Miletus was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria. Its ruins are located near the modern village of Balat in Turkey. Before the Persian invasion in the middle of the 6th century BC, Miletus was considered the greatest and wealthiest of Greek cities. Evidence of first settlement at the site has been made inaccessible by the rise of sea level and deposition of sediments from the Maeander; the first available evidence is of the Neolithic. In the early and middle Bronze age the settlement came under Minoan influence. Legend has it; the site was renamed Miletus after a place in Crete. The Late Bronze Age, 13th century BC, saw the arrival of Luwian language speakers from south central Anatolia calling themselves the Carians. In that century other Greeks arrived; the city at that time rebelled against the Hittite Empire. After the fall of that empire the city was destroyed in the 12th century BC and starting about 1000 BC was resettled extensively by the Ionian Greeks.

Legend offers an Ionian foundation event sponsored by a founder named Neleus from the Peloponnesus. The Greek Dark Ages were a time of Ionian settlement and consolidation in an alliance called the Ionian League; the Archaic Period of Greece began with a sudden and brilliant flash of art and philosophy on the coast of Anatolia. In the 6th century BC, Miletus was the site of origin of the Greek philosophical tradition, when Thales, followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes began to speculate about the material constitution of the world, to propose speculative naturalistic explanations for various natural phenomena. Miletus is the birthplace of the Hagia Sophia's architect Isidore of Miletus and Thales, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher in c. 624 BC. The ruins appear on satellite maps at 37°31.8'N 27°16.7'E, about 3 km north of Balat and 3 km east of Batıköy in Aydın Province, Turkey. In antiquity the city possessed a Harbor at the southern entry of a large bay, on which two more of the traditional twelve Ionian cities stood: Priene and Myus.

The harbor of Miletus was additionally protected by the nearby small island of Lade. Over the centuries the gulf silted up with alluvium carried by the Meander River. Priene and Myus had lost their harbors by the Roman era, Miletus itself became an inland town in the early Christian era. There is a Great Harbor Monument where, according to the New Testament account, the apostle Paul stopped on his way back to Jerusalem by boat, he met the Ephesian Elders and headed out to the beach to bid them farewell, recorded in the book of Acts 20:17-38. During the Pleistocene epoch the Miletus region was submerged in the Aegean Sea, it subsequently emerged the sea reaching a low level of about 130 meters below present level at about 18,000 BP. The site of Miletus was part of the mainland. A gradual rise brought a level of about 1.75 meters below present at about 5500 BP, creating several karst block islands of limestone, the location of the first settlements at Miletus. At about 1500 BC the karst shifted due to small crustal movements and the islands consolidated into a peninsula.

Since the sea has risen 1.75 m but the peninsula has been surrounded by sediment from the Maeander river and is now land-locked. Sedimentation of the harbor began at about 1000 BC, by AD 300 Lake Bafa had been created; the earliest available archaeological evidence indicates that the islands on which Miletus was placed were inhabited by a Neolithic population in 3500–3000 BC. Pollen in core samples from Lake Bafa in the Latmus region inland of Miletus suggests that a grazed climax forest prevailed in the Maeander valley, otherwise untenanted. Sparse Neolithic settlements were made at springs and sometimes geothermal in this karst, rift valley topography; the islands offshore were settled for their strategic significance at the mouth of the Maeander, a route inland protected by escarpments. The graziers in the valley may have belonged to them; the prehistoric archaeology of the Early and Middle Bronze Age portrays a city influenced by society and events elsewhere in the Aegean, rather than inland.

Beginning at about 1900 BC artifacts of the Minoan civilization acquired by trade arrived at Miletus. For some centuries the location received a strong impulse from that civilization, an archaeological fact that tends to support but not confirm the founding legend—that is, a population influx, from Crete. According to Strabo:Ephorus says: Miletus was first founded and fortified above the sea by Cretans, where the Miletus of olden times is now situated, being settled by Sarpedon, who brought colonists from the Cretan Miletus and named the city after that Miletus, the place being in possession of the Leleges; the legends recounted as history by the ancient historians and geographers are the strongest. Recorded history at Miletus begins with the records of the Hittite Empire and the Mycenaean records of Pylos and Knossos, in the Late Bronze Age. Miletus was a Mycenaean stronghold on the coast of Asia Minor from c. 1450 to 1100 BC. In c. 1320 BC, the city supported an anti-Hittite rebellion of Uhha-Ziti of nearby Arzawa.

