The Northrop B-2 Spirit known as the Stealth Bomber, is an American heavy strategic bomber, featuring low observable stealth technology designed for penetrating dense anti-aircraft defenses. The bomber can deploy both conventional and thermonuclear weapons, such as up to eighty 500-pound class Mk 82 JDAM Global Positioning System-guided bombs, or sixteen 2,400-pound B83 nuclear bombs; the B-2 is the only acknowledged aircraft that can carry large air-to-surface standoff weapons in a stealth configuration. Development started under the "Advanced Technology Bomber" project during the Carter administration; the ATB project continued during the Reagan administration, but worries about delays in its introduction led to the reinstatement of the B-1 program. Program costs rose throughout development. Designed and manufactured by Northrop Northrop Grumman, the cost of each aircraft averaged US$737 million. Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft, which includes spare parts, equipment and software support.

The total program cost, which included development and testing, averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997. Because of its considerable capital and operating costs, the project was controversial in the U. S. Congress; the winding-down of the Cold War in the latter portion of the 1980s reduced the need for the aircraft, designed with the intention of penetrating Soviet airspace and attacking high-value targets. During the late 1980s and 1990s, Congress slashed plans to purchase 132 bombers to 21. In 2008, a B-2 was destroyed in a crash shortly after takeoff. Twenty B-2s are in service with the United States Air Force, which plans to operate them until 2032; the B-2 is capable of all-altitude attack missions up to 50,000 feet, with a range of more than 6,000 nautical miles on internal fuel and over 10,000 nautical miles with one midair refueling. It entered service in 1997 as the second aircraft designed to have advanced stealth technology after the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk attack aircraft. Though designed as a nuclear bomber, the B-2 was first used in combat dropping conventional, non-nuclear ordnance in the Kosovo War in 1999.

It served in Iraq and Libya. By the mid-1970s, military aircraft designers had learned of a new method to avoid missiles and interceptors, known today as "stealth"; the concept was to build an aircraft with an airframe that deflected or absorbed radar signals so that little was reflected back to the radar unit. An aircraft having radar stealth characteristics would be able to fly nearly undetected and could be attacked only by weapons and systems not relying on radar. Although other detection measures existed, such as human observation, infrared scanners, acoustic locators, their short detection range or poorly-developed technology allowed most aircraft to fly undetected, or at least untracked at night. In 1974, DARPA requested information from U. S. aviation firms about the largest radar cross-section of an aircraft that would remain invisible to radars. Northrop and McDonnell Douglas were selected for further development. Lockheed had experience in this field due to developing the Lockheed A-12 and SR-71, which included a number of stealthy features, notably its canted vertical stabilizers, the use of composite materials in key locations, the overall surface finish in radar-absorbing paint.

A key improvement was the introduction of computer models used to predict the radar reflections from flat surfaces where collected data drove the design of a "faceted" aircraft. Development of the first such designs started in 1975 with "the Hopeless Diamond", a model Lockheed built to test the concept. Plans were well advanced by the summer of 1975, when DARPA started the Experimental Survivability Testbed project. Northrop and Lockheed were awarded contracts in the first round of testing. Lockheed received the sole award for the second test round in April 1976 leading to the Have Blue program and the F-117 stealth attack aircraft. Northrop had a classified technology demonstration aircraft, the Tacit Blue in development in 1979 at Area 51, it developed stealth technology, LO, fly-by-wire, curved surfaces, composite materials, electronic intelligence, Battlefield Surveillance Aircraft Experimental. "The stealth technology developed from the program was incorporated into other operational aircraft designs, including the B-2 stealth bomber".

