Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic got the minimum sentences allowable under the federal guidelines: Five months in jail and five months of home detention. The sentences will be stayed pending appeal, which could last nine months or more. The chance that the convictions will stand remains 98 percent.
Martha went first. She wore black. When she glided into the courtroom, the gallery hushed, and the class-reunion atmosphere that had prevailed in the spectator benches—"I haven't seen you since the verdict!"—transformed into that of a funeral (or, rather, execution).
As is the custom in this solemn ceremony, Judge Cedarbaum addressed Stewart directly, asking whether she or her lawyer had anything to say. Bob Morvillo spoke first, requesting leniency: a sentence that avoided the "highest penalty" we place upon our citizens, the stripping away of their freedom. He suggested that Stewart's offenses had, in the end, hurt no one but herself. He cited the penalties Stewart has already paid, the loss of her job, her reputation, more than half of her net worth, the vicious and unceasing ridicule she has been subjected to over the past three years. He described the 1,500 letters written to the judge on her behalf, her extraordinary work ethic, the damage already inflicted upon her company and employees. He asked that, instead of going to jail, Stewart be allowed to work with poor women to help them improve their lives (vague, but productive-sounding).
Morvillo was articulate, but Stewart upstaged him. She stood up at the defendant's table, and, voice breaking, read a statement that, in the moment, sounded remarkably raw and heartfelt, a statement that, later, much less effectively, she would read portions of to the television cameras outside.
Today is a shameful day. It is shameful for me, for my family, and for my beloved company and all of its employees and partners. What was a small personal matter became over the last two and a half years an almost fatal circus event of unprecedented proportions spreading like oil over a vast landscape, even around the world. I have been choked and almost suffocated to death during that time. …I ask that, in judging me, you remember all the good that I have done, all the contributions I have made through the company I founded, as well as personally over the past decades of my life that have been devoted almost entirely to productive, creative, and useful activities. I ask, too, that you consider all the intense suffering that I and so many dear others have endured every single moment of the past two and a half years. I seek the opportunity to continue serving my country and my community in the same positive manner I always have. I seek the opportunity to repair the damage wrought by the situation, to get on with what I have always thought was a good, worthwhile, and exemplary life.My heart goes out to you and to everyone in this courtroom, and my prayers are with you. My hopes that my life will not be completely destroyed lie entirely in your competent and experienced and merciful hands. Thank you and peace be with you.
When Stewart sat down, the lead prosecutor, Karen Patton Seymour, rose. With the quiet confidence of a victor, Seymour reminded the court that Stewart was asking for leniency beyond that which "ordinary people" would receive and that, contrary to Morvillo's assertion, hers were serious crimes.
After a pause, Judge Cedarbaum asked Stewart to stand once again. Then, in a strong first-person ("I sentence you …"), she began: Five months in prison. Five months of home detention. Two years of probation. Two strangely minor (for Stewart) fines, including a "special assessment" of $400 that had to be paid immediately. (For what? Drinks and dinner?) Four hours later, with Peter Bacanovic and his family in attendance, the ritual would be repeated again.
All in all, the sentences feel fair. As Morvillo suggested, Stewart will have paid an enormous price even before her official "punishment" begins. Had this caused Judge Cedarbaum to depart from the sentencing guidelines, however, or had Stewart simply been allowed to "work with poor women" or be confined to her estate in Bedford, N.Y., there would have been little sense that justice was being done. Peter Bacanovic will also have paid an enormous pre-punishment price—less in absolute terms than Stewart's (he wasn't blessed with a billion dollars of stock to lose) but one that wipes him out financially and professionally.Unlike Stewart, when he gets out, he won't have a company, career, or fortune to return to.
Here is what was curious: The moment the sentences were read, the proceedings no longer felt like funerals. Instead, perhaps because five months is, well, five months and not five years, the uncertainty and dread disappeared, and, suddenly, there was light (life?) at the end of the tunnel. For the first time, we could see beyond jail. For the first time, the verdict wasn't the end. On the contrary—as the stock market instantly recognized, driving the stock of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia up nearly 40 percent by day's end—no matter what happens next, there is now a very real point when this is going to end. In two years, most likely, Stewart will have exhausted her appeals, served her time, and reappeared. For the first time, in other words, Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic are closer to the end than the beginning.
On the steps outside, when she finished reading her now-stale statement, Stewart put the paper aside. She took a few sentences to warm up, but then, suddenly, she became her once and future self again. She ad-libbed. She pitched her products. She laughed. She donned her drill sergeant-homemaker-chief executive guise, reached through the camera and, summoning the indomitable drive and confidence that has taken her from a Westport, Conn., kitchen to global superstardom, grabbed her millions of fans by the lapels. "I'll be back," she said. "I will be back." And, love her or hate her, no one who has ever seen her in action would doubt it.
Photograph of Martha Stewart by Peter Morgan/Reuters.


text:
Q: Llamar a la clave foranea PHP Estoy intentado hacer un formulario despues de hacer un login como usuario y en la base de datos tengo una llave foranea que es usuario_id de la tabla pedidos que se junta con id_usuario de la tabla usuarios
Este codigo es el que almacenaria el pedido pero me faltaria agregar el usuario_id para que aparezca que id del usaurio que solicito el pedido en la tabla de pedidos pero no sabria como agregarlo
    <?php
        include("../conexion.php");
        session_start();
        if(empty($_SESSION['active'])){
            header('location: ../login.php');
        }
        ?>

  <form method="post" action="insertarp.php">

    Tipo de servicio
            <select name="tipox" id="user_type" >
                <option value="1">1</option>
                <option value="2">2</option>
                <option value="3">3</option>
            </select>

    Tipo
            <select name="carx" id="user_type" >
                <option value="1">S/C</option>
                <option value="2">G</option>
                <option value="3">M</option>

            </select>

    Fecha del servicio
    <input type="date" name="fechax">

    Telefono
    <input type="number" name="telx">

    Mensajes/Comentarios
    <input type="text" name="menx" placeholder="Sin comentarios">

    <button type="submit" class="btn" name="btn">Solicitar</button>

    </form>

Esto es donde se insertan los datos del formulario anterior insertarp.php

<?php
include("../conexion.php");

$tipo = $_POST["tipox"];
$car = $_POST["carx"];
$fecha = $_POST["fechax"];
$tel = $_POST["telx"];
$mensaje = $_POST["menx"];

$us_id = $_POST["u_id"];

//var_dump($_POST);

$actualizar2 = "INSERT INTO pedidos (tipo_ser,car,fecha,c_tel,men,usuario_id) VALUES ('$tipo','$car', '$fecha', '$tel', '$mensaje', '$us_id' )";

$resultado2 = mysqli_query($conexion, $actualizar2);

if($resultado2){
    echo "";

