Gdańsk is a city on the Baltic coast of northern Poland. With a population of 470,907, Gdańsk is the capital and largest city of the Pomeranian Voivodeship and one of the most prominent cities within the cultural and geographical region of Kashubia. It is Poland’s principal seaport and the center of the country’s fourth-largest metropolitan area.
The city is situated on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay on the Baltic Sea, in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, the resort town of Sopot, and suburban communities; these form a metropolitan area called the Tricity (Trójmiasto), with a population approaching 1.4 million. Gdańsk lies at the mouth of the Motława River, connected to the Leniwka, a branch in the delta of the nearby Vistula River, which drains 60 percent of Poland and connects Gdańsk with the Polish capital, Warsaw. Together with the nearby port of Gdynia, Gdańsk is also a notable industrial center.
On Nov 4, 2016, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement published a statement on their website, announcing that they would be replacing the swastika with the odal rune to enter mainstream politics.Four years and an attempted fascist putsch later, it’s the stage at CPAC.
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“The Odal rune symbolized several values which were of central importance to Nazi ideology.”
Vernon Jordan, the civil rights lawyer who built a career as a power broker in politics and business, has died at age 85.
Jordan “passed away peacefully last evening surrounded by loved ones,” his daughter, Vickee Jordan, said in a statement sent to NPR. “We appreciate all of the outpourings of love and affection.”
A native of Atlanta, Jordan attended DePauw University before earning his law degree at Howard University. Soon after graduating, he devoted himself to ending discrimination against Black Americans in the fight for equal rights. In 1992-93, he chaired President Bill Clinton’s transition team, and for decades he remained a friend and adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Jordan played an important role in desegregating education in the South, particularly at the college level. In the early 1960s, he became the Georgia field director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he famously helped escort Charlayne Hunter through a crowd of white protesters at the University of Georgia in 1961.
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Vernon Jordan has died at 85. He’s seen here in November of 1992 when he led then-President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team.
A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms a perceived outline or pattern, typically representing an animal, mythological person or creature, or an inanimate object.
The origins of the earliest constellations likely go back to prehistory. People used them to relate stories of their beliefs, experiences, creation, or mythology. Different cultures and countries adopted their own constellations, some of which lasted into the early 20th century before today’s constellations were internationally recognized. The recognition of constellations has changed significantly over time. Many changed in size or shape. Some became popular, only to drop into obscurity. Some were limited to a single culture or nation.
Chess has a reputation for cold logic, but Vladimir Kramnik loves the game for its beauty.
“It’s a kind of creation,” he says. His passion for the artistry of minds clashing over the board, trading complex but elegant provocations and counters, helped him dethrone Garry Kasparov in 2000 and spend several years as world champion.
Yet Kramnik, who retired from competitive chess last year, also believes his beloved game has grown less creative. He partly blames computers, whose soulless calculations have produced a vast library of openings and defenses that top-flight players know by rote. “For quite a number of games on the highest level, half of the game—sometimes a full game—is played out of memory,” Kramnik says. “You don’t even play your own preparation; you play your computer’s preparation.”
Wednesday, Kramnik presented some ideas for how to restore some of the human art to chess, with help from a counterintuitive source—the world’s most powerful chess computer. He teamed up with Alphabet artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, whose researchers challenged their superhuman game-playing software AlphaZero to learn nine variants of chess chosen to jolt players into creative new patterns.
In 2017, AlphaZero showed it could teach itself to roundly beat the best computer players at either chess, Go, or the Japanese game shogi. Kramnik says its latest results reveal beguiling new vistas of chess to be explored if people are willing to adopt some small changes to the established rules.
On the afternoon of February 22, 2019, a tall Asian man rang the doorbell of the North Korean Embassy in Madrid. His business card identified him as Matthew Chao, an investor from Baron Stone Capital, with offices in Toronto and Dubai. Once he was allowed in, nine men in their twenties and thirties, carrying pellet guns, knives, and metal bars, entered. They covered their faces with black balaclavas, tied up four staffers with zip ties and handcuffs, and herded them into a meeting room, before taking a senior Embassy official to the basement. His wife and his eight-year-old son were put in a room on the first floor.
About thirty minutes later, an employee of a nearby gym was driving past the Embassy and came across a woman, her face covered in blood, who had jumped from a second-floor balcony. The gym employee called for an ambulance, and, when it arrived, the woman told the medics that there were intruders in the Embassy killing people. Soon, the police rang the doorbell of the Embassy. The tall Asian man, now wearing a badge featuring the face of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s Great Leader, came out and told the police that there had been a misunderstanding. At 9:40 P.M., most of the men drove off in Embassy cars. An Uber, ordered under the name Oswaldo Trump, pulled up nearby, and the final two members of the group left in it. Afterward, the North Koreans walked out of the Embassy looking beaten and disheveled. An Italian I.D. bearing the name Matthew Chao was found by the police.
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Free Joseon, a secret network mobilizing against Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship, aims to form a provisional government. Illustration by Chloe Cushman
Fort Worth is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Texas and the 13th-largest city in the United States. It is the county seat of Tarrant County, covering nearly 350 square miles (910 km2) into three other counties: Denton, Parker, and Wise. According to the 2019 census estimates, Fort Worth’s population was 909,585. Fort Worth is the second-largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area, which is the fourth-most populous metropolitan area in the United States.
The city of Fort Worth was established in 1849 as an army outpost on a bluff overlooking the Trinity River. Fort Worth has historically been a center of the Texas Longhorn cattle trade. It still embraces its Western heritage and traditional architecture and design. USS Fort Worth(LCS-3) is the first ship of the United States Navy named after the city. Although considered by some to be a satellite city due to its proximity to Dallas, Fort Worth has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States in recent years, particularly in the 21st century, and has more than doubled its population since 1990.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An image from Gdansk, Poland
Dimitri Otis | Getty Images
James' World 2 