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Serj Tankian Speaks Out on Murder of Armenian Journalist
Published February 10, 2007	Abuse , Armenia , Genocide , Serj Tankian , Terror 14 Comments
I was shocked and deeply saddened to hear of Hrant Dink's murder (more like assassination) today in front of his Agos newspaper offices, in Istanbul Turkey.
I met Hrant Dink at the L.A. premiere of "Screamers", the documentary by Carla Garapedian featuring System Of A Down. Hrant is interviewed by Carla in the film where he explains how the "deep state" in Turkey is utilizing an outdated penal code, Article 301 to try him, Orhan Pamuk, and other journalists, writers, and human rights activists for "insulting or offending Turkishness."
In his newspaper Agos, Hrant discussed issues important to the Armenians of Turkey. He was quite careful not to insult anyone in Turkey present or past regarding the Armenian Genocide or any other "sticky issues" that may be taken negatively. He instead tried to truly understand why so many people in Turkey were in denial of their past, why it was important to have a "real democracy" there where everyone can speak freely without worrying about retributions. He was by no means a fanatic nor extremist, but was a humble, kind, yet truthful individual who cared about Turkey, his country, and being Armenian, his culture and heritage.
He yearned to bridge the understanding between Armenians and Turks to get over the pains of the past stemming from the Armenian Genocide by the Ottomans in 1915. The difference between Hrant Dink and Orhan Pamuk and other writers or journalists incriminated under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code was that Hrant Dink was of Armenian descent and therefore may have been viewed more so as a traitor than other Turks of Turkish descent.
After many attempts at appealing the 3 different cases brought against him in reference to Article 301, Hrant was ready to take his case of freedom of speech to the European Court of Human Rights. In the last article he wrote for Agos on Jan. 10th, he made it very clear that the overwhelming amount of death threats against him were psychologically punishing him for speaking out. He felt his life was in extreme danger and asked for help from security officials of the country, but was not given any. When friends encouraged him to leave Turkey to avoid danger, he said that if he left now, he would be betraying the fight for democracy in Turkey, and that wouldn't be fair to others in his situation. I am not that heroic, I would have left. And funny enough when we met, he mused with me, calling me heroic, the whole time while I looked into his gentle eyes and knew in my heart that he was the true hero. It's easy for me to speak out against things, because at worst, I'll be faced with brutal disagreement, where he was faced with prison terms, harassment, psychological torture, and now death.
So he was killed, brutally, in daylight, with bullets to the head, another beautiful soul silenced no more.
Hrant Dink's cases along with Orhan Pamuk's past case and many others facing incrimination in Turkey under Article 301 of the penal code encouraged me to work with Amnesty International in getting the word out and working on trying to reverse this unjust incrimination of the freedoms of speech there
Nothing to be "thankful" for!
Published November 23, 2006	Abuse , Animalrights! , Idiots , Stupid People Leave a Comment
^Is this your Meal today ?^
More than 45 million turkeys are killed each year at Thanksgiving, and more than 22 million die at Christmas.
Before ending up as holiday centerpieces, these gentle, intelligent birds spend five to six months on factory farms where thousands of them are packed into dark sheds with no more than 3.5 square feet of space per bird. Turkeys on factory farms are denied everything that is natural to them, such as foraging for food, dustbathing, and raising their young.
To keep the overcrowded birds from scratching and pecking each other to death, workers cut off portions of the birds' toes and upper beaks with hot blades and de-snood the males (the snood is the flap of skin that runs from the beak to the chest). No pain relievers are used during any of these procedures.
Turkeys are genetically bred to grow as fast as possible, and they often become crippled under their own weight. A PETA investigator videotaped one turkey farmer beating sick and injured birds to death with a pole, a killing method deemed "standard industry practice."
Turkeys won't breathe fresh air or feel the sun on their backs until they're shoved onto trucks bound for slaughter. They are transported for hours without food or water through all weather extremes—and many will die on this nightmarish journey.
At the slaughterhouse, the survivors are hung upside-down by their weak and crippled legs before their heads are dragged through an electrified "stunning tank," which immobilizes but does not kill them. Many birds dodge the tank and are still fully conscious when their throats are slit. If the knife fails to properly cut the birds' throats, they are scalded alive in the tank of boiling water used for feather removal.
Please don't support an industry that abuses these fascinating animals. Click here for a free vegetarian starter kit.
Adopt a Turkey Project!
TOUCHED BY A TURKEY
Thousands of Farm Sanctuary visitors have met our feathered friends and seen that turkeys are unique individuals with distinct personalities and feelings, just like other animals. One visitor remarked, "Turkeys remember your face and they will sit closer to you with each day you revisit." Another visitor told us how she learned to scratch a turkey, "I have scratched dog ears and cows backs and a host of other animal hard-to-reach spots — but I never dreamed a bird, let alone a domestic turkey, would ask for a belly rub."
TURKEY LOVE
Turkeys love cuddles, kisses and tickles just as much as people do! Read about Lydia the hugging turkey, who liked to give turkey hugs to shelter visitors…or Megan the Cuddling turkey who gives turkey kisses. Like dogs and cats, turkeys are very affectionate and companionable.
Every Thanksgiving, visitors flocked to Farm Sanctuary's California shelter to receive a hug from Lydia. The famous "hugging turkey" would flap her wings and run toward guests. As visitors bent down, Lydia embraced them by pressing her chest against them and stretching her head and neck over their shoulders. Lydia brought much happiness to her visitors, and she enjoyed teaching people that turkeys need love too!
Since 1986, Farm Sanctuary's annual Adopt-A-Turkey Project has rescued over one thousand turkeys from a thankless fate at the dinner table and given thousands of people an opportunity to adopt a turkey for the holidays.
Farm Sanctuary's Adopt-A-Turkey Project offers two ways for people to adopt turkeys this Thanksgiving holiday.
1. Sponsor "adopt" a turkey who lives at Farm Sanctuary's Watkins Glen, New York or Orland, California shelter for farm animals. For a one-time $20 adoption fee, adopters receive a color photograph of their turkey, an adoption certificate and a year subscription to Farm Sanctuary's quarterly newsletter. The adoption fee provides funds for feed, bedding and veterinary care for the turkeys. Please call 607-583-2225 or click here to adopt a turkey who lives at Farm Sanctuary.
2. Home adopt and provide a safe, permanent and loving home for two or more turkeys. Home adopters must be vegetarian or vegan, and committed to providing lifelong care for their turkey friends. Individuals interested in home adoptions must complete an adoption application. Approved adopters will be placed on a schedule to have their turkey companions personally delivered by Farm Sanctuary staff on the Turkey Express.
Every year, more people are choosing to celebrate a compassionate Thanksgiving for ALL, by saving a turkey!
The Adopt-A-Turkey Project is a program of Farm Sanctuary, the nation's largest farm animal rescue and protection organization.
Turkish Crimes Against Humanity
Published November 19, 2006	Abuse , Arabic & Arab (арабский язык) , Armenia , Terror , Wala 3ala Baloh 2 Comments
THE GREEK HOLOCAUST OF THRACE
ASIA MINOR AND PONTOS
What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia, unto Ephesus and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira and unto Sardis and unto Philadelphia and unto Laodicea. (Apoc. I11).
The seven churches, the seven torches of light of the Greek-Christian civilization are no longer burning. The land of Asia Minor, an area where for 3000 years Greek civilization flourished is now being trampled by foreign invaders: the Turks.
The Turks invaded Asia Minor in two waves: The Seljuks were first at the end of the 11th century and the Ottomans came later, at the beginning of the l3th century.
Using indiscriminately force, murder, genocide, and Turcification they managed to hold on to a foreign land expelling or exterminating its natural residents: Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs.
In the 8th century, the Oguz Turks, a semi-savage nomadic people moved westward from their homeland in Mongolia, and settled in what is today West Turkestan.
The Seljuks, a sect of the Oguz Turks, moved further in the direction of Persia and today's Iraq, where they served as mercenaries for the caliphs of Baghdad.
From this encounter with the advanced Persian and Arab civilizations, they enriched their poor vocabulary, adopted the Arabic script and became Muslims retaining simultaneously their warring nomad characteristics.
Their king, Alp Arslan (1063-1072), unified the various Seljuk factions, invaded Armenia, and sacked its capital of Ani in 1064. After that he and his armies invaded Byzantium and following the critical battle at Manzikert (1071) where the Byzantines were defeated, the Seljuks occupied a large part of the Asia Minor provinces of Byzantium. Previous to the invasion, there was not a single Turk living in these provinces.
In this foreign, for the Turks land there were thus established a number of Seljuk controlled emirates.
After a short period of time the Byzantines and the Crusaders dissolved nearly all of these emirates, except one whose capital was Iconium. This had been named as the Sultanate of Roum in other words the land of the Romans, as was the official title of the Greek Byzantine Empire, which was a continuation and succession of the Eastern Roman Empire.
The raids by Genghis Khan's (1167-1227) Mongols forced another Turkish tribe, led by Suleyman-Shah, to abandon Turkistan and to head towards the west. This group tried to settle in Eastern Asia Minor, but the Armenians and Kurds ousted them. In an attempt to cross the Euphrates river, their leader was drowned and buried there, which ever since has been known as Turk-mezari, or the tomb of the Turk. A title which is indicative of how alien the Turks were in these areas.
The tribe then moved toward the Sultanate of Roum where it settled often assuming the role of border-guards. Suleyman's grandson, Osman, (1259-1326), took over the title of Sultan from the Seljuks and he gave his name to the Turkish people: The Ottomans.
The leaders of the Osmanlis quickly realized that since they comprised a minority of conquerors it would be difficult for them to control the occupied lands, and simultaneously to pursue further conquests without taking certain special measures!
Thus, they decided to adopt and apply harsh methods previously unknown to the whole world. Methods, which were never repeated again by another nation on earth. The primary measures taken were as follows:
They declared their state a warrior or Gazi state. In other words, a state that was bound to declare holy war (Jihad) against the non-believers. This way, they were able to bring together all kinds of adventurers, who were willing to fight either for ideological reasons, or for just the spoils of the war.
They adopted the inhumane measure of forcibly recruiting young Christian children. In other words, they forcibly took male children of the enslaved Christian families (mainly Greeks. and later also Armenians Bulgarians, Albanians and Serbs), and brought them up in special camps They conditioned them to become fanatic Turks and relentless killers to their own people. These children would grow up to believe that their father was the Sultan and that if they were to die in battle they would go to heaven. Thus, because of this New Army, or Janissaries, (Yeni-ceri in Turkish) the Turks continued to pursue their conquests.
They slaughtered systematically millions of Asia Minor's inhabitants, in order to change the ethnic character of the land. It has been estimated that during the seven centuries of Turkish presence in Asia Minor several millions of Greeks, at least two-three million Armenians and hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Syrians, but also Serbs, and Bulgarians in Europe, were systematically massacred. In the 20th century alone, it has been estimated that approximately 1,5 million Armenians and more than 1 million Greeks were exterminated.
In this manner, the Turks managed to hold on to Asia Minor, a foreign land for them, where Greek civilizations had flourished for 2.000 years before the appearance of the Turks.The Turks just destroyed these civilizations and unfortunately did not even try to take advantage of its accomplishments.
In two previous occasions the Greek people contributed in civilizing their conquerors, as was the case with the Romans and the Franks. One must possess a cultural identity to be able to absorb what is creative and good from other civilizations. Unfortunately, the conquering Turks lacked such an identity.
The Turks also failed to administer their subject peoples within the Ottoman Empire. There were no laws in the civilized sense of the word. The Sultan's word was the law in the capital and arbitrary rule of local representatives was the law in the provinces. The property, honor, and life of the conquered were completely at the mercy of the occasional Turkish official.
The only bond that kept the multiethnic empire together was the crude use of force-ultimately the butchery-of the rulers. Slaughter was the rule without concern for innocence or guilt.
Under these conditions the Turkish administration was truly detestable to all the subject people who suffered and patiently waited for each opportunity to throw off the Ottoman yoke.
The Turks failed to assimilate the various nationalities within their empire. They could not also administer them efficiently, not even control the economy because commerce and industry was left in the hands of the Greeks, Armenians and Jews, while the Turks kept busy with governing and simultaneously exploiting the profits while terrorizing the inhabitants.
For the enslaved people to be finally liberated from their rulers there took place a series of revolutions, which led to the establishment of independent states. In 1908 the Young Turk revolution forced the Sultan to grant a constitution to the remnants of the Ottoman Empire.
In spite of the apparent liberalism of the formally bourgeois revolution, which was spearheaded by the military without the participation of the people, there continued to develop additional centrifugal tendencies as they did in the times of the Sultan's despotism. For those nations still within the Empire whose fellow nationals had established independent states, e. g. the Greeks- it was natural for them to seek union with their free compatriots. Those peoples still within the Empire that had not attained separate statehood, e.g. the Armenians, and the Kurds, focused all their energies towards the attainment of self-determination and the establishment of autonomous national homelands.
The Young Turks sought to rid themselves of troublesome non-Turkish ethnic groups so that they could build a homogeneous Turkish state and so they could avoid further mutilation of Turkish controlled territory in areas where non-Turks were in the majority, such as Eastern Thrace,
Western Asia Minor and Pontos, where the Greeks were in the majority, Eastern Asia Minor where the Armenians were in the majority and, Southeastern Asia Minor where the Kurds were in the majority.
Thus, the supposedly liberal and constitutionally oriented Young Turks returned to the usual Sultanic abrasiveness and brutality, which now became much more organized and systematic and assumed genocidal proportions.
The massacres were premeditated: It was decided that the Ottomanisation of all Turkish citizens, which never succeeded through persuasion, had to be done by the force of arms.
This was stated in the L o n d o n T i m e s on the 3rd of October 1911 summarizing the proceedings of the Council of Union and Progress (The Young Turks).
At first, the persecutions took place against the Greeks, made under the pretext of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). Persecution took the form of lootings, expulsions and murders. After the wars, persecution continued even more intensively, to the point where on the 25 of May 1914 the Ecumenical Patriarchate was forced to declare that the Orthodox Church was under attack.
The Patriarchate, further, in a show of protest and mourning, suspended the activities of Greek churches and Greek schools throughout Turkey.
After the declaration of World War I, the Turks found the perfect opportunity to organize more effectively the massacres against ethnic minorities, so that they could finally transform their empire into a homogeneous nation-state.
Prominent officers of the Young Turks movement, while serving as members of the government, organized the expulsion of the inhabitants as well as the lootings and massacres that were perpetrated against them. Specifically, Talaat Pasha, minister of the interior, was prominent as the mastermind of the pogroms. However, the entire Turkish state administration participated in the organization and the execution of the extermination program.
They began with the genocide of the Armenians, who did not possess a state, which would rush to their aid and followed it up with mass expulsions and massacres of the Greeks. The victims of this period are over 2.5 million people of which 1.5 million were Armenians. In the chronological Index one can see detailed figures regarding the persecution of the Greeks of Asia Minor, Thrace and Pontos.
After the end of World War I, the Allies recognized that the Turkish government could not protect the property, honor, and life of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire.
They assigned to Greece the responsibility to administer Eastern Thrace and the Smyrna district. This arrangement was contained in the Treaty of Sevres. Simultaneously, there was established a separate and independent Pontian state.
In 1920, Alexander Millerand, president of the Supreme Allied Council stated: The Turkish government not only failed in its duty to protect its non-Turkish citizens from the looting, violence and murders, but there are many indications that the Turkish government itself was responsible for directing and organizing the most cruel attacks against the populations, which it was supposed to protect. For these reasons, the Allied powers have decided to liberate from the Turkish yoke all the lands where the majority of the people were non-Turks.
The Turkish government signed the Treaty of Sevres but Mustafa Kemal refused to recognize it.
After 40 long months of war, during which Kemal's forces secured considerable foreign assistance, the Greek military front in Anatolia collapsed.
The Turks reoccupied Asia Minor and entered Smyrna on September 8, 1922. In Smyrna, in the meantime, there was an influx of refugees from various parts of Asia Minor. And the conquering Turks set the city on fire and unleashed the last phase of the genocide against the Greeks and Armenians.
These were moments of unbelievable horror. The pier turned red by the blood of the victims. The bishop of Smyrna Chrysostomos was publicly ridiculed and then slaughtered. Events were too horrible to even describe. The American Consul in Smyrna, George Horton, gives a detailed and objective picture of the chilling Turkish crimes in his book
T h e B l i g h t o f A s i a (Indianapolis: Bobb and Merryl, 1925).
The Treaty of Lausanne ended the Greek-Turkish war and imposed the unjust and mandatory exchange of 300,000 Turks from Greece for the 1,400,000 Greeks that survived the holocaust.
The Greek refugees of Asia Minor, without being consulted had to give up their ancestral homes to the Turks, after almost 4,000 years of glorious and productive history.
Through the unjust actions of massacre and persecution of Greeks and Armenians, the contemporary Turkish state was thus created. It was a state founded on crime, the state about which French prime minister George Clemanceau said on the 25th of June, 1919: We do not find even one example in Europe, Asia, or Africa, where the imposition of Turkish sovereignty had not been followed by a decline in material prosperity, and by the impoverishment of its culture. Also there does not exist one example where liberation from Turkish control was not followed by the advancement of material prosperity and an improvement of the cultural level. Whether dealing with Christians or Muslims, the Turk has managed to bring destruction wherever he conquered. The Turk has never been able to develop in peace that which he won through conquest.
On the 26th of November 1979, the New York Times wrote quite characteristically: According to the most recent statistics, the Christian population in Turkey was diminished from (4.500.000) at the beginning of this century to just about 150,000. Of those, the Greeks are no more than 7,000 yet, in 1923 they were as many as 1, 2 millions (After the massacres of many hundreds of thousands).
Even though human justice has not yet punished the Turks, we believe that there is a Divine Justice to which the Turks will sooner or later be answerable.
Beit Hanun Massacre – Photos without Words
Published November 18, 2006	Abuse , Arabic & Arab (арабский язык) , Terror , War Leave a Comment
Click on the Picture, to see the remaining 157 Photos of the Beit Hanun Massacre!
A genocide on children…CHILDREN!!
Armenian Genocide – Turkification!
Published November 17, 2006	Abuse , Armenia , Serj Tankian , War 17 Comments
The French College in Aintoura, Lebanon or Jemal Paha's orphanage where Armenian children were to be turkified!
ARTICLE BY: Nora Parseghian
The Armenian nation lived the most horrible phase of its history in 1915. The Ottoman authorities executed the Genocide which resulted in the killing of over 1 million Armenians, while most of the Armenians remaining on the western parts of historic Armenia were compelled to leave there cities and villages and deported, marched towards the deserts of Iraq and Syria.
Parts of the deported Armenians reached Lebanon where they believed that they were left in peace without realizing that in one of the not-so-far villages of Lebanon, namely Aintoura, near Zouk, Keserwan, which is about half an hour drive from the capital city Beirut, a plan of Turkification of Armenian orphans had been put in motion in 1915.
Such a new page in the history of the Armenian Genocide was recently discovered by Missak Keleshian, who is an avid collector of all kinds of photos of the Armenian Genocide. This is how he speaks about this most recent discovery:
"A few months ago I was reading a book entitled "The Lions of Marash" by Stanley E. Kerr, (President of the American Univerity of Beirut) who tells about his personal experiences with Near East Relief during the years 1919-1922.
In the book I came across a shocking photo with the following caption:
"Jemal Pasha…on the steps of the French College at Aintoura, Lebanon. Jemal Pasha had established an orphanage for Armenian children in the college building and had appointed Halide Edib to be its directress".
Halide Edib Hanum was a famous Turkish feminist and very well known for her efforts to turkify Armenian orphans. Beside being shocking, the photo was the first step that lead to a new discovery.
