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Dassault-Breguet Super Étendard

The Dassault-Breguet Super Étendard (Étendard is French for "battle flag", cognate to English "standard") is a French carrier-borne strike fighter aircraft designed by Dassault-Breguet for service with the French Navy.

The aircraft is an advanced development of the Étendard IVM, which it replaced. The Super Étendard first flew in October 1974 and entered French service in June 1978. French Super Étendards have served in several conflicts such as the Kosovo war, the war in Afghanistan and the military intervention in Libya.

The Super Étendard was also operated by Iraq (on a temporary lease) and Argentina, which both deployed the aircraft during wartime. Argentina's Navy use of the Super Étendard and the Exocet missile during the 1982 Falklands War led to the aircraft gaining considerable popular recognition. The Super Étendard was used by Iraq to attack oil tankers and merchant shipping in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq-Iran War. In French service, the Super Étendard was replaced by the Dassault Rafale in 2016.

Development
The Super Étendard is a development of the earlier Étendard IVM which had been developed in the 1950s. The Étendard IVM was originally to have been replaced by a navalised version of the SEPECAT Jaguar, designated as the Jaguar M; however the Jaguar M project was stalled by a combination of political problems and issues experienced during trial deployments on board carriers. Specifically, the Jaguar M had suffered handling problems when being flown on a single engine and a poor throttle response time that made landing back on a carrier after an engine failure difficult. In 1973, all development work on the Jaguar M was formally cancelled by the French government.

There were several proposed aircraft to replace the Jaguar M, including the LTV A-7 Corsair II and the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk. Dassault pulled some strings with the French government and produced its own proposal to meet the requirement. According to Bill Gunston and Peter Gilchrist, Dassault had played a significant role in the cancellation of the Jaguar M with the aim of creating a vacancy for their own proposal – the Super Étendard. The Super Étendard was essentially an improved version of the existing Étendard IVM, outfitted with a more powerful engine, a new wing and improved avionics. Dassault sold its plane as the only fully French-made candidate, and as cheaper than the other contestants, using modern technology already proven in existing Dassault planes. Dassault's Super Étendard proposal was accepted by the French Navy in 1973, leading to a series of prototypes being quickly assembled.

The first of three prototypes to be built, an Étendard IVM which had been modified with the new engine and some of the new avionics, made its maiden flight on 28 October 1974. The original intention of the French Navy was to order a total of 100 Super Étendards, however the order placed was for 60 of the new model with options for a further 20; further budget cuts and an escalation in the aircraft's per unit price eventually led to only 71 Super Étendards being purchased. Dassault began making deliveries of the type to the French Navy in June 1978.

In the first year of production, 15 Super Étendards were produced for the French Navy, allowing the formation of the first squadron in 1979. Dassault produced the aircraft at a rough rate of two per month.

The Argentine Navy was the only export customer. Argentina placed an order for 14 aircraft to meet their requirements for a capable new fighter that could operate from their sole aircraft carrier. In 1983, all manufacturing activity was completed, the last delivery to the French Navy taking place that year.

Design
The Super Étendard is a small, single-engined, mid-winged aircraft with an all-metal structure. Both the wings and tailplane are swept, with the folding wings having a sweepback of about 45 degrees, while the aircraft is powered by a non-afterburning SNECMA Atar 8K-50 turbojet with a rating of 49 kN (11,025 lbf). Its performance was not much better than the Étendard IV, but its avionics were significantly improved.

The main new weapon of the Super Étendard was the French anti-shipping missile, the Aérospatiale AM 39 Exocet. The aircraft had a Thomson-CSF Agave radar, an updated version of the Cyrano IV used on the Dassault Mirage F1, which, amongst other functions, was essential to launch the Exocet missile. One of the major technical advances of the Super Étendard was its onboard UAT-40 central computer; this managed most mission-critical systems, integrating navigational data and functions, radar information and display, and weapons targeting and controls.

In the 1990s, significant modifications and upgrades were made to the type, including an updated UAT-90 computer and a new Thomson-CSF Anemone radar which provided nearly double the range of the previous Agave radar. Other upgrades at this time included an extensively redesigned cockpit with HOTAS controls, and airframe life-extension work was undertaken; a total of 48 aircraft received these upgrades, at a rate of 15 per year. During the 2000s, further improvements included significantly improved self-defence ECM capability to better evade enemy detection and attacks, cockpit compatibility with night vision goggles, a new inertial data system partly integrating GPS, and compatibility with the Damocles Laser designator pod.

The Super Étendard could also deploy tactical nuclear weapons; initially these were unguided gravity bombs only, however, during the 1990s the Super Étendard was extensively upgraded, enabling the deployment of the Air-Sol Moyenne Portée, a ramjet-powered air-launched nuclear missile. The aircraft was also refitted with the ability to operate a range of laser-guided bombs and, to enable the type to replace the retiring Étendard IV in the reconnaissance mission, the Super Étendard was fitted to carry a specialist reconnaissance pod as well. However, the aircraft is unable to perform naval landings without jettisoning unexpended ordnance.

Argentina

The Argentine Naval Aviation decided to buy 14 Super Étendards in 1979 after the United States put an arms embargo in place, due to the Dirty War and refused to supply spare parts for Argentina's fleet of A-4Q Skyhawks. Between August and November 1981, five Super Étendards and five anti-ship sea-skimming Exocet missiles were shipped to Argentina. The Super Étendards, armed with Exocet anti-ship missiles played a key role in the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982. The 2nd Naval Squadron was stationed at the Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego naval air base; during the conflict. The threat posed to British naval forces led to the planning of Operation Mikado and other proposed infiltration missions to raid the airbase, aiming to destroy the Super Étendards to prevent their use. A total of four Super Étendards were operational during the conflict.

A first attempt to attack the British fleet was made on 2 May 1982, but this was abandoned due to in-flight-refuelling problems. On 4 May, two Super Étendards, guided by a Lockheed P-2H Neptune, each launched one Exocet at the British destroyer HMS Sheffield (D80), with one missile crippling Sheffield. On 25 May, another attack by two Super Étendards resulted in two missiles hitting the merchant ship SS Atlantic Conveyor, which was carrying several helicopters and other supplies to the front line. The Exocets that struck Atlantic Conveyor had been inadvertently redirected by decoy chaff deployed as a defensive measure by other ships; Both Sheffield and Atlantic Conveyor sank whilst under tow some days later following these Exocet strikes.

On May 30 two Super Étendards, one carrying Argentina's last remaining Exocet, escorted by four A-4C Skyhawks each with two 500lb bombs, took off to attack the carrier HMS Invincible. The missile was shot down by a Sea Dart fired by HMS Exeter.

Following the end of the conflict, by 1984 Argentina had received all the 14 Super Étendards ordered, and Exocets with which to arm them. Super Étendards performed qualifications on the aircraft carrier ARA 25 de Mayo until the ship's final retirement. Since 1993, Argentine pilots have practised on board the neighbouring Brazilian Navy's aircraft carrier BRAZILIAN AIRCRAFT CARRIER São Paulo. Touch-and-go landing exercises were also common on US Navy carriers during Gringo-Gaucho manoeuvres and joint exercises.

In 2009, an agreement was signed between Argentina and France to upgrade Argentina's remaining fleet of Super Étendards. An earlier proposal to acquire former French Naval Super Étendards was rejected due to high levels of accumulated flight hours; instead equipment and hardware would be removed from retiring French airframes and installed into Argentine aircraft, effectively upgrading them to the Super Étendard Modernisé (SEM) standard. By March 2014, while the Argentine Navy continued to seek the upgrade kits for 10 of its 11 remaining Super Étendards; this ambition appears to have been complicated by several factors, France has been non-committal regarding the sought sale; critically, political developments between France and the UK may potentially allow the UK to obstruct the supply of military equipment to Argentina such as the upgrade kits and the Exocet missile.

In 2017 five Super Étendard Modernisé were purchased from France to bolster the fleet at a cost of €12.5 million, along with a simulator, eight spare engines, and a large batch of spares and tooling. However, while these aircraft were delivered in 2019, in 2020 they were still awaiting the delivery of key spare parts and it was announced that they may not be in operational service for a further two years. In 2021, it was reported that the aircraft also remained non-operational due to problems obtaining components for the Martin Baker ejection seats manufactured in the U.K.. As a result, alternative parts were being sought in the United States. In early 2022, it was reported that the spare parts problem remained unresolved and the aircraft remained in storage. On 17 May 2023, on the occasion of the 209th anniversary of the Argentine Navy, Argentinean Minister of Defense Jorge Taiana, announced the withdrawal from service of all the Super Étendards of the Aviación Naval Argentina.

France

Deliveries of the Super Étendard to the French Navy started in 1978, with the first squadron, Flottille 11F becoming operational in February 1979. As they offered no air combat capabilities France had to extend useful life of its Crusaders fighters, as no replacement option was found.

In total, three operational squadrons and a training unit were equipped with the Super Étendard. The Super Étendards would operate from both of France's aircraft carriers at that time, FRENCH AIRCRAFT CARRIER Clemenceau and FRENCH AIRCRAFT CARRIER Foch; either carrier's air wing typically comprised 16 Super Étendards, 10 F-8 Crusaders, 3 Étendard IVPs, 7 Breguet Alizé anti-submarine aircraft, as well as numerous helicopters.

The first fighting operational missions took place in Lebanon during Operation Olifant. On 22 September 1983, French Navy Super Étendards operating from Foch bombed and destroyed Syrian forces positions after a few artillery rounds were fired at the French peace keepers. On November 10, a Super Étendard dodged a Syrian SA-7 shoulder-launched missile near Bourj el-Barajneh while flying over Druze positions. On 17 November 1983, the same airplanes attacked and destroyed an Islamic Amal training camp in Baalbeck after a terrorist attack on French paratroopers in Beirut.

