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Baden-Powell Scouts' Association

The Baden-Powell Scouts' Association (B-PSA) is a worldwide youth organisation originating in the United Kingdom, with friendly relationships with similar traditional scouting organisations in various countries. Baden-Powell Scouting focuses on the importance of tradition in the scout movement.

The Baden-Powell Scouts' Association shares the heritage of the youth scouting movement, however they believe in a traditional way of scouting which closely follows the programme set out by Lt. General Robert Baden-Powell in his book: Scouting for Boys.

The Baden-Powell Scouts' Association was formed in the United Kingdom in 1970 by the Reverend William Dowling when it was felt that the Scout Association was abandoning the traditions and intentions set out by Baden-Powell in 1908. The Baden-Powell Scouts retain the belief that the essence of the movement should be based on outdoor activities related to the skills of explorers, backwoodsmen and frontiersmen.

It is a voluntary, non-formal educational charity association for young people. It is an independent, non-political, and non-military organisation. The B-PSA believes this programme should be available to everyone.

As an independent scout association, they are members of the World Federation of Independent Scouts (WFIS). The WFIS was formed in Laubach, Germany, in 1996 by Lawrie Dring, a scouter and President of the B-PSA, and scouts from Laubach. The WFIS is an international body that recognises independent scouts associations in countries around the world that teach traditional Baden-Powell scouting values. Their aim is to improve the standard of future citizens with the object of using their efficiency for service for their fellows.

History
For the origins and history of the scout movement generally see: Scouting

Following the origin of the Boy Scout Movement and, in 1908, the publication of Robert Baden-Powell's book, Scouting for Boys, the Boy Scouts Association was formed in 1910 and, until 1967, it followed the programme established by Baden-Powell. However, the publication of the Chief Scouts' Advance Party Report, introduced major changes to that association's name, uniform, sections and programme.

In 1969, some of those, led by the Reverend William Dowling, who did not agree with changes being introduced following the Advance Party Report formed a pressure group within the Scout Association, known as 'the Scout Action Group'. They asked that Scout Groups wishing to maintain a more traditional approach to Scouting should be allowed to do so. In mid-1970 the Scout Action Group published A Boy Scout Black Paper, which outlined their views.

As a result of discussions, the whole organisation fractioned into two groups on 20 September 1970 – The Scout Association and the Baden-Powell Scouts' Association.

In 1979, due to internal arguments, the Baden-Powell Scouts' Association split into two organisations, with both claiming the name and charity number of the association. The two factions reconciled their differences in June 1990, and in 1994 there were nearly 70 groups in the association.

In the 1990s there was a dip in the number of active groups in the Baden-Powell Scouts' Association, in common with a fall in numbers experienced by the various United Kingdom Scout organisations at that time, and the number of groups had dropped to around 40 in 2001. The Baden-Powell Scouts' Association, as with Scouting in the United Kingdom generally, has shown subsequent growth in numbers with the opening of new groups. A report in The Times in August 2004 gave a membership of 5,000 in 56 groups.

The B-PSA celebrated 100 years of Scouting in 2007, issuing centenary badges and holding their own Centenary Camp in Southampton.

Jamboree 2008, marked the centenary of the first official Scout Camp held by Baden-Powell at Humshaugh. The event included parades at Hexham Abbey and a ceremony at the original Carr Edge camp site.

Aims, methods and ideals

The main policy is Traditional Scouting – which is taking Baden-Powell's original nine Scout Laws and the later 10th Scout Law and using them, along with Baden-Powell's original training programme and rank system.

Once a Scout is invested Baden-Powell believed that he would continue to live the Scout Law. This law is kept by Scouts from the age of ten and Adult Leaders must renew their promise on regular occasions. The original Scout Law, written by Baden-Powell, appeared in 1908. The Baden-Powell Scouts' Association uses his 1911 version, which is as follows:

 * 1) A Scout's honour is to be trusted
 * 2) A Scout is loyal to the King and to his officers, and to his country, and to his employers.
 * 3) A Scout's duty is to be useful and to help others.
 * 4) A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what social class the other belongs.
 * 5) A Scout is courteous.
 * 6) A Scout is a friend to animals.
 * 7) A Scout obeys orders of his patrol leader or Scout master without question.
 * 8) A Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties.
 * 9) A Scout is thrifty.
 * 10) A Scout is clean in thought, word and deed.

The Baden-Powell Scouts' Association hold to the ideals of Scouting that were created by Baden-Powell. The association's heritage dates back to the foundations of Scouting in the UK in 1908. The association follows a charter set down in their Policy Association Rules. They have no paid Executive Staff or Leaders.

The traditional programme also develops a sense of duty, personal discipline and honour. In addition to a wide range of activities Scouts in the B-PSA continue to practise traditional Scouting skills:
 * lighting fire by friction
 * navigating by means other than a compass
 * backwoods cooking
 * camping in self erected "bivvys"

The Baden-Powell Scouts' Association are members of the World Federation of Independent Scouts. The Baden-Powell Scouts use the original programmes and wear traditional uniforms. Wolf Cubs continue to use the Grand Howl at the beginning and end of their meetings.

The advancement program for members of the Baden-Powell Scouts' Association is symbolised by the earning of badges and awards.

In Wolf Cubs this consists of Tenderpad, First Star and Second Star – working towards the final award of Leaping Wolf. The First and Second Stars are worn on the Cub's cap, this positioning leading them to sometimes be referred to as one, then both, eyes open.

In the Scouts section they use the same ranks as in Scouting for Boys with Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, and the Scout Cord. Senior Scouts can earn the Bushman's Thong (with variations for Air and Sea Scouts) and the St. George's Scout award, which takes the place of the Queen's Scout award. Rover Scouts are able to earn the Baden-Powell Award.

The requirements for these badges, and the overall designs of the award badges, remain true to the pre-1967 Boy Scouts Association requirements and designs, with the stars on the original awards being replaced by the initials B and P, and the word "BOY" being replaced by "B-P".

Uniform

The Scout sections wear the traditional uniform designed by Baden-Powell.
 * Headwear: Campaign hat or beret, with the Section badge in front.
 * Neckerchief: Of the group colour worn with a woggle or a loose knot at the throat.
 * Shirt: In non-Sea Scout or Air Scout Groups, a khaki shirt. Air Scouts wear Wedgwood Blue.
 * Shorts or trousers: Khaki or dark blue for Air Scouts.
 * Belt: Brown leather, official pattern.
 * Socks: Any plain colour, worn turned down below the knee
 * Boots or shoes: Brown or black.
 * Shoulder badge: Indicating the group, worn on the right shoulder.

Sections
The Baden-Powell Scout's Association retains the pre-Advance Party Report (1967) sections, the traditional UK Scout sections developed by Baden-Powell, to which Beavers were added in 1982. The association is open to males and females in mixed and separate sections.

The sections (Beavers to Senior Scouts) are led by a Section Master, who must hold a warrant for the position, aided by assistants. Other adults who help run a section may be volunteers (such as parents of children in the group), Instructors (Scouts, Senior Scouts and Rovers that have been trained to assist the leaders), and members of the group executive committee who help operate the group financially. Rover Crews mainly govern themselves, but are assisted by a Rover Scout Leader who ensures that the crew is working within the rules of the association.

Group branches
There are Air Scouts and the provision for Sea Scouts within the organisation. These branches follow the same core programme as other sections but add more aeronautical or nautical emphasis depending on the branch.

Child protection
In common with other United Kingdom youth organisations all adults have to undergo extended criminal record checks since their introduction in 1997. New leaders are required to give personal references and complete an interview before taking an appointment. The B-PSA has a child protection officer and there is a full child protection policy in place.

Each international association follows the child protection measures expected in their own country.

Australia
The 1st Devonport Scouts in Tasmania under Alan Richmond, OAM, several groups in South Australia under Frank Payne and later groups in New South Wales and another in Queensland affiliated with the B-PSA.

Canada
The B-PSA was first organized in Canada in Victoria, British Columbia in February 1996 as the Baden-Powell Scouts' Association of Canada (BPSA Canada). Scouts Canada lodged a complaint against this name with Industry Canada. This prompted the association to reorganize on a provincial basis. BPSA Associations currently operate in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

Denmark
The Yellow Scouts of Denmark – Baden-Powell Scouts (De Gule Speijdere i Danmark) started on 25 February 1984, as "Det Danske Pige- og Drenge Spejderkorps", aiming to return to a more traditional Scouting approach as a response to changes in the mainstream Danish Scouting movement.

Ghana
The Baden-Powell Scouts Association is active in Ghana. The Baden-Powell Scouts of Ghana operates in Accra, Ghana. It has a Beaver Lodge of 40, two Wolf Cub Packs of 30 and a Scout Troop of 48 members.

Malta
Baden-Powell Scouts Malta was set up in 2011 and there are currently seven active groups located in Mtarfa, Mgarr (Sea Scouts), Luqa (Air Scouts), Qormi, St Paul's Bay (Sea Scouts), Bahrija and Zebbug. BPSM was admitted to full membership of WFIS in 2014.

United States
The Baden-Powell Scout Association became a registered corporation in the United States in June 2002, and was issued federal non-profit organisation status, operating the 1st Tarrant Scout Group in Texas, notable as the first B-PSA group to operate in the United States. B-PSA was affiliated with the Baden-Powell Scouts Association of England before they ceased operations, possibly about 2010.

