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Sanda Island

Sanda Island (Sandaigh) is a small island in the Firth of Clyde, off of Argyll and Bute, Scotland, near the southern tip of the Kintyre peninsula, near Southend and Dunaverty Castle.

On clear days Sanda can be seen from the southern tip of the Kintyre peninsula, from the Isle of Arran and from northeast County Antrim. It is known locally on Arran and on the Antrim coast as "Spoon Island" because of its resemblance to an upturned spoon.

Population
In the 2001 census Sanda was one of four Scottish islands with a population of just one person. However, since then there has been some development, and in 2008 the island had a population of 3. In August 2008, as a result of their separation, the husband and wife owners put the island up for sale at a price of £3.2 million, and in January 2009 they announced that a sole caretaker would be resident until spring viewings re-commenced. The island was eventually sold to Swiss businessman Michi Meier for the reduced price of £2.5 million. The island's growth as a tourist destination may come to an end under the new owner, who has stated that he wants the island for personal use. By the time of the 2011 census, it had no usual residents.

Wildlife
The island is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its importance for both migrating and breeding birds. Sanda Bird Observatory was the first bird observatory to be set up on the west coast of Scotland.

Geography and geology
According to Haswell-Smith, the island's geology is "lower old red sandstone in red and yellow varieties, and undifferentiated schists."

Sanda lies in the Straits of Moyle (Sruth na Maoile) between Scotland and Ireland. It is part of a mini-archipelago to the southeast of the Mull of Kintyre, at the far end of the Firth of Clyde. The other islands are Glunimore and Sheep Island, to the north east. Located on the north shore of Sanda is the Oitir Buidhe (yellow sand spit), a pronounced area of sand exposed at low tide, that has two slipways. To the east there is also the notorious "ship catcher", Paterson's Reef.

The island has cliffs on most sides. There are caves on the west coast, and also a couple of natural arches, particularly near "the Ship" as the lighthouse is nicknamed. There are two main hills, in the north west and south east. In between them is a valley which has the double advantage of being sheltered from the prevailing winds and catching the heat of the sun.

History
The island has connections with several well-known historical personages, including the Bruce family, Wallace and Saint Ninian, the first evangeliser north of Hadrian's Wall.

The island is known for the ruins of a chapel built by Saint Ninian, for its Celtic crosses and its reputed holy well. It is said that Ninian was buried here, and indeed, the island was in possession of the Priory of Whithorn in Galloway until the Reformation. It is said that Ninian's grave was marked by an alder tree, and that whoever stepped on it would die.

It was known as "Sandey" (sandy island) by the Norse. This probably refers to the Oitir Buidhe which lies on the north shore of Sanda facing Sheep Island. Another name that appears to have attached itself to the island is Havoin (and numerous variants such as "Aven", "Avona"), which was recorded amongst the "Danish" by Dean Monro in his 16th century Description of the Western Isles of Scotland. This is cognate with the English "haven", and probably refers to the anchorage on the north coast, alternatively, but much less likely, as Haswell-Smith suggests, this could also be a reference to the Scottish Gaelic "abhainn" which means a river.

In the Middle Ages, there was some association with the Bruce family, notably, Robert the Bruce and his brother Edward. Edward lends his name to "Prince Edward's Rock", which is just south of Sanda Lighthouse, and which is nothing to do with Bonnie Prince Charlie, as sometimes thought. Robert was once forced to flee there, en route to Ireland after being pursued by the English navy. He has been sheltering with sympathisers at nearby Dunaverty Castle, on Kintyre in 1306, but was forced to leave. He later sheltered at Rathlin Island, which is less than 20 nmi away, and which is where he was said to have seen the legendary spider in the cave. In the south are "Wallace's Rocks" which may be linked in legend to William Wallace.

In the later 16th and 17th centuries, the island was connected with the MacDonalds of Kintyre, who sided with Montrose Colkitto married a MacDonald of Sanda; those MacDonalds were also caught up in related fighting from the 1630s onwards, and lost their position as a result of the Dunaverty Massacre.

The island has had a number of different owners in its history, including, in 1969, Jack Bruce of the rock group Cream.

Lighthouse

At the southern tip of the island there is a lighthouse built in 1850 by Alan Stevenson. When seen from the sea to the south, the natural arch, and the lighthouse on the rock can look like a ship, hence its name "The Ship" on marine charts.

Byron Darnton
A pub was opened in 2003, named Byron Darnton after the vessel which wrecked on the island in 1946. The Byron Darnton was named after an American war correspondent whose son, John Darnton, also became a journalist and wrote of his visit to the island in 2005.

Stamps
Local stamps have been issued for Sanda since 1962. The stamps served the resident staff employed by the Northern Lighthouse Board, the owners and the many visitors to the island who wished to have their mail posted there, and carried to the nearest GPO post box on the mainland.

title: Sanda Island


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Erskine Childers (author)

Robert Erskine Childers (25 June 1870 – 24 November 1922), usually known as Erskine Childers, was an English-born Irish nationalist who established himself as a writer with accounts of the Second Boer War, the novel The Riddle of the Sands about German preparations for a sea-borne invasion of England, and proposals for achieving Irish independence.

As a firm believer in the British Empire, Childers served as a volunteer in the army expeditionary force in the Second Boer War in South Africa, but his experiences there began a gradual process of disillusionment with British imperialism. He was adopted as a candidate in British parliamentary elections, standing for the Liberal Party at a time when the party supported a treaty to establish Irish home rule, but he later became an advocate of Irish republicanism and the severance of all ties with Britain. On behalf of the Irish Volunteers, he smuggled guns into Ireland later used against British soldiers in the Easter Rebellion. He had a significant role in the negotiations between Ireland and Britain that culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but was elected as an anti-Treaty member of the first Irish parliament. He sought an active role in the Irish Civil War (over the acceptance of the terms of the treaty) that followed and was executed by the Irish Free State.

As an author, his most significant work was the novel The Riddle of the Sands, published eleven years before the start of the First World War. Its depiction of a secret German invasion fleet directed against England influenced Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, into strengthening the Home Fleet of the Royal Navy. On the outbreak of the First World War Churchill was instrumental in calling Childers for service in the Royal Navy, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Childers was the son of British Orientalist scholar Robert Caesar Childers, the father of the fourth president of Ireland Erskine Hamilton Childers, the cousin of British politician Hugh Childers and of Irish nationalist Robert Barton, and the grandfather of the writer and diplomat Erskine Barton Childers and of the former MEP Nessa Childers.

Early life
Childers was born in Mayfair, London, in 1870. He was the second son of Robert Caesar Childers, a translator and oriental scholar from an ecclesiastical family, and Anna Mary Henrietta Barton, from an Anglo-Irish landowning family of Glendalough House, Annamoe, County Wicklow, with interests in France such as the winery that bears their name. When Erskine was six, his father died from tuberculosis and his mother, although at that stage showing no signs of the disease, was confined to an isolation hospital to safeguard her children. She corresponded regularly with Childers until she died from tuberculosis, without having seen her children again, six years later. The five children were sent to the Bartons, the family of their mother's uncle, at Glendalough. Well-treated by his new family, Childers grew up with a strong affection for, and knowledge of, Ireland, albeit, at that point in time, from the comfortable viewpoint of the "Protestant Ascendancy". According to his biographer Michael Hopkinson, it was the personal tension caused by his innate belief in English superiority, in conflict with this new respect for Ireland, which later caused his remarkable conversion to "hard-line Irish republicanism".

He was educated at home by tutors (with his brother Henry and cousin Robert Barton) until the age of ten, when he became a boarder at a preparatory school in England, returning to Glendalough for the holidays. At the recommendation of his grandfather, Canon Charles Childers, in 1883 he was sent to the Haileybury and Imperial Service College. His performance there was initially described as "middling" but he later won school prizes in Latin and in his final year he was made "head of house". There he won an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied the classical tripos and then law. He distinguished himself as the editor of Cambridge Review, the university magazine. Notwithstanding his unattractive voice and poor debating skills, he became president of the Trinity College Debating Society (known as the "Magpie and Stump"). Although Childers was an admirer of his cousin Hugh Childers, a member of the British Cabinet who had supported the first Irish home rule bill, he spoke vehemently against the policy in college debates, warning that "[Irish] national aspirations were incompatible with our own safety.". A sciatic injury sustained while hillwalking in the summer before he went up, which persisted for the rest of his life, left him slightly lame and he was unable to pursue his intention of earning a rugby blue, but he became a proficient rower.

