Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is an American-British Internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia.

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, where he attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in finance from Auburn University and the University of Alabama respectively. In graduate school, Wales taught at two universities; however, he departed before completing a PhD to take a job in finance and later worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm.

In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal featuring entertainment and adult content. Bomis  provided the initial funding for the free peer-reviewed encyclopedia, Nupedia (2000–2003), and its successor, Wikipedia. On January 15, 2001, with Larry Sanger and others, Wales launched Wikipedia—a free, open-content encyclopedia that enjoyed rapid growth and popularity. As Wikipedia's public profile grew, he became its promoter and spokesman. Though he is historically credited as co-founder, he has disputed this, declaring himself the sole founder.

Wales serves on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the charity that he helped establish to operate Wikipedia, holding its board-appointed "community founder" seat. For his role in creating Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, in 2006 Time named him one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World".

Early life
Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama, shortly before midnight on August 7, 1966; however, his birth certificate lists his date of birth as August 8. His father Jimmy, worked as a grocery store manager, while his mother, Doris Ann (née Dudley), and his grandmother, Erma, ran the House of Learning, a small private school in the tradition of the one-room schoolhouse, where Wales and his three siblings received their early education.

As a child, Wales enjoyed reading. When he was three, his mother bought a World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman. As he grew up and learned to read, it became an object of reverence, but Wales soon discovered that the World Book had shortcomings: no matter how much was in it, there were many more things that were not. World Book sent out stickers for owners to paste on the pages in order to update the encyclopedia, and Wales was careful to put the stickers to work, stating, "I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought."

During an interview in 2005 with Brian Lamb, Wales described his childhood private school as a "Montessori-influenced philosophy of education", where he "spent lots of hours poring over the Britannicas and World Book Encyclopedias". There were only four other children in Wales's grade, so the school grouped together the first through fourth-grade students and the fifth through eighth-grade students. As an adult, Wales was sharply critical of the government's treatment of the school, citing the "constant interference and bureaucracy and very sort of snobby inspectors from the state" as a formative influence on his political philosophy.

After eighth grade, Wales attended Randolph School, a university-preparatory school in Huntsville, graduating at sixteen. Wales said that the school was expensive for his family, but that "education was always a passion in my household ... you know, the very traditional approach to knowledge and learning and establishing that as a base for a good life." He received his bachelor's degree in finance from Auburn University in 1986. He began his Auburn education when he was 16 years old. Wales then entered the PhD finance program at the University of Alabama before leaving with a master's degree to enter the PhD finance program at Indiana University. At the University of Alabama, he played Internet fantasy games and developed his interest in the web. He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a PhD, something he ascribed to boredom.

Career

Chicago Options Associates and Bomis

In 1994, Wales took a job with Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Illinois. Wales has described himself as having been addicted to the Internet from an early stage and he wrote computer code during his leisure time. During his studies in Alabama, he had become an obsessive player of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)—a type of virtual role-playing game—and thereby experienced the potential of computer networks to foster large-scale collaborative projects.

Inspired by the remarkably successful initial public offering of Netscape in 1995, and having accumulated capital through "speculating on interest-rate and foreign-currency fluctuations", Wales decided to leave the realm of financial trading and became an Internet entrepreneur. In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal featuring user-generated webrings and, for a time, erotic photographs. Wales described it as a "guy-oriented search engine" with a market similar to that of Maxim magazine; the Bomis venture did not ultimately turn out to be successful.

Nupedia and the origins of Wikipedia

Though Bomis had at the time struggled to make money, it provided Wales with the funding to pursue his greater passion, an online encyclopedia. While moderating an online discussion group devoted to the philosophy of Objectivism in the early 1990s, Wales had encountered Larry Sanger, a skeptic of the philosophy. The two had engaged in detailed debate on the subject on Wales's list and then on Sanger's, eventually meeting offline to continue the debate and becoming friends. Years later, after deciding to pursue his encyclopedia project and seeking a credentialed academic to lead it, Wales hired Sanger—who at that time was a doctoral student in philosophy at Ohio State University—to be its editor-in-chief, and in March 2000, Nupedia ("the free encyclopedia"), a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia, was launched. The intent behind Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics, and to sell advertising alongside the entries in order to make profit. The project was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias.

In an October 2009 speech, Wales recollected attempting to write a Nupedia article on Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert C. Merton, but being too intimidated to submit his first draft to the prestigious finance professors who were to peer review it, even though he had published a paper on Option Pricing Theory and was comfortable with the subject matter. Wales characterized this as the moment he realized that the Nupedia model was not going to work.

In January 2001, Sanger was introduced to the concept of a wiki by extreme programming enthusiast Ben Kovitz after explaining to Kovitz the slow pace of growth Nupedia endured as a result of its onerous submission process. Kovitz suggested that adopting the wiki model would allow editors to contribute simultaneously and incrementally throughout the project, thus breaking Nupedia's bottleneck. Sanger was excited about the idea, and after he proposed it to Wales, they created the first Nupedia wiki on January 10, 2001. The wiki was initially intended as a collaborative project for the public to write articles that would then be reviewed for publication by Nupedia's expert volunteers. The majority of Nupedia's experts, however, wanted nothing to do with this project, fearing that mixing amateur content with professionally researched and edited material would compromise the integrity of Nupedia's information and damage the credibility of the encyclopedia. Thus, the wiki project, dubbed "Wikipedia" by Sanger, went live at a separate domain five days after its creation.

Wikipedia

Originally, Bomis planned to make Wikipedia a profitable business. Sanger initially saw Wikipedia primarily as a tool to aid Nupedia development. Wales feared that, at worst, it might produce "complete rubbish". To the surprise of Sanger and Wales, within a few days of launching, the number of articles on Wikipedia had outgrown that of Nupedia, and a small collective of editors had formed. It was Jimmy Wales, along with other people, who came up with the broader idea of an open-source, collaborative encyclopedia that would accept contributions from ordinary people. Initially, neither Sanger nor Wales knew what to expect from the Wikipedia initiative. Many of the early contributors to the site were familiar with the model of the free culture movement, and, like Wales, many of them sympathized with the open-source movement.

Wales has said that he was initially so worried about the concept of open editing, where  the encyclopedia, that he would awaken during the night and monitor what was being added. Nonetheless, the cadre of early editors helped create a robust, self-regulating community that has proven conducive to the growth of the project. In a talk at SXSW in 2016, he recalled that he wrote the first words on Wikipedia: "Hello world", a phrase computer programmers often use to test new software.

Sanger developed Wikipedia in its early phase and guided the project. The broader idea he originally ascribes to other people, remarking in a 2005 memoir for Slashdot that "the idea of an open source, collaborative encyclopedia, open to contribution by ordinary people, was entirely Jimmy's, not mine, and the funding was entirely by Bomis. Of course, other people had had the idea", adding, "the actual development of this encyclopedia was the task he gave me to work on." Sanger worked on and promoted both the Nupedia and Wikipedia projects until Bomis discontinued funding for his position in February 2002; Sanger resigned as editor-in-chief of Nupedia and as "chief organizer" of Wikipedia on March 1 of that year. Early on, Bomis supplied the financial backing for Wikipedia, and entertained the notion of placing advertisements on Wikipedia before costs were reduced with Sanger's departure and plans for a non-profit foundation were advanced instead.

Controversy regarding Wales's status as co-founder

Wales has asserted that he is the sole founder of Wikipedia, and has publicly disputed Sanger's designation as a co-founder. Sanger and Wales were identified as co-founders at least as early as September 2001 by The New York Times and as founders in Wikipedia's first press release in January 2002. In August of that year, Wales identified himself as "co-founder" of Wikipedia. Sanger assembled on his personal webpage an assortment of links that appear to confirm the status of Sanger and Wales as co-founders. For example, Sanger and Wales are historically cited or described in early news citations and press releases as co-founders. Wales was quoted by The Boston Globe as calling Sanger's claim "preposterous" in February 2006, and called "the whole debate" "silly" in an April 2009 interview.

In late 2005, Wales edited his own biographical entry on the English Wikipedia. Writer Rogers Cadenhead drew attention to logs showing that in his edits to the page, Wales had removed references to Sanger as the co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger commented that "having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out." Wales was also observed to have modified references to Bomis in a way that was characterized as downplaying the sexual nature of some of his former company's products. Though Wales argued that his modifications were solely intended to improve the accuracy of the content, he apologized for editing his own biography, a practice generally discouraged on Wikipedia.

Role
In a 2004 interview with Slashdot, Wales outlined his vision for Wikipedia: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Although his formal designation is board member and chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales's social capital within the Wikipedia community has accorded him a status that has been characterized as benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch and spiritual leader. In two interviews with the Guardian in 2014, Wales elaborated on his role on Wikipedia. In the first interview, he said that while he "has always rejected" the term "benevolent dictator", he does refer to himself as the "constitutional monarch". In the second, he elaborated on his "constitutional monarch" designation, saying that, like the Queen, he has no real power. He was also the closest the project had to a spokesperson in its early years. The growth and prominence of Wikipedia made Wales an Internet celebrity. Although he had never traveled outside North America prior to the site's founding, his participation in the Wikipedia project has seen him flying internationally on a near-constant basis as its public face.

When Larry Sanger left Wikipedia, Wales's approach was different from Sanger's. Wales was fairly hands-off. Despite involvement in other projects, Wales has denied intending to reduce his role within Wikipedia, telling The New York Times in 2008 that "Dialing down is not an option for me ... Not to be too dramatic about it, but, 'to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,' that's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal." In May 2010, the BBC reported that Wales had relinquished many of his technical privileges on Wikimedia Commons (a Wikipedia sister project that hosts much of its multimedia content) after criticism by the project's volunteer community over what they saw as Wales's hasty and undemocratic approach to deleting sexually explicit images he believed "appeal solely to prurient interests".

Wikimedia Foundation

In mid-2003, Wales set up the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), a non-profit organization founded in St. Petersburg, Florida and later headquartered in San Francisco, California. All intellectual property rights and domain names pertaining to Wikipedia were moved to the new foundation, whose purpose is to support the encyclopedia and its sister projects. Wales has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees since it was formed and was its official chairman from 2003 through 2006. Since 2006 he has been accorded the honorary title of chairman emeritus and holds the board-appointed "community founder's seat" that was installed in 2008. His work for the foundation, including his appearances to promote it at computer and educational conferences, has always been unpaid. Wales has often joked that donating Wikipedia to the foundation was both the "dumbest and the smartest" thing he had done. On one hand, he estimated that Wikipedia was worth US$3 billion; on the other, he weighed his belief that the donation made its success possible.