Also in the US is the Baden-Powell Service Association (United States) (BPSA-US), formed in 2006 and later incorporated in California, 2009. BPSA-US is not directly affiliated with the Baden-Powell Scouts' Association, but is part of the traditional Scouting movement and a member of the World Federation of Independent Scouts. BPSA-US has worked closely with members of the Baden-Powell Scouts' Association and the Baden-Powell Service Association in Canada, and is working with others in defining their traditional Scouting program.

title: Baden-Powell Scouts' Association


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Algebraic independence

In abstract algebra, a subset $$S$$ of a field $$L$$ is algebraically independent over a subfield $$K$$ if the elements of $$S$$ do not satisfy any non-trivial polynomial equation with coefficients in $$K$$.

In particular, a one element set $$\{\alpha\}$$ is algebraically independent over $$K$$ if and only if $$\alpha$$ is transcendental over $$K$$. In general, all the elements of an algebraically independent set $$S$$ over $$K$$ are by necessity transcendental over $$K$$, and over all of the field extensions over $$K$$ generated by the remaining elements of $$S$$.

Example
The two real numbers $$\sqrt{\pi}$$ and $$2\pi+1$$ are each transcendental numbers: they are not the roots of any nontrivial polynomial whose coefficients are rational numbers. Thus, each of the two singleton sets $$\{\sqrt{\pi}\}$$ and $$\{2\pi+1\}$$ is algebraically independent over the field $$\mathbb{Q}$$ of rational numbers.

However, the set $$\{ \sqrt{\pi}, 2\pi+1 \}$$ is not algebraically independent over the rational numbers, because the nontrivial polynomial
 * $$P(x,y)=2x^2-y+1$$

is zero when $$x=\sqrt{\pi}$$ and $$y=2\pi+1$$.

Algebraic independence of known constants
Although both $$\pi$$ and e are known to be transcendental, it is not known whether the set of both of them is algebraically independent over $$\mathbb{Q}$$. In fact, it is not even known if $$\pi+e$$ is irrational. Nesterenko proved in 1996 that:
 * the numbers $$\pi$$, $$e^\pi$$, and $$\Gamma(1/4)$$, where $$\Gamma$$ is the gamma function, are algebraically independent over $$\mathbb{Q}$$.
 * the numbers $$e^{\pi\sqrt{3}}$$ and $$\Gamma(1/3)$$ are algebraically independent over $$\mathbb{Q}$$.
 * for all positive integers $$n$$, the number $$e^{\pi\sqrt{n}}$$ is algebraically independent over $$\mathbb{Q}$$.

Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem
The Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem can often be used to prove that some sets are algebraically independent over $$\mathbb{Q}$$. It states that whenever $$\alpha_1,\ldots,\alpha_n$$ are algebraic numbers that are linearly independent over $$\mathbb{Q}$$, then $$e^{\alpha_1},\ldots,e^{\alpha_n}$$ are also algebraically independent over $$\mathbb{Q}$$.

Algebraic matroids
Given a field extension $$L/K$$ that is not algebraic, Zorn's lemma can be used to show that there always exists a maximal algebraically independent subset of $$L$$ over $$K$$. Further, all the maximal algebraically independent subsets have the same cardinality, known as the transcendence degree of the extension.

For every set $$S$$ of elements of $$L$$, the algebraically independent subsets of $$S$$ satisfy the axioms that define the independent sets of a matroid. In this matroid, the rank of a set of elements is its transcendence degree, and the flat generated by a set $$T$$ of elements is the intersection of $$L$$ with the field $$K[T]$$. A matroid that can be generated in this way is called an algebraic matroid. No good characterization of algebraic matroids is known, but certain matroids are known to be non-algebraic; the smallest is the Vámos matroid.

Many finite matroids may be represented by a matrix over a field $$K$$, in which the matroid elements correspond to matrix columns, and a set of elements is independent if the corresponding set of columns is linearly independent. Every matroid with a linear representation of this type may also be represented as an algebraic matroid, by choosing an indeterminate for each row of the matrix, and by using the matrix coefficients within each column to assign each matroid element a linear combination of these transcendentals. The converse is false: not every algebraic matroid has a linear representation.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Algebraic independence


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LILO (bootloader)

LILO (Linux Loader) is a boot loader for Linux and was the default boot loader for most Linux distributions. Unlike loadlin, it allowed booting Linux without having DOS on the computer. As of 2009, most distributions had switched to GRUB as the default boot loader. Further development of LILO was discontinued in December 2015 along with a request by Joachim Wiedorn for potential developers.

ELILO
For EFI-based PC hardware the now orphaned ELILO boot loader was developed, originally by Hewlett-Packard for IA-64 systems, but later also for standard i386 and amd64 hardware with EFI support.

On any version of Linux running on Intel-based Apple Macintosh hardware, ELILO is one of the available bootloaders.

It supports network booting using TFTP/DHCP.

title: LILO (bootloader)


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Labour Representation Committee

Labour Representation Committee may refer to:

 * Labour Representation Committee (1900), the original name of the British Labour Party
 * Labour Representation Committee (2004), a 21st-century pressure group within the British Labour Party
 * Belfast Labour Representation Committee, group active in the 1910s which later became the Belfast Labour Party
 * Northern Ireland Labour Representation Committee, a party label started in 2016 by Labour Party activists in Northern Ireland

title: Labour Representation Committee


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GNU GRUB

GNU GRUB (short for GNU GRand Unified Bootloader, commonly referred to as GRUB) is a boot loader package from the GNU Project. GRUB is the reference implementation of the Free Software Foundation's Multiboot Specification, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular operating system's partitions.

GNU GRUB was developed from a package called the Grand Unified Bootloader (a play on Grand Unified Theory ). It is predominantly used for Unix-like systems.

Booting
When a computer is turned on, its BIOS finds the primary bootable device (usually the computer's hard disk) and runs the initial bootstrap program from the master boot record (MBR). The MBR is the first sector of the hard disk. This bootstrap program must be small because it has to fit in a single sector. For a long time, the size of a sector has been 512 bytes. Since 2009 there are hard disks available with a sector size of 4096 bytes, called Advanced Format disks, but, such hard disks are still accessed in 512-byte sectors, using the 512e emulation. The legacy MBR partition table supports a maximum of four partitions and occupies 64 bytes, combined. Together with the optional disk signature (four bytes) and disk timestamp (six bytes), this leaves between 434 and 446 bytes available for the machine code of a boot loader. Although such a small space can be sufficient for very simple boot loaders, it is not big enough to contain a boot loader supporting complex and multiple file systems, menu-driven selection of boot choices, etc. Boot loaders with bigger footprints are therefore split into pieces, where the smallest piece fits in the MBR, while one or more larger pieces are stored in other locations such as empty sectors between the MBR and the first partition. The code in the MBR then does little more than starting the second part.

The purpose of the remaining part(s) of the boot loader is to actually boot an operating system by configuring it and starting the kernel. Kernels are in most cases stored as files residing on appropriate file systems, but the concept of a file system is unknown to the BIOS. Thus, in BIOS-based systems, the duty of a boot loader is to access the content of those files, so it can be loaded into the RAM and executed.

One possible approach for boot loaders is to load kernel images by directly accessing hard disk sectors without understanding the underlying file system. Usually, an additional level of indirection is required, in form of maps or map files – auxiliary files that contain a list of physical sectors occupied by kernel images. Such maps need to be updated each time a kernel image changes its physical location on disk, due to installing new kernel images, file system defragmentation, etc. Also, in case of the maps changing their physical location, their locations need to be updated within the boot loader's MBR code, so the sectors indirection mechanism continues to work. This is not only cumbersome, but it also leaves the system in need of manual repairs in case something goes wrong during system updates.

Another approach is to make a boot loader aware of the underlying file systems, so kernel images are configured and accessed using their actual file paths. That requires a boot loader to contain a driver for each of the supported file systems, so they can be understood and accessed by the boot loader itself. This approach eliminates the need for hardcoded locations of hard disk sectors and existence of map files, and does not require MBR updates after kernel images are added or moved around. The configuration of a boot loader is stored in a regular file, which is also accessed in a file system-aware way to obtain boot configurations before the actual booting of any kernel images. Thus, fewer things can go wrong during system updates. As a downside, such boot loaders are larger and more complex.

GNU GRUB uses the second approach, by understanding the underlying file systems. The boot loader itself is split into multiple stages so that it fits in the MBR boot scheme.

Two major versions of GRUB are in common use: GRUB version 1, called GRUB legacy, is only prevalent in older releases of Linux distributions. GRUB 2 was written from scratch and intended to replace its predecessor, and is now used by a majority of Linux distributions.

Version 0 (GRUB Legacy)

GRUB 0.x follows a two-stage approach. The master boot record (MBR) usually contains GRUB stage 1, or can contain a standard MBR implementation which chainloads GRUB stage 1 from the active partition's boot sector. Given the small size of a boot sector (512 bytes), stage 1 can do little more than load the next stage of GRUB by loading a few disk sectors from a fixed location near the start of the disk (within its first 1024 cylinders).

Stage 1 can load stage 2 directly, but it is normally set up to load the stage 1.5., located in the first 30 KiB of hard disk immediately following the MBR and before the first partition. In case this space is not available (unusual partition table, special disk drivers, GPT or LVM disk) the install of stage 1.5 will fail. The stage 1.5 image contains file system drivers, enabling it to directly load stage 2 from any known location in the filesystem, for example from. Stage 2 will then load the default configuration file and any other modules needed.

