The 2007 Houston elections took place on May 12, June 16, and November 6, 2007. All City Council posts, the City Controller, and the Mayor all had elections. All positions were non-partisan.

Mayor
See 2007 Houston mayoral election

City Controller

The 2007 Houston City Controller election was a non disputed election with Incumbent Annise Parker being re-elected to a third term with virtually 100% of the vote.

City Council At-large 1

In the 2007 Houston City Council At-large 1 election, Peter Hoyt Brown was re-elected to a second term with 100% of the vote.

City Council At-large 2

In the 2007 Houston City Council At-large 2 election, Sue Lovell was re-elected to a second term against opponent Michael Griffin (Not the former administrator of NASA).

City Council At-large 3

2007 was a rough year for At-large 3, First in May many candidates dove into a crowded special election, the top two, Melissa Noriega and Roy Morales, then ran in the run-off in June. Noriega won but later faced Morales again in November and was again successful.

City Council At-large 4

In the 2007 Houston City Council At-large 4 election, Ronald Green, was re-elected to a third term. He was given 100% of the vote from the voters.

City Council At-large 5

In the 2007 Houston City Council At-large 5 election, Jolanda Jones was elected to an at-large position, after a run-off.

City Council District A

In the 2007 Houston City Council District A election, Toni Lawrence was re-elected to a third term with 100% of the vote.

City Council District B

In the 2007 Houston City Council District B election, Jarvis Johnson was re-elected to a second term.

City Council District C

In the 2007 Houston City Council District C election, Anne Clutterbuck was re-elected to a second term.

City Council District D

In the 2007 Houston City Council District D election, Wanda Adams was elected after a run-off.

City Council District E

In the Houston City Council District E election, Mike Sullivan was elected after a run-off.

City Council District F

In the 2007 Houston City Council District F election, M. J. Khan was elected to a third term with 100% of the vote.

City Council District G

In the 2007 Houston City Council District G election, Pam Holm was elected to a third term with 100% of the vote.

City Council District H

In the 2007 Houston City Council District H election, Adrian Garcia was elected to a third term with 100% of the vote. He resigned one year into his term to become the Harris County Sheriff.

City Council District I

In the 2007 Houston City Council District I election, James Rodriguez was elected as a new council member.

mayoral election
Houston
Non-partisan elections


Major General Thomas Savage, 3rd Earl Rivers ( – 14 September 1694) was an English nobleman and soldier.

He was the first son of John Savage, 2nd Earl Rivers by his wife Catherine, daughter of William Parker, 13th Baron Morley. His father was closely involved in the English Civil War on the Royalist side from 1641. Consequently, he lost his castles at Halton and Rocksavage and their contents were confiscated.

About 1647, he married firstly Elizabeth (b. 1627), illegitimate daughter of Emanuel Scrope, 1st Earl of Sunderland by his mistress Martha Jeanes. Their children included: Thomas, who married Charlotte, daughter of Charles Stanley, 8th Earl of Derby; Richard, who succeeded as 4th Earl Rivers; Elizabeth; and Annabella. They also had other children who died young.

He was widely believed to be a Roman Catholic, and during the Popish Plot he was denounced by informers, but the evidence was so flimsy that no charges were ever brought against him.

About 1684, he married secondly Arabella, daughter of Robert Bertie, 3rd Earl of Lindsey. They had no issue.

He died at his house in Great Queen Street in the Parish of St Giles in the Fields, Middlesex. A memorial to him by William Stanton was installed in St Michaels Church, Macclesfield.

Documented evidence exists in the form of a pamphlet which details a murder by a Thomas Savage of St Giles in the Fields. It is likely the Thomas in question is the son of the 3rd Earl Rivers, or a family relation.

References

1628 births
1694 deaths
Earls Rivers
17th-century English nobility
Savage family


Un-D-Nyable Entertainment is a record label founded by Frank Thomas (“The Big Hurt”), the star player and home run hitter of the Chicago White Sox.

Label history
In the fall of 1996, after funding the development of a number of producers in Atlanta for roughly three years, Frank felt it was time to move things to the next level. He moved the producers to Chicago, leased two floors in a downtown Chicago office building that had recently been the studios for a PBS radio station, WBEZ, and equipped it with high quality industry standard recording equipment.

The first artist signed to Un-D-Nyable was Virgo Williams. Virgo was the featured vocalist on a Sony/So So Def Records album release "So So Def Bass All Stars" that sold over 560,000 units in the US. The hit single was "My Boo", featuring Virgo.

In 1997, Paul David Wilson accepted an offer from Frank, to serve as President of Un-D-Nyable Entertainment. Paul agreed to run the label in partnership with Thomas.

Said Wilson,

Their initial release was a CD single entitled “3-5, The White Sox Got’em Open Up Wide,” with Frank Thomas featuring D. Stoy.  Jet magazine wrote:

In June 1997, Un-D-Nyable, with Wilson, signed 15-year-old Dejah Gomez to an exclusive recording contract.

In 1998, Chicago quartet Entourage (James “Slique” Adams , Floyd Massey, Eric "Papi312" Wade
 and Irone Guyton, a R&B singing group) was signed to the label, followed by rap artist Ant-Dub and STRONG, an R&B group that was a family of five brothers.

In late 1998, Wilson and Thomas produced the debut CD for Dejah Gomez (“Dejah”) and Entourage (“The Fall Backs of a Playa”)   and matching videos for the CD songs and a CD single title “I Can’t Hide” featuring STRONG.  In December, a single “When,” by Entourage, they charted on Billboard. Soon, both Dejah and Entourage were starting to “take off,” but, in January 1999, just as the action and excitement was building for his young record company, Wilson suffered a stroke. Thomas subsequently did not renew Wilson's contract.

"Frank's vision always was for Un-D-Nyable to have a street hip-hop kind of a vibe," Regina Daniel, a publicist who has represented Un-D-Nyable.  "Where Paul was leading it was not necessarily where Frank's vision was."  Danielle Dickerson, Promotions Manager of the label, she said  "the company's problems had more to do with the inherent difficulty of competing against the major companies than any failure by Un-D-Nyable."  On June 25, 1999, the main office were closed due to poor record sales and lack of funding.  Three months later in September, 1999 the studio equipment was sold and the Un-D-Nyable Recording studio was closed.

Albums

Singles

References

American record labels


Phillipsburg Mall was an indoor shopping mall located along U.S. Route 22 in Warren County, New Jersey, United States. Despite its name, the mall was actually located on the border of Lopatcong Township and Pohatcong Township, just east of Phillipsburg.

The mall was located on the eastern edge of the Lehigh Valley, the metropolitan area of Allentown, Pennsylvania. The mall's anchor store was Kohl's. There were 3 other anchor stores that were once The Bon-Ton, Sears, and Black Rose Antiques & Collectibles. As of February 2021, the mall is scheduled to be demolished in the near future.

History

Crown American first announced Phillipsburg Mall in 1985. The original anchor stores chosen were Bradlees, Sears, and Hess's, then a subsidiary of Crown American. As Bradlees was undergoing store closings at the time, Crown American instead chose to make that anchor space a Kmart. The Mall was originally slated for a 1987 opening, but was delayed due to highway and sewage system issues. Upon opening on September 24, 1989, the mall had Kmart, Hess's (the first and only
location in New Jersey), and Sears as its anchor stores, as well as 90 smaller stores, with more to come later in the year. Over 7,000 people attended the mall's grand opening. The Hess's store even had to skip its ribbon-cutting ceremony due to the crowd of 2,000–3,000 waiting to shop there. Traffic on U.S Route 22 was backed up to a mile from the mall in both directions on opening day. JCPenney would later open in March 1990. The Hess's store was sold to The Bon-Ton in 1994. Kmart closed its store at Phillipsburg Mall in 2002 as part of bankruptcy proceedings; one year later, the space was sold to Kohl's. The store would open in April 2004.

PREIT, which acquired the Crown American portfolio in 2003, sold the mall to Mason Asset Management/Namdar Realty Group for $11.5 million in 2013. On January 15, 2014, it was announced that the JCPenney store would be closing as part of a plan to close 33 locations nationwide. In addition to this anchor, many stores left the mall in 2013 and 2014.

As those stores were closing, other new shops began to open. An antique shop called Black Rose Antiques & Collectibles began to occupy the former JCPenney space. The store opened on January 1, 2017. Meanwhile, a record store called Spin Me Round Records opened near the former JCPenney space. In 2017, a Gold's Gym opened in the space once occupied by Hot Topic and several restaurants.

On November 2, 2017, Sears Holdings announced that Sears would also be closing as part of a plan to close 63 Sears and Kmart stores nationwide. The Phillipsburg Mall location closed on January 28, 2018.

In November, 2017, Bon-Ton, struggling with around $1.1 billion in debt, announced a plan to close over 40 stores in 2018, including its Phillipsburg Mall location. On January 31, 2018, Bon-Ton confirmed that closing sales would begin February 1 and run for 10–12 weeks until the store is closed in April. The store closed on April 29, 2018.

In August 2018, due to a heavy rain storm, an approximately  portion of roof in the former Sears collapsed. Due to the roof collapse, stores that were on the Sears side of the mall moved closer to the Kohls side of the mall and Sears was blocked off. In September 2018, the Old Navy store, that had opened around 2000, had closed and relocated down the street to a Shopping Center.

The former Sears was later demolished in August 2019, followed by the former Bon-Ton in October of that year. Communication from mall ownership about changes has been virtually non-existent.

Closure and redevelopment

Mason Asset Management President Elliot Nassim said in March 2019 that the property "...is better suited as something other than a mall." Throughout 2019, many stores in the mall closed, including AT&T, Gold's Gym, H&M, Victoria's Secret, and others. On December 23, 2019, the remaining tenants of Phillipsburg Mall received lease termination notifications, informing them they had 30 days to vacate the mall. As of July 2020, the interior mall was shuttered.
On January 28, 2020, Black Rose Antiques announced that it would be closing in March 2020. In March 2020, Kohl's stated that it would not be closing because it is separately owned.