Having stayed an extra year at Cambridge to gain a further degree (in law) Childers briefly entered legal chambers in London as a pupil, the first stage in becoming a barrister. After four months, influenced by his cousin Hugh Childers, he resigned his pupillage and enrolled at a crammer to prepare for the competitive entry examination to become a parliamentary official. He was successful and, early in 1895, he became a junior committee clerk in the House of Commons, with responsibility for preparing formal and legally sound bills from the proposals of the government of the day.

Sailing

Childers and his brother Henry had kept a small sailboat on Lough Dan, near to Glendalough. From time to time while at Cambridge he had sailed on the Norfolk Broads. With many sporting ventures now closed to him because of his sciatic injury, Childers was encouraged by Walter Runciman, a friend from Trinity College, to take up sailing. After picking up the fundamentals of seamanship as a deckhand on Runciman's yacht, in 1893 with his brother Henry he bought his own boat, the former racing yacht Shulah. This vessel required an experienced crew and was totally unsuitable for novices: they sold it in 1895. His next vessel was the "scrubby little yacht" Marguerite, an 18 ft half-deck, which he kept at Greenhithe, close to London. After teaching himself navigation and taking lessons in sailboat handling, he undertook trips around the English coast and across the English Channel with his brother Henry. In April 1897 he replaced Marguerite with the larger and more comfortable 30 ft cutter Vixen; in August that year there was a long cruise in Vixen to the Frisian Islands, Norderney and the Baltic with Henry and Ivor Lloyd Jones, a friend from Cambridge, as crew. These were the adventures he was to fictionalise in 1903 as The Riddle of the Sands, his most famous book and a huge bestseller.

In 1903 Childers was again cruising in the Frisian Islands, in Sunbeam, a boat he bought in syndicate with William le Fanu and other friends from his university days. He was now accompanied by his new wife Molly Osgood. Molly's father, Dr. Hamilton Osgood, arranged for a fine 28-ton yacht, Asgard, to be built for the couple as a wedding gift and Sunbeam was only a temporary measure while Asgard was being fitted out.

Asgard was Childers's last and most famous yacht: in July 1914, he used it to smuggle a cargo of 900 Mauser Model 1871 rifles and 29,000 black powder cartridges to the Irish Volunteers movement at the fishing village of Howth, County Dublin. The Asgard was acquired by the Irish government as a sail training vessel in 1961, stored on dry land in the yard of Kilmainham Gaol in 1979, and is now exhibited at The National Museum of Ireland.

Boer War

As with most men of his social background and education, Childers was originally a steadfast believer in the British Empire. Indeed, for an old boy of Haileybury College, a school founded to train young men for colonial service in India, such an outlook on Childers's part was almost inevitable, although, privately, he did not accept completely the "conformist" values of the school.

In 1898, as negotiations over the voting rights of British settlers in the Boer territories of Transvaal and Orange Free State failed and the Boer War broke out, Childers needed little encouragement when in December Basil Williams, a colleague at Westminster, suggested that he too should enlist. Williams was already a member of the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC), a volunteer regiment, so at the end of December 1898 Childers joined the HAC.

A battery from the HAC formed part of the hastily constituted City Imperial Volunteers, something of an ad hoc force set up from soldiers from different volunteer regiments, funded by City institutions and provided with the most modern equipment. Childers became a member of the artillery division of this new force, classed as a "spare driver" to care for horses and ride in the ammunition supply train. On 2 February 1900, after three weeks' training, the unit set off for South Africa. Most of the new volunteers and their officers were seasick and it largely fell to Childers to care for the troop's 30 horses. After a three-week voyage, the company was disappointed not to see immediate action but on 26 June, while escorting a supply train of slow ox-wagons, Childers first came under fire during a three-day skirmish in defence of the column. It was a smartly executed defence of a beleaguered infantry regiment on 3 July that established the worth of his unit and more significant engagements followed.

On 24 August, Childers was evacuated from the front line to hospital in Pretoria, suffering from trench foot. The seven-day journey happened to be in the company of wounded infantrymen from Cork, Ireland, and Childers noted approvingly how cheerfully loyal to Britain the men were, how resistant they were to any incitement in support of Home Rule, and how they had been let down only by the incompetence of their officers. This is a striking contrast to his attitude by the end of the First World War when conscription in Ireland was under consideration and he wrote of "young men hopelessly estranged from Britain and [...] anxious to die in Ireland for Irish liberty.". After a chance meeting with his brother Henry, also suffering from a foot injury, he rejoined his unit, only for it to be dispatched to England on 7 October 1900.

Gun running to Ireland
Childers's attitude to Britain's establishment and politics had become somewhat equivocal by the start of the First World War. He had resigned his membership of the Liberal Party, and with it his hopes of a parliamentary seat, over Britain's concessions to Unionists and a further postponement of Irish self-rule; he had written works critical of British policy in Ireland and in its South African possessions; above all in the Summer of 1914 he had been a member of Mary Spring Rice committee planning to smuggle guns bought in Germany to supply the Irish Volunteers in the south of Ireland, a "largely symbolic" response to the April 1914 Ulster Volunteers' importation of rifles and ammunition in the Larne gun-running. Although in 1914 John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Volunteers, argued that in the case of war his movement would cooperate with the Ulster Volunteers in the defence of Ireland, thus allowing Britain to release troops from the country for the war in Europe, the committee's weapons were used against British soldiers in the Easter Rising of 1916.

The members of the committee of eleven included, in addition to Spring Rice: Alice Stopford Green, Roger Casement, Darrell Figgis and Conor O'Brien. Monetary subscriptions were received from other influential figures. O'Brien owned a small yacht Kelpie but Childers considered that his own seagoing experience made him the natural choice to lead the operation. Mindful of the risk that the vessel used to carry the shipment could be confiscated, only when Spring Rice's own boat proved unseaworthy did Childers offer Asgard. With no regard for security, Childers canvassed some acquaintances among British army officers to crew Asgard for the exploit, but only Gordon Shephard of the Royal Fusiliers accepted. Childers and Figgis arranged the weapons' purchase from Hamburg. The landing, with Molly Childers at the helm of Asgard, was on 26 July 1914 at Howth, openly conducted in broad daylight to offer the maximum publicity for the cause. The police and British Army's attempt to intercept the cargo as it was transferred inland led to the Bachelor's Walk massacre of 26 July 1914, when soldiers from the Kings Own Scottish Borderers fired upon uninvolved onlookers.

A week later, when war with Germany was declared, Childers was in Dublin, writing articles for American newspapers to exploit the success of the operation. The knowledge that Childers had made a delivery of rifles and ammunition to Irish nationalists was not in wide circulation, but neither was it a great secret, and the official telegram from the British Admiralty calling Childers to naval service was sent to the Dublin headquarters of the group to which he had made the delivery.

At that stage, Childers still believed that a self-governing Ireland would take its place as a dominion within the Empire and so he was easily able to reconcile himself to the belief that fighting for Britain in defence of nations under threat from Germany was the right thing to do. In mid-August 1914 he responded to the Admiralty telegram and volunteered for service. He received a temporary commission as lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, although hostile to spending money on armaments at the time The Riddle of the Sands was published, later gave the book the credit for persuading public opinion to fund vital measures against the German naval threat, and he was instrumental in securing Childers's recall.

Naval service
Childers's first task was, in reversal of the plot of The Riddle of the Sands, to draw up a plan for the invasion of Germany by way of the Frisian Islands. He was then allocated to HMS Engadine (1911), a seaplane tender of the Harwich Force, as an instructor in coastal navigation to newly trained pilots. His duties included flying as a navigator and observer. A sortie navigating over a familiar coastline in the Cuxhaven Raid (an inconclusive bombing attack on the Cuxhaven airship base on Christmas Day 1914) earned him a mention in despatches. In 1915, he was transferred in a similar role to HMS Ben-my-Chree, in which he served in the Gallipoli Campaign and the eastern Mediterranean, earning himself a Distinguished Service Cross.

He was sent back to London in April 1916 to serve in the Admiralty where, because he understood the requirements of airmen, his work included the mundane task of allocating seaplanes to their intended ships. It took Childers until autumn of that year to extricate himself and train for service with a new coastal motor-boat squadron operating in the English Channel.

