Sonny Perdue
George Ervin "Sonny" Perdue III is an American veterinarian and politician serving as the 31st United States Secretary of Agriculture since 2017. He served as the 81st Governor of Georgia from 2003 to 2011, he was the first Republican Governor of Georgia since Reconstruction. Founder and partner in an agricultural trading company, Perdue served from 2012 to 2017 on the Governors' Council of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D. C, he is the second Secretary of Agriculture from the Deep South. On January 18, 2017, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Perdue to be Secretary of Agriculture, his nomination was transmitted to the U. S. Senate on March 9, 2017, his nomination was approved by the United States Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry on March 30 by a 19–1 voice vote, by the entire Senate in a vote of 87–11 on April 24. Perdue was born in Perry, the son of Ophie Viola, a teacher, George Ervin Perdue Jr. a farmer. He still lives in Bonaire, an unincorporated area between Perry and Warner Robins.
Born George Ervin Perdue III, Perdue has been known as Sonny since childhood, prefers to be called by that name. Perdue is the first cousin of U. S. Senator David Perdue. Perdue played quarterback at Warner Robins High School and was a walk-on at the University of Georgia, where he was a member of the Beta-Lambda chapter of Kappa Sigma Fraternity. In 1971, Perdue earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, worked as a veterinarian before becoming a small business owner starting three small businesses. Perdue is not related to the family that operates Perdue Farms. Perdue served in the U. S. Air Force, rising to the rank of captain before his discharge. After serving as a member of the Houston County Planning & Zoning Commission in the 1980s, Perdue ran as a Democrat for a seat in the Georgia General Assembly, he defeated Republican candidate Ned Sanders in 1990 and succeeded Democratic incumbent Ed Barker as the senator representing the 18th district.
Perdue was elected as a Democrat in 1991, 1994, 1996. He served as his party's leader in the Senate from 1994 as president pro tempore. After his first year in office Senator Perdue wrote Lt. Governor Pierre Howard asking for more responsibilities, Howard obliged, he shortly after became a committee chairman climbed the leadership ladder to majority leader Senate Pro-Tempore. Many credit Pierre Howard for helping Perdue build the early foundation of what would become his future political career, his committee assignments included Ethics, Finance & Public Utilities, Health & Human Services and Economic Development, Tourism & Cultural Affairs. He switched party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in 1998 and was reelected to the Senate as a Republican, he won reelection in 2000. 2002In December 2001, Perdue resigned as state senator and devoted himself to running for the office of Governor of Georgia. He won the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial election, defeating Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes 51% to 46%, with Libertarian candidate Garrett Michael Hayes taking 2% of the vote.
He became the first Republican governor of Georgia in over 130 years since Benjamin F. Conley. 2006In 2006, Perdue was re-elected to a second term in the 2006 Georgia gubernatorial election, winning nearly 58% of the vote. His Democratic opponent was Lieutenant Governor Mark Taylor. Libertarian Garrett Michael Hayes was on the ballot. Economic issuesPerdue advocated reforms designed to cut waste in government, most notably the sale of surplus vehicles and real estate. Prior to Perdue's becoming governor, no state agency had compiled an inventory of what assets the state owned. In January 2003, Perdue signed an executive order prohibiting himself and all other state employees from receiving any gift worth more than $25. During his governorship, Perdue collected at least $25,000 in gifts, including sporting event tickets and airplane flights. Late in the evening of March 29, 2005, the penultimate day of the legislative session, Representative Larry O'Neal, who worked part-time as Perdue’s personal lawyer, introduced legislation making capital gains tax owed on Georgia land sales deferrable if the income goes to purchase out-of-state land unusually, making the tax break retroactive.