On January 29, 2021, Mason Asset Management announced that demolition of the mall is scheduled to begin "within the next couple of weeks" and will be completed by June 2021 to make way for a proposed  warehouse.

References

Lopatcong Township, New Jersey
Pohatcong Township, New Jersey
Phillipsburg, New Jersey
Shopping malls in New Jersey
1989 establishments in New Jersey
2020 disestablishments in New Jersey
Buildings and structures in Warren County, New Jersey
Shopping malls established in 1989
Tourist attractions in Warren County, New Jersey
Namdar Realty Group
Defunct shopping malls in the United States
Shopping malls disestablished in 2020


Vilabertran (1913) is a painting by the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. This is among Dalí's earliest works, having been painted when he was about nine years old. It is a landscape painting from Vilabertran, which and where Dalí often drew in his early period.

See also
 List of works by Salvador Dalí

1913 paintings
Paintings by Salvador Dalí


Eastern Bloc politics followed the Red Army's occupation of much of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and the Soviet Union's installation of Soviet-controlled Marxist–Leninist governments in the region that would be later called the Eastern Bloc through a process of bloc politics and repression. These governments contained apparent elements of representative democracy (such as parliaments, elections, and sometimes even multiple political parties) to initially conceal the process.

Once in power, each country's Soviet-controlled Communist Party took permanent control of the administration, political organs, police, societal organizations and economic structures to ensure that no effective opposition could arise and to control socioeconomic and political life therein. Party and social purges were employed along with the extensive use of secret police organizations modeled on the Soviet KGB to monitor and control local populations. While multiple political parties continued to nominally exist in some countries, they were all subordinated to the government, and supported government policies. While elections continued to be held, voters were usually presented with a single candidate. The national parliaments composed of representatives elected in this manner met infrequently and always approved government proposals.

Background

Creation of the Eastern Bloc

In 1922, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SFSR, approved the Treaty of Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Soviet Union. At the end of World War II by mid-1945, all eastern and central European capitals were controlled by the Soviet Union. During the final stages of the war, the Soviet Union began the creation of the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics that were originally effectively ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Eastern Poland, eastern Finland, the Baltics, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, now called Moldova, were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. The eastern Polish territories remain part of Ukraine and Belarus as of the early 21st century.

Red Army and NKVD personnel began to impose the communist system in 1939. They made extensive use of local communists, socialists, and their collaborators to wage a campaign of mass violence and mass deportations to camps in order to "Sovietize" the areas under their occupation. The Soviet invasion of these areas in 1939 created local allies and produced NKVD officers experienced in imposing the communist system. The Soviet Union began planning the transformation of Eastern Europe even before the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR. There is evidence that the USSR did not expect to create a communist bloc quickly or easily. Ivan Maiskii, Soviet foreign minister under Stalin, wrote in 1944 that all European nations would eventually become communist states but only after a period of three to four decades.

Central and Eastern European communist leaders generally participated in "national front" coalitions during the 1930s to oppose Nazi expansion. These coalitions were modeled upon those of Spain and France. Historian Tony Judt described the civil war in Spain as “a dry run for the seizure of power in Eastern Europe after 1945.”

These included Eastern Poland (annexed by the Soviet Union), Latvia (became Latvia SSR), Estonia (became Estonian SSR), Lithuania (became Lithuania SSR), part of eastern Finland (became Karelo-Finnish SSR) and northeastern Romania (part of which became the Moldavian SSR). By 1945, these additional annexed countries totaled approximately 180,000 additional square miles (465,000 km2), or slightly more than the area of West Germany, East Germany and Austria combined.

Other states were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Bulgaria,  the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Romania, the People's Republic of Albania, and later the German Democratic Republic from the Soviet zone of German occupation.  The Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was also considered part of the Bloc, though a Tito–Stalin split occurred in 1948

Conditions in the Eastern Bloc

Throughout the Eastern Bloc, both in the Soviet Socialist Republic and the rest of the Bloc, Russia was given prominence, and referred to as the naibolee vydajuščajasja nacija (the most prominent nation) and the rukovodjaščij narod (the leading people). The Soviets encouraged the worship of everything Russian and the reproduction of their own Communist structural hierarchies in each of the Bloc states.

The defining characteristic of communism implemented in the Eastern Bloc was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable spheres. While over 15 million Eastern Bloc residents migrated westward from 1945 to 1949, emigration was effectively halted in the early 1950s, with the Soviet approach to controlling national movement emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets mandated expropriation and   etatization of private property.

The Soviet-style "replica regimes" that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced Soviet command economies, but also adopted the brutal methods employed by Joseph Stalin and Soviet secret police to suppress real and potential opposition.  Furthermore, the Eastern Bloc experienced economic mis-development by central planners resulting in those countries following a path of extensive rather than intensive development, and lagged far behind their western European counterparts in per capita Gross Domestic Product. In addition, media in the Eastern Bloc served as an organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party. The state owned radio and television organizations while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the ruling communist party.

Seizing control

Early history

The initial issue arising in countries occupied by the Red Army in 1944 and 1945 was the manner in which to transform occupation power into control over domestic development. At first, western countries' willingness to support "antifascist" action and for "democratization" with a socialist element helped Soviet efforts to permit communists in their respective countries to initiate a process of gradual almost imperceptibly slow Sovietization.  Because communists were relatively small minorities in all countries except Czechoslovakia, they were initially instructed to form coalitions in their respective countries.

At the war's end, concealment of the Kremlin's role was considered crucial to neutralize resistance and to make the regimes appear not only led by local people, but also to resemble "bourgeois democracies". Joseph Stalin had already effectively sealed off outside access to the Soviet Union since 1935 (and until his death), effectively permitting no foreign travel inside the Soviet Union such that outsiders did not know of the political processes that had taken place therein. During this period, and even for 25 years after Stalin's death, the few diplomats and foreign correspondents permitted inside the Soviet Union were usually restricted to within a few miles of Moscow, their phones were tapped, their residences were restricted to foreigner-only locations and they were constantly followed by Soviet authorities.  Dissenters who approached such foreigners were arrested. For many years after World War II, even the best informed foreigners did not know the number of arrested or executed Soviet citizens, or how poorly the Soviet economy had performed.

In the other countries of the Bloc, Stalin stated that the Eastern European version of democracy was a mere modification of western "bourgeois democracy." Consequently, Soviet takeover of control at the outset generally followed a three-stage "bloc politics" process: (i) a general coalition of left-wing, antifascist forces; (ii) a bogus coalition in which communists neutralized those in other parties not willing to accept communist supremacy; and (iii) complete communist domination, frequently exercised in a new party formed by the fusion of communist and other leftist groups.  At the same time, Soviet advisers were placed in government institutions, with higher concentrations in the army and the police, while trade agreements gave the USSR a preponderant influence in local economies. The result of the process was that, from 1944 to 1948 in the Eastern Bloc, political parties, organizations, voluntary associations and territorial communities were covertly steered to gradually incapacitate, dissolve, and spend themselves by their own efforts in various processes.

Socioeconomic reforms

Stalin felt that socioeconomic transformation was indispensable to establish Soviet control, reflecting the Marxist-Leninist view that material bases—the distribution of the means of production—shaped social and political relations. This "sovietization" involved the gradual assimilation of local political, socioeconomic, and cultural patterns into the Soviet model while severing ties with “bourgeois” Western values and traditions.  Moscow trained cadres were placed into crucial power positions to fulfill orders regarding sociopolitical transformation.  Elimination of the bourgeoisie's social and financial power by expropriation of landed and industrial property was accorded absolute priority.   These measures were publicly billed as reforms rather than socioeconomic transformations. Throughout the whole of eastern Europe, except for Czechoslovakia, organizations such as trade unions and associations representing various social, professional and other groups, were erected with only one organization for each category, with competition excluded.  Those organizations were managed by communist cadres, though some diversity was permitted initially. Soviet and local concerns formed "joint stock companies" permitting Soviet officials to exercise direct control over important sections of the economy.

Concealment

At first, the Soviet Union concealed its role, with the transformations appearing as a modification of western "bourgeois democracy." As one young communist was told in East Germany: "it's got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control."

With the initial exception of Czechoslovakia, activities by political parties had to adhere to "Bloc politics", with parties eventually having to accept membership in an "antifascist" "bloc" obliging them to act only in mutual "consensus".  Moscow cadres in key positions would refuse via veto to provide consensus for opposed changes, while those who opposed communist proposed changes were accused of insubordination to Soviet authorities, frequently followed by harsh punishment. When such measures did not produce the desired effect, occupation officers would directly intervene. Accordingly, elections—which had been promised to the Western allies—did not offer a difference in policy choices.

Bloc politics eventually forced purported bourgeois politicians and parties to choose between unconditional political surrender and outright rejection.  If they chose the former, they would alienate their followers and marginalize themselves, while the latter case led to defamation as deviators from the "anti-fascist democratic consensus" and "traitors" to the people, followed by ensuing isolation, prosecution, and liquidation.

Consequently, the bloc system permitted the Soviet Union to exercise Eastern Bloc domestic control indirectly.  "Bourgeois" politicians willing to follow communist bloc leadership and to support socioeconomic reforms were recruited to further the illusion of classical democracy.  Similar non-communist officials were put in place in some administration positions, while a reliable communist cadre worked behind the scenes to control the apparatus and decision-making process.  Crucial departments such as those responsible for personnel, education, general police, secret police, and youth, were strictly communist run. From the outset, the multiparty system established by Soviet occupation authorities was planned to be temporary. Two kinds of alliances were envisaged: permanent "natural" alliances with related social forces such as peasants willing to submit to communist vanguard parties and temporary accords with bourgeois parties necessary for temporary objectives.  Parties, such as Social Democrats, were seen as belonging to the permanent natural category, but would be eventually expected to undergo transformations.   Moscow cadres distinguished "progressive forces"  from "reactionary elements", and rendered both powerless through self-emasculation or future self-sacrifice.  Such procedures were repeated continuously until communists had gained unlimited power, while only politicians who were unconditionally supportive of Soviet policy remained.

