World War II World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, though related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. In a state of "total war", the major participants threw their entire economic, industrial and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II altered the political alignment and social structure of the world. Chronology The start of the war in Europe is generally held to be 1 September 1939,[9][10] beginning with the German invasion of Poland; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. Others follow the British historian A. Background
Causes of World War I Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Britain attempting to keep the lid on the simmering cauldron of imperialist and nationalist tensions in the Balkans to prevent a general European war. They were successful in 1912 and 1913, but did not succeed in 1914. The crisis came after a long and difficult series of diplomatic clashes between the Great Powers (Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Austria-Hungary and Russia) over European and colonial issues in the decade before 1914 that had left tensions high. In turn these diplomatic clashes can be traced to changes in the balance of power in Europe since 1867.[2] The more immediate cause for the war was tensions over territory in the Balkans. Austria-Hungary competed with Serbia and Russia for territory and influence in the region and they pulled the rest of the Great Powers into the conflict through their various alliances and treaties. Background "Moltke described to me his opinion of our military situation. Domestic political factors
Rationing Di Natale ration stamps printed, but not used, as a result of the 1973 oil crisis Rationing is the controlled distribution of scarce resources, goods, or services. Rationing controls the size of the ration, one's allotted portion of the resources being distributed on a particular day or at a particular time. In economics[edit] In economics, rationing is an artificial restriction of demand. Romanian ration card, 1989 A reason for setting the price lower than would clear the market may be that there is a shortage, which would drive the market price very high. Rationing using ration stamps is only one kind of non-price rationing. Authorities which introduce rationing often have to deal with the rationed goods being sold illegally on the black market. Health care rationing[edit] Shortages of organs for donation forced the rationing of hearts, livers, lungs and kidneys in the United States. Credit rationing[edit] Military rationing[edit] Civilian rationing[edit] United States[edit] Poland[edit]
Origins and history The Constitution of the ILO was drafted in early 1919 by the Labour Commission, chaired by Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labour (AFL) in the United States. It was composed of representatives from nine countries: Belgium, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Members of the Commission on International Labour Legislation to the Paris Peace Conference. Samuel Gompers in the first row, third from the left. The process resulted in a tripartite organization, the only one of its kind, bringing together representatives of governments, employers and workers in its executive bodies. The driving forces for the ILO's creation arose from security, humanitarian, political and economic considerations. Reflecting these ideas, the Preamble of the ILO Constitution states: Early years The ILO moved to Geneva in the summer of 1920, with France's Albert Thomas as its first Director. ILO staff at the port in Portugal. Going global
Oxford spelling Oxford spelling (or Oxford English Dictionary spelling) is the spelling used by Oxford University Press (OUP), including in its Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and other publishers who are "etymology conscious", according to Merriam-Webster.[1] Oxford spelling is best known for its preference for the suffix ‑ize rather than -ise. Apart from OUP, British dictionary publishers that use it include Cassell, Collins, and Longman.[2] In digital documents it may be indicated by the language tag en-GB-oed. Defining features[edit] Oxford spelling can be recognized by its use of the suffix ‑ize instead of -ise: organization, privatize and recognizable instead of organisation, privatise and recognisable. The spelling affects about 200 verbs, and is favoured on etymological grounds, in that -ize corresponds more closely to the Greek root, -izo, of most -ize verbs.[3] The suffix -ize has been in use in the UK since the 15th century,[4] and is the spelling variation used in American English.
7 Novels Written About World War I by Dictionary.com Slideshow 7 Novels Written About World War I To commemorate the centennial of the Great War, we’re looking back at the novels written about and influenced by World War I. John Dos Passos’s 1921 Three Soldiers is known for its bold realist depiction of war. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, published in 1930, is the second book in a trilogy by British author Siegfried Sassoon. Like John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway was a volunteer ambulance driver during the Great War. This 1929 book is an autobiography by Robert Graves, a British officer on the Western Front, who was gravely wounded in 1916. Dalton Trumbo’s dark 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun chronicles a war veteran with injuries so extreme that he cannot communicate with the outside world. Published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front detailed the atrocities of trench warfare and has become the most emblematic novel of the war.