Irish Convention
In July 1917, the year following the Easter Rising, Horace Plunkett asked for Childers (then a lieutenant-commander in the RNAS serving at a seaplane station at Dunkirk), to be relieved of his operational duties and assigned as secretary to prime minister David Lloyd George's Home Rule Convention. This was an initiative, suggested by Jan Smuts who had used the tactic successfully at the culmination of the Boer War, to convene within Ireland all shades of Irish political opinion to agree a method of government. Plunkett did not have his way, however, as Childers's writings had identified him as a partisan for Home Rule; instead he was appointed as an assistant secretary, with the role of advising the nationalist factions on procedure and presenting their case in formal terms. Talks lasted nine months and at the end Plunkett was obliged to pass on his conclusions that no agreement could be reached: the issues of devolved fiscal powers for the new government, and guarantees to Unionists of the right to nominate a percentage of members of parliament, forcing deadlock. Lloyd George, who was facing the consequences of a German breakout from the trenches in France ("the gravest military crisis of the war"), took no action.

Royal Air Force
On his return to London in April 1918, Childers found himself transferred into the newly created Royal Air Force, with the rank of major. He was attached to the new Independent Bomber Command as a group intelligence officer, having the responsibility of preparing the navigational briefings for attacks on Berlin. The raids were forestalled by the Armistice and Childers's last assignment was to provide an intelligence assessment of the effects of bombing raids in Belgium. He departed Royal Air Force service on 10 March 1919.

Marriage
In autumn 1903, Childers travelled to the United States as part of a reciprocal visit between the Honourable Artillery Company of London and the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts of Boston. Childers had with him a letter of introduction to Dr. Hamilton Osgood, an eminent and wealthy physician in the city, that had been provided by Boston banker Sumner Permain, a friend of Childers's father. Childers was invited to dinner at Osgood's house and there he met Mary Alden Osgood (known as "Molly"), the host's daughter. The well-read republican-minded heiress and Childers found each other congenial company and Childers elected to extend his stay, with much time shared with Molly. The pair were married at Boston's Trinity Church on 6 January 1904. Cousin Robert Barton travelled to Boston to be best man.

Childers returned to London with his wife and resumed his position in the House of Commons. His reputation as an influential author gave the couple access to the political establishment, which Molly relished, but at the same time she set to work to rid Childers of his already faltering imperialism. In her turn Molly developed a strong admiration for Britain, its institutions and, as she then saw it, its willingness to go to war in the interests of smaller nations against the great. Over the next seven years they lived comfortably in their rented flat in Chelsea, supported by Childers's salary—he had received promotion to the position of parliamentary Clerk of Petitions in 1903—his continuing writings and, not least, generous benefactions from Dr. Osgood.

Molly, despite a severe weakness in the legs following a childhood skating injury, took enthusiastically to sailing, first in Sunbeam and later on many voyages in her father's gift, Asgard. Childers's letters to his wife show the couple's contentment during this time. Three sons were born: Erskine in December 1905, Henry, who died before his first birthday, in February 1907, and Robert Alden in December 1910.

Writing
Childers's first published work was some light detective stories he contributed to The Cambridge Review while he was editor.

In the Ranks of the C.I.V.
His first book was In the Ranks of the C.I.V., an account of his experiences in the Boer War, but he wrote it without any thought of publication: while serving with the Honourable Artillery Company in South Africa he composed many long, descriptive letters about his experiences to his two sisters, Dulcibella and Constance. They and a family friend, Elizabeth Thompson, daughter of George Smith of the publishing house Smith, Elder, edited the letters into book form. The print proofs were waiting for Childers to approve on his return from the war in October 1900 and Smith, Elder published the work in November. It was well-timed to catch the public's interest in the war, which continued until May 1902, and it sold in substantial numbers.

Childers edited his colleague Basil Williams's more formal book, The HAC in South Africa, the official history of the regiment's part in the campaign, for publication in 1903.

Childers's neighbour, Leo Amery, was editor of The Times History of the War in South Africa, and having already persuaded Basil Williams to write volume four of the work, he used this to persuade Childers to prepare volume five. This profitable commission took up much of Childers's free time until publication in 1907. It drew attention to British political and military errors and made unfavourable contrast with the tactics of the Boer guerrillas.

The Riddle of the Sands
In January 1901, Childers started work on his novel, The Riddle of the Sands, but initially progress was slow; it was not until winter of that year that he was able to tell Williams, in one of his regular letters, of the outline of the plot. At the end of the following year, after a hard summer of writing, the manuscript went to Reginald Smith at Smith Elder. But in February 1903, just as Childers was hoping to return to editing The HAC in South Africa, Smith sent back the novel, with instructions for extensive changes. With the help of his sisters, who cross-checked the new manuscript pages against the existing material, Childers produced the final version in time for publication in May 1903. Based on his own sailing trips with his brother Henry along the German coast, it predicted war with Germany and called for British preparedness. There has been much speculation about which of Childers's friends was the model for "Carruthers" in the novel: he is based not on Henry Childers but on the author's long-term friend the yachting enthusiast Walter Runciman. "Davies", of course, is Childers himself. Widely popular, the book has never gone out of print. The Observer included the book on its list of "The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time". The Telegraph listed it as the third best spy novel of all time. It has been called the first spy novel (a claim challenged by advocates of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, published two years earlier), and enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I. It was an extremely influential book: Winston Churchill later credited it as a major reason that the Admiralty decided to establish naval bases at Invergordon, Rosyth on the Firth of Forth and Scapa Flow in Orkney. It was also a notable influence on authors such as John Buchan and Eric Ambler.

"Cavalry controversy"
Motivated by his expectation of war with Germany, Childers wrote two books on cavalry warfare, both strongly critical of what he saw as outmoded British tactics. Everyone agreed that cavalry should be trained to fight dismounted with firearms, but military traditionalists wanted cavalry still to be trained as the arme blanche, bringing shock tactics to bear by charging the enemy with lance and sabre. Training in the traditional, mounted tactics had been reestablished after the modernising reformer Field Marshal Roberts retired in 1904, when General Sir John French, who had commanded successful cavalry charges at the Battle of Elandslaagte and the relief of Kimberley, was promoted to the senior levels of the army. Childers's War and the Arme Blanche (1910) carried a foreword from Roberts, and recommended that cavalry, instead of charging the enemy positions, should "make genuinely destructive assaults upon riflemen and guns" by firing from the saddle. French, among the traditionalists, responded in defence of the old tactics in his preface (in an unlikely alliance) to Prussian general Friedrich von Bernhardi's Cavalry in War and Peace (1910). This allowed Childers to counter with German Influence on British Cavalry (1911), an "intolerant" rejoinder to the criticisms of his book made by French and Bernhardi.

The Framework of Home Rule
It was as a prospective Liberal Party candidate for Parliament that Childers wrote his last major book: The Framework of Home Rule (1911). Childers's principal argument was an economic one: that an Irish parliament (there would be no Westminster MPs) would be responsible for making fiscal policy for the benefit of the country, and would hold "dominion" status, in the same detached way in which Canada managed its affairs. His arguments were based in part on the findings of the Childers Commission of the 1890s, which was chaired by his cousin, Hugh Childers. Erskine Childers consulted Ulster Unionists in preparing Framework and wrote that their reluctance to accept the policy would easily be overcome. Although it represented a major change from the opinions Childers had previously held, enacting Irish Home Rule was the Liberal government's policy at the time.

An emerging problem was that the book assumed fiscal independence and self-government for the whole island of Ireland, including the wealthier and more industrialised counties around Belfast. During his research Childers naïvely came to believe that the opposition of the unionists in the region was mainly bluff, or that the industrialists' entrepreneurial spirit would easily overcome any monetary disadvantages they might initially suffer. In this he was wrong: this disparity (together with the largely Protestant unionists' fear of Catholic "rule from Rome") was a significant contributor to the failure of the 1917 Home Rule Convention and, ultimately, to the Partition of Ireland of 1921.

Reception for the work, in both England and Ireland, was positive, although the Belfast Newsletter warned that the pretensions and influence of the Catholic church would endanger acceptance of any such proposals. The Manchester Guardian took issue with Childers's optimistic comparisons with other British overseas territories, warning that the manner of colonial rule over indigenous populations, effective in distant parts of the empire, would be impossible to implement in Ireland. This point was taken up by several other reviewers as an indication of a tendency in Childers towards white supremacy. For example: Robert Lynd of the Daily News wrote that Childers was drawing on the argument that "the essential Irish character[…]is the same as the character of other white races," and the Glasgow Herald wondered why Childers would confine the benefits of freedom only to the "white races".