Political systems

"People's democracy"
Despite the initial institutional design of communism implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Eastern Bloc (see Stalinism), subsequent development varied across countries.  In satellite states, after peace treaties were initially concluded, opposition was essentially liquidated, fundamental steps toward socialism were enforced, and Kremlin leaders sought to strengthen control therein. While communism came to power in the Soviet Union following the Russian civil war, of some embarrassment to the ruling regimes was that, in the rest of the Eastern Bloc, it came to power with the occupation of the Red Army. What emerged is what Hungarian communist László Rajk (who was later executed) called "a dictatorship of the proletariat without the Soviet form," a "people's democracy." The defining characteristic of communism implemented therein was the unique symbiosis of the state with society and the economy, resulting in politics and economics losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable spheres.  Initially, Stalin directed systems that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, democratic governance (dubbed "bourgeois democracy" in Soviet parlance), and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state.  The resulting states aspired to total control of a political center backed by an extensive and active repressive apparatus, and a central justification of ostensibly Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Vestiges of "bourgeois democracy"
Vestigial democratic institutions were never entirely destroyed, resulting in facade of representative institutions. Parliaments rubber-stamped decisions made by ruling parties.  So little attention was paid to them that some of those serving in parliaments were actually dead and officials would sometimes openly state that they would seat members who had lost elections. Constitutions were promulgated but never enforced. Government institutions practiced democratic centralism, where subordinate organs of the party and state unconditionally supported the decisions of senior party leaders. Decisions of consequence were made by the ruling communist parties, which were not political parties in the western sense, but apparatuses for totalitarian control of the state and society. They did not represent sectional interests, they imposed them. Parliaments were elected, but their meetings occurred only a few days per year and they served to only create legitimacy for politburo decisions.

Ruling parties

Non-Soviet Eastern Bloc Communist Parties held congresses every five years, not long after the Soviet Communist Party had held its congress, to elect central committees and endorse new party programs, though "emergency" congresses could be called by central committees.  Attendance at party congresses was frequently given as a reward for long service.  Parties also sometimes held national conferences to address specific issues.

The Central Committees usually met in full, or plenary, sessions two to three times per year to elect members of the politburo and the communist party "secretariat", which numbered 15-20 senior party individuals who each was in charge of a department of the party secretariat.  These departments were either party "shadows" of the actual government departments they ended up governing (e.g., agriculture, foreign affairs, education, etc.) or party specific institutions in charge of cadres or a party control commission that investigated any alleged infringements of party discipline.

The General Secretary or First Secretary of the Central Committee was the most powerful figure in each regime.  He exercised his day-to-day authority through the politburo or presidium, which generally possessed 10-15 full members. During the Stalinist period, the head of the party also led the executive branch, with variations in the practice occurring after Stalin's death, though executive authority always resided in the party's highest organs.  In Romania after the mid-1960s, no politburo existed and, instead, General Secretary Nicolae Ceauşescu nominated a small permanent executive committee from which he nominated a small permanent bureau consisting of himself, his wife, and four to five other members.  In general, the longer the First or General Secretary was in office, the more powerful he became, and he could generally retain power as long as he remained healthy.  The degree of leadership freedom varied, with Ceauşescu facing little debate, while Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov could undertake actions such as forcing Bulgarian names on ethnic Turks without even discussing the matter.

The party over which the politburo held sway was not a mass party but, comporting with Leninist tradition, a smaller selective party of between three percent (e.g., Albania) and fourteen percent (e.g., Czechoslovakia) of the country's population who had accepted total obedience.  For example, a Polish communist described faith in the Polish United Workers' Party as that it "means that his faith in it is uncritical at every stage, no matter what the party is saying.  It is a person with the ability to adapt his mentality and his conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the party is never wrong, even though it is wrong all the time."  Entry usually required a period of probation. Those who secured membership in this selective party received considerable rewards, such as access to special lower priced shops with a greater selection of goods, special schools, holiday facilities, cinemas, homes, furniture, works of art, and official cars with special license plates so that police and others could identify these members from a distance. These members, also called nomenklatura, also obtained permission to travel abroad, which was rarely given to the general public. Envelopes containing banknotes, and sometimes foreign hard currency, were not infrequently passed out to certain party or politburo members.  After the confiscation through nationalizations from prior owners following Soviet occupation, the party at first possessed considerable additional property and real estate to give members.  All members possessed a party card or book in which were recorded attendance at meetings, service to the party, and any deviation from party conduct. Periodically, these cards would be inspected, frequently as a prelude to a culling or purge of those considered undesirable or insufficiently committed.

The Communist Party was at the center of the political system in the Eastern Bloc, with its leading role being absolute political rule with virtually no political discussion.  Most of the parties in non-Soviet Eastern Bloc countries differed from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in that they were technically coalitions. Only in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania (and only after 1965) did the parties use the word "communist" in their name.  The ruling parties in the Eastern Bloc included:

While, in some states, other parties were allowed to exist, frequently their only substantial function was to legitimize the existence of a national front or some similar umbrella organization.  The organization of the party was based on the "territorial-production" principle, meaning that the lowest level unit could be based either in an area or in a place of work.  The next highest level was territorial, into districts, towns, regions and states.  Each level had its own committees, bureau and secretariat.

Purges and show trials
In accordance with Soviet directives, "building communism" in the Eastern Bloc included liquidation of class enemies and constant vigilance against counterrevolutionaries, especially within the Communist parties themselves.  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, more frequently after the campaign to route out "Titoists" after the 1948 Tito–Stalin split, protests occurred, with many of those taking part being workers, intellectuals, dissatisfied young men inducted into the peasantry as part of collectivizations and those who were originally most enthusiastic about Communist systems.  In response, in Poland, the central committee held a "vigilance plenum" against nationalists. One of the methods of control involved several party purges between 1948 and 1953, including 90,000 purged in Bulgaria, 200,000 in Romania (about one third of party), 200,000 in Hungary, 300,000 in East Germany, 370,000 in Poland (about one quarter of party members) and 550,000 in Czechoslovakia (30% of the party).  In Hungary, approximately 150,000 were also imprisoned, with 2,000 summarily executed. In the Estonian SSR, a purge of "bourgeois nationalists" from the Estonian Communist party occurred from 1949 to 1951. In Czechoslovakia, approximately 130,000 people were sent to prisons, labor camps and mines.  The evolution of the resulting harshness of purges in Czechoslovakia, like much of its history after 1948, was a function of the late takeover by the communists, with many of the purges focusing on the sizable numbers of party members with prior memberships in other parties.  Party leader Klement Gottwald's early claims that Czechoslovakia was different from the rest of the Eastern Bloc created jealousy and additional danger later when Stalin was showing an almost paranoiac desire for unity and uniformity.

Nine copies of reports, confessions and other documents in all countries' purges were circulated to Soviet and other Eastern Bloc leaders.  In Poland, when the local leadership resisted Soviet pressure for show trials, the Soviets demanded the construction of more prisons, including one containing a special wing for high-ranking party members.  The intensity of the purges varied by country, with thorough purges in places with a relatively popular party in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, and less thorough purges in places where the party was initially less well-established, such as Poland, Romania and East Germany.

Any member with a western connection was immediately vulnerable, which included large numbers of people who had spent years in exile in the West during the Nazi-occupation of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.  Many veterans of the Spanish Civil War were imprisoned or killed because they were tainted by their western experiences.  Persons with western wives also were the targets of persecution.  In addition to connections with Tito or Yugoslavia, persons who had previously belonged to non-communist parties merged in the Bloc politics process were also at risk, as were members from a non-working-class background.

In addition to rank-and-file member purges, prominent communists were purged, with some subjected to public show trials.  These were more likely to be instigated, and sometimes orchestrated, by the Kremlin or even Stalin, as he had done in the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. They included Koçi Xoxe in Albania and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, who were both purged and arrested. After Kostov was executed, Bulgarian leaders sent Stalin a telegram thanking him for the help.  In Romania, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca were arrested, with Pătrăşcanu being executed.   Stalin's NKVD emissary coordinated with Hungarian General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi and his ÁVH head the way the show trial of Hungarian Foreign Minister László Rajk, who was later executed.  The Rajk trials led Moscow to warn Czechoslovakia's parties that enemy agents had penetrated high into party ranks, and when a puzzled Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald inquired what they could do, Stalin's NKVD agents arrived to help prepare subsequent trials. The Czechoslovakian party subsequently arrested Slánský himself, Vladimír Clementis, Ladislav Novomeský and Gustáv Husák (Clementis was later executed). Slánský and eleven others were convicted together of being "Trotskyist-zionist-titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors" in one series of show trials, after which they were executed and their ashes were mixed with material being used to fill roads on the outskirts of Prague. By the time of the Slánský trials, the Kremlin had been arguing that Israel, like Yugoslavia, had bitten the Soviet hand that had fed it, and thus the trials took an overtly anti-Semitic tone, with eleven of the fourteen defendants tried with Slánský being Jewish.

The Soviets directed show trial methods, including a procedure in which confessions and "evidence" from leading witnesses could be extracted by any means, including threatening to torture the witnesses’ wives and children. The higher ranking the party member, generally the more harsh the torture that was inflicted upon him. For the show trial of Hungarian Interior Minister János Kádár, who one year earlier attempted to force a confession of László Rajk in his show trial, regarding "Vladimir" the questioner of Kádár:

After this trial, Kádár later rose to General Secretary of the ruling Hungarian Working People's Party when Imre Nagy was executed. Once in the interrogation room, the inquisitors made no pretense about attempting to seek real evidence, making it clear that their only task was to extract a confession that would be used to convince other people of the defendant's guilt.  Many dedicated party members accepted the argument that they could perform one last service to the party by allowing themselves to be convicted of crimes that they had not committed.  Even after the party reneged on a deal that was supposed to have spared László Rajk, Rajk allegedly yelled just before his execution "long live the party!"  For those not executed, degradation and humiliation continued for years in prison or labor camps.

