Nadia Elena Comăneci is a Romanian retired gymnast and a five-time Olympic gold medalist, all in individual events. In 1976 at the age of 14, Comăneci was the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0 at the Olympic Games. At the same Games, she received six more perfect 10s for events en route to winning three gold medals. At the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Comăneci won two more gold medals and attained two more perfect 10s. During her career, Comăneci won nine Olympic medals and four World Artistic Gymnastics Championship medals. Comăneci is one of the world's best-known gymnasts and is credited with popularizing the sport around the globe. In 2000, she was named as one of the Athletes of the 20th Century by the Laureus World Sports Academy, she has lived in the United States since 1989. She worked with and married American Olympic gold medal gymnast Bart Conner, who set up his own school. In 2012 she became a naturalized United States citizen, has dual citizenship maintaining her citizenship in Romania.

Nadia Elena Comăneci was born on November 12, 1961, in Onești, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains, in Bacău County, Romania, in the historical region of Western Moldavia. She was born to Gheorghe and Ștefania Comăneci, has a younger brother, her parents separated in the 1970s, her father moved to Bucharest, the capital. She and her younger brother Adrian were raised in the Romanian Orthodox Church. In a 2011 interview, Nadia's mother Ștefania said that she enrolled her daughter into gymnastics classes because she was a child, so full of energy and active that she was difficult to manage. After years of top-level athletic competition, Comăneci graduated from Politehnica University of Bucharest with a degree in sports education, which gave her the qualifications to coach gymnastics. Comăneci began gymnastics in kindergarten with a local team called Flacăra, with coaches Duncan and Munteanu. At age 6, she was chosen to attend Béla Károlyi's experimental gymnastics school after Károlyi spotted her and a friend turning cartwheels in a schoolyard.

Károlyi was looking for gymnasts. When recess ended, the girls went inside and Károlyi went around the classrooms trying to find them. By 1968, when she was seven, Comăneci had started training with Károlyi, she was one of the first students at the gymnastics school established in Onești by Béla and his wife, Márta. As a resident of the town, Comăneci was able to live at home for many years. In 1970, Comăneci began competing as a member of her hometown team and, at age nine, became the youngest gymnast to win the Romanian Nationals. In 1971, she participated in her first international competition, a dual junior meet between Romania and Yugoslavia, winning her first all-around title, contributing to the team gold. For the next few years, she competed as a junior in numerous national contests in Romania and dual meets with countries such as Hungary and Poland. At the age of 11, in 1973, she won the all-around gold, as well as the vault and uneven bars titles, at the Junior Friendship Tournament, an important international meet for junior gymnasts.

Comăneci's first major international success came at the age of 13, when she nearly swept the 1975 European Women's Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Skien, Norway. She won the all-around and gold medals in every event but the floor exercise, in which she placed second, she continued to enjoy success that year, winning the all-around at the "Champions All" competition, placing first in the all-around, vault and bars at the Romanian National Championships. In the pre-Olympic test event in Montreal, Comăneci won the all-around and the balance beam golds, as well as silvers in the vault and bars. Accomplished Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim won the golds in those events and was one of Comăneci's greatest rivals during the next five years. In March 1976, Comăneci competed in the inaugural edition of the American Cup at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, she received rare scores of 10, which signified a perfect routine without any deductions, for her vault in the preliminary stage and for her floor exercise routine in the final of the all-around competition, which she won.

During this competition, Comăneci met American gymnast Bart Conner for the first time. While he remembered this meeting, Comăneci noted in her memoirs that she had to be reminded of it in life, she was 14 and Conner was celebrating his 18th birthday. They both were photographed together. A few months they participated in the 1976 Summer Olympics that Comăneci dominated, while Conner was a marginal figure. Conner said, "Nobody knew me, didn't pay attention to me." At Montreal received four of her seven 10s on the uneven bars. The apparatus demands such a spectacular burst of energy in such a short time—only 23 seconds—that it attracts the most fanfare, but it is on the beam. She scored three of her seven 10s on the beam, her hands speak there as much as her body. Her pace magnifies her balance, her command and distance hush the crowd. On 18 July 1976, Comăneci made history at the Montreal Olympics. During the team compulsory portion of the competition, she was awarded the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics for her routine on the uneven bars.