Conversion
There was no single incident which was responsible for Childers's conversion from supporter of the British Empire to his leading role in the Irish revolution. In his own words, delivered on 8 June 1922 while a Teachta Dála (Deputy) at the Dáil Éireann, replying to a motion of censure: "[...] by a process of moral and intellectual conviction I came away from Unionism into Nationalism and finally into Republicanism. That is a simple story." There was a growing conviction, later turning to "fanatical obsession" (as his critics and friends both would suggest ) that the island of Ireland should have its own government.

An early source of disillusionment with Britain's imperial policy was his view that, given more patient and skilful negotiation, the Boer War could have been avoided. His friend and biographer Basil Williams noticed his growing doubts about Britain's actions in South Africa while they were on campaign together: "Both of us, who came out as hide-bound Tories, began to tend towards more liberal ideas, partly from the [...] democratic company we were keeping, but chiefly, I think, from our discussions on politics and life generally." Molly Childers, brought up in a family that traced its roots to the Mayflower, also influenced her husband's outlook on the right of Britain to rule other countries.

The ground was well prepared, then, when in the summer of 1908 he and his cousin Robert Barton took a holiday motor tour inspecting Horace Plunkett's agricultural co-operatives in the south and west of Ireland—areas ravaged with poverty. "I have come back", he wrote to Basil Williams, "finally and immutably a convert to Home Rule ... though we both grew up steeped in the most irreconcilable sort of Unionism."

In the autumn of 1910 Childers resigned his post as Clerk of Petitions to leave himself free to join the Liberal Party, with its declared commitment to Home Rule: the Liberal Party relied on Irish Home Rule MPs for its Commons majority. In a lecture delivered in Dublin in March 1912, Childers described the benefits to Ireland, and opportunities for nationalists, from the Liberal party's proposed new home rule bill (placed before the UK parliament on 11 April 1912). Childers's narrative explaining the Liberal's proposals was well received, but he noted that his audience reacted "coldly" to any suggestion that, post-independence, Ireland could participate in the future of the Empire.

Childers secured for himself the candidature in one of the parliamentary seats in the naval town of Devonport. As the well-known writer of The Riddle of the Sands, with its implied support for an expanded Royal Navy, Childers could hardly fail to win the vote whenever the next election was called. But in response to threats of civil war from the Ulster Unionists, the party began to entertain the idea of removing some or all of Ulster from a self-governed Ireland. Childers abandoned his candidacy and left the party.

The Liberals' Home Rule Bill, introduced in 1912, would eventually pass into law in 1914, but was immediately—by a separate Act of Parliament—shelved for the duration of the Great War, which had just begun. The Amending Bill to exclude six of the nine counties of Ulster for an indeterminate period was eliminated altogether. On Easter Monday of 1916 the Irish Volunteers (who had taken possession of the rifles Childers had delivered at Howth in 1914) mounted a violent uprising (the "Easter Rising") in protest at the delay. Its harsh suppression using artillery, and the ruthless prosecution of the captured ringleaders, dismayed Childers and he did not regret that the rifles from the Howth landing had been used against British soldiers.

Home Rule
In the United Kingdom General Election of November 1918 Sinn Féin secured 73 of the 105 Irish seats. The party's policy was to refuse to take up their places in the Westminster parliament and in January 1919 they set up their own assembly, the Dáil Éireann, in Dublin. In March 1919 Childers presented himself at the Dublin office of Sinn Féin and offered his services. Desmond FitzGerald, responsible for Sinn Féin publicity, recognised that an English author with a wide following would be useful and he suggested that Childers should assist him. FitzGerald and Robert Barton arranged for Childers to be introduced to the Irish military leader Michael Collins, who in turn introduced him to Éamon de Valera, the President of Sinn Féin. After recuperating from a severe attack of influenza at Glendalough, Childers returned to London, where he could more effectively lobby on behalf of Sinn Féin. He rejoined Molly at their Chelsea flat, while also renting a house in Dublin. Molly was reluctant to remove to Dublin: she was mindful of her sons' education at English schools and she believed that she and her husband could best serve the Nationalist cause by influencing opinion in London. She eventually gave up their London home of fifteen years to settle in Dublin at the end of 1919.

A month after returning to London, Childers received an invitation to meet the Sinn Féin leaders in Dublin. Anticipating an offer of a major role, Childers hurried to return but, apart from Collins, he found the leadership wary, or even hostile. Arthur Griffith, in particular, considered him as at best a renegade and traitor to Britain, or at worst as a British spy. He was appointed to join the Irish delegation from the as-yet-unrecognised Irish state to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. His unpromising role, as Childers saw it, was to advance the cause of Irish self-determination by reminding delegates of the ideals of freedom over which Britain had gone to war. The initiative proved unavailing, and he returned once again to London.

In 1920 he published Military Rule in Ireland, a pamphlet made up of eight articles from the left-wing London Daily News appearing between March and May 1920, each a strong attack on British army operations in Ireland. At the 1921 elections, he was elected (unopposed) to the Second Dáil as Sinn Féin member for the Kildare–Wicklow constituency, and published the pamphlet ''Is Ireland a Danger to England? The strategic question examined'', rebutting British prime minister Lloyd George's claim that an independent Ireland risked Britain's security.

In February 1921 Childers became editor of the Irish Bulletin and Director of Publicity for the Dáil after the arrest of Desmond FitzGerald. He stood as a Sinn Féin (anti-treaty) candidate at the 1922 general election but lost his seat.

Irish War of Independence
From 1919 the Irish Republican Army (IRA), notionally under the command of Irish defence minister Cathal Brugha, regarded itself as a legitimate force answerable to the Dáil Éireann. It began a series of attacks on British institutions in Ireland. The "Irish War of Independence", as the series of IRA strikes (and British reprisals, such as those by the "Black and Tans") became known, lasted until July 1921, when Éamon de Valera and British prime minister David Lloyd George agreed a truce. Childers had exercised more influence on the British change of heart than he knew: his reporting in the United States had strengthened sympathy for the Nationalist cause and in turn the US government applied pressure on the British administration.

Treaty negotiations
On 12 July 1921 de Valera and a small group, including Childers as secretary, travelled to London for discussions with Lloyd George. De Valera submitted Lloyd George's proposals to the Dáil and the outcome was an Irish delegation sent to London on 7 October 1921 for formal talks to negotiate the terms of a treaty. De Valera did not go but he insisted against strong opposition that Childers, in whom he had particular faith, should remain secretary. Protracted negotiations continued until agreement was reached on 5 December 1921.

Childers was vehemently opposed to the final draft of the agreement, even when the clauses that required Irish leaders to take the Oath of Allegiance to the British monarch had been redefined to remove any real authority of the Crown in Ireland. As secretary to the delegation (rather than a full delegate) his determined resistance to the terms offered by the British was overruled, notwithstanding his attempts "forever trying to manipulate the Irish delegates into uncompromising positions". At the termination of the talks, Lloyd George noted a "sullen" Childers, disappointed that his "tenacious [and] sinister" attempts to wreck the negotiations had failed. Historian Frank Pakenham was less critical: many of the English concessions that had permitted the Irish delegation eventually to sign the document had been introduced at Childers's instigation.

The Anglo-Irish treaty agreement was presented to the Dáil and debated between December 1921 and January 1922. Childers denounced it, declaring that by accepting compromise Ireland had of its own volition relinquished its independence. Arthur Griffith, a member of the delegation who had pragmatically conceded to England over the Oath of Allegiance, alleged that Childers was a secret agent of England now working to wreck the agreement and destabilise the new state. The Dáil voted to adopt the terms by the narrow majority of 64 to 57.

Onset of civil war
The treaty with Britain broadened the division between Sinn Féin and the "Irregulars" a breakaway anti-treaty faction of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) led by Cathal Brugha. Ireland descended into civil war on 28 June 1922, when government forces, using borrowed British artillery, bombarded the Four Courts, once Ireland's judicial centre but now used as the military headquarters of the IRA.