Wales gives an annual "State of the Wiki" address at the Wikimania conference.

Controversies
Wales's association with the foundation has led to controversy. In March 2008, Wales was accused by former Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool of misusing the foundation's funds for recreational purposes. Wool also stated that Wales had his Wikimedia credit card taken away in part because of his spending habits, a claim Wales denied. Then-chairperson of the foundation Florence Devouard and former foundation interim Executive Director Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing by Wales or the foundation, saying that Wales accounted for every expense and that, for items for which he lacked receipts, he paid out of his own pocket; in private, Devouard upbraided Wales for "constantly trying to rewrite the past".

Later in March 2008, it was claimed by Jeffrey Vernon Merkey that Wales had edited Merkey's Wikipedia entry to make it more favorable in return for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation, an allegation Wales dismissed as "nonsense". In early 2016, Wikipedia editors perceived the WMF's Knowledge Engine project as a conflict of interest for Wales, whose business Wikia might benefit from having the WMF spend a lot of money on research in respect to search. Wikia attempted to develop a search engine but it was closed in 2009.

Wikia and later pursuits
In 2004, Wales and then-fellow member of the WMF Board of Trustees Angela Beesley founded the for-profit company Wikia. Wikia is a wiki farm—a collection of individual wikis on different subjects, all hosted on the same website. It hosts some of the largest wikis outside Wikipedia, including Memory Alpha (devoted to Star Trek) and Wookieepedia (Star Wars). Another service offered by Wikia was Wikia Search, an open source search engine intended to challenge Google and introduce transparency and public dialogue about how it is created into the search engine's operations, but the project was abandoned in March 2009. Wales stepped down as Wikia CEO to be replaced by angel investor Gil Penchina, a former vice president and general manager at eBay, on June 5, 2006. Penchina declared Wikia to have reached profitability in September 2009. In addition to his role at Wikia, Wales is a public speaker represented by the Harry Walker Agency. He has also participated in a celebrity endorsement campaign for the Swiss watchmaker Maurice Lacroix.

On November 4, 2011, Wales delivered an hour-long address at The Sage Gateshead in the United Kingdom to launch the 2011 Free Thinking Festival on BBC Radio Three. His speech, which was entitled "The Future of the Internet", was largely devoted to Wikipedia. Twenty days later, on November 24, Wales appeared on the British topical debate television program Question Time.

In May 2012, it was reported that Wales was advising the UK government on how to make taxpayer-funded academic research available on the internet at no cost. His role reportedly involved working as "an unpaid advisor on crowdsourcing and opening up policymaking", and advising the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and the UK research councils on distributing research.

In January 2014, it was announced that Wales had joined The People's Operator as co-chair of the mobile phone network.

On March 21, 2014, Wales spoke on a panel at a Clinton Global Initiative University conference held at Arizona State University, along with John McCain, Saudi Arabian women's rights activist Manal al-Sharif and Harvard University student Shree Bose. The topic of discussion was "the age of participation" and the ability of an increasingly large number of citizens to "express their own opinions, pursue their own educations, and launch their own enterprises." Wales exhorted young people to use social media to try to bring about societal change, and compared government suppression of the Internet to a human rights violation.

On May 26, 2014, Google appointed Wales to serve on a seven-member committee on privacy in response to Google v. Gonzalez, which led to Google's being inundated with requests to remove websites from their search results. Wales said he wanted the committee to be viewed as "a blue-ribbon panel" by lawmakers and for the committee to advise the lawmakers as well as Google.

In 2017, Wales announced that he is launching an online publication called WikiTribune, with a goal to fight fake news through a combination of professional journalists and volunteer contributors. Wales described it as "news by the people and for the people", and that it will be the "first time that professional journalists and citizen journalists will work side-by-side as equals writing stories as they happen, editing them live as they develop, and at all times backed by a community checking and rechecking all facts".

In October 2019, Wales launched an ad-free social network, WT:Social.

Political and economic views

Personal philosophy

Wales is a self-avowed Objectivist, referring to the philosophy invented by writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism. Wales first encountered the philosophy through reading Rand's novel The Fountainhead during his undergraduate period and, in 1992, founded an electronic mailing list devoted to "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy". Though he has stated that the philosophy "colours everything I do and think", he has said, "I think I do a better job—than a lot of people who self-identify as Objectivists—of not pushing my point of view on other people."

When asked by Brian Lamb about Rand's influence on him in his appearance on C-SPAN's Q&A in September 2005, Wales cited integrity and "the virtue of independence" as personally important. When asked if he could trace "the Ayn Rand connection" to a personal political philosophy at the time of the interview, Wales labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the U.S. Libertarian Party as "lunatics", and citing "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them" as his guiding principles.

An interview with Wales served as the cover feature of the June 2007 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason. In that profile, he described his political views as "center-right". Prior to 2008, Wales attended George Soros's birthday.

In a 2011 interview with The Independent, he expressed sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London protesters, saying, "You don't have to be a socialist to say it's not right to take money from everybody and give it to a few rich people. That's not free enterprise."

Dan Hodges in The Telegraph has described Wales as a "Labour sympathizer". In 2015, he offered to help Ed Miliband with the Labour Party's social media strategy, but Miliband turned him down.

In 2015, Wales signed up as the committee chair for Lawrence Lessig's 2016 presidential campaign.

In 2016, Wales and eleven other business leaders signed on to an open letter to American voters urging them not to vote for Donald Trump in that year's United States presidential election.

In May 2017, he said on Quora that he is a Centrist and a Gradualist and believes "that slow step-by-step change is better and more sustainable and allows us to test new things with a minimum of difficult disruption in society."

Philosophy in practice
The January/February 2006 issue of Maximum PC reported that Wales refused to comply with a request from the People's Republic of China to censor "politically sensitive" Wikipedia articles—other corporate Internet companies, such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, had already yielded to Chinese government pressure. Wales stated that he would rather see companies such as Google adhere to Wikipedia's policy of freedom of information. In 2010, Wales criticized whistle-blower website WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange, saying that their publication of Afghan war documents "could be enough to get someone killed"; furthermore, he expressed irritation at their use of the name "wiki": "What they're doing is not really a wiki. The essence of wiki is a collaborative editing process".

Development and management of Wikipedia

Wales cites Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek's essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society", which he read as an undergraduate, as "central" to his thinking about "how to manage the Wikipedia project". Hayek argued that information is decentralized—that each individual only knows a small fraction of what is known collectively—and that as a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge, rather than by a central authority. Wales reconsidered Hayek's essay in the 1990s, while reading about the open source movement, which advocated for the free distribution of free software. He was particularly moved by "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", an essay which was later adapted into a book of the same name, by one of the founders of the movement, Eric S. Raymond, as it "opened [his] eyes to the possibilities of mass collaboration."

From his background in finance, and working as a futures and options trader, Wales developed an interest in game theory and the effect of incentives on human collaborative activity. He identifies this fascination as a significant basis for his developmental work on the Wikipedia project. He has rejected the notion that his role in promoting Wikipedia is altruistic, which he defines as "sacrificing your own values for others", stating that the idea of "participating in a benevolent effort to share information is somehow destroying your own values makes no sense to me".

Testimony before Senate Homeland Security Committee
On December 11, 2007, Wales testified before to the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He also submitted written testimony to the Senate Committee entitled "E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration and Access".

Senator Joseph Lieberman introduced Wales by stating:

Wales's testimony is available for viewing on C-SPAN.

European Court of Justice Google ruling
On May 14, 2014, Wales strongly reacted to the European Court of Justice (ECJ)'s ruling on the right of individuals to request the removal of information from Google's search results. He stated to the BBC that the ruling was "one of the most wide-sweeping internet censorship rulings that I've ever seen". In early June 2014, the TechCrunch media outlet interviewed Wales on the subject, as he had been invited by Google to join an advisory committee that the corporation had formed as an addition to the formal process that the ECJ requested from Google to manage such requests.

The May 2014 ECJ ruling required swift action from Google to implement a process that allowed people to directly contact the corporation about the removal of information that they believe is outdated or irrelevant. Google's Larry Page revealed that 30 percent of requests received by Google since the ruling was made were categorized as "other". Wales explained in email responses that he was contacted by Google on May 28, 2014, and "The remit of the committee is to hold public hearings and issue recommendations—not just to Google but to legislators and the public." When asked about his view on the ECJ's "right to be forgotten" ruling, Wales replied:

I think the decision will have no impact on people's right to privacy, because I don't regard truthful information in court records published by court order in a newspaper to be private information. If anything, the decision is likely to simply muddle the interesting philosophical questions and make it more difficult to make real progress on privacy issues. In the case of truthful, non-defamatory information obtained legally, I think there is no possibility of any defensible "right" to censor what other people are saying. It is important to avoid language like "data" because we aren't talking about "data"—we are talking about the suppression of knowledge.

Wales then provided further explanation, drawing a comparison with Wikipedia: "You do not have a right to use the law to prevent Wikipedia editors from writing truthful information, nor do you have a right to use the law to prevent Google from publishing truthful information." Wales concluded with an indication of his ideal outcome: "A part of the outcome should be the very strong implementation of a right to free speech in Europe—essentially the language of the First Amendment in the U.S."

Other issues
In 2012, the Home Secretary of the U.K. was petitioned by Wales in regard to his opposition to the extradition of Richard O'Dwyer to the U.S. After an agreement was reached to avoid the extradition, Wales commented, "This is very exciting news, and I'm pleased to hear it ... What needs to happen next is a serious reconsideration of the UK extradition treaty that would allow this sort of nonsense in the first place."

In August 2013, Wales criticized U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron's plan for an Internet porn-filter, saying that the idea was "ridiculous." In November 2013, Wales also commented on the Snowden affair, describing Edward Snowden as "a hero" whom history would judge "very favourably"; additionally, Wales said the U.S. public "would have never approved [the] sweeping surveillance program [publicized by Snowden]", had they been informed or asked about it.

Wales has visited Israel over ten times and taken over $1M in donations from Israeli universities. He has said that he is "a strong supporter of Israel".

Personal life

Jimmy Wales has been married three times. At the age of twenty, he married Pamela Green, a co-worker at a grocery store in Alabama. They divorced in 1993. He met his second wife, Christine Rohan, through a friend in Chicago while she was working as a steel trader for Mitsubishi. The couple were married in Monroe County, Florida in March 1997, and had a daughter before separating in 2008. Wales moved to San Diego in 1998, and after becoming disillusioned with the housing market there, relocated in 2002 to St. Petersburg, Florida.