From 1991, the original pure attack Étendard IVMs were withdrawn from French service; though the reconnaissance version of the Étendard IV, the IVP, remained in service until July 2000. In response, the Super Étendards underwent a series of upgrades throughout the 1990s to add new capabilities and update existing systems for use in the modern battlefield. Designated Super Étendard Modernisé (SEM), the first combat missions for the type came during NATO's Allied Force operations over Serbia in 1999 flying 400 combat missions. An Étendard IVPM from the Flottile 16.F was hit by a Serb SAM on 15 April 1994, while flying a reconnaissance mission over Gorazde, Bosnia, as part of Operation Deny Flight. The pilot managed to safely land on Clemenceau despite heavy damage on its tailpipe, elevators and fin.

The SEM also flew strike missions in Operation Enduring Freedom. Mission Héraclès starting 21 November 2001 saw the deployment of the aircraft carrier FRENCH AIRCRAFT CARRIER Charles de Gaulle and its Super Étendards in Afghanistan. Operation Anaconda, starting on 2 March 2002 saw extensive use of the Super Étendard in support of French and allied ground troops. Super Étendards returned to operations over Afghanistan in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010–2011. One of their main roles was to carry laser designation pods to illuminate targets for Dassault Rafales.

In March 2011, Étendards were deployed as a part of Task Force 473, during France's Opération Harmattan in support of UN resolution 1973 during the Libyan conflict. They were paired again with Dassault Rafales on interdiction missions. The final Super Étendards in French naval aviation were in one "flottille" (squadron) called flottille 17F. All Super Étendards were retired from French service on 12 July 2016 to be replaced by the Dassault Rafale M, 42 years after the subsonic attack jet performed its first flight. The Super Étendard's last operational deployment from Charles de Gaulle was in support of Opération Chammal against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, which began in late 2015. On 16 March 2016, the aircraft undertook its final launch from Charles de Gaulle ahead of its final withdrawal from service in July.

Iraq
A total of five Super Étendards were loaned to Iraq in 1983 while the country was waiting for deliveries of Agave-equipped Dassault Mirage F1s capable of launching Exocet missiles that had been ordered; the first of these aircraft arrived in Iraq on 8 October 1983. The provision of Super Étendards to Iraq was politically controversial, the United States and Iraq's neighbour Iran were vocal in their opposition while Saudi Arabia supported the loan; the aircraft were seen as an influential factor in the 1980–88 Iraq-Iran War as they could launch Exocet strikes on Iranian merchant shipping traversing the Persian Gulf. The Super Étendards began maritime operations over Persian Gulf in March 1984; a total of 34 attacks were carried out on Iranian shipping through the rest of 1984. Tankers of any nationality that were carrying Iranian crude oil were also subject to Iraqi attacks.

Iraq typically deployed the Super Étendards in pairs, escorted by Mirage F1 fighters from bases in Southern Iraq; once inside the mission zone, the Super Étendards would search for targets using their onboard radar and engage suspected tankers at long range without visual identification. While tankers would typically be struck by a launched Exocet, they were often only lightly damaged. On 2 April 1984, an Iraqi Super Étendard was reportedly shot down by a AIM-7E-2 missile fired by an Iranian F-4 Phantom II piloted by Khosrow Adibi over Kharg Island. Separately, on 26 July and 7 August 1984, claims of Super Étendard losses to Iranian Grumman F-14 Tomcats were reported. Iran claimed a total of three Super Étendards to have been shot down by Iranian interceptors; France stated that four of the five leased aircraft were returned to France in 1985.

Potential operators

 * Ukrainian Air Force. Speculation suggests Argentina had offered to transfer the 5 jets it had previously bought back to France for overhaul and eventual donation to Ukraine in exchange for drones or helicopters.
 * Ukrainian Air Force. Speculation suggests Argentina had offered to transfer the 5 jets it had previously bought back to France for overhaul and eventual donation to Ukraine in exchange for drones or helicopters.

Former operators

 * Argentine Navy originally received 14 aircraft, of which few are currently operational. A further 5 ex-French navy aircraft (Modernisé spec) were acquired for operational service and training/spare parts in 2017; these aircraft remain non-operational as of 2021. On 17 May 2023, the final withdrawal from service of all the Super Étendards of the Aviación Naval Argentina was announced. In June 2024, The Argentine government is discussing with France to send five of these aircraft to Ukraine.
 * French Navy received 71 aircraft; retired from active service on 12 July 2016.
 * 🇮🇶 Iraq
 * Iraqi Air Force was loaned five French aircraft between 1983 and 1985; one was lost during the Iran–Iraq War, the remainder returned to France in 1985.
 * 🇮🇶 Iraq
 * Iraqi Air Force was loaned five French aircraft between 1983 and 1985; one was lost during the Iran–Iraq War, the remainder returned to France in 1985.

title: Dassault-Breguet Super Étendard


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Fractional part

The fractional part or decimal part of a non‐negative real number $$x$$ is the excess beyond that number's integer part. The latter is defined as the largest integer not greater than $x$, called floor of $x$ or $$\lfloor x\rfloor$$. Then, the fractional part can be formulated as a difference:

 * $$\operatorname{frac} (x)=x - \lfloor x \rfloor,\; x > 0$$.

For a positive number written in a conventional positional numeral system (such as binary or decimal), its fractional part hence corresponds to the digits appearing after the radix point. The result is a real number in the half-open interval [0, 1).

For negative numbers
However, in case of negative numbers, there are various conflicting ways to extend the fractional part function to them: It is either defined in the same way as for positive numbers, i.e., by $$\operatorname{frac} (x)=x-\lfloor x \rfloor$$, or as the part of the number to the right of the radix point $$\operatorname{frac} (x)=|x|-\lfloor |x| \rfloor$$ , or by the odd function:

 * $$\operatorname{frac} (x)=\begin{cases}

x - \lfloor x \rfloor & x \ge 0 \\ x - \lceil x \rceil & x < 0 \end{cases}$$

with $$ \lceil x \rceil$$ as the smallest integer not less than $x$, also called the ceiling of $x$. By consequence, we may get, for example, three different values for the fractional part of just one $x$: let it be −1.3, its fractional part will be 0.7 according to the first definition, 0.3 according to the second definition, and −0.3 according to the third definition, whose result can also be obtained in a straightforward way by
 * $$\operatorname{frac} (x)= x - \lfloor |x| \rfloor \cdot \sgn(x)$$.

The $$x - \lfloor x \rfloor$$ and the "odd function" definitions permit for unique decomposition of any real number $x$ to the sum of its integer and fractional parts, where "integer part" refers to $$\lfloor x \rfloor$$ or $$\lfloor |x| \rfloor \cdot \sgn(x)$$ respectively. These two definitions of fractional-part function also provide idempotence.

The fractional part defined via difference from ⌊ ⌋ is usually denoted by curly braces:
 * $$\{ x \} := x-\lfloor x \rfloor.$$

Relation to continued fractions
Every real number can be essentially uniquely represented as a continued fraction, namely as the sum of its integer part and the reciprocal of its fractional part which is written as the sum of its integer part and the reciprocal of its fractional part, and so on.

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

title: Fractional part


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Council of Siena

In the Catholic Church, the Council of Siena (1423–1424) marked a somewhat inconclusive stage in the Conciliar movement that was attempting reforms in the Church. If it had continued, it would have qualified as an ecumenical council. In the official List of ecumenical councils, the Council of Siena is no longer listed, as the conciliarism expressed there was later branded as a heresy.

History
According to the terms of the Council of Constance calling for periodic ecumenical councils to discuss church policies, Pope Martin V convened a council at Pavia, which was hardly inaugurated on 23 April 1423, when plague broke out at Pavia and the council was hastily adjourned to Siena.

At Siena, the procedure of the Council followed that established at Constance. Right at the start, certain formalities of the safe conducts issued by the city for the members of the Council were the cause of jurisdictional friction with papal prerogatives. Attendance to the Council was sparse, specially for high ranking prelates from transalpine regions; at the opening session of November 6, the Council only counted with two cardinals and twenty-five mitred prelates (bishops), as representatives of the higher clergy. Nevertheless, on the eighth of November four decrees were published, all of them directed against easy targets: against the followers of the heretical reformers, Jan Hus, recently burnt at the stake at the Council of Constance despite a promise of safe conduct, and against the English followers of John Wycliffe, who claimed that the highest authority was the Bible; against the followers of the schismatic Antipope Benedict XIII; a decree postponing the negotiations with the Greeks and other Eastern Orthodox churches (which were later worked into acceptable compromises in the long working sessions of the Council of Florence, 1438 to 1445); and a decree advising greater vigilance against heresy, the easiest target of all.

The formal proceedings of the council were held in the Cathedral of Siena, while the sessions that did not require a liturgical celebration were held in its sacristy.

Proposals for genuine institutional reform within the Catholic Church hung fire ominously. French proposals for more local control ("Gallican" proposals, generally speaking) produced resistance from the loyalists of the Papal Curia. Nothing was accomplished at Siena in that area.

On 19 February 1424, Basel was selected as the place of the next Council and the Council dissolved itself the following day (the decree published 7 March). The French members would have preferred to continue the Council until a thorough reform of the church had been accomplished, both "in capite et in membris" ("in its head and its members"), but whether in order to avoid a new schism, or whether on account of fear of the Pope (since Siena in southern Tuscany was near the Papal States), they departed. The selection of the venue for the next council, far from the armed temporal authority of the Papacy, is significant.

The magistrates of Siena took care not to let anyone depart until he had paid his debts.

title: Council of Siena


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Ministry of Intelligence (Iran)

The Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the primary intelligence agency of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a member of the Iran Intelligence Community. It is also known as VAJA and previously as VEVAK (Vezarat-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar) or alternatively MOIS. It was initially known as SAVAMA, after it took over the Shah's intelligence apparatus SAVAK. The ministry is one of the three "sovereign" ministerial bodies of Iran due to nature of its work at home and abroad.

History
Reliable and valid information on the ministry is often difficult to obtain. Initially, the organization was known as SAVAMA, and intended to replace SAVAK, Iran's intelligence agency during the rule of the Shah, but it is unclear how much continuity there is between the two organizations—while their role is similar, their underlying ideology is radically different. It is suspected that the new government was initially eager to purge SAVAK elements from the new organization, but that pragmatism eventually prevailed, with many experienced SAVAK personnel being retained in their roles. Former SAVAK staff are believed to have been important in the ministry's infiltration of left-wing dissident groups and of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party.

