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Juli Furtado

Juliana "Juli" Furtado (born April 4, 1967, in New York City) is a retired American professional mountain biker, who began her sports career in skiing.

After knee injuries dashed her hopes of ski success, she took up cycling and won the US National Road Championship, and then went on to be very successful at mountain bike events - during her short 6-year career in MTB Furtado won five national titles and represented her country at the Olympics.

Early life
Born on April 4, 1967, her father's parents were Portuguese from São Miguel Island. She started skiing at age two, and racing at age 9 after her family moved to Vermont, where Furtado attended the Stratton Mountain School.

At age 15 she became the youngest member of the U.S. National ski team, for which she competed from 1982 to 1987. After undergoing several knee operations, Furtado's hopes of competing in the Olympics were forced to an end, and she attended University of Colorado Boulder on a skiing scholarship, where she received her BA in marketing. While racing for CU her knee injuries forced her to retire from competitive skiing, and Juliana switched to cycling.

Cycling
In 1989, her first year competing, Furtado won the US National Road Championship. She was then introduced to mountain biking, and in 1990, again her first year competing, she won the cross-country event (along with Ned Overend) in the first official Mountain Bike World Championship, held in Durango, Colorado. In 1992, she won the downhill world championship. In 1996, Furtado won both the World Cup (her 3rd WC championship) and the NORBA (U.S. National race authority) cross-country championships. She also participated in the Atlanta Olympics. Unfortunately, though she was the overwhelming favorite to win, she suffered in the severe Atlanta sun and heat due to the as yet undetected Lupus in her system and finished with an uncharacteristically slow 7th place. Soon after her Lupus was diagnosed, and again Furtado was forced into early retirement from her sport due to physical conditions. Her disease is currently under control, and she still rides solo.

Women's bikes
After retiring, Furtado started a company to design and produce female specific MTB components, such as smaller diameter handlebars and grips, stems, and seats.

Her designs were eventually picked up by Santa Cruz Bikes. At the same time, Santa Cruz Bikes developed the first female specific cross-country aluminum MTB called the "Juliana". Furtado became the director of grass-roots sponsorship and marketing for Santa Cruz Bicycles, in Santa Cruz, California. In 2013, Furtado developed the concept for turning the single Juliana frame and associated components into a complete line of fully outfitted women's mountain bikes, which would be a first for Santa Cruz Bikes, primarily a frame producer. The Juliana line has 5 models comprising one of the world's largest women's MTB ranges in the industry.

Legacy
In 1998, the book "Rugged Racer" was written about Juliana's struggles and successes, overcoming injuries in pursuit of her dream to compete in the Olympics. Despite a short MTB career of 6 years, Juliana held a Guinness World Record for most career 1st-place finishes in MTB (male or female) and, at that time, her career total wins exceeded the combined total wins of the most successful man (Ned Overend) and next most successful woman.

She became the mother of a son in 2008 and is currently working again with the U.S. National ski team, as an advocate for retiring athletes.

Furtado was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 1993 and the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame in 2005.

title: Juli Furtado


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Christianity in Iran

Christianity in Iran dates back to 3rd century. Through this time the Christian faith has always been followed by a minority of the population of Iran under its different state religions: Zoroastrianism in historical Persia, followed by Sunni Islam and different branches of Shia Islam in the Middle Ages after the Arab conquest, then Shia Islam since the Safavid conversion of the 15th century. However, Christians comprised a larger share of the population in the past than they do today. Iranian Christians have played a significant part in the historical Christian mission: currently, there are at least 600 churches and 300,000 –370,000 converts; some sources claim significantly higher numbers.

Major denominations
A number of Christian denominations are represented in Iran. Many members of the larger and older churches belong to minority ethnic groups, with the Armenians and Assyrians having their own distinctive culture and language. The members of the newer and smaller churches are drawn both from the traditionally Christian ethnic minorities and converts from a non-Christian background.

The main Christian churches in Iran are:

Other particularities and churches include: According to Operation World, there are between 7,000 and 15,000 members and adherents of the various Protestant, Evangelical, and other minority Christian denominations in Iran.
 * Armenian Apostolic Church (between 110,000, 250,000, and 300,000 adherents)
 * Assyrian Church of the East (about 11,000–20,000 adherents),
 * Catholic Church (about 21,380 adherents) in three different rites.
 * Chaldean Catholic Church (3,900 adherents as of 2014)
 * Armenian Catholic Church and Latin Church
 * Presbyterianism, including the Assyrian Evangelical Church
 * Pentecostalism, including the Assyrian Pentecostal Church
 * Jamaʿat-e Rabbani (Iranian Assemblies of God)
 * Anglican Diocese of Iran

In the 2016 census, the Statistical Center of Iran reported there were 117,700 Christians in the country; other reports put the figure at over half a million people.

The "Country Information and Guidance: Christians and Christian Converts, Iran" report published in December 2014 by the U.K. Home Office states that there were 370,000 Christians in Iran.

History

During the apostolic age Christianity began to establish itself throughout the Mediterranean. However, a quite different Semitic-speaking Christian culture developed on the eastern borders of the Roman Empire and in Persia. Syriac Christianity owed much to preexistent Jewish communities and to the Aramaic language. This language had been spoken by Jesus, and, in various modern Eastern Aramaic forms is still spoken by the ethnic Assyrian Christians in Iran, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey and Iraq today (see Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and Senaya language).

From Persian-ruled Assyria (Assuristan), missionary activity spread Eastern-Rite Syriac Christianity throughout Assyria and Mesopotamia, and from there into Persia, Asia Minor, Syria, the Caucasus and Central Asia, establishing the Saint Thomas Christians of India and erecting the Nestorian Stele and the Daqin Pagoda in China.

Early Christian communities straddling the Roman-Persian border found themselves in the midst of civil strife. In 313, when Constantine I proclaimed Christianity a tolerated religion in the Roman Empire, the Sassanid rulers of Persia adopted a policy of persecution against Christians, including the double-tax of Shapur II in the 340s. The Sassanids feared the Christians as a subversive and possibly disloyal minority. In the early-5th century official persecution increased once more. However, from the reign of Hormizd III (457–459) serious persecutions grew less frequent and the Persian church began to achieve a recognized status. Through the Battle of Avarayr (451) and the resultant treaty of 484, for example, the Persian Empire's numerous Armenian subjects gained the official right to profess Eastern Christianity freely. Political pressure within Persia and cultural differences with western Christianity were mostly to blame for the Nestorian schism, in the course of which the Roman Empire church hierarchy labelled the Church of the East heretical. The bishop of Ctesiphon (the capital of the Sassanid Empire) acquired the title first of catholicos, and then patriarch, completely independent of any Roman/Byzantine hierarchy.

Khosrau I, Shahanshah from 531 to 579, married a Christian wife, and his son Nushizad was also a Christian. When the king was taken ill at Edessa a report reached Persia that he was dead, and at once Nushizad seized the crown and made the kingdom Christian (c. 550). Very soon the rumour proved false, but people who appear to have been in the pay of Justinian persuaded Nushizad to endeavour to maintain his position. The actions of his son deeply distressed Khosrau; he had to take prompt measures, and sent the commander, Ram Berzin, against the rebels. In the battle which followed Nushizad was mortally wounded and carried off the field. In his tent he was attended by a Christian bishop, probably Mar Aba I, the Patriarch of the Church of the East from 540 to 552. To this bishop Nushizad confessed his sincere repentance for having taken up arms against his father, an act which, he was convinced, could never win the approval of Heaven. Having professed himself a Christian he died, and the rebellion was quickly put down.

Many old churches remain in Iran from the early days of Christianity. Some historians regard the Assyrian Church of Mart Maryam (St. Mary) in northwestern Iran, for example, as the second-oldest church in Christendom after the Church of Bethlehem in the West Bank. A Chinese princess, who contributed to its reconstruction in 642 AD, has her name engraved on a stone on the church wall. The famous Italian traveller Marco Polo also described the church following his visit.

The Arab Islamic conquest of Persia, in the 7th century, originally benefited Christians as they were a protected minority under Islam.

Shortly after 781, the Nestorian monk Shubhalishoʿ began evangelizing the Daylamites and Gilakis attempting to convert them to Christianity. He and his associates made only a little headway before encountering competition from Islam which eventually won the hearts of the mostly Zoroastrian Iranians of Deylam and Gilan.

Shubhalishoʿ remained for many years in Daylam and Gilan. He was assassinated by some disgruntled Zoroastrians after returning to his monastery. A monk, Qardagh, from within the mission was appointed to succeed him as metropolitan and the mission continued.

The Christian population gradually declined to a small minority. Christians disengaged from mainstream society and withdrew into ethnic ghettos (mostly Assyrian- Aramaic- and Armenian-speaking). Persecution against Christians revived in the 14th century; when the Muslim warlord of Turco-Mongol descent Timur (Tamerlane) conquered Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Asia Minor, he ordered large-scale massacres of Christians in Mesopotamia, Persia, Asia Minor and Syria. Most of the victims were indigenous Assyrians and Armenians, members of the Assyrian Church of the East and of Orthodox Churches.

In 1445 a part of the Assyrian Aramaic-speaking Church of the East entered into communion with the Catholic Church (mostly in the Ottoman Empire, but also in Persia). This group had a faltering start but has existed as a separate church since Pope Julius III consecrated Yohannan Sulaqa as Chaldean Patriarch of Babylon in 1553. Most Assyrian Catholics in Iran today are members of the Chaldean Catholic Church. The Aramaic-speaking community that remains independent is the Assyrian Church of the East. Both churches now have much smaller memberships in Iran than the Armenian Apostolic Church.

