1.
Pinta (ship)
La Pinta was the fastest of the three ships used by Christopher Columbus in his first transatlantic voyage in 1492. The New World was first sighted by Rodrigo de Triana aboard Pinta on 12 October 1492, the owner of Pinta was Cristobal Quintero. The Quintero brothers were owners from Palos. The owner of the ship allowed Martin Alonso Pinzon to take over the ship so he could keep an eye on the ship, by tradition Spanish ships were named after saints and usually given nicknames. Thus, like Niña, was not the actual name. The actual name of Pinta is unknown, the origin of the ship is disputed but is believed to have been built in Spain in the year 1441. It was rebuilt for use by Christopher Columbus, Pinta was square rigged and smaller than Santa María. The ship weighed approximately 60 tons with a deck length of 17 meters. The crew size was 26 men under Captain Martín Alonso Pinzón, the other ships of the Columbus expedition were Niña and Santa María. There are no known likenesses of Columbuss ships.
Santa María was the largest, of a known as a carrack. They were called caravels, a name given to the smallest three-masted vessels. Columbus once used it for a vessel of forty tons, but it applied in Portuguese or Spanish use to a vessel ranging one hundred and twenty to one hundred. This word represents a capacity about one-tenth larger than that expressed by the modern English ton, Niña, and Santa María were not the largest ships in Europe at the time. They were small trade ships surpassed in size by ships like Great Michael, built in Scotland in 1511 with a length of 73.2 m, and a crew of 300 sailors,120 gunners, and up to 1,000 soldiers. Peter von Danzig of the Hanseatic League was built in 1462 and was 51 m long. Another large ship, the English carrack Grace Dieu, was built during the period 1420–1439, was 66.4 m long, ships built in Europe in the fifteenth century were designed to sail the Mediterranean sea and the Atlantic ocean coastlines. Columbus smaller-sized ships were considered riskier on the ocean than larger ships
2.
Operation Mincemeat
Operation Mincemeat was a successful British disinformation strategy used during the Second World War. Correspondence between two British generals which suggested that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily as merely the target of a feint, was placed on the body. It was picked up the morning by a Spanish fisherman. The nominally neutral Spanish government shared copies of the documents with the Abwehr, forensic examination showed they had been read, and decrypts of German messages showed the Germans fell for the ruse. Reinforcements were shifted to Greece and Sardinia both before and during the invasion of Sicily, Sicily received none, the true impact of Operation Mincemeat is unknown, although the island was liberated more quickly than anticipated and losses were lower than predicted. Montagus work formed the basis for a 1956 film, the historian Ben Macintyre observes that although the paper was published under Godfreys name, it bore all the hallmarks of. Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, Godfreys personal assistant, the memo contained a number of schemes to be considered for use against the Axis powers to lure U-boats and German surface ships towards minefields.
Number 28 on the list was titled, A Suggestion, it was an idea to plant misleading papers on a corpse that would be found by the enemy. The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson, I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one. The deliberate planting of fake documents to be found by the enemy was not new, known as the Haversack Ruse, it had been practised by the British and others in the First and Second World Wars. In August 1942, before the Battle of Alam el Halfa, on the corpse was a map purportedly showing the locations of British minefields, the Germans used the map and their tanks were routed to areas of soft sand where they bogged down. In September 1942 an aircraft flying from Britain to Gibraltar crashed off Cádiz, all aboard were killed, including Paymaster-Lieutenant James Hadden Turner – a courier carrying top secret documents – and a French agent. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, would arrive in Gibraltar on the eve of the target date of 4 November.
Turners body washed up on the beach near Tarifa and was recovered by the Spanish authorities, when the body was returned to the British, the letter was still on it, and technicians determined that the letter had not been opened. Other Allied intelligence sources established that the notebook carried by the French agent had been copied by the Germans, to British planners it showed that some material that was obtained by the Spanish was being passed to the Germans. His plan was A body is obtained from one of the London hospitals, the lungs are filled with water and documents are disposed in an inside pocket. The body is dropped by a Coastal Command aircraft. On being found, the supposition in the mind may well be that one of our aircraft has either been shot or forced down
3.