}else{
   //echo "";
}

Cualquier duda de el codigo comenten y edito

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
[This article is taken from the Journal of Democracy Vol. 4, No. 4 October 1993, pp. 54-68. It is reprinted here by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press, Copyrights © 1993. You are welcome to have a link to this cite. However, please do not post this article independently. Thank you.]
The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict
INDIA: THE DILEMMAS OF DIVERSITY
--Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr.
Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. is the Temple Professor of the Humanities in Government and Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. His numerous publications include India Under Pressure (1984) and With Stanley A. Kochanek) India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation (5th ed., 1993).
India came to independence in 1947 amidst the trauma of partition. The nationalist movement, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, aimed to gather what was then British India plus the 562 princely states under British paramountcy into a secular and democratic state. But Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, feared that his coreligionists, who made up almost a quarter of the subcontinent's population, would find themselves a permanent and embattled minority in a Hindu-dominated land. For Jinnah, India was "two nations," Hindu and Muslim, and he was determined that Muslims should secure protection in an Islamic state of Pakistan, made up of the Muslim-majority areas of India. In the violence that accompanied partition, some half a million people were killed, while upwards of 11 million Hindus and Muslims crossed the newly created borders as refugees. But even all this bloodshed and suffering did not settle matters, for the creation of Pakistan left nearly half of the subcontinent's Muslims in India.
Muslims today are India's largest religious minority, accounting for 11 percent of the total population. Among other religious groups, the Sikhs, some of whom in 1947 had sought an independent Sikhistan, are concentrated in the northern state of Punjab and number less than 2 percent of India's population. Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees, and Jews add further richness to India's religious diversity, but their comparatively small numbers only accentuate the overwhelming proportion of Hindus, with some 83 percent of the population.
The Hindus, although they share a common religious tradition, are themselves divided into a myriad of sects and are socially segmented by thousands of castes and subcastes, hierarchically ranked according to tradition and regionally organized. The geographic regions of India are linguistically and culturally distinct. There are more than a dozen major languages, grouped into those of Dravidian South India and Indo-European (or Aryan) North India; Hindi, an Indo-European language spoken by 30 percent of all Indians, is recognized by the Constitution of 1950 as the official language (along with English). In addition to the many Indo-European and Dravidian languages and dialects, there are various tribal languages spoken by peoples across India, most notably in southern Bihar and in the seven states of the Northeast.
In confronting this staggering diversity, the framers of India's Constitution sought to shape an overarching Indian identity even as they acknowledged the reality of pluralism by guaranteeing fundamental rights, in some cases through specific provisions for the protection of minorities. These include freedom of religion (Articles 25-28); the right of any section of citizens to use and conserve their "distinct language, script or culture" (Article 29); and the right of "all minorities, whether based on religion or language," to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice (Article 30). With respect to caste, the Constitution declared the practice of "untouchability" unlawful (Article 17). To provide compensatory justice and open up opportunity, a certain percentage of admissions to colleges and universities and places in government employment were "reserved" for so-called Scheduled Castes (untouchables) and Scheduled (aboriginal) Tribes (Article 335). Similarly, to ensure adequate political representation, Scheduled Castes and Tribes were allotted reserved seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, and in state legislatures in proportion to their numbers (Article 330). These reservations were to have ended in 1960, but they have been extended by constitutional amendment at ten-year intervals.
Federalism and the Party System
Despite enormous pressures, India has been remarkably successful in accommodating cultural diversity and managing ethnic conflict through democratic institutions. This success has in large part been the product of that diversity itself, for at the national level--what Indians call "the center"--no single ethnic group can dominate. Each of the 25 states in India's federal system reflects a dominant ethnolinguistic group, but these groups are in turn divided by caste, sect, religion, and a host of socioeconomic cleavages. Federalism provides a venue, however flawed, for expressions of cultural distinctiveness, but it also serves to compartmentalize friction. The cultural conflicts of one state rarely spill over into another, and the center can thus more effectively manage and contain them.
Even as India reflects a multitude of cross-cutting identities, however, religion has the potential to shape a national majority. Political appeals on the basis of pan-Hindu identity, facilitated by modern mass communications, have begun to forge an increasingly self-conscious religious community capable of transcending its own heterogeneity. The expression of this communal awareness as Hindu nationalism poses a fundamental challenge to India as a secular state.
India's party system, like its constitutional framework, has served to sustain democratic politics and national unity, providing access to political participation for newly mobilized groups. For 41 of the 46 years since 1947, India has been governed at the center by the Indian National Congress, the party that led India to independence. For the first two decades after independence, the main arena of political competition at both national and state levels was within the Congress party, but with increasing frequency since the mid-1960's, regional parties have successfully challenged Congress's hold on various states. Then in 1977, opposition parties for the first time defeated Congress at the center.
Today there are three major forces at the center, represented by parties that at least claim to be "national" in character. The Congress, under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, rules as a minority government sustained by its alliances with an array of minor and regional parties. The Congress draws its support widely from across the country, from all classes and groups, but a critical margin of support has traditionally come from religious minorities, notably Muslims, and from untouchables. The leading opposition party is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party of Hindu nationalism. From its base in the Hindispeaking heartland of North India, it has dramatically expanded its support by direct appeals to pan-Hindu religious sentiment. Though its strength is still concentrated in the north, the BJP has made inroads, especially among the urban middle classes, into other parts of India. 1 The third force at the center is made up of various Janata Dal (People's Party) factions that draw support principally from the rural peasant classes, mainly in North India, and the Left Front, led by the Communist Party (Marxist), the ruling party of West Bengal.
The Congress remains the only genuinely all-lndia party, for the other claimants for power at the center have bases of support that are largely confined to particular regions. Any party or coalition that wishes to rule at the national level, however, must represent a range of cultural identities. Even the BJP, in seeking to forge a Hindu nation, must cast its net broadly--though in doing so, it excludes Muslims and other minorities unwilling to subordinate their distinctive identities.
At the state level, national parties compete with those that are wholly regional in their base of support, and in a number of states, regional parties--identified with particular ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups--are the major political forces. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, for instance, Tamil nationalist parties have ruled since 1967; in Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam party is the major rival to the Congress; in the Punjab, it is the Sikh party, known as the Akali Dal; and in the Northeast, ethnically based regional parties compete with Congress in various states. Ethnically or religiously based parties serve as vehicles of regional identity within a united India, but can also threaten cultural minorities by wielding nativist appeals to local "sons of the soil" whose interests are supposedly being endangered by migrants from other parts of India or indigenous religious and linguistic minorities. Such appeals dramatically expose the tensions that lie just under the multicultural surface of Indian democracy.
Liberal democracy stands or falls according to its ability to elicit a dual commitment to both majority rule and minority rights. The legitimacy of a majority at any given time depends on the maintenance of an open marketplace of ideas, free and periodic elections through which the majority can be challenged, and guarantees of basic human rights for all. But how and in what form are minority rights to be protected? Liberal democracy is classically expressed in terms of individual rights, and the Preamble to the Indian Constitution embodies a commitment to justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity for the individual. Yet minority interests are typically expressed in terms of group identity, and political demands may call for the protection or promotion of language, religion, and culture, or of the "group" more generally, in ways that conflict not only with "the will of the majority," but with constitutional guarantees of individual rights and equal protection. This tension, and the problems it causes, can be seen in India in the contexts of: (1) ethnolinguistic regionalism and separatism; (2) caste-based reservations; and (3) secularism and Hindu-Muslim communal relations.2
Regionalism and Separatism
With independence, the old princely states were integrated into the Indian union, but the newly created federal states were linguistically and culturally heterogeneous. Long before independence, the Congress party had organized its provincial branches along linguistic lines, and demands for the reorganization of states on a linguistic basis brought the issue before the Constituent Assembly. Nehru and the Congress leadership feared that linguistic states would have a "subnational bias" that would retard national integration and unleash "fissiparous tendencies." Moreover, they argued, most states, however their boundaries might be drawn, would still have linguistic minorities. But the democratic logic behind the call for linguistic states--the notion that state administration and judicial processes should be conducted in the language of the local majority--was compelling. Political pressure for the reorganization of states ultimately proved irresistible. Beginning in 1953 with the creation of Andhra Pradesh as a Telugu-speaking state, and then in 1956, with a more general reorganization on a linguistic basis, the principle of language as the basis for state boundaries was broadly accepted.
The federal reorganization of 1956, however, did not quell demands for the creation of new states. In 1960, following widespread agitation and violence, the state of Bombay was bifurcated to form the linguistic states of Maharashtra and Gujarat; in 1966, the Sikhs secured a Punjab state; and in the following years, several tribal states were carved out of the Northeast. In 1987, India's twenty-fifth state was created as the former Portuguese colonial enclave of Goa was elevated to statehood. The pressures continue today. In the late 1980s, Nepalis in West Bengal's Darjeeling district raised the demand for a separate "Gurkhaland" state within India. After two years of violence, in which more than 300 people were killed, the Gurkha National Liberation Front accepted a proposal for what would be, in effect, an autonomous region within the state of West Bengal; lately, however, it has renewed its demand for a separate Gurkha state. The Bodo tribals of Assam have pursued a violent struggle--thus far unsuccessfully--for the creation of a separate Bodoland. More formidable is the demand by tribals in mineral-rich southern Bihar and the contiguous districts of neighboring states for a Jharkhand state. This demand has been voiced with varying intensity since 1947, but in 1992 it reemerged with new militancy, as strikes and bombings were directed to an economic blockade of the region.
The organization of states on a linguistic basis provides the framework for expanded political participation. It permits people more effective access to government--but with the drawback that their use of this access may all too often reflect the parochialism of language and region. The creation of linguistic states has reinforced regionalism and stimulated demands for increased state autonomy. India's Constitution guarantees freedom of movement with only a few qualifications, yet almost every state outside the Hindi heartland of central India has spawned a militant nativist movement directed against outsiders. The fundamental issue has been employment for local people, and many state governments, either officially or unofficially, have supported the protection of jobs for the "sons of the soil." Among the most virulent is the Shiv Sena, a regional party in Maharashtra. Exploiting local grievances and economic frustration, the Shiv Sena, under the banner "Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians," has directed both verbal and physical attacks at South Indian immigrants and Muslims.