The number of Christians in Iran was further significantly boosted through various policies of the subsequent kingdoms that ruled from 1501. For example, in 1606 during the Ottoman–Safavid War (1603–18), king Abbas I resettled some 300,000 Armenians deeper within modern-day Iran, as well as establishing their own quarter in the then-capital Isfahan, which is still largely populated by Christian Armenians some four centuries later: the New Julfa district. Other hundreds of thousands of Christian Georgians and Circassians were furthermore deported and resettled during the same Safavid era and in the later Qajar era within Iran, although both communities are exclusively Muslim nowadays.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Protestant missionaries began to evangelize in Persia. They directed their operations towards supporting the extant churches of the country while improving education and health-care. Unlike the older, ethnic churches, these evangelical Protestants began to engage with the ethnic Persian Muslim community. Their printing presses produced much religious material in various languages. Some Persians subsequently converted to Protestantism and their churches still exist within Iran (using the Persian language).

In the early 20th century, once again Iran's stable and extant Christian population was boosted – this time due to the effects of the Assyrian genocide (1914–1924) and the Armenian genocide (1914–1923), as many tens of thousands of refugees poured in. However, both massacres drastically negatively affected Iran's Christian population as well, as Ottoman troops crossed the Iranian border in the later stages of World War I and massacred many tens of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians within Iran's borders as well, especially in West Azerbaijan Province, but also in adjacent provinces. Vibrant, huge and millennia-old native Christian communities in these parts of Iran were virtually shattered by the Ottoman actions, being reduced from formerly composing majorities in some of the regions, to very small – though noticeable – surviving communities. Prior to World War I and the Assyrian genocide, the population of Urmia was 40% to 50% Christian, for example. Nowadays, this number for the same city lies at 1% to 2%.

In 1918, during the Persian Campaign, about half of the Assyrians of Persia died in Turkish and Kurdish massacres and in related outbreaks of starvation and disease. About 80 percent of Assyrian clergy and spiritual leaders perished, threatening the nation's ability to survive as a unit.

Current situation

In 1976, the census reported that the Christian population of Iran holding citizenship there numbered 168,593 people, with most of them being Armenians. Due to the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, almost half of the Armenians migrated to the newly independent Armenia, but one estimate from 1999 placed the number as high as 310,000. Other estimates since 2000 have placed the number of Christians with Iranian citizenship as high as 109,415 in 2006.

Significant immigration of Assyrians from Iraq has been recorded during this period, due to massacres and harassment in post-Saddam Iraq. However, most of those Assyrians in Iran do not have Iranian citizenship, and therefore are not included in the data. In 2008, the central office of the International Union of Assyrians was officially transferred to Iran after being hosted in the United States for more than four decades.

The government guarantees the recognized Christian minorities a number of rights (production and sale of non-halal foods), representation in parliament, special family law etc. According to US-based Barnabas Fund government intrusion, expropriation of property, forced closure and persecution, particularly in the initial years after the Iranian Revolution, have all been documented.

On 2 February 2018, four United Nations human rights experts said that members of the Christian minority in Iran, particularly those who have converted to Christianity, are facing severe discrimination and religious persecution in Iran. They expressed their concerns over treatment of three Iranian Christians imprisoned in Iran.

Iranian Christians tend to be urban, with 50% living in Tehran.

Christianity remains the second-largest non-Muslim minority religion in the country.

A June 2020 online survey found a much smaller percentage of Iranians stating they believe in Islam, with half of those surveyed indicating they had lost their religious faith. The poll, conducted by the Netherlands-based GAMAAN (Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran), using online polling to provide greater anonymity for respondents, surveyed 50,000 Iranians and found 1.5% identified as Christians.

Christian converts from Islam
Beginning in the 1970s, some Protestant pastors started to hold church services in homes in Persian, rather than in one of the ethnic Christian minority languages such as Armenian or Syriac. One of the key leaders who spearheaded this movement was the Assemblies of God bishop Haik Hovsepian Mehr. Worship in homes rather than in church buildings, and the utilization of the national language (Persian), which was spoken by nearly all Iranians, combined with dissatisfaction at violence connected to the Iranian Revolution, led to substantial numbers of Iranian Muslims departing Islam and converting to Christianity. This took place both within Iran and abroad, among the Iranian diaspora. It is currently illegal to distribute Christian literature in the official language, Persian.

Muslims who change their faith to Christianity are subject to societal and official pressure which may lead to the death penalty. Although the Civil Code does not provide explicitly for the death penalty – with the crime being punishable by fines, lashing, and prison terms – judges can impose the death penalty if they desire. Iran was number nine on Open Doors’ 2022 World Watch List, an annual ranking of the 50 countries where Christians face the most extreme persecution.

Pentecostal pastor Hossein Sudmand was charged with apostasy and executed in 1990. Mehdi Dibaj was arrested and imprisoned for more than 10 years before he was sentenced to death in 1993, but after international pressure, he was freed in 1994, although the death sentenced was not lifted. He was murdered the next year. In 2011, Youcef Nadarkhani, an Jammiat-e Rabbani pastor, was allegedly sentenced to death for refusing to recant his faith. More recently the Iranian-American pastor and former Muslim Saeed Abedini, who in 2013 was sentenced to eight years prison, allegedly "Helped to build the country’s underground Christian church network". Satellite TV networks, such as Mohabat TV, Sat7 Pars, and TBN Nejat TV, distribute educational and encouraging programs for Christians, especially targeting Persian speakers. Some Christian ex-Muslims emigrate from Iran for educational, political, security or economic reasons.

It is difficult to obtain accurate figures for Protestants of all denominations and Catholics in Iran. Complicating the matter is the mixture of ethnic identity with religious affiliation, and the number of Muslim converts to Christianity, who as discussed above have a strong incentive to conceal themselves. Most informants often referred to "only a few thousand" in estimating the overall numbers of non-ethnic Christians in Iran. According to the data from the mid 1990s, all Protestant churches in Iran claimed an ethnic and Iranian membership of 5,000, 8,000, 10,000 or 15,000. A 2015 study estimated (describing this as a conservative estimate) that there were 100,000 Christian believers from a Muslim background living in Iran, most of them evangelical or Pentecostal Christians. Significant numbers of Muslim converts to Christianity in Iran are estimated to range from 300,000 to 500,000 by various sources. Other estimates put the numbers between 800,000 and 3 million.

According to scholar Ladan Boroumand, "Iran today is witnessing the highest rate of Christianization in the world." According to scholar Shay Khatiri of Johns Hopkins University, “Islam is the fastest shrinking religion in there [Iran], while Christianity is growing the fastest”, and in 2018 "up to half a million Iranians are Christian converts from Muslim families, and most of these Christians are evangelicals." He adds that "recent estimates claim that the number might have climbed up to somewhere between 1 million and 3 million".

In May 2019 Iran's Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi expressed concern over Iranian Muslims converting to Christianity and said the Intelligence Ministry have dispatched agents active in "countering the advocates of Christianity" to areas where there is a potential for people to convert. In June 2024, it was reported that the Iranian judiciary sentenced five Christian converts to a total of over 25 years in prison.

The Bible in languages of Iran

Armenian and Assyrian Christians use Bibles in their own languages.

Multiple Persian translations and versions of the Bible have been translated in more recent times, although distribution of Christian literature in Persian is currently illegal.

Portions of the Bible are translated into Azeri, Mazanderani, Gilaki, Bakhtiari, Luri, Kurdish (Kurmanji and Sorani).

Freedom of religion
In 2023, the country was given a score of zero out of four for religious freedom.

In the same year, it was ranked as the eighth most difficult place in the world to be a Christian.

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

title: Christianity in Iran


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Talk:RSA Factoring Challenge

Archive page created with older discussions from before 2010
Following the manual process on H:ARC, I created a new archive page for this Talk page and moved all the older discussions from before 2010, as well as an external links modified section from 2017. - Dyork (talk) 19:18, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Question - should RSA-129 be removed from the table?
Question for other editors - should the entry for RSA-129 be removed from the table? As the note on the entry indicates: "RSA-129 was not part of the RSA Factoring Challenge, but was related to a column by Martin Gardner in Scientific American". If it had nothing to do with the "RSA Factoring Challenge", why are we including it.. other than to have it in a list of RSA numbers that have been factored?

I note that RSA-129 is included in the RSA numbers article, which I think is fine. But I don't think it should be here in THIS article as it was not actually part of the "challenge".

My recommendation would be to delete the entry for RSA-129. Comments from any other editors? - Dyork (talk) 20:27, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

title: Talk:RSA Factoring Challenge


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Poso

Poso (Old Spelling: Posso) is the administrative capital of Poso Regency, Indonesia. It is the main port and transportation hub for the central-southern coast of Central Sulawesi. Its urban area consists of three districts, Poso Kota, North Poso Kota, and South Poso Kota. Poso lies in the middle of the province on the shore of the Gulf of Tomini, right in the central part of Sulawesi Island. With a total population of 47,477 in 2020, it is one of the biggest and oldest towns in the province.

Poso began to develop as a small port town located at the mouth of the Poso River at the end of the 19th century—making it one of the oldest towns in Central Sulawesi, its presence was considered important for the Dutch to control the southern region of Tomini in the early days of their arrival. Poso was the administrative center of Landschap Poso, Onderafdeling Poso, and later Afdeling Poso during colonial times. Amid World War II, the Japanese made Poso one of their military posts. Post-independence, Poso was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Central Sulawesi in 1948 before the capital was moved to Palu in 1951.

The central location of Poso has made it a stopover either from the north to the south, or from west to the east of Sulawesi. It is for this reason that the population of Poso consists of many different ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds. People living in Poso are spread from the coastal area to the mountainous region, with the main sources of income being trade and services.

Poso is crossed by the Trans-Sulawesi National Highway and served by Kasiguncu Airport, linking it to other cities in Sulawesi such as Palu and Makassar.

Climate
Poso has a tropical rainforest climate (Af) with heavy rainfall year-round.

Tourism and culture
Poso can be reached by plane from Palu or by bus from many other big cities on Sulawesi and is situated on the equator. It features tropical rain forest, seashore gardens, and other natural scenery. Sintuwu Maroso Square is the main town square and is located in central Poso. Rumah Katu Marine Park is a water park located 10 km from the center of Poso.

