Alessandro Spezialetti
Alessandro Spezialetti is an Italian former professional road bicycle racer, who competed professionally between 1997 and 2012. He was known as top domestique in Grand Tours. Alessandro Spezialetti at Cycling Archives Profile from L. P. R. Brakes official website
Jona
Jona is a former municipality in the Wahlkreis of See-Gaster in the canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Jona is located at the eastern shore of Obersee, it has been part of the municipality of Rapperswil-Jona since 2007, as before comprising the villages of Bollingen, Curtiberg, Kempraten-Lenggis and Wurmsbach. The river Jona flows through the municipality in the Lake Zürich, the settlement is named after the river, first recorded in Latinized form Johanna in AD 834, as super Johannam fluvium; the Middle High German form Jonun is recorded 1243. The river name was adapted into Alemannic around the 8th century from a Gallo-Roman *Jauna as a weakly inflecting feminine *Jōna, yielding modern dialectal Jōne. In 1350, Rapperswil and its castle was destroyed by Rudolf Brun, the Herrschaft Rapperswil – Rapperswil and some surrounding villages including Jona – was acquired by the Habsburg family. After 1803's Act of Mediation and Jona joined the canton of St. Gallen, the former Herrschaft Rapperswil was split into the municipalities Rapperswil and Jona.
Jona, as municipality, was established in 1803 around the former boundaries of the city of Rapperswil, comprising the small rest of the former Herrschaft Rapperswil and the villages of Bollingen, Curtiberg, Kempraten-Lenggis and Wurmsbach. In the early 19th century, Jona river's hydropower was used for a larger number of watermills along the small river; as a renewable source, the river was important for industrialization of the growing village. On January 1, 2007, the municipalities of Rapperswil and Jona merged to form a new political entity: Rapperswil-Jona has a population of 25,777; this makes it the second largest town in the canton after the capital St. Gallen itself; the town's bus service has been provided, since 2008, by the Verkehrsbetriebe Zürichsee und Oberland. Jona railway station area will be newly constructed by the end 2015, as well as the bus station situated nearby. Alberich Zwyssig the present Swiss national anthem. Carl Gustav Jung a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology Wangpo Tethong, Swiss-Tibetan activist, spokesperson of Greenpeace Switzerland and member of the 15th Tibetan Parliament in Exile Eugen Halter: Geschichte der Gemeinde Jona.
Politische Gemeinde Jona, Schweizer Verlagshaus, Zürich 1970. Rapperswil-Jona Bollingen in German and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. Busskirch in German and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. Jona in German and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. Kempraten in German and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland
Ziegelbrücke
Ziegelbrücke is a village in Switzerland. Ziegelbrücke is shared by the municipalities of Niederurnen in the canton of Glarus and Schänis in the canton of St. Gallen; the village of Ziegelbrücke is divided by the Linth into two halves: The northern part, including Ziegelbrücke railway station, is located in the municipality of Schänis in the canton of St. Gallen; the southern part, on the other side of the Linth, is located in the canton of Glarus in the municipality of Glarus Nord. At the former Roman tariff station, near the Maag and Linth rivers between Lake Walen and Lake Zürich, a Mercury statue was found; the center of the village is situated on the territory of the canton of Glarus around Fritz & Caspar Jenny AG, a spinning and weaving factoring established in 1833, and, part of the Inventory of Swiss Heritage Sites. The vocational school of Glarus is situated in the Glarus part of Ziegelbrücke. On the side of the canton of St. Gallen, Ziegelbrücke railway station is located. Ziegelbrücke railway station is a nodal point of the SBB-CFF-FFS lines between Chur.