The formation of the ministry was proposed by Saeed Hajjarian to the government of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and then the parliament. There were debates about which branch of the state should oversee the new institution, and the other options apart from the presidency were the Judiciary system, the Supreme Leader, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Finally, the government got the approval of Ayatollah Khomeini to make it a ministry, but a restriction was added to the requirements of the minister: that he must be a doctor of Islam.

The ministry was finally founded on 18 August 1983, either abandoning, silently subsuming, or relegating to hidden existence many small intelligence agencies that had been formed in different governmental organizations. The five ministers since the founding of the ministry, have been Mohammad Reyshahri (under Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi), Ali Fallahian (under President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani), Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi (under President Mohammad Khatami, resigned after a year), Ali Younessi (under President Khatami, until 24 August 2005), Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehei (under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, from 24 August 2005 to 24 August 2009) and Heyder Moslehi (under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, from 29 August 2009 to 15 August 2013).

"Chain" assassinations
In late 1998, three dissident writers, a political leader and his wife were killed in Iran in the span of two months.

After great public outcry and journalistic investigation in Iran and publicity internationally, prosecutors announced in mid-1999 that one Saeed Emami had led "rogue elements" in Iran's intelligence ministry in the killings, but that Emami was now dead, having committed suicide in prison. In a trial that was "dismissed as a sham by the victims' families and international human rights organisations", three intelligence ministry agents were sentenced in 2001 to death and twelve others to prison terms for murdering two of the victims. Two years later, the Iranian Supreme Court reduced two of the death sentences to life.

Foreign executions
Massoud Molavi Verdanjani, an online opposition activist, was shot and killed on a street in Istanbul's Shishli neighborhood on Thursday, 14 November 2019. A Turkish security official later claimed Verdanjani's suspected killer had confessed to acting under the orders of two Iranian intelligence officers at the Iranian consulate in Turkey.

On 20 April 2022, According to a statement issued by the semi-official Fars news agency, Iran's intelligence ministry stated it had captured three Mossad spies.

title: Ministry of Intelligence (Iran)


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Gomperz

Gomperz, Gompertz, Gumpertz, Gumperz, Gomperts or Gompers is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
 * Aaron Solomon Gumperz (1723–1769), Jewish German scholar and physician
 * Benjamin Gompertz (1779–1865), British actuary, and mathematician
 * Gompertz function, named for Benjamin Gompertz
 * Don Gumpertz, sailor who circled the world on MV Westward in the 1970s
 * Henry Gompertz (1867–1930), English-born judge active in Hong Kong and the Federated Malay States.
 * Ian Gompertz (born 1975), English cricketer
 * John J. Gumperz, linguist
 * Julian Gumperz, German sociologist, communist activist, publicist and translator
 * Heinrich Gomperz (1873–1942), Austrian philosopher
 * Isaac Gompertz (1774–1856), English poet
 * Lewis Gompertz (c. 1783–1865), English inventor, writer and animal rights and veganism activist
 * Louis Gompertz (1886–1951), Anglo-Indian soldier and writer
 * Marcia Gumpertz, American statistician
 * Samuel W. Gompertz (1868–1952), American showman
 * Sydney G. Gumpertz (1879–1971), American soldier in World War I
 * Theodor Gomperz (1832–1912), Moravian-Austrian philologist
 * Will Gompertz (born 1964), British arts journalist
 * Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), US labour organizer and founder of the AFL
 * Dr Rebecca Gomperts (born 1966), founder of Women on Waves.

title: Gomperz


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Robert Evans

Robert Evans (born Robert J. Shapera; June 29, 1930 – October 26, 2019) was an American film producer who worked on Rosemary's Baby (1968), Love Story (1970), The Godfather (1972), and Chinatown (1974).

Evans began his career in a successful business venture with his brother, selling women's apparel. In 1956, while on a business trip, he was by chance spotted by actress Norma Shearer, who thought he would be right to play the role of her late husband Irving Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). Thus he began a brief film acting career. In 1962, Evans went into film producing instead, using his accumulated wealth from the clothing business, and began a meteoric rise in the industry. He was made head of Paramount Pictures in 1967. While there, he improved the ailing Paramount's fortunes through a string of commercially and critically acclaimed films. In 1974, he stepped down to produce films on his own. In 1980, Evans's career, and life, took a downturn after he pled guilty to cocaine trafficking. Over the next 12 years, he produced only two films, both financial flops: The Cotton Club (1984) and the Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes (1990). In 1993, he produced films on a more regular basis, with a mixed track record that included both flops (such as Jade in 1995) and hits (such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in 2003, his final film credit).

Early life and acting career
Evans was born in New York City, New York, the son of Florence (née Krasne), a housewife who came from a wealthy family, and Archie Shapera, a dentist in Harlem. He described both of his parents as "second-generation Jews". He grew up on New York City's Upper West Side during the 1930s, where he was better off than most people living during the Great Depression. In his early years, he did promotional work for Evan-Picone, a fashion company founded by his brother Charles. After high school, he did a variety of voice work on radio. With a clear, deep voice as a teenager and a knack for foreign accents, by his estimation he performed in more than 300 radio shows before he turned 18. This included a leading role on The Aldrich Family situation comedy.

He was spotted by actress Norma Shearer next to the pool at The Beverly Hills Hotel on November 6, 1956. She successfully touted him for the role of her late husband Irving Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces. The same year, Evans also caught the eye of Darryl F. Zanuck, who cast him as Pedro Romero in the 1957 film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, against the wishes of co-star Ava Gardner and Hemingway himself. In 1959, he appeared in Twentieth Century Fox's production of The Best of Everything with Hope Lange, Diane Baker and Joan Crawford.

Career as producer
Dissatisfied with his own acting talent, he was determined to become a producer. He got his start by purchasing the rights to a 1966 novel titled The Detective which Evans made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra, Lee Remick, Jack Klugman, Robert Duvall and Jacqueline Bisset, in 1968. Peter Bart, a writer for The New York Times, wrote an article about Evans's aggressive production style. This got Evans noticed by Charles Bluhdorn, who was head of the Gulf+Western conglomerate which owned Paramount, and hired Evans as production vice-president in 1966 as part of a shakeup at Paramount Pictures (which included Bart, whom Evans would recruit as a Paramount executive).

When Evans took over as head of production for Paramount, the floundering studio was the ninth largest. Despite his inexperience, Evans was able to turn the studio around. He made Paramount the most successful studio in Hollywood and transformed it into a profitable enterprise for Gulf+Western. During his tenure at Paramount, the studio turned out films such as Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Romeo and Juliet, Rosemary's Baby, The Italian Job, True Grit, Love Story, Harold and Maude, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Serpico, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Save the Tiger, The Conversation, Chinatown, The Great Gatsby, and many others.

Dissatisfied with his financial compensation and desiring to produce films under his own banner, Evans struck a deal with Paramount in 1972 that enabled him to stay on as executive vice president of worldwide production while also working as an independent producer on five films. Other producers at Paramount felt this gave Evans an unfair advantage. After the huge critical and commercial success of the Evans-produced Chinatown, he stepped down as production chief, which enabled him to produce films on his own. From 1976 to 1980, working as an independent producer, he continued his streak of successful films with Marathon Man, Black Sunday, Popeye and Urban Cowboy. After 1980, his film output became both more infrequent and less critically acclaimed. He produced only two films over the next twelve years: The Cotton Club and The Two Jakes. From 1993 to 2003 he produced the films Sliver, Jade, The Phantom, The Saint, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

Evans produced and provided the voice for his eponymous character in the 2003 animated series Kid Notorious. In 2004 Evans hosted a Sirius Satellite Radio show, In Bed with Robert Evans. In 2009, Evans was in talks to produce a film about auto executive John DeLorean, as well as an HBO miniseries titled The Devil and Sidney Korshak. Neither project came to fruition.

In July 2019 Paramount did not renew its contract with Robert Evans Productions, which had been in place since 1974 after Evans stepped down from running the studio. Evans had a staff of three and had been working from his Woodland estate in Beverly Hills because of poor health.

Cotton Club murder
In the early 1980s, Evans was introduced to theatrical impresario Roy Radin, a producer of traveling musical and comedy revues, by cocaine dealer Karen Greenberger (aka Lanie Jacobs). Radin was trying to break into the film industry with a movie about the legendary New York nightclub, the Cotton Club. The deal arranged on the film The Cotton Club mandated that Evans and Radin establish a production company in which each would own 45% of the film with the remaining 10% split between two other parties. Radin offered Greenberger (aka Jacobs) a $50,000 finder's fee for her efforts, which she found unsatisfactory.

As The Cotton Club film financing was being arranged, the 33-year-old Radin was murdered in 1983. Contract killer William Mentzer was among four people sentenced for shooting Radin multiple times in the head and using dynamite to make identification by authorities more challenging. At the trial, Greenberger was convicted of second-degree murder and kidnapping. Her involvement was said to be over a fear of being cut out of a producer's role and potential profits from the film. As a result, the trial was dubbed the "Cotton Club" murder trial.

Heeding the advice of his attorney Robert Shapiro, Evans refused to testify during a May 1989 preliminary hearing, invoking the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself. Police reports that had been submitted to obtain search warrants indicated at least two witnesses said Evans was involved in the Radin murder.

Greenberger testified during her 1991 trial that Evans was not involved in the murder. She also claimed during her trial that she had been Evans's lover.

Cocaine trafficking
Evans was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1980. He entered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor in federal court after being arrested for engineering a large cocaine buy with his brother Charles. As part of his plea bargain, he filmed an anti-drug TV commercial. The alleged drug dealing, which Evans continued to deny (the misdemeanor was later wiped from his record), came out of his own involvement with the drug. He told the Philadelphia Inquirer in a 1994 interview, "Bob 'Cocaine' Evans is how I'll be known to my grave". He argues that he never should have been convicted of federal selling and distribution charges, as he was only a user.