"On December 8, 2005 I visited the village of Aintoura and located the school where the photo was taken. It's a famous French College and it was established by the Jesuit priests 1657-1783 and Lazarist priests 1783-1834.
I met with the school principal Superior Lazarist Father Jean Sfeir and after showing him the photo, I asked for his permission to research the school's archives for additional information about it and reveal its entire history. He was also amazed by the photo and asked the archivist of the school to assist me."
"The archivist of the school Mr. Jean Sebastian Arhan, a Frenchman who came to Lebanon 43 years ago and has been since working in the archive of the French College in Aintoura. I showed him the photo and explained to him what I was looking for. To my amazement he was not only well aware of that part of the school's history that I was interested in but he had also gathered all the archival material pertaining to that period in a separate file which he gave to me."
According to Missak Keleshian, the most important revelation of the photo is the presence of Jemal Pasha and Halide Hanum beside Armenian orphans. Halide Hanum (Halide Edib Adivar 1884-1964) was one of the world renowned feminists of her times. She had received higher education American College for Women in1901. Best known for her novels criticizing the low social status of Turkish women; her first novel Seviye Talip, was published in 1909, Her first husband, Salih Zeki, then she remarried Dr. Adnan Adivar in 1917.
She served as a sergeant in Turkey's nationalist military. Lived in UK, France, and as one of the early feminists met with Gandhi and visited the United States of America for meeting with the leaders of the feminist movement there. She fell in love with Kemal Atatourk but the latter rejected her.
Halide Hanum was a strong supporter of the pashas who planned, organized and executed the Armenian Genocide and played a crucial role in the efforts to turkify the remnants of the Armenians and was one of the leaders of that effort with Nigar Hanum.
Halide Adivar was Member of Parliament 1950-1954.
On October 29, 1914 the Ottoman Empire declared war against France, Great Britain and Russia. Therefore the agreement signed between the great powers and the Ottomans giving Mount Lebanon special status on June 9, 1861 was voided.
The last christian governor of Lebanon, Ohannes Kouyoumdjian Pasha, is replaced by Ali Mounif Bey, during whose reign Lebanon lived horrible condition including hunger, very harsh economic conditions and a surge in the number of executions.
At the end of 1915, the kaymakam (district governor) of Jounieh informs the responsible of the Aintoura College that they must close it down. The clergy are compelled to leave to another monastery on a higher altitude, others are taken to Anatolia and Ourfa while a few older priests, who are unable to travel, remain in Aintoura.
Following the expulsion of the Lazarist priests the school is transformed into an orphanage for Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish children. In 1915 the school housed 800 orphans and 30 soldiers who guarded the school. The staff consisted of 10 Lebanese and the director was Nebih Bey. This is when efforts to turkify the Armenian orphans start to be implemented.
The boys are circumcised and they are given Arabic and Turkish names by keeping the first letters of their Armenian names.
This is how Haroutiun Najarian becomes Hamid Nazim, Boghos Merdanian becomes Bekim Mohammed, Sarkis Sarafian becomes Safwad Suleyman.
Poor sanitary conditions, lack of nourishment and diseases prevail in the school and as a result a big number of children die. Turkish responsibles visiting the school blame Nebih Bey and accuse him of incompetence.
In 1916, the commander of the Fourth Turkish Army Jemal Pasha decides to visit the orphanage. Upon being informed that the official who had appointed him to his position and charged him with the responsibility of turkifying the orphans is planning a visit, Nebih Bey orders the statues of St. Joseph and the statue of father Saliege removed from the school's entrance. Jemal Pasha arrives at the school accompanied by feminist Halide Hanum, who is immediately appointed to replace Nebih Bey as the principal of the orphanage.
Halide Hanum is assisted by five Lebanese nuns from the Sacred Heart Order, who are responsible of the sanitation and nutrition of the orphans and other chores. Beside the Aintoura orphanage, Halide Hanum is also responsible of the Sister Nazareth school in Beirut, which is closed down in 1917.
400 new orphans between the ages 3-15 are brought to Aintoura with Jemal Pasha. They are accompanied by 15 young women from Turkish elite families, who join the team of 40 people working towards the islamization and turkification of the orphans.
Halide Hanum, the principal of the school, was the highest authority and was supervising all the activities aiming at the full turkification of the orphans in the shortest possible interval. Her goal was to transform the Aintoura College into an idea Turkish institution.
While famine was prevailing in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon and the Turkish plan to exterminate the Armenians by the sword and the Arabs by famine was being carried on, cows, sheep and flour were abundant in the Aintoura orphanage.
The goal was to have well fed and healthy newly turkified children. Lebanese outside the compound walls used to gather and beg for food.
Teaching at the orphanage was in Turkish. Older orphans were trained in trades – shoemaking, carpentry and others and the mullah assigned to the schools called the children to prayer five times a day.
Every night the band used to play "Long live Jemal Pasha".
In the summer of 1916 leprosy starts spreading within the orphanage while the Ottoman Armies start loosing on the fronts in the Balkans and in Palestine.
Lutfy Bey, Rashid Bey and Halide Hanum abandon the school and the orphanage starts falling into chaos. Students start leaving the school compound and disorderly conduct leads to fights between the Turkish and Kurdish students on one side and the Armenian orphans – who were blaming the parents of the Turkish and Kurdish students of having killed their parents – on the other.
It is only through the interference of the Turkish soldiers stationed at the school that killings are avoided.
From the 1200 orphans kept at the Aintoura orphanage one thousand are Armenians and the remaining 200 are Turkish and Kurdish.
The Armenian orphans used to keep forks and other sharp objects to defend themselves. When the Ottomans retreat and the French and British arrive in the region, accompanied by members of the clergy, they find a chaotic situation in the school. One of the Lazarist leaders approaches Bayard Dodge, an officer of the American University of Beirut for assistance, who immediately complies with the request and arrange for shipments of food through the American Red Cross.
On October 1, 1918 the Turkish Army abandons Lebanon. On October 7 Father Sarlout returns to Aintoura and realizes that the situation is untenable. He arranges for the Turkish and Kurdish orphans to be transported to Damascus to ease the tension within the orphanage.
He then gathers the Armenian orphans and starts working with them to remember their Armenian names and tries to explain to them that the turkification process they were going through is no longer in force.
Once convinced, the Armenian orphans start calling each other by their original names then they gather all the forks and sharp items they were hiding and "surrender" them to the school officials.
The statue of St. Joseph is returned to its podium and the French flag flies over the school. But father Sarlout realizes that his resources are limited and he cannot support that many orphans. He calls upon Bayard Dodge and the American Red Cross to support the school and the orphans.
Mr. Crawford is then appointed principal of the Aintoura school, the staff of the school is replaced by Armenian teachers and the orphans are offered lessons in Armenian and English. Later "Near East Relief" takes over the school and keeps it until the fall of 1919, when the male orphans are sent to Aleppo and the females to the Armenian orphanage in the village of Ghazir, Lebanon.
While the school was under Turkish control, as a result of malnourishment, lack of sanitary conditions and diseases (mainly typhus), 300 Armenian orphans die. They are buried during 1916 in the backyard of the school.
In 1993 the school directors decide to build an extension in that same backyard. When they start digging the ground they come across human remains which they gather and rebury in a few joint graves in the cemetery belonging to the Aintoura priests.
When the Turks leave and Father Sarlout returns to the school, he finds there 670 orphans – 470 boys and 200 girls.
"Wondering in the different parts of the school, one corner looked very familiar to me. At a first glance I couldn't remember where or how I had seen that spot but I was sure that this was not new to me. When I returned home I started working in my collection of photographs and after three hours I found what I was looking for:
it was the photo of a young orphan, which was actually taken in the same corner of the Aintoura school that looked familiar to me. The original of the photo was in the archives of the Catholicosate of the Holy See of Cilicia in Antelias, Lebanon, in the documents and photos belonging to Maria Jacobson.
The writing on the side of the photo notes: "Armenian orphan, clean-cut and bright". The seal of "Near East Relief" is still visible at the bottom-left of the photo. At the time, the photo in question did not seem that important but toady, following the newly discovered facts about the Aintoura college, it was another piece of the puzzle I was faced with",- says Keleshian.
By putting the photos side by side and researching the archives of the Aintoura College, Missak Keleshian succeeded in reconstructing one of the most horrifying phases in the life of the orphans of the Armenian Genocide – Turkification, which was nothing else but another portion of the general plan of annihilating the Armenian nation.
NATO Unaffected By Turkey-France Military Row: Officials
Published November 17, 2006	Abuse , Armenia , Politics, Political Point of Views , Serj Tankian , Wala 3ala Baloh 1 Comment
Agence France Presse — English November 16, 2006 Thursday
NATO's operations will not be affected by a decision by the Turkish army to suspend its military relations with France, officials at the defence alliance said Thursday.
Turkish army chief General Ilker Basbug made the announcement late Wednesday in retaliation to a French parliamentary bill which would make it a crime to deny that the World War I massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks constituted genocide.
"It's a bilateral issue. It won't affect their relations at NATO," an official in Brussels said. Both French and Turkish troops were operating in Kabul, he added.
"They're there today," he stressed. French and Turkish troops operate side-by-side in the Afghan capital, under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), combatting a fierce insurgency by Taliban rebels.
However, General Basbug told reporters in Ankara that high-level visits between the two countries had stopped, according to the Turkey's semi-official Anatolia news agency.
Turkey has warned that bilateral ties will suffer a great blow if France adopts the bill, which foresees one year in jail for anyone who denies that Armenians were the victims of genocide by Ottoman Turks between 1915-17.
The bill was approved by the lower house of the French parliament last month but still needs the approval of the Senate and the president to take effect.
Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their people were slaughtered in orchestrated killings during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey's predecessor.
But Turkey rejects the use of the term "genocide", saying some 300,000 Armenians died when the Ottoman Empire fell apart, but at least as many Turks did too. "
This doesn't concern NATO," a diplomat at the military organisation agreed. "We don't foresee any difficulties in the NATO sphere. There won't be any impact on the functioning of the Alliance".
Top military officers from NATO and Partner nations were completing two days of talks in Brussels Thursday, two weeks ahead of a NATO Summit in Riga, to shape and inform military advice for the North Atlantic Council.
Iraqi tribunal sentences Saddam to hang
Published November 5, 2006	Abuse , Arabic & Arab (арабский язык) , Politics, Political Point of Views , Terror , War Leave a Comment
By HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced Sunday to hang for crimes against humanity in the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single Shiite town, as the ousted leader, trembling and defiant, shouted "God is great!"
As he, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal, Saddam yelled out, "Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!" Later, his lawyer said the former dictator had called on Iraqis to reject sectarian violence and refrain from revenge against U.S. forces.
The trial brought Saddam and his co-defendants before their accusers in what was one of the most highly publicized and heavily reported trials of its kind since the Nuremberg tribunals for members of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and its slaughter of 6 million Jews in the World War II Holocaust
"The verdict placed on the heads of the former regime does not represent a verdict for any one person. It is a verdict on a whole dark era that has was unmatched in Iraq's history," said Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's Shiite prime minister.
Some feared the court decision could exacerbate the sectarian violence that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war, after a trial that stretched over nine months in 39 sessions and ended nearly 3 1/2 months ago. The verdict came two days before midterm elections in the United States widely seen as a referendum on the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. U.S. and Iraqi officials have denied the timing was deliberate.
The White House praised the Iraqi judicial system and denied the U.S. had been "scheming" for the verdict.
Iraqis "are the ones who conducted the trial. The Iraqi judges are the ones who spent all the time pouring over the evidence. … It's important to give them credit for running their own government," said Tony Snow, the president's spokesman.
In north Baghdad's heavily Sunni Azamiyah district, clashes broke out between police and gunmen. Elsewhere in the capital, celebratory gunfire rang out.
"This government will be responsible for the consequences, with the deaths of hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands, whose blood will be shed," Salih al-Mutlaq, a Sunni political leader, told the Al-Arabiya satellite television station.
Saddam and his seven co-defendants were on trial for a wave of revenge killings carried out in the city of Dujail following a 1982 assassination attempt on the former dictator. Al-Maliki's Islamic Dawa party, then an underground opposition, has claimed responsibility for organizing the attempt on Saddam's life.
In the streets of Dujail, people celebrated and burned pictures of their former tormentor as the verdict was read.
Saddam's chief lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi condemned the trial as a "farce," claiming the verdict was planned. He said defense attorneys would appeal within 30 days.
The death sentences automatically go to a nine-judge appeals panel, which has unlimited time to review the case. If the verdicts and sentences are upheld, the executions must be carried out within 30 days.
A court official told The Associated Press that the appeals process was likely to take three to four weeks once the formal paperwork was submitted.
During Sunday's hearing, Saddam initially refused the chief judge's order to rise; two bailiffs pulled the ousted ruler to his feet and he remained standing through the sentencing, sometimes wagging his finger at the judge.
Before the session began, one of Saddam's lawyers, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from the courtroom after handing the judge a memorandum in which he called the trial a travesty.
Chief Judge Raouf Abdul-Rahman pointed to Clark and said in English, "Get out."
In addition to the former Iraqi dictator and Barzan Ibrahim, his former intelligence chief and half brother, the Iraqi High Tribunal convicted and sentenced Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the head of Iraq's former Revolutionary Court, to death by hanging. Iraq's former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Three defendants were sentenced to 15 years in prison for torture and premeditated murder. Abdullah Kazim Ruwayyid and his son Mizhar Abdullah Ruwayyid were party officials Dujail, along with Ali Dayih Ali. They were believed responsible for the Dujail arrests.
Mohammed Azawi Ali, a former Dujail Baath Party official, was acquitted for lack of evidence and immediately freed.
He faces additional charges in a separate case over an alleged massacre of Kurdish civilians — a trial that will continue while appeals are pending.
The guilty verdict is likely to enrage hard-liners among Saddam's fellow Sunnis, who made up the bulk of the former ruling class. The country's majority Shiites were persecuted under the former leader but now largely control the government.
Al-Dulaimi, Saddam's lawyer, told AP his client called on Iraqis to reject sectarian violence and called on them to refrain from taking revenge on U.S. invaders.
"His message to the Iraqi people was 'pardon and do not take revenge on the invading nations and their people'," al-Dulaimi said, quoting Saddam. "The president also asked his countrymen to 'unify in the face of sectarian strife.'"
In Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, 1,000 people defied the curfew and carried pictures of the city's favorite son through the streets. Some declared the court a product of the U.S. "occupation forces" and condemned the verdict.
"By our souls, by our blood we sacrifice for you Saddam" and "Saddam your name shakes America."
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad issued a statement saying the verdicts "demonstrate the commitment of the Iraqi people to hold them (Saddam and his co-defendants) accountable."
"Although the Iraqis may face difficult days in the coming weeks, closing the book on Saddam and his regime is an opportunity to unite and build a better future," Khalilzad said.
Two U.S. officials who worked as advisers to the court on matters of international judicial procedures said Saddam's repeated outbursts during the trial may have played a key part in his conviction.
They cited his admission in a March 1 hearing that he had ordered the trial of 148 Shiites who were eventually executed, insisting that doing so was legal because they were suspected in the assassination attempt against him. "Where is the crime? Where is the crime?" he asked, standing before the panel of five judges.
Later in the same session, he argued that he was in charge and he alone must be tried. His outburst came a day after the prosecution presented a presidential decree with a signature they said was Saddam's approval for the Dujail death sentences, their most direct evidence against him.
About 50 of those sentenced by the "Revolutionary Court" died during interrogation before they could go to the gallows. Some of those hanged were children.
"Every time they (defendants) rose and spoke, they provided a lot of incriminating evidence," said one of the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Under Saddam, Iraq's bureaucracy showed a consistent tendency to document orders, policies and minutes of meetings. One document gave the names of everyone from Dujail banished to a desert detention camp in southern Iraq. Another, prepared by an aide to Saddam, gave the president a detailed account of the punitive measures against the people of Dujail.
Saddam's trial had from the outset appeared to reflect the turmoil and violence in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
One of Saddam's lawyers was assassinated the day after the trial's opening session last year. Two more were later assassinated and a fourth fled the country.
In January, chief judge Rizgar Amin, a Kurd, resigned after complaints by Shiite politicians that he had failed to keep control of court proceedings. He, in turn, complained of political interference. Abdul-Rahman, another Kurd, replaced Amin.
Hearings were disrupted by outbursts from Saddam and Ibrahim, with the two raging against what they said was the illegitimacy of the court, their ill treatment in the U.S.-run facility where they are being held and the lack of protection for their lawyers.
The defense lawyers contributed to the chaos in the courtroom by staging several boycotts.
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As the Conquest release nears, we thought it was time to fill you in on our collaboration with Patrick Rue of The Bruery and the beer itself.
When Solemn Oath was still in planning, we read Patrick Rue's blog about his efforts to open The Bruery, learning some important lessons through his experience. Since then, we've enjoyed many of his beers as much as watching The Bruery's rise as an important American brewery known for one-of-a-kind beers with delicate, complex flavor profiles rooted in the Belgian tradition. To collaborate with Patrick on a beer is an important moment for Solemn Oath, one that we'd like to take in for a moment with you.
Here's a Q&A with Patrick and our Head Brewer Tim Marshall. Details on release day are coming shortly, so check back soon.
Je voudrais une croissant, Je suis enchante.
In 1886 the people of France gifted the USA a copper statue of mammoth proportions. Now, the French may have a reputation for being the camembert to America's hard and sharp cheddar, but when they are brainstorming what to share with their brothers in arms they go big. Statue-of-Liberty big. It's the same 'round here.
Now, like a good, steamy french kiss, it's back as big, as wet, and as unforgettable as ever. Imperial Farmhouse IPA means as many things as you would think. Huge tropical fruit hop aroma jumps out immediately, followed by an earthy, peppery farmhouse yeast profile that wouldn't be out of place in your favorite sessionable saison. It's that funky farmhouse yeast that leaves this beer super dry but jam packed with layers of bitterness, tangy citrus (un peu de pamplemousse?) and tropical fruit (ananas!) hop flavor, with a powerfully fresh aroma thanks to some sturdy dry-hopping with Amarillo, Citra and Centennial. Sound good? Oui? Faisons l'amour! Rapidement! Santé!
Ever wonder why a brewery makes the beers it makes? Ninety percent of the time it's because they're making the beers they like to drink. That couldn't be more true when it comes to Hexafoos, our American-style farmhouse ale.
We've put this beer on tap before and kept it off menu just so it would stick around longer, hoping we could squeeze a few more shift beers out before you drank it all. We squirrel some away every year in the creepy crawl space below our brewery alongside live hostages from who we're contractually bound by our landlord not to disturb until Jean Claude Van Damme arrives. Point is, the brewing team at Solemn Oath loves this beer.
Up front, Hexafoos is full of earthy, peppery, and stone fruit aroma from our French saison yeast strain and pineapple-like tropical fruit notes from a blend of Galaxy and American hops. The flavor is citrus-forward with a smack of ripe peach in the mid-palate and a dry, fruity finish with moderate bitterness and effervescent carbonation.