By 1976, these programs had progressed to a position in which a long-range strategic stealth bomber appeared viable. President Carter became aware of these developments during 1977, it appears to have been one of the major reasons the B-1 was canceled. Further studies were ordered in early 1978, by which point the Have Blue platform had flown and proven the concepts. During the 1980 presidential election campaign in 1979, Ronald Reagan stated that Carter was weak on defense, used the B-1 as a prime example. In response, on 22 August 1980 the Carter administration publicly disclosed that the United States Department of Defense was working to develop stealth aircraft, including a bomber; the Advanced Technology Bomber program began in 1979. Full development of the black project followed, was funded under the code name "Aurora". After the evaluations of the companies' proposals, the ATB competition was narrowed to the Northrop/Boeing and Lockheed/Rockwell teams with each receivi

Kyaw Nyein, called honorifically U Kyaw Nyein (Burmese: ဦးကျော်ငြိမ်း. A proponent of import substitution, he pursued the industrialization of Burma, he was a driving force of Burma's non-alignment policy, an advocate for a Third Force position of post-colonial countries, a main initiator of the Asian Socialist Conference. Kyaw Nyein was born January 19, 1913, in Pyinmana, British Burma as third child to Daw Thon and Po Toke, a lawyer and leader of the General Council of Burmese Associations, he attended the King Edward Memorial School in Pyinmana where he befriended Than Tun, who would become chairman of the Communist Party of Burma. In 1930, he became engaged in university politics. Together with Thein Pe Myint he fought against the closing down of Mandalay College. After passing the Intermediate, he and Thein Pe Myint transferred in 1933 from Mandalay College to Rangoon University, where he joined the English Honors program. Following his graduation in 1936, he entered law school and supported himself teaching English as a tutor at the Rangoon University, where he met his future wife, Daw Nwe Nwe Yee.

He subsequently worked as appraiser in the customs department. While a senior student at Rangoon University, he continued his student activism. In 1933, he introduced him to Thein Pe Myint and Than Tun. In the same year, he, Aung San and Thein Pe Myint decided to run for offices of the Rangoon University Student Union's executive council, he and Thein Pe Myint were elected in Aung San in a second. As executive council member of the RUSU, Kyaw Nyein was in charge of public relations and became editor of the RUSU Bulletin. Kyaw Nyein served as the first post-independence Minister of Home Affairs and assumed in September of 1948 additionally the offices of Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister U Nu. In early April 1949, at the height of multiple insurgencies, when the U Nu government had lost control of most of Burma's territory, he and five fellow socialist ministers were pressured by the army chief Ne Win to resign. Thakin Tin, one of the ministers involved, recalled the course of events:"One day, General Ne Win showed up at our meeting and informed us that the communists had communicated to him their desire to form a coalition government with the army if we socialists would resign from the government.

We replied that in the interest of the country and peace, all socialist comrades are ready to resign. However, Prime Minister U Nu is not under our influence and therefore he, Ne Win, should cooperate with U Nu to form a government. Ne Win agreed to our suggestion. Two or three days General Ne Win came back informing us that the communists had agreed to our suggestion. However, the communists demanded that we resigned from our positions before they come to Rangoon to work out the details of the arrangements. So we resigned and made the announcement in radio and newspapers. Moreover, General Ne Win said to U Kyaw Nyein and I, that the two of us should temporarily go into hiding when the communists entered the government."Kyaw Nyein reentered U Nu's cabinet in 1951 and held various minister positions until the split of the AFPFL into two factions in 1958. From 1946 to 1958, he was General Secretary of both the Burma Socialist Party and the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League. After the split, he became a leader of the Stable AFPFL faction alongside Ba Swe.

Detained in August 1963 after the 1962 military coup d'état of General Ne Win, he was released in February 1968 at the height of tensions between Burma and China and an escalating civil war between Ne Win's armed forces and the China-backed Burma Communist Party. In the same year, he and other veteran politicians among them U Nu and U Ba Swe were invited by Ne Win to advise his Revolutionary Council on drafting a national constitution and "ways of improving the country's stability and prosperity." Together with twenty-one politicians of the thirty-three members of the advisory committee, he proposed a return to democracy with a mixed economy while a minority of eleven proposed a one-party system. The chairman of the Revolutionary Council Ne Win rejected the majority advice, he established in 1974 a Soviet-style one-party socialist system based on a new constitution. He died in Rangoon after a long illness on 29 June 1986, aged 73, he has been called "the brain of Burma's drive to socialism."