In the Northeast, the issue for the Assamese is not only jobs, but the preservation of the Assamese language and culture in the face of a demographic shift that threatens to make the Assamese a minority in their own state. Bengalis have been migrating into Assam for more than a century, but since 1971, the influx of "foreigners" (Bengali Muslims from Bangladesh) has deepened ethnic insecurity and served as the catalyst for a movement that engulfed Assam in violence. In a six-yearlong agitation (1980-86), more than five thousand people were killed in ethnic conflict. In 1986, the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi reached a settlement with the movement leaders. By the terms of the accord, the central government promised--in addition to commitments for the deportation of illegal immigrants and enhanced economic development--to provide "legislative and administrative safeguards to protect the cultural, social, and linguistic identity and heritage" of the Assamese people.
Assam's agony did not end with the accord, which is still largely unfulfilled; like other states in the ethnically turbulent Northeast, it continues to suffer from violent convulsions. In the tribal states of Nagaland and Mizoram, India has fought against insurgency movements since 1947, and among the tribal peoples of the Northeast more generally, the aspiration for independence from India has been met by a renewed Indian determination to secure the territorial integrity of the union.
India is a federal system with a strong central government. The Constitution also lists state and concurrent powers, but provides the center with a capacity to intervene in state affairs and even to dismiss elected state governments and impose its own authority through "President's Rule." Under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1966-77; 198084), centralization of power increased dramatically, both within government and in the structure and operation of the ruling Congress party. The results were an increasing, almost pathological, imbalance in the relationship between the center and the states and growing demands for autonomy voiced by non-Hindi states. In Tamil Nadu, for example, anger at the status of Hindi as the national language was the catalyst for the rise to power of ethnoregional parties; similar discontent was seen in Andhra, resulting in the victory of the Telugu Desam party; and in West Bengal, where the Communist Party (Marxist) functions as a regional party. Most notable, however, is the Punjab, where in 1982 the Sikh-dominated Akali Dal pushed demands for greater state autonomy and Sikh militants launched a campaign of terrorism for an independent nation of Khalistan.
Punjab and Kashmir
No "ethnic" conflict in India has been more traumatic than the one involving the Punjab, "homeland" of the Sikhs, who make up some 55 to 60 percent of the local population. At least twenty thousand people have died in political violence there since 1981. The state has been under President's Rule for long periods marked by draconian methods of keeping order.3 This has nurtured mutual distrust between Hindus and Sikhs, and official actions like the army's June 1984 incursion into Amritsar's Golden Temple, the major Sikh shrine, alienated most Sikhs from the government, if not from India itself. It was in revenge for the violation of the temple that two Sikh members of her own bodyguard murdered Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in October 1984. While tensions originally developed over nonsectarian demands behind which all Punjabis, Hindu and Sikh, could rally, the Akali Dal set these issues in the context of various demands for the protection of Sikh religious interests that excluded Hindus and to which the central government, affirming its commitment to secularism, would not yield. For the militants challenging the Akali Dal for Sikh leadership, this refusal proved that the Sikh religion could be protected only by an independent, theocratic Sikh state. For the Akalis, the issue was political power; for the militants, it was (or so they claimed) Sikh identity itself and the fear of absorption into the Hindu majority.
Aggrieved though they were, most Sikhs in the Punjab opposed the idea of Khalistan, and by the late 1980s, the original political and religious goals of many terrorist gangs had been displaced by the routinization of extortion, robbery, and murder as a way of life. The people, sickened by both terrorism and police repression, were ready for a return of the political process. After 56 months of direct rule from New Delhi, state-assembly elections were held in February 1992. Under terrorist threat and Akali Dal boycott, a low voter turnout brought a Sikh-led Congress government to power. Initially enjoying little credibility, the government won increasing popular confidence, and in the village-council elections of January 1993, with terrorists quiescent, 82 percent of the electorate turned out. With the restoration of self-government and the continued police campaign against the militants, the Punjab crisis eased--though the specter of terrorism remains to haunt any return to normalcy.
In the far-northern state of Kashmir, India faces an even more serious problem. India and Pakistan have fought two wars over what was once the princedom of Jammu and Kashmir, which remains the principal source of antagonism between the two nations. For India, the state--now divided by a "line of control"--is fully a part of the Indian union; with its 65-percent Muslim population, it stands as a symbolic rebuttal to the "two nation" theory that underlay the founding of Pakistan. Moreover, India asserts that Kashmir's inclusion in India serves as a guarantor of the secular state. Pakistan, on the other hand, continues to insist that the people of Kashmir be allowed to decide by plebiscite whether to be a part of India or Pakistan--a demand that rests on the assumption that the decision would be for Pakistan. The largest number of the state's Muslims, however, would likely choose an independent Kashmir, and this has been the goal of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), albeit with comparatively little popular support before 1988.
Hindus predominate in Jammu, and Tibetan Buddhists in the sparsely populated region of Ladakh; it is only in Kashmir proper that Muslims form a majority, but at 4 million they account for but a small portion of India's more than 100 million Muslims. Under the National Conference, as the regional Muslim party of Jammu and Kashmir is called, the state had been comparatively quiet, but in the late 1980s more and more Kashmiri Muslims--increasingly alienated by fraudulent elections, widespread corruption, and the failure of the center to help their state develop economically--responded to the nationalist call for the liberation of Kashmir from "Hindu India." In 1988, the JKLF and an assortment of separatist and fundamentalist groups initiated a wave of strikes, bombings, and assassinations. Imposing President's Rule, the center responded with what Pakistan, Kashmiri Muslims, and Indian human rights advocates decried as an indiscriminate use of force, further alienating the people of Kashmir.
The principal groups involved in the Kashmir insurgency are the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, which supports an independent and secular Kashmir, and the Islamic fundamentalist Hezb-ulMujahideen, which is closely linked to Pakistan's Jammiat-i-lslami party and the presumed recipient of Pakistani largess. The sources of the separatist movement are internal to Kashmir and owe their origin to years of maladministration at home and political interference from New Delhi, but the agitation has had support from within Pakistan. Some 250,000 troops of the Indian Army and paramilitary forces are deployed in Kashmir, but their inability to suppress the uprising underscores the limits of force when, as here, it is unaccompanied by a political process that effectively engages at least those few prepared to enter into dialogue. But with Kashmiri moderates so often targeted for assassination, and with a death toll of 12,000 and rising in all political violence since 1989, prospects for a settlement are dim.
India's federal system once acted to compartmentalize social unrest, with political crises often containable within a single state or region. But the centralization of power also centralized problems, bringing to the desk of the prime minister issues once resolved at the state level. The balance must be restored through a devolution of power to the states, indeed, perhaps to an increased number of states and possibly "autonomous regions" within states. But this Evolution must be accompanied by the constitutional guarantee of civil rights and liberties to ensure that all persons receive the equal protection of the law. Among the many measures proposed for redressing the balance between the center and the states, the most compelling include an end to the arbitrary dismissal of state governments and imposition of President's Rule; a more equitable sharing of revenues; and a respect by the center for spheres of public policy that are properly state concerns.4
Caste Reservations
Hindu society in India is divided by caste and subcaste in a complex hierarchy that stretches down from Brahmins to untouchables. The 1950 Constitution abolished untouchability and specified that no citizen be subject to any disability or restriction with regard to places of public use or accommodation on the basis of caste. Political representation was guaranteed for Scheduled Castes (untouchables) and Tribes through the proportionate reservation of seats in elected legislative bodies, from Parliament to village councils. But despite these various provisions and the extended protections of the Untouchability (Offenses) Act, untouchables--who today number more than 130 million--continue to suffer discrimination and deprivation. To address this situation and to overcome the cumulative results of past discrimination, the government instituted a program of "compensatory discrimination"--an Indian version of affirmative action--that reserved 22.5 percent of all central government jobs for members of Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Comparable reservations were provided for state-level employment, and reservations were extended to college and university admissions.
The system has been controversial, and many higher-caste Hindus, particularly Brahmins, who have been denied government employment or entrance into universities, feel that they have been victims of reverse discrimination. Far more controversial, however, has been the extension of reservations to "Other Backward Classes"--specific castes chosen because of their low levels of social and educational advancement. Predominantly rural, they account for a substantial portion of India's population and in many states command significant political power. In response to that power, a number of states have extended reservations in university admissions and government employment to them.
In 1980, the Backward Classes Commission, chaired by B.P. Mandal--a former chief minister of Bihar state and himself a member of a backward caste--recommended the reservation of 27 percent of all central government jobs for the backward classes in addition to the 22.5 percent already reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The 3,743 castes and subcastes identified as beneficiaries make up 52 percent of the Indian population. The report gathered dust for a decade, but in 1990, then-Prime Minister V.P. Singh announced that his Janata Dal government would implement the Mandal recommendations. The decision brought widespread criticism from the press and strong opposition from higher castes, especially students. In New Delhi and other cities in the north of India, violent protests (including self-immolations) and shootings by police raised the specter of "caste war."
Singh declared the reservations a matter of social justice, but to his political opponents, it was seen as a cynical political move to shore up his threatened base of support among the backward peasant castes. Given the numbers involved, however, no political party could oppose the reservations outright, although the left argued for reservations based on income and educational criteria rather than upon caste. Implementation was stayed by the Supreme Court, pending a ruling on the constitutionality of the measure. Returned to power in 1991, the Congress party under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao sought to mollify opposition to the reservations by adding a 10-percent reservation for the poor of the higher castes. In November 1992, the Supreme Court upheld the reservation for backward castes, with the provision that it be need-based, but struck down the additional 10 percent as constitutionally impermissible. The complexities of the court decision effectively preclude implementation of the reservation, but the controversy has sharpened caste enmities.
Rather than leading India toward a "casteless" society, the policy of reservation has reinforced caste identities. Reservations for untouchables may indeed be compelling because it is precisely their caste identity that has been the source of stigma and discrimination, but in using caste rather than individual need as the criterion for benefits, their identity as untouchables is officially sanctioned. Moreover, the dilemma is manifest in that all untouchables do not benefit equally. Reservations go disproportionately to the more "advanced" among the untouchables, while those most in need remain effectively excluded.