Self-confidence is the secret ingredient to success, both in business and in personal life. It is the tool you need to overcome fear of failure, to garner the courage to break out of your comfort zone, and to persevere when something doesn't work out quite the way you planned. The question is: where does it come from, and how do you get it?
Truthfully, our parents and the way they raised us significantly influence our self-confidence level. If you were fortunate enough to come from a stable home environment where your parents supported and encouraged your endeavors, chances are that you will have developed an innate sense of self-confidence from a young age.
If your childhood environment was not so supportive, you may have to work a little bit harder to develop self-confidence in your adolescent or adult life. But never fear – as your experienced online counselor, I am here to assure you that it is VERY possible! Here are a few simple but effective ways you can work on boosting your self-confidence levels.
If you spend all of your time rushing around taking care of other people, you'll likely wind up feeling exhausted and drained. In order to care for others, we must first care for ourselves. Dedicating time to self-care (such as soaking in a bath, doing yoga, or reading a book) will help remind you that you're worth it – that you deserve to be happy.
Turns out Grandma was on to something all those times that she told you to sit (or stand) up straight. Believe it or not, sitting or standing tall is a great way to boost your self-confidence. It is a powerful nonverbal message that you are capable and worthwhile, and that you deserve nothing but the best.
The way you feel about your appearance will greatly influence your confidence level. Exercising to tone your muscles and shed some pounds may be your first thought, but grooming yourself can be much more simple than that. Simply taking the time to shower, fix your hair, or apply a little makeup can work wonders on enhancing your self-image.
This goes hand-in-hand with grooming yourself, but it's a little different. In addition to taking the time to groom yourself, it's important to dress in a manner that makes you feel good about yourself. While this certainly can include dressing in expensive professional attire, it doesn't have to. Clothes don't have to be expensive to make you feel good about your appearance.
Self-awareness is a key component of self-confidence. In order to be true to yourself, you have to have a good understanding of your beliefs, your values, and your core principles. Once you identify what makes you comfortable and what doesn't, honor those impulses by avoiding situations that don't sit well with you. This isn't to say that you should never push yourself to try something new, of course – what matters is that you learn to say no to circumstances that violate your values.
What are your personal goals? While it's good to have ambitious, long-term goals to strive for, it can be hard to monitor your progress towards these goals. You may find it helpful to break your overarching goals into smaller, more easily achievable steps. This way you can easily see the progress you make towards these, which will give you something to feel good about.
Remember, you don't ever have to face your journey alone! If you are looking for ways to build your self-confidence, need help overcoming a specific challenge, or simply in need of an avenue in which to vent frustrations over a certain situation, I would be honored to offer my services. My online counseling practice makes it easy for me to meet with you however and whenever works best for you.
Online Therapy: It's More Effective Than You Think!