Fugitive
During the civil war Childers was on the run with the anti-treaty forces in County Cork and County Kerry. The author Frank O'Connor was involved with Childers during the later part of the Civil War and gave a colourful picture of Childers's activities. According to O'Connor, Childers was ostracised from the anti-treaty forces and referred to as "that bloody Englishman", with untrained military officers, newly created from "country boys", ignoring Childers's considerable experience as a professional soldier. The high command of the anti-treaty forces, too, distanced themselves from Childers. His lowly rank was "Staff Captain, Southern Command, IRA". Although the headquarters of the rebel army was at Macroom, County Cork only for a short time, while there Childers was able to produce southern editions of An Phoblacht which, as it was produced in the "war zone", he called Republican War News. His clandestine printing press was moved between safe houses by pony and trap.

Childers's reporting of the skirmishes allowed Kevin O'Higgins, the provisional government's justice minister, to declare that Childers was in fact the leader of the rebels, and indeed nothing less than the instigator of the civil war itself, through his resistance to compromise with England. Frank O'Connor saw that the government's intention was to "prepare the way for [Childers's] execution". The death in an ambush of Michael Collins intensified the desire of Free State authorities for retribution, and on 28 September 1922, the Dáil introduced the Army Emergency Powers Resolution, establishing martial law powers and listing carrying firearms without a licence a capital offence.

Early in November 1922, after his printing press had fallen down a hillside and become lost in a bog, Childers decided that the cause would be better served if he were at de Valera's side as he attempted to rally the anti-treaty forces. Accordingly he set off by bicycle (in company with David Robinson, also on the run) on the 200 mi journey from Cork to his old home at Glendalough, as a staging post before meeting De Valera in Dublin. On 10 November Free State forces, possibly informed by an estate worker, burst into the house and arrested him. Robinson had hidden himself in a cellar and was not captured. Upon hearing of Childers's capture Winston Churchill expressed his satisfaction, referring to Childers as "the mischief-making, murderous renegade". Years later, Churchill's opinion of Childers seems to have softened referring to him as a "man of distinction, ability and courage[...]who had shown daring and ardour against the Germans in the Cuxhaven raid on New Year's Day 1915[...]."

Trial and appeal
Childers was put on trial by a military court on the charge of possessing a small Spanish-made "Destroyer" .32 calibre semi-automatic pistol on his person in violation of the Emergency Powers Resolution. The gun had been a gift from Michael Collins before Collins became head of the pro-treaty Provisional Government. Childers was convicted by the military court and sentenced to death on 20 November 1922.

Childers appealed against the sentence, and this was heard the next day by Judge Charles O'Connor, who said he lacked jurisdiction because of the civil war: "The Provisional Government is now de jure as well as de facto the ruling authority bound to administer, to preserve the peace and to repress by force, if necessary, all persons who seek by violence to overthrow it ... He [Childers] disputes the authority of the [military] Tribunal and comes to this Civil Court for protection, but its answer must be that its jurisdiction is ousted by the State of War which he himself has helped to produce."

Childers's lawyer appealed to the Supreme Court, but before it was even accepted by the court and listed as an appealable case, he was put to death.

Execution
Childers was executed on 24 November 1922 by firing squad at the Beggars Bush Barracks in Dublin. Before his execution he shook hands with the firing squad. He obtained a promise from his then 16-year-old son, the future President of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers, to seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed his death sentence. His final words, spoken to the firing squad, were: "Take a step or two forward, lads, it will be easier that way."

Childers's body was buried at Beggars Bush Barracks until 1923, when it was exhumed and reburied in the republican plot at Glasnevin Cemetery.

Legacy
Winston Churchill, who had exerted pressure on Michael Collins and the Free State government to make the treaty work by crushing the rebellion, expressed the view that, "No man has done more harm or shown more genuine malice or endeavoured to bring a greater curse upon the common people of Ireland than this strange being, actuated by a deadly and malignant hatred for the land of his birth.". By contrast, Éamon de Valera said of him, "He died the Prince he was. Of all the men I ever met, I would say he was the noblest.".

On 23 November 2022 the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ transmitted a television programme to mark the centenary of Childers's execution. While acknowledging the importance within Ireland of his political and revolutionary achievements, and his role as "an active propagandist" for the revolution, it contended that his fame beyond Ireland now rests only on his novel The Riddle of the Sands.

It was the express wish of Molly Childers, upon her death in 1964, that the extensive and meticulous collection of papers and documents from her husband's in-depth involvement with the Irish struggles of the 1920s should be locked away until 50 years after his death. In 1972, Erskine Hamilton Childers started the process of finding an official biographer for his father. In 1974, Andrew Boyle (previous biographer of Brendan Bracken and Lord Reith amongst others) was given the task of exploring the vast Childers archive, and his biography of Robert Erskine Childers was finally published in 1977.

In December 2021 An Post, the Irish national post office, issued a postage stamp to mark the centenary of Childers's execution. Also available was a "first day cover", with an image of the Asgard.

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

title: Erskine Childers (author)


text:
Brendan Comiskey

Brendan Comiskey (born August 13, 1935), is the Roman Catholic Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Ferns. He was born in Clontibret, County Monaghan, Ireland.

He was ordained a priest of the little known Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary on 25 June 1961, and appointed Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Dublin in 1979.

He was appointed Bishop of Ferns on 4 April 1984.

He resigned on 1 April 2002, over charges that he had failed to deal adequately with allegations that Fr. Seán Fortune and others who were sexually abusing children.

Early career
Comiskey's early clerical career was extremely promising. He was head of his order in Ireland and the UK by the age of 34, became an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Dublin at age 45 and soon thereafter was appointed to the Diocese of Ferns at the age of 47. In 2016, his name still appeared on the website of his congregation where he said to be a retreat giver whose conferences are "filled with profound content mixed with wit and humour."

Diocese mired in clerical sexual abuse
Brendan Comiskey succeeded the ebullient but utterly ineffective Donal Herlihy as Bishop of Ferns in 1984. Herlihy, a former staff member at the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, is reported to have had alcohol-related issues in his last years as bishop and his governance of the diocese was slack.

As a result of The Ferns Report, published by the Irish Government on 25 October 2005 into child sex abuse in this diocese (between 1962 and 2002), the wider Irish public became aware of a catalogue of abuse going back to Herlihy's tenure on office involving 100 individual cases involving 21 priests.

It is alleged that Tomás Ó Fiaich, Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh, had been told about the allegations, as had the Holy See.

Resignation
Comiskey resigned in 2002 after the transmission of the BBC documentary "Suing the Pope" amid allegations that he did not report allegations that Fr Sean Fortune had abused a number of children while Comiskey was in control of the diocese. Fortune was a serial paedophile with a manipulative personality and Comiskey admits he found him difficult to deal with. Fortune committed suicide while on bail.

According to the founder of the abuse victims' charity One in Four, Colm O'Gorman, Comiskey was not alone in his responsibility to report the allegations to civil authorities. O'Gorman is quoted as saying, "It would be sad if he (Comiskey) was ultimately scapegoated in all this and the church failed to accept full responsibility".

Bishop Éamonn Walsh was installed in March 2002 as Apostolic Administrator in Ferns and implemented a new child protection policy which resulted in many more historic allegations of child-sexual abuse emerging.

In 2014 Brendan Comiskey "broke his silence" on the child abuse scandal in Ireland claiming that he had done his best and "that he was deeply sorry for all that had happened,"

title: Brendan Comiskey


text:
Quantum Corporation

Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides technology to store, manage, archive, and protect video and unstructured data throughout the data life cycle. Their products are used by enterprises, media and entertainment companies, government agencies, big data companies, and life science organizations. Quantum is headquartered in San Jose, California and has offices around the world, supporting customers globally in addition to working with a network of distributors, VARs, DMRs, OEMs and other suppliers.

History
Quantum was founded in 1980 as Quantum Software Systems Inc. By 1984, it led the market for mid-capacity 5.25-inch drives. That year, a subsidiary was launched called Plus Development to focus on the development of hardcards. Plus Development became a successful designer of 3.5-inch drives with Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics (now Panasonic) as the contract manufacturer. By 1989, Quantum led the compact drive market.

The company had 11 new models of 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. It signed distribution agreements with Rein Electronik in Germany and Inelco Peripheriques in France. It also merged its subsidiary Plus Development Corporation into its Commercial Products Division.

Quantum was the largest drive producer worldwide in 1994.

In 2000, Maxtor agreed to acquire Quantum’s hard disk drive group. In 2004, Quantum became a member of the LTO Consortium after acquiring Certance.

In 2012, Quantum announced Q-Cloud, which combines on-premise storage with cloud storage. In 2015, the company released a multi-tier storage product, StorNext 5.3, which supports Q-Cloud and powers the company’s Xcellis workflow storage technology.