The "backward" castes share with the untouchables a comparatively low level of educational and social advancement, but their position is not the result of discrimination based on caste, nor do they suffer the stigma and disabilities associated with untouchability. And for all their "backwardness" as a group, they command considerable political power and, as peasants, many among them enjoy increasing prosperity. It is thus very hard to justify reservations for the backward castes: the appropriate response is to individual need and merit, not group identity.
Hindu-Muslim Conflict
India may be an officially secular state, but Indian society is defined by religious identities and riven by communal mistrust and hatreds. In India, the term "communal" refers principally to Hindu-Muslim conflict, and with memories of partition still bitterly nurtured, Hindu-Muslim tensions are sustained by jealousy and fear. Each year several hundred incidents of communal violence and rioting are officially reported, and their number and intensity have grown in recent years. In December 1992, following the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu fanatics, rioting across the country left some 1,200 persons dead. In January 1993, Bombay witnessed a nine-day anti-Muslim pogrom that left more than six hundred people dead.
Since the early 1980s, the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in India has spurred a heightened Hindu consciousness and led Hindu nationalists to project India's 83-percent Hindu majority as threatened. Hindu nationalism has its roots in the late nineteenth century and is today represented by an increasingly formidable range of organizations and parties--the powerful paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its revivalist affiliate Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the leading opposition political party with ambitions to take control of the central government. With visions of a revitalized Hindu India, they portray India's secularism as no more than a pretext for the "pampering" of religious minorities.
Secularism in India does not erect a "wall of separation" between church and state, but rather seeks to recognize and foster all religious communities. The Constitution guarantees freedom of worship and the right of each religious group to establish and administer its own schools and to maintain its distinct traditions. But in India, as in the United States, the form and degree of state accommodation of religious practice have been matters of controversy. At issue is the appropriate democratic balance between majority preference and minority protection.
In the wake of partition and the heightened insecurity of India's remaining Muslim population, the Congress government under Nehru permitted Muslims to retain their personal law (governing such matters as marriage, divorce, and inheritance) while amalgamating other Indians under a uniform civil code. For Hindu nationalists, who would recognize no exceptions, this smacked of a "pseudosecularism" that privileged Muslims over Hindus. The issue was dramatically confronted in the 1985 Shah Bano case. The Supreme Court had ruled in favor of a 73-year-old woman, Shah Bano, divorced after 43 years of marriage by her husband in the traditional Muslim manner, and awarded her a monthly maintenance from her husband, where Muslim personal law would have required none. Muslim clerics, with the cry of "Islam in danger," rallied Muslims to the cause and warned that imposition of a uniform civil code would deny them the right to follow the injunctions of their faith.
In an attempt to stem the loss of Muslim support from the Congress party, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (initially favorable to the judgment) announced support for the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill that would remove Muslim divorce from provisions of law and, in effect, scuttle the Supreme Court decision. Though welcomed by traditional Muslims, the bill came under immediate attack by progressive Muslims, women, secularists, and Hindu chauvinists. Hindus are not disadvantaged by the application of Muslim personal law, although Muslim women may surely enjoy fewer rights than their Hindu sisters. But this was not a human rights issue for Hindu nationalists, to whom the government's response to the Shah Bano case simply demonstrated the appeasement of minorities they had long denounced. In pandering to Muslims, Hindu nationalists declared, the Congress party had sold out the Hindus and their birthright as rulers of India.
Hindu nationalists project a mythic Hindu majority that denies the diversity that makes Hinduism--and India--what it is. They have invented a muscular Hinduism that would, through the state, impose a conformity as oppressive to the individual Hindu as to the recalcitrant minority. Religion, for the Hindu nationalists, is the vehicle by which they seek to achieve political power and restore Ram-rajya, the ideal rule of the mythic age of Lord Ram. The conceptual catalyst is Hindutva ("Hinduness") a term that embodies the notion that all Indians--including Muslims--are part of a Hindu nation and that Ram and the gods and heroes of Hindu mythology are part of their patrimony. Those unwilling to accept Hindutva are thus not just apostates but traitors.
The god Ram is the potent symbol that Hindu nationalists have chosen to weld Hindus, disparate in their profusion of sects and traditions, into a self-conscious community. The city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh is the presumed birthplace of Lord Ram, and devotees assert that in the sixteenth century the Mogul emperor Babur destroyed the temple marking the birthplace and in its place constructed a mosque, the Babri Masjid. In 1989, efforts by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other Hindu revivalist groups to demolish the Babri Masjid and "to recapture injured Hindu pride" through the construction of a new temple of Ram precipitated what was up to that time probably the most serious Hindu-Muslim rioting since partition in 1947. In 1990, to galvanize Hindu sentiment behind the BJP, party president L.K. Advani launched his rath yatra (chariot pilgrimage), a 10,000-kilometer journey in a van fashioned to look like a mythological chariot across the heart of North India to Ayodhya to launch the construction of the new temple. Prime Minister V.P. Singh, invoking the principles of secularism, warned that the mosque would be protected "at all costs." As Advani and other BJP leaders approached Ayodhya, they were arrested. The BJP, in turn, withdrew its parliamentary support from the minority Singh government, and after an unprecedented 346-to-142 vote of no-confidence on November 5, the prime minister submitted his resignation.
In the fall of 1992, the VHP and BJP vowed that on December 6, they would begin building a new temple at the sacred site. More than 200,000 Hindu militants converged on Ayodhya and at the appointed hour stormed through the police barricades and demolished the Muslim shrine. The police and paramilitary guarding the mosque offered little resistance. In face of the action and subsequent rioting, the Congress government of P.V. Narasimha Rao seemed paralyzed; when the prime minister finally did act, he dismissed the BJP government of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, and imposed President's Rule. A week later, the governments of the remaining three BJP-ruled states were dismissed. Advani and other Hindu-nationalist leaders were arrested and charged with inciting the militants. The central government also announced two-year bans on three Hindu communal organizations--the RSS, VHP, and the fascistic Bajrang Dal--as well as two Muslim fundamentalist groups. The president of the VHP vowed that any government efforts to impede the construction of the new Ram temple would result in "a confrontation of unimaginable magnitude."
As Hindu-Muslim antipathies intensify, India's secularism finds itself increasingly challenged at every level of society, from the drawing rooms of New Delhi intellectuals and the rising urban "consumer" middle class to the ranks of saffron-clad VHP militants and the armed thugs of the Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena. The challenge is to India as a secular state and to its capacity to secure democracy, justice, and equality in a multicultural society.
Majority Rule and Minority Rights
India's experience enables us to draw some conclusions about the democratic management of ethnic and religious conflict:
* Democratic conflict management requires a substantive distribution of power between the center and the periphery and among the various groups within the country. A balance must be maintained between steps taken to check tendencies toward the over centralization of political power and steps taken to contain the centrifugal forces that can rip apart a multicultural state.
* There is also a tension between the liberal emphasis on individual rights and the assertion of group rights and identity, and the democratic polity must find its way toward balance here as well.
* Historically, problems of ethnic and religious conflict in India have eased when political and group leaders have sought to deal with them through accommodation, bargaining, and the political process, and particularly when the center has sought accommodation with minority groups. Problems tend to get worse when the center intervenes directly to impose an outcome on a group or region asserting its independent interests and identity. Force alone has been unable to overcome separatist tendencies; if it is to be successfully applied, it must be accompanied by political dialogue and accommodation.
In every democracy, there is necessarily a tension between majority rule and minority rights, yet the two are by the same token inextricably bound together. Indeed, democracy is sustained because there is no single, monolithic, and permanent majority, but rather a shifting series of ruling coalitions made up of minorities. The minorities may reflect the cross-cutting social cleavages and overlapping memberships that characterize the idealized model of democratic pluralism, or else may form a mosaic of distinct groups that define their identity in terms of one or more attributes like religion, language, or caste. In either event, there must be an underlying political culture of mutual respect and trust or, at a minimum, a basic agreement on the rules of the political game among the various groups themselves. Lacking such a consensus, one group, or perhaps a coalition, may seek power and domination over others; if the center cannot hold, the society may find itself torn apart by war and secession.
In India, in a political culture of mutual distrust and increasing violence, the dangers are legion. India's democracy is challenged by communalism, excessive caste consciousness, and separatism. But in the state response to these challenges, India confronts yet another dilemma--weakening the very values of individual liberty that are at the core of its democratic commitment. In its attempts to quell endemic unrest and the challenge of terrorism, India has enacted a plethora of laws that have become instruments of repression; police and paramilitary abuses seem to get worse while all sorts of other violations of human rights are reported with numbing frequency. But for all the challenges, pressures, and dilemmas to which India is exposed by virtue of its plight as a multicultural state, Indian democracy, sustained through ten elections, still shows remarkable strength and resilience.
1. The growth of the BJP is reflected in its increase in seats in the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of Parliament--from 2 seats won in 1984 (7.4 percent of the vote) to 85 seats (11.4 percent) in 1989, and, contesting twice as many seats as in earlier elections, 119 seats (21 percent) in t991.
2. For an extended discussion of these issue areas, with extensive bibliographic references, see Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. and Stanley A. Kochanek, India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation, 5th ed. (Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), especially ch. 4, "The Challenge of Federalism," 125-66, and ch. 5, "Arenas of Conflict: Groups in Indian Politics," 167-215.
3. Provisions for designated "disturbed areas X permit arrest and detention without trial for as long as two years; secret trials by special tribunals; and wide powers of censorship. For a discussion of the array of such laws, see ibid., 209-12.
4. The 1988 Sarkaria Commission Report on Center-State Relations made a number of recommendations that would enhance "cooperative federalism," but its measured proposals have been largely ignored.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Belmopan. April 3, 2017. Five ambassadors presented their Letters of Credence today to the Governor General of Belize H.E. Sir Colville Young at the Belize House in Belmopan.
The ambassadors were: H.E. Harald Peter Klein, Ambassador of Germany; H.E. Georg Andrén, Ambassador of Sweden; H.E. Eduardo Jose A. De Vega, Ambassador of the Philippines; H.E. Mohammad Taghi Hosseini, Ambassador of Iran; and H.E. Ahmed Hatem Barghash Almenhali, Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates. The Ambassadors each expressed, on behalf of their respective countries, the desire to maintain a strong friendship with Belize, as well as interest in pursuing areas for further development of diplomatic ties.
The Governor General graciously received the Ambassadors' credentials and welcomed them to Belize.