Personal life
Evans married seven times. He first married Sharon Hugueny in 1961, staying with her until 1962. Subsequently, he married Camilla Sparv (1964–1967), Ali MacGraw (1969–1973), Phyllis George (1977–1978), Catherine Oxenberg (1998), Leslie Ann Woodward (2002–2004), and Victoria White (2005–2006). Evans's marriage to Oxenberg was annulled after nine days. He married his seventh wife, Victoria White O'Gara (widow of Lord White), while in Mexico, in August 2005 shortly after his 75th birthday. She filed for divorce on June 16, 2006, citing irreconcilable differences.

Evans had one child, Josh Evans, from his marriage to MacGraw. Josh is a film producer.

Evans's brother Charles Evans (1926–2007) was a businessman involved in clothing, real estate, promoting fire detectors and was also an occasional film producer (Tootsie, 1982, Monkey Shines, 1988 and Showgirls, 1995). His nephew is broadcast journalist Michael Shure Another nephew is Charles Evans, Jr. a documentary producer. His sister, Alice Shure, who was associate producer on Without a Trace (1983), has produced other films, and founded documentary film production companies.

Health and death
On May 6, 1998, during a dinner party in honor of director Wes Craven, Evans suffered a stroke while giving a toast, and was rushed to nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Evans flatlined in the ambulance, but was resuscitated. Suffering a series of three strokes in quick succession, he was left paralyzed on his right side and completely unable to speak. During his hospital stay, he was encouraged by media mogul and friend Sumner Redstone, who stayed at his bedside, to work on his speech and recovery. A few days after Evans's stroke, Frank Sinatra died from a heart attack in one of the adjoining rooms at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Witnessing his body being taken away, Evans said it was an event that furthered his desire to recover.

Evans eventually regained his ability to talk and returned to producing. From 2013, he relied on a cane for shorter walks and had limited mobility.

Evans died in Beverly Hills, California on October 26, 2019, at the age of 89.

In popular culture

 * Orson Welles' final film, The Other Side of the Wind (filmed 1970–1976 and released in 2018), a satire of 1970s Hollywood, has a young studio boss, "Max David", played by Geoffrey Land, who Welles admitted was a spoof of Evans.
 * The character David Blackman in Blake Edwards' 1981 film S.O.B., played by Robert Vaughn, is based on Evans.
 * Evans felt that Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of Mumbles, a mobster, in the 1990 film Dick Tracy, was based on Evans's speaking style.
 * In the 1997 film Wag the Dog, a Washington, D.C., spin doctor distracts the US electorate from a presidential sex scandal by hiring a Hollywood producer, again played by Hoffman, whose character was an open parody of Evans. Hoffman emulated Evans's work habits, mannerisms, quirks, clothing style, hairstyle, and his large square-framed eyeglasses. The real Evans is said to have declared, "I'm magnificent in this film!"
 * The character Bob Ryan, portrayed by Martin Landau in the HBO series Entourage, who was a successful movie producer in the 1970s and now chafes at no longer being considered a major Hollywood player, was thought by some (including Evans himself) to be based on Evans. However, series creator Doug Ellin denied this, saying that he wrote the part based on someone he met while making Kissing a Fool, not on Evans. Nevertheless, Evans reportedly received an offer to play the part himself (which he declined), and his house was used in the show as Bob Ryan's home.
 * Evans served as the inspiration for a Mr. Show sketch in which Bob Odenkirk portrays God recording his memoirs, dressed as and speaking like Evans. Odenkirk also attributes Evans as his primary influence on his portrayal of lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad.
 * Joe Eszterhas in his book, Hollywood Animal, writes that "all lies ever told anywhere about Robert Evans are true." His autobiography also goes into detail about a cocaine addiction that plagued Evans in the 1980s.
 * Evans played himself in the film An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1998).
 * Evans voiced a fictionalized caricature of himself in the animated series, Kid Notorious, alongside his real-life butler, Alan "English" Selka, and next-door neighbor, former Guns N' Roses lead guitarist Saul "Slash" Hudson.
 * Evans appears in the 2005 Bruce Campbell novel Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way, with Campbell impersonating him to infiltrate the Paramount Studios lot.
 * In 2010, Smuggler Films acquired the stage rights to Evans's memoirs, The Kid Stays in the Picture, and its sequel, The Fat Lady Sang (which was eventually published in 2013). The play was to be written by Jon Robin Baitz. No further information has been released on the production.
 * Bill Hader played a character inspired by Evans in the two-part season two finale of Documentary Now! that parodies The Kid Stays in the Picture.
 * Michael Douglas played a character that parodies Evans in the 2009 romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.
 * Matthew Goode portrays Evans in the 2022 Paramount+ miniseries The Offer.
 * In The Boys, Paul Reiser plays a retired producer based on Robert Evans.

Filmography
He was a producer in all films unless otherwise noted.

Film

 * As head of production at Paramount

 * As studio executive

 * As an actor

 * Miscellaneous crew

 * Thanks

Television

 * As an actor

 * As writer

 * Thanks

Publications

 * The Kid Stays in the Picture – Hyperion Books, 1994, autobiography, also released as a 1994 audiobook read by Evans; adapted as a 2002 documentary film
 * The Fat Lady Sang – It Books, 2013, publication date November 22, 2013, ISBN 9780062286048

title: Robert Evans


text:
Digital Anvil

Digital Anvil, Inc. (formerly Digital Anvil Holdings, Inc. ) was an American video game developer based in Austin, Texas owned by Microsoft Game Studios (MGS). It was founded in 1996 by brothers Chris and Erin Roberts along with Tony Zurovec, Marten Davies, Craig Cox, John Miles, Eric Peterson and Robert Rodriguez, creators of the Wing Commander franchise from Origin Systems.

Davies held the position of president of the studio from its founding until February 2000, when his departure was announced. In June 2000, Microsoft started talks to buy Digital Anvil. Roberts admitted that his team required large sums of money, which only a huge company could provide. The acquisition of Digital Anvil by MGS was completed in December of that same year.

History
Digital Anvil was founded in 1996 by Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, Tony Zurovec, Marten Davies, Craig Cox, John Miles, Eric Peterson, and Robert Rodriguez. The name derived from the team's idea to provide "hard work and high tech". Digital Anvil offered profit-related pay to encourage creative drive and give employees a sense of ownership in the company.

Digital Anvil was purchased by Microsoft on December 5, 2000. One of the consequences of Digital Anvil's purchase was a reshuffling of titles being developed. Conquest: Frontier Wars and Loose Cannon were dropped by the company, eventually being picked up by Ubisoft. Conquest was released in 2001. Many of the Digital Anvil staff working on Loose Cannon were reassigned to the company's flagship Freelancer. Brute Force (still unannounced at the time) was switched from a computer game to an Xbox exclusive. Of all the projects being produced, only Freelancer escaped major change. Co-founder Chris Roberts left the company after the Microsoft takeover, but he still worked as a consultant on Freelancer. Digital Anvil also worked on the visual effects of the 1999 film Wing Commander.

For the next year, Digital Anvil was mostly silent, and many wondered whether any games from the company would see the light of day. Then, in 2001, Digital Anvil revealed a lighter Freelancer to the press. Although some of the more ambitious elements were dropped, this act proved Freelancer was not vaporware. In March 2003, Freelancer was released and immediately became one of the month's top-selling games. In May of the same year, Digital Anvil released Brute Force for the Xbox. The game also did quite well, setting first-month sales records for Xbox games. In November 2005, Microsoft redeployed the developer's employees to its Microsoft Studios headquarters. Digital Anvil was officially dissolved on January 31, 2006.

Hartman, the studio head of Digital Anvil at the time of its closure, was moved from Austin to Redmond as head of Turn 10 Studios, authors of the Forza Motorsport franchise.

title: Digital Anvil


text:
William Shepherd

William McMichael "Bill" Shepherd (born July 26, 1949), (Capt, USN, Ret.), is an American former Navy SEAL, aerospace, ocean, and mechanical engineer, and NASA astronaut, who served as commander of Expedition 1, the first crew on the International Space Station. He is a recipient of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

Education and training
Shepherd was born on July 26, 1949, to George R. Shepherd and Barbara Shepherd in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but he considers Babylon, New York, his hometown. He is married to Beth Stringham of Batavia, New York. He graduated from Arcadia High School in Phoenix, Arizona in 1967, and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland in 1971. He completed Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training in 1972, then joined the United States Naval Special Warfare Command and qualified as a Navy SEAL. He served with the Navy's Underwater Demolition Team ELEVEN, SEAL Teams ONE and TWO, and Special Boat Unit TWENTY. He obtained an Engineer's degree in Ocean Engineering and a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering, both in 1978, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

NASA career

After Shepherd was selected for NASA Astronaut Group 10 in 1984, rumors spread that he had answered a standard interview question about what he did best by saying, "kill people with knives" but he later refused to confirm or deny the account, commenting "it's too good a story". He was the first military non-aviator in astronaut training, following his unsuccessful application for NASA Astronaut Group 9 in 1980. In 1986, Shepherd's Navy SEAL training proved unexpectedly useful to NASA as he helped to direct the underwater salvage operations of the Space Shuttle Challenger after its destruction. Shepherd then served as a mission specialist on three Space Shuttle flights: mission STS-27 in 1988, mission STS-41 in 1990, which deployed the Ulysses probe, and mission STS-52 in 1992. He was the first member of NASA Astronaut Group 10 to fly a space mission.

From March 1993 to January 1996, he was assigned to the International Space Station Program, serving as Program Manager and Deputy Program Manager. In November 1995 he was selected to command the first crew of the International Space Station (ISS). The mission was supposed to launch in 1997, but a long series of political, financial, and technical problems caused significant delays. Although sixteen nations would participate in the ISS program, Russia, along with the United States would bear the majority of the station's costs.

Spaceflight experience
STS-27: Atlantis (December 2–6, 1988) Shepherd served with his crewmates on a mission that lasted 105 hours and carried Department of Defense payloads. The mission is noteworthy due to the severe damage Atlantis sustained to its critical heat-resistant tiles during ascent.