The station is a terminus of the Zürich S-Bahn on the line S2 to Effretikon, of the regional line to Schänis and Rapperswil. In addition, the Postauto and local Autobetrieb Weesen-Amden bus lines connect the communities in the Wahlkreis See-Gaster and the municipalities Bilten and Niederurnen. Niederurnen official website Schänis official website
Swiss Reformed Church
The Swiss Reformed Church is the Reformed branch of Protestantism in Switzerland started in Zürich by Huldrych Zwingli and spread within a few years to Basel, Bern, St. Gallen, to cities in southern Germany and via Alsace to France. Switzerland is the birthplace of the Reformed tradition as it was Zwingli who first preached it in 1519. Since 1920, the Swiss Reformed Churches have been organized in 26 member churches of the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches; as of 2017, 2,150,387 people are registered members of a Reformed cantonal church. The Reformation spread into the cities of Switzerland, composed of loosely connected cantons. Breakthrough began in the 1520s in Zurich under Zwingli, in Bern in 1528 under Berchtold Haller, in Basel in 1529 under Johannes Oecolampadius. After the early death of Zwingli in 1531, the Reformation continued; the French-speaking cities Neuchâtel and Lausanne changed to the Reformation ten years under William Farel and John Calvin coming from France. The Zwingli and Calvin branches had each their theological distinctions, but in 1549 under the lead of Bullinger and Calvin they came to a common agreement in the Consensus Tigurinus, 1566 in the Second Helvetic Confession.
The German Reformed ideological center was Zurich, the French speaking Reformed movement bastion was Geneva. A distinctive feature of the Swiss Reformed churches in the Zwinglian tradition is their almost symbiotic link to the state, only loosening in the present. In cities where the Reformed faith became leading theology, several confessions were written, some of them: The 67 Articles of Zurich Theses of Berne 1528 Berne Synodus 1532 Confession of Geneva 1537 Second Helvetic Confession written by Bullinger in 1566In the mid 19th century, opposition to liberal theology and interventions by the state led to secessions in several cantonal churches. One of these secessionist churches still exists today, the Evangelical Free Church of Geneva, founded in 1849, while a couple of others have reunited with the Swiss Reformed Church in 1943 and 1966. An important issue to liberal theologians was the Apostles' Creed, they questioned its binding character. This caused a heated debate; until the late 1870s, most cantonal reformed churches stopped prescribing any particular creed.
In 1920 the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches, with 24 member churches — 22 cantonal churches and 2 free churches, was formed to serve as a legal umbrella before the federal government and represent the church in international relations. Like many European Protestant denominations, several of the Swiss Reformed churches have welcomed gay and lesbian members to celebrate their civil unions within a church context; as early as 1999, the Reformed Churches in St. Gallen and Lucerne had permitted prayer and celebration services for same-sex couples to recognize their civil unions. Since the Reformed Church in Aargau has allowed for prayer services to celebrate same-sex couples. To date, seven other Swiss Reformed churches, including Bern-Jura-Solothurn, Graubünden, Ticino, Vaud, Zürich, have allowed prayer or blessing services for same-sex civil unions. Organizationally, the Reformed Churches in Switzerland remain cantonal units; the German churches are more in the Zwinglian tradition. They are governed synodically and their relation to the respective canton ranges from independent to close collaboration, depending on historical developments.
Reformed Churches in the Swiss cantons: Reformed Church of Aargau Evangelical-Reformed Church of Appenzell Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton Basel-Landschaft Evangelical-Reformed Church of the Canton Basel-Stadt Reformed Churches of the Canton Bern-Jura-Solothurn Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton Freiburg Protestant Church of Geneva Evangelical Free Church of Geneva Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Glarus Evangelical Reformed Church of Graubünden Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Lucerne Reformed Church of the Canton of Neuchâtel Evangelical-Reformed Church of Nidwalen Association of Evangelical Reformed Churches in the Canton of Obwalden Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of St. Gallen Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Schaffhausen Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Schwyz Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Solothurn Evangelical Reformed Church of Ticino Evangelical Church of the Canton of Thurgau Evangelical Reformed Church of Uri Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Vaud Evangelical Reformed Church in Valais Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zürich Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zug
2006 Winter Olympics
The 2006 Winter Olympics known as the XX Olympic Winter Games and known as Turin 2006 or Torino 2006, was a winter multi-sport event, held in Turin, Italy from February 10 to 26, 2006. This marked the second time that Italy had hosted the Winter Olympic Games, the first being the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo. Italy hosted the Summer Olympics in 1960 in Rome. Turin was selected as the host city for the 2006 Games in June 1999; the official motto of the XX Olympic Winter Games was "Passion lives here". The official logo depicts a stylized profile of the Mole Antonelliana building, drawn in white and blue ice crystals, signifying the snow and the sky; the crystal web was meant to portray the web of new technologies and the Olympic spirit of community. The Olympic mascots of the Games were Neve, a female snowball, Gliz, a male ice cube. Turin was chosen as the host of the Olympics on June 19, 1999, at the 109th IOC Session in Seoul, South Korea; this was after the IOC had adopted new election procedures during the 108th Extraordinary IOC Session in light of the controversies surrounding the votes for the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics.