Modero is a well-known traditional dance that is performed during the celebration of rice harvesting (Padungku), usually in the evenings.

title: Poso


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User talk:Mathew~enwiki

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia.

You might find these links helpful in creating new pages or helping with the above tasks: How to edit a page, How to write a great article, Naming conventions, Manual of Style. You should read our policies at some point too.

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UtherSRG 19:05, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

you can sign your name using three tildes, like. If you use four, you can add a datestamp too.

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Mathew. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Mathew~enwiki that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name. If you think you might own all of the accounts with this name and this message is in error, please visit Special:MergeAccount to check and attach all of your accounts to prevent them from being renamed.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

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Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 01:23, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 16:03, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Mathew~enwiki


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User talk:John7

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia.

You might find these links helpful in creating new pages or helping with the above tasks: How to edit a page, How to write a great article, Naming conventions, Manual of Style. You should read our policies at some point too.

If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian!

UtherSRG 19:05, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

you can sign your name using three tildes, like. If you use four, you can add a datestamp too.

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title: User talk:John7


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User talk:Zaskie

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia.

You might find these links helpful in creating new pages or helping with the above tasks: How to edit a page, How to write a great article, Naming conventions, Manual of Style. You should read our policies at some point too.

If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian!

UtherSRG 19:05, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

you can sign your name using three tildes, like. If you use four, you can add a datestamp too.

Unreferenced BLPs
Hello Zaskie! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 1 of the articles that you created  is tagged as an Unreferenced Biography of a Living Person. The biographies of living persons policy requires that all personal or potentially controversial information be sourced. In addition, to ensure verifiability, all biographies should be based on reliable sources. If you were to bring this article up to standards, it would greatly help us with the current Category:All_unreferenced_BLPs article backlog. Once the article is adequately referenced, please remove the unreferencedBLP tag. Here is the article:

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 * 1) Juli Furtado -

Nomination of Zapata Espinoza for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Zapata Espinoza is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Zapata Espinoza until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished. Boleyn (talk) 16:03, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

title: User talk:Zaskie


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Tony Levin

Anthony Frederick Levin (born June 6, 1946) is an American musician and composer specializing in electric bass guitars, Chapman Stick and upright bass. He also sings and plays synthesizer. Levin is best known for his work with King Crimson (1981–2021) and Peter Gabriel (since 1977). He is also a member of Liquid Tension Experiment (1997–1999, 2008–2009, 2020–present), Bruford Levin Upper Extremities (1998–2000) and HoBoLeMa (2008–2010). He has led his own band, Stick Men, since 2010.

A prolific session musician since the 1970s, Levin has played on over 500 albums. Some notable sessions include work with John Lennon, Herbie Mann, Sarah McLachlan, Paula Cole, Stevie Nicks, Pink Floyd, Robbie Robertson, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Joan Armatrading, Tom Waits, Buddy Rich, The Roches, Todd Rundgren, Seal, Warren Zevon, Bryan Ferry, Laurie Anderson, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Gibonni, Chuck Mangione and Jean-Pierre Ferland. He has toured with artists including Paul Simon (with whom he appeared in the 1980 film One-Trick Pony), Gary Burton, James Taylor, Judy Collins, Carly Simon, Peter Frampton, Tim Finn, Richie Sambora, Ivano Fossati, Claudio Baglioni and Lawrence Gowan.

Levin helped to popularize the Chapman Stick and the NS electric upright bass. He also created "funk fingers", modified drumsticks that attach to the fingers of the player in order to strike the bass strings, adding a distinctive percussive "slap" sound used in funk bass playing. In 2011, Levin ranked # 2 behind John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin in the "20 Most Underrated Bass Guitarists" in Paste magazine. In July 2020, Levin was ranked #42 on the "50 Greatest Bassists of All Time" list by Rolling Stone magazine.

Early life and education
Anthony Frederick Levin was born on June 6, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up in a Reform Jewish household in the suburb of Brookline. He began playing double bass at 10 years old, primarily studying classical music. In high school, he learned tuba, soloing with the concert band, and also started a barbershop quartet.

After high school, he attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York and played in the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Also at Eastman, he studied with drummer Steve Gadd. He traded in his Ampeg electric upright "Baby Bass" for a Fender Precision Bass; in the early days his first bass amplifier was an Ampeg Portaflex B-15. Levin's first recording was in 1968, when he and Gadd played on Diana in the Autumn Wind, Gap Mangione's first solo album.

1970s–1980s
In 1970, Levin moved to New York City, joining a band called Aha, the Attack of the Green Slime Beast, with Don Preston of The Mothers of Invention. Soon after, he began working as a session musician, and through the 1970s he played bass on many albums, including Buddy Rich's big band jazz album, The Roar of '74, and Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years (1975).

In 1971, John McLaughlin asked Levin to join his new project, the Mahavishnu Orchestra: "My original choice for bass was Tony Levin. But he told me, 'Oh man, I just took a gig with Gary Burton.'"

From 1973 to 1975, Levin and Steve Gadd played in the band of veteran jazz flautist Herbie Mann. Two of Levin's early compositions (“Daffodil” and “Music Is a Game We Play”) were featured on the 1973 Mann album First Light.

In 1976, Levin helped create the lush textures on Andy Pratt's Resolution album, that featured numerous notable musicians including Arif Mardin, Andy Newmark, Hugh McDonald, Luther Vandross and Levin's frequent rhythm section partner Steve Gadd. Allmusic.com and Rolling Stone magazine rated this album as one of the best singer/songwriter albums of the 1970s.

In 1977, Levin joined Peter Gabriel's band. He had met Gabriel through producer Bob Ezrin with whom Levin had recorded Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare and Lou Reed's Berlin. Levin has been Gabriel's bass player of choice ever since. On Peter's first solo album, Levin played tuba as well, and directed and sang with a barbershop quartet on "Excuse Me".

With the exception of John Giblin's fretless bass playing on Peter Gabriel III, and some additional work by Larry Klein on "In Your Eyes" & "Mercy Street", and Bill Laswell on "This is the Picture" (all three tracks from So), Levin has been the bassist on all of Gabriel's studio sessions and on his many tours around the world.

In his years with Gabriel, Levin developed two unique aspects of his playing: further advancement on the Chapman Stick, which he would later utilize heavily in King Crimson,and invented funk fingers. Essentially, these are short drumsticks used to strike the bass strings, resulting in a very percussive effect. Levin credits Gabriel with the concept and his tech at the time (Andy Moore) with actually making them workable.

In 1978, Levin moved to Woodstock, New York, to join the band L'Image, which included his old friend Steve Gadd as well as Mike Mainieri and Warren Bernhardt. The band broke up after a year, though Levin still decided to stay in the area: he currently resides in Kingston, New York. This Ill-fated group would reunite much later in Levin's career. While recording Peter Gabriel's first album, Levin became acquainted with guitarist Robert Fripp, and in 1978 played on Fripp's solo album, Exposure. This would lead Levin to become a member of the 1981–1984 incarnation of King Crimson, along with Fripp, guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew and drummer Bill Bruford. Levin recorded four studio albums as part of King Crimson: Discipline (1981), Beat (1982), Three of a Perfect Pair (1984) and THRAK (1995), all critically acclaimed. Tony is best known for works with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel who mentions him the “Emperor of the Bottom End.”

In 1980, Levin participated in the sessions for John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy album.

In 1987, Levin played the bass and Chapman Stick parts on Pink Floyd's first album after the departure of Roger Waters, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

In 1988 Bruford asked Levin to be an "unofficial fifth member" in the Yes related supergroup Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe, which consisted of all the members from the classic Yes lineup except bassist Chris Squire, but he only functioned as a session player on ABWH's eponymous album. Due to a severe virus, he was unable to play on some of the final dates of the accompanying tour, being replaced by Jeff Berlin. Levin also plays on the Yes album Union from 1991.

In 1984 Levin released Road Photos, a collection of black and white photos taken during his travels with Crimson, Gabriel, Simon, and others. Another book of photos focusing on King Crimson's travels in the 1980s, The Crimson Chronicles volume 1, was released in 2004. There has been no word yet on the release of volume 2, which will cover the 1990s and possibly 2000s versions of the band. Levin has also written a book of career anecdotes and road stories called Beyond the Bass Clef.

Levin was part of King Crimson again from 1994 to 1997 as part of the "Double Trio" line-up of the band which consisted of Levin, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn, Pat Mastelotto, and Bill Bruford. Fripp then reformed King Crimson as a quartet, without Levin and Bruford. Levin also took part in two of the post-breakup experimental sub-groups, ProjeKct One (1997) and ProjeKct Four (1998). Levin played bass on "Watcher of the Skies" from Steve Hackett's Genesis Revisited album (1996). He was very busy in the late 1990s with his own groups Bruford Levin Upper Extremities, Bozzio Levin Stevens and Liquid Tension Experiment. In 2008, Levin joined King Crimson's 40th Anniversary Tour, in a lineup including Fripp, Belew, and drummers Mastelotto and Gavin Harrison (Porcupine Tree). He holds the record as Crimson’s longest-serving bassist.

1990s–2000s
In 1998, Levin and Bruford formed Bruford Levin Upper Extremities with trumpeter Chris Botti and guitarist David Torn; they released one studio album in 1998 and a live double album in 2000. Torn, Levin, and Bruford had worked with trumpeter Mark Isham, for Torn's album Cloud About Mercury. Former Japan bassist Mick Karn replaced Levin for Isham's tour at the time. Levin also continued recording albums with his own band, consisting of drummer/saxophonist/vocalist Jerry Marotta, guitarist Jesse Gress, synthesizer programmer/player Larry Fast, and Levin's brother, keyboardist Pete Levin. He also regularly played (and occasionally recorded) with the California Guitar Trio when their schedules permitted.