Startup on systems using BIOS firmware

 * See illustration in last image on the right.
 * (stage 1) is written to the first 440 bytes of the Master Boot Record (MBR boot code in sector 0), or optionally in a partition boot sector (PBR). It addresses  by a 64-bit  LBA address. The actual sector number is written by  .   is the first sector of   with the sole purpose to load the rest of   identified by LBA sector numbers also written by.
 * On MBR partitioned disks,  (stage 1.5) is stored in the empty sectors (if available) between the MBR and the first partition. Recent operating systems suggest a 1 MiB gap here for alignment (2047 512-byte, or 255 4KiB, sectors). This gap used to be 62 sectors (31 KiB) as a reminder of the sector number limit of Cylinder-Head-Sector (C/H/S) addressing used by BIOS before 1996, therefore   is designed to be smaller than 32 KiB.
 * On GPT partitioned disks  is written to its own partition. It must be flagged "BIOS_grub", must not be formatted and can be as tiny as 1 MiB.
 * stage 2:  loads   from the partition configured by  . If the partition index has changed, GRUB will be unable to find the , and presents the user with the GRUB Rescue prompt.
 * Depending on how GRUB2 was installed, the  is either in the root partition of the Linux distribution, or in the separate /boot partition.
 * after normal.mod loaded:  parses , optionally loads modules (eg. for graphical UI and file system support) and shows the menu.

Startup on systems using UEFI firmware

 * (for x64 UEFI systems) is installed as a file in the EFI System Partition, and booted by the firmware directly, without a  in MBR sector 0. This file is like stage1 and stage1.5.
 * can be installed on the EFI System Partition or the separate /boot partition.
 * For x64 UEFI systems, stage2 are the  file and other   files.

After startup
GRUB presents a menu where the user can choose from operating systems (OS) found by grub-install. GRUB can be configured to automatically load a specified OS after a user-defined timeout. If the timeout is set to zero seconds, pressing and holding while the computer is booting makes it possible to access the boot menu.

In the operating system selection menu GRUB accepts a couple of commands:
 * By pressing e, it is possible to edit kernel parameters of the selected menu item before the operating system is started. The reason for doing this in GRUB (i.e. not editing the parameters in an already booted system) can be an emergency case: the system has failed to boot. Using the kernel parameters line it is possible, among other things, to specify a module to be disabled (blacklisted) for the kernel. This could be required if the specific kernel module is broken and thus prevents boot-up. For example, to blacklist the kernel module, one could append   at the end of the kernel parameters.
 * By pressing c, the user enters the GRUB command line. The GRUB command line is not a regular Linux shell, like e.g. bash, and accepts only certain GRUB-specific commands, documented by various Linux distributions.

Once boot options have been selected, GRUB loads the selected kernel into memory and passes control to the kernel. Alternatively, GRUB can pass control of the boot process to another boot loader, using chain loading. This is the method used to load operating systems that do not support the Multiboot Specification or are not supported directly by GRUB.

Identifying partitions (UUID workaround)
A computer can have multiple hard disks connected to it. These could be identified via their SATA port. Each time the computer POSTs, the hard disk connected to port 1 (of the motherboard), could be assigned the same identifier, e.g. hd0. But what if such consistency cannot be guaranteed? What if the constellation of connected hard disks changed from one start up to another? What if a hard disk shall be connected to another computer?

By entering ls into either the in GRUB rescue console (available after loading core.img ) or the GRUB console (available after loading normal.mod) a list of all available hard disks and partitions can be obtained. Either by guessing or by further investigation (e.g. ls (hd0,5)/) can these numbers be assigned to actual hard disks and partitions.

As it cannot be guaranteed that the numbering of hard disks via dumb numbers hd0, hd1, … is consistent, GNU GRUB can use the UUID to identify partitions (actually file system instances) – that have this feature – instead.

The file systems ext2, ext3, ext4 and xfs use an Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) to uniquely identify an instance. The UUID is created when a partition is formatted. The UUID is part of the file system and written to the superblock. All operations but a formatting should leave the UUID unaltered, but it is possible to change it or duplicate it (by using dd to clone an entire partition).

The file grub.cfg is used to configure GRUB. It is the file where the commands which shall be executed during each start up are stored. Without an existing and valid grub.cfg, GRUB will present a prompt.

An absolute minimal grub.cfg might contain only the following two commands (cf. initial ramdisk): linux (hd0,1)/kernel/vmlinuz-3.20.1-4 ro # use the file name "vmlinuz-…" located in the directory /kernel on the first partition of the first hard disk as linux kernel image initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.img-3.20.1-4  # use the file named "initrd.img–…" located in the directory /boot on the first partition of the first hard disk as initial ramdisk

More fancy grub.cfg will describe a menu to be presented, will use multiple colors, and maybe a background picture.

History
GRUB was initially developed by Erich Boleyn as part of work on booting the operating system GNU/Hurd, developed by the Free Software Foundation. In 1999, Gordon Matzigkeit and Yoshinori K. Okuji made GRUB an official software package of the GNU Project and opened the development process to the public. , the majority of Linux distributions have adopted GNU GRUB 2, as well as other systems such as Sony's PlayStation 4.

Development
GRUB version 1 (also known as "GRUB Legacy") is no longer under development and is being phased out. The GNU GRUB developers have switched their focus to GRUB 2, a complete rewrite with goals including making GNU GRUB cleaner, more robust, more portable and more powerful. GRUB 2 started under the name PUPA. PUPA was supported by the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA) in Japan. PUPA was integrated into GRUB 2 development around 2002, when GRUB version 0.9x was renamed GRUB Legacy.

Some of the goals of the GRUB 2 project include support for non-x86 platforms, internationalization and localization, non-ASCII characters, dynamic modules, memory management, a scripting mini-language, migrating platform specific (x86) code to platform specific modules, and an object-oriented framework. GNU GRUB version 2.00 was officially released on June 26, 2012.

Three of the most widely used Linux distributions use GRUB 2 as their mainstream boot loader. Ubuntu adopted it as the default boot loader in its 9.10 version of October 2009. Fedora followed suit with Fedora 16 released in November 2011. OpenSUSE adopted GRUB 2 as the default boot loader with its 12.2 release of September 2012. Solaris also adopted GRUB 2 on the x86 platform in the Solaris 11.1 release. Buildroot also uses GNU GRUB for x86 and x86_64 targets.

In late 2015, the exploit of pressing backspace 28 times to bypass the login password was found and quickly fixed.

Variants
GNU GRUB is free and open-source software, so several variants have been created. Some notable ones, which have not been merged into GRUB mainline:
 * OpenSolaris includes a modified GRUB Legacy that supports Solaris VTOC slices, automatic 64-bit kernel selection, and booting from ZFS (with compression and multiple boot environments).
 * Google Summer of Code 2008 had a project to support GRUB legacy to boot from ext4 formatted partitions.
 * The Syllable project made a modified version of GRUB to load the system from its AtheOS File System.
 * TrustedGRUB extends GRUB by implementing verification of the system integrity and boot process security, using the Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
 * The Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) provides a GRUB environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS supports scripting via Python, and includes Python APIs to access various low-level functionality of the hardware platform, including ACPI, CPU and chipset registers, PCI, and PCI Express.
 * GRUB4DOS is a GRUB legacy fork that improves the installation experience on DOS and Microsoft Windows by putting everything besides the GRLDR config in one image file. It can be loaded directly from DOS, or by NTLDR or Windows Boot Manager. GRUB4DOS is under active development and as of 2021 supports UEFI.

GRUB configuration tools

The setup tools in use by various distributions often include modules to set up GRUB. For example, YaST2 on SUSE Linux and openSUSE distributions and Anaconda on Fedora/RHEL distributions. StartUp-Manager and GRUB Customizer are graphical configuration editors for Debian-based distributions. The development of StartUp-Manager stopped on 6 May 2011 after the lead developer cited personal reasons for not actively developing the program. GRUB Customizer is also available for Arch-based distributions.

For GRUB 2 there are KDE Control Modules.

GRLDR ICE is a tiny tool for modifying the default configuration of grldr file for GRUB4DOS.

Boot repair utilities
Boot-Repair is a simple graphical tool for recovering from frequent boot-related problems with GRUB and Microsoft Windows bootloader. This application is available under GNU GPL license. Boot-Repair can repair GRUB on multiple Linux distributions including, but not limited to, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, and Arch Linux.

Installer for Windows
Grub2Win is a Windows open-source software package. It allows GNU GRUB to boot from a Windows directory. The setup program installs GNU GRUB version 2.12 to an NTFS partition. A Windows GUI application is then used to customize the GRUB boot menu, themes, UEFI boot order, scripts etc. All GNU GRUB scripts and commands are supported for both UEFI and legacy systems. Grub2Win can configure GRUB for multiboot of Windows, Ubuntu, openSuse, Fedora and many other Linux distributions. It is freely available under GNU GPL License at SourceForge.

Alternative boot managers
The strength of GRUB is the wide range of supported platforms, file systems, and operating systems, making it the default choice for distributions and embedded systems.

