text:
Title: East and West
Author: Elisée Reclus
Topics: cultural geography, geography
Source: raforum.info, snapshot at Internet Archive.
Notes: Contemporary Review vol. 66 (oct. 1894) No. 346 p. 475–487. (Bibl nat. de France , Paris : Microfiche 8-G-9928 ; 8° G. Pièce. 546)
Elisée Reclus
ON the surface of this round earth the cardinal points have no precise meaning except in relation to particular places. The Greenwich observer may point to his north and his south, his east and his west; but the astronomers of Paris, of Washington, of Santiago, and direction-seeking mankind generally, will look for theirs in other directions. The lines traced by the meridians and the equator are purely artificial. Nevertheless the attempt has been made to give to the geographical terms of orientation a common neaning that should be accepted by all. Thus Carl Ritter, taking into account the idea of heat and of blinding light which Europeans associate with the "South," reserved the name of "South" for the Sahara and the other deserts of the torrid zone which lie between the northern and the southern hemisphere. In the same way the expressions "East" and "West" have been used for thousands of years as synonymous with "Asia" and "Europe"; and indeed the very names of the two continents, in their original tongues, meant precisely "the Rising Sun" and "the Setting Sun." To the Assyrians the land of Assú – i.e. Asia – was the region lit by the earliest morning rays, and the land of Ereb, or Europe, included all the countries lying west of them, towards the evening purple. The Arabs took up the word again, and applied it to the western extremity of their conquests in Mauritania and the Iberian peninsula---" El Gharb," "Maghreb," "the Algarves."
In current speech the expressions East and -West must necessarily apply to regions whose boundary shifts from age to age with the march of civilisation. Thus Asia Minor, the "West" par excellence to the Assyrian, became to the Byzantines the land of the sun-rising (Anatolia, Natolie, Anadoli) ; and later, along the shores of the Mediterranean, the word "Levant," applied by the mariners of the "Ponant" to all the ports of the seas that bathe the coasts of Asia, came to mean more particularly Smyrna and the other ports of the Asiatic peninsula. So, again, the "Eastern Empire," embracing fully half the Roman world, included in its vast domain the territory of the Ravennate, belonging to that Italian peninsula which was the ancient Hesperia, "the going down of the sun." Thus the phrases "East" and "West" were bound to change their meaning, even in the popular acceptation, and it became necessary to gain precision by introducing subdivisions -" Eastern Europe," "Eastern Asia," the "Far East," just as, in the United States, they distinguish between "East" "West," and "Far West."
From an historical point of view, however, it may be useful to try and determine approximately the normal line of separation between the two halves of the ancient world which best deserve the names of East and West, Just as every surface has its diagonal, and every body its axis, so the total mass of the continents has its median line, where the contrasts of soil, climate and history poise themselves over against each other. Taking as a whole the regions in which mankind has spent its life, and reached at last the consciousness of its collective personality, what is this median line, this watershed of human history? Africa may be left out, for its development appears to have taken place almost independently; and that massive continent four-fifths of whose surface lies within the southern temperate or the torrid zone — the "South" par excellence — belongs to our common world of early history only by its Mediterranean littoral — Egypt, Cyrenaica, Mauritania. But, on the other hand, we must restore to the ancient world the isles of the Indian Ocean which form the retinue of the Gangetic peninsulas, and all the island groups that people the immense stretch of sea eastward towards America, for, by the migrations and counter-migrations of their inhabitants, by their legends and traditions, and by the whole testimony of historic evolution, these ocean territories do indeed form part of the same circle as Farther Asia.
It might seem, at first sight, as if the true and natural partition between East and West must be indicated by the watershed which separates the eastward slope towards the Indian and Chinese seas from the slope that drains into the Atlantic through the Mediterranean and other European waters. But this boundary, purely artificial after all, as it winds from the Taurus to the Caucasus, crosses populations subject to the same influences of soil and climate, participators in the same historical movements, and composed to a great extent of elements of the same ethnological origin. The true frontier between the Eastern and Western world must be so shifted as to throw off upon the Western side the whole watershed of the great twin streams, Tigris and Euphrates, as well as the chief summits of Iran. This whole region of Persia and Media, of Assyria and Chaldaea, is intimately associated in its history with the countries of the Mediterranean, while its relations with the Eastern world were always less active and more frequently interrupted.
The line of separation, then, is to be found farther East, and it is well marked, not by the outlines of the continent of Asia, but by a space of territory distinguished at once by the high relief of the soil and the comparative sparseness of the population. Between Mesopotamis, where the swarming human race reared its tower of Babel, and the Western plains of Hindostan, with their teeming populations – in some parts two thousand or more to the square mile – a transverse zone, containing less than two inhabitants to the same surface, runs from north to south between the Gulf of Oman and the icy Arctic Sea. This almost uninhabited zone begins just west of the plaine of the lower Indus and its frontier mountains, in the desert tracts of southern Beloochistan, scattered with rare oases. Between India and Afghanistan it stretches north and north-east along the rugged escarpments of the Suleiman Dagh and other ranges, whose hidden basins and narrow gorges give shelter to mountain tribes living far from the haunts of other men, except when the martial fury seizes them and brings them to blows with their neighbours of the lower tableland or the plains. To the north-west of Hindostan the folds of the soil become deeper and more numerous, sharply dividing the world with their countless walls. The high summits of the Hindoo-Koosh, inferior only to those of the Himalaya of Nepaul, tower above these ridges and spread their glaciers to enormous distances. Beyond these, again, the immense mass of almost impassable highlands which have been called the" Roof of the World "continue the line of demarcation very effectually between Hindoo-Koosh and Thian-Shan, and the ill-watered adjacent plains broaden at many points the median zone of separation between East and West. Finally, farther north, in the great Siberian depression, the salt borders of Lake Balkash and the barren reaches of Semipalatinsk and the "Hungry Steppe "stretch between the Obi and the Yenisei along a hand of thinly inhabited country which loses itself in the frozen tundras. The researches of Gmelin and other naturalists have established the fact that the true separation between Europe and Asia lies here, in these low and arid regions, and not along the green heights of the Ural mountains.
The ancient world, then, is clearly divided into two distinct halves, their continental masses being of nearly equal size. The broad zone of separation is formed, along half its length, of a chain of eminences which includes the central knot of the mountain system of Eurasia, and is broken only at rare intervals by passes which have served as roadways for war and merchandise. Narrow exceedingly, and difficult of access were these few highways, which afforded the only means of communication between the populations on either side, the only junction between the different civilisations of the eastern, and western slopes! Just as a fall of earth may suddenly choke the current of a stream, so an incursion of mountain tribes might suddenly close the transit between East and West, and the world be thus sharply cut in two again. This, as a matter of fact, has happened many times. To open the passage and to keep it open has needed from age to age the marshalling of enormous forces, such as those of he great conquerors, Alexander, Mahmoud the Ghaznavid, Akbar the Great. In our own day, the mountainous part of the dividing line still opposes serious obstacles to the march of man, in spite of roads and railways, caravanserais and forts of refuge; but how much more dangerous was the mountain barrier in historic times, when it rose before him bare and formidable, without roads or cities!
In that sense, the general meaning- of the expressions East and West is clearly determined for the rest of the earth's circuit. On the one side lies all that part of Asia which leans toward the Indian Ocean and the Pacific -– India, Ceylon, the Malay peninsula, and the great islands and island groups which stud the vast stretch of craters almost to the American coast. On the other hand lies the Asiatic peninsula which reaches out into the Mediterranean world – Egypt and Morocco, Europe, and, beyond the Atlantic, the whole American continent. For that double continent, facing eastward by its estuaries, by the valleys of its great rivers and the spread of its fertile plains, belongs incontestably, by its history no less than by its geographical orientation, to the European cosmos.
Thus delimited, the two halves of the world, East and West – including their inland seas and the oceans that bathe them – occupy a surface of such extent that, up to a few centuries ago, their boundaries were unknown to their own inhabitants. At the far ends of the earth, the isolation and unconsciousness of the populations which had been left outside the cycle of universal history prevented their concerning themselves with the great contrast between the separated halves of humanity; but in the ancient world, from the very beginnings of national life in the historic nations, as they are preserved to us in legends and annals, the distinction between East and West already existed in full force. The evolution of humanity was worked out differently on the two sides of the line, and every century increased the original divergence of the separate civilisations. Which of these two evolutions –taking place, the one around the shores of the great ocean, the other chiefly on the Mediterranean seaboard – was destined to produce the mightier results, to contribute the larger share to the common education of humanity? There can be no hesitation as to the answer. In the struggle for existence the championship remains with the West. It is the peoples of the West who have shown that they possess both the initiative to advance and the power of recovery.
And yet it seemed at first as if the East were the privileged half of the planet. History indeed proves to demonstration that, taken, as a whole, the nations of the East had their period of real superiority. Without entering on a problem which it would now be impossible to solve, that of assigning a priority of civilisation to one country or another, without inquiring whether the ground was first tilled on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates or on those of the Indus and the Yang-tse-kiang, or whether ships were sailing the Mediterranean Sea before the Indian Ocean was known to the mariner, we may assuredly say that, 3000 years ago, the races sufficiently advanced to be aware of their own place in history occupied a far wider region east of the diaphragm of Asia than west of it. The ravines and tablelands occupied by the Medes and Persians, the plains of Assyria and Chaldaea, the countries of the Hittites, of the children of Israel and the children of Ishmael, the coasts of the Phoenicians and the mountains of the Himyarites, the islands of Cyprus and Crete, and finally the frontier lands of Asia where germinated the civilisation which was to blossom in Greece, on the other side, of the AEgea Sea – all these countries form, but a small domain compared with the vast tract of south-eastern Asia, from the Indus to the Yellow River. And to this great Asiatic territory, together perhaps with Southern Siberia, so rich in inscriptions of a vanished age, we must add a great part of th Malay archipelago, whose civilisation is certainly of very ancient date. And finally, the lands of Oceania, scattered eastward over a liquid expanse not less in extent than the whole continental mass of the ancient world, appear to have formed part of an area whose historical development was superior to that of the European populations at the time of the Pelasgians.
