The Swedish Academy, founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. Its 18 members, who are elected for life, comprise the highest Swedish language authority. Outside Scandinavia, it is best known as the body that chooses the laureates for the annual Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in memory of the donor Alfred Nobel; the Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members, it is said that Gustaf III intended there to be twenty members, half the number of those in the French Academy, but decided on eighteen because the Swedish word for that number, "Aderton", had such a fine ring. The academy's motto is "Talent and Taste"; the academy's primary purpose is to further the "purity and sublimity of the Swedish language". To that end the academy publishes two dictionaries; the first is a one-volume glossary called Svenska Akademiens ordlista. The second is a multi-volume dictionary, edited on principles similar to those of the Oxford English Dictionary, entitled Svenska Akademiens Ordbok.

The SAOL has reached its 14th edition while the first volume of the SAOB was published in 1898 and, as of 2017, work has progressed to words beginning with the letter "V". The building now known as the Stockholm Stock Exchange Building was built for the bourgeoisie; the bottom floor was used as a trading exchange, the upper floor was used for balls, New Year's Eve parties, etc. When the academy was founded, the ballroom was the biggest room in Stockholm that could be heated and thus used in the winter, so the King asked if he could borrow it; the academy has had its annual meeting there every year since, attended by members of the Swedish royal family. However, it was not until 1914 that the academy gained permanent use of the upper floor as their own, it is here that the academy meets and, amongst other business, announces the names of Nobel Prize laureates. This task arguably makes the academy one of the world's most influential literary bodies. Members are elected by a secret ballot in the Academy and before the result is made public it must be submitted to the Academy's Patron, the King of Sweden, for his approval.

Members of the Academy include writers, literary scholars, historians and a prominent jurist. Writers were in the minority in the Academy, but during the twentieth century the number of writers grew to represent more than half of The Eighteen; the Swedish Academy have a long history of being a male dominated institution, but the Academy has moved towards better equality. Since 20 December 2019 one third of the chairs belong to female Academy members. Prior to 2018 it was not possible for members of the academy to resign; this happened twice to Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt, excluded in 1794, re-elected in 1805 and excluded again in 1811. In 1989, Werner Aspenström, Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten chose to stop participating in the meetings of the academy, over its refusal to express support for Salman Rushdie when Ayatollah Khomeini condemned him to death for The Satanic Verses, in 2005, Knut Ahnlund made the same decision, as a protest against the choice of Elfriede Jelinek as Nobel laureate for 2004.

On 25 November 2017, Lotta Lotass said in an interview that she had not participated in the meetings of the academy for more than two years and did not consider herself a member any more. Dag Hammarskjöld's former farm at Backåkra, close to Ystad in southern Sweden, was bought in 1957 as a summer residence by Hammarskjöld Secretary-General of the United Nations; the south wing of the farm is reserved as a summer retreat for the 18 members of the Swedish Academy, of which Hammarskjöld was a member. On 11 April 2019, the academy published its financial statements for the first time in its history. According to it, the academy owned financial assets worth 1.58 billion Swedish kronor at the end of 2018. In April 2018, three members of the academy board resigned in response to a sexual-misconduct investigation involving author Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of board member Katarina Frostenson. Arnault was accused by at least 18 women of sexual harassment; the three members resigned in protest over the lack of appropriate action against Arnault.

Two former permanent secretaries, Sture Allén and Horace Engdahl, called the current leader, Sara Danius, a weak leader. On 10 April, Danius resigned from her position with the academy, bringing the number of empty seats to four. Frostenson voluntarily agreed to withdraw from participating in the academy, bringing the total of withdrawals to five; because two other seats were still vacant after the Rushdie affair, this left only 11 active members. The scandal was seen as damaging to the credibility of the Nobel prize in Literature and the authority of the academy. "With this scandal you cannot say that this group of people has any kind of solid judgment," noted Swedish journalist Björn Wiman. On 27 April 2018, the Swedish Economic Crime Authority opened a preliminary investigation regarding financial crime linked to an association run by Arnault and Frostenson, which had received funding from the academy. On 2 May 2018, the Swedish King amended the rules of the academy and made it possible for members to resign.