However, there are boot managers targeted at the end user that give more friendly user experience, graphical OS selector and simpler configuration:
 * rEFInd – Macintosh-style graphical boot manager, only for UEFI-based computers (BIOS not supported).
 * CloverEFI – Macintosh-style graphical boot manager for BIOS and UEFI-based computers. It emulates UEFI with a heavily modified DUET from the TianoCore project and requires a FAT formatted partition even on BIOS systems. As a benefit, it has a basic filesystem driver in the partition boot sector, avoiding the brittleness of a second or third stage and the infamous GRUB Rescue prompt. The user interface looks similar to rEFInd: both inherit from the abandoned boot manager rEFIt.

Non-graphical alternatives:
 * systemd-boot – Light, UEFI-only boot manager with text-based OS selector menu.

How-Tos and troubleshooting
Distribution wikis have many solutions for common issues and custom setups that might help you:
 * Arch Linux /GRUB
 * Ubuntu /Grub2 (also see Links at the bottom)
 * Fedora /GRUB_2
 * Gentoo /GRUB2
 * Grub2 theme tutorial

Documentation

 * GRUB manual – most detailed documentation, including all commands
 * GRUB wiki archived in 2010
 * GRUB wiki archived in 2010

Introductory articles

 * Boot with GRUB, an April 2001 article in Linux Journal

Technicalities

 * Booting Linux on x86 using Grub2 – in-depth article
 * Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI firmware, common since 2012)
 * GUID Partition Table (GPT) – handles hard drives bigger than 2 TiB and more than 4 partitions
 * Master boot record used with BIOS firmware (motherboards roughly before 2012)
 * BIOS Boot Specification Version 1.01 (January 11, 1996) – hard to find

title: GNU GRUB


text:
Pibgorn

Pibgorn may refer to:
 * Pibgorn (instrument), a Welsh musical instrument of the hornpipe family
 * Pibgorn (webcomic)

title: Pibgorn


text:
Malcolm Muggeridge

Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990) was an English journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party Members of Parliament (for Romford, in Essex). Malcolm's brother Eric was one of the founders of Plan International. In his twenties, Muggeridge was attracted to communism and went to live in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the experience turned him into an anti-communist.

During World War II, he worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy, first in East Africa for two years and then in Paris. In the aftermath of the war, he converted to Christianity under the influence of Hugh Kingsmill and helped to bring Mother Teresa to popular attention in the West. He was a critic of the sexual revolution and of drug use.

Muggeridge kept detailed diaries for much of his life, which were published in 1981 under the title Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, and he developed them into two volumes of an uncompleted autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time.

Early life and career
Muggeridge's father, Henry (known as H. T. Muggeridge), served as a Labour Party councillor in the local government of Croydon, South London, as a founder-member of the Fabian Society, and as a Labour Member of Parliament for Romford (1929–1931) during Ramsay MacDonald's second Labour government. Muggeridge's biographer Richard Ingrams described H.T. as "a small bearded man with a large frame, a twinkling eye, and a rather bulbous nose which he passed on to his son." Muggeridge's mother was Annie Booler.

The middle of five brothers, Muggeridge was born in Sanderstead, Surrey. His first name, Thomas, was chosen by H.T. in honor of his hero Thomas Carlyle. He grew up in Croydon and attended Selhurst Grammar School there and then Selwyn College, Cambridge, for four years. Still a student, he taught for brief periods in 1920, 1922 and 1924 at the John Ruskin Central School, Croydon, where his father was Chairman of the Governors. After graduating in 1924 with a pass degree in natural sciences, he went to British India for three years to teach English literature at Union Christian College, Aluva, Kingdom of Cochin. His writing career began during his time in the Kingdom via an exchange of correspondence on war and peace with Mahatma Gandhi, with Muggeridge's article on the interactions being published in Young India, a local magazine.

Returning to Britain in 1927, he married Katherine "Kitty" Dobbs (1903–1994), the daughter of Rosalind Dobbs (a younger sister of Beatrice Webb). He worked as a supply teacher before moving to teach English literature in Egypt six months later. There he met Arthur Ransome, who was visiting Egypt as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian. Ransome recommended Muggeridge to the newspaper' editors, who offered him his first position in journalism.

Moscow
Initially attracted by communism, Muggeridge and his wife travelled to Moscow in 1932. He was to be a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian standing in for William Henry Chamberlin, who was about to take a leave of absence. During Muggeridge's early time in Moscow he was completing a novel, Picture Palace, loosely based on his experiences and observations at the Manchester Guardian. It was completed and submitted to publishers in January 1933, but there was concern by the publishers over potential libel claims, and the published book was not distributed. Very few first-edition copies exist today. That setback caused considerable financial difficulties for Muggeridge, who was not employed and was paid only for articles that were accepted.

Increasingly disillusioned by his close observation of communism in practice, Muggeridge decided to investigate reports of the famine in Ukraine by travelling there and to the Caucasus without first obtaining the permission of the Soviet authorities. The revealing reports that he sent back to The Manchester Guardian in the diplomatic bag, thus evading censorship, were not fully printed, and those that were published (on 25, 27 and 28 March 1933) were not published under Muggeridge's name. Meanwhile, fellow journalist Gareth Jones, who had met Muggeridge in Moscow, published his own stories. The two accounts helped to confirm the extent of a forced famine, which was politically motivated. Writing in The New York Times Walter Duranty denied the existence of any famine. Jones wrote letters to the Manchester Guardian in support of Muggeridge's articles about the famine.

Having come into conflict with British newspapers' editorial policy of not provoking the authorities in the Soviet Union, Muggeridge returned to novel writing. He wrote Winter in Moscow (1934), which describes conditions in the "socialist utopia" and satirised Western journalists' uncritical view of the Soviet regime. He was later to call Duranty "the greatest liar I have met in journalism". Later, he began a writing partnership with Hugh Kingsmill. Muggeridge's politics changed from an independent socialist point of view to a conservative religious stance. He wrote later:

"I wrote in a mood of anger, which I find rather absurd now: not so much because the anger was, in itself, unjustified, as because getting angry about human affairs is as ridiculous as losing one's temper when an air flight is delayed."

Return to India
After his time in Moscow, Muggeridge worked on other newspapers, including The Statesman in Calcutta, of which he was editor in 1934 to 1936. In his second stint in India, he lived by himself in Calcutta, having left behind his wife and children in London. Between 1930 and 1936, the Muggeridges had three sons and a daughter. His office was in the headquarters of the newspaper in Chowringhee.

Second World War
When war was declared, Muggeridge went to Maidstone to join up but was sent away: "My generation felt they'd missed the First War, now was the time to make up." He was called into the Ministry of Information, which he called "a most appalling set-up", and joined the army as a private. He joined the Corps of Military Police and was commissioned on the General List in May 1940. He transferred to the Intelligence Corps as a lieutenant in June 1942. Having spent two years as a Regimental Intelligence Officer in Britain, he was by 1942 in MI6 and had been posted to Lourenço Marques, the capital of Mozambique, as a bogus vice-consul (called a Special Correspondent by London Controlling Section). Before heading out, Muggeridge stayed in Lisbon for some months, waiting for his visa to come through. He stayed in Estoril at the Pensão Royal on 17 May 1942.

His mission was to prevent information about Allied convoys off the coast of Africa falling into enemy hands. He wrote later that he also attempted suicide. After the Allied occupation of North Africa, he was posted to Algiers as liaison officer with the French sécurité militaire. In that capacity, he was sent to Paris at the time of the liberation and worked alongside Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces. He had a high regard for de Gaulle and considered him a greater man than Churchill. He was warned to expect some anti-British feeling in Paris because of the attack on Mers-el-Kébir. In fact, Muggeridge, speaking on the BBC retrospective programme Muggeridge: Ancient & Modern, said that he had encountered no such feeling and indeed had been allowed on occasion to eat and drink for nothing at Maxim's. He was assigned to make an initial investigation into P. G. Wodehouse's five broadcasts from Berlin during the war. Though he was prepared to dislike Wodehouse, the interview became the start of a lifelong friendship and publishing relationship as well as the subject for several plays. He also interviewed Coco Chanel in Paris about the nature of her involvement with the Nazis in Vichy France during the war. Muggeridge ended the war as a major, having received the Croix de Guerre from the French government for undisclosed reasons.

Later life
Muggeridge wrote for the Evening Standard and also for The Daily Telegraph where he was appointed deputy editor in 1950. He kept detailed diaries, which provide a vivid picture of the journalistic and political London of the day, including regular contact with George Orwell, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene and Bill Deedes; and he comments perceptively on Ian Fleming, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

When George Orwell died in 1950, Muggeridge and Anthony Powell organized Orwell's funeral.

Muggeridge also acted as Washington correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. He was editor of Punch magazine from 1953 to 1957, a challenging appointment for one who claimed that "there is no occupation more wretched than trying to make the English laugh". One of his first acts was to sack the illustrator E. H. Shepard. In 1957, he received public and professional opprobrium for criticism of the British monarchy in a US magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. The article was given the title "Does England Really Need a Queen?", and its publication was delayed by five months to coincide with the Royal State Visit to Washington, DC taking place later that year. It was little more than a rehash of views expressed in a 1955 article, Royal Soap Opera, but its timing caused outrage in the UK, and a contract with Beaverbrook Newspapers was cancelled. His notoriety then propelled him into becoming better known as a broadcaster, with regular appearances on the BBC's Panorama, and a reputation as a tough interviewer. Encounters with Brendan Behan and Salvador Dalí cemented his reputation as a fearless critic of modern life.