As far back as history goes towards the origin of the Eastern world, we find traces of the very considerable share of influence exercised by the group of nations. which has been included under the general name of Malay,, taken from a district of Sumatra, one of the large islands partly populated by them. No region in the world was better furnished than this with the facilties for transit and exchange; if the word "predestined" could be applied to any part of the earth's surface, it might justly. be applied to those islands and peninsulas of Malaysia. They abound in products. of every sort and kind, minerals and precious gems, bark and gums, plants and fruits; every island has its riches; nowhere is there a greater diversity of living forms, vegetable or animal; two fieras, two faunas, men of different nationality and race, confront each other across a narrow arm of sea. Great trunks of floating trees supply the riverside populations with ready-made rafts, only needing to be disbranched and solidly lashed together with liana ropes; while the forests of the seashore offer their choicest woods to the boat-builder. Wide roadsteads and sheltered havens break the outline of the islands; innumerable ports of call present themselves on every side, directing the voyage of the navigator. Gradually, the Malays became the natural intermediaries between the various countries of Eastern Asia, from India to Japan; and, favoured by the trade winds which carried them across the Indian Ocean from shore to shore, succeeded in turning the flank of the great barrier that separated the two worlds, and even gained the coast of Africa. Madagascar was included within their area of navigation and of conquest, and their civilisation radiated almost to the opposite extremity of the earth's surface, within a little distance of the American continent. The system of numeration which obtains in all the Polynesian languages is proof sufficient of the wide spread of this Malay civilisation. Even in our own day, notwithstanding the great superiority that science and industry have given to the European navigator, a great part of the carrying trade of the Far East is still conducted by the Malaya with their fleets of praus. No literature is richer than theirs in stories of the sea; and it was the Malay seaman who gave to the Arab the Thousand and One Nights that still charm our children.
The Polynesians, again, like the Malaya-scattered over their hundred islands, their ocean rocks and coral banks -took to the sea by natural compulsion, and thus contributed to the spread of geographical knowledge in the ancient East. The great diversity of types to be met within a single group, or even on a single island, the innumerable legends of native migrations, and, finally, indisputable historical documents, prove that the Pacific Ocean was traversed from the earliest times, not only from East to West, in the direction of the trade winds, but also in the opposite direction, with the set of the counter-currents. All this was long ago understood. It is well known that the equatorial zone strictly so called, embracing a space of about five hundred miles north and south of the Equator, escapes the domination of the trade winds, and the west wind alternates with calms, during which the mariner may row his boat where he will, while the normal set of swells and currents is from west to east. [1] Moreover, even in the zone of the trade winds proper, there are storm winds that sometimes blow in a contrary direction to the prevailing atmospheric currents – as if, according te the Tongan legend, [2] a god had separated families of brothers by blowing an obstinate east wind between them, but now and then stopped blowing to let the relatives renew their acquaintance. The islanders were not slow to profit by the respite. Skilful in the management of their boats, they knew how to seize the opportunity afforded by the very slightest deviation of the regular winds to modify their course, reefing their sails as close as possible and pointing in the eye of the wind. When the Spaniards first visited the Marianne islands, of which they were afterwards almost to exterminate the inhabitants, they were astonished at the sight of the flying barques, far swifter than any boat of European construction. Most of the Polynesian vessels were, moreover, provided with outriggers, which made it almost impossible to upset them; and many of them were large enough te convey the whole fighting strength of a tribe. Coppinger [3] saw a canoe built to carry 250 men.
Thus fortified by their nautical industry, the Polynesians were in a position to contribute largely, and did in fact contribute, to the discovery and exploration of the world. Some of their navigators, carried away by the storm and lost upon the waste of waters, would be guided in their search for a place of refuge by the indications afforded by the waves, by birds and fishes. Others might be driven from their native isle by force of war or civil dissension, and launched upon the sea at the mercy of wind and wave while others, again, young and adventurous, would set out of their own accord in search of some region more vast or more fortunate than their own. Myths and legends, the vague reminiscences, perhaps, of earlier migrations, would stimulate this exodus of islanders across the infinite expanse of sea. Thus the natives of Eastern Polynesia, looking towards the West as towards a region of divine repose, concealing somewhere in its bosom the Islands of the Blest, might seek again and again to discover the happy land. Who can tell? The unconscious impulse may have been a true nostalgia, an hereditary instinct, a re-awakened yearning for the home of their ancestors. Or perhaps it was the mirage of the clouds that lured them, as it reared fantastic mountains toward the zenith, or stretched away in golden plains under the purple light of evening. Perhaps they really imagined that they saw with their own eyes that land of desire rising out of the sea, its outline appearing dimly on the horizon, then lost again – a promise not yet fulfilled, but never to be forgotten. Polynesian history tells us that these island families had a natural tendency to multiply westward – just as our modern towns, encroaching constantly on the surrounding districts stretch out their suburbs towards the setting sun. Again and again, Polynesian voyagers, impelled by the thirst for the unknown, attempted the discovery of these lands of promise, like nomads of the steppes moving forward in search of fresh pastures. Even so lately as the beginning of this century, the people of Nouka Riva – now more than decimated by war, oppression, and disease – sent out, from time to time, -their surplus population of young men in the supposed direction of the traditional Isle of Utupu, whence the god Tao was said to have brought the cocoanut tree [4]. Happy couples, full of hope, would put out on the transparent evening tide, rowing towards the distant land; they rowed away and never came back: no one knew whether the sea had sucked them in, or the grim Hunger had devoured them, or whether they had indeed made at last the shore of Perpetual Youth.
Doubtless the savage tribes of 'Europe in the Age of Stone had also their migrations and counter-migrations, overrunning, from this point or from that, countries widely remote from one another; but the political and social condition of. these tribes did not afford sufficient cohesion for the preservation of any record of their comings and goings. In a world itself unknown, their journeyings remained unknown, as if they had never been; while the equally unrecorded migrations of the Pacific islanders were at any rate connected, by the network of Malay navigation, with the great world of insular and continental India thus enabling the Orientals to form some vague idea of that vast sea, studded with a milky way of islands, which spread outwards from the coast of Asia into the immeasurable distance. It was not on that side of the world that the ocean could have been conceived – as the Greeks did conceive it – as a winding stream, embracing in its narrow arms the countries of the continent. To the Indian and Malay it must rather have seemed a limitless expanse, losing ite1f in the immensity of heaven.
In those early times, the East was thus far in advance of the West, both in point of its known extent and the greater cohesion of its races. But for thirty centuries, and without any retrogression of its own – for, speaking generally, evolution has everywhere been in the direction of the better, or at any rate of the vaster and more comprehensive – the East has found itself strangely distanced by he West. It has often been suggested that the precocity of its civilisation was itself the cause of this arrest of development; that the Asiatic and Polynesian races had attained a too early and therefore inferior civilisation [5]. Some writers, giving themselves up to mystical fancies, and arguing from a supposed Providential predestination, have tried to explain the contrast between West and East by an original and irreducible racial difference. In the beginning, according to them, the Eastern and Western races were created different, the Eastern mind cloudy and chimerical, its perceptions warped beforehand, its ideas subtle and twisted to selfcontradiction; while the Western was gifted with the very genius of observation, a natural rectitude of thought, a true comprehension of life. The myth of the Serpent in the Garden, symbolising, as it were, the dangerous influence of the East, seems to dominate history. But such a conception evidently rests on no better basis than the recollection of conflicts which took place at a time when the populations thrown across each other's path by war or rivalry encountered one another at different stages of their political and social development. Between a decadent civilisation and a society in full process of growth the conditions are not equal ; to judge fairly between them, they must be viewed at the corresponding periods of their collective life; it is no use making comparisons between the triumphant youth of Greece and the senility of Persia. Setting aside, therefore, this assumed essential difference of the races, we must turn to the geographical conditions of the Eastern world, and there seek the causes of its retarded development as compared with the progress of the West.
In the first place, the great ocean, with its thousands and thousands of islands, has, for all its immense expanse of waters, but a very meagre allowance of dry land, over and above the arid Australian continent; and the centres of civilisation, such as Samoa, Tahiti, and the Tongan and Fijian groups, separated by long distances from each other, and each inhabited by but a scanty population, could have no chance of exerting any considerable influence. There was no room within such narrow bounds for the creation of any nucleus radiating an active intellectual propaganda. New Zealand, with a superficies large enough to make the home of a powerful nation, lies altogether apart, in the solitary southern seas, far from the track of the Polynesian islands. It was colonised later; and perhaps has not been inhabited at all for more than some thirty generations. As for the equatorial islands, from Papua to Borneo, they are large and very favourably situated at the south-eastern angle of the continent of Asia, in the very axis of the general movement of civilisation ; but the very richness of their forest vrgetation, znd the ease of living, enabled the aboriginal tribes to maintain themselves in their primitive isolation; and thus the greater part of these magnificent archipelagoes was left outside the march of progress; the Malay adventurers, as well as the colonists of other races, contented themselves with occupying the seashores. The interior was unexplored, and was, indeed, in some islands effectually closed to visitors by the "Head-hunters." Only two large islands, those lying nearest to the Asiatic continent, Sumatra and Java, were attached to the civilised world of Eastern Asia; and even there the inland forests and plateaux of the former country were still occupied by barbarians averse to all commerce with the foreigner. Java, again, if she enjoys the privilege of being associated with the regions of Hindoo civilisation, undoubtedly owes it to her geographical conformation. Very long, very narrow, with no continuous mountain chain to serve as a backbone, cut through at intervals by passages which are practically so many straits, she has been, from the earliest days of colonisation, as easy of access as if she had been a row of islands strung together like a necklace. Come whence they would, from the northern or the southern coast, the immigrants penetrated with ease into the open country between the giant volcanoes, which themselves contributed – unlikely as it might seem – to render access to the island comparatively convenient, by burning down the once impenetrable forests of the intermediate valleys, and thus opening the way from coast to coast.