In 2018, Jamie Lerner became CEO, and Quantum shifted focus from hard drives/tape to providing data storage, management, and protection for video and other unstructured data.

In 2019, the company added a subscription for cloud-based device management and product, called Distributed Cloud Services.

In 2020-2021 Quantum acquired technology to support the shift in focus including ActiveScale and CatDV. They also acquired video surveillance software from Pivot3.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Quantum was a recipient of a government loan of US$10 million as part of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

In October 2021, Quantum and IBM announced they would work together to develop LTO-10, the next generation of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology.

In April 2023, Quantum announced a new scale-out unstructured data storage platform called Myriad. The solution is software-defined, initially running on Quantum-supplied hardware but capable of running on public cloud infrastructure.

Acquisitions
Prior to the 2000 merger of the hard drive division, Quantum began a series of tape technology acquisitions:
 * 1998 – ATL Products, a manufacturer of automated tape libraries.
 * 1999 – Meridian Data, a network-attached storage supplier.
 * 2001 – M4 Data (Holdings) Ltd., a manufacturer of tape libraries.
 * 2002 – Benchmark Storage Innovations, who manufactured the VStape product line under a Quantum license.
 * 2005 – Certance, the former tape business of Seagate Technology, becoming a member of the LTO consortium.
 * 2006 – Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC), Scalar brand tape libraries, StorNext filesystem and de-duplication technology.
 * 2011 – Pancetera Software, a specialist in data management and protection for virtual environments, for $12 million.
 * 2014 – SymForm, a cloud storage company.
 * 2020 - Atavium, storage and data workflow startup.
 * 2020 – ActiveScale object storage business acquired from Western Digital.
 * 2020 – UK-based Square Box Systems Ltd, maker of CatDV and a specialist in data cataloging, user collaboration, and digital asset management software.
 * 2021 – Video surveillance assets from Pivot3, a hyperconverged infrastructure company.
 * 2021 – EnCloudEn, a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software company.

Products
Quantum provides data storage, management, and protection for video and other unstructured data. The company’s products, solutions and services include:

StorNext
At the core of Quantum's high-performance shared storage product line is Quantum StorNext software which enables video editing and management of large video and image datasets. StorNext software is a parallel file processing system that provides fast streaming performance and data access, a shared file storage environment for Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, and Linux workstations, and intelligent data management to protect data across its lifecycle. StorNext runs on standard servers and is sold with storage arrays that are used within the StorNext environment. These storage arrays include Quantum QXS-Series, a line of high-performance, reliable hybrid storage arrays, offered with either HDDs, SSDs, or some combination of the two. StorNext software can also manage data across different types, or pools, of storage, such as public cloud object stores and disk-based object storage systems. StorNext supports a broad range of both private and public object stores. For customers that have been archiving video and image data for years, StorNext is also integrated with tape storage and can assign infrequently used but important data to tape to create a large-scale active archive.

In 2011, the company added the StorNext appliance offerings to its product family. In addition to the StorNext Archive Enabled Library (AEL), the company added a metadata controller (StorNext M330), a scale-out gateway appliance (G300), and several scalable storage systems (QM1200, QS1200 and QD6000). In February 2012, the company bolstered the StorNext appliance family with the addition of the QS2400 Storage System, followed in May by the M660 metadata appliance.

The HSeries is a line of high-performance storage arrays. In January 2021, Quantum introduced its H2000 series of hybrid arrays that provide on-premise storage for media production workflows and block storage arrays that provide an alternative to QXS. It includes the 2U H2012 and the H2024, which provides 307 TB after data reduction. The H4000 appliance series was released in late 2021. The series uses a converged infrastructure that runs file, block, and client services virtually on a single box.

In April 2022, Quantum released the H4000 Essential. It is for small, independent creative teams and provides shared storage and automatic content indexing, discovery, and workflow collaboration by combining Quantum’s CatDV asset management and the company’s StorNext 7 shared storage software.

F-Series NVMe
In April 2019, Quantum introduced F-Series, a new line of NVMe storage arrays “designed for performance, availability, and reliability.” Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) flash drives allow for massive parallel processing, while the latest Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking technology provides direct access between workstations and the NVMe storage devices. These hardware features are combined with the Quantum Cloud Storage Platform and the StorNext file system to provide storage capabilities for post-production houses, broadcasters and other rich media environments.

In April 2022, the company’s F2100 NVMe storage appliance was released as the latest in the F-Series line It provides 50 GB/s for multi-client reads and up to 737 TB of raw NVMe storage, which was an increase from previous F-Series products. To provide proactive system monitoring, it was integrated with Quantum Cloud-Based Analytics software.

Xcellis
The Quantum Xcellis product line was released in 2015. The first products were designed for disk and SSDs. In 2018, the company added nonvolatile memory express to its Xcellis NAS appliances. The NVMe Xcellis option was designed for flash storage.

Tape storage
Since 1994, when it acquired the Digital Linear Tape product line from Digital, Quantum has sold tape storage products, including tape drives, media and automation.

LTO tape drives and media
In 2007, Quantum discontinued development of the DLT line in favor of Linear Tape-Open (LTO), which it began selling in 2005 following its acquisition of Certance. LTO is an open tape format designed for high-capacity long-term storage. It is often used for large-scale cold storage.

In September 2020, Quantum, IBM, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise released the specifications for LTO-9 storage tape technology. Products using this technology were available a year later. In 2021, Quantum partnered with IBM on its development of LTO-10 tape drives and media.

Scalar tape libraries
In 2012, Quantum introduced its Scalar LTFS (Linear Tape File System) appliance, which offers new modes of portability and user accessibility for archived content on LTO tape.

In 2016, Quantum refreshed its Scalar LTO tape library family and added an appliance for rich media archiving. The three new systems are part of the Quantum Scalar Storage Platform aimed at handling large-scale unstructured data. The Scalar i3 and i6 was introduced with support for LTO-6 and LTO-7 tapes, supporting LTO-9 today. The Quantum Scalar i3 is designed for small to medium-sized businesses and departmental configurations. It scales up to 3 PB in a 12U rack space. The Quantum Scalar i6 is a midrange library for small enterprises. It scales up to 12 PB within a single 48U rack.

The StorNext AEL6 archiving appliance combines the Quantum Scalar i6 library with Quantum's StorNext data management software for archive storage. It has self-healing auto-migration and targets rich media use cases. In 2021, Quantum introduced Scalar Ransom Block to prevent ransomware attacks on its Scalar tape libraries.

DXi-Series
Quantum introduced its first disk-based backup and recovery product, the DX30, in 2002 and has continued to build out this product line.

At the end of 2006, shortly after its acquisition of Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC), Quantum announced the first of its DXi-Series products incorporating data deduplication technology which ADIC had acquired from a small Australian company called Rocksoft earlier that year. Quantum expanded and enhanced this product line.

DXi-Series products incorporate Quantum's data deduplication technology, providing typical data reduction ratios of 15:1 or 93%. The company offers both target and source-based deduplication as well as integrated path-to-tape capability. DXi works with all major backup applications, including Symantec's OpenStorage (OST) API, Oracle SBT API, Veeam DMS, and supports everything from remote offices to corporate data centers. Quantum includes almost all software licenses for each model in the base price.

In 2011, in addition to its DXi-Series of disk backup products, Quantum offered its RDX removable disk libraries and NDX-8 NAS appliances for data protection in small business environments. In 2012, Quantum announced a virtual deduplication appliance, the DXi V1000.

In January, 2019, Quantum refreshed its DXi series, with the addition of the DXi9000 and DXi4800. The DXi9000 targets the enterprise market, scaling from 51 TB to 1 petabyte of usable capacity. The 12 TB hard drives allow for more storage using less physical space. The DXi4800 is a smaller-scale appliance targeting midmarket organizations and remote sites.

In 2021, Quantum replaced the V2000 and V4000 with the DXi V5000. The DXi is offered in both virtual and physical appliances, used by remote and branch offices that need a backup target system.

Virtual machine data protection
Quantum's vmPRO software and appliances were used for protecting virtual machine (VM) data. vmPRO software worked with DXi appliances and users' existing backup applications to integrate VM backup and recovery into their existing data protection processes.

In March 2012, Quantum announced that its vmPRO technology and DXi V1000 virtual appliance had been selected by Xerox as a key component of the company's cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) services.

