The Federal Aviation Administration is a governmental body of the United States with powers to regulate all aspects of civil aviation in that nation as well as over its surrounding international waters. Its powers include the construction and operation of airports, air traffic management, the certification of personnel and aircraft, the protection of U. S. assets during the launch or re-entry of commercial space vehicles. Powers over neighboring international waters were delegated to the FAA by authority of the International Civil Aviation Organization. Created in August 1958, the FAA replaced the former Civil Aeronautics Administration and became an agency within the U. S. Department of Transportation; the FAA's roles include: Regulating U. S. commercial space transportation Regulating air navigation facilities' geometric and flight inspection standards Encouraging and developing civil aeronautics, including new aviation technology Issuing, suspending, or revoking pilot certificates Regulating civil aviation to promote transportation safety in the United States through local offices called Flight Standards District Offices Developing and operating a system of air traffic control and navigation for both civil and military aircraft Researching and developing the National Airspace System and civil aeronautics Developing and carrying out programs to control aircraft noise and other environmental effects of civil aviation The FAA is divided into four "lines of business".

Each LOB has a specific role within the FAA. Airports: plans and develops projects involving airports, overseeing their construction and operations. Ensures compliance with federal regulations. Air Traffic Organization: primary duty is to safely and efficiently move air traffic within the National Airspace System. ATO employees manage air traffic facilities including Airport Traffic Control Towers and Terminal Radar Approach Control Facilities. See Airway Operational Support. Aviation Safety: Responsible for aeronautical certification of personnel and aircraft, including pilots and mechanics. Commercial Space Transportation: ensures protection of U. S. assets during the launch or reentry of commercial space vehicles. The FAA is headquartered in Washington, D. C. as well as the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City and its nine regional offices: Alaskan Region – Anchorage, Alaska Northwest Mountain – Seattle, Washington Western Pacific – Los Angeles, California Southwest – Fort Worth, Texas Central – Kansas City, Missouri Great Lakes – Chicago, Illinois Southern – Atlanta, Georgia Eastern – New York, New York New England – Boston, Massachusetts The Air Commerce Act of May 20, 1926, is the cornerstone of the federal government's regulation of civil aviation.

This landmark legislation was passed at the urging of the aviation industry, whose leaders believed the airplane could not reach its full commercial potential without federal action to improve and maintain safety standards. The Act charged the Secretary of Commerce with fostering air commerce and enforcing air traffic rules, licensing pilots, certifying aircraft, establishing airways, operating and maintaining aids to air navigation; the newly created Aeronautics Branch, operating under the Department of Commerce assumed primary responsibility for aviation oversight. In fulfilling its civil aviation responsibilities, the US Department of Commerce concentrated on such functions as safety regulations and the certification of pilots and aircraft, it took over the building and operation of the nation's system of lighted airways, a task initiated by the Post Office Department. The Department of Commerce improved aeronautical radio communications—before the founding of the Federal Communications Commission in 1934, which handles most such matters today—and introduced radio beacons as an effective aid to air navigation.

The Aeronautics Branch was renamed the Bureau of Air Commerce in 1934 to reflect its enhanced status within the Department. As commercial flying increased, the Bureau encouraged a group of airlines to establish the first three centers for providing air traffic control along the airways. In 1936, the Bureau itself began to expand the ATC system; the pioneer air traffic controllers used maps and mental calculations to ensure the safe separation of aircraft traveling along designated routes between cities. In 1938, the Civil Aeronautics Act transferred the federal civil aviation responsibilities from the Commerce Department to a new independent agency, the Civil Aeronautics Authority; the legislation expanded the government's role by giving the CAA the authority and the power to regulate airline fares and to determine the routes that air carriers would serve. President Franklin D. Roosevelt split the authority into two agencies in 1940: the Civil Aeronautics Administration and the Civil Aeronautics Board.

CAA was responsible for ATC, airman and aircraft certification, safety enforcement, airway development. CAB was entrusted with safety regulation, accident investigation, economic regulation of the airlines; the CAA was part of the Department of Commerce. The CAB was an independent federal agency. On the eve of America's entry into World War II, CAA began to extend its ATC responsibilities to takeoff and landing operations at airports; this expanded role became permanent after the war. The application of radar to ATC helped controllers in their drive to keep abreast of the postwar boom in commercial air transportation. In 1946, Congress gave CAA the added task of administering the federal-aid airport program, the first peacetime program of financial assistance aimed exclu

Phoenicianism is a form of Lebanese nationalism first adopted by Lebanese Christians Maronites, at the time of the creation of Greater Lebanon. It constitutes identification of the Lebanese people with the ancient Phoenicians, it promotes the view that Lebanese people, or sometimes just Lebanese Christians, are not Arabs and that the Lebanese speak a distinct language and have their own culture, separate from that of the surrounding Middle Eastern countries. Supporters of this theory of Lebanese ethnogenesis maintain that the Lebanese are descended from Phoenicians and are not Arabs; some maintain that Levantine Arabic is not an Arabic variety, rather a variation of Neo-Aramaic, but has become a distinctly separate language. Other theories of Maronite origin suggest Aramean origin, ancient Assyrian origin, or Mardaite origin. Phoenicianism parallels other Middle Eastern Christian ancient continuity theories, such as Nestorian Assyrian continuity and Coptic Pharaonism; these are contrasted with pan-Arabism.