Dagmar Enkelmann is a German politician. In 2005 she became Parliamentary Party Manager for Die Linke in the Bundestag, a position from which she resigned in 2013 after losing her seat. In December 2012 she took on the chair of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a position to which she was elected in succession to Heinz Vietze. Dagmar Gertraud Elsa Ebert was born in Altlandsberg, a small historic town a short distance to the east of Berlin and at that time in the Bezirk Frankfurt of East Germany, she attended school in nearby Strausberg, passing her school leaving exams in 1974, which opened the way to a university level education. Between 1974 and 1979 she was a student of the History faculty at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, she emerged with an extensive knowledge of Marxist sociology and a degree in 1979. After that she taught history between 1979 and 1985 at the "Wilhelm Pieck FDJ Youth Academy" at Bogensee, near Bernau and just outside Berlin. From 1985 till 1989 she was a post-graduate student at the ruling party central committee's Academy for Social Sciences.

It was here that she submitted her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Analysis and critique of concepts of the bourgeois ideologues in West Germany: Identity Crises of East German youth". The modalities of what happened next were affected by the political changes that followed the breach of the Berlin Wall by protestors in 1989, but Dagmar Ebert received what amounted to a doctorate, though not the form of doctorate she would have been anticipating when she embarked on her researches for the work four years earlier. Dagmar Enkelmann joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1977; the SED was the ruling party. She engaged in women work. After reunification the party rebranded itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism and scrambled to reinvent itself for a democratic future. Enkelmann stayed with the party, she served between 2003 and 2006 as deputy leader of the PDS. In regional elections in Brandenburg in 2004 she put herself forward as an alternative to the regional minister president Matthias Platzeck of the centre-left Social Democratic Party.

The party's share of the vote increased to 28 %. It was the best result the PDS had achieved in Brandenburg since reunification and the restoration in 1990 of Brandenburg as a state with its own regional legislature. However, it was not enough to overturn the governing coalition; as a result of the 2007 merger between the PDS and the WASG movement, Dagmar Enkelmann became a member of the party now branded as Die Linke. At a time when her youngest child was still a young baby, Enkelmann came to national politics through active participation in the Round table movement. Between March and October 1990 she was a member of East Germany's first - and as matters turned out last - elected national parliament, she became co-leader of the PDS group in the chamber, one of two PDS party members elected by party colleagues to the chambers' Präsidium. Reunification took place formally in October 1990, at which point the East German Volkskammer and the West German Bundestag were merged. In order to respect demographic fairness, only 143 members of the 400 seat East German chamber retained seats in the combined assembly.

Dagmar Enkelmann was one of these, however. She was re-elected to the Bundestag, representing the Brandenburg electoral district in 1990, again in 1994, leaving the Bundestag in 1998, still aged only 42, she told an interviewer that "eight years in such an exposed position" had been enough, although she never expressly ruled out a return to national politics. Between September 1999 and October 2005 she was a member of the Brandenburg regional parliament, serving till 2004 as a member of the regional party executive, spokesperson on environment and energy policy and a member of the committee for agriculture, environmental protection and planning. During 2004/2005 Dagmar Enkelmann was the leader of the PDS group in the Brandenburger Landtag. At the 2005 general election Dagmar Enkelmann returned to the National Parliament, she served as Parliamentary Party Manager for Die Linke between 2005 and 2013. In order to avoid the distortions arising in wholly constituency based systems, the German electoral system allocates some seats on a list basis, shared between the parties according to their overall vote shares.

In 2005 Enkelmann was elected because her name was sufficiently high up on the regional PDS party list. In the Bundestag she became a member of the chamber's Council of Elders serving on the committee for election verification, parliamentary immunity and procedure. In the 2009 general election she stood as a "direct candidate" for the Barnim II electoral district. However, in the 2013 general election, when she stood for re-election in the same constituency, she lost out to the CDU candidate, Hans-Georg von der Marwitz. Unlike von der Marwitz, Enkelmann had rejected the idea of having her name placed on her party list as insurance against not securing direct election in the Barnim constituency, accordingly in 2013 she left the Bundestag for a second time. On 26 February 2010 Dagmar Enkelmann was one of a large number of PDS Bundestag members to be expelled from the chamber durin