Wales had a brief relationship with Canadian conservative columnist Rachel Marsden in 2008 that began after Marsden contacted Wales about her Wikipedia biography. After accusations that Wales's relationship constituted a conflict of interest, Wales stated that there had been a relationship but that it was over and said that it had not influenced any matters on Wikipedia, a claim which was disputed by Marsden.

Wales married Kate Garvey at Wesley's Chapel in London on October 6, 2012. She is Tony Blair's former diary secretary, whom Wales met in Davos, Switzerland. Wales has three daughters: one with Rohan and two with Garvey.

Wales is an atheist. In an interview with Big Think, he said his personal philosophy is firmly rooted in reason and he is a complete non-believer. , he lives in London, England.

Privately, Wales is a passionate cook. He cooks often, and, by his own account, quite well.

Publications

Distinctions

Wales is a former co-chair of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East 2008, and a former board member of Socialtext.
He is a member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and the board of directors at Creative Commons and Hunch.com.
In 2006, Wales was listed in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section of the [[Time 100|TIME 100]] and number 12 in Forbes "The Web Celebs 25".
Wales has also given a lecture in the Stuart Regen Visionary series at New Museum which "honors special individuals who have made major contributions to art and culture, and are actively imagining a better future" and by the World Economic Forum as one of the "Young Global Leaders" of 2007.
The 2008 Global Brand Icon of the Year Award, and on behalf of the Wikimedia project the Quadriga award of Werkstatt Deutschland for A Mission of Enlightenment.
The 2009 Nokia Foundation annual award, the Business Process Award at the 7th Annual Innovation Awards and Summit by The Economist.
In April 2011, Wales served on the jury of the Tribeca Film Festival, Wales has received a Pioneer Award, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize and the Leonardo European Corporate Learning Award in 2011,Isobel Leybold-Johnson. "Knowledge is our most important resource". Swissinfo January 27, 2011. Retrieved December 26, 2017. the Monaco Media Prize. Wales has also received honorary degrees from Knox College, Amherst College, Stevenson University, Argentina's Universidad Empresarial Siglo 21, and Russia's MIREA University.
On December 5, 2013, Wales was awarded the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal in Copenhagen, Denmark at a conference on "An Open World" to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Niels Bohr's atomic theory. His presentation on "Wikipedia, Democracy and the Internet" emphasised the need to expand Wikipedia into virtually all the languages of the world. The "Wikipedia Zero" initiative was beginning to prove successful in encouraging telecommunications companies to provide children in the developing world with free access to Wikipedia for educational purposes. Wales was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.
In February 2014, Wales was named one of "25 Web Superstars" by The Daily Telegraph. On May 17, 2014, Wales was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI Lugano, Switzerland). On June 25, 2014, Wales received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. On July 10, 2014, Wales received the UK Tech4Good Awards "Special Award" for establishing Wikipedia. He was one of eight winners in various categories meant to honor organizations and individuals who use digital technology to improve the lives of others. In December 2014, Wales shared the inaugural $1-million Mohammed bin Rashid Knowledge Award with World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
In January 2015, Maastricht University awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa to Wales. On April 25, 2015, Wales received the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service along with Jon Bon Jovi and Edward Norton. On May 17, 2015, Wales received the Dan David Prize of $1 million in the "Present" category (others won that amount for "Past" and "Future" contributions to society). He was awarded the prize for "launching the world's largest online encyclopedia".
In January 2016, Wales, along with Baroness Rebuck, became a non-executive director of the Guardian Media Group. On February 2, 2016, he received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Université Catholique de Louvain.
In June 2016, during the opening ceremony on Wikimania 2016, Wales was awarded with the honour citizenship of Esino Lario.
In September 2017, he was awarded the President's Medal of the British Academy "for facilitating the spread of information via his work creating and developing Wikipedia, the world's largest free online encyclopedia".

See also
 Jimmy Wales Foundation
 List of Wikipedia people

References

Bibliography

External links

Jimmy Wales' Wikia userpage

, Wales's role in the English Wikipedia as described by its editors
 You can look it up: The Wikipedia story – excerpt from the 2014 book The InnovatorsMultimedia
"Wikimania: Meet the Wikipedians. Those "persnickety," techy types who keep your favorite Internet information website brimming with data." 60 Minutes: Morley Safer interviewing Jimmy Wales. First aired on April 5, 2015. Rebroadcast on July 26, 2015.

 On Being w/Krista Tippett; Jimmy Wales – The Sum of All Human Knowledge (broadcast WAMU American University) September 11, 2016
Articles re Wales' efforts and ideas
 Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales is Taking on Facebook and the Dangers Lurking in the Rise of Artificial Intelligence, by Fred Guterl, Newsweek'', December 12, 2019.

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Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, London)

There are several self-portraits by Rembrandt in London. The paintings (ignoring prints and drawings) include:

Self-Portrait in a Black Cap, c. 1637, Wallace Collection
Self-portrait at the age of 34, 1640, National Gallery
Self-Portrait with Two Circles, 1665-69, Kenwood House
Self-portrait at the age of 63, 1669, National Gallery

Category:Self-portraits by Rembrandt


Sylvia Perez

Sylvia E. Perez (born November 17, 1961) is an American news anchor. Based in Chicago, Perez currently anchors the weekend editions and special segments of Good Day Chicago on WFLD-TV (FOX 32) since October 2016. From 1989 until 2013, Perez co–anchored the 11AM newscast on Chicago's WLS-TV (ABC 7) alongside Linda Yu. Perez was also the station's "Healthbeat" reporter covering daily health and medical investigative stories for the 4PM and 10PM newscasts.

Career
A graduate of the University of Oklahoma School of Journalism, Perez began her career in 1983. Prior to joining ABC7, Sylvia worked in Houston and Amarillo, Texas. She also worked in Oklahoma where she won several awards for her reporting. Sylvia's interest in medical reporting came when she worked at KPRC-TV in Houston, where she also became the weekend co-anchor. She still does that while in Chicago. Ms Perez is the youngest of five children, and an "army brat," the highlight of her career came when covering the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. There she followed an Illinois veteran back to Hawaii to visit the  where his brother and many other American war heroes died.

Perez first joined ABC 7 in June 1989. On June 20, 2013, Sylvia was released from WLS-TV after 24 years with the station because they decided to cancel the 11am newscast. The 11am news she anchored with Linda Yu was cancelled in September in favor of Windy City Live (WCL), which moved to the timeslot after Live with Kelly and Michael moved to the 9am slot from WGN-TV. In September 2016, media critic Robert Feder announced on his blog that Perez had been hired to anchor the weekend morning newscasts on WFLD-TV. Perez also reports for the daily 9 p.m. newscast.

Other ventures and personal
After leaving ABC7, Perez formed her own production company, Sylvia Perez Productions, where she offers video training, media coaching and other media services to non-profits around the Chicago area. Perez currently resides in the suburbs of Chicago with her husband Daniel Blasdell. In March 2016, Perez put her Hinsdale, Illinois mansion back on the market for $1.95 million dollars, previously selling the property for $2.4 million in 2013. Perez purchased the home in 2006.

References

Category:Television anchors from Chicago
Category:Television anchors from Houston
Category:1961 births
Category:Living people


Manaharwa

Manaharwa is a town and Village Development Committee  in Bara District in the Narayani Zone of south-eastern Nepal. At the time of the 1991 Nepal census it had a population of 5,676 persons living in 947 individual households.

References

External links
UN map of the municipalities of Bara District

Category:Populated places in Bara District


Khudneshwar Asthan Morwa

Khudneshwar Asthan is a Hindu temple devoted to Lord Shiva located 17 kilometers southwest of the Samastipur district headquarters.

The name of the temple was inherited from a Muslim woman named Khudni who found the Lingam at this location and became a devotee of Lord Shiva. Her mortal remains were buried one yard south beside the Lingam under the same temple roof.

History

During the British Empire, Narhan estate built this temple in 1858 and appointed a priest as a caretaker. Devotees flock there yearround, but especially during its annual festival of Maha Shivratri and in the month of Shravan, crowds emerge for darshana and worship. In 2008 Bihar Religious Trust Board Chairman Kishore Kunal provided financial assistance from the board and announced it to be developed for tourists to demonstrate Hindu-Muslim unity.

Legend

In the 14th century the temple site was covered by dense forest and was used mainly for grazing cattle. Khudni often went there for grazing her cow. One day while returning home after grazing, she tried milking her cow but received no milk. This continued for several days. One day while grazing, the cow left her sight. She found the cow and was astonished to see her cow shedding milk. She ran to the village to relate her discovery. The local people cleared the ground and started digging, only to find a Lingam. After her death her remains were buried beside the Lingam. They erected a temple that they named "Khudneshwar Asthan" inherited from the name of the Muslim woman Khudni Biwi.

References

Category:Hindu temples in Bihar


Priamursky

Priamursky is an urban locality (an urban-type settlement)  in  Smidovichsky District of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Russia. Population:

References

Category:Urban-type settlements in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast


Corcel Blair

Corcel Blair (26 September 1950 – 21 August 2008) was a Jamaican footballer who played in the National Soccer League, North American Soccer League, and National Premier League.

Career
Blair began his career in 1966 at the youth level with Vere Technical, where he won the daCosta Cup four times. In 1971, he went abroad to play in the National Soccer League with Sudbury City. The following season he played with Toronto Croatia, where he assisted in securing the regular season title. Throughout this tenure with Croatia he won the NSL Championship in 1974, and another regular season title in 1973.

In 1975, he was recruited to play in the North American Soccer League, where he appeared in eight matches for the Toronto Metros-Croatia. He returned to Jamaica in 1975 to play with Santos F.C. in the National Premier League, where he won four consecutive Premier League titles. In 1977, he played in the Second Division of the National Soccer League with Sudbury Cyclones.

He made the transition to managing in 1980 with the Magic Athletic Club in the Toronto & District League. He died on 21 August 2008.His son Corcel Blair, Jr. was a head coach for the Caribbean Selects in the Canadian Soccer League.

International career
Blair made his debut for the Jamaica national football team on 2 June 1969 against Haiti. In total he appeared in 6 matches and recorded 2 goals. He featured in the 1969 CONCACAF Championship qualification matches.

References

Category:1950 births
Category:2008 deaths
Category:Jamaican footballers
Category:Jamaican expatriate footballers
Category:Jamaica international footballers
Category:Toronto Croatia players
Category:Toronto Blizzard (1971–1984) players
Category:Canadian National Soccer League players
Category:North American Soccer League (1968–1984) players
Category:National Premier League players
Category:Santos F.C. (Jamaica) players
Category:Expatriate soccer players in Canada
Category:Jamaican expatriate sportspeople in Canada
Category:Association football forwards


Camellia yunnanensis

Camellia yunnanensis is a 1.3–7 m tall shrub or small tree.