The evidence was often not just non-existent but absurd, with Hungarian George Paloczi-Horváth’s party interrogators delightedly exclaiming "We knew all the time—we have it here in writing—that you met professor Szentgyörgyi not in Istanbul, but in Constantinople."  In another case, the Hungarian ÁVH secret police also condemned another party member as a Nazi accomplice with a document that had actually been previously displayed in glass cabinet of the Institute of the Working Class Movement as an example of a Gestapo forgery. The trials themselves were "shows", with each participant having to learn a script and conduct repeated rehearsals before the performance.  In the Slánský trial, when the judge skipped one of the scripted questions, the better-rehearsed Slánský answered the one which should have been asked.

Administrative structures
Initially, communist parties were small in all countries except Czechoslovakia, such that there existed an acute shortage of politically "trustworthy" persons for administration, police and other professions. Accordingly, "politically unreliable" non-communists initially filled such roles.  Those not obedient to communist authorities were ousted, while Moscow cadres started a large-scale party programs to train personnel who would meet political requirements.

In addition, throughout the Eastern Bloc, armies appeared in Soviet-style uniforms studying military manuals copied from the Red Army. The party dominated the armed forces, with party members comprising almost every rank above captain.

Two lists were often kept by the party structure: the cadre and the nomenklatura lists.  The latter contained every post in each country that was important to the smooth application of party policy, including military posts, administrative positions, directors of local enterprises, social organization administrators, newspapers, etc.  In Czechoslovakia, the nomenklatura lists were thought to contain 100,000 post listings, while the number estimated in Poland was 2-3 times that figure. The names of those that the party considered to be trustworthy enough to secure a nomenklatura post were compiled on the cadre list.  One did not have to be a party member to be on the cadre list, but any sign of unconventional behavior would mean exclusion from the list.  The considerable amount of information disseminated to the party from police or trusted observers ensured that the cadre lists were timely and comprehensive.  The end result was that anyone aspiring to have an influential or rewarding job had to conform to party dictates.

De-Stalinization
Some relaxation of Soviet control occurred after Stalin's death in 1953 and the subsequent de-stalinization. State brutality and repression waned in the Bloc.  The Red Army withdrew from the Balkans, though not from East Germany and countries needed for transit purposes. Continuing maintenance of communist power was guaranteed by the Brezhnev Doctrine, such as in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, on the grounds that a threat to the system in one country was a challenge to the alliance as a whole.

As with Yugoslavia after the Tito–Stalin split, Albania took a different course than most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc.  Because of Party of Labour of Albania First Secretary Enver Hoxha's adherence to Stalinism, Albania broke with the Soviet Union in 1960 following the Soviet de-stalinization. Albania began to establish closer contacts with Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China. Following Mao's death and China seeking close ties with the United States, Albania also severed ties with China in 1978.

The cult of personality intensified around Hoxha, who became increasingly paranoid about foreign intrigue and conspiracy. Hoxha tolerated no dissent and thousands of Albanians were executed, sent to state labor camps or exiled to remote areas for work. After a purge in the military and the economic bureaucracy, in 1976, Albania implemented a rigidly Marxist-Leninist constitution that not only made the party the leading force in state and society, but also limited private property and forbade foreign loans. Isolating itself completely from the rest of the world, Albania embarked on a massive defense program, including the amassing of a huge arsenal of weapons and the construction of more than 700,000 concrete military bunkers for a country with only 3 million citizens.

Political repression

While the initial institution of communism destroyed most of the prior institutional and organizational diversity of the Eastern Bloc countries, communist structures existed in different manifestations of strength that also varied over time. In such Communist systems, centralized and unelected state apparatuses, command economies, and scarcity or absence of independent civil associations specifically combined to tightly restrict the repertoire of action for those looking to defend their interests or press demands on the government. These features did not evolve, but rather were intentionally imposed over a relatively short span of time.

As in the Soviet Union, culture was subordinated to political needs and creativity was secondary to socialist realism. The legal system and education were redesigned on Soviet lines. In addition to emigration restrictions, civil society, defined as a domain of political action outside the party's state control, was not allowed to firmly take root, with the possible exception of Poland in the 1980s.  While the institutional designs of the communist systems were based on the rejection of rule of law, the legal infrastructure was not immune to change reflecting decaying ideology and the substitution of autonomous law.

While institutional changes creating some freedoms occurred, a change toward effective constitutionalism could not occur without the collapse of the communist political regimes.  Market-oriented reforms could not work without functioning markets. Such systems' subordination of society was not so much the result of recurrent state triumphs over rival groups as it was intermittent state triumphs combined with state-imposed structures that broke requisite links and occupied the social space necessary for rival groups to initially form.

Political dissent

Communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc viewed even marginal groups of opposition intellectuals as a potential threat because of the bases underlying Communist power therein.  The central pillar on which the monopoly power of the Communist elite was based was the belief of the administrative classes—mid-level leadership cadres in the party apparatus, industry, security organs, education and state administration—in the legitimacy of the Communist Party.  The perceived danger posed by dissidence and opposition was less that of the possible mobilization of broad open protest movements undermining a regime than that political nonconformism would undermine the reliability of the administrative classes responsible for carrying the party leadership's directives.

Accordingly, the suppression of dissidence and opposition was viewed as a central prerequisite for the security of Communist power, though the enormous expense at which the population in certain countries were kept under secret surveillance may not have been rational.  The degree of opposition and dissident suppression varied by country and time throughout the Eastern Bloc.  Following a totalitarian initial phase, a post-totalitarian period followed the death of Stalin in which the primary method of Communist rule shifted from wide scale terror to selective repression and ideological and sociopolitical strategies of legitimation and the securing of loyalty.

Post-totalitarian phase repression varied across Eastern Bloc countries according to the degree of internal coherence and the social anchoring of the Communist elites in each country. Trial by jury was replaced by a tribunal of a professional judge and two lay assessors that were dependable party actors. The features of such Communist systems combined to structure the social and political environment to raise the cost of open protest, often to a prohibitive level.  While resistance existed, it occurred mainly in the form of individual measures predicated on acceptance of the system as a whole that paradoxically often further atrophied the avenues of collective redress against the state, such as workers intentionally wasting time on the job or stealing state resources.

Class categories
Citizens were classified by socialist origin and class, with the standard categories being: worker, peasant, intelligentsia, petty employee, others and class enemies.  In order to gain a more obedient future intelligentsia, the children of class enemies were restricted to no more than primary education, while those of the fourth and fifth categories would find it difficult to gain entrance into a university.  Criminal codes could also be graded on a class basis, with the class origin of the convicted determining how dangerous to society the crime had been.

Broad social purges
In addition to party purges, more widespread social purges occurred, and were aimed with equal or greater intensity at all levels of society. As with the party purges, the social purges were justified theoretically by the Stalinist doctrine that the class struggle intensifies in the immediate aftermath of the socialist revolution and in the first stages of the construction of socialism. Consequently, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois attitudes arose leading, for example, to the reliance upon home production and the black market in the resulting shortage economies. When added to the perceived external dangers of the Cold War, and especially following the paranoia arising from the Tito–Stalin split, an emphasis was put on stopping the internal dangers of petty-bourgeois activities which might foment additional resistance and popular sympathy of the masses for the west.

These social purges constituted generalized episodes of terror intended to be seen as such in order to establish order and control.  No person was safe from the purges' effects and denunciations were rife.  The definitions of crime employed in such purges were broad and vague, including the possession of goods in short supply being construed as hoarding.  It was the responsibility of all citizens to integrate into their daily lives the responsibility for administering the purges.  A former Romanian Securitate leader stated:

In Budapest, Hungary, at 2:00 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, vans transported purge targets, who by 1953, numbered approximately 700,000.  Of those, 98,000 were branded as spies and saboteurs, 5,000 of which were executed.  In Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1954, approximately 150,000 targets were arrested.  Similar proportions of the population suffered in other Eastern Bloc states.

Civil society groups
As with the party purges, any institution with western connections was particularly vulnerable. Eastern Bloc branches of organizations with western contacts, such as the boy scouts, the girl guides and the international federation of professional and business women, were closed.  Churches were subjected to attack, including the Uniate church in the Ukraine and Romania, Protestants in Bulgaria and the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary.  People that constituted former "class enemies" because of their social upbringing were at risk, as well as those with prior memberships in non-communist parties.

While the purges quelled outward manifestations of dissatisfaction, they also caused severe economic dislocations.  Large construction projects were launched with insufficient capital such that unpaid prisoners were required to serve in place of modern equipment. Disruption of the trained administrative and management elites also caused harm. So many workers were dismissed from established professions that they had to be replaced by hastily trained younger workers that did not possess questionable class origins. A Czechoslovakian noted:

The purges often coincided with the introduction of the first Five Year Plans in the non-Soviet members of the Eastern Bloc.  The objectives of those plans were considered beyond political rapproche even where they were absurd, such that workers that did not fulfill targets were targeted and blamed for economic woes, while at the same time, the ultimate responsibility for the economic shortcomings would be placed on prominent victims of the political purge.  In Romania, Gheorghiu-Dej admitted that 80,000 peasants had been accused of siding with the class enemy because they resisted collectivization, while purged party elite Ana Pauker was blamed for this "distortion".

In addition, sizable resources were employed in the purge, such as in Hungary, where almost one million adults were employed to record, control, indoctrinate, spy on and sometimes kill targets of the purge. Unlike the repressions under Nazi occupation, no ongoing war existed that could bring an end to the tribulations of the Eastern Bloc, and morale severely suffered as a consequence.  Because the party later had to admit the mistakes of much that occurred during the purges after Stalin's death, the purges also destroyed the moral base upon which the party operated.  In doing so, the party abrogated its prior Leninist claim to moral infallibility for the working class.

