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Spanish Civil War. The war began after a pronunciamiento (declaration of opposition) by a group of generals of the Spanish Republican Armed Forces, under the leadership of José Sanjurjo, against the elected government of the Second Spanish Republic, at the time under the leadership of President Manuel Azaña. The rebel coup was supported by a number of conservative groups, including the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right,[nb 3] monarchists such as the religious conservative Carlists, and the Fascist Falange. [nb 4][5] The coup was supported by military units in Morocco, Pamplona, Burgos, Valladolid, Cádiz, Cordova, and Seville. However, rebelling units in important cities—such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao, and Málaga—were unable to capture their objectives, and those cities remained in control of the government. The Nationalists advanced from their strongholds in the south and west, capturing most of Spain's northern coastline in 1937.

Background[edit] Military coup[edit] Outcome[edit] People's Olympiad. The People's Olympiad (Catalan: Olimpíada Popular, Spanish Olimpiada Popular) was a planned international multi-sport event that was intended to take place in Barcelona, the capital of the autonomous region of Catalonia within the Spanish Republic. It was conceived as a protest event against the 1936 Summer Olympics being held in Berlin during the Nazi regime. Despite gaining considerable support, the People's Olympiad was never held, as a result of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona would later host the 1992 Summer Olympics, after the Spanish transition to democracy that followed the end of the Franco dictatorship. Background[edit] In 1931, the International Olympic Committee had selected Berlin, then the capital of the Weimar Republic, to host the 1936 Summer Olympics at the 29th IOC Session in Barcelona.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War just as the games were to begin, the alternate games were hastily cancelled. In popular culture[edit] See also[edit] The Spanish Armada. Throughout 1587 and early 1588, rumours that Philip of Spain was assembling a massive fleet to conquer England and Ireland were spreading like wildfire. Reports came to Ireland mainly from the crews of trading ships returning from the ports of Spain and France. English intelligence sources confirmed these rumours but Elizabeth evidently believed that a war situation could be avoided, even up to early 1588, when the massive fleet was nearing readiness to sail from Lisbon. From the outset, the fleet seemed destined for bad luck. After a month at sea, little progress had been made due to unfavourable winds. Food which was badly packed had already gone rotten and drinking water had gone stagnant. Scarcely had the major part of the fleet reached the shelter of Corunna, in the North West of Spain, than a fierce gale arose in the Bay of Biscay, scattering the remaining ships.

On the same day, another Spanish ship, the Zuniga, appeared off Liscannor. The emergence of supremacist puritanism in modern Islam – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics. The real challenge that confronts Muslim intellectuals today is that political interests have come to dominate public discourses to the point that moral investigations and thinking have become marginalized in modern Islam. In the age of postcolonialism, Muslims have become largely preoccupied with the attempt to remedy a collective feeling of powerlessness and a frustrating sense of political defeat, often by engaging in highly sensationalistic acts of power symbolism. The normative imperatives and intellectual subtleties of the Islamic moral tradition are not treated with the analytic and critical rigor that the Islamic tradition rightly deserves, but are rendered subservient to political expedience and symbolic displays of power.

Far from being authentic expressions of inherited Islamic paradigms, or a natural outgrowth of the classical tradition, these groups, and their impulsive and reactive modes of thinking, are a byproduct of colonialism and modernity. Myanmar. The ancient Chinese exam that inspired modern job recruitment. 22 July 2013Last updated at 19:41 ET In Victorian England, getting a job was all about who you knew. But have things really changed that much, asks Lucy Kellaway. Getting an office job can be a complicated process. There are the headhunters and references, psychometric testing and endless interviews. Even these aren't the straightforward things they used to be. They have started asking wacky questions. Yet whatever the method, everyone agrees that the aim is to hire on merit. The idea that the best man for the job was the one who was, well, the best, was once quite unheard of.

Author Anthony Trollope described the hopelessly unprofessional way he was hired by the Post Office in 1834. "I was asked to copy some lines from the Times newspaper with an old quill pen, and at once made a series of blots and false spellings… (The next day) I was seated at a desk without any further reference to my competency. " But things were changing. But the issue was contentious. Continue reading the main story. Remembering Sri Lanka's Black July. 23 July 2013Last updated at 02:16 GMT The mob violence that erupted after an attack on 13 soldiers triggered a 26-year civil war Thirty years ago, Tamil separatists stepping up militant attacks in northern Sri Lanka killed 13 soldiers who reported for duty only a day earlier. Over the next few days, mobs of the Sinhalese majority took revenge, killing between 400 and 3,000 Tamils around the country and triggering a civil war that lasted 26 years and sent hundreds of thousands of Tamils into exile.

The BBC's Charles Haviland reports on the legacy of what came to be known as Black July. In the stillness of a Colombo afternoon, as a clock chimes three, an elderly woman looks back 30 years and remembers. "There was a first mob of about 80-odd young guys with iron rods and things. Priya Balachandran - the BBC has changed her name as she prefers anonymity - recalls the time Colombo and much of southern Sri Lanka seemed gripped by madness. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote. Bastille Day: How peace and revolution got mixed up. 13 July 2013Last updated at 19:54 ET By Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris Monarchists did not want France's national day to be remembered as a day of bloodshed, historians say When the French parade on Sunday for their national day they will be marking the fall of the Bastille prison-fortress on 14 July 1789.