Nevertheless, Java, and some districts of Sumatra, and a few little neighbouring islands which participate in the same civilisation, do not together form a sufficient extent of territory, in comparison with the immensity of the ocean spaces, to afford a basis and centre of illumination for the whole island world of the extreme East. Nay, more; the group of great islands, as a whole, has rather contributed to break the historic unity of the insular regions. Borneo, Celebes, the greater part of the Philippine Islands, New Guinea (itself almost continental), and the arid coast of the neighbouring continent of Australia, were so many countries in which the stranger, whether shipwrecked mariner or adventurous colonist, ran every chance of a hostile, if not a hungry, welcome. And, furthermore, the principal waterway between Polynesia and the islands of the Indian archipelago is almost barred by coral reefs.
Nor was it possible to find a common centre for the civilisation of the Eastern world on the shores of the continent. Remarkable as was the progress of thought in the communities which sprang up on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges, in Ceylon, on the coasts of Malabar and Coromandel, in the basins of the Thdo-Chinese rivers, among the plains watered by the Yang-tse-kiang, and in the Yellow Country of the Hundred Families, these different civilisations never grouped themselves into any sort of political union, and such union as they did form, lax as it was, lasted but for a short time under the influence of religions proselytism. The communication that took place between the various countries was always rare and uncertain. Tribes which no one had been able to reduce to subjection, inhabiting in independent groups nearly all the mountain regions, broke into separate fragments the territory of the civilised nations. Taken as a whole, that territory presents itself pretty much in the form of a spread fan. The axis of the basin of the Indus, where the first Vedas were first uttered, points toward the south-west; the united streams of the Ganges and the Brahmapootra bend their common delta directly toward the south; the water-courses of Indo-China flow in a southeasterly direction; while the rivers of China – and the progress of culture, which tends the sespe way – set due east. Thus the various civilisations of these countries have a natural centrifugal tendency; they never meet in a common geographical centre; and even the Indo-Chinese peninsula, situated at the very heart of the Eastern world, serves at many points rather as a barrier of separation, with its parallel mountain ranges inhabited by savage tribes. On the other hand, the table-land of Thibet, the region of the forced pass between China and India – which, from a geometrical point of view, is the true focus in the semicircle of the south-eastern countries of Asia – stretches its snowy ridges at such a height and under such a climate that its scanty populations live, as it were, for shelter, enclosed between the fissures of the soil.
To the north-west, the Oriental world is, as we have seen, sharply defined by mountain ranges, and, to some extent, by arid and almost uninhabitable wastes. Its mode of communication with the Western world, always precarious and often interrupted, was by way of dangerous mountain passes, or else by sea, either skirting the deserts of Gedrosia (south-east Beloochistan), towards the Persian Gulf, or doubling the Arabian peninsula to the narrow outlet of the Red Sea. It was thus by slender driblets, almost drop by drop, that the quintessence of Oriental thought had to be distilled before it could join the flowing torrent of the culture of the West. But, by a striking contrast, the roads by which this transmission from world to world necessarily took place are disposed in a diametrically different manner from that which characterises the axes of civilisation at the opposite extremity of Asia, Instead of diverging at a very obtuse angle, they tend towards one another, converging uniformly, all of them, upon the basin of the Hellenic Mediterranean. The long fissure of the Red Sea, which united the land of the Himyarites and Ethiopia to Lower Egypt, points directly towards the Eastern Mediterranean, from which it is separated only by a narrow strip of shore; the winding valley of the Nile opens out in the same direction; the Persian Gulf, continued to the north-west by the course of the Euphrates, runs in a straight line towards that angle of the Mediterranean which is occupied by the Isle of Cyprus; while, further north, all the rivers, all the highways of commerce which descend from Asia Minor, from the continent of Asia, and from the Sarmatian plains to the Black Sea, become tributaries of the Greek waters through the Bosphorus and the Hellespont. Even the Anatolian peninsula divides into a number of little secondary peninsulas, enclosing basins that face towards Greece. Thus the marvellous cosmos of the Greek islands and capes was indicated, by the convergence of the ways, as the necessary meeting-point of all the Asiatic civilisations, and the focus of elaboration of all these ancient elements into new forms.
It is needless here to describe in detail the march of culture in the West. The tory has been told by innumerable writers, and the knowledge of it forms a part of the Ordinary classical education. Every one knows how the beacons of civilisation sprang up in succession from the south-east to the north-west, under a climate sharper and less equable than that of India or the Pacific, and consequently under conditions which imposed on man a sterner struggle of adaptation and efforts more vigorous and more sustained. Every one knows how Rome, situated in the midst of a semicircle of extinct volcanoes, enclosed in their turn by the grander semicircle of the Apennines, gradually consolidated herself within this double rampart, then made herself mistress of the whole of Italy on the hither side of the Alpine wall, and, firmly established in the centre of the Mediterranean and of the whole known world, ended by annexing all the countries which pour their waters into that inland sea, and many that border on the open sea besides. When the political power of Rome had passed away, her juridical power still remained; and then the ancient Rome was replaced by a new and mightier religious Rome, which bound to itself by the subtler tie of spiritual influence the peoples which heretofore had been the mere conquest of the sword. After Italian Rome, other centres of intense vitality sprang up north of the Alps, on the outer slope of Europe; but, even in shifting its centre of gravity towards the north and west, the world of western civilisation lost nothing, or at any rate it regained all it had lost, of the lands which had formed part of the world known to the Greeks.
The ever-increasing domain of European ascendeucy has ended by embracing the whole world. Enlarged, to begin with by the addition of the two Americas, it is now assuming to itself the continent of Africa, while its perpetual encroachments are slowly sucking in the vast territories of the rival civilisation. Either directly, by force of conquest, or indirectly, under the continuous pressure of commerce and of moral influences, the whole world is being Europeanised. Of the two halves of the world struggling for existence, the Western half has won: the preponderance is hers for the future; but she has won to a great extent by the use of weapons which the East had forged for her, since the religions of the West had been elaborated in India before they came to be remodelled and transformed in Persia, in Palestine, in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome. Besides, this very triumph of the West subserves the progress of the nations it has overcome. From Western Europe, as the centre of equilibrium between the forces of the human race, radiate not only all the roadways of commerce, but rise the ideas and influences of social life, in its collective solidarity.
Thanks to mutual interpenetration, the contrast between East and West is gradually diminishing. Nevertheless, it is still sharp enough; and at many points –notably in China and India – it presents itself in such a form that reconciliation seems an almost impossible task. It is now at the two extremities of the earth that the opposing forces meet in all the intensity of their antagonism; but, sometimes at one point, sometimes at another, the conflict has always been going on. The oldest historical legends – the expedition of the Argonauts, the Tale of Troy – recall the state of permanent tension in which the ancient populations lived and clashed against each other – representatives in miniature of the two worlds, and, like them, seeking, in spite of their very hostility, to find some way of union. The Greeks were well aware of the profound meaning of those hereditary instincts which drove them into conflict with the peoples of the East, and which, struggle after struggle, brought them at last, with Alexander, to the banks of the Hydaspes.
It is in this same region that we must look for the end – not now, perhaps, very far distant – of the conflict between the two worlds. Travel and commerce, passing to and fro on the sea highway, are slowly contributing to bring about a mutual understanding between the races of men which points towards their unification, intellectual and moral. England, now dominant in India, labours persistently, even against her will, to reduce the contrasts that divide the populations of the peninsula, and to give them a moral unity corresponding to that of their geographical position; but the barrier of mountains and of solitudes which, to the north-west of India, marks the natural limit between East and West, is still almost as difficult to cross as it was two thousand years ago. The mountain passes are open only to the privileged – privileged by fortune or by political power; there are no great highways, even yet, to facilitate freedom of movement to and fro. And indeed, before any such highways can be opened to the free ingress of the nations, a great question of political equilibrium – the greatest and most pressing of modern times – must be settled once for all, and settled at the foot of those very mountains of Hindostan which have stood through all times barring the corner passage between the two worlds. England and Russia are the two countries specialty involved in the dispute; it is for them to solve – by peaceful means if possible – this problem of the levelling of the mountains of Central Asia. It was said once – but in a purely dynastic sense, and history has not yet ratified the saying – "The Pyrenees are no more!" It rests with the civilisation of the West to say, more truly, and from a human, not a dynastic point of view, "We have done away with the Himalaya!"
[1] La Pérouse; Kerhallet; Dunmore Lang; Ellis, &c.
[2] Mariner, "Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands." London. 1817.
[3] "Cruise of the Alert."
[4] Rienzi; Fornander, "Account of the Polynesian Races."
[5] Gaétan Delaunay, "Mémoire sur l'Infériorité des Civilisations Précoces."