Secret police

Eastern Bloc secret police organizations were formed on Vladimir Lenin's theory and Joseph Stalin's practical application of "the defense of the revolution." One of the first acts of Lenin after the October 1917 Revolution was the establishment of a secret police, the Cheka. Such organizations in the Eastern Bloc became the "shield and sword" of the ruling Communist party.  The party's claim was based on Lenin's general theory of class struggle, imperialism, legitimate socialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The police served to deter opposition to party directives, and contain it should it appear. The political police were the core of the system. Large numbers of citizens were recruited, sometimes through blackmail, to become informers for the secret police.  Sophisticated police networks monitored all strata of society while persecuting only those who overtly expressed dissatisfaction or disagreement with the regime. The names of each political police organization became synonymous with unbridled power and threats of violent retribution should an individual become active against the collective. After Stalin's death in 1953, in general, the profile of the secret police declined, and became less a means to instill terror than to preserve the existing distribution of political power, overall becoming more reactive than proactive. The exceptions to this lower profile were in Albania under Enver Hoxha and in Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu. The linchpin of Soviet control early in the Eastern Bloc was General Ivan Serov, who was appointed to chairman of the new Soviet KGB in 1954 as a reward for having effectively applied his secret police expertise to the sovietization of the Eastern Bloc.

KGB and the formation of the Stasi
During party purges, the secret police became so entrenched within the party that they became their own elite within the elite of the party.  State police organizations were vast.  The East German Stasi became the Soviet KGB's most important surrogate following Lenin's statement that "the principal link in the chain of revolution is the German link, and the success of world revolution depends more on Germany than upon any other country." In 1947, Stalin told Edvard Kardelj, then prime minister of Yugoslavia, "We Russians will never get out of Germany."  The NKVD at first maintained a number of former Nazi concentration camps, such as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, to house former Nazis.  After the forced merger of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany thousands of anti-Nazi social democrats and communists that opposed the merger also ended up in those camps. Erich Mielke, a key operator for the Soviets after the war, built the Stasi into a vast secret police and espionage organization. Mielke became the longest-serving state security chief in the Eastern bloc, and his relationship with the Soviet secret police dated back to 1931, when he had fled Germany for Moscow after murdering two Berlin policemen.  Although Mielke's Stasi was superficially granted independence in 1957, until 1990 the KGB continued to maintain liaison officers in all eight main Stasi directorates, each with his own office inside the Stasi's Berlin compound, and in each of the fifteen Stasi district headquarters around East Germany.  Collaboration was so close that the KGB invited the Stasi to establish operational bases in Moscow and Leningrad to monitor visiting East German tourists and Mielke referred to the Stasi officers as "Chekists of the Soviet Union."  In 1978, Mielke formally granted KGB officers in East Germany the same rights and powers they enjoyed in the Soviet Union.

All information acquired worldwide by the intelligence and security services in the Eastern bloc was stored in the Soviet computer SOUD (System of Joint Acquisition of Enemy Data). The SOUD became a valuable KGB asset for the Stasi. Stasi engineers had actually created the system using stolen and illegally obtained Western technology, but the Soviets insisted that it be based in Moscow.

Stasi operations

The Stasi employed 120,000 full-time agents and an official estimate of 100,000 informants to monitor a country that possessed only 16 million inhabitants.  Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 persons.  In terms of total inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants, by 1995, 174,000 had been identified, which approximated 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60. While these calculations were from official records, because many such records were destroyed, there were likely closer to 500,000 Stasi informers. A former Stasi colonel estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included.

The result was a society in which residents often did not know whom to trust, and in which few attempted to share their private thoughts with anyone but close friends or colleagues. A popular saying in East Germany was that whenever three people engaged in a conversation, one was bound to be a Stasi informant.   Stasi efforts with one agent per 166 citizens dwarfed, for example, the Nazi Gestapo, which employed only 40,000 officials to watch a population of 80 million (one officer per 2,000 citizens) and the Soviet KGB, which employed 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million residents (one agent per 583 citizens).  When informants were included, the Stasi had one spy per 66 citizens of East Germany.  When part-time informer adults were included, the figures reached approximately one spy per 6.5 citizens.

Full-time officers were posted to all major industrial plants and one tenant in every apartment building was designated as a watchdog reporting to an area representative of the Volkspolizei (Vopo). Spies reported every relative or friend that stayed the night at another's apartment. Tiny holes were bored in apartment and hotel room walls through which Stasi agents filmed citizens with special video cameras. Similarly, schools, universities, and hospitals were extensively infiltrated.

Political offenses usually came under broad crimes such as "Treasonable Relaying of Information", "Treasonable Agent Activity" and "Interference in Activities of the State or Society." Defendants usually were persons who had requested (nominally) legal exit permits from East Germany or contacted a Western consulate to inquire about emigration procedures. Sentences of up to two and a half years' hard labor were not unusual as punishment for such inquiries. Those accused of "propaganda hostile to the state" could be those that once stated that it was not necessary to station tanks at the border, referred to border fortifications as "nonsense" or received West German television programs and relayed the contents to others. Writing to friends in the west about wishes to emigrate, which the Stasi could intercept, could draw a conviction for "establishing illegal contacts."  In addition, it was a crime to fail to denounce fellow citizens, such as informers who failed to report friends stating they wished to escape to the west.  After the mid-1950s, Stasi executions were carried out in strict secrecy, usually by guillotine and, in later years, by a single pistol shot to the neck. In most instances, the relatives of the executed were not informed of either the sentence or the execution. The corpses were cremated and the ashes buried secretly, sometimes at construction sites.

The Stasi also focused upon the allies of the ruling communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany. For example, during the Soviet-backed forced merger of the SED, the Stasi arrested 5,000 Social Democratic Party of Germany members that disapproved of the merger.  400 died from a mix of executions, malnutrition or disappearing.  200 of them were later sentenced to a total of 10,000 years jail time.  Until 1950, all such sentences were pronounced by Soviet military tribunals in trials that lasted no more than ten minutes each.

While the Stasi had only 4,000 members in 1953, it grew considerably over the years to 52,707 in 1973.  Its ranks swelled much more quickly after Eastern Bloc countries signed the 1975 Helsinki accords, which Erich Honecker viewed as a grave threat to his regime because they contained language binding signatories to respect "human and basic rights,   including freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and conviction.  Stasi size was immediately increased by 10,000. Mielke was accorded new, wide-ranging powers while the Stasi became the leadership's instrument of power to an extent not seen in the Eastern Bloc since Stalin's death, with the exception of the Securitate in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu.  The Stasi then set up 24 internment camps throughout East Germany to house six categories of persons to be arrested.

Mielke then issued Richtlinie 1/76, a standard operating procedure manual outlining surveillance of the population down to the last detail.  Stasi Division M employed officers at every post office to surreptitiously open all letters and parcels sent to, or received from, a non-communist country. Writing samples were taken from letters that could be used to match with writing on any dissident pamphlets.  Those questioned by the Stasi were forced to put special cloths under the arms that were later stored in sealed and numbered cans in a massive warehouse for later use by bloodhounds in the event of a manhunt.  The Stasi also sprayed a special chemical on sidewalks in front of their offices that would adhere to the shoes of those leaving and permit dogs more easily to track them.  In the late 1970s, when certain western news organizations were allowed to employ offices in East Berlin, they were required to hire all employees from a specified labour pool, all of whom were Stasi informants.

State police organizations
Under Nicolae Ceauşescu, the powers of the Securitate secret police increased to become, in proportion to Romania's population, one of the largest and most brutal secret police forces in the Eastern bloc.  By 1989, total Securitate personnel officers and security troops totalled 38,682 for a population of 23 million.  The Securitate employed nearly a half-million informers. Following several leaders of a miner strike later dying of premature disease, it was later discovered that Securitate doctors had subjected them to five-minute-long chest X-rays in an attempt to develop cancer. After birth rates fell, Securitate agents were placed in all gynecological wards while regular pregnancy tests were mandated for women of child-bearing age in Romania, with severe penalties for anyone who was found to have terminated a pregnancy. The Securitate also arrested 80,000 peasants who opposed labor reforms in 1949.

Albania's Sigurimi, under the leadership of isolationist Stalinist Enver Hoxha, were as brutal as the Securitate.  From the beginning, the ÁVH (first known as the ÁVO) acted as the private army of the ruling Hungarian Working People's Party.  Preceding the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the ÁVH, which fired on protesters, was opposed by the Hungarian army and abolished for a brief period during the revolution until the Red Army's invasion of Hungary thereafter.  In Bulgaria, the Sigurnost grew throughout the 1970s and became even more subservient to the KGB as leader Todor Zhivkov  declared that Bulgaria and the Soviet Union would "act as a single body, breathing with the same lungs and nourished by the same blood stream", and attempted to incorporate Bulgaria in the Soviet Union. The UDBa in Yugoslavia operated with more restraint than secret police agencies in the communist states of Eastern Europe. In its latter decades it was composed of eight semi-independent secret police organizations—one for each of the six Yugoslav federal republics and two for the autonomous provinces—coordinated by the central federal headquarters in the capital of Belgrade.

In Poland, the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa ("Security Office", or UB) was initially formed to wage a covert war against communists in Poland. The UB was modelled on the Soviet NKVD, whose specialists had helped forge the new "shield of the state." NKVD chief Ivan Serov had begun training Polish NKVD recruits as early as 1940, when the Soviets initially invaded eastern Poland, including training in the Soviet Union.  By 1945, the UB, under NKVD control, had agents in every branch of the Polish government.

Several state police and secret police organizations enforced communist party rule, including:

The secret police and Eastern Bloc dissolution

The Stasi acted as a proxy for KGB conduct activities in Poland, where the Soviets were not well liked.  When the Polish Solidarity movement arose, Stasi-KGB data was immediately handed to the Polish SB which immediately arrested hundred of Solidarity members within a few hours of declaring martial law, as demanded by the Soviets.  All telephone, telegraph and mail traffic in and out of Poland was put under Stasi control, while a massive Stasi Tenth Department of the Second Main Directorate (counterintelligence) was created to monitor Poland.  With worries throughout the Eastern Bloc of a possible collapse if communism fell in any country, the Stasi Tenth Department dispatched operational groups to Czechoslovakia and Hungary.  The Tenth Department, however, could not monitor the large number of discontented citizens in the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s, with the first significant breach coming Hungary when the government therein ordered the dismantling of fortifications and barbed wire barriers along its border with Austria in August 1989. Word spread rapidly to East Germany, where thousands seeking freedom poured into Hungary.  Hungary ignored Stasi threats regarding closure of the border.  Thereafter, the battle was effectively lost, with East Germany beginning the dismantling of the Berlin Wall months later.

