title: Virtual Network Computing

text: The server sends small rectangles of the framebuffer to the client. In its simplest form, the VNC protocol can use a lot of bandwidth, so various methods have been devised to reduce the communication overhead. For example, there are various "encodings" (methods to determine the most efficient way to transfer these rectangles). The VNC protocol allows the client and server to negotiate which encoding they will use. The simplest encoding, supported by all clients and servers, is "raw encoding", which sends pixel data in left-to-right scanline order, and after the original full screen has been transmitted, transfers only rectangles that change. This encoding works very well if only a small portion of the screen changes from one frame to the next (as when a mouse pointer moves across a desktop, or when text is written at the cursor), but bandwidth demands get very high if a lot of pixels change at the same time (such as when scrolling a window or viewing full-screen video).


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: VNC by default uses TCP port 5900+"N", where "N" is the display number (usually :0 for a physical display). Several implementations also start a basic HTTP server on port 5800+"N" to provide a VNC viewer as a Java applet, allowing easy connection through any Java-enabled web-browser. Different port assignments can be used as long as both client and server are configured accordingly. A HTML5 VNC client implementation for modern browsers (no plugins required) exists too.


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: Although possible even on low bandwidth, using VNC over the Internet is facilitated if the user has a broadband connection at both ends. However, it may require advanced network address translation (NAT), firewall and router configuration such as port forwarding in order for the connection to go through. Users may establish communication through virtual private network (VPN) technologies to ease usage over the Internet, or as a LAN connection if VPN is used as a proxy, or through a VNC repeater (useful in presence of a NAT).


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: "Xvnc" is the Unix VNC server, which is based on a standard X server. To applications, Xvnc appears as an X "server" (i.e., it displays client windows), and to remote VNC users it is a VNC server. Applications can display themselves on Xvnc as if it were a normal X display, but they will appear on any connected VNC viewers rather than on a physical screen. Alternatively, a machine (which may be a workstation or a network server) with screen, keyboard, and mouse can be set up to boot and run the VNC server as a service or daemon, then the screen, keyboard, and mouse can be removed and the machine stored in an out-of-the way location.


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: In addition, the display that is served by VNC is not necessarily the same display seen by a user on the server. On Unix/Linux computers that support multiple simultaneous X11 sessions, VNC may be set to serve a particular existing X11 session, or to start one of its own. It is also possible to run multiple VNC sessions from the same computer. On Microsoft Windows the VNC session served is always the current user session.


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: Users commonly deploy VNC as a cross-platform remote desktop system. For example, Apple Remote Desktop for Mac OS X (and more recently, "Back to My Mac" in 'Leopard' - Mac OS X 10.5) interoperates with VNC and will connect to a Unix user's current desktop if it is served with x11vnc, or to a separate X11 session if one is served with TightVNC. From Unix, TightVNC will connect to a Mac OS X session served by Apple Remote Desktop if the VNC option is enabled, or to a VNC server running on Microsoft Windows.


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: By default, RFB is not a secure protocol. While passwords are not sent in plain-text (as in telnet), cracking could prove successful if both the encryption key and encoded password were sniffed from a network. For this reason it is recommended that a password of at least 8 characters be used. On the other hand, there is also an 8-character limit on some versions of VNC; if a password is sent exceeding 8 characters, the excess characters are removed and the truncated string is compared to the password.


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: UltraVNC supports the use of an open-source encryption plugin which encrypts the entire VNC session including password authentication and data transfer. It also allows authentication to be performed based on NTLM and Active Directory user accounts. However, use of such encryption plugins makes it incompatible with other VNC programs. RealVNC offers high-strength AES encryption as part of its commercial package, along with integration with Active Directory. Workspot released AES encryption patches for VNC. According to TightVNC, TightVNC is not secure as picture data is transmitted without encryption. To circumvent this, it should be tunneled through an SSH connection (see below).