Muggeridge was described as having predatory behaviour towards women during his BBC years. He was described as a "compulsive groper", reportedly being nicknamed "The Pouncer" and as "a man fully deserving of the acronym NSIT—not safe in taxis". His niece confirmed these reports, while also reflecting on the suffering inflicted on his family and saying that he changed his behaviour when he converted to Christianity in the 1960s.

In the early 1960s, Muggeridge became a vegetarian so that he would be "free to denounce those horrible factory farms where animals are raised for food".

He took to frequently denouncing the new sexual laxity of the Swinging Sixties on radio and television. He particularly railed against "pills and pot": birth control pills and cannabis.

In contrast, he met the Beatles before they were famous: On 7 June 1961 he flew to Hamburg for an interview with the Stern magazine and afterwards went out on the town and ended up at the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn. In his diary, he described their performance as "bashing their instruments, and emitting nerveless sounds into microphones". However, they recognised him from the television and they entered into conversation. He acknowledged that "their faces [were] like Renaissance carvings of the saints or Blessed Virgins".

His book, Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes (1966), though acerbic in its wit, revealed a serious view of life. The title is an allusion to the last line of the poem Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats: "Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." In 1967, he preached at Great St Mary's, Cambridge, and again in 1970.

Having been elected Rector of Edinburgh University, Muggeridge was goaded by the editor of The Student, Anna Coote, to support the call for contraceptive pills to be available at the University Health Centre. He used a sermon at St Giles' Cathedral in January 1968 to resign the post to protest against the Students' Representative Council's views on "pot and pills". The sermon was published under the title "Another King".

Muggeridge resigned as a judge for the 1971 Booker Prize because of his "general lack of sympathy with entries for this year's Booker Prize" and was replaced on the panel by Philip Toynbee.

Muggeridge was also known for his wit and profound writings often at odds with the opinions of the day. "Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream", he liked to quote. He wrote two volumes of an autobiography called Chronicles of Wasted Time (the title is a quotation from Shakespeare's sonnet 106). The first volume (1972) was The Green Stick. The second volume (1973) was The Infernal Grove. A projected third volume, The Right Eye, covering the postwar period, was never completed.

Conversion to Christianity
Agnostic for most of his life, Muggeridge became a Protestant Christian, publishing Jesus Rediscovered in 1969, a collection of essays, articles and sermons on faith, which became a best seller. Jesus: The Man Who Lives followed in 1976, which was a more substantial work describing the gospel in his own words. In A Third Testament, he profiles six spiritual thinkers, whom he called "God's Spies", who influenced his life: Augustine of Hippo, William Blake, Blaise Pascal, Leo Tolstoy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Søren Kierkegaard. He also produced several BBC religious documentaries, including In the Footsteps of St. Paul.

Muggeridge became a leading figure in the Nationwide Festival of Light in 1971 protesting against the commercial exploitation of sex and violence in Britain and advocating the teaching of Christ as the key to recovering moral stability in the nation. He said at the time: "The media today—press, television, and radio—are largely in the hands of those who favour the present Gadarene slide into decadence and Godlessness."

Criticism of Life of Brian
In 1979, along with Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, Muggeridge appeared on the chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning to discuss the film Life of Brian with Monty Python members John Cleese and Michael Palin. Although the Python members gave reasons that they believed the film to be neither anti-Christian nor mocking the person of Jesus, both Muggeridge and the bishop insisted that they were being disingenuous and that the film was anti-Christian and blasphemous. Muggeridge further declared their film to be "buffoonery", "tenth-rate", "this miserable little film" and "this little squalid number". Furthermore, Muggeridge stated that there was "nothing in this film that could possibly destroy anybody's genuine faith"; in saying this, the Pythons were quick to point out the futility of criticising it so vitriolically since Muggeridge did not think it was significant enough to affect anyone. According to Palin, Muggeridge arrived late and so missing the two scenes in which Jesus and Brian were distinguished as different people. The discussion was moderated by Tim Rice, the lyricist for the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, which had also generated some controversy in Britain about a decade earlier over its depiction of Jesus.

The comedians later expressed disappointment in Muggeridge, whom all in Monty Python had previously respected as a satirist. Cleese said that his reputation had "plummeted" in his eyes, and Palin commented, "He was just being Muggeridge, preferring to have a very strong contrary opinion as opposed to none at all".

Later years
In 1982, at 79, Muggeridge was received into the Catholic Church after he had rejected Anglicanism, like his wife, Kitty. This was largely under the influence of Mother Teresa about whom he had written a book, Something Beautiful for God, setting out and interpreting her life. His last book, Conversion (1988), describes his life as a 20th century pilgrimage, a spiritual journey.

Muggeridge died on 14 December 1990 in a nursing home in Hastings, England, at the age of 87. He had suffered a stroke three years earlier.

Legacy
An eponymous literary society was established on 24 March 2003, the occasion of his centenary, and it publishes a quarterly newsletter, The Gargoyle. The Malcolm Muggeridge Society, based in Britain, is progressively republishing his works. Muggeridge's papers are in the Special Collections at Wheaton College, Illinois, US.

In November 2008, on the 75th anniversary of the Ukraine famine, both Muggeridge and Gareth Jones were posthumously awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit III Class to mark their exceptional services to the country and its people.

In an interview on the Eric Metaxas Radio Show, notable Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias identified Malcolm Muggeridge and G. K. Chesterton as two important influencers in his life.

A week following Muggeridge's death, William F. Buckley wrote a tribute published in The Washington Post. Buckley, in an interview on C-SPAN, described Muggeridge as "a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man, a great wit and a brilliant, brilliant analyst."

Books

 * Three Flats: A Play in Three Acts (1931)
 * Winter in Moscow (1934) ISBN 080280263X
 * Picture Palace (1934, 1987) ISBN 0-297-79039-0
 * La Russie. Vue par Malcolme [sic] Muggeridge. Paris, Imprimerie Pascal, N.d.(c. 1934) 14pp.
 * The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode (1936)
 * In a Valley of This Restless Mind (1938) Reprinted in 1978 with introduction by Muggeridge and illustrations by Papas ISBN 0-00-216337-3
 * The Thirties, 1930–1940, in Great Britain (1940, 1989) ISBN 0-297-79570-8
 * Ciano, Count Galeazzo. Ciano's Diary, 1939–1943 (1947). Edited with in introduction by Muggeridge
 * Affairs of the Heart (1949)
 * Muggeridge wrote the introduction.
 * Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes (1966). Collection of essays
 * Jesus Rediscovered (1969) ISBN 0-00-621939-X
 * Muggeridge Through the Microphone: BBC Radio and Television (1969). Broadcasts
 * Something Beautiful for God (1971) ISBN 0-00-215769-1 Muggeridge introduced Mother Teresa to the world with this book
 * Paul, Envoy Extraordinary (1972) with Alec Vidler, ISBN 0-00-215644-X
 * London: Collins, 1972
 * London, Collins, 1973
 * Jesus: The Man Who Lives (1975) ISBN 0-00-211388-0
 * Christ and the Media (1977) ISBN 0-340-22438-X
 * Hesketh Pearson. The Smith of Smiths: Being the Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith (Folio Society, 1977). New introduction by Muggeridge; book first published 1934.
 * Things Past (1979)
 * The End of Christendom (1980) ISBN 0-8028-1837-4
 * Like it Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge (1981) ISBN 0-00-216468-X
 * Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim (1988, 2005) ISBN 1-59752-101-9
 * Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim (1988, 2005) ISBN 1-59752-101-9
 * Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim (1988, 2005) ISBN 1-59752-101-9

Sermons and lectures

 * Ultimate Concern: 'Am I a Christian?', etc., Cambridge (1967)
 * Living Water, Aberdeen (1968) ISBN 0-7152-0016-X
 * Another King, St Andrews Press (1968)
 * Still I Believe: Nine Talks Broadcast during Lent and Holy Week (1969), ISBN 0-563-08552-5
 * Light in our Darkness, Edinburgh (1969) ISBN 0-7152-0069-0
 * Fundamental Questions: What is Life About?, Cambridge (1970)
 * The Authority and Relevance of the Bible in the Modern World (Bible Society of Australia, 1976)
 * "America Needs a Punch," Esquire (April 1958), 59–60, 60

title: Malcolm Muggeridge


text:
1958 Lebanon crisis

The 1958 Lebanon crisis was a political crisis in Lebanon caused by political and religious tensions in the country that included a United States military intervention. The intervention lasted for around three months until President Camille Chamoun, who had requested the assistance, completed his term as president of Lebanon. American and Lebanese government forces occupied the Port of Beirut and Beirut International Airport. With the crisis over, the United States withdrew.

Arab Cold War
After the end of World War II in 1945, the United States and Soviet Union were the two major world powers. Two years later, the Truman Doctrine was issued, aimed at containing the spread of communism and the Soviet Union. The Cold War is generally considered to have begun around this time. As the world divided into the Eastern (communist) and Western (capitalist) Blocs, a struggle for ideological geopolitical supremacy between the US and USSR emerged. One of the ways it manifested was through proxy wars in various global regions. One of those regions was the Middle East, where the Arab Cold War took place. After the Suez Crisis in 1956, there was an increase in Arab hostility to the West as well as increased Soviet influence in Egypt and Syria. The crisis also encouraged pan-Arabism and increased the popularity and influence of Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt. The United States feared that the region was susceptible to the spread of communism.