Since IOC members were forbidden from visiting the candidate cities, the 109th IOC Session elected a special body, the Selection College, to choose finalist cities from the pool of candidate cities after each had made their final presentations to the full IOC Session. The full IOC Session voted on the cities chosen as finalist cities by the Selection College. Although six cities launched candidacies and made presentations to the full IOC Session, the Selection College chose only two cities to go forward to be voted upon by the full IOC Session: Sion and Turin; the candidacies of Helsinki, Finland. The selection of Turin over Sion came as a surprise, since Sion was the overwhelming favorite in part because the IOC is based in Switzerland. Turin's selection came two years after Rome's unsuccessful 2004 Summer Olympics bid; those games were awarded to Athens, Greece. The information below comes from the International Olympic Committee Vote History web page; the Oxford Olympics Study established the outturn cost of the Torino 2006 Winter Olympics at USD 4.4 billion in 2015-dollars and cost overrun at 80% in real terms.
This includes sports-related costs only, that is, operational costs incurred by the organizing committee for the purpose of staging the Games, e.g. expenditures for technology, workforce, security, catering and medical services, direct capital costs incurred by the host city and country or private investors to build, e.g. the competition venues, the Olympic village, international broadcast center, media and press center, which are required to host the Games. Indirect capital costs are not included, such as for road, rail, or airport infrastructure, or for hotel upgrades or other business investment incurred in preparation for the Games but not directly related to staging the Games; the cost and cost overrun for Torino 2006 compares with costs of USD 2.5 billion and a cost overrun of 13% for Vancouver 2010, costs of USD 51 billion and a cost overrun of 289% for Sochi 2014, the latter being the most costly Olympics to date. Average cost for Winter Games since 1960 is USD 3.1 billion, average cost overrun is 142%.
The 2006 Winter Olympics featured 84 medal events over 15 disciplines in 7 sports. Events that made their Olympic debut in Turin included mass start biathlon, team sprint cross-country skiing, snowboard cross and team pursuit speed skating. Most of the cross-country skiing events at these Games involved different distances from those at the previous Winter Games in 2002; the classical men's 50 km and women's 30 km distances, which were held at Salt Lake 2002, were not included in these Games, as these events were alternated with freestyle events of the same distances. The following list shows the disciplines that were contested at the 2006 Games. Numbers in parentheses indicate the number of medal events contested in each separate discipline. All dates are in Central European Time The top ten listed NOCs by number of gold medals are listed below. Host country To sort this table by nation, total medal count, or any other column, click on the icon next to the column title. Stefania Belmondo, a 10-time Olympic medalist in cross-country skiing, lit the Olympic Flame during the opening ceremony on February 10.
