Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is a commune in the Bouches-du-Rhône department in southern France. The town is named after Saint Remigius. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is situated about 20 km south of Avignon, just north of the Alpilles mountain range; the Avignon-TGV high-speed train station is 20 km from the city. The closest airports are located in Avignon, Nîmes, Marseille. There are several highways and main roads which serve Saint-Remy; the A7 autoroute, which runs down the Rhone valley and connects Lyon to Marseille via Orange is about 12 km east of Saint Remy. The A54 autoroute runs from Nîmes to Salon-de-Provence, passes through Arles, 17 km away; the A9 is 20 km to the north-west and runs from Orange to Perpignan via Montpelier. The climate in the Alpilles is considered Mediterranean. Winters there are gentle and dry, summers are hot and dry; the highest average temperature is recorded in July and August 29 °C, the lowest in December and January 3 °C. The rainiest month is January with an average of 7 rainy days, compared with July, the driest month, with an average of 2 rainy days.

The Alpilles region receives more precipitation than 1 -- 2 cm more per year. There are about 30 days of frost per year. Snow can be heavy when it does fall; the mistral is a wind which blows violently from the north or the north-west during winter and spring. A strong wind is felt 100 days per year on average, a weaker wind 83 days; this leaves about 182 days without wind. There are two types of "mistral": the white mistral where the sky clears and the natural light increases, the black mistral, rarer but accompanied by rain. On the southern outskirts of the city, the ruins of the Roman city of Glanum can still be seen, including a "triumphal arch". Saint-Rémy-de-Provence was the birthplace of a 16th-century author of prophecies. Marie Gasquet, a Provençale novelist and queen of the Felibrige, was born in Saint-Remy-de-Provence; the painter Vincent van Gogh was treated here in the psychiatric center at Monastery Saint-Paul de Mausole. Pierre Daboval, lived for many years in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Princess Caroline of Monaco and her children lived in Saint-Rémy for several years following the death of her second husband, Stefano Casiraghi. Renaissance man and Nobel prizewinning thinker Albert Schweitzer was interned here from March to July 1918. In 1952 soaring over the mountains here Charles Atger set the world duration record in a sailplane, he stayed aloft for 15 minutes. Because of concerns over pilot exhaustion, this record category has been discontinued; the globally popular metal band Rammstein recorded their seventh album at Saint-Rémy's studio "La Fabrique". Communes of the Bouches-du-Rhône department Domaine Henri Milan INSEE Saint Rémy de Provence Tourist office website The Complete Works of Van Gogh, Saint-Rémy Official site Google aerial view Information and photos from ProvenceBeyond website

Joshua Prawer was a notable Israeli historian and a scholar of the Crusades and Kingdom of Jerusalem. His work attempted to portray Crusader society as a forerunner to European colonialist expansion, he was an important figure in Israeli higher education, was one of the founders of the University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University, was a major reformer of the Israeli education system. Prawer was born on November 10, 1917 to a prosperous Jewish merchant family in Będzin, a small city in the Polish part of Silesia, he grew up speaking Polish and German, learned Hebrew and Latin at school, after joining a Zionist group, learned Yiddish as well. He immigrated to Palestine in 1936, where he learned English, became a student of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. An invitation to study at the university was one of the few legal ways for Jews to enter the British Mandate of Palestine at the time, his mother died at the outbreak of World War II, most of his family died in the Holocaust.

Prawer found that he was unhappy with mathematics, his father suggested he study history instead since he had always enjoyed history in high school. His professor, Richard Koebner, an Anglophile historian of imperialism, set him on the course of studying the crusader colonies in the Holy Land; the close ties to Koebner were to have instilled in Prawer his interest in the history of settlements and colonialization. Prawer began his teaching career at the Hebrew University in 1947 and soon rose through the faculty ranks, he became deputy dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1953–55, was made professor and chair of medieval history in 1958, was dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1962–66, served as prorector at the university in the years 1975–78. In the process, he succeeded in making the university into a "global center" for Crusade Studies, trained many future Israeli historians in that specialty. Prawer has been described as an outstanding teacher and lecturer who combined thorough preparation with a charismatic style.

He was invited to lecture abroad. In addition to his work at the Hebrew University, Joshua Prawer was involved in the creation of other Israeli institutions of higher learning, namely Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the University of Haifa, where he was the first dean and academic chairman in the years 1966-8. Prawer was a key contributor to Israeli government policy as well. Between 1957 and 1959, at the request of David Ben-Gurion, he chaired the Pedagogic Secretariat of the Education Ministry, responsible for setting up new norms for Israeli secondary education, he fought against graded fees and for wider free compulsory education, gave high priority to social integration and the rights of Sephardi students. During that time and as advisor to education minister Zalman Aranne afterwards, he helped draft the principles for teaching "Jewish awareness" that were incorporated into the primary and secondary school curricula. In 1963-65, he chaired a committee of experts bearing his name that recommended a radical reform of the entire Israeli education system.