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Чемпионат мира по настольному теннису среди команд 2012 года (полное официальное название «Liebherr 2012 World Team Table Tennis Championships») прошёл с 25 марта по 1 апреля 2012 года в Дортмунде, Германия. Это был 51-й по счету Чемпионат мира по настольному теннису.

Состав участников
Первый, чемпионский, дивизион состоял из 24 команд. К соревнованиям в этом дивизионе были допущены 18 лучших команд первого дивизиона и 2 лучшие команды второго дивизиона согласно результатам командного чемпионата мира 2010 года в Москве. Остальные 4 места были заполнены на основании командного мирового рейтинга ITTF.

Также в рамках чемпионата были проведены соревнования второго, третьего, четвёртого и пятого дивизионов.

Медали

Медалисты

Медальный зачёт

Примечания

Ссылки
 LIEBHERR 2012 World Team Table Tennis Championships на официальном сайте ITTF

Международные спортивные соревнования в Дортмунде
Март 2012 года
Апрель 2012 года
Международные соревнования по настольному теннису в Германии
Чемпионаты мира в Германии

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text:
Meet Aanchal Kumar : Shark Tank's Anupam Mittal's Wife, Who Is Prettier Than Most Actresses
Entertainment / By DCS
With new talks involving people stuck in a storm, it's one of the hottest topics in town these days. Shark Tank India is the most popular show in India this year.
The internationally acclaimed show has now found its way to the Indian coast after being adopted in Australia, the United States, and a number of other countries. The basis of the show is simple. It is made up of a group of investors known as "sharks" who listen to entrepreneurs' ideas for new products or business concepts. After that, the sharks evaluate the proposal and decide whether or not to invest their money in assisting and coaching the contestant.
The Indian version of Shark Tank has been a huge hit with viewers so far, thanks to the great quality of the production and the unapologetically candid comments regarding the pitch. It's like a breath of fresh air when the show's reality is hammered because there are more scripts and less realism.
About Anupam Mital
The show's positive reviews piqued people's interest in sharks. It's obvious from the show's perspective because the shark is the one who moves the ship. Anupam Mittal is a well-known shark.
The CEO of Shaadi.com is one of the most well-known figures on the show, and he has a distinct charisma. Many people are familiar with Anupam Mittal as the founder of the People Group and one of India's most well-known investors, but few are familiar with his personal life.
ALSO READ : 100+ Best Movies On Netflix – The Ultimate List Including All Genre Movies
In The Kapil Sharma Show
But that isn't the sole reason for his popularity. All of the sharks and their families were recently invited to The Kapil Sharma Show, and all eyes were on Anupam Mittal's wife. Anchal Kumar, a former model, was revealed to be his wife.
Anchal has been a part of the Indian modeling scene for a long time, having won the Gladrags Mega Model competition in 1999. She has also worked as a commercial operations manager for companies including Rexona, Sunsilk, and Bombay Dyeing. She was also a contestant on Bigg Boss Season 4 in 2010.
Anupam Mittal and Aanchal Kumar met at an event hosted by a mutual acquaintance and struck it off right away, according to sources. The couple never declared their relationship to the media, but their regular public presence was enough to gratify their fans at the time. After several coffee dates and dinner dates, Aanchal and Anupam built a deep bond and began to meet each other officially.
Their Love Story
Anupam Mittal and Anchal Kumar decided to take their relationship to the next level in 2013 after dating for a few years. Anupam married Anchal in Jaipur's Pink City on July 4, 2013. Their wedding became a talking point throughout town. The couple chose Jaipur as the location for their wedding since they adore the city.
Anupam Mittal and his wife Anchal Kumar were overjoyed to welcome a young daughter, Alyssa Mittal, into their lives after several years of marriage. The loving parents of Alyssa Mittal made it obvious on social media that she was the center of their universe.
In overall, it is safe to state that Anupam Mittal triumphs in both business and life. Entrepreneurial wealth and success are fueled by a thriving business, a happy family, increased achievement, and recognition as a "Shark."

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The accounts will be approved at a PCC meeting in March and presented at the AGM on 16th April 2018. Everyone is welcome to attend this is a public meeting.
If any parishioner would like to raise a question on the accounts especially in relation to any personal donations made, please contact Chairperson Jackie Carlyle-Clarke or Joint Treasurer Kay Allen or Richard Shirley.