Before that, the ceremony celebrated the best of Italy and Sport including a segment honoring the Alps. The FilmMaster Group K-events created and produced the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the XX Winter Olympic Games in Turin in 2006. Executive Producer Marco Balich, Content Supervisor Alfredo Accatino, Art Direction Lida Castelli. Monica Maimone of Studio Festi directed the section From Renaissance To Baroque, part of the Opening Ceremony; the first gold medal of the 2006 Games was awarded in the 20 kilometre biathlon, won by German Michael Greis on the first day of competition. Ice hockey began with the women's competition. On February 12, Latvia won its first winter Olympic medal when Mārtiņš Rubenis took the bronze in the men's luge. Armin Zöggeler's win in that event gave Italy its first gold medal of the Games, his fourth in a row. Chinese figure skating pair Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao, trailing a
Muslims
Muslims are people who follow or practice Islam, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion. Muslims consider the Quran, their holy book, to be the verbatim word of God as revealed to the Islamic prophet and messenger Muhammad; the majority of Muslims follow the teachings and practices of Muhammad as recorded in traditional accounts. "Muslim" is an Arabic word meaning "submitter". The largest denomination of Islam are Sunni Muslims who constitute 85-90% of the total Muslim population, followed by the Shia who make up most of the remainder of Muslims; the beliefs of Muslims include: that God is eternal and one. The religious practices of Muslims are enumerated in the Five Pillars of Islam: the declaration of faith, daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. To become a Muslim and to convert to Islam, it is essential to utter the Shahada, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, a declaration of faith and trust that professes that there is only one God and that Muhammad is God's messenger.
It is a set statement recited in Arabic: lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāhu muḥammadun rasūlu-llāh "There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the messenger of God."In Sunni Islam, the shahada has two parts: la ilaha illa'llah, Muhammadun rasul Allah, which are sometimes referred to as the first shahada and the second shahada. The first statement of the shahada is known as the tahlīl. In Shia Islam, the shahada has a third part, a phrase concerning Ali, the first Shia Imam and the fourth Rashid caliph of Sunni Islam: وعليٌ وليُّ الله, which translates to "Ali is the wali of God; the word muslim is the active participle of the same verb of which islām is a verbal noun, based on the triliteral S-L-M "to be whole, intact". A female adherent is a muslima; the plural form in Arabic is muslimūn or muslimīn, its feminine equivalent is muslimāt. The ordinary word in English is "Muslim", it is sometimes transliterated as "Moslem", an older spelling. The word Mosalman is a common equivalent for Muslim used in South Asia.
Until at least the mid-1960s, many English-language writers used the term Mahometans. Although such terms were not intended to be pejorative, Muslims argue that the terms are offensive because they imply that Muslims worship Muhammad rather than God. Other obsolete terms include Muslimist. Musulmán/Mosalmán is modified from Arabic, it is the origin of the Spanish word musulmán, the German Muselmann, the French word musulman, the Polish words muzułmanin and muzułmański, the Portuguese word muçulmano, the Italian word mussulmano or musulmano, the Romanian word musulman and the Greek word μουσουλμάνος. In English it has become archaic in usage. Apart from Persian, Polish, Portuguese and Greek, the term could be found, with obvious local differences, in Armenian, Pashto, Hindi, Marathi, Turkish, Uzbek, Azeri, Hungarian, Bosnian, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian and Sanskrit; the Muslim philosopher Ibn Arabi said: A Muslim is a person who has dedicated his worship to God... Islam means making one's religion and faith God's alone.
The Qur'an describes many prophets and messengers within Judaism and Christianity, their respective followers, as Muslim: Adam, Abraham, Jacob and Jesus and his apostles are all considered to be Muslims in the Qur'an. The Qur'an states that these men were Muslims because they submitted to God, preached His message and upheld His values, which included praying, charity and pilgrimage. Thus, in Surah 3:52 of the Qur'an, Jesus' disciples tell him, "We believe in God. In Muslim belief, before the Qur'an, God had given the Tawrat to Moses, the Zabur to David and the Injil to Jesus, who are all considered important Muslim prophets; the most populous Muslim-majority country is Indonesia, home to 12.7% of the world's Muslims, followed by Pakistan and Egypt. About 20 % of the world's Muslims lives in the Middle North Africa. Sizable minorities are found in India, Russia, the Americas and parts of Europe; the country with the highest proportion of self-described Muslims as a proportion of its total population is Morocco.