World War II
World War II, known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the worlds countries—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust and the bombing of industrial and population centres. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human history, from late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European colonies in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific.
The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Midway, near Hawaii, in 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territorial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy, thus ended the war in Asia, cementing the total victory of the Allies. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world, the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The victorious great powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the Cold War, which lasted for the next 46 years. Meanwhile, the influence of European great powers waned, while the decolonisation of Asia, most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic recovery.
Political integration, especially in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities, the start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland and France declared war on Germany two days later. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or even the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred simultaneously and this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the forces of Mongolia and the Soviet Union from May to September 1939, the exact date of the wars end is not universally agreed upon.
It was generally accepted at the time that the war ended with the armistice of 14 August 1945, rather than the formal surrender of Japan
4.
Hurricane Vince
Hurricane Vince was an unusual hurricane that developed in the northeastern Atlantic basin. Forming in October during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, it strengthened over waters thought to be too cold for tropical development, Vince was the twentieth named tropical cyclone and twelfth hurricane of the extremely active season. Vince developed from a system on October 8, becoming a subtropical storm southeast of the Azores. The National Hurricane Center did not officially name the storm until the next day, the storm weakened at sea and made landfall on the Iberian Peninsula as a tropical depression on October 11. Vince was the first tropical system to do so since the 1842 Spain hurricane and it dissipated over Spain, bringing much needed rain to the region, and its remnants passed into the Mediterranean Sea. On October 5, an unnamed subtropical storm which had gone unnoticed by the NHC was absorbed by a temperate frontal low. The low pressure system gained a more concentrated circulation and lost its frontal structure after absorbing the subtropical storm, the developing system became a subtropical storm itself early on October 8,580 miles southeast of Lajes in the Azores.
However, the NHC decided not to name the system Vince at the time, the storm gradually gained the tropical characteristics of symmetry and a warm inner core and became a tropical storm the next day. Its transformation to a tropical system occurred over water cooler than 24 °C, soon after it became a tropical storm on October 9 near Madeira, with a ragged eye already present, the NHC officially named it Tropical Storm Vince and began to issue advisories. The storms ragged eye quickly solidified and contracted into a bona fide eye with a diameter of 15 mi and this increase in organization was accompanied by strengthening, and Vince reached its peak strength as a hurricane with 75 mph winds that day. The NHC forecaster decided that if it looks like a hurricane, it probably is, despite its environment, Hurricane Vinces impressive organization was very short lived as westerly wind shear began to erode the eye within hours. In response, the weakened to a tropical storm shortly thereafter. A broad low-level trough approached the storm from the northwest, pulling the convection northward as the storms low-level center accelerated eastward.
On October 10, two brief bursts of convection surprised forecasters, but with the sea surface temperature as low as 22 °C, the flares were not sustained. Vince continued to weaken as it approached the Iberian Peninsula and became a depression on October 11, shortly before it made landfall near Huelva. The fast-moving tropical depression dissipated over land. Its remnants moved across southern Spain, dumping rain on the drought-ridden region, the Spanish Center for Emergency Coordination declared a rain pre-emergency for the province of Castellón in the anticipation that Hurricane Vince would bring rains capable of flooding. The Instituto Nacional de Meteorología issued a bulletin that warned of a 40% chance of flooding, four Spanish autonomous communities issued flood warnings, and Canarias issued a wind warning
5.