Perdue signed the legislation into law on April 2005, three days before tax day. Perdue used the new law on his 2004 tax return to defer $100,000 in taxable gains from the sale of land. In 2007, Perdue convinced a skeptical legislature to approve a $19 million fishing tourism program he called Go Fish Georgia. Perdue decided that the Go Fish Education Center would be built down the road from his home. Education reformIn education, Perdue promoted the return of most decision-making to the local level. After Perdue took office, in 2003 and 2004, Georgia moved up from last place in the country in SAT scores. Although it returned to last place in 2005, Georgia rose to 49th place in 2006 in the combined math and reading mean score, including the writing portion added to the test that year. In 2007, Georgia moved up to 46th place. In 2008, Georgia moved up again, to 45th place. Perdue created additional opportunities for charter schools and private schools. Georgia state flagAfter Democratic Governor Roy Barnes replaced the 1956 state flag, adopted by Georgia to protest integration, because it featured a battle flag emblem of the Confede
Foster E. Mohrhardt
Foster Edward Mohrhardt was a United States librarian. He had a long and illustrious career in library and information science as a scholar and diplomat, was listed by American Libraries among "100 Leaders we had in the 20th Century". Mohrhardt was born in Michigan, on March 7, 1907, to Albert Mohrhardt and Alice Mohrhardt, he earned his A. B. degree from Michigan State University in 1929 while working as an assistant to the University Librarian. He earned a B. S. Degree in 1930 from Columbia University and subsequently received a diploma from the University of Munich in 1932, he completed his M. A. in 1933 at the University of Michigan and was enrolled in the Ph.d program at Columbia University in 1934–35. After completing his formal education, Mohrhardt worked with William Bishop on an advisory group on junior college libraries for the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 1935 to 1937. During this time he traveled the country extensively meeting various school representatives of junior college libraries with the purpose of compiling a list of books for junior colleges.
His compilation was published as List of Books for Junior College Libraries by the American Library Association in 1937. From 1938 to 1946, he was Librarian of Lee University. During his tenure there he was responsible for completing renovations to the Library building as well as developing special collections. During World War II, the Library of Congress was interested in protecting some of its more valuable collections and Mohrhardt offered surplus space available at Washington and Lee University for this purpose. Mohrhardt performed military service during the war, serving in both the U. S. Army Air Corps and the U. S. Navy. In 1946, he served as Office of Technical Services; this agency was responsible for collecting and indexing various civilian and military documents and evaluating their use in the public and private sector. Mohrhardt simultaneously served as a consultant at Brookhaven National Laboratory and visiting professor at Columbia University from 1947 to 1948, his activities at Brookhaven National Laboratory are unknown due to a lack of records.
While at Columbia University, Mohrhardt taught courses in library management and collection development until autumn 1948 when he returned to federal service. Arriving at the Library Services for the Veteran's Administration, Mohrhardt worked as assistant director until taking over as director. From 1948 to 1954 his responsibilities included 450 collections located domestically and overseas, he established a reputation for skillfully organizing and streamlining the procurement and cataloguing systems that endeared him for assignment to the U. S. Department of Agriculture Library. Mohrhardt served as director of the U. S. Department of Agriculture Library until his retirement from federal service in 1968. During his time there he helped accomplish the redesignation of the USDA Library to the National Agricultural Library, remarking that it had been a national library since its inception; the organizer, Mohrhardt set about reorganizing and streamlining the administration. He placed the functions of the library into four categories: Public Services, Technical Services and Special Services, Management Services.
He used these changes to facilitate coordination with various national and international agricultural libraries. During Mohrhart's time at the National Agricultural Library he was active in numerous associations and commissions; some positions he held included President of Association of Research Libraries, 1966, President of ALA, 1967-68, Vice President of the International Federation of Library Associations, 1965–71, President of the National Federation of Science Abstracting and Indexing Services, 1964–65, chairman of the U. S. National Commission for FID in 1965, his work with these associations the International Federation of Library Associations, demonstrated his reputation as an international diplomat. This can be characterized by one incident that occurred during a board meeting when an Eastern-bloc representative became distraught at the course of dialogue. Mohrhardt left the room and returned with a flower for the woman and was able to defuse the tense situation with his charm. Morhardt died on June 7, 1992, in Arlington, leaving his wife Katherine, son David and daughter Katri Nowak.