Hart's Rules Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford was an authoritative reference book and style guide published in England by Oxford University Press (OUP). Hart's Rules originated as a compilation of rules and standards by Horace Hart over almost three decades during his employment at other printing establishments, but they were first printed as a single broadsheet page for in-house use by the OUP in 1893 while Hart was Controller of the University Press. They were originally intended as a concise style-guide for the staff of the OUP, but they developed continuously over the years, were published in 1904, and soon gained wider use as a source for authoritative instructions on typesetting style, grammar, punctuation, and usage. Publishing history[edit] After their first appearance, Hart's rules were reissued in a second edition in 1894, and two further editions in 1895. See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit]
Latin declension Latin is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined (i.e. their endings alter to show grammatical case). A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five declensions, which are numbered and grouped by ending and grammatical gender. For simple declension paradigms, visit the Wiktionary appendices: First declension, Second declension, Third declension, Fourth declension, Fifth declension. Grammatical cases[edit] A complete Latin noun declension consists of up to seven grammatical cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative. They are often abbreviated to the first three letters. The sequence NOM-VOC-ACC-GEN-DAT-ABL has been the usual order taught in Britain and many Commonwealth countries since the publication of Hall Kennedy's Latin Primer (1866). Meanings and functions of the various cases[edit] Syncretism[edit] Gender-specific[edit] Case-specific[edit] Nouns[edit] Masculine:
Blue Force Tracking Blue Force Tracking is a United States military term for a GPS-enabled system that provides military commanders and forces with location information about friendly (and despite its name, also hostile) military forces. In NATO military symbology, blue typically denotes friendly forces. The system provides a common picture of the location of friendly forces and therefore is referred to as the "Blue Force" tracker. Systems[edit] Blue Force Tracking systems consist of a computer, used to display location information, a satellite terminal and satellite antenna, used to transmit location and other military data, a Global Positioning System receiver (to determine its own position), command-and-control software (to send and receive orders, and many other battlefield support functions), and mapping software, usually in the form of a geographic information system (GIS), that plots the BFT device on a map. Additional capability in some BFT devices is found in route planning tools. Adoption[edit]
Oxford English Dictionary The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1988. The online version has been available since 2000, and as of August 2010 was receiving two million hits per month from paying subscribers. The third edition of the dictionary will probably only appear in electronic form. The chief executive of Oxford University Press, Nigel Portwood, feels it unlikely that it will ever be printed.[5] Entries and relative size[edit] According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to "key in" text to convert it to machine readable form which consists of a total of 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to store it electronically.[6] As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Despite its impressive size, the OED is neither the world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. It continues: History[edit] Origins[edit] Early editors[edit]
Low Orbit Ion Cannon The software has inspired the creation of an independent JavaScript version called JS LOIC, as well as LOIC-derived web version called Low Orbit Web Cannon. These enable a DoS from a web browser.[4] Use LOIC performs a denial-of-service (DoS) attack (or when used by multiple individuals, a DDoS attack) on a target site by flooding the server with TCP or UDP packets with the intention of disrupting the service of a particular host. Countermeasures LOIC attacks are easily identified in system logs, and the attack can be tracked down to the IP addresses used at the attack.[8] Notable uses Project Chanology and Operation Payback Operation Megaupload Origin of name The LOIC application is named after the Ion cannon, a fictional weapon from many sci-fi works.[14] Other implementations Another implementation of LOIC named LOIC++[15] has been made to run natively on Linux. References External links
Armenian Genocide The Armenian Genocide[7] (Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն Hayots Tseghaspanutyun),[8] also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, traditionally by Armenians, as Medz Yeghern (Armenian: Մեծ Եղեռն, "Great Crime"),[9] was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects from their historic homeland within the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate term for the mass killings of Armenians that began under Ottoman rule in 1915.[22] It has in recent years been faced with repeated calls to recognize them as genocide. Background Prelude to genocide
July Crisis This picture is usually associated with the arrest of Gavrilo Princip, although some[1][2] believe it depicts Ferdinand Behr, a bystander. The July Crisis was a diplomatic crisis among the major powers of Europe in the summer of 1914 that led to the First World War. Immediately after Gavrilo Princip, a Yugoslav nationalist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo, a series of diplomatic maneuverings led to an ultimatum from Austria-Hungary to Serbia, and ultimately to war. This ultimatum was part of a coercive program meant to weaken the Kingdom of Serbia as a threat to Austria-Hungary's control of the northern Balkans which had a significant southern Slavic population, including a Serbian community in Bosnia. One month after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, thus initiating the First World War. Assassination and investigation[edit] Serbian involvement[edit] The last assassin[edit]
The Holocaust The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt")[2] also known as Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "the catastrophe"; Yiddish: חורבן, Churben or Hurban, from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the mass murder or genocide of approximately six million Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout the German Reich and German-occupied territories.[3] Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.[4] Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men.[5] A network of over 40,000 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territory were used to concentrate, hold, and kill Jews and other victims.[6] The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Etymology and use of the term Distinctive features Origins