The Eisenhower Doctrine was announced by President of the United States Dwight D. Eisenhower in January 1957. It pledged American economic and military aid to prevent communism from spreading in the Middle East. The United States Congress passed the doctrine on 7 March and it was signed into law on 9 March. James P. Richards began to tour the Middle East and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and United States European Command began to make plans for intervention in the region. Their plan centered around the United States Sixth Fleet, stationed in the Mediterranean Sea, the Middle East Force and several Air Force units. 11,000 soldiers were made ready for combat in the region. While the doctrine was never formally invoked, the US supported Hussein of Jordan in 1957 against an alleged coup attempt and moved to prevent communism from spreading in Syria.

Situation in Lebanon
The partition of the Ottoman Empire divided present-day Syria and Lebanon under the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon in 1923. Lebanon completely became an independent nation on 22 November 1943 when the French Mandate formally ended. Around the time of independence, the National Pact was agreed upon, stating that, among other things, "Lebanon was to be a completely independent sovereign state. The Christians were to forego seeking foreign [...] protection or attempting to bring Lebanon under foreign control or influence. In return, the Muslims were to forego making any attempt to bring Lebanon into any political union with Syria, or into the formation of any Arab Union". The Pact marked a compromise between several religious sects living in the country—namely Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, Greek Catholic Christians and Druzes.

Camille Chamoun was elected as the second President of Lebanon in the presidential elections in 1952, replacing Bechara El Khoury in the post. Described as "quite openly anti-Communist", the United States viewed Chamoun as "definitely our friend." In 1956, Prime Minister Abdallah El-Yafi and Minister of State Saeb Salam resigned in protest due to Chamoun's refusal to condemn the British-French invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis. This caused Muslim opposition groups to form the United National Front in 1957. The United States agreed to provide military assistance to the Lebanese government from 6 June 1957.

In 1957, shortly after the announcement of the Eisenhower Doctrine—which Chamoun's regime had been the only Arab government to openly endorse "without reservation"—the United States became concerned that parliamentary elections set for June would result in the election of a parliament that was hostile to the US. Many Muslims in the nation supported Nasser and the United Arab Republic (UAR). Kamal Jumblatt and Rashid Karami, Druze and Sunni leaders, respectively, condemned Chamoun's support for the doctrine as violating the National Pact. US attempts to influence the election included approving the sending of $12.7 million in military or financial aid and sending operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency (including David Atlee Phillips, Miles Copeland Jr. and Wilbur Eveland) to the region, who provided "campaign contributions" towards pro-West politicians. In late May 1957 pro-Chamoun troops killed seven and wounded seventy-three protesters in Beirut and the following month opposition leaders argued that Chamoun "had bought so many votes and gerrymandered so many districts that the balloting would be meaningless." The election was an American success, as fifty-three out of sixty-six parliamentarians supported Chamoun. The US continued to provide aid to Chamoun, fearing Soviet and UAR influence in the region. Chamun's opponents maintained that the election was invalid and needed to be re-held.

On 8 May 1958 a Lebanese journalist, Nasib Al Matni, was assassinated in his office in Beirut. He was a pro-Nasserist and anti-Chamoun Maronite. Following this incident intensive protests occurred in Beirut and Tripoli.

In 1958, Camille Chamoun was in the sixth and final year of his term as President of Lebanon.

Heightened tensions
On 1 February 1958, Syria and Egypt united, forming the UAR. The United States feared initially that the new nation would become the dominant power in the Middle East, but recognized it on 25 February after deciding that the UAR could be beneficial in halting communism's spread and keeping Nasser contained. Chamoun and Charles Malik worried that "the peril of subversion in Lebanon" by the UAR "was immediate" and asked for American aid.

Tensions were increasing in Lebanon throughout early 1958. Although Chamoun's term would have expired on 23 September 1958, he intended to run for president again, which was not permitted in the Constitution of Lebanon, and asked for American support in his effort. While the United States feared that a movement against Chamoun could harm their interests in the region, they were reluctant to withdraw support for him, as Fouad Chehab, the chief of staff of the Lebanese Army, was the most likely figure to succeed Chamoun. Robert M. McClintock, American ambassador to Lebanon, described Chehab as "a neutral legume who would require careful pruning to grow in the right direction." As a result, the US did not formally support Chamoun's effort.

Protests by various groups—mainly the Sunnis and the Druzes—began in February against the Christian Chamoun, who had also aligned himself in support of the US and Britain, actions that protesters considered breaches of the National Pact. Demonstrations also protested that Chamoun had not allowed Lebanon to join the UAR. The protesters felt that "Chamoun was not willing to modify his foreign policy unless he was forced to." Tensions between Maronite Christians and Arab Muslims continued to rise after the killing of Nasib Al Matni on 8 May. Matni was the editor of Al Telegraf and had been critical of Chamoun's rule. Fighting erupted on the streets of Beirut as a Muslim mob burned the US Information Service library down. Heightened tensions existed around the country, including in the Beqaa Valley, where Shia militants were receiving weapons from Syria. The New York Times dated the beginning of a formal armed rebellion to 10 May 1958. Chamoun requested American military intervention in early May against the threat to his power under the Eisenhower Doctrine, although McClintock noted that there was an "absence of overt Communist aggression".

The leader of the UAR, Nasser, began publicly calling for Arab unity. Various nations, including Lebanon, blamed Nasser's actions for the increase in sectarian unrest, and the Lebanese government filed a formal complaint to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on 22 May 1958, accusing the UAR of meddling in the nation's affairs. The UNSC passed a resolution on 11 June 1958 that recommended sending a group to Lebanon "to ensure that there is no illegal infiltration of personnel or supply of arms or other material across the Lebanese borders". A "Group of Three"—Galo Plaza, Rajeshwar Dayal and Odd Bull—Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and members of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization were soon dispatched to Lebanon to form the United Nations Observation Group in Lebanon (UNOGIL).

Operation Blue Bat
Eisenhower responded by authorizing Operation Blue Bat on 15 July 1958, in the first application of the Eisenhower Doctrine in which the US announced that it would intervene to protect regimes that it considered to be threatened by international communism. The goal of the operation was to bolster Chamoun's pro-Western Lebanese government from internal opposition and threats from Syria and Egypt. The plan was to occupy and secure Beirut International Airport, a few miles south of the city, and then to secure the port of Beirut and the approaches to the city.

The chain of command for Operation Blue Bat was as follows: the Eisenhower administration at the strategic level; Specified Command, Middle East (SPECCOMME, a 'double-hat' for Commander in Chief, US Naval Forces, Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean) at the operational level; the United States Sixth Fleet, with aircraft carriers USS Saratoga (CV-60), USS Essex (CV-9) and USS Wasp (CV-18), cruisers USS Des Moines (CA-134) and USS Boston (CA-69), and two destroyer squadrons, including the USS The Sullivans DD-537, USS Leary (DDR-879), USS Vesole (DDR-878) and the USS William M. Wood (DD-715). At the end of June, Essex and Boston were anchored at Piraeus, Greece, while Des Moines, from which Vice Admiral Charles R. Brown was flying his flag, was at Villefranche-sur-Mer, France. Land forces included the 2nd Provisional Marine Force (Task Force 62) and the United States Army Task Force 201 at the tactical level. Each of these three components influenced Operations Plan 215-58 and its execution.

The operation involved more than 14,000 men, including 8,509 US Army personnel, a contingent from the 1st Airborne Battle Group, 187th Infantry from the 24th Infantry Division and 5,670 officers and men of the United States Marine Corps (the 2nd Provisional Marine Force, of Battalion Landing Teams 1st Battalion, 8th Marines and 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines under Brigadier General Sidney S. Wade). The 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines arrived on 16 July after a 54-hour airlift from Cherry Point, North Carolina. They were supported by a fleet of 70 ships and 40,000 sailors. On 16 July 1958, Admiral James L. Holloway Jr., CINCNELM and CINCSPECCOMME, flew in from London to Beirut airport and boarded USS Taconic from which he commanded the remainder of the operation. The US withdrew its forces on 25 October 1958.

Eisenhower sent the diplomat Robert Daniel Murphy to Lebanon as his personal representative. Murphy played a significant role in convincing both sides of the conflict to reach a compromise by electing the moderate Christian general Fouad Chehab as incoming president, but allowing Chamoun to continue in power until the end of his term, on 22 September.

Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami formed a national reconciliation government after the end of the 1958 crisis.

Books and studies

 * Alin, Erika G. The United States and the 1958 Lebanon Crisis, American Intervention in the Middle East, 1994.
 * Brands, H.W. Into the Labyrinth: The United States and the Middle East, 1945-1993 (1994) excerpt pp 72–80.
 * Gendzier, Irene L. Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East 1945–1958, 1997
 * Korbani, Agnes G. U.S. Intervention in Lebanon, 1958–1982: presidential decisionmaking, 1991.
 * Schulimson, Jack. Marines in Lebanon 1958, Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, Department of the Navy, United States Marine Corps, 1966, 60 p.
 * Wright, Quincy. "United States intervention in the Lebanon." American Journal of International Law 53.1 (1959): 112–125.
 * Yaqub, Salim. Containing Arab Nationalism, The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East, 2003.
 * Yaqub, Salim. Containing Arab Nationalism, The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East, 2003.