STS-41: Discovery (October 6–10, 1990) during 66 orbits of the Earth, the crew aboard the Orbiter successfully deployed the Ulysses, starting it on a four-year journey (via Jupiter) to investigate the polar regions of the Sun.

STS-52: Columbia (October 22 to November 1, 1992) was the 10-day mission deployed the Laser Geodynamic Satellite (LAGEOS), and conducted U.S. microgravity payload experiments.

Expedition 1: From October 31, 2000, to March 21, 2001, he and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergey Krikalev launched from Baikonur on Soyuz TM 31 and served as Expedition 1, the first crew on board ISS. The crew returned to Earth on the Space Shuttle Discovery, STS 102.

Shepherd has logged over 159 days in space.

Post-NASA career
Shepherd was next assigned to the staff of Commander, Naval Special Warfare Command, to assist with the development of new capabilities and programs for the Navy's SEAL and Special Boat units. He retired from the U.S. Navy in January 2002. CAPT Shepherd also served as U.S. Special Operations Command's first Science Advisor from 2008–2011.

Organizations

 * American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)

Awards and honors

 * Congressional Space Medal of Honor
 * NASA's "Steve Thorne" Aviation Award
 * 2004 inductee into the International Space Hall of Fame
 * 2009 inductee into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.
 * Honorary Naval Aviator

 * Fédération Aéronautique Internationale V. M. Komarov Diploma
 * Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) Yuri Gagarin Gold Medal
 * Spirit of St Louis Medal
 * NDIA Lt. Col. George M. Chinn Award
 * Dr. Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy
 * Medal "For Merit in Space Exploration"
 * International Space Station Program, which Capt. Shepherd led both on the ground, and in space, was awarded the 2009 Collier Trophy.

title: William Shepherd


text:
Flame robin

The flame robin (Petroica phoenicea) is a small passerine bird native to Australia. It is a moderately common resident of the coolest parts of south-eastern Australia, including Tasmania. Like the other two red-breasted Petroica robins—the scarlet robin and the red-capped robin—it is often simply called the robin redbreast. Like many brightly coloured robins of the Petroicidae, it is sexually dimorphic. Measuring 12 – long, the flame robin has dark brown eyes and a small thin black bill. The male has a brilliant orange-red chest and throat, and a white patch on the forehead above the bill. Its upper parts are iron-grey with white bars, and its tail black with white tips. Female coloration is a muted grey-brown. Its song has been described as the most musical of its genus.

The position of the flame robin and its Australian relatives on the passerine family tree is unclear; the Petroicidae are not closely related to either the European or American robins, but appear to be an early offshoot of the Passerida group of songbirds. The flame robin is predominantly insectivorous, pouncing on prey from a perch in a tree, or foraging on the ground. A territorial bird, the flame robin employs song and plumage displays to mark out and defend its territory. It is classified by BirdLife International as least concern.

Taxonomy
The flame robin was first described by the French naturalists Jean René Constant Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard in 1830 as Muscicapa chrysoptera. The specific epithet chrysoptera is derived from the Ancient Greek words 'golden', and  'feather'.

John Gould placed the flame robin in its current genus as Petroica phoenicea in his 1837 description, and it was this latter binomial name that has been used since that time. Given this, Quoy and Gaimard's name was declared a nomen oblitum. The generic name is derived from the Ancient Greek words petros, 'rock', and oikos, 'home', from the birds' habit of sitting on rocks. The specific epithet is also derived from Ancient Greek, from the adjective phoinikeos 'crimson, dark red'. It is one of five red- or pink-breasted species colloquially known as "red robins", as distinct from the "yellow robins" of the genus Eopsaltria. Although named after the European robin, the flame robin is not closely related to either it or the American robin. The Australian robins were placed in the Old World flycatcher family Muscicapidae, and the whistler family Pachycephalidae, before being classified in their own family Petroicidae. Sibley and Ahlquist's DNA-DNA hybridisation studies placed the robins in a Corvida parvorder comprising many tropical and Australian passerines, including pardalotes, fairy-wrens and honeyeaters, as well as crows. However, subsequent molecular research (and current consensus) places the robins as a very early offshoot of the Passerida, or "advanced" songbirds, within the songbird lineage.

No subspecies are recognised, and the degree of geographic variation is unclear. Adult male birds which breed on the mainland have been reported as having lighter upperparts and underparts than their Tasmanian relatives, and females are said to be browner, but these differences may also result from worn plumage. Furthermore, migration across the Bass Strait by some birds obfuscates the issue. Mainland and Tasmanian birds are the same size. Ornithologists Richard Schodde and Ian Mason argued that the poor quality of museum collections and partially migratory habits meant that discrete subspecies could not be distinguished on the basis of the observed variation within the species.

Flame-breasted robin was the common name formerly used for the species, and it was gradually abbreviated to flame robin. Other names recorded include bank robin, redhead, and (inaccurately) robin redbreast. Flame robin is the preferred vernacular name of the International Ornithological Congress.

Description
The largest of the red robins, the flame robin is 12 – long. It has a more slender build than other members of the genus Petroica, with relatively long wings and neck and small head. The male is easily distinguished by the bright orange-red plumage of the throat, breast, and abdomen. The crown, nape, ear coverts, hindneck, and sides of neck are dark grey, and lores and chin are a grey-black. The grey feathers of the sides of the crown may be suffused with dull orange. The rest of the upperparts, comprising the wings, back and tail, are dark grey. There is a small, white frontal spot above the bill, and the wing bar and outer tail shafts are white. The feathers of the posterior belly, flanks, and vent are white with grey-black bases. The female is plainly coloured—pale brown overall, and a lighter buff underneath. The lower belly, sides, and underside are a soft off-white colour. Similar to the male, feathers on the sides of the crown might have a subtle hint of dull orange, and this coloration could also extend to the feathers on the breast area. There are small, off-white marks on the wings and above the bill. The bill, legs, feet, and claws are black, and the eyes dark brown. A flame robin with an all lemon-yellow breast and otherwise female plumage was observed in a small flock of flame robins near Swansea, in eastern Tasmania, in September 1950.

Nestlings have dark grey or brown down, cream to grey bills, cream gapes and orange throats. The plumage of juvenile birds in their first moult resembles that of the adult female, but the head and upperparts are streaked and slightly darker. Soon after fledging, juveniles moult into their first immature plumage, and more closely resemble the adult female. The breasts of male juveniles may have some orange feathers. Birds in their second year moult into a second immature phase, some males of which may resemble adult males, while others retain a more immature brown plumage. Determining the age and sex of birds in brown plumage can be very difficult. Information on exact timing of moulting is lacking, but the replacement of primary feathers takes place over the summer months between December and February.

The colour alone is not a reliable guide to determine the species, as some scarlet robins (P. boodang) take on an orange hue, but while male scarlet and red-capped robins (P. goodenovii) have red breasts and black throats, the flame robin's breast plumage extends right up to the base of the bill. It is also a little slimmer and has a smaller head than the scarlet robin, and is clearly larger than the red-capped robin. Females of the respective species are harder to tell apart. Those of red-capped, rose, and pink robins are all smaller, with wing lengths less than 7 cm, smaller than the smallest flame robin. The female scarlet robin has a more pronounced red flush to the breast and the spot on the forehead above the bill is more prominent and white rather than off-white.

The flame robin's calls are grouped into louder and quieter calls; the former can be heard from 150 m away, while the latter, which are often briefer, from 30 m. Loud songs make up almost 90% of calls in spring, summer, and autumn, but less than 50% of calls from May to July. Males sing rarely during this time, although they do so to defend their territories. Their song is more varied and complex than that of the scarlet robin, and has been described as the most musical of the red robins. A series of descending notes in groups of three, the musical song has been likened to the phrases, "you-may-come, if-you-will, to-the-sea" or "you-are-not a-pretty-little-bird like-me". Both males and females sing this song, often perched from a vantage point, such as a stump or fence. This loud song is used to attract the attention of a potential mate, and to announce the bringing of food to its mate or young. The softer call has been described as a tlip, terp or pip, and is used as a contact call in the vicinity of the nest. The female makes a hissing sound, if approached while on the nest, and the male has been recorded making a wheezing call when displaying around the nest.

Distribution and habitat
The flame robin is found in temperate regions of southeastern Australia and all over Tasmania, although it is less common in the southwest and west. In Victoria, it is more common in uplands than lower altitudes. It ranges from the Adelaide and Murray Plains around the mouth of the Murray River in southeastern South Australia, across Victoria, and into the South West Slopes and southern regions of New South Wales. Further north, it is found along the Great Dividing Range and its western slopes, with a few records from southeast Queensland. Within its range, it is generally migratory, moving from alpine and subalpine regions to lowlands in winter, although the breeding and non-breeding ranges overlap. There is some evidence that male birds migrate several days before the females. It is unclear what proportion of Tasmanian birds cross Bass Strait to winter in Victoria. Birds which remain in Tasmania move away from breeding areas, and are found in paddocks in loose flocks of up to fourteen birds. They have left these areas by August, and immature birds appear to disperse earlier. A field study in the outer Melbourne suburb of Langwarrin showed that climate did not influence peak abundance of flame robins there. The international organisation BirdLife International has regraded it from Least Concern to Near Threatened in 2004, due to its population decline over the previous 25 years. The Australian Government had classified it as Least Concern, but noted evidence of decline at the edges of its non-breeding range; it has become rare in South Australia, and uncommon in the lowlands of Victoria. Flame robins are not rare in the Victorian high country. They are frequently encountered at high elevations on the Great Dividing Range, especially in sparser snow gum woodland and similar habitat, and during the summer breeding season are one of the most reliably observed species around the summit of Mount Macedon, NW of Melbourne.