But Omega SA, the traditional Olympics

Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival is an international chamber music festival held every July for two weeks in Kuhmo, Finland. It is the largest chamber music festival in Finland in terms of sold tickets; the festival attracts 6,000–8,000 visitors annually, with 95% of them being from Finland. The number of concerts held within the two weeks is around 70. 170 artists from Finland and abroad perform at the festival. The Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival offers music courses, master classes and chamber music workshops that are taught by the festival artists; the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival was founded by a Finnish cellist Seppo Kimanen in 1970. He and a handful of fellow students were looking for a place to arrange music courses and play chamber music; the total number of the audience in the 1970 festival was 800. In 2013, there were 72 concerts and over 36 000 tickets sold. Vladimir Mendelssohn has been the Artistic Director of the festival since 2005; the main venue is the Kuhmo Arts Centre. It was opened in 1993, it is renowned for both its acoustics and design.

There are two halls. Other venues include the Kontio Kuhmo Church. Hillila, Ruth-Esther and Hong, Barbara Blanchard. "Kuhmo Festival". Historical Dictionary of the Music and Musicians of Finland, pp. 195–196. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-313-27728-1 Subrenat, Jean-Jacques: Listen, There’s Music from the Forest: A Short Presentation of the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival. ISBN 952-92-0564-3. Official website

Plain Folk of the Old South is a 1949 book by Vanderbilt University historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians. In it he used statistical data to analyze the makeup of Southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was thought. Historians have long debated the social and political roles of Southern classes. Terms used by scholars for the non-elite class include "common people" and "yeomen." At a lower status level are the poor whites known disparagingly, in some areas of the South, as "Crackers."In the colonial and antebellum years, subsistence farmers tended to settle in the back country and uplands. They did not raise commodity crops and owned few or no slaves. Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats favored the term "yeoman" for a land-owning farmer, it emphasized economic self-reliance. Northerners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled in and wrote about the 1850s South, through the early 20th-century historians such as William E. Dodd and Ulrich B.

Phillips, assessed common southerners as minor players in antebellum social and political life of the South. Twentieth-century romantic portrayals of the antebellum South, such as Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind and the 1939 film adaptation ignored the yeomen; the nostalgic view of the South emphasized the elite planter class of wealth and refinement, controlling large plantations and numerous slaves. Novelist Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road portrayed the degraded condition of whites dwelling beyond the great plantations; the major challenge to the view of planter dominance came from historian Frank Lawrence Owsley in Plain Folk of the Old South. His work ignited a long historiographical debate. Owsley started with the work of Daniel R. Hundley, who in 1860 had defined the southern middle class as "farmers, traders, artisans, mechanics, a few manufacturers, a goodly number of country school teachers, a host of half-fledged country lawyers, doctors and the like". To find these people, Owsley turned to the name-by-name files on the manuscript federal census.

Using their own newly invented codes, the Owsleys created databases from the manuscript federal census returns and trial records, local government documents and wills. They gathered data on all southerners. Historian Vernon Burton described Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South, as "one of the most influential works on southern history written". Plain Folk argued that southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role in it; the religion and culture of these common people created a democratic "plain folk" society. Critics say Owsley overemphasized the size of the southern landholding middle class, while excluding the large class of poor whites who owned neither land nor slaves. Owsley believed. In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina, Orville Vernon Burton classified white society into the poor, the yeoman middle class, the elite. A clear line demarcated the elite, but according to Burton, the line between poor and yeoman was less distinct.