Before German unification, the last East German government ordered the burning of thousands of Stasi computer records to attempt to protect against later prosecution.  In addition, they shredded thousands of espionage files and placed the remains in 172,000 paper sacks.  Examination of what remains of the vast Stasi files is difficult because of their enormous size.
In the first three years after the October 3, 1990 German reunification, large numbers of sensational arrests of Stasi infiltrators throughout the former West German government occurred weekly. It became clear that the entire West German government had been infested by the East German spy organization, as was every political party, West Germany's industry, banks, the church, and the news media. One female Stasi mole in the BND, an East German agent for seventeen years, had been entrusted with the job of preparing the daily secret intelligence summary for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.  Stasi archivists estimate that at least 20,000 West Germans had spied for the Stasi and that that estimate may be conservative.  After German reunification, the examination by former targets of their Stasi files led to countless civil suits being filed against informers, with large numbers of family and friend relationship destroyed.

Notes

References

Eastern Bloc


"You're the Reason I'm Living"" is a 1963 single written and performed by Bobby Darin, from his album of the same name. Musicians on the recording session included drummer Earl Palmer.

Chart performance
The single was very successful spending 2 weeks at #3 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart beginning March 16, 1963.  "You're the Reason I'm Living" peaked at #9 on the Hot R&B Singles chart.

Cover versions
Elvis Presley recorded a live version of the song for 1975's "Live in Las Vegas."

References

1963 singles
Bobby Darin songs
Songs written by Bobby Darin
1963 songs
Capitol Records singles


Pilestredet Park is a neighborhood in the borough St. Hanshaugen in Oslo, Norway, about one kilometer north of the city center.

It is named after the street Pilestredet. From 1893, it was the location of Rikshospitalet. The area underwent an urban renewal after 2000, when the hospital moved to Gaustad. The area is mostly residential, with about 2000 residents, and has some of the highest housing prices in the city.

Oslo Metropolitan University has a campus by Pilestredet Park. The area is served by the station Høyskolesenteret of the Oslo Tramway.

Neighbourhoods of Oslo


"My Love" is a song by American R&B singer Mary J. Blige from her debut album, What's the 411? (1992). The song, released by Uptown and MCA, was co-written by singer-songwriter Kenny Greene and Dave Hall, who served as the song's original producer. It peaked at number 23 on the US Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and at number 29 on the UK Singles Chart in 1994, becoming Blige's second single to reach the top 40 in the United Kingdom.

Lyrics and composition
The lyrics discuss Mary J. Blige's relationship with her ex-lover, after his failed relationship with the woman he left Blige for he wants to come back and start over. This causes her to wonder "what you're gonna do without my love?"

Versions
The original version is featured on Blige's debut album. A Teddy Riley-produced remix of the song, featuring rapper Heavy D, was released a promotional single in 1994; this version is found on Blige's 1993 What's the 411? Remix album, in a longer form.

Critical reception
Chris Roberts from Melody Maker felt that on the track, "Mary J Blige obligingly does that sleek swing thing of hers to sapid, even Sapphic, effect."

Track listings

 US cassette single
 "My Love" (Hip Hop with Rap) – 3:56
 "My Love" (New Jack Jazz) – 6:15

 US cassette maxi single
 "My Love" (Hip Hop with Rap) – 3:56
 "My Love" (Street Mix 1) – 6:35
 "My Love" (New Jack Jazz) – 6:15
 "My Love" (TR and Mary Mix) – 4:02
 "My Love" (Acapella) – 3:52

 UK cassette single
 "My Love" (Radio Mix) – 3:56
 "My Love" (Album Version) – 4:14

 UK CD single and UK 12" single – version 1
 "My Love" (Radio Mix) – 3:56
 "My Love" (On Da Street) – 6:35
 "Reminisce" (Uno Clio Mix) – 6:14
 "Reminisce" (Sure is Pure Dub Two) – 7:16

 UK 12" single – version 2
 "My Love" (Album Version) – 4:14
 "Reminisce" (D&D Dub) – 6:20
 "Reminisce" (S.D.A. Dub) – 9:09
 "Reminisce" (Sure is Pure Dub One) – 6:36

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

Release history

References

Mary J. Blige songs
1992 songs
1994 singles
MCA Records singles
Song recordings produced by Dave Hall (record producer)
Song recordings produced by Teddy Riley
Songs written by Dave Hall (record producer)
Songs written by Kenny Greene
Uptown Records singles


The 1993–94 season of the EHF Cup was won by BM Alzira in a final match against ASKÖ Linz.

First round

Eighth-finals

Quarter-finals

Semi-finals

Final

References

EHF Cup seasons
Ehf Cup, 1993 94
Ehf Cup, 1993 94


Mike Kuchar (born August 31, 1942, in New York City) is an American underground filmmaker, actor, and artist. Kuchar is notable for his low-budget and camp films such as Sins of the Fleshapoids and The Craven Sluck.

Biography
Raised in The Bronx, he made his first films as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother George Kuchar and participated in New York's underground film scene in the 1960s and 1970s. He divided his time between New York City and his brother's San Francisco apartment until 2007, when he moved to San Francisco permanently; George died in 2011.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Mike Kuchar created comics and illustrations for homoerotic publications including Meatmen, Gay Heart Throbs, First Hand, and Manscape, and continued to draw commissions afterward.

It Came From Kuchar, a documentary film about George and Mike Kuchar by Jennifer Kroot, premiered at the South by Southwest film festival on 14 March 2009.

In more recent years, Kuchar has focused on more intimate one person expressionistic films. At the Vienna International Film Festival in 2009, he unveiled two short films, Swan Song and Dumped. Swan Song features the pain of a young man tormented by his sensuality who is painted as an animal writhing in pain, and Dumped stars veteran stage actress Deirdre McGill in a portrait of a woman engaged in a deadly love triangle. Kuchar teaches in the film program at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Kuchar also worked as a cameraman for Rosa von Praunheim.

The Kuchar brothers collaborated on a book, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (1997), a humorous memoir discussing four decades of filmmaking, with an introduction by director John Waters.

Partial filmography
 The Pervert (1963)
 Born of the Wind (1964)
 Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965)
 Green Desire (1966)
 The Secret of Wendel Samson (1966)
 Fragments (1967)
 The Craven Sluck (formerly titled Madonna ) (1967)
 Variations (1968)
 Cycles (1968)
 Tales of the Bronx (1969)
 Chronicles (1969)
 Abode of the Snow (1970)
 Aqua Circus (1971)
 Didgeridoo (1972)
 Faraway Places (1972)
 Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults (1976)
 Dwarf Star (1977)
 Fable for a New Age (1984)
 Tone Poem (1984)
 Seascape (1984)
 Dumped ( 2009)
 Swan Song (2009)
 Midnight Suite (2011)
 Litany of the Seven Kisses (2011)
 Tickled Pink (2012)
 Fallen Angels (2013)
Produced at the San Francisco Art Institute:
 The Masque of Valhalla (1972)
 The Wings of Muru (1973)
 Blood Sucker (1975)
 The Passions: A Psycho-Drama (1977)
 Isle of the Sleeping Souls (1979)
 Circe (1984)
 Midnight Carnival (2011)
Produced at the Collective For Living Cinema's Dramatic Narrative Class:
 Scream of the Damned (1987)

Films featuring Mike Kuchar
 Portrait George and Mike Kuchar (1977) by Rosa von Praunheim.
 Bird, Bath and Beyond (2003) by Marie Losier.

Bibliography
 Jack Stevenson, Desperate Visions 1: The Films of John Waters and George & Mike Kuchar (UK: Creation Books, 1996)
 George and Mike Kuchar, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (Berkeley CA: Zanja Pr Dangerous Concepts, 1997)

References

External links
 Kuchar Brothers Official Website

 George & Mike Kuchar Interview in Vice magazine
 The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth Bright Lights Film Journal
 Brothers from Another Planet Article in the East Bay Express
 An Afternoon with Mike Kuchar a documentary visiting Mike at home.

Artists from New York City
1942 births
Living people
American experimental filmmakers
Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area
LGBT comics creators


Westgate Mall is a shopping mall located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It is anchored by Harbor Freight Tools, Lehigh Valley Health Network, Oak Street Health, Sky Zone Trampoline Park, and Weis Markets.

History
The first buildings on the mall property were constructed in 1964 by Harold Campbell. George's IGA Foodliner opened in 1967 and Hess's was built on the site in 1971. Westgate Mall was built in 1973. On February 12, 1977 a three-alarm fire occurred at the Westgate Mall causing the loss of 18 stores and injuries to several firefighters. The fire only stopped due to a firewall and was ruled arson, but no suspect was ever found. Damage to the mall totaled  $2,857,452. George's IGA was sold to King's IGA in 1992, with King's planning to make upgrades. Hess's interior was redesigned in 1993 and the store was purchased by The Bon-Ton in 1994. From 1999-2005, a legal dispute over the land that housed The Bon-Ton occurred, and it was eventually sold to PREIT for $500,000. Newberry's converted to a Dollar Zone before closing in April 2002.

The family of Harold Campbell attempted to take control of Westgate Mall on June 4, 2002, which resulted in legal action by the mall's two managers, who had power of attorney over it since 1997. The issue was later settled in 2002 with the managers retaining control of the mall. Starting in November 2011, The Market at Westgate farmers market opened at the mall on Wednesdays. City View Capital LLC purchased most of the mall in June 2013 for $2.3 million. PREIT, who owned the land that housed The Bon-Ton, later sold it to an affiliate of the mall's owners in December 2014 for $3.85 million. The owners of Westgate announced in mid-2015 that the mall would receive $5 million in changes, including a new facade. Sky Zone Trampoline Park was announced as a future addition to the mall in August 2015. The Bon-Ton chain liquidated starting in April 2018, with Westgate's store closing during the summer. Jack Williams Tire subleased space from The Bon-Ton.