In spring and summer, the flame robin is more often found in wet eucalypt forest in hilly or mountainous areas, particularly the tops and slopes, to an elevation of 1800 m. It generally prefers areas with more clearings and less understory. In particular, it prefers tall forests dominated by such trees as snow gum (Eucalyptus pauciflora), mountain ash ( E. regnans), alpine ash (E. delegatensis), manna gum (E. viminalis), messmate stringybark (E. obliqua), black gum (E. aggregata), white mountain gum (E. dalrympleana), brown barrel (E. fastigata), narrow-leaved peppermint (E. radiata), and black peppermint (E. amygdalina). It is occasionally encountered in temperate rainforest. In the autumn and winter, birds move to more open areas, such as grasslands and open woodlands, particularly those containing river red gum (E. camaldulensis), Blakely's red gum (E. blakelyi), yellow box (E. melliodora), grey box (E. microcarpa), and mugga ironbark (E. sideroxylon), at lower altitude.

Flame robins often become more abundant in areas recently burnt by bushfires, but move away once the undergrowth regrows. They may also move into logged or cleared areas in forests. However, a field study in the Boola Boola State Forest in central Gippsland revealed they are not found in areas where the regrowth after logging is dense.

Behaviour
The flame robin mostly breeds in and around the Great Dividing Range, the Tasmanian highlands, and islands in Bass Strait. With the coming of cooler autumn weather, most birds disperse to lower and warmer areas, some travelling as far as eastern South Australia, southern Queensland, or (in the case of some Tasmanian birds) across Bass Strait to Victoria. Birds breeding in the warmer climates north of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales tend to retain their highland territories all year round. Outside the breeding season, birds may congregate in loose flocks, but they are most usually encountered throughout the year singly or in pairs, the latter more commonly in breeding season.

When perched or between bouts of foraging on the ground, the flame robin holds itself in a relatively upright pose, with its body angled at 45° or less from the vertical, and its wings held low below its tail. It impresses as nervous and twitchy, flicking its wings alternately when still. The flame robin's flight is fast, with a markedly undulating character.

The flame robin is territorial, defending its territory against other members of its species, and also against scarlet robins where they co-occur. In Nimmitabel in southern New South Wales, migratory flame robins invaded and eked out their territories from amid existing scarlet robin territories. Once settled, however, no species dominated over the other and stable boundaries emerged. The flame robin deploys a number of agonistic displays, including a breast-puffing display where it puffs its breast feathers, and a white spot display where it puffs its feathers to accentuate its frontal white spot, white wing markings or white outer tail feathers. They may also fly at intruders or sing to defend their territory.

Courtship and breeding
Several courtship behaviours have been recorded. Males have been recorded feeding females. A male flame robin either lands next to and moves a female off her perch, or flies in front of her. Courting males also run to and fro in front of a female, in a crouch with wings and head lowered, and hiding their breast feathers. In both displays, the male proceeds to chase the female. Pairs are generally monogamous, and remain together unless one bird perishes, although "divorces" have been recorded.

The breeding season is August to January with one or two broods raised. The male proposes suitable nest sites to the female by hopping around the area. Unlike other robins, the female sometimes initiates the site selection. A pair spends anywhere from one to five days looking before finding a suitable site. The female constructs the nest alone. Eucalypts are generally chosen, but birds have been recorded nesting in Pinus radiata on Mount Wellington in Tasmania. The flame robin is more versatile in its selection of nesting sites than other robins, and has even been recorded nesting in sheds.

The nest is a neat, deep cup made of soft dry grass, moss, and bark. Spider webs, feathers, and fur are used for binding/filling, generally in a tree fork or crevice, or cliff or riverbank ledge, typically within a few metres of the ground. The clutch generally numbers three or four dull white eggs, which are laid on consecutive days. They are tinted bluish, greyish or brownish, and splotched with dark grey-brown, and measure 18 mm x 14 mm. A field study in open eucalypt forest at Nimmitabel found that flame robins and scarlet robins chose different sites to breed, the former in tree hollows and bark crevices, most commonly of Eucalyptus viminalis around 4 m off the ground, and the latter more commonly in forks or on branches of E. pauciflora around 7 m above the ground. Flame robins, which were migratory at the site, were more successful in raising young, but the success rate of scarlet robins in the area appeared to be poor compared with other sites.

Incubation has been recorded as averaging around 17 days. Like all passerines, the chicks are altricial; they are born blind and naked, and start to develop down on their heads on day two. Their eyes open around day six, and they begin developing their primary flight feathers around day nine or ten. For the first three days after hatching, the mother feeds the nestlings alone, with food brought to her by the father. The father feeds them directly from the fourth day onwards, with the mother brooding them afterward until day seven. Flies, butterflies, moths, caterpillars, and beetles predominate in the food fed to the young birds. Flame robins fed a higher proportion of flying insects to their young at Nimmitabel than did scarlet robins, which may have been due to their later start to breeding. Both parents participate in removing faecal sacs from the nest. Parents have been observed feeding young up to five weeks after leaving the nest.

The fan-tailed cuckoo (Cacomantis flabelliformis) and pallid cuckoo (C. pallidus) have been recorded as brood parasites of the flame robin; female cuckoos lay their eggs in robin nests, which are then raised by the robins as their own. One fan-tailed cuckoo was recorded ejecting baby robins before being raised by its foster parents. Other nest predators recorded include the grey shrikethrush (Colluricincla harmonica), pied currawong (Strepera graculina), and eastern brown snake (Pseudonaja textilis).

Feeding
Like all Australasian robins, the flame robin is a perch and pounce hunter, mainly eating insects, and often returning to a favourite low perch several times to stand erect and motionless, scanning the leaf-litter for more prey. They are typically seen in pairs (during the spring and summer breeding season) or in loose companies in more open country during winter, when they more commonly feed on the ground. A field study in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales found no significant difference in foraging behaviour between male and female flame robins. Birds have been recorded foraging for insects in furrows in freshly ploughed fields. In Deniliquin, a flame robin was observed holding one foot forward and pattering the ground repeatedly to disturb ground-dwelling insects, and then watching and snapping up any which emerged; this behaviour is otherwise seen in waders.

Compared with the scarlet robin, the flame robin eats a higher proportion of flying insects. Biologist, Doug Robinson, has proposed that scarcity of flying insects in winter is a reason why the flame robin migrates. They have been seen in mixed-species flocks with other small insectivorous passerines, such as scarlet robins, hooded robins (Melanodryas cucullata), white-fronted chats (Epthianura albifrons), and Australian pipits (Anthus australis).

Among the types of insects consumed are many families of beetles, wasps, and ants, flies (families Tabanidae and Asilidae), bugs, and caterpillars. Other invertebrates eaten include spiders, millipedes and earthworms. The flame robin consumes small prey items whole, and bashes larger victims against a hard surface repeatedly to break up before eating. The latter group constitute only 0.5% of prey over time—seasonally varying from a peak of 1.8% in autumn to a low of 0.2% of prey caught in winter.

title: Flame robin


text:
Sabreman

The Sabreman series of games was released by Ultimate Play the Game for the ZX Spectrum in the 1980s. Some of the instalments were also released on other popular home microcomputers, namely the Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, and MSX. The series stars Sabreman, who is depicted wearing khakis and a pith helmet.

Games
The story of Sabreman's adventures is not developed within the games themselves, but each game would come with an explanation of the story so far on the cassette inlay cards.

 * Sabre Wulf (1984), in which Sabreman must escape a large jungle maze by collecting four pieces of an amulet, while avoiding the titular wulf. Finding all four would grant access to:
 * Underwurlde (1984), in which Sabreman must find three weapons to defeat three guardians in an extensive system of caverns. This done, three exits are available, each leading to one of the following three games.
 * Knight Lore (1984), in which Sabreman arrives at Knight Lore Castle to seek a cure for his newfound lycanthropy. Collecting a number of items for the resident wizard Melkhior achieves both the cure and progress to:
 * Pentagram (1986), in which Sabreman, as a newly qualified wizard himself, embarks on a quest to find the Pentagram, a powerful magic artifact. Once this is achieved Sabreman is directed to the final game in the series:
 * Mire Mare (cancelled), which was never released and about which little is known.

Sabreman's appearance in Knight Lore inspired the character Sabrewulf in the Killer Instinct series, while Sabreman himself made a cameo in Banjo-Tooie, both by Ultimate's successor company Rare. No other games in the series were released until Sabre Wulf on the Game Boy Advance in 2004, which builds on the story from the original Sabre Wulf, the object being to collect amulet pieces to defeat the Wulf once again. An Xbox 360 title, Sabreman Stampede, was in development as a rework of Rare's cancelled title Donkey Kong Racing, but was also cancelled during development due to a lack of focus and Rare's unfamiliarity with the hardware. In 2015, Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde, and Knight Lore were re-released as part of the Rare Replay compilation for Xbox One.

title: Sabreman


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Audio game

An audio game is an electronic game played on a device such as a personal computer. It is similar to a video game save that there is audible and tactile feedback but not visual.

Audio games originally started out as 'blind accessible'-games and were developed mostly by amateurs and blind programmers. But more and more people are showing interest in audio games, ranging from sound artists, game accessibility researchers, mobile game developers and mainstream video gamers. Most audio games run on a personal computer platform, although there are a few audio games for handhelds and video game consoles. Audio games feature the same variety of genres as video games, such as adventure games, racing games, etc.

Audio game history
The term "electronic game" is commonly understood as a synonym for the narrower concept of the "video game." This is understandable as both electronic games and video games have developed in parallel and the game market has always had a strong bias toward the visual. The first electronic game, in fact, is often cited to be Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device (1947) a decidedly visual game. Despite the difficulties in creating a visual component to early electronic games imposed by crude graphics, small view-screens, and power consumption, video games remained the primary focus of the early electronic game market.

Arcade and one-off handheld audio games – the early years
Atari released the first audio game, Touch Me, in 1974. Housed in an arcade cabinet, Touch Me featured a series of lights which would flash with an accompanying tone. The player would reproduce the sequence by pressing a corresponding sequence of buttons and then the game would add another light/sound to the end of the growing sequence to continually test the player's eidetic memory in a Pelmanism-style format. Although the game featured both a visual and an auditory component, the disconnect between the two enabled both the seeing and the visually impaired to equally enjoy the game.