In August 2012, Quantum announced Q-Cloud, its own branded cloud-based data protection service, which is also based on vmPRO and DXi technology.

Media asset management software
CatDV is a media management and workflow automation platform that helps organizations manage large volumes of unstructured data such as video, images, audio files, and PDF digital assets. The software catalogs and analyzes these files and can be used with Quantum’s StorNext file storage.

In April 2022, the company released the NVIDIA AI platform to provide AI and machine learning (ML) to video production and data management workflows via CatDV software. The new platform combines the CatDV asset management and automation platform, NVIDIA A2 Tensor Core GPU infrastructure, and the NVIDIA Deepstream, Riva, and Maxine software development kits.

Lattus
In late 2012, Quantum introduced the Lattus product family OEMed from Amplidata, an object storage system composed of storage nodes, access nodes and controller nodes for large data stores. Lattus-X was the first disk-based archive in the Lattus family that includes a native HTTP REST interface, and CIFS and NFS access to applications.

ActiveScale software and systems
In 2020, Quantum entered into an agreement with Western Digital Technologies, Inc. to acquire its ActiveScale object storage business. ActiveScale allows companies to manage, protect, and preserve unstructured data, from a few hundred terabytes to tens of petabytes. It is used in industries such as media and entertainment, surveillance, big data, genomics, HPC, telecom, and medical imaging.

In 2021, Quantum released subscription-based ActiveScale 6.0.

Cold storage archives
In October 2021, Quantum introduced ActiveScale Cold Storage as a storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offering. It combines the company’s tape technology with the ActiveScale object storage platform. It is also used to store, migrate, and restore objects to and from the cold archives.

Video surveillance storage
Quantum has a number of products that capture and store video data, including video recording servers and hyperconverged storage systems. The VS-HCI series provides hyperconverged infrastructure for surveillance recording and video management.

In July 2021, Quantum acquired assets and intellectual property from Pivot3, a hyperconverged infrastructure technology company. Pivot3’s video surveillance appliances, NVRs, management applications, and scale-out hyperconverged software are sold under Quantum’s VS-Series product portfolio. In August 2021, Quantum acquired EnCloudEn, a hyperconverged infrastructure software company.

In March 2022, the company released the Unified Surveillance Platform (USP). The software platform could be used to record and store video surveillance data and runs on standard servers.

Autonomous vehicle edge storage
Quantum’s R-Series Edge Storage is a ruggedized storage system that captures large amounts of data generated by vehicles. The removable storage allows the data to be quickly transferred to a centralized data center.

Fireball
The Fireball brand of hard drives were manufactured between 1995 and 2001. In 1995, 540 MB Fireball hard drives using ATA and SCSI were available. In 1997, the Fireball ST, available in 1.6 GB to 6.4 GB capacities, was considered a top performer, while the Fireball TM was significantly slower.

title: Quantum Corporation


text:
Mössbauer (disambiguation)

Rudolf Mössbauer (1929–2011) was a German physicist.

Mössbauer may also refer to:

 * Mössbauer effect, or recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence
 * Mössbauer spectroscopy, a spectroscopic technique based on the Mössbauer effect

title: Mössbauer (disambiguation)


text:
Warren Rudman

Warren Bruce Rudman (May 18, 1930 – November 19, 2012) was an American attorney and Republican politician who served as United States Senator from New Hampshire between 1980 and 1993. He was known as a moderate centrist, to such an extent that President Clinton approached him in 1994 about replacing departing Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen in Clinton's cabinet, an offer that Rudman declined.

After two terms in office, Rudman chose not to run for re-election in 1992. At the time of his death, he was a co-chair of Albright Stonebridge Group; a retired partner in the international law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and an advisory board member of Promontory Financial Group. He previously sat on the board of directors of Raytheon, Collins & Aikman, Allied Waste, Boston Scientific and a number of funds in the Dreyfus Family of Funds.

Early life and education
Rudman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Theresa (née Levenson) and Edward G. Rudman. His family were Jewish immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Russia. Rudman lived his entire life in New Hampshire, with few exceptions. He attended the Valley Forge Military Academy boarding school in Wayne, Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate degree from Syracuse University, and served in the United States Army during the Korean War. He received his J.D. degree from Boston College Law School in 1960, and was appointed Attorney General of New Hampshire in 1970; serving in that capacity until 1976.

Career
From 2004 to 2006, Rudman led a team of attorneys that investigated accounting practices at Fannie Mae.

Prior to the September 11 attacks, Rudman had served on a now oft-cited national panel investigating the threat of international terrorism. He, along with fellow former Senator Gary Hart (D-CO), chaired the panel, and both Rudman and Hart have been lauded since September 11 for their prescient conclusions.

Rudman was an Advisory Board member and Co-Chair of the Partnership for a Secure America, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to recreating the bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy.

Rudman was one of the few Jewish politicians elected in New Hampshire. He spent his final years as a resident of Hollis, New Hampshire, a suburb of Nashua.

He was the author of a memoir called Combat.

Senate career
Rudman defeated incumbent John Durkin in the 1980 election, riding the wave of Ronald Reagan's landslide victory. Durkin resigned and the Governor appointed Rudman to fill the vacancy in late December 1980. Rudman served on the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Ethics Committee. His best-known legislative effort was the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act.

A moderate Republican, Rudman was conservative on matters of fiscal and defense policy—favoring tax cuts, reduced domestic spending, and higher military spending, but liberal on social issues—supporting a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, gay rights, and opposing a constitutional amendment mandating voluntary school prayer. Rudman, along with John H. Sununu, was a key player in the appointment of Rudman's personal friend, Supreme Court Justice David Souter, to both the First Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal later editorialized about the appointment, saying: "Rudman, the man who helped put liberal jurist David Souter on the high court" and who in his "Yankee Republican liberalism" took "pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House chief of staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle." Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had "suspected all along" that Souter would not "overturn activist liberal precedents." Sununu later said of Rudman, "In spite of it all, he's a good friend. But I've always known that he was more liberal than he liked the world to think he was."

Post-Senate years
After leaving the Senate, Rudman continued to practice law and be an active member in national politics. Senator John McCain asked Rudman to serve as his campaign chair during McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. On January 8, 2001, he was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Clinton.

He was twice considered as a possible vice presidential candidate on the ticket of two parties other than the GOP. In 1996, Ross Perot offered Rudman the slot to be his vice presidential running mate on the Reform Party ticket, but Rudman refused (as did former Democratic Senator David Boren of Oklahoma). Perot eventually selected Pat Choate. In 2004, Rudman was mentioned as possible running mate for Democratic nominee John Kerry. Kerry eventually selected John Edwards.

In 1999, a leaked report by the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) stated that Carlos Hank González, a Mexican criminal, politician and influential businessman, and his two sons are so involved in drug trafficking and money laundering that they "pose a significant criminal threat to the United States." After the report was disclosed, the Hank family mobilized to rebut the allegations, hiring high-profile lawyers including Rudman. Rudman was an attorney with the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and represented Hank Gonzalez's oldest son, Carlos Hank Rhon.

Rudman lobbied the government to disavow the report and in March 2000 Attorney General Janet Reno wrote a letter that said the report "was beyond the substantive expertise and area of responsibility of the NDIC.″ At Rudman's request, a copy of Reno's letter was sent to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan because of the Hank family's banking interests in the United States. Carlos Hank Rhon was later fined $40 million to settle charges that he violated banking laws when he bought Laredo National Bancshares in Texas and failed to disclose the sale of a $20 million share in Laredo National to his father.

He was a co-chair, along with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business consulting and strategy firm based in Washington, D.C.

He died of cancer on November 19, 2012. His death came only a month after his predecessor John Durkin had died.

After his death, President Obama praised Rudman as an early advocate for fiscal responsibility.

title: Warren Rudman


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User talk:Sihan

Dear Sihan, welcome to the wikipedia ... Muriel 19:33, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Sihan 22. May 2009: someone wise once wrote, "Take it with humour. What I am trying to express is that lots of people are just too serious with what is said or written about them or their subject".

title: User talk:Sihan


text:
Elastoplast

Elastoplast is a brand of adhesive bandages (also called sticking plasters) and medical dressing made by Beiersdorf.

Background
In 1928 Smith & Nephew of the UK acquired the licence to market and produce the Elastoplast range of bandages.

Beiersdorf bought the brand in 2000. It has become a generic trademark for "sticking plaster" in some Commonwealth countries including the United Kingdom and Australia.