He experienced a productive career that left an indelible mark on his field. His greatest achievement was the transformation of the National Agricultural Library, establishing it alongside the Library of Congress and the National Library of Medicine as the defining institutions of their fields. In addition to this he built a reputation as a professional dedicated to the organization and use of knowledge for the public, he was able to see beyond the borders of his own nation and worked with people from around the world productively in order to ensure that knowledge was shared so all humankind could benefit
Foreign Agricultural Service
The Foreign Agricultural Service is the foreign affairs agency with primary responsibility for the United States Department of Agriculture's overseas programs—market development, international trade agreements and negotiations, the collection of statistics and market information. It administers the USDA's export credit guarantee and food aid programs and helps increase income and food availability in developing nations by mobilizing expertise for agriculturally led economic growth. In 2003, FAS began to return to a long-abandoned role in national security; the FAS mission statement reads, "Linking U. S. agriculture to the world to enhance export opportunities and global food security", its motto is "Linking U. S. Agriculture to the World". USDA posted its first employee with assignment of Edmund Moffat to London. In 1894, USDA created a Section of Foreign Markets in its Division of Statistics, which by 1901 numbered seven employees, it was succeeded over the next few decades by larger units. Creation of this series of units in Washington to analyze foreign competition and demand for agricultural commodities was paralleled by assignment abroad of agricultural statistical agents, commodity specialists, "agricultural commissioners".
Moffat went out as a "statistical agent" of USDA's Division of Statistics but with the status of Deputy Consul General on the roster of the Department of State at London. Subsequent USDA officials assigned overseas, did not enjoy diplomatic or consular status; this impeded their work, which at that point consisted of collecting and transmitting to Washington time-sensitive market information on agricultural commodities. The analytical unit in Washington, by the early 1920s supervised by Leon Estabrook, deputy chief of USDA's Bureau of Agricultural Economics, compiled publications based on reports from the USDA's overseas staff, U. S. consuls abroad, data collected by the Rome-based International Institute of Agriculture. In 1924, USDA officials Nils Olsen and Louis Guy Michael and Congressman John Ketcham began drafting legislation to create an agricultural attaché service with diplomatic status; the legislation passed the House multiple times, but it did not pass the Senate until 1930, in part due to opposition from then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
Hoover, however supported the legislation in order to garner support of the farm bloc during his presidential campaign. Accordingly, the Foreign Agricultural Service was created by the Foreign Agricultural Service Act of 1930, which President Herbert Hoover signed into law on June 5, 1930; the law stipulated. The USDA created a Foreign Agricultural Service Division within the Bureau of Agricultural Economics to serve as the FAS's headquarters staff in Washington, D. C. naming Asher Hobson, a noted economist and political scientist, as its first head. The 1930 Act explicitly granted the USDA's overseas officials diplomatic status and the right to the diplomatic title attaché. In short order, FAS posted additional staff overseas, to Marseille, Belgrade and Kobe, in addition to existing staff in London, Buenos Aires and Shanghai. In Washington, Hobson hired Lazar Volin, a Russian émigré, as the agency's first D. C.-based regional analyst, to specialize in the study of Russia as a competitor to U.
S. agriculture. In 1934, Congress passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which stipulated that the President must consult with the Secretary of Agriculture when negotiating tariff reductions for agricultural commodities. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace delegated this responsibility to the Foreign Agricultural Service Division, thus began the FAS's role in formulation and implementation of international trade policy; the FAS led agricultural tariff negotiations, first concluding a new tariff agreement with Cuba, followed by Belgium, Sweden and Colombia. By 1939, new agricultural tariffs were in place with 20 countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States' largest agricultural trading partner; this new responsibility spurred a change in field reporting from overseas offices. In order to negotiate tariff agreements, the FAS needed comprehensive information on the domestic agricultural policies of trading partners, the primary source of this information was the agency's field offices abroad.
