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🔗 Biography 🔗 Canada 🔗 Death 🔗 Law

Garry Hoy (January 28, 1954 – July 9, 1993) was a Canadian lawyer who died when he fell from the 24th floor of his office building at the Toronto-Dominion Centre in Toronto, Ontario. In an attempt to prove to a group of prospective articling students that the building's glass windows were unbreakable — a stunt he had performed without incident many times before — he threw his body against the glass; however, this time the entire window frame gave way, and Hoy fell to his death.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Smithsonian Institution

During the 1940s–1960s, nude photographs were routinely taken of incoming freshmen at elite colleges in the United States, such as the Ivy Leagues and Seven Sisters schools. Purportedly taken to assess the posture and health of the students, the bulk of the photographs were produced by W. H. Sheldon, a psychologist and eugenicist who believed non-white races were intellectually stunted. Sheldon developed a theory that measuring a human body could predict the subject's intelligence, temperament, and moral worth. The inspiration to take mass photos for his research came from the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, who proposed such a photo archive for the British population.

The institutions that had "posture photo" programs included Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Vassar, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Swarthmore, University of Pennsylvania, Hotchkiss, Syracuse, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Purdue, Brooklyn College, the Oregon Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and others. The years that each institution participated vary. Some schools, such as Harvard and Wellesley, had their own practice of taking posture photos well before Sheldon's involvement, as early as the 1880s.

Most of the photo archives were destroyed voluntarily by the schools in the 1960s and '70s, after ending their posture photo practices. After Sheldon's death in 1977, his personal archive of over 20,000 photos and negatives was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives. These were never displayed, and could only be viewed by researchers who petitioned the chief archivist. After a write-up in the New York Times Magazine in 1995, the Smithsonian sealed the documents completely, and destroyed the Yale archives upon request.

Some celebrities have mentioned their experiences getting their posture photo taken, including Sylvia Plath, Nora Ephron, Dick Cavett and Judith Martin (the etiquette expert known as Miss Manners). In the 2020s posture photos of the actors James Franciscus and Bill Hinnant resurfaced and were sold on eBay.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Politics 🔗 European history 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography 🔗 Firefighting

The Reichstag fire (German: Reichstagsbrand, pronounced [ˈʁaɪçstaːksˌbʁant] ) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday, 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist, was said to be the culprit; the Nazis attributed the fire to a group of Communist agitators, used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, and pursue a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi rule in Germany.

The first report of the fire came shortly after 9:00 p.m., when a Berlin fire station received an alarm call. By the time police and firefighters arrived, the structure was engulfed in flames. The police conducted a thorough search inside the building and found Van der Lubbe, who was arrested.

After the Fire Decree was issued, the police – now controlled by Hitler's Nazi Party – made mass arrests of communists, including all of the communist Reichstag delegates. This severely crippled communist participation in the 5 March elections. After the 5 March elections, the absence of the communists allowed the Nazi Party to expand their plurality in the Reichstag, greatly assisting the Nazi seizure of total power. On 9 March 1933 the Prussian state police arrested Bulgarians Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev, and Blagoy Popov, who were known Comintern operatives (though the police did not know it then, Dimitrov was head of all Comintern operations in Western Europe). Ernst Torgler, chairman of the KPD Reichstag faction, had surrendered to police on 28 February.

Van der Lubbe and the four communists were the defendants in a trial that started in September 1933. It ended in the acquittal of the four communists and the conviction of Van der Lubbe, who was then executed. In 2008, Germany posthumously pardoned Van der Lubbe under a law introduced in 1998 to lift unjust verdicts from the Nazi era. The responsibility for the Reichstag fire remains a topic of debate, as while Van der Lubbe was found guilty, it is unclear whether he acted alone. The consensus amongst historians is the Reichstag was set ablaze by Van der Lubbe; some consider it to have been a part of a Nazi plot, a view Richard J. Evans labels a conspiracy theory.

🔗 Media 🔗 Journalism

State media are typically understood as media outlets that are owned, operated, or significantly influenced by the government. They are sometimes distinguished from public service media, which are designed to serve the public interest, operate independently of government control, and are financed through a combination of public funding, licensing fees, and sometimes advertising. The crucial difference lies in the level of independence from government influence and the commitment to building trust and serving a broad public interest rather than the interests of a specific political party or government agenda.

State media serve as tools for public diplomacy and narrative shaping. These media outlets can broadcast via television, radio, print, and increasingly on social media, to convey government viewpoints to domestic and international audiences. The approach to using state media can vary, focusing on positive narratives, adjusting narratives retroactively, or spreading misinformation through sophisticated social media campaigns.

Public or state media may be financed through different sources, such as direct government funding, a licence fee paid by television viewers, donations, and commercial advertising.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Elections and Referendums

Democratic backsliding is a form of autocratization, a process of regime change toward authoritarianism in which the exercise of political power becomes less limited and more arbitrary and repressive. Democratic backsliding specifically assumes a starting point of a democratic system. The process typically restricts the space for public contest and political participation in the process of government selection. Democratic backsliding involves the weakening of democratic institutions, such as the peaceful transition of power or free and fair elections, or the violation of individual rights that underpin democracies, especially freedom of expression. Democratic backsliding is the opposite of democratization.