Stephanie McCurry argues that yeomen were distinguished from poor whites by their ownership of land. Yeomen were "self-working farmers", distinct from the elite because they physically labored on their land alongside any slaves they owned. Planters with numerous slaves had work, managerial, they supervised an overseer rather than the slaves themselves. Wetherington argues the plain folk supported secession to defend their families and notions of white liberty. During the war, the established patriarchy continued to control the home front and kept it functioning though growing numbers of plain folk joined the new wartime poor. Wetherington suggests that their localism and racism dovetailed with a republican ideology founded on Jeffersonian notions of an "economically independent yeomanry sharing common interests". Plain folk during the war raised subsistence crops and vegetables and relied on a free and open range to hunt hogs. Examples of these conditions can be seen in the award-winning novel Cold Mountain.

Before the war, they became more active in the cotton and slave markets, but plain folk remained unwilling to jeopardize their self-sufficiency and the stability of their neighborhoods for the economic interests of planters. The soldiers had their own reasons for fighting. First and foremost, they sought to protect home from Yankee threats. White supremacy and masculinity depended on slavery. Plain-folk concepts of masculinity explain why so many men enlisted: they wanted to be worthy of the privileges of men, including the affections of female patriots. By March 1862, the piney woods region of Georgia had a 60% enlistment rate, comparable to that found in planter areas; as the war dragged on, hardship became a way of life. Wetherington reports that enough men remained home to preserve the paternalistic social order, but there were too few to prevent mounting deprivation. Wartime shortages increased the economic divide between planters and yeoman farmers. Wetherington's argument weakens other scholars' suggestions that class conflict led to Confederate defeat.

More damaging to Confederate nationalism was the growing lo

Skyway Airlines was an American ramp and aircraft ground handling services and catering company based in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Until April 5, 2008, it operated as a regional airline and banner carrier for Midwest Express Airlines under the business name Midwest Connect, feeding Midwest's hub at General Mitchell International Airport with twelve 32-seat Fairchild-Dornier 328JET regional jet aircraft, four 19-seat Beechcraft 1900 commuter turboprops. Skyway Airlines, along with its parent corporation, Midwest Air Group, has since ceased operations. Skyway Airlines, operating as the Midwest Express Connection, began flight operations on April 17, 1989. Skyway began operations as a division of Phoenix, Arizona-based Mesa Air Group. Mesa's Skyway Airlines division operated Beechcraft 1900C 19-passenger airliners, providing regional airline feed to Midwest Express Airlines in Milwaukee and Rockford, Illinois. In 1994, Midwest Express established Astral Aviation, Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary to take over the operation of Skyway Airlines.

The 1900C aircraft were replaced with 15 brand-new Beechcraft 1900D aircraft. The first flight took place from Milwaukee to Flint, Michigan, on February 15, 1994. Skyway grew to connect Milwaukee with communities in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, Arkansas, Tennessee and Toronto, Canada. In 1999, Skyway became the world launch customer for the Fairchild Dornier 328JET aircraft, a 32-seat jet, it acquired 12 328JETs. The 328JETs allowed Skyway to provide new service to cities as far as Hartford, New York City, Washington, D. C. and Raleigh-Durham, to provide more comfortable passenger accommodations on routes served by the Beechcraft 1900. Skyway planned to transition to an all-jet fleet by obtaining additional 328JET aircraft, purchasing German manufacturer Fairchild Dornier's planned 44-seat version, known as the 428JET, phasing out the Beechcraft 1900. While the September 11 attacks impacted all U. S. airlines, other events brought about the end of Skyway Airlines. Skyway's plans to continue modernizing its fleet with additional Dornier aircraft unwound when Dornier failed, parent company Midwest Air Group's financial problems caused it to end Skyway's flight operations.