In 1997, Levin teamed up with Mike Portnoy and John Petrucci, members of Dream Theater, as well as future Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess, for a project called Liquid Tension Experiment. The combo released two albums, Liquid Tension Experiment and Liquid Tension Experiment 2 in 1998 and 1999 respectively, as well as playing short tours in 1998 and 2008. There have also been two CDs of material released under the name "Liquid Trio Experiment"; the first composed of studio jams from the LTE2 sessions without Petrucci (Spontaneous Combustion), released for the band's tenth anniversary, and a live recording from a 2008 Chicago show where Rudess's equipment failed and the other three covered for it with a nearly hour-long improvisation (When the Keyboard Breaks). During the COVID-19 global pandemic, the group reconvened and recorded Liquid Tension Experiment 3.

At the end of 2003 Trey Gunn left King Crimson and Levin rejoined as the bassist, although the band was only active for a handful of rehearsals at that time and the aforementioned 40th Anniversary tour in the summer of 2008.

In 2006, Levin released Resonator, The first album to feature Levin as a lyricist and lead vocalist. 2007 saw the release of Stick Man, an album of pieces recorded on the Chapman Stick.

In 2009 Levin reunited with his band from 1978, L'Image, featuring Mike Mainieri, Warren Bernhardt, David Spinozza, and Steve Gadd. The group performed at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City, toured Japan, and released the album L'Image 2.0. In 2010 Levin toured with HoBoLeMa, a group consisting of Allan Holdsworth on guitar, Terry Bozzio on drums, Levin on bass and Pat Mastelotto. All their shows were completely improvised with no written music.

Following on from the Stick Man album, Levin joined up with fellow player Michael Bernier and King Crimson drummer Pat Mastelotto to form the group Stick Men. The band released its first album Soup in 2010. Bernier left the group shortly after the release of Soup and was replaced by touch guitarist Markus Reuter in 2010. This lineup has continued with a busy touring and recording schedule, releasing the EP Absalom in 2011 and the full albums Open (June 2012), and Deep (Sept 2012).

Levin's brother, Pete Levin, is a New York keyboardist and writer who is known for his work with Gil Evans. In the 1970s, Tony and Pete collaborated with Steve Gadd in the comedy band The Clams. Levin has stated that some of the Clams' material may eventually be released. Levin also played on Jean-Pierre Ferland's Jaune album, which included hits "Le petit roi" and "Le chat du café des artistes".

On September 24, 2013, Levin was officially announced as a member of the eighth incarnation of King Crimson, alongside band founder Robert Fripp, guitarist Jakko Jakszyk, the returning Mel Collins on saxophone, and drummers Pat Mastelotto, Gavin Harrison and new member Bill Rieflin. The group toured the United States in the autumn of 2014 and continued to tour throughout the world until 2021, including 2019 when King Crimson celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Influence
Many artists have cited Levin as an influence or have expressed their admiration for him, including Les Claypool of Primus, Colin Hodgkinson, Nick Beggs, Al Barrow of Magnum, Dan Briggs of Between the Buried and Me, Zach Cooper of Coheed and Cambria and Jonathan Hischke of Dot Hacker and El Grupo Nuevo de Omar Rodriguez Lopez.

Personal life
Levin met Andi Turco in 1995 when she was promoting Virgin Records in Atlanta. They married three years later. Andi Turco-Levin ran for mayor of Kingston, New York, in 2011, and for Ulster County Legislature in 2019, both campaigns unsuccessful. Turco-Levin is credited with backing vocals on the album Resonator (2006) and for photography on Levin Minnemann Rudess (2013). Levin has one child, filmmaker Maggie Levin. In 2003, Levin stated that he is a vegetarian.

Discography
Levin has played on hundreds of recordings as a session musician or a guest artist.
 * Jaune (1970) – Jean-Pierre Ferland
 * Carly Simon (1971) – Carly Simon
 * Diana in the Autumn Wind (1972) – Gap Mangione (arrangements by Chuck Mangione)
 * Alive! (1972) – Chuck Mangione Quartet
 * Don McLean (1972) – Don McLean
 * Berlin (1973) – Lou Reed
 * Over the Rainbow (1973) – Livingston Taylor
 * The Roar of '74 (1973) – Buddy Rich
 * Playin' Favorites (1973) – Don McLean
 * Simba (Groove Merchant, 1974) – O'Donel Levy
 * Discotheque (1975) – Herbie Mann
 * Still Crazy After All These Years (1975) – Paul Simon
 * Welcome To My Nightmare (1975) – Alice Cooper
 * Judith (1975) – Judy Collins
 * Second Childhood (1976) – Phoebe Snow
 * Goes to Hell (1976) – Alice Cooper
 * Main Squeeze (1976) – Chuck Mangione
 * Lace and Whiskey (1977) – Alice Cooper
 * Never Letting Go (1977) – Phoebe Snow
 * Singin'... (1977) – Melissa Manchester
 * Ringo the 4th (1977) – Ringo Starr
 * Watermark (1977) – Art Garfunkel
 * Nested (1978) – Laura Nyro
 * Blue Montreux (1978) – Arista All-Stars (Brecker Bros, Larry Coryell, etc.)
 * Boys in the Trees (1978) – Carly Simon
 * The Roches (1979) – The Roches
 * Spy (1979) – Carly Simon
 * Double Fantasy (1980) – John Lennon, Yoko Ono
 * Me Myself I (1980) – Joan Armatrading
 * Come Upstairs (1980) – Carly Simon
 * Walk Under Ladders (1981) – Joan Armatrading
 * Scissors Cut (1981) – Art Garfunkel
 * Season of Glass (1981) – Yoko Ono
 * It's Alright (I See Rainbows) (1982) – Yoko Ono
 * Keep On Doing (1982) – The Roches
 * Times of Our Lives (1982) – Judy Collins
 * Scenario by Al Di Meola also with Phil Collins, Jan Hammer and Bill Bruford - (1983)
 * The Key (1983) – Joan Armatrading
 * Hello Big Man (1983) – Carly Simon
 * Milk and Honey (1984) – John Lennon, Yoko Ono
 * Boys and Girls (1985) – Bryan Ferry
 * Starpeace (1985) – Yoko Ono
 * Strange Animal (1985) – Lawrence Gowan
 * That's Why I'm Here (1985) – James Taylor
 * Downtown (1985) – Marshall Crenshaw
 * Rain Dogs (1985) – Tom Waits
 * Cloud About Mercury (ECM, 1986) – David Torn
 * The Big Picture (1986) – Michael W. Smith
 * Premonition (1986) – Peter Frampton
 * A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) – Pink Floyd
 * Robbie Robertson (1987) – Robbie Robertson
 * Great Dirty World (1987) – Lawrence Gowan
 * Coming Around Again (1987) – Carly Simon
 * Cher (1987) – Cher
 * Sentimental Hygiene (1987) – Warren Zevon
 * Safety in Numbers (1987) – David Van Tieghem
 * Julia Fordham (1988) – Julia Fordham
 * Tommy Page (1988) – Tommy Page
 * Hide Your Heart (1988) – Bonnie Tyler
 * Amnesia (1988) – Richard Thompson
 * The Other Side of the Mirror (1989) – Stevie Nicks
 * Maria McKee (1989) – Maria McKee
 * Tim Finn (1989) – Tim Finn
 * N.Y.C. (1989) – Steps Ahead
 * The Natural Edge (1989) Pop Out World – David Wilcox
 * Lost Brotherhood (1990) – Lawrence Gowan
 * World Gone Strange (1991) – Andy Summers
 * Stranger in This Town (1991) – Richie Sambora
 * Discipline (1991) – Desmond Child
 * New Moon Shine (1991) – James Taylor
 * Matters of the Heart (1992) – Tracy Chapman
 * Arkansas Traveler (1992) – Michelle Shocked
 * Spin 1ne 2wo (1993) – Spin 1ne 2wo
 * Flyer (1994) – Nanci Griffith
 * Swamp Ophelia (1994) – Indigo Girls
 * What's Inside (1995) – Joan Armatrading
 * Dream Sequence (Psi, 1995–2003 [2003]) – Kenny Wheeler
 * This Fire (1996) – Paula Cole
 * Gravity (1996) – Jesse Cook
 * The Last Dance of Mr. X (1997) – Andy Summers
 * The Cappuccino Songs (1998) – Tanita Tikaram
 * By 7:30 (1999) – Vonda Shepard
 * Amen (1999) – Paula Cole
 * Snowfall on the Sahara (1999) – Natalie Cole
 * Aura (2001) – Asia

 * My Ride's Here (2002) – Warren Zevon
 * Chinatown (2002) – Vonda Shepard
 * Heathen (2002) – David Bowie
 * Afterglow (2003) – Sarah McLachlan
 * Courage (2007) – Paula Cole
 * L'Image 2.0 (2009) – L'Image
 * Ithaca (2010) – Paula Cole
 * The Next Day (2013) – David Bowie
 * Raven (2013) – Paula Cole
 * EVOLUTION (2014) Svjetlana Bukvich
 * Music From An Expanded Universe (2014) – Leon Alvarado
 * The Desired Effect (2015) – Brandon Flowers
 * This Bright Red Feeling (2016) – Paula Cole
 * Ballad of a Bad Girl (album) (2021) – Kate McDonnell
 * Troika (2022) - D'Virgilio, Morse, & Jennings

title: Tony Levin


text:
Additive Schwarz method

In mathematics, the additive Schwarz method, named after Hermann Schwarz, solves a boundary value problem for a partial differential equation approximately by splitting it into boundary value problems on smaller domains and adding the results.

Overview
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are used in all sciences to model phenomena. For the purpose of exposition, we give an example physical problem and the accompanying boundary value problem (BVP). Even if the reader is unfamiliar with the notation, the purpose is merely to show what a BVP looks like when written down.