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: VNC may be tunneled over an SSH or VPN connection which would add an extra security layer with stronger encryption. SSH clients are available for most platforms; SSH tunnels can be created from UNIX clients, Microsoft Windows clients, Macintosh clients (including Mac OS X and System 7 and up) – and many others. There are also freeware applications that create instant VPN tunnels between computers.


title: Virtual Network Computing

text: An additional security concern for the use of VNC is to check whether the version used requires authorization from the remote computer owner before someone takes control of their device. This will avoid the situation where the owner of the computer accessed realizes there is someone in control of their device without previous notice.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG () was a lobby group and a denialist veterans' organisation founded by former high-ranking Waffen-SS personnel in West Germany in 1951. Its main objective was to achieve legal, economic, and historical rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS.


title: HIAG

text: To achieve these aims, the organisation used contacts with political parties, and employed multi-prong historical negationism and propaganda efforts, including periodicals, books, and public speeches. A HIAG-owned publishing house, Munin Verlag, served as a platform for its publicity. This extensive body of work, 57 book titles and more than 50 years of monthly periodicals, has been described by historians as revisionist apologia.


title: HIAG

text: Always in touch with its members' Nazi past, HIAG was a subject of significant controversy, both in West Germany and abroad. The organisation drifted into open far-right extremism in its later history; it disbanded in 1992 at the federal level, but local groups continue to exist into the 21st century. Its monthly periodical, "Der Freiwillige", survived until 2014. While HIAG only partially achieved its goals of legal and economic rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS, its propaganda efforts led to the reshaping of the image of the Waffen-SS in popular culture.


title: HIAG

text: In the years following World War II, the Allied occupational authorities in Germany implemented policies which included demilitarisation, denazification, democratisation and decentralisation. The Allies' attempts were often perceived by the occupied population as "victors' justice" and met with limited success. For those in the Western occupation zones, the beginning of the Cold War further undermined these policies by reviving the idea of the necessity to fight against Soviet communism, echoing an aspect of Hitler's foreign policy. In 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War, it became clear to the United States that German armed forces would need to be reconstituted. Former German officers used the changing political and military situation as leverage to demand the rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht. In October 1950, a group of former senior officers produced a document, which became known as the "Himmerod memorandum", for West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. It included the demands that German war criminals be released and that the "defamation" of the German soldiers, including the Waffen-SS personnel, cease, which Adenauer worked to implement.


title: HIAG

text: To accommodate the West German government, the Allies commuted a number of sentences for war crimes. A public declaration by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower followed in January 1951, distinguishing "between the regular German soldier and officer and Hitler and his criminal group... The fact that certain individuals committed in war dishonorable and despicable acts reflects on the individuals concerned and not on the great majority of German soldiers and officers." The same year, some former career officers of the Wehrmacht were granted war pensions. Unlike the Wehrmacht, the SS had been deemed a criminal organisation at the Nuremberg trials and could thus act as an "alibi of a nation" (as Gerald Reitlinger's 1956 book of that title suggested), as being solely responsible for crimes of the Nazi regime. Consequently, Waffen-SS career personnel were not covered under the 1951 law.


title: HIAG

text: In 1949, the ban on forming veterans' associations was lifted. Encouraged by the shifting tone of the World War II discourse and the courting of the Wehrmacht veterans by the West German government and political parties, former Waffen-SS members came forward to campaign for their interests.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG's history began in late 1950 by a gradual amalgamation of local groups. The majority of its members were former junior officers in the Waffen-SS. In the summer of 1951, HIAG was formally established by Otto Kumm, a former SS-Brigadeführer. By October 1951, HIAG claimed to consist of 376 local branches.


title: HIAG

text: By December 1951, former high-ranking Waffen-SS general Paul Hausser was HIAG's first spokesperson. Two well-known former Waffen-SS commanders, Felix Steiner and Herbert Gille, became early leading figures. Sepp Dietrich and Kurt Meyer became active members upon their release from prison, in 1955 and 1954. Meyer became HIAG's most effective spokesman. After Meyer's death in 1961, Erich Eberhardt, formerly of SS Division "Totenkopf", assumed that role. As of 1977, Wilhelm Bittrich served as the chairman.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG membership was open to convicted war criminals, with the group's position being to absolve them of their responsibility. For example, the group openly embraced and advocated on behalf of Dietrich, Walter Reder, and Herbert Kappler, former SS men convicted of wartime massacres.