Assessment: Oh, just read the line above again and weep. A trained frickin' bee? And did anyone ever tell him that male bees don't even sting? Okay, to be fair, he did have a swarm of trained bees at his command but Michael was his special friend. And, in a display of self-awareness that's almost poignant, The Red Bee seems to acknowledge his complete and utter pitiful lack of coolness by wearing the worst costume in superhero history. Red and yellow striped tights? Who was his designer? Extrano?
Nightmare big-screen scenario: David Lynch turns the concept on its head, telling the film from the point of view of Michael, a desperate bee press-ganged into attacking Nazis and hoodlums by a deranged, sociopathic, colour-blind misfit. Michael (voiced by Mickey Rourke) starts hallucinating a life on another planet where humans are frozen in honey like museum exhibits. Then a mad, mutant, serial-killing bug exterminator starts skipping between the two realities. And a one-legged man who smokes menthol cigarettes records the sound of buzzing hives to play to his housebound wife. Or something.


Why did God want animal sacrifices and burnt offerings made to him?
When reading Leviticus there is a lot information about burnt offerings and animal sacrifices. It makes you wonder what the significance of this is, and why God looked favorably upon those who did it.
← What is the "book of Jashar" that is mentioned in Joshua 10:13?
Thank you for the kind words and for the pingback.
And thank you for providing such great and meaningful content on your site, it helped me learn an answer to that question. M site is in its infancy, but hoping to build a giant database of questions and answers I run into as I attempt my first pass at reading the Bible from cover to cover!
Hi there! This article couldn't be written much better! Reading through this post reminds me of my previous roommate! He constantly kept talking about this. I will send this post to him. Fairly certain he will have a very good read. Thanks for sharing!