Its leaves are elliptic to broad-elliptic or ovate-elliptic, bluntly acute. They are deep green.

Its flowers is white, perulate and solitary.

Distribution
It is distributed in Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, China.

The plants was introduced to Japan after 1979 in the form of seeds and scions for grafting.

References

yunnanensis
Category:Fauna of Yunnan
Category:Flora of China


Athletics at the 1998 Asian Games – Men's 50 kilometres walk

The men's 50 kilometres walk competition at the 1998 Asian Games in Bangkok, Thailand was held on 18 December.

Schedule
All times are Indochina Time (UTC+07:00)

Results
Legend
DNF — Did not finish

References

Results (archived)

External links
Results

Men's 50 kilometres walk
1998


Roles played by Sarah Bernhardt

This is a list of the notable roles played by the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, including both stage roles and early motion pictures, with the year of the first performance. This list does not include one-time performances or revivals. Roles first performed by Bernhardt are noted as premieres.

Theatrical roles

1862–1869
1862
 Iphigénie by Racine, role of Iphigénia
 Valérie by Eugene Scribe, role of Valerie
 Les Femmes Savantes by Molière, role of Henriette
 L'Etourdi by Molière, role of Hippolyte
1864
 Le Père de la Debutante, by Emmanuel Théaulon and Jean-François Bayard, role of Anita
 Le Démon du Jeu, by Théodore  Barrière and Henri Crisafulli (premiere)
 Un Soufflet n'est Jamais Perdu
 La Maison sans Enfants by Dumanoir
 L'Etourneau, by Baya and Laya
 Le Premier Pas Labiche & Deslandes
 Un Mari qui Lance sa Femme by Deslandes
1865
 La Biche aux Bois by the Coignard brothers, role of Princess Désirée
1866
 Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard by  Pierre de Marivaux, role of Silvia
1867
 Les Femmes Savantes by Molière, role of Armande
 King Lear by William Shakespeare, role of Cordelia
 Athalie by Racine, role of Zarcharie
 Le Testament de César Girodot, by Bélot and Villetard, role of Hortense
 François le Champi by George Sand, role of Mariette
  Le Marquis de Villemer by George Sand,  role of Baronne d'Arglade
1868
 Kean by Alexander Dumas père, role of Anna Damby
 La Loterie du Marriage by Jules Barbier, role of Laure Dufour (premiere)
1869
 Le Passant by François Coppée , role of Zanetto (premiere)
 Le Bâtard by Alphonse Touroude, role of Jeanne  (premiere)

1870–1879
1870
 L'Affranchi by Latour de Saint-Ybars (premiere)
 L'Autre by George Sand, role of Hélène de Mérangis  (premiere)
1871
 Jeanne-Marie by André Theuriet, role of Thérése (premiere)
1872
 Mademoiselle Aïssé by Louis Bouilhet, role of Mlle. Aissé (premiere)
  Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, role of Doña Maria de Neubourg, Queen of Spain
 Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle  by Alexander Dumas, role of Gabrielle (premiere)
 Le Cid by Corneille, role of Chimène
  Britannicus by Racine, role of Juie
1873
 Le Mariage de Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, role of Chérubin
 Dalila by Octave Feuillet, role of Princess Falconieri
 L'Absent by Eugène Manuel, role of Mistress Douglas (premiere)
 Chez l'Avocat by Paul Ferrier, role of Marthe (premiere)
 Andromache by Racine, role of Andromache
 Phèdre by Racine, role of Aricie
1874
 Le Sphinx by Octave Feuillet, role of Berthe de Savigny (premiere)
 La Belle Paule by Louis Denayrousse, role of d'Henri de Ligniville (premiere)
 Zaire by Voltaire, role of Zaire
 Phèdre by Racine, role of Phèdre
1875
 La Fille de Roland by Henri de Bornier, role of Berthe
 Gabrielle by Emile Augier, role of Gabrielle
1876
 L'Étrangère by Alexandre Dumas, fils, role of Mrs. Clarkson
 La Nuit de Mai by Alfred de Musset, role of the Muse
 Rome Vance by Alexandre Parodi, role of Posthumia (premiere)
1877
 Hernani by Victor Hugo, role of Doña Sol
1878
 Othello by William Shakespeare, role of Desdemona
 Amphytrion by Molière, role of Alcméne
1879
 Mithradite by Racine, role of Monime

1880–1889
1880
 L'Aventurière by Emile Augier, role of Dona Clorinde
 Le Sphinx by Octave Feuillet, role of Blanche de Chelles
 Adrienne Lecouvreur by Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouvé, title role
 Froufrou by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, role of Gilberte
 La Dame aux Camélias by, role of Marguerite Alexandre Dumas fils
1881
 La Princesse Georges, by Alexandre Dumas fils, role of Sévérine
1882
Fédora by Victorien Sardou, role of Fédora (premiere)
1883
Nana-Sahib by Jean Richepin, role of Djamma (premiere)
1884
 Macbeth by William Shakespeare, adaptation by Jean Richepin, role of Lady MacBeth
 Théodora by Victorien Sardou, role of Theodora, Empress of Byzantium (premiere)
1885
 Marion Delorme by Victor Hugo, role of Marion
1886
 Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, role of Ophelia
 La Maitre des Forges by Georges Ohnet, role of Claire de Beaulieu
 L'Aveu by Sarah Bernhardt, one act, role of Comtesse Marthe de Rocca (premiere)
1887
 La Tosca by Victorien Sardou', role of Floria Tosca (premiere)
1888
 Francillon by Alexandre Dumas, fils, role of Francine de Riverolles
1889
 Léna by PIerre Berton, role of Léna Despart (premiere)

1890–1899
1890
 Jeanne d'Arc by Jules Barbier, incidental music by Charles Gounod role of Jeanne d'Arc
 Cléopâtre by Victorien Sardou, role of Cleopatra (premiere)
1891
 Gringoie by de Banville, role of Gringoire
1893
 Les Rois by Jules LeMaitre, role of Princess Wilhelmine (premiere)
1894
 Izéyl by Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand, role of Izeyl  (premiere)
 La Femme de Claude, by Alexandre Dumas fils, role of Césarine
 Gismonda by Victorien Sardou, role of Gismonda (premiere)
1895
 Magda by Hermann Sudermann, role of Magda
 La Princesse Lointaine by Edmond Rostand, role of Mélissande (premiere)
1896
 Lorenzaccio by Alfred de Musset, role of Lorenzaccio (premiere)
1897
 Spiritisme by Victorien Sardou, role of Simone (premiere)
 La Samaritaine by Edmond Rostand, role of Photine
 Les Mauvais Bergers by Octave Mirbeau, role of Madeleine
1898
 La Ville Morte by Gabriele d'Annunzio, role of Anne (premiere)
 Lysiane by Romain Coolus, role of Lysiane (premiere)
 Medée by Catulle Mendès, role of Medea
1899
 Hamlet by William Shakespeare, adapted by Marcel Schwob and Eugene Morand, role of Hamlet

1900–1909
1900
 L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand, role of the Duc de Reichstadt (premiere)
 Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, role of Roxane
1901
 La Pluie et le beau Temps by Gozlan, role of the Baroness
 Les Precieuses Ridicules by Moliere, role of Madelon
1902
 Francesca da Rimini by Francis Marion Crawford and Schwob, role of Francesca
 Sapho by Alphonse Daudet, role of Fanny Legrand
  Théroigne de Méricourt by Paul Hervieu,  role of Théroigne (premiere)
1903
 Andromaque by Racine, role of Hermione, then the role of Andromaque
 Werther by Goethe, role of Werther (premiere)
 Plus que Reine by Emile de Bergerat, role of Joséphine de Beauharnais
 Jeanne Wedekind by Felix Philippi, adaptation by Luigi Krauss (premiere)
 La Sorcière by Victorien Sardou, role of Zoraya  (premiere)
1904
 Le Festin de la Mort by Boni de Castellane, role of Mme. Maujourdain (premiere)
 Varennes by Henri Lavedan and Georges LeNôtre, role of Marie Antoinette (premiere)
1905
 Angelo by Victor Hugo, role of Thisbé
 Esther by Racine, role of Assuerus
 Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck role of Pelléas
 Adrienne Lecouvreur adapted by Sarah Bernhardt, role of Adrienne
1906
 La Vierge d'Avila by Catulle Mendès, role of Saint Theresa
1907
 Les Bouffons by Miguel Zamacoïs, role of the hunchback Jacasse
  Le Vert-Galant by Émile Moreau, role of Queen Margot
  La Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty), adapted by Jean Richepin, role of Prince Charming
1908
 Le Courtisan e de Corinthe by Paul Bilhaud and Michel Carré, role of Cléonice (premiere)
1909
 La Nuit de Mai by Alfred de Musset, role of the poet
 La Fille de Rubenstein by Remon
 Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc by Émile Moreau, role of Jeanne d'Arc (premiere)

1910–1919
1910
 La Beffa by Sem Beneli, adapted by Jean Richepin, role of Gianetto Malespini
 La Femme X by Alexandre Bisson, role of Jacqueline Fleuriot
 Judas by John Wesley De Kay, role of Judas Iscariot (premiere)
1911
 Lucrèce Borgia by Victor Hugo, title role
1912
 La Reine Elizabeth by Emlie Moreau, title role (premiere)
 Une nuit de Noel sous la Terreur by Maurice Bernhardt and Henri Cain, role of Marion (premiere)
1913
 Jeanne Foré, by Tristan Bernard, role of Jeanne (premiere)
1914
 Tout à coup by Paul de Cassagnac, role of the Marquis de Chalonne (premiere)
1915
 Les Cathédrales by Eugène Morand, role of Strasbourg Cathedral (one act - premiere)
1916
 La Mort de Cléopatre by Maurice Bernhardt and Henri Cain (one act - premiere)
  l'Holocauste by Maurice Bernhardt, role of the Duchesse (one act - premiere)
 Au Champ d'Honneur , by Maurice Bernhardt and Henri Cain,  role of a soldier
 Vitrail by René Fauchois, role of Violaine (one act)
 Hécube by Maurice Bernhardt and Chavance, role of Hécube (one act)
 Le Faux Modèle, Daurelly, role of Madeleine (one act)
 Le Marchand de Venise (The Merchant of Venice) (excerpts), role of Portia
 L'Etoile dans la nuit by Henri Cain, role of Jane de Mauduit (one act)
 Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (as Queen Elizabeth)