The new rules state that a member, inactive in the work of the academy for more than two years can be asked to resign. Following the new rules, the first members to formally be granted permission to leave the acade

The 2014 World Championship of Ping Pong was a table tennis tournament. The tournament used standardized sand paper covered paddles, as opposed to the paddles used in table tennis events that have rubber surfaces with optional sponge underneath for more spin and speed; this ping pong tournament was held from 4 January 2014 to 5 January 2014 at the Great Hall in Alexandra Palace. The tournament was organized by the sport event promotion company Matchroom Sport. Russian Maxim Shmyrev won the tournament for the third year in a row; the format of the tournament consisted of sixty-four of the best ping pong players. The remaining thirty-two competed in a knockout form for the championship

Virginia Mennonite Missions is a mission agency owned by and affiliated with Virginia Mennonite Conference and headquartered in Harrisonburg, Virginia. VMM works in the United States, it was founded in 1919 as Virginia Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities, a board responsible to the Conference, which oversaw church planting efforts in western Virginia and eastern West Virginia. A number of congregations in that region are still members of Virginia Mennonite Conference and support the work of Virginia Mennonite Missions; the agency name was shortened to Virginia Mennonite Board of Missions, used until 2007, when it changed to Virginia Mennonite Missions. VMM sends both short-term mission workers. There are a handful of US-based service areas for long-term workers. VMM has a growing presence in the Caribbean region, in the Mediterranean region, in several US states working with church planting. Virginia Mennonite Missions has two short-term mission programs: Partners in Mission, from a week to a month of service, tranSend, a one-year program for individuals and couples exploring a future long-term ministry.

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Laura Feiersinger is an Austrian football midfielder playing for 1. FFC Frankfurt in the German Bundesliga. Feiersinger starter her senior career with USK Hof in the Austrian league, she spent two years at the club, scoring 9 goals. Feiersinger was recruited and signed for Herforder SV who played in the Frauen-Bundesliga, the top flight of German Football; this move required her to leave home at age 18. While playing for Herforder she made 18 regular season appearances. Feiersinger left the club after they were relegated to the 2. Frauen-Bundesliga. Feiersinger signed for Bundesliga side FC Bayern Munich in 2011. During her first year at the club she won the DFB Pokal, Germany's second-most important title in women's football. In March 2014 she suffered a serious injury, breaking her fibula. However, she was able to get her contract with the club renewed in 2015, she went on to win back to back Frauen Bundesliga titles in 2014–2015 and 2015–2016. At the time of her departure in 2016 Feiersinger had made 62 regular season appearances.

Feiersinger moved to SC Sand ahead of the 2016–2017 season in order to get more regular playing time. During her first season with the club she was runner-up for the 2016–17 DFB-Pokal Frauen, she left SC Sand after 39 regular season appearances and 5 goals. Feiersinger signed Bundesliga side 1. FFC Frankfurt ahead of their 2018–2019 season on a two-year contract. During her first year with the club she made scoring 10 goals, she has been a member of the Austrian national team since 2010. With Austria she won the 2016 Cyprus Cup, she was part of the squad which qualified and went to their first major tournament, the UEFA Women's Euro 2017 in the Netherlands. The team did exceptionally well. Feiersinger players every single minute of the tournament for Austria; when Feiersinger was younger she tried a variety of sports including biathlon, cross country and football. She entered the Austrian sports school model and at age 15 decided to specialize as a footballer. Wolfgang Feiersinger, her father, is a former footballer who won the champions league playing for Borussia Dortmund and played for the Austrian national team.

Feiersinger pursued a bachelor's degree in sports science. Bayern MünchenBundesliga: Winner 2014–15, 2015–16 DFB-Pokal: Winner 2011–12AustriaCyprus Women's Cup: Winner 2016IndividualAustrian Footballer of the Year: 2012 Feiersinger is one of UEFA's official ambassadors for #WePlayStrong, a social media and vlogging campaign, launched in 2018; the campaign's "...aim is to promote women’s football as much as we can and to make people aware of women’s football, really,” Evans, another participant explains. “The ultimate goal is to make football the most played sport by females by 2020. So it’s a UEFA initiative to get more women and girls playing football, whether they want to be professional or not.” The series, which originally included professional footballers Sarah Zadrazil, Eunice Beckmann, Lisa Evans and now includes Petronella Ekroth and Shanice van de Sanden, follows the daily lives of female professional footballers. Instagram Twitter

The Snow Leopard is a 1978 book by Peter Matthiessen. It is an account of his two-month search for the snow leopard with naturalist George Schaller in the Dolpo region on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas; the book recounts the journey of Matthiessen and Schaller in 1973 to Shey Gompa in the inner Dolpo region of Nepal. Schaller's original objective was to compare the mating habits of the Himalayan blue sheep with those of the common sheep of the USA, while for Matthiessen the trip was more of a spiritual exploration. Another aim was to spot the snow leopard, a predator on the bharal and a creature, seen. A third part of the plan was to visit its Buddhist lama; the travel aspect of the work is in the tradition of writing by Sir Richard Burton, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. The nature writing aspect brings echoes of the work of Alexander von Charles Darwin, it involves a meditation upon inner peace, however, as well as external exploration, in a way, reminiscent of Basho, Wordsworth or Thoreau.