Thus, in addition to traditional commodity reporting, the attachés and commissioners were called on to add policy analysis to their portfolios. On December 1, 1938, the Foreign Agricultural Service Division was upgraded, made directly subordinate to the Secretary, renamed the Foreign Agricultural Service. On July 1, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all diplomatic personnel, including the agricultural attachés and commissioners, transferred to the Department of State; the Foreign Agricultural Service was abolished, its headquarters staff was renamed the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations. At that time the Director of Foreign Agricultural Relations, Leslie A. Wheeler, was appointed by executive order to the Board of the Foreign Service and the Board of Examiners, an acknowledgement of OFAR's status as a foreign affairs agency. OFAR began handling food aid in 1941 when President Roosevelt and the Congress authorized $1.35 billion of food assistance to Great Britain. During this period OFAR led negotiations that resulted in creation of the International Wheat Council, began assisting Latin American countries to develop their agriculture.
This latter effort was related to the need for strategic commodities as World War II loomed, as well as the need to tie South America closer to the Allies and thereby to keep Nazi Germany from gaining a f
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the nation through the American Civil War, its bloodiest war and its greatest moral and political crisis, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, modernized the U. S. economy. Born in Kentucky, Lincoln grew up on the frontier in a poor family. Self-educated, he became Whig Party leader, state legislator and Congressman, he left government to resume his law practice, but angered by the success of Democrats in opening the prairie lands to slavery, reentered politics in 1854. He became a leader in the new Republican Party and gained national attention in 1858 for debating and losing to national Democratic leader Stephen A. Douglas in a Senate campaign, he ran for President in 1860, sweeping the North and winning. Southern pro-slavery elements took his win as proof that the North was rejecting the Constitutional rights of Southern states to practice slavery.
They began the process of seceding from the union. To secure its independence, the new Confederate States of America fired on Fort Sumter, one of the few U. S. forts in the South. Lincoln called up volunteers and militia to restore the Union; as the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican Party, Lincoln confronted Radical Republicans, who demanded harsher treatment of the South. Lincoln fought the factions by pitting them against each other, by distributing political patronage, by appealing to the American people, his Gettysburg Address became an iconic call for nationalism, equal rights and democracy. He suspended habeas corpus, he averted British intervention by defusing the Trent Affair. Lincoln supervised the war effort, including the selection of generals and the naval blockade that shut down the South's trade; as the war progressed, he maneuvered to end slavery, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Lincoln managed his own re-election campaign, he sought to reconcile his damaged nation by avoiding retribution against the secessionists.
A few days after the Battle of Appomattox Court House, he was shot by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, on April 14, 1865, died the following day. Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the United States' martyr hero, he is ranked both by scholars and the public as among the greatest U. S. presidents. Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, as the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, in a one-room log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky, he was a descendant of Samuel Lincoln, an Englishman who migrated from Hingham, Norfolk, to its namesake Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638. Samuel's grandson and great-grandson began the family's westward migration, passing through New Jersey and Virginia. Lincoln's paternal grandfather and namesake, Captain Abraham Lincoln, moved the family from Virginia to Jefferson County, Kentucky, in the 1780s. Captain Lincoln was killed in an Indian raid in 1786, his children, including eight-year-old Thomas, Abraham's father, witnessed the attack.
Thomas worked at odd jobs in Kentucky and in Tennessee, before settling with members of his family in Hardin County, Kentucky, in the early 1800s. Lincoln's mother, Nancy, is assumed to have been the daughter of Lucy Hanks, although no record documents this. Thomas and Nancy married on June 12, 1806, in Washington County, moved to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, they produced three children: Sarah, born on February 10, 1807. Thomas Lincoln leased farms in Kentucky. Thomas became embroiled in legal disputes, lost all but 200 acres of his land in court disputes over property titles. In 1816, the family moved to Indiana, where the survey process was more reliable and land titles were more secure. Indiana was a "free" territory, they settled in an "unbroken forest" in Hurricane Township, Perry County. In 1860, Lincoln noted that the family's move to Indiana was "partly on account of slavery", but due to land title difficulties. In Kentucky and Indiana, Thomas worked as a farmer and carpenter, he owned farms, town lots and livestock, paid taxes, sat on juries, appraised estates, served on country slave patrols, guarded prisoners.