1920–1923
1920
 Rossini by René Fauchois, role of Rossini's mother
 Athalie by Racine, role of Athalie
 Daniel by Louis Vernouil, role of Daniel Arnaud (premiere)
 Comment on écrit l'Histoire by Sacha Guitry, role of Mariette (one act- premiere)
1921
 La Gloire by Maurice Rostand, role of La Gloire (one act, premiere)
1922
 Régine Armand by Louis Vernouil, role of  Régine Armand

Filmography

 1900: Le Duel d'Hamlet (Hamlet, as Hamlet) An excerpt from the play, featuring Bernhardt in a duel to the death with Laertes.
 1908: La Tosca (Tosca, as Tosca) A one-reel condensation of the play by the same name by Victorien Sardou.
 1911: La Dame aux Camélias (Lady of the Camelias – Camille, in the U.S. release, as Camille) A two-reel condensation of the play by the same name, and co-starring Lou Tellegen.
 1912: Adrienne Lecouvreur (An Actress's Romance; as Adrienne Lecouvreur) A two-reel condensation of the play by the same name. Co-starring Lou Tellegen.
 1912: Les Amours d'Elisabeth, Reine d'Angleterre (Queen Elizabeth; a major success) A four-reel condensation of the play of the same name. Co-starring Lou Tellegen.
 1912: Sarah Bernhardt à Belle-Isle (Sarah Bernhardt at Home, as herself) This documentary features Sarah at home with her family and friends, fishing for shrimp, and cuddling indoors with her pet dogs.
 1915: Ceux de Chez Nous (Those at Home: biographical, home movies) Among other celebrated persons of the era, there is a brief scene featuring Sarah sitting on a park bench and reading from a book.
 1916: Jeanne Doré (as Jeanne Doré). Based on a play of the same name. Bernhardt appears as a widowed mother, who lavishes attention on her son, Jacques. When he is seduced by a temptress and accidentally murders a man, she visits him in his cell on the night before his execution, pretending to be his fiancée.
 1917: Mères Françaises (Mothers of France), as Madame Jeanne D'Urbex, a war widow in World War I. When she learns that her son has also been wounded, she searches the battlefields, crawls through trenches, and finally reaches him at a medical station only to have him die in her arms. After this tragedy, she dedicates her life to helping others survive the ravages of war.

 1921: Daniel (five-minute death scene from the play of the same name) Bernhardt appears as a morphine addict in the hour before death.

 1923: La Voyante (The Fortune Teller'') Bernhardt appears as a clairvoyant, who makes predictions that influence the outcome of national events. This film was Bernhardt's final performance, and was made while she was mortally ill. It was eventually completed with scenes made with a stand-in performing Bernhardt's character with her back turned to the camera.

References

Bibliography

External links

 The Sarah Bernhardt Pages

 Performances in Theatre Archive University of Bristol

 Sarah Bernhardt Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
 Bibliography
 Sarah Bernhardt Jewish Women's Archive
 , Video Lecture by Professor Sharon Marcus
 Elie Edson press files on Sarah Bernhardt, 1910–1911, held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Category:19th-century French actresses
Category:20th-century French actresses
Category:French stage actresses
Category:French silent film actresses
Category:Actresses from Paris
Category:Jewish French actresses
Category:Shakespearean actresses
Category:Actor-managers


Anfatis

Anfatis SpA (;) is the holding company of a group of 6 Italian distributors (Concessionari) which sell, distribute and deliver pharmaceuticals products to +8,000 pharmacies. Founded in Italy in 2004, it is headquartered in Milan.

History
2004: Anfatis SpA was founded in Milan, Italy, following a business idea and a business plan conceived and produced by Antonio Carrari, a long-term pharma business expert, and Silvio Conforti, a financial advisor.

2005: Beginning of the acquisition plan. Jacopetti Farmaceutici Srl and Jacopetti Commerciale Srl are acquired in Padua; SAF Srl and Marpur Srl are acquired in Bari; Elifarm Srl is acquired in Catania.

2006: Della Santa Vasco Eredi Srl is acquired in Florence; Piemont-Farm Srl is acquired in Turin; Venos Srl is acquired in Bologna.

2007: Pharmatre SpA, a Foligno, Perugia, based distributor and producer, is the last acquisition to be added to the group.

2010: Kjos SpA, an Italian private equity firm, becomes the majority shareholder and the driver of a new plan.

2011: Kjos, the majority shareholder, together with Anfatis management define and design an integration plan.

2012: In August 2012 Jacopetti Commerciale Srl is merged into Jacopetti Farmaceutici Srl; in December 2012 Elifarm Srl and Marpur Srl are merged into SAF Srl.

See also
 List of pharmaceutical companies
 Medical technologist

References

External links

 https://web.archive.org/web/20140101100813/http://jacopettifarmaceutici.it/
 http://www.pharmatre.it/
 https://web.archive.org/web/20131126030147/http://www.piemontfarm.it/

Category:Pharmaceutical companies of Italy
Category:Holding companies established in 2004


Linda Loredo

Linda Loredo (June 20, 1907 – August 11, 1931) was an American-born actress and dancer of Mexican descent. She is most commonly associated with Spanish language versions of Laurel and Hardy short subjects. Her sister, Maria Loredo (1905–1998), was also an actress.

Career
Loredo was born in Arizona Territory. She entered silent films in 1927, playing Carmen in the ten-installment silent serial Heroes of the Wild, but her career really came into its own with the advent of sound. The Hal Roach Studios produced foreign-language versions of their most popular series – Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, Our Gang and Harry Langdon – for the lucrative Spanish markets in both hemispheres.

She appeared in four Laurel and Hardy shorts, including an English-speaking one, Come Clean, which was released after her death. She is one of only two actresses to have played both Laurel's and Hardy's wife, alongside Isabelle Keith, and the only one to have done so more than once.

Typically, the headline stars would stay on upon completion of the English-language version, and then would speak their foreign lines phonetically from cue cards in shot-for-shot remakes; they would be joined by native-speaking supporting players to round out the cast. Loredo's fluency in Spanish was of great value in the making of these films.

Death
Loredo entered Queen of Angels Hospital on June 11, 1931, for an emergency appendectomy and succumbed two months later to peritonitis, age 24.

Filmography
Heroes of the Wild (1927) – Carmen
After the Storm (1928) – Malay Dancer
Great Gobs (1929)
La Vida Nocturna (1930) – Sra. Laurel
El Jugador de Golf (1930)
La Estación de Gasolina (1930)
¡Pobre Infeliz! (1930)
Radiomanía (1930) – Sra. Hardy
Politiquerías (1931) – Sra. Hardy
El Alma de la Fiesta (1931) – Doctora
La Señorita de Chicago (1931)
Come Clean (1931) – Mrs. Laurel

References

External links

Category:1907 births
Category:1931 deaths
Category:Deaths from peritonitis
Category:Disease-related deaths in California
Category:Actresses from Arizona
Category:American film actresses
Category:American actresses of Mexican descent
Category:20th-century American actresses


Len Lovett

Leonard Walker Lovett  (July 17, 1852 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania – November 18, 1922 in Newark, Delaware) played in Major League Baseball.

Sources

Category:1852 births
Category:1922 deaths
Category:19th-century baseball players
Category:Baseball players from Pennsylvania
Category:Major League Baseball right fielders
Category:Elizabeth Resolutes players
Category:Philadelphia Centennials players


Jonathan Vandiar

Jonathan David Vandiar (born 25 April 1990 in Paarl, Western Cape) is a South African first-class cricketer who currently plays for the Titans Cricket Team. Jonathan played for Dolphins since 2007 season, but later opted a switch to the Highveld Lions Cricket Team. Jonathan excelled during his spell at the Lions by representing South Africa at U-19 level. Jonathan was in the U-19 side that reached the 2008 U-19 World Cup Final vs India. He was the top run-scoring South African in the tournament. Jonathan then went on to represent South Africa A in various tours abroad and was also drafted in the 2011 Preliminary South African World Cup 30-man squad. Jonathan was signed for the Royal Challengers Bangalore Team for the 2011 IPL Season. Jonathan moved back to the Dolphins in 2012 before joining the Titans in 2016. .

In August 2017, he was named in Jo'burg Giants' squad for the first season of the T20 Global League. However, in October 2017, Cricket South Africa initially postponed the tournament until November 2018, with it being cancelled soon after.

In June 2018, he was named in the squad for the Titans team for the 2018–19 season. He was the leading run-scorer for the Titans in the 2018–19 CSA 4-Day Franchise Series, with 449 runs in seven matches.

References

External links

Category:1990 births
Category:Living people
Category:South African cricketers
Category:Sportspeople from Paarl
Category:Dolphins cricketers
Category:KwaZulu-Natal cricketers
Category:Gauteng cricketers
Category:Lions cricketers
Category:Royal Challengers Bangalore cricketers


Plimmerton

The suburb of Plimmerton lies in the northwest part of the city of Porirua in New Zealand, adjacent to some of the city's more congenial beaches. State Highway 1 and the North Island Main Trunk railway line pass just east of the main shopping and residential area.

Plimmerton has its modern origins as a late 19th Century seaside resort. It is named after John Plimmer, an English settler and entrepreneur who, through the Wellington and Manawatu Railway Company, helped to fund and direct construction of the railway line. Today, around 2,100 people reside in the suburb.

History
The area was first settled by the Māori people early in their occupation of New Zealand. Ngāi Tara and then Ngāti Ira settled south of Kapiti, and a number of other tribes may have lived in the area including Muaūpoko, Ngāti Apa, Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Hotu.

Ngāti Toa people took control of the Porirua coast in the 1820s.  In the 1840s the area where Plimmerton is situated was the home of Te Rauparaha, who had his main residence at Taupo Pa. Te Rauparaha was captured by 200 British troops and police on 23 July 1846 near the southern end of Motuhara Road. A tiny historic reserve contains a cabbage tree that may be descended from the one he was said to have been captured near, and a plaque. Over the next few years Taupo Pa was deserted and the main Ngāti Toa villages in Porirua became Takapuwahia and Urukahika.

The area was leased for farming by European settlers over the following decades. These included William Cooper, Canington (possible Carrington), and then Levi Tandy (from 1859).  James Walker farmed from Paremata to Plimmerton beginning in 1875.

The settlement was originally known as Taupo after the pa, and when the Horokiwi Valley Road was opened fewer travellers followed the Taua Tapu track through Taupo to Pukerua Bay. So Pauatahanui grew at the expense of Taupo until the railway line was opened in 1885.
In the 1880s the Wellington and Manawatu Railway Company decided to build a railway link from the capital, Wellington, to Longburn, near Palmerston North. Several towns, including Plimmerton, were established along the way to encourage settlements that would contribute to the line's business. John Plimmer, after whom Plimmerton was named, was a director of the company.