For example, towards the end of the book Matthiessen sits on some rocks and observes "These hard rocks instruct my bones in what my brain could never grasp in the Heart Sutra, that'form is emptiness and emptiness is form'—the Void, the emptiness of blue-black space, contained in everything."Matthiessen digresses to remember his wife Deborah Love who had died of cancer prior to the adventure. The book is, therefore a meditation upon death, loss and healing; the memories of Deborah operate with a number of other recursive stylistic traits that play against the linear, outward progress of the journey logged through maps and dates. Questions of absence and presence play in tandem with the wider question of gaining peace through an acceptance of how the world is rather than desiring phenomena to arise which do not exist; the Snow Leopard won the 1979 National Book Award in the category Contemporary Thought and the 1980 National Book Award for Nonfiction. It has garnered more critical acclaim since then.

It has been included in several lists of best travel books including World Hum's ten most celebrated books, Washington Post Book World's Travel Books That Will Take You Far, National Geographic Traveler's Around the World in 80+ Books. Review published in the NY Times on November 26, 1978 Review by Amanda Fox in Salon's Wanderlust The Snow Leopard - A Pictorial Companion Book documenting PM's trip to Upper Dolpo in pictures

Grimmenturm is a medieval tower and restaurant situated at Neumarkt in Zürich, Switzerland. The Grimmenturm building is situated at Neumarkt in the Altstadt of Zürich on the right shore of the Limmat river, it houses the restaurant Neumarkt in one of the attached buildings towards Neumarkt. The tower was built by the Zürich family Bilgeri between 1250 and 1280 AD as a residential tower. First mentioned in the year 1324 as tower of the Pilgrin family, it was one of about 30 residential towers that existed in the European Middle Ages in Zürich. Before 1300 a housing was attached to the north-western side. Although the building was for decades used by the Bilgeri family as their home, it has not their name, as a building. Grimmenturm's name was given by another member of the same family, Johann Bilgeri the younger and its nickname "Grimm" or "Grimme"; the nickname Grimm was so common that it was mentioned in official documents, such as in a parchment from the year 1330. On 12 July 1336 Rudolf Brun, mayor of the city of Zürich, defeated his political opponents, the former members of the Rat of Zürich, of which around 12 members found refuge by count Johann I in Rapperswil.

The document, sealed by the Princess Abbess of Fraumünster, the abbot of the Einsiedeln Abbey and the Propst von Zürich, listed among others the names of Heinr. Bilgeri im Niclaus Bilgeri, Rudolf Bilgeri and Joh. Bilgeri der jüngere zum Steinbock to be banned at least two years from the city of Zürich. In 1350 Sister Elsbeth Reinger handed over her house and paddock, located at the Neumarkt between the houses of Waser and Heinrich von Rapperswil to establish a hospital. Johann Pilgrim, der Grimme left over the tower together with residential buildings to the hospital for accommodation and nursing sisters, so a monastic community was established. In occasion of the Reformation in Zürich, the nunnery was abolished in 1524, the building was used as wine cellar and granary; the next 300 years the building served as a vicarage and accommodation building, in 1962 it passed over to the city government of Zürich. Being part of the former second first fortification of the medieval city of Zürich, the building has an irregular, octagonal floor plan, consisting of three former separate buildings.

On its northeast facade a lounge corner with Gothic pointed arch windows is installed. The so-called Zum Langen Keller residential building was attached to the northwestern side of the tower before 1300. From 1837 to 1839 the building was renewed. In the late 19th century, the property was in private hands and was once more rebuilt: The clock and bell were removed, on the south and north side new windows and a new roof were installed; the original clock tower was installed in 1541, in 1865 renewed and between 1964 and 1966 it was rebuilt as a distinctive clock tower. The building is listed in the Swiss inventory of cultural property of national and regional significance as a Class B object of regional importance. Dölf Wild: Stadtmauern. Ein neues Bild der Stadtbefestigungen Zürichs. Schrift zur Ausstellung im Haus zum Haus zum Rech, Zürich, 6. Februar bis 30. April 2004. Amt für Städtebau, Baugeschichtliches Archiv, Zürich 2004, ISBN 3-905384-05-1. Dölf Wild: Stadtmauern. Ein neues Bild der Stadtbefestigungen Zürichs.

Schrift zur Ausstellung im Haus zum Haus zum Rech, Zürich, 6. Februar bis 30. April 2004. Amt für Städtebau, Baugeschichtliches Archiv, Zürich 2004, ISBN 3-905384-05-1