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American Religious History Defining Fundamentalism and Liberalism&nbspEssay
Length: 8 pages
Sources: 10
Subject: Mythology - Religion
Paper: #82017601
Related Topics: Kingdom Of God, Archeology, South American, Religious Traditions
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Defining fundamentalism and liberalism in Christianity is hardly an exact science, especially because prior to about 1920 there was not even a term for fundamentalism as it exists today. While present-day fundamentalists often claim descent from the Puritans and Calvinists of the 17th and 18th Centuries, Puritans were not really fundamentalists in the modern sense. They were not in conflict with 20th Century-style liberals and supporters of evolution and Higher Criticism because those did not yet exist. As George McKenna put it "if there were no liberalism there would be no fundamentalism" to react against it (McKenna 231). Today, about one-third of Americans define themselves as evangelical Protestants, and all Republican Party politicians have to make appeals to the Christian Right (Hankins 1). In 1976 there were at least fifty million 'born again' evangelical Protestants in the United States, and today their numbers may be as high as 80-90 million. In the 1970s and 1980s they broke from their traditional alliance with the Democratic Party over issues like black civil rights, gay rights, abortion, evolution and prayer in the public schools, and even though this culture war was particularly intense, some of these battles had been fought before in the 1920s (Provenzo 3). Indeed, the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan championed the fundamentalists in the their battle against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, "prefigured the red state/blue state dichotomy that was later to play such an important role in shaping the outcome of national elections" (McKenna 234).
Fundamentalism is rooted in the evangelical and revivalist movements of the 18th and 19th Century, such as the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, although the leading theologian who emerged from that movement, Jonathan Edwards, was an orthodox Calvinist and believer in predestination rather than free will. Edwards was definitely not a "ranting evangelist that one might see on late night television," stereotypically sweating ignorance into the microphone with a Southern drawl (Hankins 5). He was also a leading thinker of the day and highly influential in other areas besides theology, and combined his Calvinist religion with the philosophy of John Locke and the Scottish Common Sense realists, as well as the science of Isaac Newton. In fact, this school of thought was the mainstream of American theology, philosophy and education until it was challenged by the newer scientific thought of Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud (Marsden 7). As it gradually shed its Calvinist roots, this philosophy was radically democratic in affirming that all persons were equally able to perceive the world with their senses, understand the Newtonian laws the governed the universe, and that individuals were "moral agents capable of free choice" (Marsden 14). Revivals gave American Christianity its "distinctly populist and democratic cast," unlike Europe where the established churches were the allies of kings, aristocrats and the ruling elites. In the U.S., "religious institutions are the refuge against power," and in history the evangelicals and fundamentalists have not necessarily been allied with the party of the economic elite. On the contrary, this is a fairly recent development in American politics (Hankins 16).
Liberalism also has its roots in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly among Deists and Unitarians who doubted the literal truth of the Bible and were skeptical of the divinity of Christ. In the 19th century, Darwinism seemed to have abolished any scientific support for the idea that God created the universe in six days or that Adam and Eve had ever really existed except symbolically. Liberal Protestant ministers like Lyman Abbott and Henry Ward Beecher simply accepted the idea that evolution was "God's way of doing things," even though theistic evolution undermined the literal truth of the Bible (Longfield 13). They acquiesced to the views of the Higher Critics that the Bible could not be read literally, although many evangelicals like Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday emphatically rejected evolution and Higher Criticism (Longfield 18). As early as 1869, the Unitarian Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted that the Bible books "cannot be taken as literal statements of fact," while D.F. Strauss and other Higher Critics in Germany had already undermined the idea that the Bible was literally true and that it had been written by the divinely-inspired prophets whose names appeared on the books (Marsden 17).
Immanuel Kant and the other Romantics and Idealists had already offered a way out for religion by effectively taking it out of competition with modern science by making it a matter purely for the moral and spiritual sense in each individual human -- a matter of faith and personal experience -- under which "science could have its autonomy, and religion would be beyond its reach" (Marsden 21). Beecher was a Kantian Idealist who rejected Calvinist predestination and believed that evolution would mean gradual progress and improvement of civilization until the Kingdom of God was established on earth. He was a liberal of the 19th Century type rather than a 20th Century 'progressive' or socialist, and his theology appealed greatly to the Victorian middle and upper classes -- who were uncomfortable with their newfound material wealth and success (Marsden 22). For the new rich of the Gilded Age, wealth seemed to be in conflict with their traditional Calvinist upbringing, especially in light of the fact that the U.S. was experiencing tremendous social and labor problems at this time, with more and more wealth becoming concentrated in the hands of the big corporations and the upper 10% of the population.
In this era from 1880-1920, the U.S. was rapidly becoming an urban, industrialized nation, dominated by giant trusts and corporations and with a new workforce of millions of immigrants. Protestants of both liberal and conservative views were deeply uneasy at these developments and struggled to find ways to keep Christianity relevant to modern society with all its social problems. In this case, though, there was no neat political division between theological liberals and conservatives, since evangelicals who would be considered fundamentalists today, like William Jennings Bryan, were often politically liberal, progressive or even radical. Evangelicals certainly stepped up their missionary activities both to the big cities and foreign countries, and the Student Volunteer Movement alone trained 13,000 missionaries in 1886-1936. Other evangelicals campaigned for prohibition and Sunday schools, although at the same time many others supported the Social Gospel at the same time (Longfield 18).
Evangelicals were slow to pick up on labor and social questions, or to break with the idea that the Bible endorsed free market capitalism, although this began to change in the 1870s with the publication of George Washington Gladden's Working People and their Employers. Along with Joseph Strong and Walter Rauschenbusch, Gladden advocated Christian Socialism as the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God on earth, and this was also endorsed by populists and progressives like William Jennings Bryan, no matter whether they endorsed theological liberalism (Longfield 20). On the other hand, fundamentalists accepted the dispensationalist ideas of John Nelson Darby, who argued that there would be seven one thousand-year ages of the world and that humanity was now living in the sixth one, just before the end times. This would end with a rapture, seven-year Great Tribulation, culminating in the Second Coming of Christ. Only then would the Kingdom of God be established on earth, lasting for one thousand years (Longfiled 20).
Although The Fundamentals (1910-15) are more frequently mentioned than actually read, almost all 741 pages are devoted to an attack on Higher Criticism rather than evolution, political liberalism or any other topic. Clearly, the fundamentalists were most upset by the European academics who denied that the Bible was divinely inspired or that it had been written by the authors whose names were on the books. Without the Bible, after all, Christianity was simply the hodgepodge of myths, fables and superstitions that the Higher Critics claimed that it was. Orthodox and fundamentalist scholars retaliated by denouncing all modernist and rationalist critics of the Bible, going back to Spinoza in the 17th Century, who claimed that Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible (Pentateuch), that Isaiah had many writers, and that Daniel never existed at all (The Fundamentals 16). Fundamentalist writers affirmed that Moses was the writer of the Pentateuch; that the Old Testament did refer to Jesus; archeology did confirm that the Bible was accurate; and Jesus was God, born of a virgin and resurrected from the dead. Two California oil millionaires, Lyman and Milton Stewart, financed the printing of three million copies of The Fundamentals, which were sent free to ministers, churches and missionaries all over the world (The Fundamentals 13). In 1919, William Bell Riley founded the World Christian Fundamentals Association to uphold these principles, while the Northern Baptist Convention established a fundamentals convention a year later (McKenna 230).
Initially, fundamentalists were simply one wing of the mainstream evangelical Protestant churches, particularly the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, and indeed all these churches have conservative, traditionalist and orthodox wings today. Starting…
Sources Used in Document:
Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Gilkey, Langdon. On Niebuhr: A Theological Study. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Hankins, Barry. American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008.
Longfield, Bradley J. The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists and Modernity. Oxford University Press, 1991.
"American Religious History Defining Fundamentalism And Liberalism" (2011, February 17) Retrieved January 18, 2020, from
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American Church History
Words: 2099
Topic: Mythology - Religion
Paper #: 28173692
Great Awakening: The Beginning of Evangelicalism The evangelicals started a new movement in the 1950s called new evangelicalism with a basis on human experiences that downplayed the role of doctrine and turned back on external church relations which in a way made it hard to differentiate evangelicalism from the mainstream Christendom. This movement has experienced several transformations since the Reformation from pietistic evangelism, fundamentalist evangelism, and classic evangelism to the
Histories of the United States Address the
histories of the United States address the matter from a secular point-of-view. The government, the society, the economy and other such matters have been examined and discussed thoroughly but religion and its history has been largely ignored. Religion played an important role in the formation of the American government and played an even more important role in the development of American society, yet, studies related to how these roles
Protestant Devotion to the Virgin
Words: 24041
However, certain elements of traditional Christian theology are centered on Mary, and the degree of emphasis that those elements receive can be very telling about Mary's actual role in the religion. For example, the connection between female chastity and religious observance seems to have been established by God's choice of a Virgin to carry his son. God did not have to choose a virgin to bear his child, but
Modernity the Discourse of Modernity
Topic: History - Israel
The already shaky relationship between the Qatar state and Iranian society was further undermined by the Western exploitation of Iranian resources during the second half of the nineteenth century. From 1918 until 1921 "British subsidies kept the government afloat, and British military and administrative advisers attempted to reorganize Iran's army and to manipulate the various political factions within the country to British advantage" (Cleveland, 185)*. When Britain added insult to
Water in the Middle East
While on one hand, the Nile gets the highest discharge from rainfall on the highlands of Ethiopia and upland plateau of East Africa, located well outside the Middle East region; on the other hand, discharge points of the other two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, are positioned well within the Middle East region, prevailing mostly in Turkey, Syria along with Iraq. In other areas, recurrent river systems are restricted to
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Judges is a book filled with stories of the early days of Israel before the kings. It was a time of great turmoil. The period of Judges is characterized by a cycle of rest, rebellion, rejection and redemption. When the people served the Lord there was rest. In time the hearts of the people turned away from God and the Lord rejected them to the plight of an oppressive army. Pleading for mercy the land would be redeemed through the hand of another judge. This story would repeat itself throughout the writings of the judges.
Early in the judges a woman named Deborah, a prophetess, was judging Israel. The people forgot the Lord and He sent Sisera commander of the army of Hazor, the Philistines, and the king of Moab to punish the people. Through the leadership of Deborah and Barak the Lord routed Sisera and all his army with Israel defeating them completely. However Sisera escaped from his chariot and fled on foot. In his retreat the commander came by the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite. She implored Sisera to come into her tent to rest and find safety. Covering him with a blanket the commander asked for a drink of water. Instead Jael brought him warm milk to drink to help him sleep. Filling himself with the cream Sisera fell fast asleep.
It was the practice of the women to pitch the tents and break them down when moving. These were large tents requiring great skill and strength to manipulate. Jael was not unfamiliar with the use of a hammer and a tent peg. Silently coming to where Sisera lay fast asleep she places the tent peg over the temple of his head and with a great blow drives the stake into his head. She strikes the peg with such force it penetrates the brain and comes out the other side into the ground. In an over simplistic manner the Holy Spirit writes, "So he died." Deborah's song illuminates the manner of his death.
Meanwhile a third woman awaits the return of her son. The army of Sisera has been decimated. No one has been left alive. As the mother of Sisera anxiously looks out the lattice her maidens comfort her that he will home soon. They tell her he is busy plundering the possessions of Israel and taking captive girls. The wait stretches into days and then weeks when they realize none of their men are coming home. She grieves the death of her son.
Three women. Deborah who judged the people in the righteousness of God's will. Jael who had the courage to execute judgement upon the enemies of Israel. A mother who would never see her son alive again. Three different stories. Three very different women. What a great story.
p. s. Heber must have treated Jael very nice from that day forward. Just saying.