In 1885 the first excursion train journeyed from Wellington to Plimmerton on 3 September, and regular services began from 10 October. With the railway's arrival, Plimmerton became accessible to holidaymakers, and evolved into a seaside resort. Plimmerton House, a two-storied hotel, was built alongside the railway station in 1886 (and burnt down in 1907). Sections began to be sold in 1888 and by the late 1890s Plimmerton had become a popular holiday destination. In 1900 Plimmerton consisted of 30 summer cottages, two private hotels and one general store.

Plimmerton was originally part of Hutt County. On 1 April 1973 the still-growing area became one of the northern suburbs of Porirua. Though small, it was one of the most lively. For a time it had the only active Residents' Association in the city.

Official name
The name Plimmerton was used in promoting the railway and advertising of sections for sale from the mid-1880s.

Plimmerton was gazetted as an official geographic name on 3 November 2011. The suburb amalgamated the previous recorded suburb names of Plimmerton and Karehana Bay. It excludes the largely Māori (Ngati Toa) settlement of Hongoeka to the west, which was gazetted on 16 December 2010.

Demographics and census information
The population of the Plimmerton area unit (which includes Hongoeka) at the 2013 census was 2,118, up slightly from 2,058 recorded in 2006 and 2,052 in both the 1996 and 2001 counts.

The 2013 census count comprised 1,056 males and 1,059 females in 840 dwellings. 14.2% were aged 65 or older (14.3% for New Zealand as a whole) and 19.7% were 15 or younger (NZ 20.4%). The largest ethnic groups were European (90.7%, compared to 74.0% in NZ) and Māori (12.5%, compared to 14.9% in NZ). 23.1% of residents were born overseas (NZ 25.2%), most commonly in the UK or Ireland. Plimmerton residents were relatively highly educated, with 35.6 percent of people aged 15 years and over having a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 20.0 percent for New Zealand. Median annual income for those aged 15+ was $44,900 (NZ $28,500).

Localities
State Highway 1, here named St Andrews Road, passes through Plimmerton, as does the North Island Main Trunk railway line.

A shopping area about two blocks long adjoins Plimmerton Railway Station on Steyne Avenue and includes two churches, a medical centre, Plunket rooms, a craft shop, a beauty salon, real estate agents, a grocery store and several eateries. Plimmerton School, Plimmerton Kindergarten, and tennis courts are close.

To the north alongside the railway line is Plimmerton Domain, comprising 3 football fields, home to the Mana Archery Club, Wellington 29th Boys' Brigade and the Mana Arts Society. Beyond is the Plimmerton Industrial Estate, which includes numerous businesses, the Plimmerton Croquet Club, and a storage facility for the New Zealand Film Archive.

The Mainline Steam railway preservation group have their extensive restoration facilities located behind Plimmerton Railway Station.

North of the industrial area is the Taupo Swamp, a flax swamp, one of the largest of its type in the southern half of the North Island. Taupo Stream passes south through the swamp, along the east edge of Plimmerton Domain, between Steyne Avenue and St Andrews Road, and then flows into the sea at the north end of South Beach.

Plimmerton Library, which was part of Porirua City Council's library system, closed on 27 July 2012. It opened in the late 1940s and operated from a single-room building near the school from November 1951 until December 2007. It then shifted to the Plimmerton Pavilion, opposite the Plimmerton Volunteer Fire Brigade building, until its closure.

South-west of the shopping area is Plimmerton Beach, a fairly sheltered, gently graded beach, which has been a popular recreation area for over a century. It is popular with windsurfers; some world champions have trained there. At the southern end is South Beach. Recreational water quality at Plimmerton Beach is rated "fair" by the Greater Wellington Regional Council; water quality at South Beach is rated "poor", however, due to periodic faecal contamination. This contamination may originate from Taupo Swamp (via Taupo Stream), which often supports a large waterfowl population.

Another popular beach is Karehana Bay, at the foot of the Airlie Road/Cluny Road valley about 1.5 kilometres north-west of the shops. Poet Denis Glover mentioned the settlement in his poem Threnody: "In Plimmerton, in Plimmerton, the little penguins play, and one dead albatross was found at Karehana Bay".

References

External links
The Storied Shores of Plimmerton from the New Zealand Railways Magazine, 1940
Picture of the Taupo Pa on Plimmerton Beach, 1840
Plimmerton Volunteer Fire Brigade (including pictures of the area)
Plimmerton Residents' Association Community Website 2010

Category:Suburbs of Porirua
Category:Populated places in the Wellington Region


Raja Indainda

In Batak mythology, Raja Indainda is a god of thunder, as well as a spy and messenger of the other gods. He may be the son of Soripada.

References

Category:Batak mythology
Category:Thunder gods
Category:Messenger gods


Volante Rossa

The organization officially known as Volante Rossa "Martiri Partigiani" (Red Quick-intervention [Team] "Partisan Martyrs"), often mentioned simply as Volante Rossa, was a clandestine antifascist paramilitary organization active in and around Milan in the postwar to the Second World War, from 1945 to 1949. Led by "tenente Alvaro" ("Lieutenant Alvaro"), nom-de-guerre of Giulio Paggio, it was made up of communists partisans and workers who aimed with their actions to build a continuity with the wartime action of the Italian Resistance.

Origins and activities
The Volante Rossa had its roots in the organizational apparatus of the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica ("Groups of Patriotic Action", GAP), small-scale nuclei within the wartime Italian Resistance Movement which saw official action until April 25, 1945, and took its moniker from a section of the Stalinist-affiliated Brigate Garibaldi operating around Ossola, near the Alps: after the Allied High Command ordered the partisan formations to give up Republican Fascist prisoners, Paggio's men started murdering individuals identified as political adversaries.

After its foundation in Milan, the organization augmented its influence, relying on local networks and spreading as much as to cover much of Northern and Central Italy. It could rely on safehouses and alliances throughout all of Lombardy and Piedmont, in the so-called Emilian "triangle of death" and as far as Latium. It remained active for four years, until 1949. Its main headquarters were in the former Casa del Fascio in Lambrate (Milano), via Conte Rosso 12, which was transformed after April 25 into a People's House. This solution provided an unexpectedly useful cover and alibi for the continuous influx of persons.

The killings

The Volante Rossa performed murders of individuals it deemed representatives of the old régime. Its first action was the murder of two ausiliarie (female RSI soldiers), Rosa Bianchi Sciaccaluga and her daughter Liliana. Some of the victims, often kidnapped without a declared pretext, were murdered in Lambrate or at the Giuriati sports field whereas others were made to disappear in the Martesana and Villoresi canals, with a rock tied around their necks; later the rumor would be purposely be spread that the victims had fled to Argentina.

The murders of former Fascists led the latter to close ranks and to start taking the initiative, and on November 5, 1945, the posters at Odeon movie theater publicizing Rossellini's film Roma città aperta were set on fire. The action was claimed by Domenico Leccisi's Partito Democratico Fascista (Democratic Fascist Party). On January 17, 1947 in via San Protaso, downtown Milan, the former Xth MAS Flottilla ausiliaria Brunilde Tanzi, also a member of the Partito Democratico Fascista was shot dead. Tilde had been responsible for switching a record during a radio advertisement, in order to play the banned Fascist anthem Giovinezza in piazza del Duomo.

The authors of Tilde's murder were never discovered, but the modus operandi was that typical of the Volante Rossa. On the same day another ausiliaria was murdered, Eva Maciacchini, a member of the Squadre d'Azione Mussolini ("Mussolini" Shock Squads), whose body was found near Lambrate. Perhaps the most notorious of these murders was that of journalist Franco De Agazio, on March 14, 1947, which the Volante Rossa publicly claimed.

De Agazio was considered guilty in that he had taken part in the RSI and because the newspaper he was currently directing, the Meridiano d'Italia, he had published an investigation into the treasure of Dongo (a hoard of gold purportedly carried by Mussolini which was never recovered) skeptical of the "official" version of events. On July 6, 1947, a grenade was thrown into the house of Fascist Fulvio Mazzetti, but volantista Mario "Mila" Gandini was also hit by some shrapnel and, once wounded, was apprehended by police.

On October 29, 1947, an attempt was made to bomb the MSI headquarters in via Santa Radegonda and on November 4 Volante Rossa members broke into the house of General Ferruccio Gatti's, formerly Lieutenant-General of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, a recipient of the Medal of Military Valour, and indicated by L'Unità (the main Communist newspaper) as one of the leaders of the fledgling Neo-Fascist movements. The former Partisans opened fire on the General, killing him and heavily wounding his son Riccardo, as he attempted to protect his father.

On January 27, 1949 Felice Ghisalberti was murdered, a former member of the "Muti" Legion, who had taken part in many anti-partisan roundups and was now accused by the Volante Rossa of killing Eugenio Curiel. In fact, Ghisalberti had been tried and declared not guilty for this accusation on June 4, 1947. Later, a Volante Rossa member who found work in Ghisalberti's father's workshop justified the murder by alleging that Ghisalberti had often boasted publicly about killing partisans. The same day, Leonardo Masazza, a clerk with Siemens, was killed. On February 10, 1949, questore (police chief) Vincenzo Agnesina organized a large-scale roundup in Lambrate, which led to the arrest of 27 volantisti.

Relationship with the Italian Communist Party (PCI)
In October 1947 the Volante Rossa started its official contacts with the Italian Communist Party as well as openly performing supporting activities for the Party and the trade unions, especially during strikes and workers' protests, where it would perform security tasks and protect the protesters from law enforcement. The Volante Rossa also took part in the November 28, 1947 clashes, when the Communist Party broke into Milan's prefetto's office to protest the replacement of old prefetto Ettore Troilo.

During the Italian general election of 1948, the Volante Rossa performed security tasks for  Communist candidates, but when Palmiro Togliatti came to Milan during his electoral tour, some sources state that he didn't let them approach him. The electoral defeat provoked a crisis between the Volante Rossa and the PCI, the latter progressively distancing itself from the former and later declaring its ignorance regarding the team's criminal activities. Nevertheless, the Volante Rossa'''s murders continued for nearly a year, and some members were tried for the double murder of Rosa Bianchi Sciaccaluga and her daughter Liliana, but without any final sentence.

== The Volante Rossa's trial ==
In 1949, after 27 Volante Rossa members were arrested, the group's activities ceased. The PCI disavowed the organization: its leaders were aided in fleeing beyond the "Iron curtain", whereas many other members were abandoned to their fate. The trial took place in 1951 in Verona. The accused were 32, of whom 27 in captivity and 5 missing. The guilty sentences were 23, of which 4 to life in prison.