text:
Events Toggle navigation
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Shaping the Post-COVID World
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The Ralph Miliband programme
The Tyranny of Merit: what's become of the common good?
Wednesday 09 September 2020 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Hosted by the School of Public Policy
Online public event
Professor Michael Sandel
Professor Andrés Velasco
Join us for this online public event with Michael Sandel who will be discussing his latest book, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?
In this new book Sandel argues that to overcome the polarised politics of our time, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalisation and rising inequality. Sandel highlights the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success - more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility, and more hospitable to a politics of the common good.
Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. His writings—on justice, ethics, democracy, and markets--have been translated into 27 languages. His course "Justice" is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was named the "most influential foreign figure of the year." (China Newsweek)
Sandel's books relate enduring themes of political philosophy to the most vexing moral and civic questions of our time. They include What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets; Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?; The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering; Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics; Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy; and Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
You can order the book, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.
Andrés Velasco (@AndresVelasco) is Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Our approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance.
Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSESandel
A podcast of this event is available to download from The Tyranny of Merit: what's become of the common good?
A video of this event is available to watch at The Tyranny of Merit: what's become of the common good?
Podcasts and videos of many LSE events can be found at the LSE Public Lectures and Events: podcasts and videos channel.
Follow LSE public events on Twitter for notification on the availability of an event podcast, the posting of transcripts and videos, the announcement of new events and other important event updates. Event updates and other information about what's happening at LSE can be found on the LSE's Facebook page and for live photos from events and around campus, follow us on Instagram. For live webcasts and archive video of lectures, follow us on YouTube.
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From time to time there are changes to event details so we strongly recommend that if you plan to attend this event you check back on this listing on the day of the event.
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Order Online The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?
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🔜 One week to go! #LSEHealth Cardiologist and scientist @hmkyale will review the challenges of today's health care… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
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text:
Last updated on: 1/27/2010 | Author: ProCon.org
Paul F. Campos, JD Biography
Professor of Law at the University of Colorado at Boulder
Con to the question "Is Obesity a Disease?"
"From the perspective of a profit-maximizing medical and pharmaceutical industry… the ideal disease would be one that never killed those who suffered from it, that could not be treated effectively, and that doctors and their patients would nevertheless insist on treating anyway. Luckily for it, the American health-care industry has discovered (or rather invented) just such a disease. It is called 'obesity.'
The reasons why the disease of obesity doesn't kill those who suffer from it and why it remains impossible to cure are one and the same: Because it doesn't exist.
…Most groups of people categorized as 'overweight' and 'obese' do not suffer from poorer health or higher mortality than 'ideal weight' individuals. In many of the largest-scale studies, groups of people currently categorized as overweight have better mortality statistics than anyone else…
The absurd notion that something as complex as an individual human being's health can be adequately gauged, or even generalized about, by determining where he or she fits on something as crude as a body mass index scale is a remnant of a level of medical knowledge (or rather ignorance) that had very little to do with science…
In fact, as we have seen, there is no valid medical reason why two women of the same height cannot weigh 100 and 200 pounds respectively, while both maintain optimum cardiovascular and metabolic fitness, and excellent overall health."
The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health, 2004
Involvement and Affiliations:
Professor, University of Colorado School of Law, 1997-present
Director, Byron R. White Center for American Constitutional Study, 1995-1999
Associate Professor, University of Colorado School of Law, 1990-1997
Visiting Professor, Southern Methodist University Law School, Fall 1997
Visiting Associate Professor, University of Minnesota Law School, Fall 1992
Attorney, Latham & Watkins, Chicago, Illinois, 1989-1990
Associate Editor, Michigan Law Review, 1987-1988
Editor, The Sports Periodicals Index, 1985-1986
JD, University of Michigan Law School, 1989
MA, University of Michigan, 1983
AB, University of Michigan, 1982
Quoted in:
Pro & Con Quotes: Is Obesity a Disease?
Obesity – Pros & Cons
Pro & Con Quotes
History of Obesity as a Disease
Portion Sizes: How Big or Small Should They Be?
Find Your Body Mass Index (BMI)
Anti-Obesity Drugs
US Obesity Levels by State
Global Obesity Levels
Who is the author? How to cite this page.
Source Biographies
Reprinting Policy
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© 2020 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Obesity – Menu
All Issues / Topics
Medical Marijuana – Should Marijuana Be a Medical Option?
Gun Control – Should More Gun Control Laws Be Enacted?
Animal Testing – Should Animals Be Used for Scientific or Commercial Testing?
Death Penalty – Should the Death Penalty Be Allowed?
Recreational Marijuana – Should Recreational Marijuana Be Legal?
School Uniforms – Should Students Have to Wear School Uniforms?
Mandatory National Service – Should the United States Have Mandatory National Service?
Social Media – Are Social Networking Sites Good for Our Society?
Zoos – Should Zoos Exist?
Illegal Immigration – What Are the Solutions to Illegal Immigration in America?
Topics by Category
ProCon.org is the institutional or organization author for all ProCon.org pages. Proper citation depends on your preferred or required style manual. Below are the proper citations for this page according to four style manuals (in alphabetical order): the Modern Language Association Style Manual (MLA), the Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago), the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), and Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Turabian). Here are the proper bibliographic citations for this page according to four style manuals (in alphabetical order):
APA (6th ed.):
ProCon.org. (2010, January 28). Paul F. Campos, JD. Retrieved from https://obesity.procon.org/source-biographies/paul-f-campos/
[Editor's Note: The APA citation style requires double spacing within entries.]
Chicago (17th ed.):
ProCon.org, "Paul F. Campos, JD," ProCon.org. last modified January 28, 2010. https://obesity.procon.org/source-biographies/paul-f-campos/.
MLA (8th ed.):
ProCon.org, "Paul F. Campos, JD." ProCon.org. 28 Jan. 2010, obesity.procon.org/source-biographies/paul-f-campos/
[Editor's Note: The MLA citation style requires double spacing within entries.]
Turabian (8th ed.):
ProCon.org. "Paul F. Campos, JD." ProCon.org. Last modified on January 28, 2010. Accessed January 15, 2021. https://obesity.procon.org/source-biographies/paul-f-campos/