Proponents claim that the land of Lebanon has been inhabited uninterruptedly since Phoenician times, that the current population descends from the original population, with some admixture due to immigration over the centuries. They argue that Arabization represented a shift to the Arabic language as the vernacular of the Lebanese people, that, according to them, no actual shift of ethnic identity, much less ancestral origins, occurred. In light of this "old controversy about identity", some Lebanese prefer to see Lebanon, Lebanese culture and themselves as part of "Mediterranean" and "Canaanite" civilization, in a concession to Lebanon's various layers of heritage, both indigenous, foreign non-Arab, Arab; some consider addressing all Lebanese as Arabs somewhat insensitive and prefer to call them Lebanese as a sign of respect of Lebanon's long non-Arabic past. The Arabic language is considered to exist in multiple forms: formal Arabic known as Modern Standard Arabic, used in written documents and formal contexts.

The one spoken in Lebanon is called "Lebanese Arabic" or "Lebanese", it is a type of Levantine Arabic, together with Mesopotamian Arabic, is classed by matter of convenience as a type of Northern Arabic. The point of controversy between Phoenicianists and their opponents lies in whether the differences between the Arabic varieties are sufficient to consider them separate languages; the former cite Prof. Wheeler Thackston of Harvard: "the languages the'Arabs' grow up speaking at home, are as different from each other and from Arabic itself, as Latin is different from English."There is a lack of consensus on the distinction between lingual taxa such as languages and dialects. A neutral term in linguistics is "language variety", which can be anything from a language or a family of languages to a dialect or a continuum of dialects, beyond; the most common, most purely linguistic, criterion is that of mutual intelligibility: two varieties are said to be dialects of the same language if being a speaker of one variety confers sufficient knowledge to understand and be understood by a speaker of the other.

By this criterion, the variety known as the Arabic language is indeed considered by linguists to be not a single language but a family of several languages, each with its own dialects. For political reasons, it is common in the Arabic-speaking world for speakers of different Arabic varieties to assert that they all speak a single language, despite significant issues of mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. For nearly a thousand years before the spread of the Arab-Muslim conquests in the 7th century AD, Aramaic was the lingua franca and main spoken language in the Fertile Crescent. Among the Maronites, neo-Aramaic had been the spoken language up to the 17th century, when Arabic took its place, while classical Syriac remained in use only for liturgical purposes, as a sacred language. Today the vast majority of people in Lebanon speak Lebanese Arabic as their first language. More some effort has been put into revitalizing Aramaic as an everyday spoken language in some ethnic Lebanese communities.

The modern type of Aramaic has an estimated 550,000 native speakers among Assyrians, a Christian ethnoreligious group related to but distinct from the Maronites of Lebanon. Followers of any religion can be Phoenicianists, including Lebanese Muslims. However, because of how religious and ethnic identities are intertwined in Lebanon, Phoenicianism is common among those Lebanese people who adhere to Christianity, the main religion of most of the Lebanese before the expansion of the Arab-Muslim conquests from the Arabian Peninsula. Among political parties professing Phoenicianism is the Kataeb Party, a Lebanese nationalist party in the March 14 Alliance, it is secular, but its electorate is Christian. Other political parties which profess Phoenicianism include the National Liberal Party; the Dutch university professor Leonard C. Biegel, in his 1972 book Minorities in the Middle East: Their significance as political factor in the Arab World, coined the term Neo-Shu'ubiyya to name the modern attempts of alternative non-Arab nationalisms in the Middle East, e.g. Aramaeanism, Greater Syrian nationalism, Kurdish nationalism, Pharaonism, Phoenicianism.

Historian Kamal Salibi, a Lebanese Protestant Christian, says: "be

Yannoulis Chalepas was a Greek sculptor and significant figure of Modern Greek art. Chalepas was born on the island of Tinos in 1851, from a family of marble hewers. From 1869 to 1872, he studied at the School of Arts in Athens, under Neoclassical sculptor Leonidas Drossis. In 1873, he left for Munich, under a scholarship of the Panhellenic Holy Foundation of the Evangelistria of Tinos, to continue his studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts under the Neoclassical sculptor Max von Widnmann, his scholarship was intercepted to be given to another student. He opened a workshop and began working individually. In 1878, Chalepas suffered a nervous breakdown, he made several suicide attempts. His condition worsened and from July 11, 1888 to June 6, 1902, he was committed to the Mental Hospital of Corfu. In 1901 his father died and the next year his mother went to Corfu and took Chalepas to Tinos. After his return, Chalepas lived under his mother's strict supervision, who blamed sculpture for her son's illness and prevented him from sculpting, destroying everything he created.

His mother died in 1916 and Chalepas began to work again with insufficient means, after a long time of inactivity. He made contacts with intellectual circles in Athens. Many eminent personalities of the arts, such as Thomas Thomopoulos, member of the Academy of Athens, Zacharias Papantoniou, director of the National Gallery of Athens, visited him in Tinos. In 1925, an exhibition of Chalepas' works was organized by the Academy of Athens, in 1927 he received the Academy's “Award for Excellence in Arts and Letters”. In 1930 he moved to Athens and continued working until his death on September 15, 1938; the creative production of Chalepas is shared between two periods, the first, from the early years to the start of his mental illness, the second, called the "post-sanity" period, divided into two phases. The first corresponds to the years of rehabilitation in Tinos, from 1918 to 1930, the second spans the last years of his life, from 1930 to his death in 1938. Chalepas's early work shows the rare maturity of the artist from the beginning.

"Chalepas Yannoulis and photos" from National Gallery. Archived 04/10/2018. Retrieved 04/10/2018