Other languages

 * Pierrick el Gammal, Politique intérieure et politique extérieure au Liban de 1958 à 1961 de Camille Chamoun à Fouad Chehab, Sorbonne University (Paris), 1991. (French)
 * Nawaf Salam, L'insurrection de 1958 au Liban, Sorbonne University (Paris), 1979. (French)

title: 1958 Lebanon crisis


text:
Manny Shinwell

Emanuel Shinwell, Baron Shinwell, (18 October 1884 – 8 May 1986) was a British politician who served as a government minister under Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee. A member of the Labour Party, he served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for 40 years, representing Linlithgowshire, Seaham and Easington.

Born in the East End of London to a large family of Jewish immigrants, Shinwell moved to Glasgow as a boy and left school at the age of eleven. He became a trade union organiser and one of the leading figures of Red Clydeside. He was imprisoned in 1919 for his alleged involvement in the disturbances in Glasgow in January of that year. He served as a Labour MP from 1922 to 1924, and from a by-election in 1928 until 1931, and held junior office in the minority Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929–1931. He returned to the House of Commons in 1935, defeating former UK Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who by that time had been expelled from the Labour Party. During the Second World War, he was a leading backbencher critic of the Coalition Government.

Shinwell is perhaps best remembered as the Minister of Fuel and Power in the Attlee ministry that nationalised coal mining in 1946. He was in charge of Britain's coal supply during the extremely harsh winter of January to March 1947, during which the supply system collapsed, leaving the United Kingdom to freeze and close down. He became unpopular with the public and was sacked in October 1947. He then served as Secretary of State for War, and then as Minister of Defence from 1950 to 1951. The high defence spending which he demanded, partly to pay for British involvement in the Korean War, was a major factor causing then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell to impose NHS charges, prompting the resignation of Aneurin Bevan from the Cabinet.

After Labour's defeat in 1951, Shinwell continued to serve in the Shadow Cabinet in Opposition until he stepped down in 1955. Thereafter he was a senior backbencher until 1970, by which time he was in his mid-eighties. That year he accepted a life peerage and was an active member of the House of Lords until shortly before his death, aged 101, in 1986.

Early life, career and trade union activities
Shinwell was born in Spitalfields, London, but his family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. His father was a Polish Jew who had a small clothing shop, and his mother, a Dutch Jew, was a cook from London. He was the eldest of thirteen children.

He educated himself in a public library and at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery. He enjoyed sport, particularly boxing, and he was the trainer of a local football team. He left school at age eleven to be apprenticed as a tailor, and began his working life as a machinist in a clothing workshop. In 1903, he became active in the Amalgamated Union of Clothiers' Operatives, and joined the Glasgow Trades Council in 1906 as a delegate of that union.

In May 1911, he was seconded to help organise the seamen of Glasgow at the request of Havelock Wilson of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union (NSFU). He played a prominent role in the six-week Glasgow seamen's strike which began on 14 June and which was part of a nationwide strike. He subsequently became the secretary of the Glasgow branch of the NSFU. In August 1912, he participated in a revolt against the union, which resulted in the Glasgow branch becoming part of the Southampton-based British Seafarers' Union (BSU). He was the local secretary of the BSU until it became part of the Amalgamated Marine Workers' Union (AMWU) in 1922, after which he served as National Organiser of the new organisation.

In 1918, he stood unsuccessfully for Linlithgowshire (alternative name West Lothian ).

In 1919, he gained national notoriety through his involvement in the Glasgow 40 Hours' Movement. This movement culminated in clashes between police and protesters in Glasgow's George Square in January 1919, in which he was alleged to have been involved. He was afterwards tried for incitement to riot and was sentenced to five months' imprisonment in Calton Jail, Edinburgh.

Interwar and World War Two
An Independent Labour Party (ILP) member, he was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Linlithgowshire at the 1922 general election.

In 1924 he was Secretary for Mines (not a Cabinet-level post) in the First Labour Government. He lost his seat in 1924, but was re-elected for Linlithgowshire at a by-election in 1928.

In the second Labour Government of 1929–31 Ramsay MacDonald appointed him Financial Secretary to the War Office (1929–30); Cowling says that MacDonald believed he had rescued Shinwell's ministerial career when no minister would take him. He then served again as Secretary for Mines from 1930 to 1931. At the time Shinwell was an admirer of MacDonald and tried to dissuade him from forming a National Government in 1931. He again lost his seat at the general election that year.

He returned to the Commons in 1935 after defeating MacDonald for Seaham Harbour, County of Durham (later renamed Easington after boundary changes in the late 1940s).

He campaigned vigorously, along with left-wingers such as Aneurin Bevan, for Britain to support the Popular Front government in Spain against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. On 4 April 1938, he doggedly criticised the government's foreign policy during a heated House of Commons debate. Eventually, Conservative MP Commander Robert Tatton Bower became exasperated and shouted at him to "go back to Poland!". Shinwell took this to be an anti-semitic remark and struck Bower on the side of the head causing internal bleeding, a blood clot, and a burst left eardrum. Both men then apologized to each other.

In May 1940 he refused a position in Winston Churchill's Coalition Government in the Ministry of Food. He became chairman of the Labour Party in 1942. During the Second World War he was a vigorous but patriotic backbench critic of Churchill. He and Earl Winterton, another serial critic of the government, were known as "Arsenic and Old Lace".

Minister of Fuel and Power
He served in Clement Attlee's Cabinet after the Labour victory in 1945 as Minister of Fuel and Power, and in 1946 he presided over the nationalisation of the mining industry. He also negotiated a miners' charter with the NUM. He declared the middle class "not worth a tinker's cuss". His insistence on the open-cast mining of the park of the Wentworth Woodhouse estate, to the doorsteps of the house, when the quality of the coal was poor, was viewed by its owners and the local mining community, which opposed it, as pure vindictiveness – an act of class warfare. In 1947-8 he was Chairman of the Labour Party.

In 1947, Britain experienced, in an exceptionally severe winter, a serious coal shortage. The supply system collapsed, leaving Britain to freeze and close down. Shinwell denied there were problems and refused to assume responsibility, blaming the climate, the railway system, or capitalism generally. Shinwell was widely criticised for his failure to avert this crisis. His earlier comment that "There will be no fuel crisis. I am Minister of Fuel and Power and I ought to know", was later included in the official handbook for Conservative Party members to use in speeches and leaflets.

In 1947 Shinwell presided over the nationalisation of electricity. In October 1947 he was sacked. He was bitterly resentful at being replaced by Hugh Gaitskell, his former deputy and a public schoolboy. He was also attacked by James Callaghan (then a junior minister) for his lack of zeal about further nationalisation.

Secretary of State for War
Shinwell was demoted to Secretary of State for War (Minister for the Army, but no longer a full member of the Cabinet) a position which he held until 1950. He was a vigorous War Minister, who got on well with the Army and was seen as jingoistic.

In November 1947 a report from MI5 alleged that Shinwell had passed secret information to a man named "Stanley", who had passed it on to Zionist paramilitary group, the Irgun. Shinwell knew self-styled "contact man" Sidney Stanley, whom he had approached for help in finding employment for his son Ernie, and Stanley had obtained information on the disbandment of the Transjordan Frontier Force from some government source.

Minister of Defence
Shinwell's seat became Easington at the February 1950 election, after which he was promoted to Minister of Defence and became a full member of the Cabinet once more. Edmund Dell described him as "putty in the hands of the defence chiefs" and his promotion as "[a] ludicrous appointment. No failure was ever great enough to persuade Attlee to deny one of his cohorts new opportunities to do damage … Shinwell never forgave Gaitskell, whom he blamed for his disgrace." Gaitskell, promoted to Chancellor of the Exchequer later in the year, recorded in his diary that Shinwell "never loses an opportunity of picking a quarrel with me, sometimes on the most ridiculous grounds".

His term of office saw the Malayan Emergency and the early stages of Korean War, which began in June 1950 and to which British troops were deployed. Shinwell was responsible for the rearmament programme which precipitated the resignation of Aneurin Bevan from the Cabinet in the spring of 1951, although Gaitskell actually gave him less defence spending than he wanted. In the summer of 1951 the Cabinet blocked him from sending British troops to Abadan when the oil refineries were nationalised by the Iranian government.

Shinwell was by now seen as being on the right of the Labour Party. At the Labour Party Conference at Scarborough that autumn, he lost his place as an elected constituency representative on the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC), the members of which were increasingly elected by Bevanites in the constituency parties. Labour lost the general election a month later.

Later political career
Shinwell stepped down from the Shadow Cabinet (which at that time was elected by Labour MPs when the party was in opposition) in 1955. That year he published a volume of memoirs, Conflict Without Malice. By the early 1960s he had changed his mind about nuclear weapons and opposed the deployment of US nuclear submarines to Holy Loch.

Shinwell did not resume ministerial office when Labour returned to power in October 1964, but instead the new Prime Minister Harold Wilson appointed him Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and during the 1964-6 Parliament he worked hard to drum up backbench support for the government, which had a very narrow majority. He was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 1965 Birthday Honours. He was vehemently opposed to Wilson's attempt to enter the EEC in 1966, and resigned as Chairman of the Labour Party in 1967.

He got on well both with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and with the journalist Sir John Junor.