In 2002, Dornier, an aviation pioneer dating back to the 1930s, became insolvent. Production of the 328JET stopped; this interrupted Skyway's plans to further expand its jet fleet and replace the Beechcraft 1900. AvCraft Aviation, a Virginia-based parts supplier for the 328 turboprop and the 328JET, purchased the production rights for the 328JET from Fairchild Dornier's receivers, planned to re-establish production of the type. AvCraft went bankrupt; this made further growth of the 328JET fleet impossible. The other regional jets built by Canadair and Embraer had substantial order backlogs, the training and inventory costs of running a small airline with three different aircraft types made another jet purchase financially impractical. Without having an available replacement aircraft, Skyway began to draw down its Beechcraft 1900 fleet, planning to eliminate that fleet. In March, 2003, Midwest Express Airlines changed its name to Midwest Airlines. Astral Aviation, Inc. d/b/a Skyway Airlines reincorporated and changed its name, to Skyway Airlines, Inc. d/b/a Midwest Connect.

New logos were designed for both airlines' aircraft and uniforms, the connection between Midwest Airlines and Midwest Connect was made more obvious for marketing purposes. In 2006, Midwest Airlines announced that it would obtain additional regional feed from SkyWest Airlines, an independently owned airline based in St. George, Utah which operated Canadair regional jets; the SkyWest aircraft would bear the name "Midwest Connect." Midwest announced that it would operate the Skyway operations side-by-side. In 2006 and 2007, Midwest Air Group fought off a hostile takeover attempt by rival airline AirTran Airways. Midwest Air Group's leadership persuaded Northwest Airlines and private equity firm TPG Capital to enter the bidding as a white knight. Northwest and TPG purchased Midwest Air Group, with 47% and 53% ownership stakes, respectively. Following the Northwest Airlines/TPG purchase, Midwest announced on January 16, 2008 that it would terminate all Skyway Airlines flight operations and transfer the remaining Midwest Connect flying to SkyWest.

Midwest discussed a potential contract with Great Lakes Airlines to provide code-share feed to the Essential Air Service cities they would serve from Milwaukee. The Skyway subsidiary would remain as a ramp services and catering company for Midwest Airlines and for certain Midwest Connect operations. Skyway's last day of flight operations was April 5, 2008. On the last day of flight operations, Skyway Airlines operated 12 328JETs and 4 Beechcraft 1900D aircraft; the last 328JET flight operated from Indianapolis to Milwaukee. The last Beech flight operated a round-robin from Milwaukee to Muskegon and Manistee and back to Milwaukee. Midwest in a financially weakened condition following the September 11, 2001 attacks and the aforementioned takeover battle, suffered another severe financial blow as a result of the 2008 fuel price spike. Midwest's fleet of MD-80 airliners had been well suited to its markets and Midwest's high-service business model during the 1990s, but by 2008 it was no longer fuel efficient as compared with newer aircraft designs.

Midwest returned them to their lessors. Shortly thereafter, as the result of a failed lease renegotiation with Boeing, Mi

Maureen Crisp is a writer, literary blogger and book awards judge. In 2017, she was awarded the Storylines Betty Gilderdale Award for outstanding service to children’s literature and she delivered the Storylines Spring Lecture on 27 November 2017, she lives in New Zealand. Maureen Crisp taught for many years in primary schools in Wellington before deciding to concentrate on writing and other literary activities, she has been published by the New Zealand School Journal and Marmac Media and was one of the founding authors of the children’s writing online competition FABO Story. As Chair of the Wellington Children’s Book Association, she was convenor of two national conferences for children’s writers and illustrators: Spinning Gold in 2009 and Tinderbox in 2015. In 2018, she was selected as one of the judges for the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, she writes a weekly blog about developments in the writing and publishing world, contributes to the Writer's Island podcast and is a creative writing workshop presenter.