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HM Prison Kirkham is a Category D men's prison, located southwest of Kirkham in Lancashire, England. The prison is operated by Her Majesty's Prison Service; the prison's location was the site of RAF Kirkham, built by George Wimpey on 220 acres of land bordering the A583 road from Blackpool to Preston. Work commenced in 1939 and the camp opened in 1940 as a training camp for RAF tradesmen. Up to 1945 it allied service men and women. In November 1941 Kirkham became the main armament training centre for the RAF, with 21 different trades and 86 different courses on equipment and weapons. Pupils came not only from the Commonwealth of Nations, but the United States, the Netherlands, France, Norway and Belgium. Kirkham had 10 hangars as well as its own hospital. From May to December 1945 Kirkham became a demob centre. After the war it trained RAF boy entrants until December 1957. In the early 1960s part of the facility was taken over by the Home Office with HMP Kirkham opening in 1962 as an open prison.

The rest of the land is now used for agricultural purposes and a nature reserve. Today most of the infrastructure and buildings of the prison are still of World War II vintage, though prisoner accommodation is located in more modern buildings. In June 2003 it emerged that Kirkham Prison had seen more prisoners abscond than any other open prison in England and Wales. Statistics showed that 911 inmates had absconded from 1998 to 2003. In January 2004 Kirkham became the first prison in England to trial the Intermittent Custody Scheme; the scheme saw some inmates held at Kirkham from Monday to Friday, while another set of prisoners were held on Saturdays and Sundays. The scheme was designed to allow prisoners on short sentences to remain in employment, independent housing and maintain family ties during their jail terms; the scheme was subsequently abandoned in November 2006. In August 2004 the Prison Reform Trust issued statistics revealing that Kirkham had the worst record for inmate drug use of all prisons in England.

A survey of drug tests at the prison showed that 35% of inmates tested positive for controlled substances. In 2011 inmates were involved in a scheme to restore Blackpool trams on behalf of the Friends of Fleetwood Trams. Kirkham is an open men's prison, holds Category D prisoners who can reasonably be trusted to serve their sentence in open conditions. Kirkham provides afternoon education provided by The Manchester College. Offenders are employed in the prison's kitchen, workshops and gardens and works departments; the full operational capacity is 630. There are 24 dormitories, of varying size, each with its own telephone. There are 572 each with its own key. Nine of the rooms are double occupancy. All rooms have television access and three of the dormitories have personal en-suite facilities including showers. There are limited disabled facilities with wheelchair access. In 2012 the prison celebrated its 50th anniversary. George Reynolds Ian Brown Simon Garner Jan Mølby Ministry of Justice pages on Kirkham

The 2016 NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship was the first annual tournament to determine the national champion of NCAA women's collegiate beach volleyball in the United States. The tournament was played on the beaches of Gulf Shores, hosted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham, from May 6–8, 2016; the American Volleyball Coaches Association had sponsored a beach volleyball championship prior to the NCAA's sanctioning of the sport in 2015. USC defeated Florida State in the championship match, 3 sets to 0, to clinch the inaugural national title; this was the Trojans' second consecutive national title, having won the last AVCA tournament before the change in the event's sponsor. There is only one national championship for beach volleyball, so all sixty NCAA beach volleyball programs, whether from the Division I, Division II, Division III, were eligible for the tournament field. A total of eight teams were invited to contest this championship. Three bids were awarded to the top three teams in both the East and West Regions, two at-large bids were awarded to the best remaining teams from either region.

All eight teams were subsequently seeded and paired accordingly in the first round of a double-elimination style tournament to be played across a three-day span. Matches were won by the first team to win three-of-five sets. NCAA Women's Indoor Volleyball Championships NCAA Men's National Collegiate Volleyball Championship