Shinwell was created a life peer as Baron Shinwell, of Easington in the County of Durham, on 29 June 1970. He later became chair of the All-Party Lords Defence Study Group. In 1973 he published another volume of memoirs, I've Lived through It All. He voted against the Labour Government in 1976. He resigned the Labour Party whip in 1982 in protest at left wing militancy.

Death
In October 1984 Shinwell celebrated his hundredth birthday against the backdrop of the miners' strike. He continued to be active in the House of Lords until shortly before his death. He became the longest-lived peer on 26 March 1986, dying a little over a month later on 8 May, aged 101. He held the record for the second longest-lived British MP (after Theodore Cooke Taylor) until overtaken by Bert Hazell in November 2008.

Shinwell's estate was valued for probate at £271,509 (around £800,000 at 2023 prices).

Personal life
Shinwell was married three times: from 1903 to 1954 to Fay (Fanny) Freeman, by whom he had two sons and a daughter, from 1956 to 1971 to Dinah Meyer, who was Danish, and from 1972 to 1977 to Sarah Sturgo. He outlived all three of his wives. Shinwell's great-niece is the former MP for Liverpool Wavertree, Luciana Berger.

Shinwell sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill for a portrait in clay. The correspondence file relating to the Shinwell portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers (2006:56) in the archive of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist. A bronze (accession number S.309) was purchased for the Collection of Glasgow City Art Gallery in 1973.

Shinwell was a lifelong smoker, having smoked tobacco from the age of 13; on many occasions he was seen smoking with his pipe. Shinwell was also an enthusiastic drinker of spirits, particularly whisky.

Archives

 * Catalogue of the Shinwell papers held at LSE Archives

title: Manny Shinwell


text:
Upper half-plane

In mathematics, the upper half-plane, $\mathcal H,$ is the set of points $(x,y)$ in the Cartesian plane with $y > 0.$ The lower half-plane is the set of points $(x,y)$ with $y < 0$ instead. Each is an example of two-dimensional half-space.

Affine geometry
The affine transformations of the upper half-plane include
 * 1) shifts $$(x,y)\mapsto (x+c,y)$$, $$c\in\mathbb{R}$$, and
 * 2) dilations $$(x,y)\mapsto (\lambda x,\lambda y)$$, $$\lambda > 0.$$

Proposition: Let $A$ and $B$ be semicircles in the upper half-plane with centers on the boundary. Then there is an affine mapping that takes $$A$$ to $$B$$.
 * Proof: First shift the center of $A$ to $(0,0).$ Then take $$\lambda=(\text{diameter of}\ B)/(\text{diameter of}\ A)$$

and dilate. Then shift $(0,0)$ to the center of $B.$

Inversive geometry
Definition: $$\mathcal{Z} := \left\{\left( \cos^2\theta,\tfrac12 \sin 2\theta \right) \mid 0 < \theta < \pi \right\} $$.

$\mathcal Z$ can be recognized as the circle of radius $\tfrac12$ centered at $\bigl(\tfrac12,0\bigr),$ and as the polar plot of $$\rho(\theta) = \cos \theta.$$

Proposition: $(0,0),$ $\rho(\theta)$ in $\mathcal{Z},$ and $(1,\tan \theta)$ are collinear points.

In fact, $$\mathcal{Z}$$ is the inversion of the line $$\bigl\{(1, y) \mid y > 0 \bigr\}$$ in the unit circle. Indeed, the diagonal from $(0,0)$ to $(1, \tan \theta)$ has squared length $$1 + \tan^2 \theta = \sec^2 \theta $$, so that $$\rho(\theta) = \cos \theta$$ is the reciprocal of that length.

Metric geometry
The distance between any two points $p$ and $q$ in the upper half-plane can be consistently defined as follows: The perpendicular bisector of the segment from $p$ to $q$ either intersects the boundary or is parallel to it. In the latter case $p$ and $q$ lie on a ray perpendicular to the boundary and logarithmic measure can be used to define a distance that is invariant under dilation. In the former case $p$ and $q$ lie on a circle centered at the intersection of their perpendicular bisector and the boundary. By the above proposition this circle can be moved by affine motion to $\mathcal Z.$ Distances on $\mathcal Z$ can be defined using the correspondence with points on $$\bigl\{(1, y) \mid y > 0 \bigr\}$$ and logarithmic measure on this ray. In consequence, the upper half-plane becomes a metric space. The generic name of this metric space is the hyperbolic plane. In terms of the models of hyperbolic geometry, this model is frequently designated the Poincaré half-plane model.

Complex plane
Mathematicians sometimes identify the Cartesian plane with the complex plane, and then the upper half-plane corresponds to the set of complex numbers with positive imaginary part:

 * $$\mathcal{H} := \{x + iy \mid y > 0;\ x, y \in \mathbb{R} \} .$$

The term arises from a common visualization of the complex number $$x+iy$$ as the point $$(x,y)$$ in the plane endowed with Cartesian coordinates. When the $y$ axis is oriented vertically, the "upper half-plane" corresponds to the region above the $$x$$ axis and thus complex numbers for which $$y > 0$$.

It is the domain of many functions of interest in complex analysis, especially modular forms. The lower half-plane, defined by $y < 0$ is equally good, but less used by convention. The open unit disk$\mathcal D$ (the set of all complex numbers of absolute value less than one) is equivalent by a conformal mapping to $\mathcal H$ (see "Poincaré metric"), meaning that it is usually possible to pass between $\mathcal H$ and $\mathcal D.$

It also plays an important role in hyperbolic geometry, where the Poincaré half-plane model provides a way of examining hyperbolic motions. The Poincaré metric provides a hyperbolic metric on the space.

The uniformization theorem for surfaces states that the upper half-plane is the universal covering space of surfaces with constant negative Gaussian curvature.

The closed upper half-plane is the union of the upper half-plane and the real axis. It is the closure of the upper half-plane.

Generalizations
One natural generalization in differential geometry is hyperbolic $n$-space $\mathcal H^n,$ the maximally symmetric, simply connected, $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold with constant sectional curvature $$-1$$. In this terminology, the upper half-plane is $\mathcal H^2$ since it has real dimension $2.$

In number theory, the theory of Hilbert modular forms is concerned with the study of certain functions on the direct product $\mathcal H^n$ of $n$ copies of the upper half-plane. Yet another space interesting to number theorists is the Siegel upper half-space $\mathcal H_n,$ which is the domain of Siegel modular forms.

title: Upper half-plane


text:
User talk:Palestine liberator/ban

I believe there is overwhelming evidence that this user is not interested in any way of contributing NPOV content to wikipedia but instead vandalising articles.

Examples

 * Inserting a picture of Ariel Sharon on the Penis page with the summary INSERTING PIC OF UGLY DICK SHARON

 * Inserting a picture of Sharon the the Feces page with the summary SHARON IS FECES

 * Inserting a picture of a penis on the Ariel Sharon page with the summary new pic looks more like him

 * replacing real headlines and texts in Israeli-Palestinian conflict with

ZIONIST TERROR
The Zionists are the REAL terrorists.

and

The Zionist entity, which the Zionists call "Israel" so that everyone forgets their crimes against the Arab nation of Palestine, is the world's biggest terrorist. Like Nazi Germany and bin Laden, this terrorist must be destroyed so that Palestine can strech from the river to the sea.

He summarised his changes as This site is crawling with Zionists

''Both intifadas were originally characterized by civil disobedience by the Palestinians, which escalated into the use of honorable armed insurrection. Many Palestinians, including women and children, were martyred due to the Nazi-fascist brutality of the Zionists. The summary he gave was This site is crawling with Zionists''.
 * In Intifada he replaced a paragraph with the following

 * redirected Israel to Zionist Entity . I deleted the page and restored it to its proper location, but he reinstated it, leading to a second deletion.

I do not have any problem with a pro-Palestinian viewpoint on wiki. Indeed I have been called pro-Arab and anti-semite by RK for seeking to stop his blatent pro-Israeli propagandising of some pages. Personally I do believe that wiki represents the what outside the US is seen as America's Israelophile sympathies. But it is crystal clear that this user is not trying to offer a balancing analysis of the Palestinian analysis of the Middle East problem. He is simply maliciously trying to vandalise articles. It is worth noting a similar user appeared on wiki some weeks ago propagandising articles supposedly from one viewpoint, yet whose contributions seemed nothing but vandalistic malicious nonsense, not a serious attempt at offering an alternative viewpoint. It might be worth someone checking this user's IP and comparing it to that user to see whether it is the same person. This user here clearly warrants a ban, not for his opinions but for his malicious vandalism of pages. FearÉIREANN 12:19, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

BTW 172 summed up this user's contributions with the following, which I concur with.

I can see that you're a mature and articulate advocate of your cause, laying out very convincing arguments involving poo poo and wee wees. 172 08:20, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Since I started this page, Pl wrote on the talk page

I will stop messing with pages without permission. I will stop making rules on my page. However, I still want to be able to have others sign the list I'm starting agreeing that Zionism is racism.

I agree Zionism = racism

 * user Palestine liberator

After changes, that version was posted at 13:02, 4 Aug 2003. He then followed it up 8 minutes later, at 13:10, 4 Aug 2003 with

 * United States - some in the Palestinian movement and others regard America as a puppet of the Zionists.

So much for the promised neutrality and stopping messing. This guy is simply playing games. FearÉIREANN 12:19, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Jimbo has just ruled on the mailing that this user should be banned. FearÉIREANN 15:19, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)

title: User talk:Palestine liberator/ban