Thomas and Nancy were members of a Separate Baptists church, which forbade alcohol and slavery. Overcoming financial challenges, Thomas obtained clear title to 80 acres of land in what became known as the Little Pigeon Creek Community. On October 5, 1818, Nancy Lincoln died of milk sickness, leaving 11-year-old Sarah in charge of a household that included her father, 9-year-old Abraham, Dennis Hanks, Nancy's 19-year-old orphaned cousin; those who knew Lincoln recalled that he was distraught over his sister's death on January 20, 1828, while giving birth to a stillborn son. On December 2, 1819, Thomas married Sarah "Sally" Bush Johnston, a widow from Elizabethtown, with three children of her own. Abraham became close to his stepmother, whom he referred t
United States National Library of Medicine
The United States National Library of Medicine, operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library. Located in Bethesda, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health, its collections include more than seven million books, technical reports, microfilms and images on medicine and related sciences, including some of the world's oldest and rarest works. The current director of the NLM is Patricia Flatley Brennan. Since 1879, the National Library of Medicine has published the Index Medicus, a monthly guide to articles, in nearly five thousand selected journals; the last issue of Index Medicus was printed in December 2004, but this information is offered in the accessible PubMed, among the more than fifteen million MEDLINE journal article references and abstracts going back to the 1960s and 1.5 million references going back to the 1950s. The National Library of Medicine runs the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which houses biological databases that are accessible on the Internet through the Entrez search engine and Lister Hill National Center For Biomedical Communications.
As the United States National Release Center for SNOMED CT, NLM provides SNOMED CT data and resources to licensees of the NLM UMLS Metathesaurus. NLM maintains ClinicalTrials.gov registry for human observational studies. The Toxicology and Environmental Health Program was established at the National Library of Medicine in 1967 and is charged with developing computer databases compiled from the medical literature and from the files of governmental and nongovernmental organizations; the program has implemented several information systems for chemical emergency response and public education, such as the Toxicology Data Network, TOXMAP, Tox Town, Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders and the Household Products Database. These resources are accessible without charge on the internet; the United States National Library of Medicine Radiation Emergency Management System provides: Guidance for health care providers physicians, about clinical diagnosis and treatment of radiation injury during radiological and nuclear emergencies Just-in-time, evidence-based, usable information with sufficient background and context to make complex issues understandable to those without formal radiation medicine expertise Web-based information that may be downloaded in advance, so that it would be available during an emergency if the Internet were not accessibleRadiation Emergency Management System is produced by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, Office of Planning and Emergency Operations, in cooperation with the National Library of Medicine, Division of Specialized Information Services, with subject matter experts from the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many U.
S. and international consultants. The Extramural Division provides grants to support research in medical information science and to support planning and development of computer and communications systems in medical institutions. Research and exhibitions on the history of medicine and the life sciences are supported by the History of Medicine Division. In April 2008 the current exhibition Against the Odds: Making a Difference in Global Health was launched. National Center for Biotechnology Information is an intramural division within National Library of Medicine that creates public databases in molecular biology, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing molecular and genomic data, disseminates biomedical information, all for the better understanding of processes affecting human health and disease. For details of the pre-1956 history of the Library, see Library of the Surgeon General's Office; the precursor of the National Library of Medicine, established in 1836, was the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, a part of the office of the Surgeon General of the United States Army.
The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and its Medical Museum were founded in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum. Throughout their history the Library of the Surgeon General's Office and the Army Medical Museum shared quarters. From 1866 to 1887, they were housed in Ford's Theatre after production there was stopped, following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In 1956, the library collection was transferred from the control of the U. S. Department of Defense to the Public Health Service of the Department of Health and Welfare and renamed the National Library of Medicine, through the instrumentality of Frank Bradway Rogers, the director from 1956 to 1963; the library moved to its current quarters in Bethesda, Maryland, on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, in 1962. JournalReview.org National Library of Medicine classification system PubMed Miles, Wyndham D.. A History of the National Library of Medicine: The Nation's Treasury of Medical Knowledge. U. S. Government Printing Office.