Turdetani
The Turdetani were an ancient pre-Roman people of the Iberian peninsula, living in the valley of the Guadalquivir, in what was to become the Roman Province of Hispania Baetica. Strabo considers them to have been the successors to the people of Tartessos, the Turdetani were in constant contact with their Greek and Carthaginian neighbors. Herodotus describes them as enjoying a civilized rule under a king, the Turdetani are said to have possessed a written legal code and to have employed Celtiberian mercenaries to carry on their wars against Rome. Strabo notes that the Turdetani were the most civilized peoples in Iberia, after the end of the Second Punic War, the Turdetani rose against their Roman governor in 197 BCE. When Cato the Elder became consul in 195 BCE, he was given the command of the whole of Hispania, Cato first put down the rebellion in the northeast, marched south and put down the revolt by the Turdetani, the least warlike of all the Hispanic tribes. Cato was able to return to Rome in 194, leaving two praetors in charge of the two provinces, turdus is the genus of the thrushes.17 and following sections
6.
Autonomous communities of Spain
Spain is not a federation, but a highly decentralized unitary state. Some scholars have referred to the system as a federal system in all. There are 17 autonomous communities and two cities that are collectively known as autonomies. The two autonomous cities have the right to become autonomous communities, but neither has yet used this right and this unique framework of territorial administration is known as the State of Autonomies. The autonomous communities are governed according to the constitution and their own organic laws known as Statutes of Autonomy, since devolution was intended to be asymmetrical in nature, the scope of competences vary for each community, but all have the same parliamentary structure. Spain is a country made up of different regions with varying economic and social structures, as well as different languages. While the entire Spanish territory was united under one crown by the 16th century, the constituent territories—be it crowns, principalities or dominions—retained much of their former institutional existence, including limited legislative, judicial or fiscal autonomy.
These territories exhibited a variety of customs, laws. From the 18th century onwards, the Bourbon kings and the government tried to establish a more centralized regime, leading figures of the Spanish Enlightenment advocated for the building of a Spanish nation beyond the internal territorial boundaries. This culminated in 1833, when Spain was divided into 49 provinces and these were the Basque Country and Catalonia. This gave rise to peripheral nationalisms along with Spanish nationalism, therefore and social changes that had produced a national cultural unification in France had the opposite effect in Spain. In a response to Catalan demands, limited autonomy was granted to Catalonia in 1913 and it was granted again in 1932 during the Second Spanish Republic, when the Generalitat, Catalonias mediaeval institution of government, was restored. During General Francos dictatorial regime, centralism was most forcefully enforced as a way of preserving the unity of the Spanish nation, peripheral nationalism, along with communism and atheism were regarded by his regime as the main threats.
When Franco died in 1975, Spain entered into a phase of transition towards democracy, the Prime Minister of Spain, Adolfo Suárez, met with Josep Tarradellas, president of the Generalitat of Catalonia in exile. An agreement was made so that the Generalitat would be restored and limited competencies would be transferred while the constitution was still being written. In the end, the constitution and ratified in 1979, found a balance in recognizing the existence of nationalities and regions in Spain, within the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation. The starting point in the organization of Spain was the second article of the constitution. In order to exercise this right, the established a open process whereby the nationalities
7.
Rome
Rome is a special comune and the capital of Italy. Rome serves as the capital of the Lazio region, with 2,873,598 residents in 1,285 km2, it is the countrys largest and most populated comune and fourth-most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. It is the center of the Metropolitan City of Rome, which has a population of 4.3 million residents, the city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio, along the shores of the Tiber. Romes history spans more than 2,500 years, while Roman mythology dates the founding of Rome at only around 753 BC, the site has been inhabited for much longer, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in Europe. The citys early population originated from a mix of Latins, Etruscans and it was first called The Eternal City by the Roman poet Tibullus in the 1st century BC, and the expression was taken up by Ovid and Livy. Rome is called the Caput Mundi, due to that, Rome became first one of the major centres of the Italian Renaissance, and the birthplace of both the Baroque style and Neoclassicism.