Michele Doyle is a plant transformation scientist at AgBiome. The transformation team validates novel crop protection traits for efficacy in plants. Previously she worked at Syngenta doing pipeline event production, vector quality control, and plant analysis. Before that, she worked at Sungene Technologies culturing elite lines of corn for crop improvement.
Michele completed her Bachelor's degree in biology with an emphasis in plants from UCSC. She holds a PhD from UCI in Developmental and Cell Biology with an emphasis in plant molecular biology.
In her spare time, Michele enjoys her family, dog, and garden.


text:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!--

 -->
<config xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../../../../../../vendor/magento/mtf/etc/pages.xsd">
  <page name="SalesGuestPrint" mca="sales/guest/print" module="Magento_Sales">
    <block name="viewBlock" class="Magento\Sales\Test\Block\Order\View" locator=".order-details-items" strategy="css selector"/>
    <block name="infoBlock" class="Magento\Sales\Test\Block\Order\Info" locator=".block-order-details-view" strategy="css selector"/>
  </page>
</config>

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Mortal Online has a very different form of leveling versus other games. In most games you will need to get experience to move ahead in the game. So for example if you wanted to enter a certain area in the game you might be required to be level 80 in world of warcraft. With Mortal Online everything is restricted by actual skills. So for example if you want to use a sword in the game all you need to do is have a high enough skill in swordsmanship to use it. In order to raise your swordsmanship you just need to go kill certain higher level mobs to actually raise it.
The games leveling system one could compare in term to eve online in how you have to raise up mini items to get a certain tier for higher end items. This way it helps to stop all players from being forced to do the same leveling in the same area as other players to max your level the fastest way possible.
When it comes to our mortal online leveling guides we are going to show you how to level your skills in the game as quickly as possible to get certain tiers taken care of. So if you wanted to be a warrior or a mage, we are going to show you the best places to level those specific skills to become that class and the proper way to train your skills so you arent forced to waste your time with unnecessary things in the game.


Lee Hannis, Head of Business Development at the Hartree Centre, alongside representatives from Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust and Alder Hey Children's Charity at the North West Coast Reaserch and Innovation Awards 2017 ceremony.
The cognitive project is part of a larger effort by the hospital, already renowned for its attention to detail with the patient experience, to take advantage of various innovative digital technologies, such as the development of an app funded by Shop Direct, which will also contribute to providing a more personal experience for the families who use the hospital's services.
Read the full press release on the launch of the cognitive hospital project.


text:
10 must-read books that are perfect for spring break
Vancouver Public Library and V.I.A. have teamed up to help you discover new reads, hidden book gems and surprising literary finds. Check back every couple of weeks for the latest reading recommendations from the experts at Vancouver's library.
Mar 16, 2018 10:00 AM By: Vancouver Public Library
Spring break is just around the corner! Whether you're planning on heading out of town or kicking back at home with a relaxing read, VPL's reading experts have just the list for you!
The Pope of Palm Beach by Tim Dorsey
Get a chuckle reading this comic novel, featuring Serge A. Storms – a disturbed vigilante antihero – and his sidekick, Coleman. If you enjoy wacky crime fiction, this one is sure to delight.
Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo
This sequel to Nobody's Fool revisits the eccentric residents of North Bath, New York. After 10 years, Doug Raymer is now the police chief, Sully comes into a small fortune and faces life-changing news, and Rub Squeers worries that Sully is no longer his best friend.
The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao by Martha Batalha
This wry and darkly humorous novel transports you to Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s. Follow the lives of Euridice and Guida – two sisters who come together to forge new paths and break conventional traditions of the time.
My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella
Bestselling author Sophie Kinsella shares a humorous take on modern life for single women. In this story, Katie Brenner must re-invent herself after losing her big city job. This read has a little bit of everything: love, drama and questions about what makes a meaningful life.
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
Andrea Bern is a native New Yorker – quirky, funny, honest, complicated, still single, unfulfilled with her job and trying to figure out life. The book presents a series of vignettes that take you through Andrea's 20s and 30s, and her first adult crisis when her niece is born with a fatal illness.
The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone
This quirky and funny murder mystery centres on feisty gaming maven and detective wannabe Dahlia Moss. In this book, Dahlia finds herself face-to-face with an Internet stalker, a corpse, kidnapping and more. If you like this story, you'll enjoy all books in the Dahlia Moss mystery series.
A Time of Love and Tartan by Alexander McCall Smith
An invitation for coffee leads to romance and complications in this latest instalment of the popular 44 Scotland Street series. Witty and comedic, this story follows the friendly residents of Edinburgh's Scotland Street as they grapple with problems – big and small.
The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
If you enjoyed Jonas Jonasson's bestselling The 100-year-old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, check out this funny follow-up to Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg's The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules. In this story, Martha and her friends, a.k.a. the Senior League, set out to get rich at the expense of some venture capitalists.
Tell Me How This Ends Well by David Samuel Levinson
When the Jacobson family gathers for Passover in Los Angeles, bickering, mistreatment and family drama ensue. Their escapades are told with dark and twisted humour.
Adventureman by Jamie McDonald
This is an amazing, one-of-a-kind true story of real-life superhero Jamie McDonald, who ran 5,000 miles across Canada to support the hospitals that saved his life as a child. This fun memoir documents his journey of survival and the superheroes he met along the way.
For great reads and more, visit vpl.ca and find us on Facebook and Twitter @VPL.
More Events and Entertainment
Influential Women in Business Awards to honour B.C.'s outstanding businesswomen
Here's your chance to wander five Vancouver arts and learning venues in one day for just $5
2020 Lunar New Year events in Vancouver


In 1978 the Tau Lambda Chapter established the Tau Lambda Education Foundation, a separately incorporated and free-standing 501(c) (3) charitable organization to support the charitable needs of the fraternity, particularly scholarships for deserving young men and women in the community.
In order to resolve the ongoing and divisive conflict between the brothers regarding the chapter's budget of $250 to the Martin Luther King Scholarship Committee, Brother Calvin O Atchison proposed that the chapter incorporate the Tau Lambda Educational Foundation, Inc. to resolve the conflict. The proposal was presented to the fraternity for adoption with the purpose 1) the Foundation assuming the function of the Martin Luther King Scholarship Committee and all other charitable commitments of the chapter, i.e., Boy Scouts, UNCF, and the like 2) the chapter provide the foundation with seed money of not less that $500 each year until the Foundation could be self sustaining.
Its charter included Bros. Atchison, Eddie T. Goins, Arthur L. Fox, Charles D. Proctor, John H. Tisdale, Wilson Q. Welch, Jr., and Ronald A. Wooding.


Below are possible answers for the crossword clue Certain jack, in cribbage.
Still struggling to solve the crossword clue 'Certain jack, in cribbage'?
If you're still haven't solved the crossword clue Certain jack, in cribbage then why not search our database by the letters you have already!


Are you searching for a top lawyer in Lake Charles, Louisiana?
Are you ready to take action? Our profile's contact form is simple to use and makes it easy to connect with a Lake Charles, Louisiana lawyer and seek legal advice.


The City of Falls Church sanitary sewer rehabilitation project is ongoing. The project is part of the former Public Utilities Department's Comprehensive Sanitary Sewer Improvement Plan developed in 2003, which outlines a phased program of sewer system evaluation and rehabilitation.
Rehabilitation extends the life of the existing sewer mains and, by reducing the amount of inflow of stormwater and ground water, is expected to reduce the treatment costs paid by the City and its ratepayers.
Am-Liner East, the city's contractor, will inspect and then perform the lining process on the sewer mains to be rehabilitated. To allow for staging room around manholes and to maintain traffic on streets, temporary no-parking zones may be designated as necessary. Please check the Citywide Notices website calendar for upcoming dates.
The resin used in the lining process has an unpleasant odor that is detectable at very low concentration levels. The odor may enter your home through dry drain traps. To eliminate any possibility of odor, please pour some water into all drains prior to 8:00 a.m. the day of service to ensure water is in the trap and a seal exists.
You must discontinue all in-house water usage, which includes showers, toilets, sinks, washing machines, dishwashers, etc. Customers should store water for personal and cooking needs prior to 8:00 a.m.
You must not discharge (i.e. flush or drain) into the sewer system until the work is completed.
If you have a sump pump and think it's connected to the sanitary sewer system, please notify Am-Liner East immediately at 540-955-9671.