Eligio Trincheri, sentenced to life in prison, remained under arrest until 1971, when he was pardoned by President Giuseppe Saragat. The three leading organizers - Giulio Paggio, Paolo Finardi and Natale Buratto, sentenced to life in prison - were all helped in fleeing to Czechoslovakia and were finally all pardoned by President Sandro Pertini in 1978.

On November 21, 1953, at the Venice Court of Assize and Appeal, headed by judge Guido Pisani, the final verdict was pronounced: after six days of hearings, the members of the Volante Rossa group were found guilty of the following charges:
 conspiracy;
 possession of weapons;
 June 16, 1947: raid at the bar in Via Pacini, Milan;
 October 29, 1947: invasion and damages to the «Il Meridiano d'Italia» newspaper offices;
 4 novembre 1947: murder of Ferruccio Gatti, in charge of the MSI Milan branch, and attempted murder on his wife, Margherita Bellingeri;
 12 dicembre 1947: kidnapping (Italo Tofanello);
 15 luglio 1948: occupazione of the «Bezzi» factory;
 27 gennaio 1949: murder of Felice Ghisalberti;
 27 gennaio 1949: murder of Leonardo Massaza.

 Members of the Volante Rossa

Some of the organization's members, with their nom-de-guerre between brackets, occupation and year of birth:

 Otello Alterchi (Otelin), electrician, born 1928;
 Felice Arnè (Mario), worker, born 1930;
 Giordano Biadigo (Tom), worker, born 1929;
 Bruno Bonasio, electrician, born 1926;
 Primo Borghini, janitor at the Lambrate People's House, born 1920;
 Mario Bosetti, born 1926;
 Natale Burato (Lino), mechanic, born 1928;
 Luigi Canepari (Pipa), mechanic, born 1925;
 Camillo Cassis, (Cassis), plumber, born 1925;
 Ennio Cattaneo, electrician, born 1930;
 Domenico Cavuoto (Menguc), bartender, born 1930;
 Giulio Cimpellin (Ciro), mechanic, born 1920;
 Ferdinando Clerici (Balilla), worker, born 1928;
 Luigi Comini (Luisott), photographer, born 1925;
 Walter Fasoli (Walter), jobless, born 1917;
 Paolo Finardi (Pastecca), born 1928;
 Mario Gandini (Milà);
 Pietro Jani (Jani), plumber, born 1926;
 Giacomo Lotteri (Loteri), mechanic, born 1920;
 Luigi Lo Salvio;
 Angelo Maria Magni, electrician, born 1926;
 Sante Marchesi (Santino), radiotechnician, born 1926;
 Antonio Minafra (Missaglia), born 1919;
 Mario Mondani, mechanic, born 1927;
 Giuseppe Morandotti (Morandoti), born 1927;
 Angelo Ostelli (Stuccafiss);
 Mauro Ostelli (Maurino); formerly in hiding in Czechoslovakia;
 Giulio Paggio (Alvaro), born 1925;
 Ettore Patrioli (Iaia), mechanic, born 1926;
 Carlo Reina, tanner, born 1926;
 Emilio Tosato (Lietù), electrician, born 1929;
 Ferruccio Tosi (Cazzo), electrician, born 1929;
 Eligio Trincheri (Marco), journalist, born 1925;
 Angelo Vecchio (Tarzan), worker, born 1925;
 Dante Vecchio (Tino), mechanic, born 1917;
 Walter Veneri (Walter), born 1927;
 Italo Zonato (Italo), mechanic, born 1925.

 See also
 Italian resistance movement
 Arditi del Popolo

References

Bibliography
 Cesare Bermani, La Volante Rossa (estate 1945-febbraio 1949), su Primo Maggio, aprile 1977
 Cesare Bermani, Storia e mito della Volante rossa. Prefazione di Giorgio Galli, Nuove Edizioni Internazionali, pp. 160, 1997
 Carlo Guerriero e Fausto Rondinelli, La volante rossa, 1996
 G. Fasanella e G. Pellegrino, La guerra civile, Rizzoli, 2005
 Massimo Recchioni, Ultimi fuochi di Resistenza - Storia di un combattente della Volante Rossa, prefazione di Cesare Bermani, Derive Approdi, 2009
 Massimo Recchioni, Il Tenente Alvaro, la Volante Rossa e i rifugiati politici italiani in Cecoslovacchia, Derive Approdi, 2011
 Enzo Antonio Cicchino e Roberto Olivo, Correva l'anno della vendetta, Mursia, 2013
 Pier Mario Fasanotti e Valeria Gandus, Mambo italiano, tre lustri di fatti e misfatti, Marco Tropea editore, 2000
 Francesco Trento, La guerra non era finita. I partigiani della Volante Rossa, Editori Laterza, 2014
 Massimiliano Griner, La pupilla del Duce'', Edizioni Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2004

Category:Anti-fascist organisations in Italy
Category:Defunct communist militant groups
Category:Communism in Italy
Category:Terrorism in Italy
Category:Organisations based in Milan
Category:Left-wing militant groups in Italy


Martin Bieber

__NOTOC__

Martin Bieber (10 November 1900  – 19 October 1974) was a German general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II who commanded  several divisions. Born in Tabarz, he was a recipient of the  Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Bieber surrendered to the Soviet forces in May 1945 and was held in the Soviet Union as a war criminal until October 1955. He died in Düsseldorf in 1974.

Awards and decorations
 Iron Cross (1914) 2nd Class (4 November 1917) & 1st Class (22 September 1918)
 Honour Cross of the World War 1914/1918 (23 January 1935)
 Wehrmacht Long Service Award 4th Class (2 October 1936)
 West Wall Medal (20 April 1940)
 Clasp to the Iron Cross (1939) 2nd Class (10 June 1940) & 1st Class  (24 June 1940)
 Wound Badge (1939) in Silver (15 February 1942)
 Eastern Front Medal (18 August 1942)
 German Cross in Gold on 2 January 1942 as Major in II./Infanterie-Regiment 167
 Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves
 Knight's Cross on 28 July 1943 as Oberst and commander of Grenadier-Regiment 184
 Oak Leaves on 2 September 1944 as Oberst and commander of Divisionsgruppe 86

References

Citations

Bibliography

Category:1900 births
Category:1974 deaths
Category:People from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
Category:People from Gotha (district)
Category:Major generals of the German Army (Wehrmacht)
Category:German military personnel of World War I
Category:Recipients of the clasp to the Iron Cross, 1st class
Category:Recipients of the Gold German Cross
Category:Recipients of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves


Richard Warren Sears

Richard Warren Sears (December 7, 1863 – September 28, 1914) was an American manager, businessman and the founder of Sears, Roebuck and Company with his partner Alvah Curtis Roebuck.

Early life

Sears was born in Stewartville, Minnesota.  His father was James Warren Sears, born circa 1828 in New York, a blacksmith and wagon-maker; his mother was Eliza Burton, born in Ohio circa 1843.  The family was living in Spring Valley, Minnesota by June 1870, where his father served as a city councilman and eventually sold his wagon shop in 1875.  Both of his parents were of English descent. During his boyhood in Spring Valley, he befriended Almanzo Wilder, the future husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder. In 1880, he started working as a telegraph operator in the town of North Branch, Minnesota for the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway, and was later transferred to North Redwood Falls, Minnesota, to be station agent there.

Businessman

In 1886, when Sears was 23, his station received a shipment of gold watches from a Chicago manufacturer, but the local consignee, jeweller Edward Stegerson, refused the unsolicited shipment.

A common scam existing at the time involved wholesalers who would ship their products to retailers who had not ordered them. Upon refusal, the wholesaler would offer the already price-hiked items to the retailer at a lower consignment cost in the guise of alleviating the cost to ship the items back. The unsuspecting retailer would then agree to take this new-found bargain off the wholesaler's hands, mark up the items and sell them to the public, making a small profit in the transaction.

But Stegerson, a retailer savvy to the scam, flatly refused the watches. Young Sears jumped at the opportunity, and made an agreement with the wholesaler to keep any profit he reaped above $12, and then he set about offering his wares to other station agents along the railroad line for $14. The watches were considered an item of urban sophistication.  Also because of the growth of railways, and the recent application of time zones, farmers and railroads needed to keep time accurately which had not been necessary until then.  For those two reasons the station agents had no trouble selling the watches to passers-by.

Within six months, Sears had netted $5,000 and felt so confident in this venture that he moved to Minneapolis and founded the R. W. Sears Watch Company.  He began placing advertisements in farm publications and mailing flyers to potential clients. From the beginning, it was clear that Sears had a talent for writing promotional copy. He took the personal approach in his ads, speaking directly to rural and small-town communities, persuading them to purchase by mail-order.

Chicago
In 1887 Sears moved his company to Chicago, an important transportation center for the Midwestern United States, and moved his residence to nearby Oak Park, Illinois.  In 1887 he also hired watch repairman Alvah Curtis Roebuck to repair any watches being returned.  Roebuck was Sears's first employee, and he later became co-founder of Sears, Roebuck & Company, which was formed in 1891 when Sears was 28 years old.  In 1895 the company was short of cash and Roebuck had left the business.  Sears sold one half of the company for $75,000.00 to Aaron Nusbaum and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenwald.  The company was incorporated in Illinois as Sears Roebuck & Co. of Illinois on September 7, 1895.  Richard Sears retired in 1908 at age 44 and Julius Rosenwald became the President.

The first Sears catalog was published in 1893 and offered only watches. By 1897, items such as men's and ladies clothing, plows, silverware, bicycles and athletic equipment had been added to the offering.

The 500-page catalog was sent to some 300,000 homes. Sears catered to the rural customer because, having been raised on a farm, he knew what the rural customer needed.  He also had experience working with the railroad and he knew how to ship merchandise to remote areas.

In 1908 Sears made another move forward and began to sell mail order homes through the catalogs.

Death
In 1908 Sears retired and moved from Oak Park to Lake Bluff, Illinois, suffering from failing health. Six years later, he died in Waukesha, Wisconsin of Bright's disease. He was interred in the mausoleum at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago near business rival Aaron Montgomery Ward.

Legacy
Sears' birthplace in Stewartville is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Sears was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1992.

References

External links

 Sears Archives biography

Category:1863 births
Category:1914 deaths

Category:Burials at Rosehill Cemetery
Category:American businesspeople in retailing
Category:American people of English descent
Category:Deaths from nephritis
Category:People from Waukesha, Wisconsin
Category:People from Stewartville, Minnesota
Category:People from Oak Park, Illinois
Category:People from Lake Bluff, Illinois
Category:People from Spring Valley, Minnesota
Category:People from North Branch, Minnesota
Category:Retail company founders
Category:Sears Holdings people


Scott Savitt

Scott Savitt is a former foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, although according to Los Angeles Times records he has never held a staff position there, and United Press International in Beijing. His articles have been published in The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other publications.