Famous artists, painters and architects made Rome the centre of their activity, in 1871 Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1946 that of the Italian Republic. Rome has the status of a global city, Rome ranked in 2014 as the 14th-most-visited city in the world, 3rd most visited in the European Union, and the most popular tourist attraction in Italy. Its historic centre is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and museums such as the Vatican Museums and the Colosseum are among the worlds most visited tourist destinations with both locations receiving millions of tourists a year. Rome hosted the 1960 Summer Olympics and is the seat of United Nations Food, however, it is a possibility that the name Romulus was actually derived from Rome itself. As early as the 4th century, there have been alternate theories proposed on the origin of the name Roma. There is archaeological evidence of occupation of the Rome area from approximately 14,000 years ago. Evidence of stone tools and stone weapons attest to about 10,000 years of human presence, several excavations support the view that Rome grew from pastoral settlements on the Palatine Hill built above the area of the future Roman Forum.
Between the end of the age and the beginning of the Iron age. However, none of them had yet an urban quality, there is a wide consensus that the city was gradually born through the aggregation of several villages around the largest one, placed above the Palatine. All these happenings, which according to the excavations took place more or less around the mid of the 8th century BC. Despite recent excavations at the Palatine hill, the view that Rome has been indeed founded with an act of will as the legend suggests in the middle of the 8th century BC remains a fringe hypothesis. Traditional stories handed down by the ancient Romans themselves explain the earliest history of their city in terms of legend and myth
8.
Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population, the term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses, other common censuses include agriculture and traffic censuses. United Nations recommendations cover census topics to be collected, official definitions, the word is of Latin origin, during the Roman Republic, the census was a list that kept track of all adult males fit for military service. Current administrative data systems allow for other approaches to enumeration with the level of detail but raise concerns about privacy. A census can be contrasted with sampling in which information is obtained only from a subset of a population, typically main population estimates are updated by such intercensal estimates. Modern census data are used for research, business marketing, and planning. Census counts are necessary to adjust samples to be representative of a population by weighting them as is common in opinion polling, stratification requires knowledge of the relative sizes of different population strata which can be derived from census enumerations.
In some countries, the census provides the official used to apportion the number of elected representatives to regions. In many cases, a carefully chosen random sample can provide accurate information than attempts to get a population census. A census is often construed as the opposite of a sample as its intent is to count everyone in a rather than a fraction. However, population censuses rely on a frame to count the population. This is the way to be sure that everyone has been included as otherwise those not responding would not be followed up on. The fundamental premise of a census is that the population is not known, the use of a sampling frame is counterintuitive as it suggests that the population size is already known. However, a census is used to collect data on the individuals in the nation. This process of sampling marks the difference between historical census, which was a house to house process or the product of a decree. The sampling frame used by census is almost always an address register, thus it is not known if there is anyone resident or how many people there are in each household.
Depending on the mode of enumeration, a form is sent to the householder, as a preliminary to the dispatch of forms, census workers will check any address problems on the ground. While it may seem straightforward to use the postal service file for this purpose, a particular problem is what are termed communal establishments which category includes student residences, religious orders, homes for the elderly, people in prisons etc
9.
Pyrite
The mineral pyrite, or iron pyrite, known as fools gold, is an iron sulfide with the chemical formula FeS2. This minerals metallic luster and pale brass-yellow hue give it a resemblance to gold. The color has led to the nicknames brass, brazzle. Pyrite is the most common of the sulfide minerals, the name pyrite is derived from the Greek πυρίτης, of fire or in fire, in turn from πύρ, fire. 1550, the term had become a term for all of the sulfide minerals. Pyrite is usually associated with other sulfides or oxides in quartz veins, sedimentary rock. Despite being nicknamed fools gold, pyrite is sometimes found in association with small quantities of gold and arsenic occur as a coupled substitution in the pyrite structure. In the Carlin–type gold deposits, arsenian pyrite contains up to 0.37 wt% gold, Pyrite has been used since classical times to manufacture copperas, that is, iron sulfate. Iron pyrite was heaped up and allowed to weather, the acidic runoff from the heap was boiled with iron to produce iron sulfate.