title: HIAG

text: With the publication of its first periodical, "Wiking-Ruf" ("Viking Call"), in late 1951, HIAG was beginning to draw attention to itself and generate public controversy, including speculation that it was a neo-Nazi organisation. In response, Hausser wrote an open letter to the Bundestag, West Germany's parliament, denying these accusations and describing the HIAG as an advocacy organisation for former Waffen-SS troops. Hausser asserted that its members rejected all forms of radicalism and were "upstanding citizens".


title: HIAG

text: The HIAG bylaws of 1952 described the aims of the organisation as providing comradeship, legal assistance, support for those in Allied captivity, help for families, and aid in searches for those still missing. The HIAG campaigned for Waffen-SS veterans to be awarded the legal status of persons formerly in the public service, under article 131 of the Basic Law, so that they would qualify for the same rights and pensions as Wehrmacht's career soldiers.


title: HIAG

text: The historian David C. Large wrote that, like any public pronouncements, these bylaws did not tell the full story of HIAG's real goals. By investigating how these statutes were applied in practice, he was able to tease out what the organisation stood for. For example, HIAG claimed to represent the entire Waffen-SS membership, living and dead, as well as their families: 500,000 in total. In reality, the organisation's rolls did not exceed 20,000. HIAG attained this number in the late 1950s, and maintained it until the early 1960s.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG also asserted that the Waffen-SS was merely "the fourth arm of the Wehrmacht"; these claims were even "more dubious", explains Large. As a Nazi organisation combining both military and police powers, the Waffen-SS was an arm of the SS: its members stood under SS jurisdiction separate from that of the Wehrmacht; its personnel were responsible for guarding concentration camps and were thoroughly implicated in war crimes during the campaigns in the West and in the East.


title: HIAG

text: On the other hand, as the war progressed, and the Waffen-SS grew to encompass conscripts (from 1943), Waffen-SS personnel began to resemble that of the Wehrmacht, contributing to the postwar confusion as to the organisation's status. The results of conscription allowed the Waffen-SS proponents to blur the line between the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht, arguing not that the Waffen-SS did not participate in atrocities, but that the Wehrmacht did so as well. Large argues that the equivalence is meaningless, as, contrary to the myth of a clean Wehrmacht, it actively participated in the racial war of extermination in the Soviet Union.


title: HIAG

text: Although HIAG's leaders discouraged political affiliations, any leanings were to be "in the spirit of European and patriotic sentiment", as described in a 1951 issue of "Wiking-Ruf". Internal disagreements began to emerge in the early and mid-1950s as to the stance of the organisation: Some believed in the adoption of a more open stance and the centralisation of the group under Steiner and Gille, while others within the organisation believed that this would harm the goals of rehabilitation.


title: HIAG

text: The main stated aims of the organisation were to provide assistance to veterans and to campaign for the rehabilitation of their legal status with respect to war pensions. During its early existence, HIAG also focused on "tracing service" actions ("Kameraden-Suchdienst").


title: HIAG

text: HIAG embraced the "Suchdienst" activities, not only because it was concerned for the fate of some 40,000 members of the Waffen-SS who were missing in action, but because this outwardly humanitarian and non-political activity could help improve how it was perceived by the West German government and the society at large. Such public relations activities ("image polishing", according to Large) were important to HIAG, as it faced ongoing scrutiny and even calls for a ban on the organisation. The "Suchdiensttreffen" events (literally: tracing service meetings) later evolved into annual "Kameradschaftstreffen" ("veterans' reunions"), which were large-scale conventions, often accompanied by rallies.


title: HIAG

text: In 1952, the organisation held its first major meeting in Verden. It began respectably, with Gille announcing that the veterans were ready to "do their duty for the Fatherland" and Steiner declaring support for "freedom, order and justice". But the next speaker delivered a different message. Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, a former paratroop general and a convicted war criminal, invited to demonstrate so-called solidarity with the Wehrmacht, condemned the Western Allies as the "real war criminals" and insisted that the blacklist on which all former SS members then stood would soon become "a list of honour".