text:
Raw and Red-Hot
Could inflammation be the cause of myriad chronic conditions?
by Jonathan Shaw
Illustration by Kasia Bogdanska
In 2007, associate professor of medicine Samia Mora and colleagues published a study of exercise that sought to understand why physical activity is salutary. They already knew that exercise reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease as much as cholesterol-lowering statin drugs do. By analyzing biomarkers in the blood of 27,055 women participating in a long-term study, and other objective measures, they hoped to tease out the source of this effect. How much of the benefit was attributable to improved blood pressure? To lower body weight? Or to something else? The women had donated blood in the 1990s when they entered the study. Eleven years later, the researchers analyzed this frozen blood to see if they could find anything that correlated with long-term cardiovascular outcomes such as heart attack and stroke. "We were actually surprised that reduced inflammation was the biggest explainer, the biggest contributor to the benefit of activity," says Mora, "because we hadn't hypothesized that. We knew that regular exercise does reduce inflammation over the long term, but we also knew that acute exercise transiently increases inflammatory biomarkers during and immediately after exertion." About a third of the benefit of regular exercise, they found, is attributable to reduced inflammation.
The anti-inflammatory effect of exercise was much greater than most people had expected. That raised another question: whether inflammation might also play a dominant role in other lifestyle illnesses that have been linked to cardiovascular disease, such as diabetes and dementia.
In 2017, two cardiologists at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who suspected such a link, published the results of a human clinical trial that will forever change the way people think about inflammation. The trial, which involved more than 10,000 patients in 39 countries, was primarily designed to determine whether an anti-inflammatory drug, by itself, could lower rates of cardiovascular disease in a large population, without simultaneously lowering levels of cholesterol, as statin drugs do. The answer was yes. But the researchers went a step further, building into the trial additional tests seeking to clarify what effect the same anti-inflammatory drug, canakinumab, might have on illnesses seemingly unrelated to cardiovascular disease: arthritis, gout, and cancer. Only the researchers themselves, and their scientific colleagues, were unsurprised by the outcome. Lung cancer mortality dropped by as much as 77 percent. Reports of arthritis and gout also fell significantly.
In medicine, believing something is true is not the same as being able to prove it. Because the idea that inflammation—constant, low-level, immune-system activation —could be at the root of many noncommunicable diseases is a startling claim, it requires extraordinary proof. Can seemingly unconnected illnesses of the brain, the vasculature, lungs, liver, and joints really share a deep biological link? Evidence has been mounting that these common chronic conditions—including Alzheimer's, cancer, arthritis, asthma, gout, psoriasis, anemia, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and depression among them—are indeed triggered by low-grade, long-term inflammation. But it took that large-scale human clinical trial to dispel any lingering doubt: the immune system's inflammatory response is killing people by degrees.
Now the pertinent question is why, and what can be done about it. The pharmaceutical industry is deeply interested in finding ways to stop inflammation with medicines like canakinumab, an orphan drug that blocks a specific pro-inflammatory pathway called IL-1beta. But some researchers suggest that the inflammatory process—a normal and necessary part of the natural immune response—has itself has been misunderstood. Scientists know that the process can be turned on and off, but have only recently understood that this doesn't mean normal physiology will resume once the inflammation caused by infection, injury, or irritant has been shut down. Instead, the restoration of health is an active phase of the inflammatory process itself, facilitated by a little-known class of molecules called pro-resolving mediators—the protectins, resolvins, maresins, and lipoxins—brimming with marvelous, untapped, regenerative capacities.
Origins of Atherosclerosis
The 2017 clinical trial, called CANTOS (Canakinumab Anti-Inflammatory Thrombosis Outcomes Study), is the result of a long-term collaboration between Paul Ridker and Peter Libby, who suspected as long ago as the 1980s that inflammation played a role in cardiovascular disease. Ridker, an epidemiologist who is Braunwald professor of medicine, came to this conclusion through studies of cardiac patients. He is the physician-scientist who first demonstrated that a molecule called C-reactive protein (CRP), easily measured by a simple and now ubiquitous blood test, could be used like a thermometer to take the temperature of a patient's inflammation. Elevated CRP, he discovered years ago, predicts future cardiovascular events, including heart attacks. Although nobody knows what it does biologically, this marker is downstream from IL-1beta, and thus provides a reliable yardstick of that pro-inflammatory pathway's level of activation.
Paul Ridker and Peter Libby
Libby, the Mallinckrodt professor of medicine, is a bench scientist and clinician with expertise in the study of heart disease. In the 1980s, orthodoxy within the cardiovascular establishment held that circulating fats (including cholesterol) build up in the arteries of patients with progressive cardiovascular disease. But no one knew why or how the plaques formed. It took work by some of the most distinguished cardiology researchers of the era to lay the groundwork that eventually produced an understanding of the molecular mechanisms that drive deposition of those plaques.
Today, in his Harvard Medical School (HMS) office, Libby sketches the origins of atherosclerosis. The interior walls of blood vessels, he explains, are made from smooth muscle cells, lined in turn with endothelial cells that are in direct contact with circulating blood. When a problem arises, caused by anything from cholesterol to bacteria, the vascular system recruits white blood cells, the immune system's front-line guardians, to the site. Two Harvard professors of pathology, Michael Gimbrone Jr. and the late Ramzi Cotran, figured out that naturally occurring adhesion molecules could attract these white blood cells and get them to stick to the endothelium lining the arteries. Their experiments implicated a pro-inflammatory signal called interleukin-1 (IL-1), which is produced by both circulating and tissue-based immune cells.
The pentameric molecular structure of C-reactive protein, a biomarker of inflammation that circulates in the blood. Cardiologists use CRP to predict a person's future risk of heart attack.
Courtesy of T. Greenhough & A. Shrive/Wellcome Image
Libby, then at Tufts, followed their work closely. IL-1 had been discovered in 1977 by one of his Tufts colleagues, Charles Dinarello, who had been focused on understanding what causes fever, one of the cardinal signs of inflammation. The others, described by Aulus Cornelius Celsus in the first century c.e., are redness (rubor), which occurs when the endothelial lining of arteries dilates to permit more blood flow; swelling (tumor), caused by endothelial cells leaking protein, which carries water; and pain (dolor). By measuring the factors in rabbits' blood, Dinarello was able to isolate and then clone the specific factor—called a pyrogen—that causes fever: interleukin-1.
But before this inflammatory pyrogen even had a name, Dinarello gave some to Libby, whose lab was down the hall. Libby discovered that arterial wall cells not only responded to IL-1, but could secrete it. This was heretical, he explains, because it was thought that only "a properly pedigreed immunological cell" could produce such signals. Now it was clear that the cells of the artery walls were capable of summoning an immune response. Libby further found that IL-1, by altering gene expression in local blood vessel cells, amplifies its signal at the site of the disease. But, "No one in cardiology was interested in inflammation" then, Libby notes. In fact, none of his early work on IL-1 appears in the cardiology literature: "My papers were rejected," he recalls; "my grants turned down." In 1986, he published his first paper showing that the lining of the arteries could produce IL-1 in the American Journal of Pathology.
The Evolution of Excessive Inflammation
Today, inflammation is a focus of intense research in many fields. Roni Nowarski, assistant professor of neurology and immunology, explains that inflammation is important across a range of seemingly distinct pathologies because immune cells are everywhere, even resident in organs, where they play an important role in monitoring and maintaining health. The paradigm that everyone knows—that the immune system's front line consists of circulating white blood cells that patrol the body to guard against infection and injury—is a bit misleading. An important arm of the immune system resides outside the blood vessels. Pac-Man-like macrophages occupy tissues, where they engulf and digest invading pathogens, debris, and dying cells. An invaluable role of these tissue macrophages is to "act as sensors," Nowarski says. "They have hard-wired mechanisms to detect signals that are out of the ordinary," and so play a critical role in maintaining a healthy equilibrium. "If there is any fluctuation," he notes, "the role of these cells is to return the system to this point of homeostasis."
These tissue-based white blood cells can also call for backup. When that happens, the heavy guns of the immune system, neutrophils, are first to arrive on the scene. These are "potent, aggressive cells" that can kill infectious agents, Nowarski explains, but "can also cause a lot of damage to healthy tissue." That's why most neutrophils are short-lived, with a tightly regulated lifespan of just a few hours: unchecked, they would cause serious harm. Neutrophils, which originate in bone marrow, also play a role in relaxing the endothelial barrier that separates blood from tissue, so immune cells can cross that barrier to reach the site of attack. Other signals—like the IL-1beta protein that Libby and Ridker blocked in their trial—promote adhesion, in order to capture circulating immune cells that reach the damaged tissue. This stickiness, though desirable in the short term, is also the basis of the process that can lead to atherosclerosis if it continues indefinitely. The endgame of a healthy immune response, on the other hand, involves cleanup, says Nowarski: even the death and uptake of neutrophils as they are gobbled by macrophages serve as signals to resolve inflammation.
Why inflammation sometimes doesn't resolve, and becomes chronic instead, is in some sense easily explained in evolutionary terms. "If I'm living 70,000 years ago at a time of food shortage," says Ridker, "and there's a drought, the 5 to 10 percent of people who will survive that drought are likely to have insulin resistance"—a tendency to store more calories as fat. "They're going to live a little longer," he continues. "When it finally rains, food comes, and that's the survivor group. In a modern world of too much food, [insulin resistance] leads to diabetes. But in prehistory, it's terribly important for survival." While stored fat is beneficial during times of famine, it also harbors potentially damaging pro-inflammatory signaling molecules (see "Eating to Excess: Metabolic Inflammation," below).
A second evolved factor is that prior to the development of antibiotics, disease "wiped out half the population before age five. So, people were under evolutionary pressure to have a hyperactive immune system." Now, "most everybody survives childhood infections," thanks in large part to vaccines. "But this hyperactive immune system remains, and adversely affects aging."
"The third piece—beyond starvation and infection—is trauma," Ridker says. "The saber-toothed tiger—or for women, bleeding to death during childbirth—selects on a genetic basis for hypercoagulable blood. So here we are, by definition all of us lucky enough to be alive today, with a consistent ancestry all the way back to the beginning. And we have all inherited a pro-inflammatory, insulin resistant, pro-coagulable state. Under the circumstances," he continues, the fact that "we have an epidemic of diabetes and heart disease makes complete sense." Evolutionary pressures have shaped a physiological system which is phenomenally well suited for surviving childhood infection, starvation, and predation. "But it contributes to many disorders of chronic aging, because from an evolutionary perspective, if you've had your kids, you're kind of done."
Evolution also explains why the underlying biology appears so similar from one disease to the next. Kennedy professor of child neurology and mental retardation Rudy Tanzi studies Alzheimer's disease, which is well known for causing plaques and tangles in the brain. In 2008, Tanzi and his colleagues discovered a gene that clearly played a role in the development of the disease, but didn't know how it worked. Five years later, they discovered that the gene is the "on" switch for inflammation in the brain. Tanzi says the work that has most influenced his thinking is the body of resilience studies conducted by Teresa Gomez-Isla, an associate professor of neurology based at Massachusetts General Hospital, who has shown that "you can have a brain full of plaques and tangles, but if you don't have neuroinflammation, you don't get the disease"—a finding that neatly parallels the pathological interactions between plaques and inflammation in atherosclerosis. This basic research on inflammation thus underlies understanding of entire classes of human illness.
Such similarities among diseases of metabolism and inflammation suggest that they are indeed rooted far back in evolutionary history. Gökhan S. Hotamisligil, Simmons professor of genetics and metabolism at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has constructed his research for the past 25 years on the premise that this shared history suggests shared biological mechanisms as well. The ailments that cluster most dramatically, he points out, are "chronic metabolic diseases" such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, nerve degeneration, and cancer. In general, a person who has any one of these illnesses is more likely to develop the others. "This is exactly the same cluster that emerges during aging," he says. "All of the age-related pathologies exhibit as clusters of non-communicable diseases, except in a much shorter period of time, and earlier in the lifespan.
"That tells us that these illnesses are part of our natural history, our biological heritage," continues Hotamisligil, who directs the Sabri Ülker Center for Metabolic Research. "If these two clusters emerge in two separate conditions in exactly the same way, that must come from deeply embedded evolutionary vulnerabilities."
"Chronic inflammation is uniformly damaging and is absolutely causal to the process, because if you interfere with it, you can reverse the pathology."
Critics might suggest that inflammation is just a symptom in these diseases, rather than a cause. But Hotamisligil says, unequivocally, "Chronic inflammation is uniformly damaging and is absolutely causal to the process, because if you interfere with it, you can reverse the pathology." And this ability to control such diseases simply by reversing inflammation is a biological response, dating far back to the time of a common ancestor, that has been retained across diverse species of animals to the present day, he says, pointing to experimental evidence: "If you can make Drosophila [fruit fly] diabetic, and then block the inflammatory response systems, you can cure diabetes in Drosophila, the same way you can reverse it in the mouse, in primates, and in humans, provided that you do it with the right tools. Of course, the higher the organism, the more complex these pathways are, so it takes more effort to define the precise mechanisms to manipulate."
Eating to Excess: Metabolic Inflammation
Seeking the origins of inflammation, Hotamisligil asks, "What is the most primordial process in the emergence of life? Metabolism. Energy management. And then, of course, the next critical process to emerge within cells is the ability to defend. And so that brings in the immune system, which is younger than metabolism, but much older than many other systems." In some of the simplest organisms, he points out, energy management and immune functions are packaged in the same organ, such as the fruit fly's fat body. But even as these functions became specialized and divided among three or four organs in more complex organisms, they retained their evolutionary memory. "They share many tricks," he says, because the "immune response is enormously expensive, energy-wise." The intimate relationship between the metabolic and immune systems, he believes, has been maintained because it takes "tremendous energy to mount an effective immune response. While this link is essential to maintain health and homeostasis, abnormalities that develop over time, as in the case of obesity, carry a great risk of damage."