 * (Model problem) The heat distribution in a square metal plate such that the left edge is kept at 1 degree, and the other edges are kept at 0 degree, after letting it sit for a long period of time satisfies the following boundary value problem:

 * fxx(x,y) + fyy(x,y) = 0
 * f(0,y) = 1; f(x,0) = f(x,1) = f(1,y) = 0

 * where f is the unknown function, fxx and fyy denote the second partial derivatives with respect to x and y, respectively.

Here, the domain is the square [0,1] × [0,1].

This particular problem can be solved exactly on paper, so there is no need for a computer. However, this is an exceptional case, and most BVPs cannot be solved exactly. The only possibility is to use a computer to find an approximate solution.

Solving on a computer
A typical way of doing this is to sample f at regular intervals in the square [0,1] × [0,1]. For instance, we could take 8 samples in the x direction at x = 0.1, 0.2, ..., 0.8 and 0.9, and 8 samples in the y direction at similar coordinates. We would then have 64 samples of the square, at places like (0.2,0.8) and (0.6,0.6). The goal of the computer program would be to calculate the value of f at those 64 points, which seems easier than finding an abstract function of the square.

There are some difficulties, for instance it is not possible to calculate fxx(0.5,0.5) knowing f at only 64 points in the square. To overcome this, one uses some sort of numerical approximation of the derivatives, see for instance the finite element method or finite differences. We ignore these difficulties and concentrate on another aspect of the problem.

Solving linear problems
Whichever method we choose to solve this problem, we will need to solve a large linear system of equations. The reader may recall linear systems of equations from high school, they look like this:

 * 2a + 5b = 12 (*)
 * 6a − 3b = −3

This is a system of 2 equations in 2 unknowns (a and b). If we solve the BVP above in the manner suggested, we will need to solve a system of 64 equations in 64 unknowns. This is not a hard problem for modern computers, but if we use a larger number of samples, even modern computers cannot solve the BVP very efficiently.

Domain decomposition
Which brings us to domain decomposition methods. If we split the domain [0,1] × [0,1] into two subdomains [0,0.5] × [0,1] and [0.5,1] × [0,1], each has only half of the sample points. So we can try to solve a version of our model problem on each subdomain, but this time each subdomain has only 32 sample points. Finally, given the solutions on each subdomain, we can attempt to reconcile them to obtain a solution of the original problem on [0,1] × [0,1].

Size of the problems
In terms of the linear systems, we're trying to split the system of 64 equations in 64 unknowns into two systems of 32 equations in 32 unknowns. This would be a clear gain, for the following reason. Looking back at system (*), we see that there are 6 important pieces of information. They are the coefficients of a and b (2,5 on the first line and 6,−3 on the second line), and the right hand side (which we write as 12,−3). On the other hand, if we take two "systems" of 1 equation in 1 unknown, it might look like this:

 * System 1: 2a = 12
 * System 2: -3b = −3

We see that this system has only 4 important pieces of information. This means that a computer program will have an easier time solving two 1×1 systems than solving a single 2×2 system, because the pair of 1×1 systems are simpler than the single 2×2 system. While the 64×64 and 32×32 systems are too large to illustrate here, we could say by analogy that the 64×64 system has 4160 pieces of information, while the 32×32 systems each have 1056, or roughly a quarter of the 64×64 system.

Domain decomposition algorithm
Unfortunately, for technical reasons it is usually not possible to split our grid of 64 points (a 64×64 system of linear equations) into two grids of 32 points (two 32×32 systems of linear equations) and obtain an answer to the 64×64 system. Instead, the following algorithm is what actually happens:

 * 1) Begin with an approximate solution of the 64×64 system.
 * 2) From the 64×64 system, create two 32×32 systems to improve the approximate solution.
 * 3) Solve the two 32×32 systems.
 * 4) Put the two 32×32 solutions "together" to improve the approximate solution to the 64×64 system.
 * 5) If the solution isn't very good yet, repeat from 2.

There are two ways in which this can be better than solving the base 64×64 system. First, if the number of repetitions of the algorithm is small, solving two 32×32 systems may be more efficient than solving a 64×64 system. Second, the two 32×32 systems need not be solved on the same computer, so this algorithm can be run in parallel to use the power of multiple computers.

In fact, solving two 32×32 systems instead of a 64×64 system on a single computer (without using parallelism) is unlikely to be efficient. However, if we use more than two subdomains, the picture can change. For instance, we could use four 16×16 problems, and there's a chance that solving these will be better than solving a single 64×64 problem even if the domain decomposition algorithm needs to iterate a few times.

A technical example
Here we assume that the reader is familiar with partial differential equations.

We will be solving the partial differential equation

 * uxx + uyy = f (**)

We impose boundedness at infinity.

We decompose the domain R² into two overlapping subdomains H1 = ( − ∞,1] × R and H2 = [0,+ ∞ ) × R. In each subdomain, we will be solving a BVP of the form:

 * u( j )xx + u( j )yy = f in Hj
 * u( j )(xj,y) = g(y)

where x1 = 1 and x2 = 0 and taking boundedness at infinity as the other boundary condition. We denote the solution u( j ) of the above problem by S(f,g). Note that S is bilinear.

The Schwarz algorithm proceeds as follows:

 * 1) Start with approximate solutions u( 1 )0 and u( 2 )0 of the PDE in subdomains H1 and H2 respectively. Initialize k to 1.
 * 2) Calculate u( j )k + 1 = S(f,u(3 − j)k(xj)) with j = 1,2.
 * 3) Increase k by one and repeat 2 until sufficient precision is achieved.

title: Additive Schwarz method


text:
County Durham

County Durham, officially simply Durham (/ˈdʌrəm/), is a ceremonial county in North East England. The county borders Northumberland and Tyne and Wear to the north, the North Sea to the east, North Yorkshire to the south, and Cumbria to the west. The largest settlement is Darlington.

The county has an area of undefined km2 and a population of. The latter is concentrated in the east; the south-east is part of the Teesside built-up area, which extends into North Yorkshire. After Darlington (92,363), the largest settlements are Hartlepool (88,855), Stockton-on-Tees (82,729), and Durham (48,069). For local government purposes the county comprises three unitary authority areas—County Durham, Darlington, and Hartlepool—and part of a fourth, Stockton-on-Tees. The county historically includes the part of Tyne and Wear south of the River Tyne, and excludes the part of the ceremonial County Durham south of the River Tees.

The west of the county contains part of the North Pennines uplands, a national landscape. The hills are the source of the rivers Tees and Wear, which flow east and form the valleys of Teesdale and Weardale respectively. The east of the county is flatter, and the two rivers meander through it; the Tees forms the boundary with North Yorkshire in its lower reaches, and the Wear exits the county near Chester-le-Street in the north-east. The county's coast is a site of special scientific interest characterised by tall limestone and dolomite cliffs.

What is now County Durham was on the border of Roman Britain, and contains survivals of this era at sites such as Binchester Roman Fort. In the Anglo-Saxon period the region was part of the Kingdom of Northumbria. In 995 the city of Durham was founded by monks seeking a place safe from Viking raids to house the relics of St Cuthbert. Durham Cathedral was rebuilt after the Norman Conquest, and together with Durham Castle is now a World Heritage Site. By the late Middle Ages the county was governed semi-independently by the bishops of Durham and was also a buffer zone between England and Scotland. County Durham became heavily industrialised in the nineteenth century, when many collieries opened on the Durham coalfield. The Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world's first public railway to use steam locomotives, opened in 1825. Most collieries closed during the last quarter of the twentieth century, but the county's coal mining heritage is remembered in the annual Durham Miners' Gala.

Toponymy
The ceremonial county is officially named Durham, but the county has long been commonly known as County Durham and is the only English county name prefixed with "County" in common usage (a practice common in Ireland). Its unusual naming (for an English shire) is explained to some extent by the relationship with the Bishops of Durham, who for centuries governed Durham as a county palatine (the County Palatine of Durham) outside the usual structure of county administration in England.

The situation regarding the formal name in modern local government is less clear:
 * The 2009 structural change legislation created the present unitary council (that covers a large part – but not all – of the ceremonial county) refers to "the county of County Durham" and names the new unitary district "County Durham" too.
 * A later amendment to that legislation refers to the "county of Durham" and the amendment allows for the unitary council to name itself "The Durham Council".
 * The council retains the name as Durham County Council. With either option, the name does not include County Durham.
 * The former postal county was named "County Durham" to distinguish it from the post town of Durham.

Anglian Kingdom of Bernicia
Around AD 547, an Angle named Ida founded the kingdom of Bernicia after spotting the defensive potential of a large rock at Bamburgh, upon which many a fortification was thenceforth built. Ida was able to forge, hold and consolidate the kingdom; although the native British tried to take back their land, the Angles triumphed and the kingdom endured.

Kingdom of Northumbria
In AD 604, Ida's grandson Æthelfrith forcibly merged Bernicia (ruled from Bamburgh) and Deira (ruled from York, which was known as Eforwic at the time) to create the Kingdom of Northumbria. In time, the realm was expanded, primarily through warfare and conquest; at its height, the kingdom stretched from the River Humber (from which the kingdom drew its name) to the Forth. Eventually, factional fighting and the rejuvenated strength of neighbouring kingdoms, most notably Mercia, led to Northumbria's decline. The arrival of the Vikings hastened this decline, and the Scandinavian raiders eventually claimed the Deiran part of the kingdom in AD 867 (which became Jórvík). The land that would become County Durham now sat on the border with the Great Heathen Army, a border which today still forms the boundaries between the historic counties of Yorkshire and County Durham.

Viking settlement petered out at the Tees and the lands north thereof lay outside of the Danelaw. The House of Bamburgh, successors of the Kings of Bernicia and Northumbria, retained control north of the Tyne; between the Tyne and the Tees emerged the Community of St. Cuthbert or Haliwerfolc, successors of the See of Lindisfarne. The House of Wessex absorbed the Kingdom of York into the unified English Kingdom in 954 and claimed overlordship over Northumbria. However, the lands north of the Tees remained outside the governmental frontiers of the English realm, thus Bamburgh and the Haliwerfolc went on to become contested buffer states between England and Scotland.