She is married with three children, likes writing science fiction, has a keen interest in astronomy and lives in Wellington. In 2017, Maureen Crisp was awarded the Storylines Betty Gilderdale Award for outstanding service to children’s literature, she delivered the Storylines Spring Lecture on Monday 27 November 2017 in Wellington. Bones, illustrated by Robert Calvert How to Lose a Rock Star Circus Quest series The Playbill, ill. Irina Burtseva Magician’s Moustache, ill. Irina Burtseva Performing Poodles, ill. Irina Burtseva Tumbling Town, ill. Irina Burtseva List of New Zealand literary awards Betty Gilderdale Award Maureen Crisp's blog

Swall Meadows is a census-designated place in southern Mono County, California. The community is residential, including second homes and a volunteer fire department, but no commercial development. Geographically, it sits partway up the Sherwin Grade below the Wheeler Crest of the eastern Sierra Nevada, at an elevation range of 6,000 to 7,000 feet, it is in pinon-juniper/subalpine zone habitat, with views south along the Sierra Crest of Mt. Tom, east across Owens Valley to the White Mountains toward Nevada, it is accessed from Lower Rock Creek Road. Swall Meadows is 20 miles north of Bishop and 25 miles south of Mammoth Lakes, it is well known in the area as an important deer migration route for the Round Valley mule deer population, which cherish the grazing in the meadow and apple falls from the old orchard trees. The ZIP Code is 93514; the community is inside area code 760. The population was 220 as of the 2010 census. According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP covers an area of 4.5 square miles, all of it land.

At the high, northwestern end is the old Sky Meadows Ranch houses and firehouse near the meadow, at the southeast end a development known as Pinyon Ranch. In addition to the predominant pinyon-juniper-sagebrush habitat, there are permanent and seasonal streams and the eponymous meadow with wetter-habitat vegetation such as Jeffrey pines, willows and bog orchids, the remnant trees of the old commercial apple orchard. In 2011 the Eastern Sierra Land Trust secured a conservation easement to protect 104 acres of the Swall Meadows meadow area, for the continued benefit of the migrating mule deer. A number of other conservation easements have been completed in Swall Meadows since the ESLT organization was founded in 2001. Between Paradise and Swall Meadows the old wagon road can be seen that climbed about 3,000 ft up the Sherwin Grade from Owens Valley toward Crowley Lake; the 2010 United States Census reported that Swall Meadows had a population of 220. The population density was 49.3 people per square mile.

The racial makeup of Swall Meadows was 201 White, 0 African American, 3 Native American, 5 Asian, 0 Pacific Islander, 2 from other races, 9 from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 6 persons; the Census reported that 220 people lived in households, 0 lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, 0 were institutionalized. There were 98 households, out of which 25 had children under the age of 18 living in them, 68 were opposite-sex married couples living together, 4 had a female householder with no husband present, 3 had a male householder with no wife present. There were 2 unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, 0 same-sex married couples or partnerships. 21 households were made up of individuals and 10 had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.24. There were 75 families; the population was spread out with 36 people under the age of 18, 6 people aged 18 to 24, 37 people aged 25 to 44, 99 people aged 45 to 64, 42 people who were 65 years of age or older.

The median age was 53.8 years. For every 100 females, there were 89.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 100.0 males. There were 128 housing units at an average density of 28.7 per square mile, of which 90 were owner-occupied, 8 were occupied by renters. The homeowner vacancy rate was 0%. 201 people lived in owner-occupied housing units and 19 people lived in rental housing units. In the California State Legislature, Swall Meadows is in the 8th Senate District, represented by Republican Andreas Borgeas, in the 5th Assembly District, represented by Republican Frank Bigelow. In the United States House of Representatives, Swall Meadows is in California's 8th congressional district, represented by Republican Paul Cook. On February 6, 2015, Swall Meadows and the neighboring community of Paradise were ravaged by the Round Fire, which burned 7,000 acres; the fire destroyed 40 homes: 39 homes in 1 home in Paradise. 2015 California wildfires Photos and video of Round Fire at Swall Meadows