The metabolic stress that is a hallmark of modern life, the stress that the body has not evolved to handle, is constant eating, he continues. When people eat, energy and nutrients enter the body rapidly, are processed, produce in turn a lot of by-products, and then need to be reduced to "functional substances that are distributed throughout the body, and then disappear very quickly. Many cells and tissues actually undergo a huge amount of stress during this process," he explains, "as they store appropriate nutrients and dispose of harmful intermediates." Part of this process also involves mounting an immune response. "The pancreas, for example, must secrete four to five hundred milliliters of enzymes every day" to be able to manage the incoming energy load with every meal. "If you place these organs under constant stress, they start malfunctioning." The consequence is that "right now, one out of every 10 individuals has diabetes. One out of every four individuals has fatty liver disease. And if you reach a certain age, one out of every three individuals will develop neurodegenerative disease."
The metabolic stress that underlies these conditions comes from the daily imbalance between how much energy people consume and how much they need, and can process in a healthy manner. The long-term consequence of overconsumption, combined with lack of sufficient expenditure, is stored energy—the accumulation of fat. Excess body fat, especially in the wrong places, is an additional risk factor for inflammation.
Clinical studies implicating stored fat as a source of inflammation have been buttressed by basic research that shows that adipose tissue—body fat—is laced with immune cells, which become more abundant with weight gain, perhaps because fat cells can secrete alarm signals that summon white blood cells. "A fat cell is almost like a primitive immune cell," says Hotamisligil. "It can request the assistance of immune cells when in trouble, but if the stress continues, and the immune cells remain, they start changing their character and behavior from helpful to harmful."
A fat cell, or adipocyte, is more than 90 percent triglyceride. If the thin cell wall enclosing this droplet of fat ruptures, an inflammatory response ensues.
iStock Images
And there is additional evidence that the physical structure of fat cells, or adipocytes, which have been described by Stephen O'Rahilly of the University of Cambridge as resembling a fried egg atop a beach ball of fat—with a tiny rim of cytoplasm encircling the droplet of triglyceride—puts them at risk of rupture. Adipocytes are "cells at the edge under the best of circumstances," explains Hotamisligil. Ninety percent or more of a fat cell's volume is triglyceride, a substance chemically similar to diesel fuel. The remaining 10 percent is all the space it has for the organelles that perform the normal functions of cell biology. This bloated cell is thus vulnerable to stress, even to the point of bursting and death. When overloaded with stored lipid, fat cells begin to lose their functional and structural integrity and may start spilling their toxic cargo. When cells fail like this, the immune system kicks in, initially to assist in clean-up. Macrophages engorge themselves on the leaking fuel, and may die themselves during this process. But in the long run, what is meant to be a mutually beneficial interaction between the metabolic and immune systems turns into a very dangerous and harmful relationship. Obese individuals thus live in a state of chronic stress and inflammation; in fact, many people do, because their energy intake vastly exceeds their needs. Hotamisligil calls this chronic energy overload, and the resulting abnormal immune response, metaflammation: metabolic inflammation.
"It is pretty clear that inflammation is a bad actor in obesity," says Korsmeyer professor of cell biology and medicine Bruce Spiegelman. His lab was the first to establish the mechanism linking obesity to inflammation—in 1993, when he and Hotamisligil, then a doctoral student, discovered that fat cells produce an inflammatory signal that interferes with the body's ability to regulate blood sugar. This, in turn, increases the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.
But inflammation in muscle, he says, is "much more complicated." In fact, "it is likely that you require inflammation in exercise," and that the inflammatory response should not be suppressed—for example, by taking ibuprofen—because that signal is likely "telling the muscle to remodel."
Together with Rasmussen professor of immunohematology Diane Mathis, Spiegelman is about to begin studying exercised muscle, a natural system that incorporates and manages inflammation on a regular basis. Mathis studies regulatory T-cells (Tregs), white blood cells that are actively involved in maintaining the internal stability (homeostasis) of tissues. Recently, she has sought to understand the role of Tregs in repairing muscle injured as a consequence of physical trauma or disease.
Now, by studying muscle that has been exercised, she and Spiegelman hope to gain a better understanding of how inflammation is "supposed to happen, and how it eventually resolves." The sequence, he says, occurs in four steps: "There's damage, inflammation, resolution of inflammation, and repair. These phases are very different." He and Mathis hope to learn how these processes unfold—and ultimately, perhaps, to learn how to stimulate, support, or mimic the body's natural mechanisms of resolution and repair.
Controlling Inflammation, Boosting the Immune System
Epidemiological studies have helped clarify the importance of lifestyle choices in controlling inflammation. Samia Mora's 2007 research highlighted the role of exercise. In 2018, she and her colleagues published a study of the Mediterranean diet, which is known to improve cardiovascular health (and also thought to protect against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's). Mora examined the effect of this diet on the women who previously participated in the exercise research, 20 years after they had entered the original study. They found that adherence to a diet rich in vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, and olive oil, that also includes fish and chicken, but that is very low in red and processed meat and sugary foods or drinks, led to a lower risk of adverse cardiovascular events. As in the exercise study, they found that about a third of the benefit was due to reductions in inflammation.
Samia Mora
But some of the diet's benefit could not be explained, meaning that an untested factor was enhancing its healthful effect. Mora speculates that the diet (which includes probiotic foods such as Greek yogurt) might support the health of the gut microbiome, or might stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, as exercise does, to help people relax. Alternatively, the diet might be protective against oxidative stress of the kind that comes from pollution or smoking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, each of these possibilities is linked to inflammation.
The great difficulty with interventions involving altered diet and increased exercise is that these healthy habits aren't aligned with preferences evolved during millennia of food scarcity. People already know what they should be doing—but for most, that knowledge doesn't change behavior. Humans are hard-wired to conserve energy (see "Born to Rest," September-October 2016, page 9), for example, and to prefer foods that are fatty, salty, and sugary.
This suggests that pharmaceutical interventions that block inflammation may be necessary to check the global epidemic of non-communicable disease. How to do that is not obvious, however. The intervention that Ridker and Libby devised, blocking a single inflammatory pathway with a drug, helped only a fraction of patients with cardiovascular disease. That is probably because a system as important to sustaining life as immune response has evolved redundancies: block one pathway and another will take over.
What the CANTOS study did establish was a biological principle, says Ridker: "Anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive are not the same thing." Suppressing an immune pathway like IL-1beta could have led to reactivation of tuberculosis infections or complications of HIV. But it didn't. There was a slight increase in the risk of viral and bacterial infections—but these were "run of the mill infections," he says. "Had we known in advance, we could very easily have taken care of these with some very simple antibiotics."
This kind of experiment is important, he continues, because it will change the way drugs like canakinumab, currently classified as an immunosuppressant, are categorized. That opens new areas to investigate, he says: "We can actually give high-risk patients this kind of anti-inflammatory without risking immunosuppression. And that's incredibly useful information for my infectious-disease colleagues."
Some researchers believe, however, that to prevent certain inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, multiple inflammatory pathways will need to be blocked to have a large effect. And blocking several of these signaling mechanisms simultaneously, they say, will almost surely suppress the immune system, exposing people to potentially fatal infections.
Hence scientists' interests in another possibility that doesn't include any risk of immunosuppression: resolving inflammation through a recently discovered class of molecules called specialized pro-resolving mediators.
A Super Family of Resolving Molecules
Gelman professor of anaesthesia Charles Serhan has been studying how inflammation ends for 25 years. He realized early on that after the immune system's soldiers have fought off an invader, the battlefield is littered with bodies: dead cells and scattered debris. The fact that infection has been defeated does not mean that the affected tissue will automatically, passively, return to normal function. There is another process at work, factors that clean up the mess, remove bodies, and repair systems so that the physiological balance within the tissue can be restored. Working with other scientists around the world, he discovered a new class of molecules that actively resolve inflammation. "It turns out that there's a whole super family of these," he explains, "and it's their collapse," which occurs naturally with aging, that leads to chronic, unresolved immune-system stimulation. "These specialized pro-resolving mediators [SPMs] have been shown in many animal models to reverse inflammation."
Charles Serhan
SPMs are unusual immune-signaling molecules, in the sense that they are fats (lipid-derived small molecules), not proteins. They can also mute pain. Their precursors—the substances the body needs in order to synthesize these potent resolving compounds—are the essential fatty acids, including the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA, and arachidonic acid.
In experiments with animals deficient in SPMs, Serhan has shown that injecting SPMs amplifies the magnitude of the healing response, causing injuries to mend more quickly. He emphasizes that reversing inflammation in this way is not the same as blocking it from occurring in the first place. When inflammatory pathways are turned off, there is always a risk that the immune response will be compromised, and that infection will ensue. The SPMs instead work in concert with the immune response by stimulating macrophages "to clear dead cells, debris, and bacteria," he says. "Then they bring the system back to homeostasis, and begin to push the buttons to signal tissue regeneration." (They even stimulate the Tregs that Diane Mathis studies to produce an anti-inflammatory signal called IL-10.)
Think about how over-the-counter anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen work. They block a particular signal. But Serhan discovered that aspirin works differently (and in a multi-faceted way): rather than blocking inflammatory signals, it attenuates them. In addition, it has mild anti-coagulant properties that are beneficial in atherosclerosis. And perhaps most importantly, aspirin stimulates the production of at least two classes of health-promoting SPMs. In work published as this magazine went to press, Serhan and colleagues showed that aspirin stimulates the production of a distinct type of SPM that fights cancer tumors in mice, and another SPM that inhibits cancer tumor formation in the first place.
Serhan has recently developed a method for creating blood profiles of individuals that reveal whether they have sufficient levels of these circulating resolving molecules, which include classes of compounds called resolvins, protectins, maresins, and lipoxins. Resolvins, for example, have proven beneficial against periodontitis in rabbits and retinopathy and colitis in mice. Protectins have proven effective in preventing ischemic stroke in rats, and against Alzheimer's in humans. Lipoxins have attenuated pleurisy and cystic fibrosis in mice. And maresins have accelerated wound-healing in mice, and blocked the perception of pain.
More broadly, he has demonstrated the benefits of such SPMs in preventing neurodegeneration, and is beginning to study their use by professional football players, who suffer high rates of tissue injuries. Serhan has shown that SPMs can be used to control the inflammation that occurs when blood flow resumes to tissues that have been deprived of oxygen during surgery. And he has created an inflammation-resolving mouth rinse that has been tested in periodontal disease and shown to be safe. In earlier experiments, he demonstrated that pro-resolving eye drops can be used to control inflammation in the eye, which "naturally makes buckets of this stuff in tears, so you are bathing normally in pro-resolving mediators." SPMs are also abundant in the brain, he has found. These are places where avoiding acute inflammation is absolutely critical: infections of the brain can be fatal, and in the eye can lead to blindness.
Colleagues of Serhan's are using resolvins to control asthma and to stimulate surgical-wound healing. They are also investigating their effects on the microbiome. Earlier animal studies showed that resolvins reduce rheumatoid arthritis.
Because these compounds have not yet been synthesized as pharmaceuticals, maintaining healthy levels of SPMs is best supported by foods rich in the essential fatty acids EPA, DHA, and arachidonic acid. "There's a reason they are called 'essential,'" says Serhan. "You can only get them from your diet." Fish contains all three, although arachidonic acid is also present in chicken, eggs, and beef, and EPA and DHA can be obtained from certain plant sources and algae. It's ironic, he points out, that veterinary science has ensured that lab animals (and even pets) in the United States eat better than most people do, because animal food is fortified with omega-3s. Most Americans, he believes, don't eat enough of them.
"To treat excessive inflammation...we don't want to block the inflammatory response. We want to stimulate the resolution pathways."
However illuminating Serhan's molecular work has proven, though, the conceptual contribution of his research may be his lasting legacy. "One of things that we are trying to teach people from what we are learning is that we don't want to knock anything out," he says. "We want to fine-tune it." Molecules such as IL-1beta—the target of the CANTOS trial—are important in the innate immune response, he explains. "To treat excessive inflammation, whether it is chronic or the result of an acute tissue injury, we don't want to block the inflammatory response. We want to stimulate the resolution pathways."
The scientific study of inflammation has transformed human understanding of this innate biological response. What once were considered merely symptoms—redness, swelling, fever, and pain—are now implicated as the source of many afflictions. For healing, Serhan foresees, we should also look within.
Jonathan Shaw '89 is managing editor of this magazine.
Toward a biomanufacturing future
Super-resolution microscopy developed in the lab of Peng Yin allows researchers using conventional microscopes to see the inner workings of cells at the single molecule level. Above, microtubules (green) and mitochondria (purple) dominate the intracellular landscape.
Building a Better Microscope
Illustration by Adam Niklewicz
David Deming on tuition-free public college underwritten by existing funds