Based on the popularity of Touch Me, in 1978 Milton Bradley Company released a handheld audio game entitled Simon at Studio 54 in New York City. Whereas Touch Me had been in competition with other visual-centric video games and consequently remained only a minor success, the allure of a personal electronic game allowed Simon to capture a much greater share of the market. Simon became an immediate success eventually becoming a pop culture symbol of the 1980s.

In the decades following the release of Simon, numerous clones and variations were produced including Merlin among others. Beginning in 1996, Milton Bradley and a number of other producers released the handheld Bop It which featured a similar concept of a growing series of commands designed to test eidetic memory. Other related games soon followed including Bop It Extreme (1998), Bop It-Extreme 2 (2002–2003), Zing-It, Top-It, and Loopz (2010)

TTS software and the PC – the second wave
Before graphical operating systems like Windows, most home computers used text-based operating systems such as DOS. Being text-based meant that they were relatively accessible to visually impaired users, requiring only the additional use of text-to-speech (TTS) software. For the same reason, following the development of TTS software, text-based games such as early text-only works of interactive fiction were also equally accessible to users with or without a visual impairment. Since the availability of such software was not commonly accessible until the inclusion of the MacInTalk program on Apple Computers in 1984, the library of games which became accessible to the vision impaired spanned everything from the earliest text adventure, Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), to the comparatively advanced works of interactive fiction which had developed in the subsequent 8 years. Although the popularity of this genre has waned in the general market as video-centric games became the dominant form of electronic game, this library is still growing with the freeware development by devoted enthusiasts of new interactive fiction titles each year.

Accessibility for the visually impaired began to change, some time prior to the advent of graphical operating systems as computers became powerful enough to support more video-centric games. This created a gap between electronic games for the seeing and games for the blind — a gap that has by now grown substantially. Due to a strong market bias in favor of the seeing, electronic games were primarily developed for this demographic. While seeing gamers could venture into 3D gaming worlds in such video game titles as Myst, Final Fantasy and Doom, blind gamers were relegated to playing more mundane games such as Blackjack, or Battleship.

As video games flourished and became increasingly common, however, amateur game designers began to adapt video games for the blind via sound. In time audio game programmers began to develop audio-only games, based to a smaller and smaller degree on existing video game ideas and instead focusing on the possibilities of game immersion and feedback with sound. Specifically, three-dimensional positional audio (binaural recording) has been developed since 2000 and now figures prominently in, for example, such audio games as BBBeat. To effect this, a sound is played in the left, center, or right channel to indicate an object's position in a virtual gaming environment. Generally, this involves stereo panning of various sound effects, many of which are looped to serve as indicators of hazards or objects with which the user can interact. Volume also plays a major role in 3D audio games primarily to indicate an object's proximity with reference to the user. The pitch of a sound is often varied to convey other information about the object it symbolizes. Voice talent is used to indicate menu items rather than text. These parameters have allowed for the creation of, among other genres, side scrollers, 3D action adventures, shooters, and arcade style games.

The website Audiogames.net provides a list of audio games and a forum for the community of audio game developers and gamers. Many of the listed games contain some primitive graphics as to make audio games not only accessible to blind and visually impaired people but also to gamers with vision, who may be unexperienced with TTS, auditory menus and typical keyboard mappings. Examples include Shades of Doom and the CURAT Sonification game.

Console audio games and the modern era
Most audio games are now developed by several small companies (consisting of only a team of one to four people). The main audience remains primarily visually impaired users, however the game market at large is gradually taking more notice of audio games as well due to the issue of game accessibility. Commercial interest in audio games has steadily grown and as a result artists and students have created a number of experimental freeware PC audio games to explore the possibilities and limitations of this gaming form.

Despite the increase in interest in audio games, however, many modern games still lack sufficient audio cues to be considered fully accessible for the visually impaired. Furthermore, the industry still lacks a clear set of accessibility guidelines for their development. Tools such as the once popular Blastbay Game Toolkit engine that aided in the development of audio games are now obsolete, but current game engines like Unity and Unreal that can support audio game development are not specifically designed for doing so, creating an additional hurdle for audio game developers.

In the field of console-gaming, there has been very little in the way of audio-games. One notable exception has been the innovative incorporation of strong audio elements in several of the games produced by the Japanese video game company, Warp. Warp was founded by musician Kenji Eno and consisted of a five-man team including first-time designer Fumito Ueda. In 1997, Warp developed a game called Real Sound for the Sega Saturn which was later ported to Dreamcast in 1999 and renamed Real Sound: Kaze no Regret ("Real Sound: Regrets in the Wind"). This game featured no visuals at all and was entirely dependent upon sound.

Discussing Real Sound's production, Eno has stated that "I got tired of [ CG graphics ] . I didn't want people to think that they could predict what Warp would do next. Also, I had a chance to visit people who are visually disabled, and I learned that there are blind people who play action games. Of course, they're not able to have the full experience, and they're kind of trying to force themselves to be able to play, but they're making the effort. So I thought that if you turn off the monitor, both of you are just hearing the game. So after you finish the game, you can have an equal conversation about it with a blind person. That's an inspiration behind this game as well. So Sega was asking for exclusive rights to the game, and I said, 'OK, if you'll donate a thousand Saturns to blind people, then I'll donate a thousand [copies of the Real Sound] game along with the Saturns.' And my condition was that if Sega would go for this idea, I would make that game Sega exclusive. So, that's how this happened."

Following the release of Real Sound, Warp again made use of a novel employment of audio elements in the Saturn game Enemy Zero (1997), in which the enemies are invisible and can only be detected through auditory clues. Audio-specific elements used in gameplay have been recognized in Warp's D2 (2000).

Nintendo, as part of its shift to alternative gameplay forms, has shown recent interest in audio games through its own development teams. In July 2006, Nintendo released a collection of audio games called Soundvoyager as the newest member of its spare Digiluxe series. The Digiluxe series for Game Boy Advance consists of 7 games (in 2 series) that are characterized by simple yet compelling gameplay, minimal graphics, and the emphasis, in such titles as Soundvoyager and Dotstream, on music. Soundvoyager contains 7 audio games (Sound Slalom, Sound Picker, Sound Drive, Sound Cock, Sound Chase, Sound Catcher, and Sound Cannon). The Digiluxe series has been available in Japan since July 2006.

In 2008, MIT students collaborated with the government of Singapore and a professor at the National University of Singapore to create AudiOdyssey, a game which allows both blind and sighted gamers to play together.

Apple's iPhone platform has become home to a number of audio games, including Papa Sangre. Other examples include Audiogame.it's Flarestar (a space-themed exploration game that features combat against training drones and other spacecraft) and Sonic Tennis (a game which simulates a tennis match and features a multiplayer mode).

Android devices also feature a myriad of audio games. For example, the studio Blind Faith Games has developed various games for Android with the goal of accessibility for the visually impaired community. Examples include Golf Accessible (a simulation of golfing) and Zarodnik (a strategy game where the user faces a monster in the depths of the ocean), which utilize screen vibrations and audio cues for the gameplay experience. Another unique example of an audio game for Android is a game currently in development by researchers at Tsinghua University titled Wander, which is intended to be used as the player falls asleep to improve the quality of their rest. A guide provides the instructions to users verbally, and they use their breath to explore a forest filled with relaxing environmental noises.

With the rise in popularity of voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa came a new set of audio games. As of June 2021, 10,000 audio games were available as Alexa Skills for use with Amazon Alexa. Among them are games like Rain Labs' Animal Sounds, which asks users to correctly identify the noises made by various animals.

TTS-enabling video games
The rise of text-to-speech (TTS) software and steady improvements in the field have allowed full audio-conversion of traditionally video-based games. Such games were intended for use by and marketed to the seeing, however they do not actually rest primarily on the visual aspects of the game and so members of the audio game community have been able to convert them to audio games by using them in conjunction with TTS software. While this was originally only available for strictly text-based games like text adventures and MUDs, advances in TTS software have led to increased functionality with a diverse array of software types beyond text-only media allowing other works of interactive fiction as well as various simulator games to be enjoyed in a strictly audio environment.

Examples of such games include:

Another example is The Last of Us Part II, which was released by Naughty Dog in the summer of 2020 for the PlayStation 4. The game contains over 60 accessibility features, including a text-to-speech feature. Other features that make the game completely playable without sight include the use of voice actors, haptic feedback, and audio cues that act as hints to the player. In addition, the game provides the common audio game feature of a sound glossary menu. On this menu, the user can scroll through a variety of audio cues and hear what they sound like and what they are used for during gameplay. For this game in particular, examples include signals to the user that they can crouch, jump, or interact with the nearby environment.
 * A Dark Room – (Doublespeak Games, 2013)
 * Hattrick – (ExtraLives AB, 1997)
 * OGame – (Gameforge, 2002)
 * Jennifer Government: NationStates – (Max Barry, 2002)
 * Grendel's Cave – (Grendel Enterprises, 1998)

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Talk:Estate in land

 * flesh out
 * subpages

Accuracy
Are you sure about the equitable estates part of this? Neither liens nor easments are creatures of equity, although they can both exist in equity: so can other estates in land because "equity follows the law". There are very real distinctions (in my jurisdiction at least) between legal and equitable liens and easements. I would be surprised if any other common law country was different, but stand to be corrected. Anyone know? Francis Davey 19:28, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

 * What is more -- what about Mortgages?

 * Shouldn't future estates, such as reversion, remainder, possibility of reverter, and right of reentry/power of termination be included, as estates that are not possessory (since the estate holder is not currently in possession) but are freehold (since the holder will or may at some point have freehold control of the estate)? None of these seem to be mentioned here.  However, I am by no means an expert, so I don't want to make the change and misinform people if there's something I'm not catching. 70.73.37.146 02:26, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Suggested deletion
This article seems to have very little merit to it. It is a mere skeleton without flesh. The article Estate (law) has been fleshed out to provide the detail and has cross-references to related topics on the right hand side. There is a category 'Real property law', which also covers the ground. There are a wide variety of possible equitable interests. Furthermore, easements (which appear to have their own article are legal not equitable interests (at least in English law), which are owned by the owner of the dominant tenement. I am not categorising this as an 'article for deletion', but would appreciate other users' comments on this.  Peterkingiron 20:28, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

 * My view is that there should be an article about estates in land. The concept of an estate is quite an important one, which has evolved in a complex way over time and deserves an article. What is here is plainly wrong for English law and probably misleadingly confused for all other jurisdictions, but I simply don't know enough comparative property law to simply delete bits. If I have time I might have a go at a complete re-write and do my best. Francis Davey 17:20, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

title: Talk:Estate in land


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World War II evacuation and expulsion

Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. The Second World War caused the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in history. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.