Converts and immigrant communities are found in every part of the world. Over 75–90% of Muslims are Sunni; the second and third largest sects and Ahmadiyya, make up 10–20%, 1% respectively. With about 1.8 billion followers a quarter of earth's population, Islam is the second-largest and the fastest-growing religion in the world. Due to the young age and high fertilit
Eastern Orthodox Church
The Eastern Orthodox Church the Orthodox Catholic Church, is the second-largest Christian church, with 200–260 million members. It operates as a communion of autocephalous churches, each governed by its bishops in local synods, although half of Eastern Orthodox Christians live in Russia; the church has no central doctrinal or governmental authority analogous to the Bishop of Rome, but the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is recognised by all as primus inter pares of the bishops. As one of the oldest religious institutions in the world, the Eastern Orthodox Church has played a prominent role in the history and culture of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Near East. Eastern Orthodox theology is based on the Nicene Creed; the church teaches that it is the One, Holy and Apostolic church established by Jesus Christ in his Great Commission, that its bishops are the successors of Christ's apostles. It maintains, its patriarchates, reminiscent of the pentarchy, autocephalous and autonomous churches reflect a variety of hierarchical organisation.
Of its innumerable sacred mysteries, it recognises seven major sacraments, of which the Eucharist is the principal one, celebrated liturgically in synaxis. The church teaches that through consecration invoked by a priest, the sacrificial bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ; the Virgin Mary is venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the God-bearer, honoured in devotions. The Eastern Orthodox Church shared communion with the Roman Catholic Church until the East–West Schism in 1054, triggered by disputes over doctrine the authority of the Pope. Before the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, the Oriental Orthodox churches shared in this communion, separating over differences in Christology; the majority of Eastern Orthodox Christians live in Southeast and Eastern Europe, Cyprus and other communities in the Caucasus region, communities in Siberia reaching the Russian Far East. There are smaller communities in the former Byzantine regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Middle East where it is decreasing due to persecution.
There are many in other parts of the world, formed through diaspora and missionary activity. In keeping with the church's teaching on universality and with the Nicene Creed, Orthodox authorities such as Saint Raphael of Brooklyn have insisted that the full name of the church has always included the term "Catholic", as in "Holy Orthodox Catholic Apostolic Church"; the official name of the Eastern Orthodox Church is the "Orthodox Catholic Church". It is the name by which the church refers to itself in its liturgical or canonical texts, in official publications, in official contexts or administrative documents. Orthodox teachers refer to the church as Catholic; this name and longer variants containing "Catholic" are recognised and referenced in other books and publications by secular or non-Orthodox writers. The common name of the church, "Eastern Orthodox Church", is a shortened practicality that helps to avoid confusions in casual use. From ancient times through the first millennium, Greek was the most prevalent shared language in the demographic regions where the Byzantine Empire flourished, Greek, being the language in which the New Testament was written, was the primary liturgical language of the church.
For this reason, the eastern churches were sometimes identified as "Greek" before the Great Schism of 1054. After 1054, "Greek Orthodox" or "Greek Catholic" marked a church as being in communion with Constantinople, much as "Catholic" did for communion with Rome; this identification with Greek, became confusing with time. Missionaries brought Orthodoxy to many regions without ethnic Greeks, where the Greek language was not spoken. In addition, struggles between Rome and Constantinople to control parts of Southeastern Europe resulted in the conversion of some churches to Rome, which also used "Greek Catholic" to indicate their continued use of the Byzantine rites. Today, many of those same churches remain, while a large number of Orthodox are not of Greek national origin, do not use Greek as the language of worship. "Eastern" indicates the geographical element in the Church's origin and development, while "Orthodox" indicates the faith, as well as communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
There are additional Christian churches in the east that are in communion with neither Rome nor Constantinople, who tend to be distinguished by the category named "Oriental Orthodox". While the church continues to call itself "Catholic", for reasons of universality, the common title of "Eastern Orthodox Church" avoids casual confusion with the Roman Catholic Church; the first known use of the phrase "the catholic Church" occurred in a letter written about 110 AD from one Greek church to another. The letter states: "Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be as where Jesus may be, there is the universal Church." Thus from the beginning, Christians referred to the Church as the "One, Holy and Apostolic Church". The Eastern Orthodox Church claims that it is today the continuation and preservation of that same early Church. A number of other Christian churches make a similar claim: the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, the Assyrian Church and the Oriental Orthodox.
In the Eastern Orthodox v