In the 15th century, such leaching began to replace the burning of sulfur as a source of sulfuric acid, by the 19th century, it had become the dominant method. Pyrite remains in use for the production of sulfur dioxide, for use in such applications as the paper industry. Thermal decomposition of pyrite into FeS and elemental sulfur starts at 540 °C, a newer commercial use for pyrite is as the cathode material in Energizer brand non-rechargeable lithium batteries. Pyrite is a material with a band gap of 0.95 eV. During the early years of the 20th century, pyrite was used as a detector in radio receivers. Pyrite detectors occupied a midway point between galena detectors and the more mechanically complicated perikon mineral pairs, Pyrite detectors can be as sensitive as a modern 1N34A germanium diode detector. Pyrite has been proposed as an abundant, inexpensive material in low-cost photovoltaic solar panels, synthetic iron sulfide was used with copper sulfide to create the photovoltaic material.
Pyrite is used to make marcasite jewelry, marcasite jewelry, made from small faceted pieces of pyrite, often set in silver, was known since ancient times and was popular in the Victorian era. Marcasite jewelry does not actually contain the mineral marcasite, from the perspective of classical inorganic chemistry, which assigns formal oxidation states to each atom, pyrite is probably best described as Fe2+S22−
10.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
The Commission is responsible for commemorating Commonwealth civilians who died as a result of enemy action during World War II. The Commission was founded by Fabian Ware and constituted through Royal Charter in 1917 named the Imperial War Graves Commission, the change to the present name took place in 1960. The Commission, as part of its mandate, is responsible for commemorating all Commonwealth war dead individually and equally, to this end, the war dead are commemorated by name on a headstone, at an identified site of a burial, or on a memorial. War dead are commemorated uniformly and equally, irrespective of military or civil rank, the Commission is currently responsible for the continued commemoration of 1.7 million deceased Commonwealth military service members in 153 countries. Since its inception, the Commission has constructed approximately 2,500 war cemeteries, the Commission is currently responsible for the care of war dead at over 23,000 separate burial sites and the maintenance of more than 200 memorials worldwide.
The Commission operates through the financial support of the member states, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India. The current President of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is Prince Edward, at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Fabian Ware, a director of the Rio Tinto Company, found that he was too old, at age 45, to join the British Army. He used the influence of Rio Tinto chairman, Viscount Milner, the new Graves Registration Commission had over 31,000 graves of British and Imperial soldiers registered by October 1915 and 50,000 registered by May 1916. When municipal graveyards began to overfill Ware began negotiations with local authorities to acquire land for further cemeteries. Ware began with an agreement with France to build joint British, similar negotiations began with the Belgian government. As reports of the grave registration work became public, the Commission began to receive letters of enquiry, by 1917,17,000 photographs had been dispatched to relatives. In March 1915, the Commission, with the support of the Red Cross, began to dispatch photographic prints, the directorates work was extended beyond the Western Front and into other theatres of war, with units deployed in Greece and Mesopotamia.
As the war continued and others concerned about the fate of the graves in the post-war period. The National Committee for the Care of Soldiers Graves was created with the intention of taking over the work of the Directorate of Graves Registration, the government felt that it was more appropriate to entrust the work to a specially appointed body rather than to any existing government department. By early 1917, a number of members of the committee believed a formal imperial organisation would be needed to care for the graves. With the help of Edward, Prince of Wales, Ware submitted a memorandum to the Imperial War Conference in 1917 suggesting that an imperial organisation be constituted, the Commissions undertakings began in earnest at the end of the First World War. Once land for cemeteries and memorials had been guaranteed, the task of recording the details of the dead could begin. By 1918, some 587,000 graves had been identified, the scale, and associated high number of casualties, of the war produced an entirely new attitude towards the commemoration of war dead
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William, ed. (1854–1857). . Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. London: John Murray.