Westgate Mall was sold to Onyx Equities LLC and PCCP LLC in October 2018 for $30 million. Weis Markets moved from its existing space at Westgate into part of the former Bon-Ton in May 2021. Lehigh Valley Health Network leased part of the former Bon-Ton for equipment storage in December 2021. Harbor Freight Tools opened in the mall 2022, using part of the space formerly occupied by Weis Markets. Redevelopment plans for Westgate Mall were announced in March 2022. The plans call for over 50,000 square feet of interior space to be demolished and replaced by new buildings, along with facade changes. In January 2023, several stores were asked to vacate in anticipation of the redevelopment, with some relocating to other locations in the Lehigh Valley. New restaurants and a bank will replace that portion of the mall. Oak Street Health opened in June 2023, using the former Rite Aid space.

Notes

References

External links
Onyx Equities Westgate Mall

Shopping malls established in 1973
1973 establishments in Pennsylvania
Buildings and structures in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania
Shopping malls in Pennsylvania
Shopping malls in Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Tourist attractions in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania


Amieva is a village and a parish in the autonomous community of Asturias, in northern Spain. It gives its name to the municipality of Amieva in which it is situated.

It is  in size. The population is 107 (INE 2011). The postal code is 33558.

The Iglesia de San Pedro de Vega stands in the village, a rectangular church with a single nave.  The western facade has the main entrance, formed by a semicircular arch, with a voluminous steeple of blocks with two apertures for bells.  Four winged angels are found at the four exterior corners of the church.  The interior is modernized but retains the original work.

References

Parishes in Amieva


Melibiulose is a disaccharide formed from fructose and galactose similar to melibiose.

References

Disaccharides


John Tempest (died 26 July 1697) was an English politician, elected as the first Member of Parliament for the County of Durham on 21 June 1675.

Life
He was the son of Sir Thomas Tempest Kt. (1594–1653), Attorney-General of Durham and later Ireland and Eleanor daughter of William Tempest of Hadham (Oxfordshire). He was styled "of the Isle" (a manor west of Bradbury, County Durham) and in right of his wife Elizabeth (daughter and sole heiress of John Heath), later of Old Durham.

He matriculated 1637 at The Queen's College, Oxford. A royalist, he was Colonel of a regiment of foot in the service of Charles I. As part of the Marquess of Newcastle's army, he was present at the battle of Northallerton (1644) and the battle of Marston Moor, and the siege of Skipton Castle.

He was nominated a Knight of the Royal Oak in 1661. He became Vice Lord Lieutenant of Durham in 1662, and Governor of Kepier School.

In the election for two members, they were John Tempest, with 1034 votes, and Thomas Vane of Raby Castle with 856 votes. Thomas Vane died of smallpox four days after his election and was succeeded by his younger brother Christopher Vane.

He died 26 July 1697, and was buried at Forcett (North Yorkshire).

References

1697 deaths
People from Durham, England
Year of birth unknown
Cavaliers
English MPs 1661–1679
John


The Whatshan Range is a subrange of the Monashee Mountains of the Columbia Mountains in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, located south of South Fosthall Creek.

References

Whatshan Range in the Canadian Mountain Encyclopedia

Monashee Mountains


The Sishen–Saldanha railway line, also known as the Ore Export Line (OREX), is an  heavy-haul railway line in South Africa. It connects iron ore mines near Sishen in the Northern Cape with the port at Saldanha Bay in the Western Cape. It is used primarily to transport iron ore (60 million tonnes per year) and does not carry passenger traffic.

The Sishen–Saldanha line was built by Iscor, the then iron and steel parastatal, opening in 1976.

In 1977 the line was transferred to Transnet Freight Rail, then known as South African Railways & Harbours, and was electrified. A voltage of 50 kV AC was chosen instead of the usual 25 kV to haul heavier loads and allow greater distance between transformers.

A single-track line with 10 crossing loops to allow trains travelling in opposite directions to pass was constructed. The number of crossing loops has increased to 19 to increase line capacity.

From an altitude of  at Sishen, the line climbs for  before descending to cross the Orange River about  downstream of Groblershoop. For the next , the line rises and falls before descending towards the Atlantic coast. The railway crosses the Olifants River on a  viaduct between Vredendal and Lutzville and reaches the coast about  north of Saldanha. From there the line follows a coastal route.

Initial train lengths consisted of three class 9E electric locomotives, hauling 210 type CR ore wagons with a payload of 80 tonnes. Upgraded wagons now carry 100 tonnes. Train lengths were increased in 2007 to 342 wagons, employing Radio Distributed Power (RDP) technology. These trains (initially with 10 locomotives, a mix of electric and diesel-electric) and 342 wagons have a total mass of 41,400 tonnes and are  long, the longest production trains in the world. The same 342-wagon trains are now powered by just five 15Es, crewed by one driver and one assistant.

The train length was increased in October 2019 to 375 wagons

See also
 South African Class 9E, Series 1
 South African Class 9E, Series 2
 South African Class 15E
 South African Class 34-000
 South African Class 34-400
 South African Class 34-500
 South African Class 34-900
 South African Class 43-000

References

Railway lines in South Africa
Iron ore railways
Mining railways
Mining in South Africa
3 ft 6 in gauge railways in South Africa
Articles containing video clips


DipNote is the official blog of the United States Department of State. It was started on September 25, 2007, with a first post by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Sean McCormack. DipNote was revised in 2009, with the Departments' 21st Century Statecraft initiative.  DipNote works in conjunction with other public diplomacy programs, as part of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's smart power initiatives.

Link
DipNote: Official blog of the US Department of State

See also
 State Department Sounding Board
 Diplopedia
 Office of eDiplomacy

References

United States Department of State
Foreign relations of the United States
United States Department of State publications
Bureau of Public Affairs
Internet properties established in 2007
2007 establishments in the United States


"Yesterday's Songs" is a 1981 single by Neil Diamond from his album On the Way to the Sky. The song was a major adult contemporary radio hit, spending six weeks at #1 on the U.S. Billboard chart and four weeks atop the Canadian Adult Contemporary chart.  On the Billboard Hot 100, it peaked at #11.  On the Canadian pop charts, the song reached #15. "Yesterday's Songs" is ranked as the 77th biggest American hit of 1982.

Record World said that "If the intriguing keyboard melody or snappy beat doesn't grab you, Diamond's spirited vocal romanticism will."

Chart history

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

See also
Neil Diamond discography
List of number-one adult contemporary singles of 1981 (U.S.)

References

External links

Neil Diamond songs
1981 singles
Songs written by Neil Diamond
Columbia Records singles
1981 songs
Songs about nostalgia
Songs about music


Age of Days (formerly Age of Daze) is a Canadian alternative rock band that formed in Fredericton, New Brunswick in 2005.

Band history
Vocalist Tim Morrison, bassist Matt McLaughlin and lead guitarist Jamie Norrad originally met while playing in a local cover band. They began writing and abandoned the cover band scene to focus on original material; guitarist Jon Price joined the band prior to the recording of their first EP in October 2005.

The band released their debut (independent) EP Age of Daze in 2006. The six-song EP was recorded at The Pocket Studios in Toronto, Ontario, and was produced by former Our Lady Peace guitarist Mike Turner. The EP was a modest success and allowed the band to open for such acts as Collective Soul, Wide Mouth Mason and Hedley.

The band entered The Pocket Studios again in June 2007, with drummer Pat Pelletier, to record their sophomore CD entitled Hollywood Ending with Turner again at the helm. The album was released through Universal Music Canada on August 19, 2008, and distributed through Fontana North/Universal Music Canada and iTunes worldwide. The first single, "Afflicted", was added to Sirius' Octane channel and was the band's first major exposure in the US market. The song reached No.17 on Canadian Rock charts (BDS), and was No.1 on the Sirius Rock 20 Countdown for two weeks. The second single in Canada, Overrated, reached No.28 on the Active Rock charts.

In the summer of 2009, Age of Daze completed their first Canadian tour supporting such acts as Hinder, Buckcherry, Papa Roach, Rev Theory, Default, and State of Shock.

The band won a 2009 Canadian Radio Music Award as Best New Group or Solo Artist (Rock). At the 2009 East Coast Music Awards, Hollywood Ending was nominated for Rock Recording of the Year, and "Afflicted" was nominated for Song of the Year. They took part in the 2009 Rock on the Range in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and performed for TLC's Orange County Choppers 10th Anniversary in New York City.

In 2011, Morrison and McLaughlin relocated to Toronto, parting ways with the remaining New Brunswick members. 2011 also brought new management—Mascioli Entertainment, and new guitarist Brent Alvey. It was at this time that they adopted the name Age of Days, signalling a fresh start.

In March 2012, the band began work on Radioactivity with Juno Award-winning producer Brian Howes (Hinder, Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd, Rev Theory, Hedley). Morrison and McLaughlin co-wrote three of the album's songs with Howes, including the lead single Bombs Away, which reached #16 on the Canadian Active Rock charts (Mediabase).  The second track on the album, Now Or Never, was co-written with Sal Costa (formerly of My Darkest Days) and features Costa on guitar and synths as well as Hinder's Cody Hanson on drums.

In July 2012, Age of Days signed with Canadian indie label Cordova Bay Records. The band then hit the road with the addition of Mike Langford on drums, and Mike Diesel filling in on rhythm guitar. The new lineup debuted at the Boonstock Music Festival in Gibbons, Alberta,.

In early 2013, the band finished recording Radioactivity at J4 Studios in Toronto with producer Justin Forsley and released the album in Canada on April 9, 2013.

The band hit the road in June 2013 on a western Canadian tour, featuring a combination of headline shows and direct support slots for Grammy-winning Pennsylvania band Halestorm. The tour was marred by a collision with a moose near Thunder Bay, Ontario, en route to the first show. But despite the accident, which caused minor injuries and demolished their touring vehicle, the band made every date. Fall 2013 saw the band complete their most comprehensive tour to date, opening for Papa Roach and Pop Evil on a three-band bill. The tour featured dates across North America, beginning in British Columbia and wrapping up in New Jersey. This was the band's first major touring exposure in the US.