City of Durham founded
In AD 995, St Cuthbert's community, who had been transporting Cuthbert's remains around, partly in an attempt to avoid them falling into the hands of Viking raiders, settled at Dunholm (Durham) on a site that was defensively favourable due to the horseshoe-like path of the River Wear. St Cuthbert's remains were placed in a shrine in the White Church, which was originally a wooden structure but was eventually fortified into a stone building.

Once the City of Durham had been founded, the Bishops of Durham gradually acquired the lands that would become County Durham. Bishop Aldhun began this process by procuring land in the Tees and Wear valleys, including Norton, Stockton, Escomb and Aucklandshire in 1018. In 1031, King Canute gave Staindrop to the Bishops. This territory continued to expand, and was eventually given the status of a liberty. Under the control of the Bishops of Durham, the land had various names: the "Liberty of Durham", "Liberty of St Cuthbert's Land" "the lands of St Cuthbert between Tyne and Tees" or "the Liberty of Haliwerfolc" (holy Wear folk).

The bishops' special jurisdiction rested on claims that King Ecgfrith of Northumbria had granted a substantial territory to St Cuthbert on his election to the see of Lindisfarne in 684. In about 883 a cathedral housing the saint's remains was established at Chester-le-Street and Guthfrith, King of York granted the community of St Cuthbert the area between the Tyne and the Wear, before the community reached its final destination in 995, in Durham.

Following the Norman invasion, the administrative machinery of government extended only slowly into northern England. Northumberland's first recorded Sheriff was Gilebert from 1076 until 1080 and a 12th-century record records Durham regarded as within the shire. However the bishops disputed the authority of the sheriff of Northumberland and his officials, despite the second sheriff for example being the reputed slayer of Malcolm Canmore, King of Scots. The crown regarded Durham as falling within Northumberland until the late thirteenth century.

County Palatine of Durham
Matters regarding the bishopric of Durham came to a head in 1293 when the bishop and his steward failed to attend proceedings of quo warranto held by the justices of Northumberland. The bishop's case went before parliament, where he stated that Durham lay outside the bounds of any English shire and that "from time immemorial it had been widely known that the sheriff of Northumberland was not sheriff of Durham nor entered within that liberty as sheriff. . . nor made there proclamations or attachments". The arguments appear to have prevailed, as by the fourteenth century Durham was accepted as a liberty which received royal mandates direct. In effect it was a private shire, with the bishop appointing his own sheriff. The area eventually became known as the "County Palatine of Durham".

Sadberge was a liberty, sometimes referred to as a county, within Northumberland. In 1189 it was purchased for the see but continued with a separate sheriff, coroner and court of pleas. In the 14th century Sadberge was included in Stockton ward and was itself divided into two wards. The division into the four wards of Chester-le-Street, Darlington, Easington and Stockton existed in the 13th century, each ward having its own coroner and a three-weekly court corresponding to the hundred court. The diocese was divided into the archdeaconries of Durham and Northumberland. The former is mentioned in 1072, and in 1291 included the deaneries of Chester-le-Street, Auckland, Lanchester and Darlington.

The term palatinus is applied to the bishop in 1293, and from the 13th century onwards the bishops frequently claimed the same rights in their lands as the king enjoyed in his kingdom.

Overview

The historic boundaries of County Durham included a main body covering the catchment of the Pennines in the west, the River Tees in the south, the North Sea in the east and the Rivers Tyne and Derwent in the north. The county palatinate also had a number of liberties: the Bedlingtonshire, Islandshire and Norhamshire exclaves within Northumberland, and the Craikshire exclave within the North Riding of Yorkshire. In 1831 the county covered an area of 679530 acre and had a population of 253,910. These exclaves were included as part of the county for parliamentary electoral purposes until 1832, and for judicial and local-government purposes until the coming into force of the Counties (Detached Parts) Act 1844, which merged most remaining exclaves with their surrounding county. The boundaries of the county proper remained in use for administrative and ceremonial purposes until the 1972 Local Government Act.

Early English and Norman period
Following the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror appointed Copsig as Earl of Northumbria, thereby bringing what would become County Durham under Copsig's control. Copsig was, just a few weeks later, killed in Newburn. Having already being previously offended by the appointment of a non-Northumbrian as Bishop of Durham in 1042, the people of the region became increasingly rebellious. In response, in January 1069, William despatched a large Norman army, under the command of Robert de Comines, to Durham City. The army, believed to consist of 700 cavalry (about one-third of the number of Norman knights who had participated in the Battle of Hastings), entered the city, whereupon they were attacked, and defeated, by a Northumbrian assault force. The Northumbrians wiped out the entire Norman army, including Comines, all except for one survivor, who was allowed to take the news of this defeat back.

Following the Norman slaughter at the hands of the Northumbrians, resistance to Norman rule spread throughout Northern England, including a similar uprising in York. William The Conqueror subsequently (and successfully) attempted to halt the northern rebellions by unleashing the notorious Harrying of the North (1069–1070). Because William's main focus during the harrying was on Yorkshire, County Durham was largely spared the Harrying. The best remains of the Norman period include Durham Cathedral and Durham Castle, and several parish churches, such as St Laurence Church in Pittington. The Early English period has left the eastern portion of the cathedral, the churches of Darlington, Hartlepool, and St Andrew, Auckland, Sedgefield, and portions of a few other churches.

Palatinate
Until the 15th century, the most important administrative officer in the Palatinate was the steward. Other officers included the sheriff, the coroners, the Chamberlain and the chancellor. The palatine exchequer originated in the 12th century. The palatine assembly represented the whole county, and dealt chiefly with fiscal questions. The bishop's council, consisting of the clergy, the sheriff and the barons, regulated judicial affairs, and later produced the Chancery and the courts of Admiralty and Marshalsea.

The prior of Durham ranked first among the bishop's barons. He had his own court, and almost exclusive jurisdiction over his men. A UNESCO site describes the role of the bishops in Durham, the "buffer state between England and Scotland": "From 1075, the Bishop of Durham became a Prince-Bishop, with the right to raise an army, mint his own coins, and levy taxes. As long as he remained loyal to the king of England, he could govern as a virtually autonomous ruler, reaping the revenue from his territory, but also remaining mindful of his role of protecting England’s northern frontier."

A report states that the Bishops also had the authority to appoint judges and barons and to offer pardons.

There were ten palatinate barons in the 12th century, most importantly the Hyltons of Hylton Castle, the Bulmers of Brancepeth, the Conyers of Sockburne, the Hansards of Evenwood, and the Lumleys of Lumley Castle. The Nevilles owned large estates in the county. John Neville, 3rd Baron Neville de Raby rebuilt Raby Castle, their principal seat, in 1377.

Edward I's quo warranto proceedings of 1293 showed twelve lords enjoying more or less extensive franchises under the bishop. The repeated efforts of the Crown to check the powers of the palatinate bishops culminated in 1536 in the Act of Resumption, which deprived the bishop of the power to pardon offences against the law or to appoint judicial officers. Moreover, indictments and legal processes were in future to run in the name of the king, and offences to be described as against the peace of the king, rather than that of the bishop. In 1596 restrictions were imposed on the powers of the chancery, and in 1646 the palatinate was formally abolished. It was revived, however, after the Restoration, and continued with much the same power until 5 July 1836, when the Durham (County Palatine) Act 1836 provided that the palatine jurisdiction should in future be vested in the Crown.

Wars
During the 15th-century Wars of the Roses, Henry VI passed through Durham. On the outbreak of the Great Rebellion in 1642 Durham inclined to support the cause of Parliament, and in 1640 the high sheriff of the palatinate guaranteed to supply the Scottish army with provisions during their stay in the county. In 1642 the Earl of Newcastle formed the western counties into an association for the King's service, but in 1644 the palatinate was again overrun by a Scottish army, and after the Battle of Marston Moor (2 July 1644) fell entirely into the hands of Parliament.

Parliamentary representation and secular powers
In 1614, a Bill was introduced in Parliament for securing representation to the county and city of Durham and the borough of Barnard Castle. The bishop strongly opposed the proposal as an infringement of his palatinate rights, and the county was first summoned to return members to Parliament in 1654. After the Restoration of 1660 the county and city returned two members each. In the wake of the Reform Act of 1832 the county returned two members for two divisions, and the boroughs of Gateshead, South Shields and Sunderland acquired representation. The bishops lost their secular powers in 1836. The boroughs of Darlington, Stockton and Hartlepool returned one member each from 1868 until the Redistribution Act of 1885.

Urban
The historic county excludes the village of Startforth, the ceremonial county excludes the city of Sunderland and the non-metropolitan county excludes the town of Stockton-on-Tees. The ceremonial county includes the non-metropolitan county with the addition of the boroughs of Darlington, Hartlepool, and Stockton-on-Tees. The historic county's boundaries stretched from the rivers Tyne to Tees and it is covered by the ceremonial county, the city of Sunderland, the boroughs of Gateshead and South Tyneside, while the non-metropolitan county includes part of Yorkshire.

County Durham contains a small area of the North East Green Belt in the county's north; surrounding the city of Durham, Chester-le-Street and other communities along the shared county border with Tyne and Wear, avoiding Wearside's spread west. A smaller green belt separates Urpeth, Ouston, Pelton, and Perkinsville from Birtley in Tyne and Wear. A further small segment by the coast separates Seaham from the Sunderland settlements of Beckwith Green and Ryhope. It was first drawn up in the 1990s.

Geology
County Durham is underlain by Carboniferous rocks in the west. Permian and Triassic strata overlie these older rocks in the east. These sedimentary sequences have been cut by igneous dykes and sills.