text:
Russian and New Zealand wartime ties revisited
New Zealand's relationship with Russia during World War Two brought a Russian film crew to Archives New Zealand's Wellington office on Wednesday 12 January.
The crew: Kirill Kiryanov, correspondent for Russian State TV – channel Rossiya-1, and cameraman Igor Nikulin, were interested in material for a special documentary on Russian's ties with other countries during the war. The programme, destined to be screened on Russian TV later this year, will include an episode on New Zealand.
Archives New Zealand holds records pertaining to the government's correspondence with European countries including Russia during the time of war. One of these documents, New Zealand's Declaration of War against Germany, signed by acting Prime Minister Peter Fraser on 3 September 1939, was of great interest to the crew.
Access Services archivist Uili Fectau showed the pair the papers and film footage and in turn was filmed explaining what the records were. The Declaration and other documents are listed on Archway, Archives New Zealand's online search engine.
The crew were accompanied on their visit to the Archives' office by Russian Embassy's Deputy Head of Mission Andrey Kornykukhin and three members of the Russian Convoy Club of New Zealand who are veterans of the Arctic Campaign 1941-45. The trio, Pen Moore aged 90, Chris King, 88, and Derek Whitwam, 85, were also interviewed.
The documentary will also feature the story of New Zealander Wing Commander Henry Ramsbottom-Isherwood who was awarded the Order of Lenin medal by the former Soviet Union. He was one of only four non-Russians to receive this prestigious medal.
Born in Petone, Mr Ramsbottom-Isherwood served in the RAF during the war, training Russian pilots and ground crew to fly and maintain British Hurricane aircraft. He led an RAF fighter wing from inside the Arctic Circle at Murmansk after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. He died in 1950.
Mr Kornykukhin thanked Archives New Zealand for helping the film crew. He said the Russian Ambassador was thrilled with the assistance and support from the department.
Before returning home Kirill and Igor are this weekend filming the Russian rugby team in New Plymouth where they are playing against a Taranaki side.
The film crew's visit to Archives New Zealand attracted the local media, with the Dominion Post featuring a story in Thursday's edition, and TVNZ running an item during its evening news.
Unidentified Aerial Sighting (UAS) files availability
Current news items refer to the release of information from New Zealand Defence Force files documenting New Zealand UAS reports over the last five decades.
The Defence Force has made copies of the relevant files in Archives New Zealand's custody, as well as its own more recent files. These copies are available from the Defence Force Library at Defence House in Wellington.
You are asked to contact the library in advance of your visit by telephoning 64 4 496 0842. Copies are also being made available at the Wellington Public Library.
Interest in The Community Archive from the Arctic Region
The fact that Archives New Zealand's Community Archive website attracts interest from all parts of the globe was verified when Ericka Chemko, Project Manager, Inuit Heritage Trust, situated in the Arctic Circle, visited the department's trade stand at the recent National Digital Forum in Wellington. Read about Ericka's visit and the National Digital Forum feature in the December issue of Ngā Tapuwae, Archives New Zealand's stakeholder newsletter.
Recent News by Topic
Topic 1 (25)