To become a sustainability specialist, you must get involved with efforts and build your experience. It's also important to make sure you have the skills and education needed to drive sustainable innovation at organizations. Here are five concrete tips.
Green jobs are very much a central and growing piece of the modern economy. More than 3.2 million people are employed in clean energy in the U.S.—that's 2.5 times more than those employed in fossil fuels. But what are these jobs exactly? Is sustainability different than green? The guide covers all this and more.
What the earth's changes mean for corporations, education, and sustainability careers.


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Q: run time error 91 - object not set When running the below code I get a run time error 91 - with object not set or with block... But I am lost how to fix it. It occures at:
.document.body.innerHTML = Status.innerHTML

Anyone sees through?
Dim Groups  As Collection
Set Groups = New Collection
Groups.Add "LineGroupSA"
Groups.Add "LineGroupPR"
Groups.Add "LineGroupEM"
i = 0
For Each group In Groups
Set Status = IEDoc.getElementById(group)
With Ie
    .document.body.innerHTML = Status.innerHTML
    .document.body.createTextRange.execCommand "Copy"
    ActiveSheet.Paste Destination:=Sheets("Sheet3").cells(1, i)
    .Quit
End With
i = i + 1
Next group

html:

    SA
    AWAITING CHANGES

A: The variable Ie isn't set anywhere... I guess that's why the error "with object not set" is prompted

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The Bauline Community Committee is offering a Babysitting Course that will be conducted by the St. John Ambulance. The course will be 1 June 2019. Participants must be between the ages of 11-15 and the cost is $45.00 per person. In order to register contact Megan at ccchair@townofbauline.ca.


«I'm a Student» has been Ukraine's only glossy youth magazine about students since the 1990s to date. It has been published since 1997.
The magazine is officially registered as a mass media with the State Registration Service of Ukraine and has ISSN code from the International Center of Periodicals in Paris.
«I'm a Student» is not just a magazine, it is also a whole media workshop for students, which includes printed version of the magazine, official website ya-student.com.ua and Internet TV for students.
The chronicle is created by students of various Ukrainian universities. They provide creative inspiration of the magazine. We never write about anything that is not interesting to us. What is more, we make dreams come true. In particular, by using printed word.
Would you like to joint our editors? Perhaps we need just you! If you want to publish your first article, if you dream about successful career, if you are active, creative, caring person, who wants to share their views of the topical problems of the time, then welcome, you have your happy ticket!
Would you like to be a columnist in our magazine? Would you like to interview extraordinary people? Would you like to appear on the cover page or make a true gift to your dearest person by publishing their photograph on the pages of the magazine?


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Supermarket Endorses British Products
A major Canadian supermarket chain has this week strongly endorsed British food products writes Blighty's Blog business correspondent Don River. But beneath the announcement, writes Don, there lurks a sinister agenda.
In a surprise announcement this week, one of Canada's largest corporate supermarket chains has identified British food as "wickedly good". The chain has invested thousands of dollars promoting imported British food as part of its Christmas marketing campaign. However, the Blighty's Blog investigative team of reporters has uncovered unsettling facts surrounding the announcement.
The products are advertised as "Imported from Scotland" but, as Don River's investigations have revealed, the products in fact come from Scotland, Ontario - a small community in south-western Ontario's Brant County. "The first clue that lead to the discovery" writes Don "was the Canadian packaging". The original manufacturer in "Scotland" could not be identified from the package, but as exclusively revealed to Blighty's Blog, the products are in fact made by a Mrs Eilean Donan who was born in Toronto, but whose grandfather emigrated from Aberdeen in 1934.
Editorial note: Don River has updated his story. The products do , in fact, come from Scotland, UK. The error arose as a result of a lunchtime meeting with Don's informant - a Mr Johnny Walker. Blighty's Blog apologizes to the giant corporate supermarket for the misinformation. but upholds its story about the dubious origins of the product manufacturer and the anonymous single malt whisky distillery. Ed.
The investigation was spurred by another item on the product label: "made with single malt whisky". When questioned by a Blighty's Blog reporter, Mrs Donan was unable to identify which distillery the whisky came from. As our team later uncovered, there is not a single whisky distillery anywhere in Scotland, Ontario!
Blighty's Tuck Store president, John Corby, was reached and gave these comments:
"Well I certainly welcome this ringing endorsement of our products from such a powerful industry player" he said "and I strongly applaud Don River for uncovering the hidden big corporate agenda. I have faith in the Canadian public's ability to discern the advantages of supporting small, honest businesses like ourselves."
Blighty's Tuck Store (www.blightys.com) carries products from Scotland, UK whose original manufacturer is clearly identified. Some of these products are made with single malt whisky from a distillery that is also clearly identified.
Oliver 12:40 PM
Down to the big corporations trying to squeeze out the smaller, family run business. They already have an established customer base, so for them to bring in poor immitation products in a means to try and create a monopoly in this market is just sickening.
Those of us that understand the quality behind the products we buy... we wont be tricked into these falsehoods and will continue to support the independant shops, where we know what we are getting is the "real deal".
Don't forget your mobile!
Literate Dogs Welcome
Another Silly British Sign


The best way to measure incoming traffic is to use either Cpanel or, even better, use a lnk.direct link for the order. By putting a '+s' behind the link, you will see the exact amount of visitors received. Bit.ly is also a handy alternative.
We set each order up via a lnk.direct tracking link, as it is a reliable third party tracker with a good amount of extra information about the visitors.
These tools work better than Google Analytics and other analytics tools, which do not register all visitors under certain circumstances.


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Q: Failing to start selenium webdriver with the error "java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: INSTANCE" I am using selenium-server-standalone-2.43.1 version
Below is the code i tried
DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
capabilities.setJavascriptEnabled(true);
capabilities.setBrowserName(browserType);
capabilities.setCapability(CapabilityType.ACCEPT_SSL_CERTS, true);
URL url = new URL("http://" + remoteIP + ":"+ port + "/wd/hub");
RemoteWebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(url, capabilities);

And this is the error I am facing:
java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: INSTANCE

Can someone help me please?


text:
Russian Olympic City Cancels Tender to Cull Strays
https://sputniknews.com/russia/20130418180711977-Russian-Olympic-City-Cancels-Tender-to-Cull-Strays/
The administration of Sochi, the host city of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, said on Thursday it had cancelled a plan to exterminate stray animals in the city, after it received no bids for a tender to carry it out.
SOCHI, April 18 (RIA Novosti) - The administration of Sochi, the host city of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, said on Thursday it had cancelled a plan to exterminate stray animals in the city, after it received no bids for a tender to carry it out.
According to the official Russian website for public tenders, Sochi was prepared to pay more than 1.7 million rubles (about $54,000) for "work to catch and dispose of" more than 2,000 dogs and cats in 2013-2015. The tender was posted in late March.
Sergei Krivonosov, a United Russia party representative from Sochi in the State Duma, said killing strays was necessary to ensure the safety of foreign visitors during the Games. He said the issue was still open for debate and urged animal rights activists to come up with realistic proposals.
In a statement delivered on Thursday, the city administration said from now on they would oblige tender respondents to have facilities for keeping, treating and sterilizing animals.
The Sochi authorities also said an animal shelter would soon be built in the city, and a plot of land has already been allocated for the purpose.
"The animal shelter will be built and maintained by the Dobromir charity organization. All the required documents are currently being finalized," the Sochi administration said in a statement.
strays, 2014 Winter Olympic Games, State Duma, United Russia, Sergei Krivonosov, Sochi


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Bloemendaal é uma vila e um município dos Países Baixos, situado na província da Holanda do Norte. Tem  de área e sua população em 2020 foi estimada em 23.566 habitantes.