The county contains a sizeable area of the North Pennines, designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, primarily west of Tow Law and Barnard Castle. The highest point (county top) of historic County Durham is the trig point (not the summit) of Burnhope Seat, height 746 m, between Weardale and Teesdale on the border with historic Cumberland in the far west of the county. The local government reorganisation of 1974 placed the higher Mickle Fell south of Teesdale (the county top of Yorkshire) within the administrative borders of Durham (where it remains within the ceremonial county). However, it is not generally recognised as the highest point in Durham.

The two main dales of County Durham (Teesdale and Weardale) and the surrounding fells, many of which exceed 2000 ft in height, are excellent hillwalking country, although not nearly as popular as the nearby Yorkshire Dales and Lake District national parks. The scenery is rugged and remote, and the high fells have a landscape typical of the Pennines with extensive areas of tussock grass and blanket peat bog in the west, with heather moorland on the lower slopes descending to the east.

Climate
The following climate figures were gathered at the Durham weather station between 1981 and 2010:

Governance
County Durham, as considered a county for lieutenancy purposes by the Lieutenancies Act 1997, is administered as a part of the constituent country of England in the United Kingdom. The area is appointed a lord lieutenant and a high sheriff.

The ceremonial county is divided into four administrative counties (see table below), one of which - Stockon-on-Tees - also extends into North Yorkshire. Technically, for administrative purposes, the County of Durham only consists of the area governed by Durham County Council. The three other areas are counties in their own right.

The county is partially parished. The city of Durham is the most populous settlement in the county to have a parish. Multiple parishes are styled as having town councils: Billingham (in Stockton Borough), Barnard Castle, Bishop Auckland, Chilton, Ferryhill, Great Aycliffe, Newton Aycliffe, Greater Willington, Peterlee, Seaham, Sedgefield, Shildon, Spennymoor, Stanley and Tow Law.

1836 to 1974
The county was aligned to other historic counties of England from 1836 until 1889; multiple acts were passed removing exclaves, splitting the county from the bishopric and reforming its structure.

The ceremonial county and administrative county were created under the Local Government Act 1888 in 1889. Darlington, Gateshead, West Hartlepool (later known as Hartlepool), South Shields and Sunderland became county boroughs during the administrative counties years of administrating; each remained in the ceremonial county while outside of the administrative county.

The ceremonial county remained under the same borders as the historic county until 1968 when the County Borough of Teesside formed. Ceremonial duties of the borough (which were made up of areas from two counties) were in the North Riding of Yorkshire ceremonial county.

1974 to present
From the 1974 until 1996, the ceremonial county was split into eight districts: A non-metropolitan county replaced the administrative county. The boundaries only deviated from the ceremonial boundaries after 1995 when the Darlington Borough became a unitary authority.
 * Chester-le-Street, including the Lumley, Pelton and Sacriston areas
 * Derwentside, including Consett and Stanley
 * City of Durham, including Durham and the surrounding areas
 * Easington, including Seaham and Peterlee
 * Borough of Sedgefield, including Spennymoor, Sedgefield and Newton Aycliffe
 * Teesdale, including Barnard Castle and the villages of Teesdale
 * Wear Valley, including Bishop Auckland, Crook, Willington, Hunwick, and the villages along Weardale
 * Borough of Darlington, Darlington along with nearby villages around the town.

On the 1 April 1996, the county of Cleveland was abolished with its boroughs of Hartlepool and Stockton-on-Tees (north of the River Tees) becoming a part of the ceremonial county.

The non-metropolitan county was reconstituted on 1 April 2009: the strategic services-providing Durham County Council was re-organised into a single district of the same name, merging with the seven local facility-providing districts in the non-metropolitan county and became structured as a unitary authority. It has 126 councillors. The three pre-existing unitary authorities were unaffected.

Parliament
The county boundaries used for parliamentary constituencies are those used between 1974 and 1996, consisting of the County Durham district and the Darlington Borough. This area elects seven Members of Parliament. As of the 2019 General Election, four of these MPs are Conservatives and three MPs are Labour. The rest of the ceremonial county is included in the Cleveland parliamentary constituency area.

Emergency services
The police and fire services operate according to the 1974-96 ceremonial county boundaries:
 * Durham Constabulary, Ron Hogg was first elected the Durham Police and Crime Commissioner for the force on 15 November 2012.
 * Cleveland Police
 * County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service, it is under supervision of a combined fire authority consisting of 25 local councillors: 21 from Durham County Council and 4 from Darlington Borough Council.
 * Cleveland Fire Brigade.

The North East Ambulance Service NHS Trust cover North East England and are responsible for providing ambulance services for the NHS. Northumbria Ambulance Service and County Durham Ambulance Service (following historic county borders) merged on 1 April 1999 to become the North East service. In 2005 the area was adapted to the modern North East England regional extent.

Air ambulance services are provided by the Great North Air Ambulance. The charity operates three bases, including one in Eaglescliffe.

Teesdale and Weardale Search and Mountain Rescue Team, are based at Sniperly Farm in Durham City and respond to search and rescue incidents in the county.

Population
The Office for National Statistics estimated in 2016 that the Durham County Council area had a population of 522,100, the Borough of Darlington a population of 105,600, the Borough of Hartlepool a population of 92,800, and the part of the Borough of Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham (the other part being in North Yorkshire) a population of 137,300. This gives the total estimated population of the ceremonial county at 857,800.

Employment
The proportion of the population working in agriculture fell from around 6% in 1851 to 1% in 1951; currently less than 1% of the population work in agriculture. There were 15,202 people employed in coal mining in 1841, rising to a peak of 157,837 in 1921.

Settlements
County Durham has a mostly rural character, especially in the west. Small population centres scatter between Durham, Crook, Bishop Auckland, Shildon, Newton Aycliffe, Sedgefield and Peterlee. These places were populated by the draw of collieries during the Industrial Revolution. The south east side of the county Between Hartlepool and Darlington form part of Teesside with settlements on the south side of the river. While the north east part of the county (on the border with Tyne and Wear) forms part of Tyneside and Wearside.

Former non-metropolitan county
At the 2001 Census, Easington and Derwentside districts had the highest proportion (around 99%) in the county council area of resident population who were born in the UK. 13.2% of the county council area's residents rate their health as not good, the highest proportion in England.

96.6% of County Durham's residents are White British, with other white groups making up a further 1.6% of the population. Around 77% of the county's population are Christian whilst 22% have no religion, and around 1% come from other religious communities. These figures exclude around 6% of the population who did not wish to state their religion.

As at 2001, Chester-le-Street district has the lowest number of available jobs per working-age resident (0.38%).

1900s
Since the Local Government Act 1972 historic county boundaries now lie within other administrative counties. These include:

1800s
Throughout the 1800s exclaves, of the historic county, each were given back to surrounding shires and lands they were closer associated with:

Economic output
The chart and table summarise unadjusted gross value added (GVA) in millions of pounds sterling for County Durham across 3 industries at current basic prices from 1995 to 2004.

Businesses
Phileas Fogg snacks are made by the United Biscuits subsidiary KP Snacks in Consett on the Number One Industrial Estate. Nearby CAV Aerospace make ice protection systems for aircraft. Thomas Swan, an international chemicals company, is in Crookhall. The Explorer Group, who own Elddis, make caravans at Delves. The LG Philips Displays cathode ray tube factory at Carrville, Durham was the second largest employer in the north east after Nissan, before the company went bankrupt in 2006. Northumbrian Water is in Pity Me, Framwellgate Moor. Esh Group is a large construction company based south of Durham in Bowburn. Schmitz Cargobull UK is the UK's biggest trailer manufacturer, notably for refrigerated trailers, and is based at Harelaw near the Pontop Pike mast.

Black & Decker and Electrolux had large factories at Spennymoor, but moved production overseas. Thorn Lighting of the Zumtobel Lighting Group are on the Green Lane Industrial Estate at Spennymoor. Since 2007 RF Micro Devices (RFMD) have made electronic wafers on the Heighington Lane Business Park at Newton Aycliffe, on the site formerly owned by Fujitsu. Slightly to the north, TKA Tallent make automotive axles and chassis components. Husqvarna-Flymo, formerly owned by Electrolux, are on the Aycliffe Industrial Estate, where the world's first hover mower was built in 1965. In West Auckland, Potters Europe make road reflectors. GlaxoSmithKline has a site at Barnard Castle that makes pharmaceuticals.

NSK make ball bearings on the North West Industrial Estate at Peterlee, and GWA International subsidiary Gliderol UK build garage doors. Mecaplast Group UK produce automotive components on the Low Hills Industrial Estate in Easington Village near Peterlee. Reckitt Benckiser make cough syrup and indigestion remedies at Shotton, near Peterlee until 2014. Walkers Crisps have a site north of Peterlee.

Mining and heavy industry
A substantial number of colliery villages were built throughout the county in the nineteenth century to house the growing workforce, which included large numbers of migrant workers from the rest of the UK. Sometimes the migrants were brought in to augment the local workforce but, in other cases, they were brought in as strike breakers, or "blacklegs". Tens of thousands of people migrated to County Durham from Cornwall (partly due to their previous experience of tin mining) between 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War, so much so that the miners' cottages in east Durham called "Greenhill" were also known locally as "Cornwall", and Easington Colliery still has a Cornish Street. Other migrants included people from Northumberland, Cumberland, South Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Coal mining had a profound effect on trade unionism, public health and housing, as well as creating a related culture, language, folklore and sense of identity that still survives today. The migrants also were employed in the railway, ship building, iron, steel and roadworking industries, and the pattern of migration continued, to a lesser extent, up until the 1950s and 1960s. Gateshead was once home to the fourth-largest Irish settlement in England, Consett's population was 22% Irish and significant numbers of Irish people moved to Sunderland, resulting in the city hosting numerous events on St. Patrick's Day due to the Irish heritage. The culture of coal mining found expression in the Durham Miners' Gala, which was first held in 1871, developed around the culture of trade unionism. Coal mining continued to decline and pits closed. The 1984–1985 United Kingdom miners' strike involved many miners across the county. Today no deep-coal mines exist in the county and numbers attending the Miners' Gala decreased over the period between the end of the strike and the 21st century. However recent years have seen numbers significantly grow, and more banners return to the Gala each year as former colliery communities restore or replicate former banners to march at the Gala parade.