Democratic backsliding is a gradual process, composed of instances of decline. It is not sudden nor dramatic, and typically follows legal processes to weaken democratic institutions. The Democratic Erosion Consortium categorizes these events of erosion into precursors, symptoms, acts of resistance to backsliding, and destabilizing events.

Proposed causes of democratic backsliding include economic inequality, unemployment, culture wars, culturally conservative reactions to societal changes, populist or personalist politics, and external influence from great power politics. Economic inequality is strongly associated with democratic backsliding in the 21st century, even in wealthy democracies. During crises, backsliding can occur when leaders impose autocratic rules during states of emergency that are either disproportionate to the severity of the crisis or remain in place after the situation has improved.

During the Cold War, democratic backsliding occurred most frequently through coups. Since the end of the Cold War, democratic backsliding has occurred more frequently through the election of personalist leaders or parties who subsequently dismantle democratic institutions. During the third wave of democratization in the late twentieth century, many new, weakly institutionalized democracies were established; these regimes have been most vulnerable to democratic backsliding. The third wave of autocratization has been ongoing since 2010 after the Great Recession, when the number of liberal democracies was at an all-time high. More than half of all autocratization episodes over 1900–2023 have a U-turn shape in which the autocratization is closely followed by and linked to subsequent democratization.

🔗 Architecture

A saw-tooth roof is a roof comprising a series of ridges with dual pitches either side. The steeper surfaces are glazed to admit daylight and face away from the equator to shield workers and machinery from direct sunlight. This kind of roof admits natural light into a deep plan building or factory. It was therefore most commonly built during the Machine Age from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, when electrification of factories was not yet common.

Many factories of the era had little or no electrical wiring; their main power sources for the machinery were often steam engines driving line shafting, and the lighting was chiefly via daylighting through the windows. Work done at night, when necessary, was typically lit by oil lamps and candles, but many factories closed for the night. Their norm of an early working day (for example, 6 a.m. to 4 p.m.) was not merely a tradition but a functional decision based on this reliance on daylighting. The same was true of the farmer's workday, for the same reason.

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Geology 🔗 Mining 🔗 Lakes

Lake Peigneur (locally pronounced [pæ̃j̃æ̹ɾ]) is a brackish lake in the U.S. state of Louisiana, 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) north of Delcambre and 9.1 mi (14.6 km) west of New Iberia, near the northernmost tip of Vermilion Bay. With a maximum depth of 200 feet (60 meters), it is the deepest lake in Louisiana.

It was a 10-foot-deep (3 m) freshwater body, popular with sportsmen, until an unusual man-made disaster on November 20, 1980 changed its structure and the surrounding land.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Amiga

WarpOS is a multitasking kernel for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture central processing unit (CPU) developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It runs on PowerUP accelerator boards developed by phase5 which contains both a Motorola 68000 series CPU and a PowerPC CPU with shared address space. WarpOS runs alongside the 68k-based AmigaOS, which can use the PowerPC as a coprocessor. Despite its name, it is not an operating system (OS), but a kernel; it supplies a limited set of functions similar to those in AmigaOS for using the PowerPC. When released, its original name was WarpUP, but was changed to reflect its greater feature set, and possibly to avoid comparison with its competitor, PowerUP.

It was developed by Sam Jordan using 680x0 and PowerPC assembly language.^[8] It was distributed free of charge.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Connecticut

The Leatherman (c. 1839–1889) was a vagabond famous for his handmade leather suit of clothes who traveled through the northeastern United States on a regular circuit between the Connecticut River and the Hudson River from roughly 1857 to 1889. Of unknown origin, he was thought to be French-Canadian because of his fluency in the French language, his "broken English", and the French-language prayer book found on his person after his death. His identity remains unknown and controversial. He walked a repeating 365-mile (587 km) route year after year, which took him through certain towns in western Connecticut and eastern New York, returning to each town roughly every 34 days.

🔗 Disability 🔗 Writing systems

English Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters (phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms). Some English Braille letters, such as ⠿ ⟨for⟩, correspond to more than one letter in print.

There are three levels of complexity in English Braille. Grade 1 is a nearly one-to-one transcription of printed English and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is nearly universal beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places (such as the letter ⠿ ⟨for⟩) and adds hundreds of abbreviations and contractions. Both Grade 1 and Grade 2 have been standardized. "Grade 3" is any of various personal shorthands that are almost never found in publications. Most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade 2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade 2 Braille. Some of the differences with Unified English Braille, which was officially adopted by various countries between 2005 and 2012, are discussed at the end.

Braille is frequently portrayed as a re-encoding of the English orthography used by sighted people. However, braille is a separate writing system, not a variant of the printed English alphabet.