Everyone knows that. Or do they? In fact there is a surprising twist in the story of this proud Republican anniversary. Without realising it, what the French may technically be celebrating is not the storming of the Bastille but an event that took place exactly one year later, on 14 July 1790: the Fete de la Federation. To explain how this came about requires a small detour into French history. It is easy to forget that for the first century after 1789, France lived mainly under the kind of monarchical regimes the revolution was supposed to have done away with. Not until 1870, after defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, did France establish a lasting republican system. 'City of hope'

House of Habsburg. The House takes its name from Habsburg Castle, a fortress built in the 1020s in present-day Switzerland by Count Radbot of Klettgau, who chose to name his fortress Habsburg. His grandson, Otto II, was the first to take the fortress name as his own, adding "Count of Habsburg" to his title. The House of Habsburg gathered dynastic momentum through the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. By 1276, Count Radbot's seventh generation descendant, Rudolph of Habsburg, had moved the family's power base from Habsburg Castle to the Duchy of Austria. Rudolph had become King of Germany in 1273, and the dynasty of the House of Habsburg was truly entrenched in 1276 when Rudolph became ruler of Austria, which the Habsburgs ruled until 1918.

A series of dynastic marriages[2] enabled the family to vastly expand its domains, to include Burgundy, Spain and her colonial empire, Bohemia, Hungary, and other territories into the inheritance. The House of Habsburg became extinct in the 18th century. History[edit] Difference Between UK, Britain, And England. Afghanistan in the 1950s and 60s - In Focus. Fractured by internal conflict and foreign intervention for centuries, Afghanistan made several tentative steps toward modernization in the mid-20th century.

In the 1950s and 1960s, some of the biggest strides were made toward a more liberal and westernized lifestyle, while trying to maintain a respect for more conservative factions. Though officially a neutral nation, Afghanistan was courted and influenced by the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War, accepting Soviet machinery and weapons, and U.S. financial aid. This time was a brief, relatively peaceful era, when modern buildings were constructed in Kabul alongside older traditional mud structures, when burqas became optional for a time, and the country appeared to be on a path toward a more open, prosperous society. Progress was halted in the 1970s, as a series of bloody coups, invasions, and civil wars began, continuing to this day, reversing almost all of the steps toward modernization taken in the 50s and 60s.

Viewpoint: Could one man have shortened the Vietnam War? 8 July 2013Last updated at 23:58 GMT Konrad Kellen was an unknown defence analyst who might have changed the course of the Vietnam War if only people had listened to him, argues Malcolm Gladwell. Listening well is a gift. The ability to hear what someone says and not filter it through your own biases is an instinctive ability similar to having a photographic memory. And I think we have a great deal of trouble with people who have this gift. There are many examples of this phenomenon, but I want to focus on the story of Konrad Kellen, a truly great listener. During the Vietnam War, he heard something that should have changed the course of history. Continue reading the main story About the author Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist and author Hear more on this story in Radio 4's Pop-Up Ideas, broadcast on Tuesday 9 July at 09:30 BST and repeated on 10 July at 20:45 BST This piece is based on an edited transcript Or catch up with iPlayer Kellen was born in 1913.

Continue reading the main story. Remembering the veterans of 'forgotten war' 10 July 2013Last updated at 19:59 ET By Stephen Robb BBC News The British contingent was mostly made up of young national servicemen Just a handful of years after World War II ended, the US, Britain, China and many more countries became embroiled in another conflict lasting three years and whose death toll is thought to be in the millions. Yet the Korean War is often referred to as the "forgotten war" by British veterans of it.

"It was a war that seemed extremely remote, the other side of the world," says Keith Taylor, who served as a 2nd Lieutenant with the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. "Most people had no idea where Korea was, and had even less idea what the war was about. " In fact, as the Cold War turned hot for the first time, it involved a fundamental battle between democracy and communism. After the Soviet-installed communist dictatorship of North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the US led a United Nations force from numerous countries that drove the North Koreans back. Io9. Which protectorates are not listening to the US via the Snowden situation? Well, since when have the South American countries started thumbing their nose at their "friend" to the North?

America started losing its grip there when they stopped installing their own regional administrators - twenty, even ten years ago, they'd have lined up to prevent Snowden from travelling there. Historically, Hong Kong would have handed him straight over, Ireland wouldn't have even considered asylum, nor would Germany and France have had so many ministers line up to say it was Europes job to protect him. I'd argue it's a hegemony, not an empire. But it's a semantic difference. Ah, but we still had a rather large Empire before the second world war - Churchill effectively had to either give up India or lose the war, and he bitterly hated the idea of giving them their country back, (woo war hero lol). Genocide in the 20th Century.

Adolf Hitler to his Army commanders, August 22, 1939: "Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my 'Death's Head Units' with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians? " The term 'Genocide' was coined by Polish writer and attorney, Raphael Lemkin, in 1941 by combining the Greek word 'genos' (race) with the Latin word 'cide' (killing).

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