Art
In 1930, the Spennymoor Settlement (otherwise known as the Pitman's Academy) opened. The settlement, initially funded by the Pilgrim Trust, aimed to encourage people to be neighbourly and participate in voluntary social service. The settlement operated during the Great Depression, when unemployment was widespread and economic deprivation rife; Spennymoor was economically underprivileged. The settlement provided educational and social work, as well as hope; this included providing unemployed miners with on outlet for their creativity, a poor person's lawyer service, the town's first library and the Everyman Theatre. The output included paintings, sewing, socially-significant plays, woodwork and sculptures. Several members went on to win adult scholarships at Oxford University when such a route would normally be closed to the underprivileged. Former members include artists Norman Cornish and Tom McGuinness, writer Sid Chaplin OBE and journalist Arnold Hadwin OBE. The Spennymoor Settlement at its home in the Everyman Theatre (Grade 2 listed) is still operating, administered by the current trustees, offering community events and activities, including Youth Theatre Group, an Art Group and various classes, as well as offering community accommodation facilities. Several Durham miners have been able to turn their former mining careers into careers in art. For example, Tom Lamb, as well as the aforementioned Tom McGuinness and Norman Cornish. Their artworks depict scenes of life underground, from the streets in which they lived and of the people they loved; through them, we can see, understand and experience the mining culture of County Durham. In 2017, The Mining Art Gallery opened in Bishop Auckland in a building that was once a bank. Part of the Auckland Project, the gallery includes the work of artists from within County Durham and beyond, including such other North-Eastern mining artists as Robert Olley, as well as contributions from outside the region. It features three permanent areas and a temporary exhibition area; the gallery's Gemini Collection includes 420 pieces of mining art. Much of the artwork was donated, by Dr Robert McManners and Gillian Wales, for example. In 2019, 100 years after his birth, a permanent tribute to the work of the artist Norman Stansfield Cornish MBE was opened within the Town Hall, and a Cornish Trail around the town was established to include areas of the town depicted in Cornish's artwork.

Music
As with neighbouring Northumberland, County Durham has a rich heritage of Northumbrian music, dating back from the Northumbrian Golden Age of the 7th and 8th centuries. Bede made references to harp-playing, and abundant archeological evidence has been found of wooden flutes, bone flutes, panpipes, wooden drums and lyres (a six-string form of harp). North-East England has a distinctive folk music style that has drawn from many other regions, including southern Scotland, Ireland and the rest of northern England, that has endured stably since the 18th century. Instruments played include, in common with most folk music styles, stringed instruments such as the guitar and fiddle, but also the Northumbrian smallpipe, which is played and promoted by people including the Northumbrian Pipers' Society throughout the North East, including County Durham, with the society having an active group in Sedgefield. Contemporary folk musicians include Jez Lowe and Ged Foley. In 2018, The Arts Council funded the Stories of Sanctuary project in the city of Durham. The project aims to assist people living in the city to share their stories about seeking sanctuary in the North East through photography, stories, poetry and music. The art is based on a history of sanctuary in Durham, from St Cuthbert's exile, through to the miners' strike of 1984, and to refugees escaping civil war in the Middle East. The music produced as part of the project includes contributions from singer-songwriter Sam Slatcher and viola player Raghad Haddad from the National Syrian Orchestra. Other notable performers/songwriters who were born or raised in the county include Paddy McAloon, Eric Boswell, Jeremy Spencer, Alan Clark, Martin Brammer, Robert Blamire, Thomas Allen, Zoe Birkett, John O'Neill, Karen Harding and Courtney Hadwin.

Flag
County Durham has its own flag, registered with the Flag Institute on 21 November 2013. Katie, Holly and James Moffatt designed the flag and entered their design into a competition launched by campaigner Andy Strangeway, who spoke of the flag as "free, public symbol for all to use, especially on 20th March each year, which is not only County Durham Day but also St Cuthbert’s birthday.” [sic - 20th March is actually the date of Cuthbert's death] The flag consists of St Cuthbert's cross counterchanged with the county's blue and gold colours.

University
Durham University is based in Durham city and is sometimes held to be the third oldest university in England. Teesside University has a campus in Darlington.

Colleges

 * Bede Sixth Form College, Billingham
 * Bishop Auckland College
 * Carmel College Sixth Form, Darlington
 * Darlington College
 * Derwentside College, Consett
 * Durham Sixth Form Centre, Durham
 * East Durham College, Durham and Peterlee
 * Hartlepool College of Further Education
 * Hartlepool Sixth Form College
 * New College Durham, Durham
 * Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College, Darlington
 * Stockton Sixth Form College
 * St Bede’s Catholic Academy and Sixth Form College Lanchester

title: County Durham


text:
User talk:KaseyGirl

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia.

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Haik Hovsepian Mehr

Haik Hovsepian Mehr (Հայկ Հովսեփյան Մեհր; January 6, 1945, Tehran – January 19, 1994) was an Iranian Armenian Protestant minister and bishop of the Jama'at-e Rabbani church (part of the Assemblies of God church movement). After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, he was one of the few Christian leaders to continue to evangelize. In 1994, he disappeared after protesting the Iranian government's treatment of converts to Christianity and is generally assumed to have been murdered by the state. The state, however, accuses the People's Mujahedin of Iran for his murder.

Early life
Hovsepian was born in 1945 in Tehran, Iran into an Armenian Apostolic middle-class family. He had three younger brothers: Edward, Roubik and George. When he was 15, he joined the Pentecostal Assemblies of God. In 1966, upon completion of his mandatory military service, Haik married Takoosh Ginagosian. In 1967, he pastored his first church in Majidieh, a suburb of the capital Tehran. Not long afterwards, he served in the military and was stationed in Gorgan, a city in Mazanderan, a northern province of Iran near the Caspian Sea, where he established a house church.

In 1969 Hovsepian, his wife and their six-month-old child were driving from Tehran to Gorgan with an American missionary family, when their car struck an unlit tractor-trailer. The four children aboard were killed. The adult passengers survived, but Hovsepian and Takoosh suffered broken legs, from which they recovered.

Christian ministry
They returned to Gorgan, where they served in church pastoral work despite hardship and persecution. Hovsepian had a strong motivation to evangelise Iranian Muslims. He was an outspoken Christian apologist, evangelist and a gifted musician.

He was responsible for initiating increased collaboration between evangelical churches within Iran after the Iranian Revolution. He became the Chairman of the Council of Protestant Ministers of Iran.

Hovsepian spoke up for the rights of Christians in Iran. In 1993 he was one of only two church leaders to refuse to sign a declaration stating that they would not allow Muslims or Muslim converts into their churches. He also refused to sign a statement that Christians enjoyed full rights in Iran. He compiled a detailed report on violations of religious freedom and invited Professor Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, the United Nations Special Representative to Iran, to visit the country and meet Protestant ministers and government officials to discuss these violations. He also met the Ministry for Islamic Guidance for Minorities to call for the government to respect the rights of religious minorities set out in the 1979 Constitution. Bishop Hovsepian and the denomination he represented, the Assemblies of God, were ordered to comply with the following directives: Haik deliberately disobeyed and defiantly declared that "Never would [he or his ministers] bow down and comply with such inhumane and unjust demands" and that "our churches are open to all who want to come in." He was killed after protesting about the treatment of his friend and colleague Mehdi Dibaj at the hands of the Iranian government. Hovsepian mounted a campaign for Dibaj, and on January 16, 1994, Dibaj was released. Three days later Hovsepian vanished from Tehran. His death was reported to his family on January 30, 1994. While the government initially denied all involvement, Iranian Christians and independent observers claimed that he was murdered for his beliefs.
 * 1) Church services could not be held in Persian, the official language of Iran;
 * 2) Church members must be issued membership cards and produce them upon attendance;
 * 3) Membership lists, complete with addresses, must be handed over to governmental authorities;
 * 4) Meetings must be confined to Sunday, not Friday the officially recognized day of Muslim worship;
 * 5) Only members could attend Sunday meetings; and
 * 6) New members could only be added to the membership and admitted to meetings once the Ministry of Information and Islamic Guidance had been notified.

"There is, of course, widespread suspicion that the Iranian authorities were responsible for the death of Bishop Haik.

Reverting to the murder, I have seen in the media no evidence of a wholehearted investigation into its cause or to find out who actually committed it.

Lord Ennals and Viscount Brentford, House of Lords, 3rd March 1994"

Arresting two suspects
On July 5, 1994, a few days after 1994 Imam Reza shrine bomb explosion, and months after Hovsepian Mehr's murder two women who were allegedly from People's Mujahedin of Iran and were going to bomb Mausoleum of Ruhollah Khomeini and Fatima Masumeh Shrine were arrested. In a TV interview, one of them related Hovsepian Mehr's murder to People's Mujahedin of Iran.

Abdelfattah Amor, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the question of religious intolerance made a visit to Iran in 1995 where he was able to speak freely in Evin prison with the women charged with murder of Hovsepian Mehr and two other Christian leaders. Amor concluded in his UN report that the Iranian Government had apparently decided to execute Bishop Hovsepian Mehr and two other Christian leaders in order not only to discredit the Mujahedin organization by declaring it responsible for those crimes, but also, to decapitate the Protestant community.

Legacy
Takoosh and her four children (Rebekkah, Joseph, Gilbert, and Andre) eventually migrated to California, to be surrounded by a large diaspora of Armenians and Persians, including family members and friends from Tehran. Takoosh and her children are frequently asked to speak at conferences, and their children are in different Christian ministries. Haik's brothers, who work as pastors, are also ministering outside Iran.

title: Haik Hovsepian Mehr