Municípios da Holanda do Norte


text:
When Sunni Gets Blue
On July 17, 2015 the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir met President Barack Obama in the White House to discuss security in the Middle East and specifically the nuclear agreement signed three days earlier with Iran. On the same day, King Salman met in Mecca with a group hitherto considered unfriendly political adversaries, the leaders of Hamas, including Khaled Meshal their political leader who lives in Qatar.
In both these conversations and in the speeches in Teheran the nature of the agreement will be discussed differently. One might hear in the White House the need to evaluate it based on the facts, not on politics, that the only option to an agreement was the use of military force against Iran, and that once the agreement is fully implemented it will effectively cut off all of Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon.
In Teheran, the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has spoken of victory because the agreement does not require Iran to stop all its enrichment of uranium, and that thousands of centrifuges will exist. What won't stop is the chanting in the streets of Iran of slogans, "Death to the United States," and "Death to Israel." For his part Iranian Prime Minister Hassan Rouhani proclaims that "constructive engagement" works.
It is the meeting in Mecca that is most meaningful since it underscores the startling recent change of policy for the Saudis. They were previously bitterly hostile to Hamas not only because the terrorist group is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood whose government in Egypt the Saudis had opposed, but also because they were aware that Hamas has been assisted materially, in finance and in arms, by Iran.
Is the Iran agreement an earthquake or only a shock? Is it an achievement of diplomacy, a substitute for military action, or appeasement of a violent religious regime that has American blood on its hands? The agreement, that President Obama calls "a comprehensive long-term deal," is considered by many, at best, as imperfect.
Simply stated, Iran nuclear program and its capacity to build a nuclear weapon may be limited for a decade. It will reduce its enrichment capacity, it will sharply cut its stockpile of low enriched uranium, it will halt its development of heavy water reactors, and UN inspectors can enter sites under certain conditions, which are not exactly clear.
However, Saudi Arabian and other critics question certain non–technical aspects of the deal with Iran. According to the agreement, all sanctions against Iran will be lifted over a period of time. Iran was already selling about 200,000 barrels of oil on the black market. Economic and financial sanctions are supposed to end when Iran complies with specific obligations to reduce centrifuges and uranium stockpiles. The United Nations ban on access to ballistic missile technology will end within 8 years, and the arms embargo will end in five years. After a decade, Iran can buy nuclear-related goods, and then after five more years can increase its nuclear program and can enrich uranium above the 3.67 per cent level.
One inherent problem is concern about the reality of the provisions for inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That agency in November 2011 caught Iran cheating on twelve areas of its activity, an incident that raises questions about Iran's genuine willingness to allow inspections and provide information.
As a result of the deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia will continue in a heightened way its more assertive actions and policies in the Middle East. The Saudis realized that the sanctions imposed on Iran since 2011 were having an impact on the country that had a high inflation rate and a sharp decline in its dollar reserves. They also realized that the U.S. had given waivers to Japan to import Iranian oil, and that the U.S. had not imposed sanctions on global financial institutions that did business with Iran. They fear that the billions that Iran will gain by the removal of sanctions — at least $150 billion in frozen assets — will cause greater problems as Iran will finance activity in the Middle East.
The challenge of Iran for the Saudis is the interrelationship of two factors, religious and geopolitical. As the major Sunni power Saudi Arabia is leading the fight against the Shia threat, led by Iran and its allies Hizb'allah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, to the 90 per cent of the Muslim world that is Sunni. It is obliged on religious grounds to challenge Iran that defines itself as an Islamic Republic based on the Twelver sect of Shiite Islam as the official religion. Supreme leadership is presently held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, successor to Ruhollah Khomeini.
Saudi Arabia is fearful that Iran can dominate the Shia world, and the Middle East, and that it is doing so to some degree by alliances with part of Sunni Islam, especially with the Muslim Brotherhood, and until recently with Hamas which became unhappy with Iran's involvement with Sunni rebels and the regime in Syria.
The Saudis have been confronted with an increasing number of terrorist attacks and suicide bombings, one of which was carried out by a man dressed as a woman, on its own territory, in May, June, and November 2014, and in May 2015 when a bomb killed 21 people in the village of al-Qudeeh in the east Qatif region. Saudi Arabia is aware that the Islamic State (IS) has been successful in recruiting some of its citizens. On July 18, 2015 it arrested 431 persons who were planning attacks in the country on mosques and security forces.
A new game of international politics in the Middle East has emerged. The Saudis want to prevent Iran from being the dominant Middle East power. An alliance, perhaps temporary, of interests exists between Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries, Egypt whose leader President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has received large sums of money from the Saudis, and Israel. This alliance is aware that Iran has sent 7,000 troops and considerable finance to support the regime of President Assad in Syria. The Saudis are now planning to use air power to target Iranian and Hizb'allah forces in Syria and to provide air support for the anti-Assad Free Syrian Army.
The Saudis have been trying to reduce Russian and Chinese support for the allies of Iran in Syria and Yemen. Some rapprochement may have resulted from the visit on June 17, 2015 of Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Salman to see Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. Some agreements were signed on oil cooperation, and on nuclear technology sharing, as well as discussions on the war in Yemen and Saudi's military actions there.
Paradoxically, in order to check the advance of Iran and the IS, Saudi Arabia has been assisting the Islamist forces, who are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, against the rebel Houthis in Yemen because that group is linked to Iran. For four months, the Saudis have carried out air strikes in Yemen, and may send in special forces. Similarly, Saudi Arabia has collaborated with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in backing Islamists opposing President Bashar al-Assad in Syria who has killed thousands of Sunnis and who is supported by Iran.
One troubling problem resulting from the Iran deal is whether the Saudis contemplate pursuing a nuclear program in order to produce a bomb. In examining and voting on the agreement, which is not a U.S. treaty, members of Congress might well consider the implications of this.
First published in the American Thinker.
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45th Space Wing prepares for first launch under the U.S. Space Force
by Sandra Erwin — January 4, 2020
The 45th Space Wing supported the launch of SpaceX's Starlink mission on a Falcon 9 rocket on November 11, 2019, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. Credit: U.S. Air Force
Brig. Gen. Doug Schiess said the 45th Space Wing will continue to do what it has been doing.
WASHINGTON — The SpaceX launch of Starlink satellites scheduled for Jan. 6 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida Space Coast will be the first launch of 2020 and also the 45th Space Wing's inaugural launch as part of the U.S. Space Force.
The 45th Space Wing, headquartered at Patrick Air Force Base, Fla., oversees the preparation and launching of U.S. government and commercial satellites from Cape Canaveral and operates the Eastern Range. It is one of five Air Force space wings that have been assigned to the U.S. Space Force effective Dec. 20, when President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act that created the U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.
"I'm excited for the 45th Space Wing to be a part of the U.S. Space Force," wing commander Brig. Gen. Doug Schiess said in a statement Jan. 3.
The 45th Space Wing will continue to do what it has been doing and the transition to the Space Force will not change that, Schiess said.
The details of how the U.S. Space Force will be structured and staffed will take at least 18 months to sort out. For now the Space Force will be composed of uniformed and civilian personnel who worked under the Air Force Space Command. AFSPC personnel have been assigned to the Space Force but still remain airmen within the U.S. Air Force. Over the next year, the Air Force will figure out a process to allow service members to leave the Air Force and officially transfer into the Space Force.
There are about 16,000 Air Force personnel that support the five space wings and are now part of the new branch. Besides the 45th Space Wing in Florida is the 30th Space Wing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California; the 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force, Colorado; the 50th Space Wing at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado; and the 460th Space Wing at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado.
The organization that oversees the five wings — the 14th Air Force, headquartered at Vandenberg — on Dec. 27 was renamed Space Operations Command. Maj. Gen. John Shaw, former commander of the 14th Air Force, is now the commander of the Space Operations Command, or SpOC.
"The effects the new Space Force will have on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Patrick Air Force Base has not been announced yet, but continuing to successfully accomplish the mission without interruption is our top priority," Schiess said.
Space Force report due to Congress
The NDAA directs the secretary of the Air Force to submit by February 1 a report on how the Space Force will be organized and its anticipated funding requirements.
The details are being hashed out by a team known as Task Force Tang-O (a play on American astronauts' preferred beverage in space). DoD sources told SpaceNews that the report that is being prepared for Congress will lay out a proposed structure but that some pieces of the puzzle will be missing until a year or 18 months from now.
The acting chief of the Space Force, Air Force Gen. John Raymond, told reporters Dec. 20 that there are still "thousands of actions will have to take place" over the coming months and years. "The uniforms, the patch, the song, the culture of a service, that work will continue," Raymond said. "We're not going to be in a rush. That's not something that we're going to roll out on day one."
Raymond, who is commander of U.S. Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base, is overseeing the Task Force Tang-O from Colorado Springs. He is working in coordination with a team at the Pentagon, led by Air Force Maj. Gen. Clinton Crosier.