By Odiana Fleury. Living Room. Published at Friday, August 03rd, 2018 01:40:57 AM.
By Hanriette Charron. Living Room. Published at Wednesday, August 08th, 2018 17:25:04 PM.
By Maurelle Marchal. Living Room. Published at Saturday, August 11th, 2018 08:30:37 AM.
By Maurelle Marchal. Living Room. Published at Tuesday, September 04th, 2018 09:59:44 AM.
By Maurelle Marchal. Living Room. Published at Tuesday, September 04th, 2018 09:58:43 AM.
By Maurelle Marchal. Living Room. Published at Tuesday, September 04th, 2018 09:55:39 AM.
By Maurelle Marchal. Living Room. Published at Tuesday, September 04th, 2018 10:01:21 AM.
By Maurelle Marchal. Living Room. Published at Tuesday, September 04th, 2018 09:54:14 AM.
By Maurelle Marchal. Living Room. Published at Tuesday, September 04th, 2018 09:52:35 AM.


text:
Roys Leads in Cash on Hand by Almost 2-1 Margin
"Our team is not wasting money on fancy office space or an army of high-priced consultants," said Sonja Chojnacki, Roys' campaign manager.
By Kelda Roys	- Jul 17th, 2018 08:22 am
MADISON, WI — Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kelda Roys has the highest cash on hand and the lowest burn rate of all the Democratic gubernatorial candidates with just four weeks left until the election.
"We are running the most disciplined campaign of the cycle, and energizing voters and grassroots donors across the state," said Sonja Chojnacki, Roys' campaign manager. "Our team is not wasting money on fancy office space or an army of high-priced consultants. We'll be spending our money where it counts: getting our message out to voters. That's why Kelda is going to win this primary."
Below is an account of how much each candidate raised and spent as reported on their January and July Continuing reports:
Candidate Total Raised Total Spent Cash on Hand Burn Rate
Roys $824,573.76 $172,718.99 $667,762.05 20.95%
Flynn $687,569.10 $284,106.33 $403,462.77 41.32%
Mitchell $1,006,066.63 $644,322.85 $368,065.85 64.04%
Evers $807,622.89 $538,686.07 $307,112.10 66.70%
McCabe $260,790.55 $192,564.27 $67,773.47 73.84%
Soglin $115,765.00 $57,965.39 $57,799.61 50.07%
Vinehout $172,618.14 $166,864.71 $21,338.03 96.67%
Pade $11,623.23 $34,698.39 -$23,075.16 298.53%
Kelda Roys, 39, is a small business owner, attorney, former state representative, and past head of NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin who has been standing up for women and families throughout her career. In the Assembly, she stood out as an influential and effective lawmaker, delivering results for working families and helping lead the opposition to Governor Scott Walker's divisive agenda. As a parent and step-parent of four girls, Roys will fight for paid family leave, affordable childcare, great schools, and quality healthcare for all. In a year in which Wisconsin voters are ready for change, Kelda Roys provides the clearest contrast to Scott Walker.
Kelda for Governor
People: Kelda Roys, Scott Walker, Sonja Chojnacki
Recent Press Releases by Kelda Roys
Roys Endorsed by Elected Officials across Southeastern Wisconsin
Aug 10th, 2018 by Kelda Roys
"I'm thrilled to have earned the endorsements of so many local elected officials throughout our great state."
Roys Endorsed by Elected Officials from Northern and Northwestern Wisconsin
"I'm honored to have earned the support of so many well-respected elected officials, from Superior to Beloit."
Kelda Roys Endorsed by Rep. Christine Sinicki
Aug 6th, 2018 by Kelda Roys
"I'm proud to have earned the endorsement of Rep. Sinicki."


What about the replay you have on Temp folder (Worms Armageddon directory) ? Try it.
Yes, exporting logs and videos is currently unavailable. Exporting logs will crash WA, and also your replay. Because, damnit, Project X unloads all its data before playback, and a fatal breaks it . The export of video is impossible because of the damn screen shot bug.
I have the same issue. As soon as the replay begins, stuff explodes or freezes followed by a subsequent crash. Is there a fix available already?
I can confirm that viewing replays works fine for me. As well as extracting scheme/map from it.
Exporting log or video, not so much though.


text:
Q: How do I force pip to update on windows? I am trying the command.
pip install --upgrade pip

Then I receive the error message:
ERROR: Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [WinError 5] Access is denied: (mypath)
Consider using the '--user' option or check permissions.
I've tried the command as admin still get the same error.

A: When you say you tried the command as admin, did you try running the command from an admin powershell? Command runs on my machine from Admin Powershell. do this: search 'powershell' in start>rightclick>click 'run as admin', then try your command again.

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i have 5 torrent leech invites to trade im looking to get into some new sites any private tracker with a wide selection would do i can show proofs upon request.
Mate first of all, you should read carefully the rules before posting in here.
Last edited by |sync|; 03-13-2013 at 09:41 AM.


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Doyle's Compounding Pharmacist at 3710 Fannin in 1948.
Doyle's Pharmacy at 5000 Montrose in 1947. The Pharmacy had the Schwarz cabinets installed. The premier Pharmacy cabinet system of its time for filing prescriptions.
Doyle's Pharmacy at 1008 Pennsylvania ave in Ft Worth in 1951. This converted gas filling station marked Doyle's 1st expansion in Texas outside of Houston.
Doyle's Pharmacy at 1216 Walker in 1945. Notice DATED DRUGS on sign. This was before the drug manufacturers placed expiration dates on prescription meds. Doyle's was the 1st Pharmacy in Houston to mark the date on the meds as they came in the Pharmacy, to know when they should be discarded.
Doyle's Pharmacy at 3710 Fannin in Houston in 1948. The 1st pharmacy window drive-in service in Houston, and probably anywhere in the U.S.
Doyle's pharmacy was founded in 1935 with the intent to offer the finest prescription service in Houston. We are dedicated to the family values and traditions that have kept our customers coming back for over 80 years, and our customers are always our first priority. Since our start so many years ago, we have always done our best to take care of our patients, and we look forward to continue serving both our existing patients and new patients with the best pharmacy service available anywhere.
Pharmacists and Staff
Jimmy Doyle
Jimmy is a second-generation Pharmacist and CEO of Doyle's Pharmacy, which was founded by his father in 1935. He graduated in 1953 from the University of Houston College of Pharmacy and is a former director of the Texas Pharmacy Association. He is currently a member of the Houston Area Pharmacy Association (HAPA), the Texas Pharmacy Association, and the American Pharmacists Association.
Dana Doyle Johnson
Dana is a third-generation Pharmacist and is President of Doyle's Pharmacy. She graduated in 1985 from the University of Houston College of Pharmacy and is a former vice-president of the Houston Area Pharmacy Association (HAPA). In recognition for her outstanding work in the continuing education programs for HAPA, Dana was awarded the Individual Educational Excellence Award from the Texas Pharmacy Association in 2000. She has completed extensive training in compounding and received her certification through the Professional Compounding Centers of America (PCCA) in 2000. She is currently a member of HAPA, the Texas Pharmacy Association, and the American Pharmacists Association.
Donna Doyle Glover
Donna is Vice President of Doyle's Pharmacy. She is a third-generation Doyle working in the family business and has done so for over 30 years.
George M Handal
George is Director of Drug Compounding for Clinical Trials. He comes from a family with five practicing Pharmacists and joined Doyle's Pharmacy in early 2002. He graduated in 1967 from the University of Houston College of Pharmacy and served as a preceptor for the University of Texas College of Pharmacy for over ten years.
Elizabeth Coble
Elizabeth earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology with concentration in biochemistry and cell biology from Rice University in 2005 and a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from The University of Texas in 2010. She was previously a Clinical Pharmacist at Kaiser Permanente in Colorado but was excited to return to Texas, her home state. Elizabeth joined Doyle's in 2012.
Tiffany M. Ruder
Tiffany graduated from the University of Kansas with her Doctor of Pharmacy degree in 2012. She has over 12 years of experience working all aspects of retail pharmacy. Tiffany joined Doyle's in 2019.
Michelle graduated from the University of Houston College of Pharmacy with a Doctor of Pharmacy degree in 2018. She has over 9 years of experience in community pharmacy and is certified in advanced compounding through Professional Compounding Centers of America (PCCA). Michelle joined Doyle's in 2021.
Yolanda Huitron Borunda
Certified Pharmacy Technician
Yoli has been with the Doyle's Pharmacy family since 1987 and has over 30 years of experience in the pharmacy field. In 1999, she received her license as a Certified Pharmacy Technician and in 2000 she received her certification in compounding techniques from the Professional Compounding Centers of America (PCCA). Yoli is fluent in Spanish and is dedicated to accommodating Doyle's international patients.
Mary Vela
Mary moved to Texas from California and joined Doyle's in 2015. She brought with her 33 years of experience in the pharmacy field not only compounding prescriptions for independent pharmacies, but also teaching Pharmacy Technician classes at Kaplan College in Palm Springs. Mary is fluent in Spanish.


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Halfdan Guldtand Solvarsson (n. 640, en nórdico antiguo: Guldtand, es un apodo y significa «diente de oro»), caudillo vikingo y rey de  Solør, Noruega en el siglo VII. Hijo del rey Solve Solvesson y nieto de Sölvi el Viejo. No se conoce el nombre de su consorte, pero su hija Solveig (n. 681) casó con el rey sueco Olof Trätälja, por lo tanto es el abuelo del legendario monarca Halfdan Hvitbeinn. Tuvo otro hijo Solve Halfdansson (n. 686).

Referencias

Bibliografía
 La Saga de los Ynglings y la Heimskringla en «Kulturformidlingen norrøne tekster og kvad» (en inglés y noruego).