P. 531. ISBN 978-0-16-002644-7. NLM 8218545. Reznick, Jeffrey. US National Library of Medicine. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4671-2608-3. LCCN 2017931439. NLM 101706419. Schullian, Dorothy. "The National Library of Medicine. I"; the Library Quarterly: Information, Policy. 28: 1–17. Doi:10.1086/618482. JSTOR 4304714. NLM 0135203. Schullian, Dorothy. "The National Library of Medicine. II"; the Library Quarterly: Information, Policy. 28: 95–121. Doi:10.1086/618521. JSTOR 4304753. NLM 0135203. Past and future of biomedical informat
Life-cycle assessment
Life-cycle assessment is a technique to assess environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product's life from raw material extraction through materials processing, distribution, use and maintenance, disposal or recycling. Designers use this process to help critique their products. LCAs can help avoid a narrow outlook on environmental concerns by: Compiling an inventory of relevant energy and material inputs and environmental releases; the goal of LCA is to compare the full range of environmental effects assignable to products and services by quantifying all inputs and outputs of material flows and assessing how these material flows affect the environment. This information is used to improve processes, support policy and provide a sound basis for informed decisions; the term life cycle refers to the notion that a fair, holistic assessment requires the assessment of raw-material production, distribution and disposal including all intervening transportation steps necessary or caused by the product's existence.
There are two main types of LCA. Attributional LCAs seek to establish the burdens associated with the production and use of a product, or with a specific service or process, at a point in time. Consequential LCAs seek to identify the environmental consequences of a decision or a proposed change in a system under study, which means that market and economic implications of a decision may have to be taken into account. Social LCA is under development as a different approach to life cycle thinking intended to assess social implications or potential impacts. Social LCA should be considered as an approach, complementary to environmental LCA; the procedures of life cycle assessment are part of the ISO 14000 environmental management standards: in ISO 14040:2006 and 14044:2006. GHG product life cycle assessments can comply with specifications such as PAS 2050 and the GHG Protocol Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard. According to the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards, a Life Cycle Assessment is carried out in four distinct phases as illustrated in the figure shown to the right.
The phases are interdependent in that the results of one phase will inform how other phases are completed. An LCA starts with an explicit statement of the goal and scope of the study, which sets out the context of the study and explains how and to whom the results are to be communicated; this is a key step and the ISO standards require that the goal and scope of an LCA be defined and consistent with the intended application. The goal and scope document therefore includes technical details that guide subsequent work: the functional unit, which defines what is being studied and quantifies the service delivered by the product system, providing a reference to which the inputs and outputs can be related. Further, the functional unit is an important basis that enables alternative goods, or services, to be compared and analyzed. So to explain this a functional system, inputs and outputs contains a functional unit, that fulfills a function, for example paint is covering a wall, making a functional unit of 1m² covered for 10 years.
The functional flow would be the items necessary for that function, so this would be a brush, tin of paint and the paint itself. The system boundaries. Any assumptions and limitations. Doing this is not easy and different methods may give different resultsand the impact categories chosen for example human toxicity, global warming, eutrophication. Life Cycle Inventory analysis involves creating an inventory of flows from and to nature for a product system. Inventory flows include inputs of water and raw materials, releases to air and water. To develop the inventory, a flow model of the technical system is constructed using data on inputs and outputs; the flow model is illustrated with a flow chart that includes the activities that are going to be assessed in the relevant supply chain and gives a clear picture of the technical system boundaries. The input and output data needed for the construction of the model are collected for all activities within the system boundary, including from the supply chain.
The data must be related to the functional unit defined in the scope definition. Data can be presented in tables and some interpretations can be made at this stage; the results of the inventory is an LCI which provides information about all inputs and outputs in the form of elementary flow to and from the environment from all the unit processes involved in the study. Inventory flows can number in the hundreds depending on the system boundary. For product LCAs at either the generic or brand-specific level, that data is collected through survey questionnaires. At an industry level, care has to be taken to ensure that questionnaires are completed by a representative sample of producers, leaning toward neither the best nor the worst, representing any regional differences due to energy use, material sourcing or other factors; the questionnai
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the United States Department of Agriculture.