Its suggestions included making preschool enrollment universal for disadvantaged children, shortening elementary school to grades 1-6. The plan was approved by the Knesset and government, which allocated substantial resources to it, the program began to be implemented in the summer of 1968. Together with Professor H. Hanani, Prawer initiated the mechina university preparatory programs in 1963, which were intended to provide an additional year of study for Sephardic students after discharge from the defense forces, but were expanded to include foreign educated students and immigrants. Prawer served as chief editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica from 1967 onwards, with volume 21 the first to be published under his tenure, he advised and helped shape the Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem, was asked to advise the government on cultural agreements with other countries. In 1967, Prawer served as chairman of the Humanities Section of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, was elected as Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

In 1969, he received the Israel Prize in the humanities. In 1969, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Montpellier. In 1974, Prawer was honored as Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, In 1974, he was awarded the Rothschild Prize and the Order of the Chevalier de L'Ordre Nationale du Mérite. In 1982, he was presented with a festschrift containing papers by twenty-two historians during a special conference in Jerusalem. In 1987, Prawer and his colleagues hosted the Second International Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. In 1989, he was honored as a Yakir Yerushalayim. In an interview a year before his death, Joshua Prawer said his message for the Jerusalem of today is "that it is a universal city, belonging to all cultures and conquering time." Prawer died in Jerusalem on April 30, 1990. Prawer was part of a cadre of historians, including Claude Cahen and Jean Richard, who freed crusader studies from the old conception of crusader society as an exemp

The Gulf Labor Coalition or Gulf Labor is the name of a coalition of artists and activists founded in 2011 and based in New York, United States, organized to bring awareness to issues surrounding the living and working conditions of migrant laborers responsible for building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed Palace Museum on Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island, United Arab Emirates, along with other buildings on the island including a New York University Abu Dhabi campus. The group seeks to call attention to increasing influx of foreign workers into Abu Dhabi from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the low pay and inadequate housing conditions given to these migrant workers, the corrupt and misleading practices of labor recruiters, growing economic and class divides in Abu Dhabi; the Groups's concern with housing conditions of Saadiyat Island's migrant workers was centered around criticism of the Saadiyat Accommodation Village compound, which can hold up to 20,000 workers.

The group circulates petitions related to works rights. Members of the group's core organizing committee include Haig Aivazian, Ayreen Anastas, Doug Ashford, Doris Bittar, Sam Durant, Rene Gabri, Hans Haacke, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Michael Rakowitz, Walid Raad, Andrew Ross, Gregory Sholette, Ashok Sukumaran, Shaina Anand, Mariam Ghani, Naeem Mohaiemen, Tania Bruguera, Rene Gabri, Nitasha Dhillon, Amin Husain, Paula Chakravartty, Noah Fischer. Gulf Labor includes affiliated offshoot groups including G. U. L. F. Occupy Museums, Who Builds Your Museum? Another affiliate of Gulf Labor is Gulf Labor West based in California, whose exhibit, "Labor Migrant Gulf" was part of 52 Weeks. "Building Towers, Cheating Workers", Human Rights Watch. November 12, 2006. "The Island of Happiness: Exploitation of Migrant Workers on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi." Human Rights Watch. May 19, 2009. "Labor Camps in the Gulf States." Middle East Institute. February 2, 2010. "The Arab World's Forgotten Rebellions: Foreign Workers and Biopolitics in the Gulf" Kanna, Ahmed.

Samar Magazine. May, 2011. "Dhaka Principles for Migration with Dignity." Institute for Human Rights & Business. May, 2011. "The Island of Happiness Revisited." Human Rights Watch. March 21, 2012. Monitoring report on labor conditions in Saadiyat Island. Gulf Labor. April, 2014. "Labor Conditions at N. Y. U.'s Abu Dhabi Campus to Be Investigated by U. S. Firm." The New York Times. June 26, 2014. On November 5, 2014, 2014, Gulf Labor offshoot G. U. L. F. Unfurls a three-story banner in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. On February 22, 2014, dropped leaflets and educational materials from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's rotunda and hung a manifesto on a lower wall. On March 29, 2014, demonstrators from the Gulf Labor Coalition offshoot Global Ultra Luxury Faction, repeated the February action, dropping mock dollar bills from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's rotunda; the bills contains illustrations of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi surrounded by American dollars. On May 8, 2015, Gulf Labor and other arts groups including Venice-based groups, Sale Docks and Macao, occupied Venice's Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

This action was the first marking Gulf Labor's participation in the 2015 Venice Biennial for Okwui Enwezor's exhibition, "All the World's Futures." Gulf Labor website