In some countries in Europe Hansaplast, a brand name started by Beiersdorf in 1922, is used instead. A third trademark, named Curitas, is used in parts of Latin America.

Nick Kochan wrote about Elastoplast in his book The World's Greatest Brands (1996); noting that "the early success of the brand was due to its high-stretch fabric material coupled with an effective adhesive"; and that it has as strong position in worldwide markets, particularly in the UK.

In the 1970s Elastoplast marketed its Airstrip product as "the fresh air plaster". The plasters were sold in small flat tin.

On 4 July 2005 Elastoplast launched a £1.1 million advertising campaign which introduced brand heroes called "the Plastermen", which had helped advertise the newly launched SilverHealing plasters.

title: Elastoplast


text: Talk:Texas State University

title: Talk:Texas State University


text:
User:Lucas v1

User: Lucasv1

I am a student in an English college of Romania. I would be happy to provide translations especially in the fields of law and history.

title: User:Lucas v1


text:
William Rees-Mogg

William Rees-Mogg, Baron Rees-Mogg (14 July 1928 – 29 December 2012) was a British newspaper journalist who was Editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981. In the late 1970s, he served as High Sheriff of Somerset, and in the 1980s was Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain and Vice-Chairman of the BBC's Board of Governors. He was the father of the politicians Sir Jacob and Annunziata Rees-Mogg.

Early life
William Rees-Mogg was born in 1928 in Bristol, England. He was the son of Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg (1889–1962) of Cholwell House in the parish of Cameley in Somerset, an Anglican, and his Irish American Catholic wife, Beatrice Warren, a daughter of Daniel Warren of New York. William Rees-Mogg was raised in the Roman Catholic faith.

He was educated at Clifton College Preparatory School in Bristol and Charterhouse in Godalming, where he was Head of School.

Not yet eighteen, Rees-Mogg went up to Balliol College, Oxford, as a Brackenbury Scholar to read history in January 1946 as a place had fallen temporarily vacant. By the end of the Trinity (summer) term, he had been elected to the library committee (the junior committee) of the Oxford Union Society and was due to be an officer of the Oxford University Conservative Association under Margaret Roberts (the future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), President for Michaelmas (autumn) Term 1946.

However, having spent two terms at Oxford he did not return in October. He later wrote that he had been forced to give up his place to a disabled ex-serviceman. From 1946 to 1948, beginning with an exceptionally bitter winter, he did his National Service in the Royal Air Force education department rising to the rank of sergeant. His duties included teaching illiterate recruits to read and write, and his reference from his commanding officer stated that he was competent to perform simple tasks under supervision.

He returned to Oxford to complete his degree, and became President of Oxford University Conservative Association in Michaelmas Term 1950 and President of the Oxford Union in Trinity term, 1951. He graduated that term with a second-class degree.

Career
Rees-Mogg began his career in journalism in London at the Financial Times in 1952 becoming chief leader writer in 1955 and, in addition, assistant editor in 1957. During this period, he was Conservative candidate for the safe Labour seat of Chester-le-Street in a by-election on 27 September 1956, losing to the Labour candidate Norman Pentland by 21,287 votes, as he did in the subsequent general election by a similar margin.

He moved to The Sunday Times in 1960, later becoming its Deputy Editor from 1964 where he wrote "A Captain's Innings", which many believe convinced Alec Douglas-Home to resign as Tory leader, making way for Edward Heath, in July 1965.

Rees-Mogg was editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981. In a 1967 editorial entitled "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?", he criticised the severity of the custodial sentence for Mick Jagger on a drugs offence. With colleagues, he attempted a buyout of Times Group Newspapers in 1981 to stop its sale by the Thomson Organisation to Rupert Murdoch, but was unsuccessful. Murdoch replaced him as editor with Harold Evans. Rees-Mogg wrote a comment column for The Independent from its foundation in the autumn of 1986 until near the end of 1992, when he rejoined The Times, where he remained a columnist until shortly before his death. In his Memoirs, published in 2011, he wrote of Murdoch: "Looking back, he has been an excellent proprietor for the Times, but also for Fleet Street."

Rees-Mogg was a member of the BBC's Board of Governors and chairman of the Arts Council, overseeing a major reform of the latter body which halved the number of arts organisations receiving regular funding and reduced the Council's direct activities. Having been High Sheriff of Somerset from 1978 to 1979, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 1981 Birthday Honours and knighted by Elizabeth II in an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace on 3 November 1981. In the 1988 Birthday Honours, Rees-Mogg was made a life peer on 8 August that year as Baron Rees-Mogg, of Hinton Blewitt in the County of Avon, and sat in the House of Lords as a cross-bencher, having twice attempted to become a Conservative MP in the 1950s. He was a member of the European Reform Forum. The University of Bath awarded him an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Laws) in 1977.

He co-authored, with James Dale Davidson, three books on the general topic of financial investment and the future of capitalism: Blood in the Streets, The Great Reckoning, and The Sovereign Individual. Published in 1997, The Sovereign Individual argues that in an internet age the nation state will become outmoded, and an era of the individual will develop. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, stated in 2014 that The Sovereign Individual was the most influential book he had read. The Sovereign Individual has had a strong influence on neoreactionary (NRx) politics.

Writing in The Times in 2001, Lord Rees-Mogg, who had a house in Somerset, described himself as "a country person who spends most of his time in London", and attempted to define the characteristics of a "country person". He also wrote that Tony Blair was as unpopular in rural England as Mrs Thatcher had been in Scotland. By now his liberal attitude to drugs policy had led to his being mocked as "Mogadon Man" by Private Eye. The magazine later referred to him as "Mystic Mogg" (a pun on "Mystic Meg", a tabloid astrologer) because of the perception that his economic and political predictions were ultimately found to be inaccurate.

Rees-Mogg served as the chairman of the London publishing firm Pickering & Chatto Publishers and of NewsMax Media and wrote a weekly column for The Mail on Sunday. He also collected 18th-century literature.

Personal life
Rees-Mogg and his wife Gillian Shakespeare Morris (b.1939) married in 1962. She is the daughter of Thomas Richard Morris who was a lorry driver and later a car salesman. He became a Conservative councillor and Mayor in the Borough of St Pancras, and later councillor for the Kings Cross ward of the London Borough of Camden. He was also a JP.

They had five children. They are:

 * Emma Beatrice Rees-Mogg (born 1962), who married David William Hilton Craigie in 1990. The couple have four children. She is a novelist under the name Emma Craigie.
 * Charlotte Louise Rees-Mogg (born 1964)
 * Thomas Fletcher Rees-Mogg (born 1966), who married Modwenna Northcote in 1996. The couple have four children.
 * Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg (born 24 May 1969), who was elected Conservative MP for the new constituency of North East Somerset in 2010, serving until 2024, after having stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Conservative Party in the 1997 and 2001 general elections (in Central Fife and The Wrekin respectively). He married Helena de Chair in 2007. The couple have six children. In July 2019, he was appointed Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council in the Johnson ministry.
 * Annunziata Mary Rees-Mogg (born 25 March 1979), who stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Conservative Party in the 2005 general election in Aberavon, and in Somerton and Frome at the 2010 election. She was elected as a Member of the European Parliament for the Brexit Party in 2019.

Rees-Mogg, a Roman Catholic, argued that the image of an ultra-conservative papacy is false and that the Vatican must overhaul its PR machine (as of 2009).

In 1964, Rees-Mogg purchased Ston Easton Park near Bath, Somerset, the former home of the Hippisley family. The house had been threatened with demolition and Rees-Mogg partially restored it. He sold the house to the Smedley family in 1978.

Death
Afflicted by oesophageal cancer, he became seriously ill just before Christmas of 2012, and died in London on 29 December at the age of 84. Rees-Mogg's funeral was held at Westminster Cathedral on 9 January 2013, with his body being buried in the graveyard of the Church of St James at Cameley in the county of Somerset.

Books

 * The reigning error: The crisis of world inflation (1975)
 * An Humbler Heaven (1977) ISBN 9780241896921
 * Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad (1986, with James Dale Davidson) ISBN 9780671627355
 * Picnics on Vesuvius: Steps towards the millennium (1992) ISBN 0283061472
 * The Great Reckoning: How the World Will Change Before the Year 2000 (1992, with James Dale Davidson) ISBN 9780330327923
 * The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (1997, with James Dale Davidson) ISBN 9780684832722

title: William Rees-Mogg