He has been interviewed on NPR, BBC, ABC’s Nightline and the CBS News. He is the in-house Chinese-English translator for numerous human rights organizations. In 1994, he founded Beijing Scene, China’s first independent weekly newspaper. In 2003 he published China Now magazine. http://www.chinanowmag.com

He’s the founding editor of the award-winning Contexts magazine http://www.contexts.org. He was a visiting scholar at Duke University until his recent relocation to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Books
Crashing the Party : An American Reporter in China (2016)

External links
 http://www.scottsavitt.com/

References

Category:Living people
Category:American male  journalists
Category:American expatriates in China
Category:Year of birth missing (living people)


Ahmad Karzan

Ahmad Mohammed Karzan Mahmoud (; born 10 October 1987 in Iraq) is an Iraqi footballer of Kurdish ethnicity. He currently plays for Peris FC, usually as a second striker.

External links
 Profile on Goalzz

Category:Living people
Category:Iraqi footballers
Category:1987 births
Category:Kurdish sportspeople
Category:Iraqi Kurdish people
Category:Association football inside forwards


Rodolfo Cuenca

Rodolfo Cuenca, sometimes known by his nickname, Rudy Cuenca, is a Filipino businessman best known as the former chairman of the Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines (CDCP), which is known today as the Philippine National Construction Corporation. He was a close associate of Ferdinand Marcos, and is noted not to be embarrassed by "his much-criticized close association with Marcos and his being tagged as a crony."

Early life and education
Rodolfo Cuenca was born on May 1, 1928, at the Philippine General Hospital, to Nicolas and Cristina Cuenca. He is the eldest among four children. Cuenca spent his early years in Vigan, as his father was assigned district engineer in Ilocos Sur. In 1937, the family transferred to Bulacan, where Cuenca finished his fourth and fifth grade. He continued sixth grade in Ateneo de Manila on Padre Faura, then transferred to the Intramuros campus for his seventh grade.

During the Second World War, Cuenca withdrew from high school and worked some jobs, one of which was at the General Engineering Depot for the US Army in Malolos. In 1946, he returned to Ateneo to finish high school. He then enrolled in Far Eastern University to study commerce, but soon dropped out to work as a road contractor. On 2 January 1948, he married Yasmin Santos, whom Cuenca met in Angat, Bulacan.

Association with Ferdinand Marcos
Cuenca financially donated to Ferdinand Marcos' first presidential campaign in 1965. In his second year of presidency, Marcos awarded large-scale projects to Cuenca's company, Cuenca Construction Company, which later became part of the Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines (CDCP). Under the Republic Act (RA) 3741, private contractors were allowed to bid for government infrastructure projects. In 1967, CDCP won government contracts to build the Manila North and South Expressways, valued in just over $16 million. The company maintained its favored treatment until the early 80s, for the benefit Cuenca and Marcos, both of whom divided and funneled commissions and kickbacks into their own pockets.

According to Cuenca, it was in also in 1967 when he started joining Marcos to play golf, along with Robert "Bobby" Benedicto, the latter's classmate in UP Law School, and the former's close friend since the 1950s. These frequent golf sessions would continue well into the Martial Law era. For Marcos' re-election campaign in 1969, Cuenca again played the role of fundraiser.

Tenure as Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines (CDCP) Chairman
Cuenca's chairmanship of Construction & Development Corporation of the Philippines (CDCP) began in 1967, and lasted until 1983. It was during this period that Cuenca acquired much of his wealth, properties, and companies. Between these years, CDCP experienced a rapid rise of profits, mainly through what critics called "bloated" government contracts. These profits then suddenly plummeted, due to accumulation of government debts and unnecessary expenses.

CDCP Projects
Cuenca's company was involved with many projects, which were constructed at the behest of Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda Marcos.  These included the Manila North and South Luzon Expressways, the San Juanico Bridge, Imelda Marcos' Manila Bay Reclamation Project, and the Light Rail Transit (LRT).

Manila North and South Luzon Expressways
The first major government contract CDCP was awarded were for the construction of Manila North and South Luzon Expressways. By the end of 1968, the first phase of the Manila North Luzon Expressway (NLEX) was open to the public, the road measuring 28 kilometers towards Guiginto Bulacan from Balintawak. In the same year of 1968, construction for the Manila South Luzon Expressway (SLEX) began. The initial 16-kilometer stretch from Nichols to Alabang was finished by 1970.

These contracts also allowed CDCP to gain back their expenditures and/or capital  by collecting toll fees for a decade, "starting from 1968 or until it accumulated $6.1 million, whichever came first." CDCP, however, requested that the duration be extended, as well the amount increased, justifying that their cost of operations had also inflated, and that they were held responsible "not only to maintain the highways but also to improve and 'expand' them." Although a TRB report showed evidence that CDCP has amassed $25.6 million already in one year alone from 1976–77, TRB approved their request and extended the duration to thirty years. Presidential Decrees (PD) 1112 and 1113 in 1977 also imposed an increase in toll rates, forcing the public to pay steep fees that would primarily benefit CDCP and Cuenca's pocket. During a 1975 toll hike, buses boycotted the NLEX and SLEX roads. The Marcos administration retaliated by releasing a PD that closed service roads for buses, which then had no choice to pass through the expressways.

San Juanico Bridge

In 1974, the Marcos administration and the CDCP tapped Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA) loans to build the San Juanico Bridge, which crossed the San Juanico Strait and connected the two then-underdeveloped islands of Leyte and Samar. With a total length of , it remains the longest bridge spanning a body of seawater in the Philippines.

It was touted as President Ferdinand Marcos' "birthday gift" to his wife Imelda,and  it was one of the high-visibility foreign-loan projects initiated by Marcos during the run-up to the 1969 Presidential election campaign.  Completed four years later, it was inaugurated on July 2, 1973 - Imelda Marcos' birthday.

Upon its completion, economists and public works engineers tagged it as a white elephant which was "constructed several decades too soon", because its average daily traffic (ADT) was too low to justify the cost of its construction. As a result, its construction has been associated with what has been called the Marcoses' "edifice complex".

In the decades after the Marcoses administration, economic activity in Samar and Leyte has finally caught up with the bridge's intended function, and it has become an iconic tourist attraction acknowledged as "part of the identity of people in Samar and Leyte."

Manila Bay Reclamation
CDCP, again at Imelda's behest sought out a land reclamation project in Manila Bay. They were to construct an artificial 240-hectare white beach behind the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The rationale of the project was to create a 'Cannes' vibe for the  international visitors of the Manila Film Festival. The white sand was quarried from the cities of Mariveles and Cavite. This area is now known to be the Manila Bay Freeport Zone. Also at Imelda's command, CDCP and other companies worked to create a "huge complex of native-style pavilions" for representatives of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in their 1979 conference in Manila. The complex became a ghost town throughout the 1980s.

Light Rail Transit
Another project of the CDCP was the Light Rail Transit (LRT), this time partly financed by a $40 million loan from the Belgian government. A study of the World Bank in 1977 challenged the intentions of the project, stating that Manila needed a street-level transport system, not a 'high-flyer'. A street-level transport system would also cost much cheaper, with only a $8.1 million estimate, compared to the $278 million over-all cost for the LRT. Despite these skepticisms, Marcos permitted Cuenca to begin construction in October 1981.

Other projects
Other projects the CDCP under Cuenca handled were the Pantabangan Dam, and the Candaba Viaduct.

Turnover of Chairmanship to Roberto Ongpin
Cuenca eventually invited Roberto Ongpin to take his place as CDCP chairman, although Cuenca kept his position as president, and "7% ownership" of the firm.

1987 PCGG Case
On July 24, 1987, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) filed a case whose respondents included Cuenca and his son Roberto,  Imelda Marcos, Roberto Ongpin, former Philippine National Bank president Panfilo O. Domingo, Development Bank of the Philippines officer Don Ferry, and eleven others, claiming that the respondents had engaged in “schemes, devices or stratagems” to acquire ill-gotten wealth.
On August 5, 2010, the Sandiganbayan dismissed the case after throwing out 60 of the 100 documentary exhibits presented by the PCGG at the trial because they were photocopies, rather than original copies of the documents.   The 27-page decision penned by Sandiganbayan Associate Justice Alex L. Quiroz,  asserted that “since the due execution and authenticity of said photocopied documents had not been proved, the same were inadmissible in evidence. Further, the documents in question were rendered inadmissible as they were only photocopies.”

In June 2018, the Philippine Supreme Court’s First Division  dismissed the complaint of the PCGG against the 2010 Sandiganbayan ruling, stating that the Supreme Court was not able to review the evidence in order to rule on the PCGG’s complaint.   The 28-page decision penned by Supreme Court Associate Justice Noel Tijam   said that: "In order to determine the veracity of the Republic's main contention that it has established a prima facie case against respondents through its documentary and testimonial evidence, a reassessment and reexamination of the evidence is necessary[….] Unfortunately, the limited and discretionary judicial review allowed under Rule 45 does not envision a re-evaluation of the sufficiency of the evidence upon which respondent court's action was predicated. "

The PCGG released a press statement reacting to the decision, saying "Although the complaint was filed by the PCGG more than 31 years ago, and the Supreme Court decision was a mere affirmation of the Sandiganbayan ruling 8 years ago, the present officials of PCGG will still exhaust all possible legal remedies to pursue the case and to protect government interest.”

2010 biography
In the 2000s, Cuenca sought out authors Jose Dalisay Jr. and Antonette Reyes to write his biography, which was eventually published in September 2010 under the title "Builder of Bridges: the Rudy Cuenca Story".

Journalist Amando Doronila, who had himself been one of the first critics arrested when Marcos proclaimed martial law in 1972, noted that "the book is the first time a Marcos crony or a senior functionary has written about his role in the Marcos hierarchy," adding that in the book, "Rodolfo Cuenca who admits to being a Marcos crony, reveals for the first time an insider’s view of the heightening rivalry among power blocs within the Marcos inner circle as the dictator’s health started to deteriorate in 1983... The book reveals the corruption and the corrosive tensions among the Marcos’ Palace elite that contributed to its downfall during the last three years of the dictatorship."

See also
 Cronies of Ferdinand Marcos
 Ferdinand Marcos

References

Category:1928 births
Category:Filipino businesspeople
Category:Marcos Administration personnel
Category:Living people