A DoD source said one of the central questions being debated by Tang-O is whether the Space Force should follow the traditional Air Force structure or should be something completely different. The way the Air Force organizes its headquarters staff and field units was tailored for aviation, and some argue that it doesn't fit space operations that are mostly conducted in garrison.
Briefing slides prepared by the Tang-O group in June proposed organizing the Space Force into a Space Operations Command and a Space Force Materiel Command. The latter would bring under a unified command the Space and Missile Systems Center, the Space Development Agency and other space-focused laboratories such as the Space Rapid Capabilities Office.
The team also suggested standing up a Space Training and Readiness Command. But bringing these ideas to fruition depends on how many "billets" (military-speak for specific positions or assignments) the Air Force turns over to the Space Force. In the NDAA Congress did not authorize the hiring of new people for the space branch.
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Milton Keynes at 50: Success town has 'nothing to be ashamed of'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-38461928
Image caption Five decades on from plans being approved for a new town, Milton Keynes has become home to more than 10,000 businesses and is used as a model for cities across the world
In January 1967 plans for a new town were given the go-ahead and soon a quiet Buckinghamshire village became the vast development of Milton Keynes. Fifty years on, what do people living in one of the UK's best-known "new towns" think of it?
When then housing minister Anthony Greenwood granted permission to transform 8,850 hectares of villages and farmland into a town of 250,000 people, little did he know the part concrete cows would play in its story.
The vision for Milton Keynes was grand in scale - part of the third and final phase of the government's plans to relocate populations following World War Two.
Almost inevitably, a small art project created some 10 years later became the focal point for a sceptical national media.
But five decades on, Milton Keynes has become home to more than 10,000 businesses and is used as a model for new towns across the world.
Image caption Celebrations to mark the 50th birthday and demonstrate the town's plans for the future will kick off on 10 January
Though sometimes mocked for those cows and its proliferation of roundabouts, Milton Keynes has "nothing to be ashamed of", according to its deputy mayor David Hopkins.
Mr Hopkins was one of the town's 40,000 original residents when he relocated from rural Buckinghamshire with his parents, who he admits were initially "horrified" at the concept of the new town.
What has MK done for us?
Image caption The cows have become closely associated with the identity of Milton Keynes
The Concrete Cows sculptures, created by Canadian artist Liz Leyh in 1978, are famous far beyond their home town
The Marshall amplifier, the first choice of many of the top rock bands around the world, was developed by Jim Marshall and the company is based in Milton Keynes
The Open University, the distance learning pioneer, was set up in 1965 and based in the town
It might have been years before the new town existed but Bletchley Park - in the town of Bletchley, which became part of Milton Keynes - was the home of British codebreaking during World War Two and is now a museum
Like most other residents they came to love it because, Mr Hopkins says, Milton Keynes is "the place to be".
"We're the place where people want to come and live, and we're the place with an identity all of its own - it's much more than concrete cows and roundabouts," he says.
"We've moved from being a rural part of North Buckinghamshire to one of the most successful economies and one of the most successful cities in the UK over the last 50 years - it's never the same two days running so why would I want to live anywhere else?"
Mr Hopkins likens growing up in a new town to going on a cruise.
Image caption Councillor David Hopkins, deputy mayor of Milton Keynes, says the town has "nothing to be ashamed of"
Image caption A street in Milton Keynes under construction in October 1978
"You take your cabin with you but you go to a different destination every day, every week. Milton Keynes has been a bit like that because we're moving to different destinations through every decade in the last 50 years," he says.
Council leader Pete Marland has an even grander analogy. He believes the town's inhabitants were similar to US residents who first went over the Appalachian Mountains with entrepreneurial ambition.
"[They thought] 'I'll go to Milton Keynes and I'll have a better life for myself', and I think that's really transferred to the new generation of people," says Mr Marland.
While he does not believe another new town on the scale of Milton Keynes will ever be constructed in England again, Mr Marland hopes the next 50 years will see Milton Keynes transform from a "plan into a place".
"One of the greatest potentials that we have in Milton Keynes is that we have no undergraduate university, and that's a huge opportunity... in the centre of Milton Keynes," he adds.
The town is also hoping to become the European City of Culture in 2023, something deputy mayor Mr Hopkins is confident can be achieved.
MK at 50
Image caption A housing estate in Milton Keynes photographed in 1978
119 square miles: The total area covered by Milton Keynes - 40% of which is green space
300,000: The number of people expected to live in the town by 2026, according to Office for National Statistics estimates
100: Number of languages spoken in the town's schools
220: The number of works of public art on display in Milton Keynes
65,000: The number of people that can fit inside the National Bowl in the town
In 2013 Milton Keynes had a population of 255,700 - 43,000 more than 12 years before, according to official statistics. The 20.2% growth was far higher than the average of 8.9% for England.
But the town slipped 40 places in a ranking of the best places to live in the country published by uSwitch in 2015.
It placed the town 97th out of 138 UK regions, praising its good employment rates and incomes, but noting that the cost of living was "very high".
Despite that, Jim Murray, 62, says he "wouldn't want to live anywhere else".
Mr Murray, an environmental health enforcement officer, says: "I love the landscape, the planning applications that have gone into it, the layout, the parks, the trees, everything really."
Image caption Milton Keynes is also the home of MK Dons, formed in 2004 after Wimbledon relocated to the town
Image caption Gill Prince, who has produced a photography art book to mark the town's anniversary
His passion for the town is shared by photographer Gill Prince, who has lived there for 25 years.
The 49-year-old has produced a photography art book to mark the town's anniversary - titled Unexpected:MK - featuring landscapes from around the city.
"I know how fantastic Milton Keynes is, I know how many beautiful places there are, but even people who live here don't always know about them," Ms Prince says.
"It's a fabulous place - all the lakes and the parks - there are just so many things to do and part of what I wanted to achieve as a photographer was to demonstrate those to other people so that they could see and maybe go there.
"I really don't want to live anywhere else. I love being here and I love everything its got."
Celebrations to mark the 50th birthday and demonstrate the town's plans for the future will kick off on 10 January with an exhibition that tells the story of Milton Keynes' development.
Milton Keynes concrete cows repainted by Parks Trust
Milton Keynes cows could be moved after skeleton vandalism
Milton Keynes Council
MK Development Corporation 1967-1992
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Viola Davis to Receive Sherry Lansing Award at Hollywood Reporter Women in Entertainment Event
8:50 AM PDT 10/30/2018 by THR staff
Emma McIntyre/BAFTA LA/Getty Images for BAFTA LA
The honor is presented annually to a female trailblazer and philanthropic leader at the star-studded breakfast held in conjunction with THR's Women in Entertainment issue.
Oscar-, Emmy- and Tony-winning actress and producer Viola Davis will be honored at The Hollywood Reporter's 2018 Women in Entertainment breakfast. The annual star-studded event, which recognizes female pioneers and industry leaders, will take place Dec. 5 in Los Angeles.
Davis will receive with the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award, given annually to a woman who is a trailblazer and philanthropic leader in her industry. Davis, who leads an ensemble in Steve McQueen's upcoming heist drama Widows, is a leader in the childhood hunger space, where she uses her own experience and story of strength to shift the discourse around the issue. From 2014-17, Davis served as an ambassador for the charitable initiative Hunger Is, raising more than $20 million to provide meals for children all over the country.
Davis has also worked to end poverty in her hometown of Central Falls, R.I.; she has donated to its public library; her high school alma mater; and the Segue Institute for Learning, a charter school. Through her partnership with the Vaseline Healing Project, Davis returned to Central Falls in 2016 to launch a free health clinic for residents unable to afford health care. The actress has also been outspoken on issues of racism, inequality and sexual violence in Hollywood.
Davis follows a long line of Lansing Award recipients, including Tina Fey, Barbra Streisand, Shonda Rhimes, Oprah Winfrey, Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Helen Mirren, Halle Berry, Jodie Foster, Glenn Close, Barbara Walters and, most recently, Jennifer Lawrence.
"Viola uses her fame in such selfless ways, amplifying the unheard voices of others, and has inspired tremendous change both in her Rhode Island hometown and across the globe," said Matthew Belloni, editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter. "Her prodigious talent and commitment to do good is unparalleled, and she is the perfect embodiment of what it means to be a leader in the Hollywood community. I can't think of a better recipient for the 2018 Sherry Lansing Award."
Added Lansing, the former CEO of Paramount Pictures and the first woman to head a Hollywood studio: "Now is the perfect time to honor a woman as bold and generous as Viola. Over her remarkable two-decade career, Viola has remained steadfast in her support for marginalized communities, while cultivating one of the greatest bodies of work in the industry. She's a motivating and refreshing voice in Hollywood when we need it most, and I couldn't be more excited to honor her at the Women in Entertainment breakfast."
The Women in Entertainment breakfast, sponsored by Lifetime, American Airlines, Cadillac and Loyola Marymount University in partnership with the Entertainment Industry Foundation, coincides with the publication of The Hollywood Reporter's annual Women in Entertainment: Power 100 list, the definitive guide to the leading women in film and television.
A highlight of the breakfast is the awarding of scholarships to young women who have taken part in The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Mentorship Program. This year, each of the 18 girls in the 2018 program — all from underserved high schools in South and East Los Angeles — will receive $10,000 toward their university costs, and several will be granted full-ride scholarships to LMU. A total of $1.7 million in scholarships will be presented.
THR staff