Belligerents on both sides engaged in forms of expulsion of people perceived as being associated with the enemy. The major location for the wartime displacements was East-Central and Eastern Europe, although Japanese people were expelled during and after the war by Allied powers from locations in Asia including India. The Holocaust also involved deportations and expulsions of Jews preliminary to the subsequent genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany under the auspices of Aktion Reinhard.

World War II deportations, expulsions and displacements
Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939 which marked the beginning of World War II, the campaign of ethnic "cleansing" became the goal of military operations for the first time since the end of World War I. After the end of the war, between 13.5 and 16.5 million German-speakers lost their homes in formerly German lands and all over Eastern Europe.

Aftermath of the invasion of Poland

 * 1939 to 1945: The Nazis planned to ethnically cleanse the whole Polish population according to a germanisation Master Plan called Generalplan Ost. Eventually in the course of Nazi occupation up to 1.6 to 2 million Poles were expelled, not counting millions of slave labourers deported from Poland to the Reich.
 * 1939 to 1940: Expulsions of 680,000 Poles from German-occupied Wielkopolska (German -Reichsgau Wartheland). From the city of Poznań Germans expelled to General Government 70,000 Poles. By 1945, half a million Volksdeutsche Germans from Soviet Union, Bessarabia, Romania, and the Baltic Germans had been resettled during action "Heim ins Reich" by German organisations like Hauptamt Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and "Resettlement department" of RKFDV (Stabshauptamt Reichkomissar für die Festigung deutsches Volkstums) from Eastern Europe.
 * 1939 to 1940: Expulsions of 121,765 Poles from German-occupied Pomerania. On Polish places 130,000 Volksdeutsche was settled including 57,000 Germans from East Europe countries: Soviet Union, Bessarabia, Romania and the Baltic states. Deportation was a part of German "Lebensraum" policy ordered by German organisations like Hauptamt Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and "Resettlement department" of RKFDV.
 * 1939 to 1940: The first evacuation of Finnish Karelia was the resettlement of the population of Finnish Karelia and other territories ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union after and during the Winter War into the remaining parts of Finland. Some of the territories were evacuated during the war or before it, as part of the course of the war. Most of the territory was evacuated after the Soviet Union gained it as a part of the Moscow peace treaty. In total, 410,000 people were transferred.
 * 1940 to 1941: The Soviets deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens, most in four mass waves. The accepted figure was over 1.5 million.    The most conservative figures  use recently found NKVD documents showing 309,000  to 381,220.  The Soviets didn't recognise ethnic minorities as Polish citizens, some of the figures are based on those given an amnesty rather than deported  and not everyone was eligible for the amnesty therefore the new figures are considered too low.   The original figures were: February 1940  over 220,000; April around 315,000;  June–July between 240,000 to 400,000; June, 1941, 200,000 to 300,000.
 * 1940 to 1941: Expulsions of 17,000 Polish and Jewish residents from the western districts of city Oświęcim from places located directly adjacent to Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and also from the villages of Broszkowice, Babice, Brzezinka, Rajsko, Pławy, Harmęże, Bór, and Budy. The Expulsion of Polish civilians was a step towards establishing the Camp Interest Zone, which was set up in order to isolate the camp from the outside world and to carry out business activity to meet the needs of the SS. German and Volksdeutsche settlers move in. This was one of the numerous forced migrations associated with the Holocaust.

World War II

 * 1940: A population exchange between Bulgaria and Romania is carried out. 103,711 Romanians, Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians are transferred to Romania and 62,278 Bulgarians are evacuated to Bulgaria.
 * 1940 to 1941: The deportation of Volga Germans by Soviet Union to Kazakhstan, Altai Krai, Siberia, and other remote areas.
 * 1941: The deportation of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians by Soviet Union.
 * 1941: The deportation and massacres of prisoners in Western Soviet Union.
 * 1941 to 1944: During the Finnish occupation of East Karelia during World War II the Russian-speaking population was held in East Karelian concentration camps.
 * 1941 to 1944: Expulsion of Poles from the Zamość region was performed in November 1941, and it was continued in June/July 1943, it was code named Wehrwolf Action I and II, and it was carried out in an attempt to make room for German (and to a lesser extent, to make room for Ukrainian) settlers as part of Nazi plans for the establishment of German colonies in the conquered territories. Around 110,000 people from 297 villages were expelled. Around 30,000 of the victims of the expulsion were children who, if they were racially "clean" (i.e. if they had physical characteristics which were deemed "Germanic") were prepared for germanisation by German families in the Third Reich. Most of the people who were expelled were sent to Germany and used as slave labourers or they were sent to concentration camps.
 * 1941 to 1944: in Kosovo and Metohija, some 10,000 Serbs lost their lives, and about 80,000 to 100,000 or more were ethnically cleansed.
 * 1941 to 1945: More than 250,000 Serbs were expelled from Croatia and Bosnia by the extreme nationalist Ustaše regime during the Serbian Genocide.
 * 1941 to 1949: During World War II, Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were interned in camps.
 * 1942: Deportation of the Ingrian Finns from Soviet controlled territory of the Leningrad Blockade.
 * 1943 to 1944: The Deportation of Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks by Soviet Union to Central Asia and Siberia.
 * 1943 to 1944: The ethnic cleansing and Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by the nationalist UPA with the bulk of victims reported in summer and autumn 1944.
 * 1943 to 1960: The Istrian–Dalmatian exodus involved the diaspora of 350,000, mostly ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) together with anti-communist Slovene and Croat people, from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatian lands (mainly from the city of Zara), after the collapse of Italian fascist regime.
 * 1944: The displacement of the majority ethnic Estonian population from the Estonian city of Narva by Soviet occupation authorities.
 * 1944: The second Evacuation of Finnish Karelia. Some 280,000 Finns had returned to areas ceded in 1940 to the Soviet Union and subsequently re-conquered by Finland in 1941. During summer and autumn 1944, Finland re-ceded these areas back to the Soviet Union, and re-evacuated the Finnish population.
 * 1944: The evacuation of almost total civilian population of Finnish Lapland, as a joint Finnish-German effort, before Finnish and German troops commenced hostilities. The evacuees, numbering 168,000 were able to return home within a year.
 * 1944 to 1945: The ethnic cleansing of Hungarians, or the massacres in Bačka by Titoist partisans during the winter of 1944–45; about 40,000 were massacred. Afterwards, between 45 and 48, internment camps were set which led directly to the death of 70,000 more, of famine, frost, plagues, tortures and executions.
 * 1944 to 1945: Between 16,000 and 20,000 Cham Albanians fled from Thesprotia Prefecture to Albania. Between 200 and 300 were killed.

Defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan

 * 1944 to 1947 & 1951 The mass deportation of Ukrainian speaking ethnic minorities from the territory of Poland after World War II, culminating in 1947 with the start of Operation Vistula.
 * 1944 to 1947 & 1951: 1.5 million Poles were deported from the eastern territories annexed by the Soviet Union into the western territories, which Soviets transferred from Germany to Poland. By 1950, 1.6 million Poles from the eastern territories annexed by the Soviet Union had been settled in what the government called the Regained Territories.
 * 1944 to 1948: Flight and expulsion of Germans after World War II. Between 13.5 and 16.5 million German-speakers fled, were evacuated or later expelled from Central and Eastern Europe, making this event the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in recorded history. estimates of the number of those who died during the process are being debated by historians and they range from 500,000 to 3,000,000.
 * November and December 1944: more than 200,000 Danube Swabians in Yugoslavia were expelled from their homes and interned in starvation and Nazi concentration camps for the old, young and disabled. Some 30,000 workers were expelled to Russia as slave laborers for war reparations.
 * Tens of thousands of the refugees were repatriated to Yugoslavia and massacred in the Yugoslav death march of Nazi collaborators.
 * Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II
 * In 1945, American and Republican Chinese forces returned Japanese colonizers from northeast China in what was termed the Japanese repatriation from Huludao. In those areas liberated by the Soviets and not the Americans, these Japanese became Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union.
 * After Japan surrendered, the Soviet Union occupied northern Korea and southern Sakhalin. These had been Japanese territories before the war and had millions of Japanese residents, who were now to be expelled. Roughly two-thirds of the Korean residents of Sakhalin were also expelled to Japan, but the others remained stranded in Sakhalin.
 * Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 as a consequence of the First Sino-Japanese War and by the beginning of World War II many Japanese civilians had settled there. Between the Japanese surrender of Taiwan in 1945 and 25 April 1946, the occupying Republic of China forces expelled 90% of the Japanese living in Taiwan.
 * More than 30,000 Serbs colonists were expelled from Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia and south-eastern Serbia
 * Aliyah Bet was the code-name for illegal immigration of Jews to the Levant in the 1930s and 1940s, while the Holocaust was occurring, and the existence of numerous displaced people, of Jewish identity, was a major reason for the birth of the state of Israel. Those migrants were helped by an underground group called Bricha. After Israel was born, European Jewish migration to Israel continued, contributing to Israel's population growth. The Kielce pogrom and other anti-Semitic incidents were contributing factors. (This migration could be seen as an expulsion, given the conditions faced by European Jews at the time.)

Establishment of refugee organisations
The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was set up in 1943, to provide humanitarian relief to the huge numbers of potential and existing refugees in areas facing Allied liberation. UNRRA provided billions of US dollars of rehabilitation aid, and helped about 8 million refugees. It ceased operations in Europe in 1947, and in Asia in 1949, upon which it ceased to exist. It was replaced in 1947 by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which in turn evolved into United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1950.

title: World War II evacuation and expulsion