenitor through time. A Besseyan cactus or commagram is devised that represents both shared and serial ancestry. Progenitor taxa may have one or more descendant taxa. Support measures in terms of Bayes factors may be given, following Zander's method of transformational analysis using decibans. Cladistic analysis groups taxa by shared traits but incorporates a dichotomous branching model borrowed from phenetics, it is a simplified dichotomous natural key, although reversals are tolerated. The problem, of course, is that evolution is not dichotomous. An ancestral taxon generating two or more descendants requires a longer, less parsimonious tree. A cladogram node summarizes all traits distal to it, not of any one taxon, continuity in a cladogram is from node to node, not taxon to taxon; this is not a model of evolution, but is a variant of hierarc

Valenki are traditional Russian winter footwear felt boots: the name valenok means "made by felting". Valenki are made of wool felt, they are not water-resistant, are worn with galoshes to keep water out and protect the soles from wear and tear. Valenki were once the footwear of choice for many Russians, but in the second half of the 20th century they lost most of their appeal in cities, due to their association with rustic dress. Valenki – warm felted highboots made from dried sheep’s wool. Valenki are a kind of traditional Russian footwear, worn for walking on dry snow when the weather is frosty. Valenki wear out most from the bottom and often are soled with leather or other durable material to prevent this, so they are worn with galoshes. To protect from getting wet – they use a rubber sole, there are valenki with glue-sew and molded soles. Traditionally, valenki come in brown, black and white, but the last few years, consumers have been able to order these boots in a variety of colors. Valenki are included in standard of supplying officers and the ranks of the internal military service of the Russian army with warm clothes and gear.

Valenki stem from the traditional felt boots worn by nomads of the Great Steppe, whose history goes back over 1500 years. However, as it’s supposed, the boots appeared at the beginning of the 18th century. Valenki became widespread only in the first half of the 19th century, when they started being manufactured by industrial methods. Before this, they were quite expensive and only wealthy people could afford to have them; the increasing complexity of needs, the growing influence of the urban mores to the village caused the change of bast shoes with felt boots, with it, the broad development of fulling production. Valenki became less popular in the urban life in recent decades because winters in Central Russia turned to be more soft and slushy, as result and waterproof footwear won popularity and replaced valenki. Valenki are associated with a traditional rustic style of clothing. Before the revolution, the production of valenki was concentrated in the Semenov district of Nizhny Novgorod province, in the Kineshma District of Kostroma province, in the Kukmor in Kazan province.

In 1900, contemporary jackboot fulling factories of Russia produced 1.4 million pairs of valenki in the amount of 2.1 million rubles. In 1900, a pair of valenki cost 1.5 rubles, in 1912 - 2 rubles, at the end of 1916 the speculative price reached up to 12-18 rubles per pair. Telogreika Ushanka Afghanka Békési, László Stalin's War: Soviet uniforms and militaria 1941-45. Ramsbury: The Crowood Press ISBN 1-86126-822-X Zaloga, Steven J; the Red Army of the Great Patriotic War, 1941-45. London: Osprey ISBN 0-85045-939-7 "Felt boot factory in Belarus - Smilovichi Felting Factory". Yahoo! News. Retrieved 2013-10-19

The Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees was a department of NKVD in charge of handling of foreign civilian internees and POWs in the Soviet Union during and in the aftermath of World War II. It was established within NKVD under the name "Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees in September 1939 after the Soviet invasion of Poland; the qualifier "main" was added in January 1945. The legal foundation was the Sovnarkom Decree of July 1, 1941 "Regulations about Prisoners of War", updated by the September 29, 1945 "Regulations about the Labor Use of Prisoners of War". In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG, its major function was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union. The top management of GUPVI came from GULAG system; the major noted distinction from GULAG was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both camp systems were similar: hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, high mortality rate.

Another noted distinction was that GUPVI was a major source of recruitment of future communist activists for communist states, such as GDR and People's Republic of Poland, as well as various "democratic committees" of Japanese, etc. Significant efforts were channeled into " ideological reforging" of the laborers, numerous clubs, local radio stations were created. In total, during the whole period of the existence of GUPVI there were over 500 POW camps which imprisoned over 4,000,000 POWs. 1939-1943: Pyotr Soprunenko, major of state security 1943-1945: I. A. Petrov, lieutenant general 1945-1947: Mikhail Krivenko 1947-1949: Taras Filippov, lieutenant general 1949-1950: I. A. Petrov, lieutenant general 1950-1953: Amayak Kobulov, lieutenant general List of POW camps in the Soviet Union Katyn massacre Sharkov, Anatoli, GUPVI Archipelago: Prisoners of War and Internees on the Territory of Belarus: 1944--1951, Belarus, ISBN 985-463-094-3 Maksim Zagorulko "Regional Structures of the USSR NKVD/MVD GUPVI, 1941-1951: Reporting and Informational Documents" ISBN 5-9233-0421-X

Peter Robert Tyler Thorburn is a New Zealand rugby union coach and former player. He played as a flanker, he was a player for Auckland until 1985. He became the first coach of the North Harbour rugby team, from the founding of the union in 1985, until 1991, he worked for the New Zealand national rugby union team and was a coach Director of Rugby, at English club Bristol Rugby from 2001 to 2003. He was nominated interim coach of USA national rugby union team, in April 2006, latter becoming effective, he was expected to perform well at 2007 Rugby World Cup finals, but after a promising 10–28 loss to England, USA managed only to achieve a bonus point at the 21–25 loss to Samoa. In 2013 he coached East Coast Bays under 85 kilogram team. In the 2013 New Year Honours, Thorburn was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to rugby