In June 2018, Age of Days released a new single and lyric video for their cover of Roxette’s hit song "The Look", featuring guest vocals by Butcher Babies' Heidi Shepherd. In 2021, the band was due to tour with Buckcherry and Bif Naked, but the shows were cancelled due to Covid restrictions.

Band members

Current
 Tim Morrison – lead vocals, rhythm guitar
 Matt McLaughlin – bass, backing vocals
 Brent Alvey – lead guitar
 Mike Langford – drums

Former
 Jon Price – lead guitar (2005–2010)
 Jamie Norrad – lead guitar (2005–2011)
 Brad Bailey – lead guitar (2010–2011)
 Pat Pelletier – drums (2007–2011)

Discography

References

External links
 Age of Days Official website
  Interview at Skylight Webzine

Musical groups established in 2005
Musical groups from Fredericton
Canadian alternative rock groups
2005 establishments in New Brunswick


Antonio Muñoz (born Jose Rafael Antonio Muñoz, January 2, 1966, in Guatemala City) is a Guatemalan actor and three-time national motocross champion.

He started racing motorcross when he was eleven. During his third year of racing, he suffered a major accident, leaving him with major facial trauma and permanent loss of taste and smell called anosmia. Muñoz competed for twenty years as a motorcross racer and held three national titles.

In 2002, he decided to pursue a career in acting, although he had no previous experience and within days he became a member of the Screen Actors Guild.

Antonio had his first break after six months. Desmond Gumbs, the director of Straight Out (2003), (his first film) took a great risk on Muñoz's raw talent and cast him in a major plot-driver role. Since then, he has worked on top-rated shows, as well as in the feature films, The Rundown, Spanglish  with Adam Sandler, and London.

He has been in television and editorial commercials including Bank of America, Nissan Altima and Infinity Insurance.

He then tried to pursue an acting career in the Hispanic-Latin market and he was soon given a feature role in the Telemundo production, El Rostro de Analía as a hitman for Gabriel Porras as Ricky Montana.

In June 2010, Antonio is worked in Petén with Dr Richard D. Hansen, providing all the logistic and helicopters for the exploration of El Mirador, the largest Mayan ruins.

Television

Film

References

External links
Official Facebook page
IMDb
Manolo A Estrada, "Un final feliz, aún por escribirse..." Carretera News, 20 June - 3 July 2009, pp 16-17

https://web.archive.org/web/20131213144022/http://www.debate.org/reference/guatemala-city
https://web.archive.org/web/20090309122951/http://the1secondfilm.com/producer/3369
http://www.makethemostoflife.net/2011/01/26/believe-in-yourself-2/
http://www.sorayaalcala.com/columna/2008/estilos130/
http://www.elsalvador.com/mwedh/nota/nota_completa.asp?idCat=6461&idArt=3623108
http://www.motivateus.com/stories/believeinyou.htm

Living people
1966 births
Guatemalan male stage actors
Guatemalan male telenovela actors
Guatemalan male television actors
Guatemalan motorcycle racers
21st-century Guatemalan male actors


Beaniidae is a small bryozoan family in the cheilostomatan suborder Flustrina and superfamily Buguloidea. Their zooids have a weak box-like shell of calcium carbonate as most Flustrina, and in this family typically arranged disjunctly, connected by small tubes, and often boat-shaped. One species, Amphibiobeania epiphylla, is the only known amphibious bryozoan known as of 2008/09.

Genera
Three genera are unequivocally assigned to this family:
 Amphibiobeania Metcalfe, Gordon & Hayward, 2007
 Beania Johnston, 1840 (including Dimorphozoum)
 Beania magellanica
 Stolonella Hincks, 1883

Footnotes

References
  (2007): An Amphibious Bryozoan from Living Mangrove Leaves – Amphibiobeania new genus (Beaniidae). Zool. Sci. 24(6): 563–570.  (HTML abstract)

External links
 Beaniidae photos at bryozoa.net

Bryozoan families
Cheilostomatida


Diana Rosamond Constance Grace Irene Gould, later Diana Menuhin, Baroness Menuhin (12 November 1912 – 25 January 2003) was a British ballerina and occasional actress and singer, who is best remembered as the second wife of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. As a dancer, however, she was described by Anna Pavlova as the only English dancer she'd seen who "had a soul", and by Arnold Haskell as "the most musical dancer the English have yet produced".

Biography

Early life
Gould was born in Belgravia, London in 1912. Her father was Gerald Gould, a civil servant with the Foreign Office, and her mother was the pianist Evelyn Suart. She had an older brother, Gerard, and a younger sister, Griselda.   Her father was of Irish descent but had been brought up in Paris; and her mother had studied in Brussels and Paris. Consequently, Diana was imbued with French culture and language from an early age. Her father died of typhoid fever in 1916, when Diana was aged only three.

In 1920, when she was seven, her mother married again, to Cecil Harcourt, a naval officer who eventually became Second Sea Lord and was knighted as Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt in 1945.

Ballet career
Diana Gould's first taste of the excitement of the dance came when she danced an Irish jig for a school concert, when she was eight. Her mother took her to study with Lubov Egorova in Paris but she returned to London to join Marie Rambert's school at the age of nine, and studied with her for ten years. She was tall for a ballerina of that time  (, and a tendency to clumsiness led to the nickname "Clumsina".

When she was 14, she partnered Frederick Ashton and danced the premiere of his first ballet, Leda and the Swan. Sergei Diaghilev noticed her and invited her to join his company, but he died before that plan could come about. These events were said to have been fictionalized in the movie The Red Shoes. The same bad luck happened with Anna Pavlova, who said that Diana was the only English dancer she'd seen who "had a soul". She was engaged to dance with Pavlova's troupe, but Pavlova died before it got off the ground.  She continued to dance at Rambert's Ballet Club, and created roles in some Frederick Ashton ballets, including Capriol Suite. She appeared with Antony Tudor in Atalanta of the East and The Planets, and with Ninette de Valois in Bar aux Folies-Bergère. She also danced with Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes.

She was a leading dancer in Marie Rambert's early seasons in the early 1930s, in such roles as Chiarina in Michel Fokine's Le Carnaval and the Chief Nymph in Vaslav Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un faune.   She danced briefly in leading roles with George Balanchine's company Les Ballets 1933 in London and Paris, but declined his offer to join his new school in the United States (which became the New York City Ballet). She also turned down Léonide Massine's invitation. In 1933 she danced in the premiere of Frederick Ashton's Pavane pour une infante défunte. Her other roles included the title role in Antony Tudor's Lysistrata.

Having closed the door on international opportunities, she worked for a time with the Alicia Markova-Anton Dolin company in 1935. She also worked in theatre and made some films as a straight actress.   She became the leading dancer of the Arts Theatre Ballet in 1940 and became prima ballerina of Jay Pomeroy's Russian Opera and Ballet Company at the Cambridge Theatre until 1944. She also became one of the first dancers to model for Fortnum and Mason's and fashion magazines.

From 1944 to 1946 she acted, danced and sang the role of Frou Frou in The Merry Widow in London and on tour.

Marries Yehudi Menuhin
Diana Gould met Yehudi Menuhin in 1944 and he was immediately struck by her beauty. He declared on the spot that they would one day marry, but she told him that that was 'nonsense' and reminded him his daughter had just turned five. He was still married to his Australian wife, Nola (née Nicholas), but that marriage had collapsed. He had two children (a son Krov and a daughter Zamira) and he was four years younger than Diana. He courted her for three years before she finally accepted his proposal. It also appears that the attraction was mutual, as she often seemed to appear wherever he was.  They married at the Chelsea Registry Office on 19 October 1947, seventeen days after his divorce from Nola had become final.  They had no time for a honeymoon as he had a concert to perform that night.

Yehudi's career became Diana's main purpose from then on, although she often experienced "agonising nostalgia" for her life as a dancer. As she wrote in Fiddler's Moll, "If one performing artist marries another, it is obvious that one of the two must dissolve his or her persona in the other".  He regarded her loyalty as unquestionable. They jointly signed their names "Yehudiana". She was very protective of him (she was known for her sharp tongue), and devoted her life to creating a perfect environment for the expression of his talent. She accompanied him on all his many international tours. They had two children who survived, Gerard and Jeremy, and another died shortly after birth. Although it was difficult to leave their children in the care of others, she felt her duty to be with Yehudi and organise his affairs was more important. His appearances were planned two years in advance, and Diana would spend up to 17 hours a day organising his paperwork and travel arrangements.
She pulled no punches, referring to herself as "the awfully frank and frankly awful Diana".   He referred to her as "my heavenly host on this earthly way" and "the ever-trustworthy and inspired companion of a lifetime".

Yehudi Menuhin was made an honorary knight in 1965, but not being a British subject, he was not entitled to be known as Sir Yehudi, and neither did Diana Menuhin become Lady Menuhin. That changed in 1985, when he adopted British citizenship, and his knighthood became substantive. In 1993 Sir Yehudi was made a life peer, as Baron Menuhin of Stoke d'Abernon, Lord Menuhin died in Berlin in 1999, and Lady Menuhin in London in 2003, aged 90. She was survived by her two sons and her two stepchildren.

She wrote two autobiographies: Fiddler's Moll (1984) and A Glimpse of Olympus (1996).  These display a gift with words and a blunt, self-deprecating wit.

Lady Menuhin's sister Griselda became the second wife of the pianist Louis Kentner.

Bibliography
 Fiddler's Moll, 1984 autobiography
 A Glimpse of Olympus, 1996 autobiography

Sources
 The Independent, Obituaries

References

1912 births
2003 deaths
20th-century English women writers
British ballerinas
Menuhin
British autobiographers
People from Belgravia
Prima ballerinas
Rambert Dance Company dancers
Spouses of life peers
Women autobiographers
Writers from London
20th-century British ballet dancers