Reyes vikingos en Noruega antes de la unificación

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


It is the year 2017 and gender equality and women thriving in work place without fear of sexual harassment or discrimination is the #1 unsolved social issue of our time.
Better Together: 8 Ways Working with Women Leads to Extraordinary Products and Profits offers a rare and startling look at the business world through the lens of an expert looking in and plots out how ALL types of businesses can gain a competitive advantage and excel past competitors by simply nurturing an equal blend of men and women on leadership teams and staff. It focuses on powerful and implementable solutions that any CEO, manager, or team leader can put to use to ensure that women thrive within the organization, leading to the business being more successful, customers happier, and employees more fulfilled.
Author Jonathan Sposato knows the challenges facing women in startup tech and venture capital today because he specifically builds his companies with-out those obstacles. He credits the unprecedented success of his businesses on his brand of gender-balanced culture, and in this fully practical guidebook to his celebrated style of team building, he puts his eight secrets to profiting through diversity in your hands. These secrets are not just for tech companies, but for teams and companies in ANY industry.
It is the culmination of extensive research on the many issues that affect gender equality (or lack thereof) in the workplace, exhaustive interviews with many powerful female CEO's and executives who have been brave in sharing stories of their own personal struggles and triumphs, as well as Jonathan's own experiences as a male entrepreneur, CEO, and angel investor in supporting the advancement of women in business. The book also shows us why that's not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do economically.
With the same entertaining and informative delivery that makes him a sought-after speaker worldwide, Jonathan walks you through adjusting your own culture to open the FULL potential of your workforce.
The data will amaze you and the real-world voices will inspire you, and with Better Together you can achieve more success with more women on your team. If you care about inclusivity and beating the forces that prevent it, you will want to read this book.
About the Author; Jonathan Sposato is chairman and co-founder of Geekwire, PicMonkey, and WeCount.org, and in general, a serial startup founder. Since his early days as a high-performing player on the first Xbox and Xbox games business, he's gone on to add numerous awards for innovation, voted "CEO of the Year" for Picnik.com, receiving the University of Washington's "Man of Integrity" award, and becoming the only person to sell two companies to Google. He recently promised all his future investments to female-founded companies—another first in the technology industry.
JONATHAN SPOSATO is chairman and co-founder of Geekwire, PicMonkey, and WeCount.org, and, in general, a serial startup founder. Since his early days as a high-performing player on the first Xbox and Xbox games business, he's gone on to add numerous awards for innovation, voted "CEO of the Year" for Picnik.com, receiving the University of Washington's "Man of Integrity" award, and becoming the only person to sell two companies to Google. He recently promised all his future investments to female-founded companies—another first in the technology industry.


The IPAA Wildcatters' Sporting Clays invitational is the premier oil & gas industry sporting clay tournament benefiting IPAA's Educational Foundation. Networking with colleagues during IPAA's Wildcatters' Sporting Clays and contributing to such a worthy cause as IPAA's Educational Foundation is a win-win for the entire energy industry. This year's 3rd sporting clays event will again be held at the exclusive Dallas Gun Club. Teams initially will be sold to sponsors then will open to individuals should any remaining slots remain.


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Raikkonen drops to P8 in British GP after strategy error
By Luke SmithJul 6, 2015, 10:00 AM EDT
Ferrari team principal Maurizio Arrivabene refused to be too harsh on Kimi Raikkonen after a strategy error caused the Finn to drop down to eighth place in the closing stages of the British Grand Prix on Sunday.
Raikkonen had been running in fifth place before a late rain shower hit Silverstone, prompting a number of drivers to pit for intermediate tires.
The Finn was among the first to make the switch, only for conditions to remain dry enough for slicks for a few more laps.
This caused Raikkonen to destroy his tires, forcing him into making a third pit stop late on that left him in eighth position at the end of the race.
"When it started raining heavily, the track became very slippery, especially in turns seven and eight," Raikkonen said after the race.
"So I took the decision to come in the pits for intermediate [tires], but then the rain stopped.
"Probably I made the call three or four laps too early. But in general, this kind of track is not ideal for us, and this is something we have to work on."
His teammate, Sebastian Vettel, finished the race in third place to end Ferrari's podium drought, but Arrivabene believes that Raikkonen could perhaps have even won the race had the rain grown in intensity earlier on.
"The strategy guys do a wonderful job, but when it rains, it's the driver who has the final call to the pits," Arrivabene said.
"In the case of Kimi, whose strategy was identical to Seb's, he thought it better to come in. If it had rained harder, maybe he could have won the race.
"But we must be honest and acknowledge that Williams was stronger than us today."
With pressure mounting on Raikkonen as Ferrari contemplates its driver line-up for the 2016 season, missing out on a possible podium finish is unlikely to have done the Finn too many favors.


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Home » Arts and Entertainment » Meet Sylvia Brooks of SBM Music
Meet Sylvia Brooks of SBM Music
Posted on October 9, 2017 in Arts and Entertainment by Alexander Martin
Today we'd like to introduce you to Sylvia Brooks.
Sylvia, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Music has always been a big part of my life. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, I came to music as a birthright. My father, pianist/arranger Don Ippolito, was a first-call player who performed with such giants as Stan Getz, Buddy Rich, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. My mother, Johanna Dordick, was a conservatory-trained opera singer, who also dazzled audiences singing pop tunes and standards at East Coast night clubs and resorts (she went on to found Los Angeles Opera Theater in 1978). While I absorbed this fabulously rich musical heritage, my initial calling to the stage took the form of acting, and I trained at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco under the great director Allen Fletcher.
After spending six years in New York, I relocated to Los Angeles, and pursued work in television and theater, while longing to return to my jazz roots. In a fateful turn of events it was the death of my father that opened the door. In looking for several of his original pieces to have played at his funeral, I immersed myself in my father's extensive archive, an experience that sparked a jazz epiphany for me. I sought out the great late pianist Tom Garvin, who took me under his wing and wrote a set of charts for me.
I made my performing debut at the Jazz Bakery, and we gained international attention with my first release in 2009- Dangerous Liaisons, followed by my second album- Restless, featuring the arrangements of the impeccable Grammy nominated Kim Richmond.
Today, I am currently promoting my latest Album- The Arrangement- featuring the arrangements of some of Los Angeles' finest musicians and composers. This album is a departure for me, because, for the first time, it also includes three original compositions that I wrote in collaboration with Christian Jacob- who composed the score for the 2016 Clint Eastwood film Sully, Quinn Johnson- who's original compositions were featured on Homeland- and Patrick Williams, a multi- award winning composer. We are hoping that it will end up on the Grammy Ballot this year (2017-2018).
We will be performing songs from all three albums on October 1st- at Vitellos Jazz Club in Studio City.
We're always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we've spoken with enough people to know that it's not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
One of the things that I love about what I do is the collaborative nature of the work- the ability to work with truly creative people who are passionate about what they do, as I am. Being an independent artist- it can be difficult to commercially compete with artists that are on labels. Labels offer a level of inside support within the industry that can be difficult for an independent artist to tap into. However, that being said, it is very important to me that I am able to make the kinds of albums that I want to make- As a producer, I am able to pick the songs that I want to record, the musicians that I want to work with, and decide the overall direction that the project is going to take. All three of my albums are an artistic extension of me.
We'd love to hear more about your business.
Music is a difficult thing to define, as taste is very personal. For me, I've always been drawn to big band sounds. I enjoy singing with horns, percussion, guitar – more than trios. So, I would say that that sets me apart from what many other Jazz Vocalists are doing. The more complexity of sound, the better. I also really believe strongly in reaching people emotionally, so I tend to gravitate to songs that have stories to tell. I always look at each song as its own world. So, this is the music that I try to make.
What were you like growing up?
As a kid, I grew up in Miami- in a blue collar neighborhood. With an Opera Singing mother, and a Jazz Playing father, you can probably see that I didn't really fit in. But I wouldn't trade it for the world. My father would have rehearsals at the house, and I was able to meet all the great players in Miami as a toddler on up. I was able to listen to this music before I could even talk. I guess that's why I love to sing- because I couldn't even talk and wanted to join in! As I grew up, I would sit in the audience at the hotels in upstate New York, and watch my mother perform. It never entered my mind that I could be anything else but an artist and performer. I think that there are two types of people in the world- artist and non-artists. Clearly, the road was paved very early.
Website: www.sylviabrooks.net
Email: http://sylviabrooks.net/contact/
Tags:female-jazz-artistfemale-jazz-singerfemale-jazz-vocalistfemale-lounge-singerfemale-vocal-artistssylvia-brookssylviabrooks.net
Bonzirecording – An Interview With Stefano Bonzi
Question: Please give our readers an introduction to your
Hilary Winfield Fine Art – An Interview With Hilary Winfield
Q. : Kindly give our readers an introduction to


