Lech Wałęsa is a Polish statesman and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who served as the first democratically-elected President of Poland from 1990 to 1995. A shipyard electrician by trade, he became the leader of Solidarity, led a successful pro-democratic effort which in 1989 ended the communist rule in Poland and ushered in the end of the Cold War. While working at the Lenin Shipyard, Wałęsa, an electrician, became a trade-union activist, for which he was persecuted by the Communist authorities, placed under surveillance, fired in 1976, arrested several times. In August 1980 he was instrumental in political negotiations that led to the ground-breaking Gdańsk Agreement between striking workers and the government, he co-founded the Solidarity trade-union movement. After martial law was imposed in Poland and Solidarity was outlawed, Wałęsa was again arrested. Released from custody, he continued his activism and was prominent in the establishment of the 1989 Round Table Agreement that led to semi-free parliamentary elections in June 1989 and to a Solidarity-led government.

After winning the Polish presidential election of 1990, Wałęsa became the first President of Poland elected in a popular vote. He presided over Poland's successful transition from communism into a free-market liberal democracy, but his active role in Polish politics diminished after he narrowly lost the 1995 presidential election. In 1995 he established Lech Wałęsa Institute. Since 1980, Wałęsa has received hundreds of prizes and awards from many countries of the world, he was named the Time Person of the Year, one of Time's 100 most important people of the 20th century, received over forty honorary degrees, including from Harvard University and Columbia University as well as dozens of highest state orders: Presidential Medal of Freedom, Knight Grand Cross of the British Order of the Bath or French Grand Cross of Legion of Honour. In 1989, Wałęsa was the first foreign non-head of state to address the Joint Meeting of the U. S. Congress; the Gdansk Lech Wałęsa Airport bears his name since 2004 Wałęsa was born in Popowo, Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, Germany.

His father, Bolesław Wałęsa, was a carpenter, rounded up and interned in a forced labour camp at Młyniec by the German occupying forces before Lech was born. Bolesław returned home after the war but died two months from exhaustion and illness. Lech's mother, Feliksa Wałęsa, has been credited with shaping tenacity; when Lech was nine, Feliksa married Stanisław Wałęsa, a farmer. Lech had three elder full siblings. In 1973, Lech's mother and stepfather emigrated to the US for economic reasons, they lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, where Feliksa died in a car accident in 1975, Stanisław died of a heart attack in 1981. Both of them were buried in Poland. In 1961, Lech graduated from primary and vocational school in nearby Chalin and Lipno as a qualified electrician, he worked as a car mechanic from 1961 to 1965, embarked on his two-year, obligatory military service, attaining the rank of corporal before beginning work on 12 July 1967 as an electrician at Lenin Shipyard, now called Gdańsk Shipyard in Gdańsk.

On 8 November 1969, Wałęsa married Mirosława Danuta Gołoś, who worked at a flower shop near the Lenin Shipyard. Soon after they married, she began using her middle name more than her first name, per Lech's request; the couple had eight children. As of 2016, Anna is running her father's office in Gdańsk and Jarosław is a European MP. In 2008, Wałęsa underwent a coronary artery stent placement and the implantation of a cardiac pacemaker at the Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. From early in his career, Wałęsa was interested in workers' concerns, he was a charismatic leader, who helped organize the illegal 1970 protests at the Gdańsk Shipyard when workers protested the government's decree raising food prices and he was considered for the position of chairman of the strike committee. The strikes' outcome, which involved the deaths of over 30 workers, galvanized Wałęsa's views on the need for change. In June 1976, Wałęsa lost his job at the Gdańsk Shipyard because of his continued involvement in illegal unions, a campaign to commemorate the victims of the 1970 protests.

Afterwards he worked as an electrician for several other companies but his activism led to him continually being laid off and he was jobless for long periods. Wałęsa and his family were under constant surveillance by the Polish secret police. Over the next few years, he was arrested several times for participating in dissident activities. Wałęsa worked with the Workers' Defence Committee, a group that emerged to lend aid to people arrested after the 1976 labor strikes and to their families. In June 1978 he became an activist of the underground Free Trade Unions of the Coast. On 14 August 1980, another rise in food prices led to a strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, of which Wałęsa was one of the instigators. Wałęsa climbed over the shipyard fence and became one of t

Chico Mall is an enclosed shopping mall in Chico, California. Opened in 1988, it features J. C. Penney, Forever 21, Dick's Sporting Goods as its anchor stores; the mall opened in 1988. Its original anchor stores were Troutman's Emporium, Longs Drugs, Sears. Longs Drugs was soon converted to a J. C. Penney store; as a result, Longs moved its store to Paradise. Upon opening, the mall cost more than $4 million to build. Following the bankruptcy and closing of the Troutman's store, it was converted to Dick's Sporting Goods in 2012. Prior to this addition, original mall expansion plans instead called for demolishing the former Troutman's building home to a local furniture store, in favor of a new lifestyle center wing. After Gottschalks went out of business, its space became a Forever 21 store in 2009. Sears, the last remaining original anchor store, announced on June 6, 2017, that it would close the Chico Mall store in September 2017 as part of a plan to close 72 stores nationwide

In comparative genomics, a sequence graph called an alignment graph, breakpoint graph, or adjacency graph, is a bidirected graph in which the vertices represent segments of DNA and the edges represent adjacency between segments in a genome. The segments are labeled by the DNA string they represent, each edge connects the tail end of one segment with the head end of another segment; each adjacency edge is labelled by a string of DNA. Traversing a connected component of segments and adjacency edges yields a sequence, which represents a genome or a section of a genome; the segments can be thought of as synteny blocks, with the edges dictating how to arrange these blocks in a particular genome, the labelling of the adjacency edges representing bases that are not contained in synteny blocks. Sequence graphs can be used to represent multiple sequence alignments with the addition of a new kind of edge representing homology between segments. For a set of genomes, one can create an acyclic breakpoint graph with a thread for each genome.

For two segments and, where a, b, c, d represent the endpoints of the two segments, homology edges can be created from a to c and b to d or from a to d and b to c - representing the two possible orientations of the homology. The advantage of representing a multiple sequence alignment this way is that it is possible to include inversions and other structural rearrangements that wouldn't be allowable in a matrix representation. If there are multiple possible paths when traversing a thread in a sequence graph, multiple sequences can be represented by the same thread; this means it is possible to create a sequence graph that represents a population of individuals with different genomes - with each genome corresponding to one path through the graph. These graphs have been proposed as a replacement for the reference human genome