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The dacha of my dreams
Plyos, an idyllic village on the Volga, is fast becoming Russia's answer to the Hamptons
A view of Plyos, the Volga and the Church of the Resurrection (before its recent restoration) © Alamy
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Claire Wrathall
Discreet though it was, the military presence on the far bank of the Volga and the two police speedboats bobbing on the river made it plain that Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's prime minister, was in residence at his country house.
I was standing in the bow of a tourist boat sailing upstream from Plyos, a once thriving port and 19th-century summer resort on the southern bank of the Volga, 375km northeast of Moscow. Alexey Shevtsov, a former mayor of the town, was pointing out the weekend homes of the rich and famous.
There was the dacha of one of Moscow's leading lawyers; another belonged to the governor of St Petersburg; another to a Russian former ambassador to Washington who was now a presidential aide …Otherwise they were owned by those he called "capitalists", a term that Shevtsov might equally apply to himself, for until he sold it in 2006, he was president and chief executive of Ormeto-Yumz, Russia's second-biggest heavy engineering company.
If all this conjures up an image of heavily-protected ostentatious rural palaces, the reality is very different. Admittedly there is high security around Medvedev's densely forested estate, Milovka, which isn't visible from the water when the birch trees are in leaf – though we got a good view of the private ski slope he is building. But otherwise Plyos is a low-key place: an enchantingly pretty town of onion-domed churches and brightly painted wooden houses with ornate carved window frames and zinc or tin roofs, spilling down the hillside to a waterfront of fine former merchants' houses and colourful houseboats. It's a town entirely free of designer shops and western brands, where no one wears heels and jewels remain in the safe: a sort of Bridgehampton for Muscovites, if you will.
As with the Hamptons, visitors to Plyos (population barely 2,500) mostly own, rent or stay with friends. But Shevtsov, who used to come here with his grandmother as a child in the 1970s and now owns 40 buildings in the town, is gradually changing that with what he is calling a "dacha hotel" named Sobornaya Sloboda. Here you can stay in one of nine houses, sleeping between two and 10, that are serviced and run like a hotel.
The dachas range from a splendid quayside art-nouveau mansion built in 1907 (which during the Soviet era housed three families in a communal apartment) to single-room wooden structures unexpectedly reminiscent of the "gingerbread" chattel houses you find in the Caribbean. I stayed in a traditional two-bedroom izba, or log cabin, called Dom Maklashinykh (after the family who built it). It stands just behind the house-museum dedicated to Isaak Levitan, arguably the greatest Russian landscape painter of the 19th century. Levitan spent three summers in Plyos in the 1880s with artist Sofia Kuvshinnikova, his much older married lover. During that time, he produced more than 200 paintings of the town and its surroundings, images that resonate with almost all Russians because of their prevalence in school textbooks, and offer visual evidence that the town has hardly changed in more than a century.
Novozhilov House, one of the properties that make up the Sobornaya Sloboda 'dacha hotel'
Levitan was not the only important artist to find inspiration here: Ilya Repin, Alexey Savrasov and Konstantin Makovsky were also drawn by the exceptional light reflected by the mighty Volga, which is 700m wide at this point, and 15m deep. This vast body of water is also said to amplify the sound of bells, hence the nine exquisite churches, from the tiny, very simple 17th-century hilltop Church of Eternal Peace to the more cathedral-like Church of the Resurrection (1817), whose green roof and golden cupolas were restored this year. (These also explain the name of Shevtsov's hotel, which roughly translates as "settlement of cathedrals".)
My temporary home was in many ways the dacha of my dreams. It was simply but evocatively furnished, with heavy Volga linens from the nearby town of Privolzhsk, and had a huge brick stove at the heart of its sitting room. Each morning, I'd rise from my supremely comfortable bed to find a hearty breakfast laid out on the dining table: kasha (buckwheat porridge), bliny, pastries, eggs, soft sweet white and hard salty yellow cheeses, ham, fresh orange juice and coffee.
Dinner, which can also be ordered in, was better still. On offer was just about every Russian dish I could think of: the classic chopped salads; clear soups of mushroom or sorrel, or ukha, a fish consommé with chunks of pike-perch from the river; pelmeni, a kind of Siberian ravioli stuffed with local duck or wild mushrooms; more bliny, this time with assorted smoked fishes and salmon caviar; and various roasted and grilled meats. The opening of Mari Vanna in London may have raised the international reputation of Russian cooking but this was the best I've tasted. (Chef Aleksandr Golubev was recruited from the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.)
In opening these dachas to paying guests, Shevtsov hopes that Plyos will become what he calls "the birthplace of a new responsible, conscientious attitude to tourism in Russia that is not about too much comfort or standardisation". Although he himself is widely travelled and no stranger to luxurious hotels, he craved what he calls "the real, the hidden Russia" and sensed that others did too.
There is no doubt that Plyos is suffused with nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times. This is the provincial Russia of Gorky's Summerfolk, of Turgenev, Tolstoy and, above all, of Chekhov, who was a life-long friend of Levitan and based several of his characters on the artist, not least Konstantin in The Seagull.
An interior at the Krylov dacha
Shevtsov has found a market for these rentals among a wealthy but wistful Russian elite keen to "experience true Russia" and to re-establish a connection with their heritage and their roots. Indeed the reason the dachas in the hotel inventory keep changing is that so many of his regular guests end up buying them. So he acquires more and, together with local architect Svetlana Zyryanova, whose life's work has been the painstaking preservation of historic houses of this kind, restores or, where necessary, rebuilds them from scratch. My other favourite was Dom Krylovykh, an elegant two-bedroom wooden house straight out of Anna Karenina. Built in 1870, it has a glazed veranda and interiors in the "English and French style" – synonyms for pretty chintz and toile de Jouy – and an extra room in the loft "for the visiting servant".
My only regret is that more has not been made of their gardens. Although they are filled with peonies and black-veined butterflies, most lack anywhere to sit and could do with a bit of weeding and overall maintenance. Still, Shevtsov's project is a work in progress. As well as the addition of more dachas and a small marina, this summer will see the reopening of a restaurant in the 19th-century former yacht club.
In the meantime, the place to eat out is Chastny Vizit, run by a Frenchman and his Russian wife in their eccentric and eclectically furnished private house. There's also good reason to cater for yourself, to picnic on fresh fat smoked bream from the river, and wash it down with kvass, a sour drink fermented from stale bread. Both are sold at stalls along the high street, a tradition that I'd assumed to have died with the Soviet Union. The surrounding birch groves and pine forests are full of wild mushrooms, especially ceps, and fragrant wild strawberries the size of fingernails. (Just be aware that there are toxic ticks too.)
You can swim in the cool clear waters of the Volga from the two narrow beaches. There are pedalos and boats for hire, and talk of a golf course. In winter, there is skiing, sledding and snowboarding, as well as hovercraft trips on the frozen river.
But mostly, I sensed, people come here to recharge. "Yes indeed, what peace, what harmony!" Chekhov wrote when he came to Plyos in 1890. It's a line that resonates still. No wonder the substantial riverside estate currently under construction a few kilometres downstream is rumoured to be earmarked for Vladimir Putin.
Dachas at Sobornaya Sloboda in Plyos range from Rbs9,800 (£195) to Rbs36,000 (£716) per night (tel: +7 493 394 3846; email: sloboda@plios.ru).
Claire Wrathall was a guest of Russia travel specialists Exeter International, which offers three nights in Plyos from £1,350 per person, including transfers from Moscow.
Moscow's five-star stopovers: Stolichnaya and a stained-glass dome
The journey from Moscow to Plyos takes about five hours, whether you go by road or cut the driving time in half by taking the high-speed Sapsan train from Kursk station to Vladimir. So you'll probably need a night or two in Moscow – in which case don't miss Levitan's paintings of Plyos at the State Tretyakov Gallery.
The Nikolskaya's presidential suite
For the moment, Moscow's newest hotel is the Kempinski Nikolskaya (doubles from Rbs11,900 [£237]), which opened in May in a lavishly restored palace built for Count Orlov-Davydov in the 1870s. It has a magnificent stained-glass dome over its lobby and original fin-de-siècle mosaics in its cavernous restaurant. Here the traditional Russian cuisine is good but the cost of sparkling water ruinous: a bottle of San Pellegrino will set you back about £18.50. The overall look of the hotel is as gilded and glitzy as you'd expect from Leo International, the designers responsible for the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. But the staff are delightful. Be warned that the rooms facing the Lubyanka, headquarters of the Federal Security Service, suffer from traffic noise.
Later this year, Four Seasons should also open its first Moscow property. It will occupy part of what was the Hotel Moskva, the 1930s behemoth depicted on bottles of Stolichnaya vodka and, in 1937, condemned by Frank Lloyd Wright, at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects, as the ugliest structure he had ever seen. Off Red Square, the Moskva was demolished in 2004 but has inexplicably been rebuilt to look exactly as it did. The hotel's modern interiors, by British firm Richmond International, might make up for the clunking exterior. (A second Four Seasons, facing the Kremlin on Sofiskaya Embankment, is also under construction.)
Amid this growing competition, the supremely efficient Ararat Park Hyatt (doubles from Rbs12,800 [£255]) has unveiled 24 new Park Suites designed by Tony Chi to feel convincingly like private apartments. Like the rest of the hotel (which is a rare outpost of understatement in a city in thrall to bling), their style is modern and high-tech, though liberal use of reflective glass can make you feel as if you're in a fairground hall of mirrors.
Europe holidays


The U.S. Air Force must make better use of its spacecapabilities to support warfighters on the ground and in the air, according tothe outgoing commander of the Air Force Space Command.
Better space capabilities can build on existing satellitesand other assets rather than just launching more into Earth's crowdedspace lanes, said General C. Robert Kehler.
The general spoke during the Air Force Association's recent Air& Space Conference and Technology Exposition held in Oxon Hill, Maryland onSept. 14.
One example of using existing assets comes from shufflingaround the Global Positioning System's satellites, so that GPS users on theground get better coverage whether walking between city buildings or in thecanyons of Afghanistan.
"This way we are taking advantage of those satellitesthat are already on orbit but repositioning them in a way that has realoperational benefit," Kehler explained.
The Air Force already began repositioning some GPSsatellites a year ago, as part of a process expected to take 12 to 18months and boost overall coverage.
Kehler also pointed out that the Air Force already knowswhat space systems it will have 10 to 20 years from now, given the long delayinvolving development and deployment. Such systems "are leaving the launchpads today," he added.
For instance, a new advancedcommunications satellite that launched in August was meant to ensure openlines between the president, military commanders and troops on the battlefieldeven during all-out nuclear war.
But a propulsionglitch meant that Air Force controllers had to devise a new way to raiseits orbit slowly, delaying operations by six or seven months.
Space Command also needs to integrate better within the AirForce's air and cyberspace domains, Kehler suggested. But he warned that no onestrategy would work for every mission that requires space capabilities.
"We need to bring innovation when thinking of thosestrategies. We cannot abandon innovation to avoid risk," Kehler said.


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