title: HIAG

text: The outburst caused a furor within West Germany. Periodicals as far as the U.S. and Canada carried headlines "Hitler's Guard Cheers Ex-chief" and "Rabble-Rousing General Is Worrying the Allies", with the latter article reporting that Ramcke's speech had been greeted with "roars of approval and cries of 'Eisenhower, "Schweinehund"!' ('Pig – Dog')". HIAG and its spokesperson Steiner hastily tried to distance the organisation from Ramcke and his remarks.


title: HIAG

text: The notion that Waffen-SS personnel had been "soldiers like all others" found its way into the discourse regarding war captivity. HIAG claimed that its members were victims of Allied arbitrariness and complained of harsh internment conditions. HIAG equated the status of war criminals with that of prisoners of war and obfuscated the differences between the veterans of the Wehrmacht and those of the Waffen-SS.


title: HIAG

text: In its periodical "Wiking-Ruf", HIAG made use of the same drawings of emaciated German POWs behind barbed wire used by the publications of another post-war organisation—the West German (VdH). In its turn, VdH saw its role as a counterbalance to militaristic veterans' organisations such as HIAG and explicitly distanced itself from them in the early 1950s.


title: HIAG

text: Along with other veterans' organisations, HIAG campaigned for the immediate amnesty and early release of war criminals still in Allied captivity. This issue was significant, as most of these organisations made their cooperation in the area of rearmament contingent on the satisfactory resolution of the amnesty issue. It was partly for this reason that the West German government was sympathetic to the fate of these individuals and made every effort to secure their early release. Chancellor Adenauer even met with Kurt Meyer in Werl Prison when he went there on an inspection tour.


title: HIAG

text: Behind the scenes, HIAG cultivated close relationships with the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the main opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), garnering attention by inflating its membership numbers and influence. In meetings with politicians in the early 1950s, HIAG claimed to represent 2 million potential voters, a vast exaggeration, as only 250,000 Waffen-SS veterans were living in West Germany at that time.


title: HIAG

text: In 1951, SPD leader Kurt Schumacher established contact with HIAG. When he first met with its leaders, Schumacher believed that 150,000 people were already members of HIAG, as evidenced by internal party correspondence; he considered that number to be "politically significant". In the same letter, Schumacher referred to the Waffen-SS as a "branch of the Wehrmacht". Later, the SPD defence policy expert Fritz Erler and Helmut Schmidt, a member of SPD parliamentary delegation and a future Chancellor of Germany, handled the relationship with HIAG. They maintained close contact, attending private and public meetings and keeping up regular correspondence. They often admonished HIAG leadership for the membership's "undemocratic" ways, but these efforts at reforming the veterans were futile. Such dealing with HIAG caused concerns within the SPD, where HIAG's members were thus described as "unteachables" ("Unbelehrbare").


title: HIAG

text: HIAG found its best champion in the centre-right Free Democratic Party (FDP), whose platform was most closely aligned to HIAG's goals. The FDP demanded the release of war criminals, seeing their incarceration as "political". Through their support of HIAG, the FDP hoped to win popular support.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG took on the cause of those imprisoned or executed for war crimes and openly celebrated its members' Nazi past. A partial list of ensuing controversies in the first 12 years of HIAG's existence includes:


title: HIAG

text: Large, who studied HIAG extensively, stated in 1987 that HIAG's anti-democratic and anti-Semitic statements were "the essence of what HIAG was all about", concluding that the HIAG's leaders remained true to their Nazi ideology. Similarly, the historian Karsten Wilke, who worked with the HIAG archives in the 2000s, discovered that the HIAG members' positions were "consistently racist, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic", as the German news magazine "Der Spiegel" characterised them in its 2011 article "The Brown Bluff: How Waffen SS Veterans Exploited Postwar Politics". Referencing Wilke's work, "Der Spiegel" quoted a HIAG member's letter to the leadership conveying the dismay at "Jews" who became "powerful once again" and could thus stand in the way of political support for the Waffen-SS rehabilitation. "Spiegel" also reported Wilke's findings that the HIAG leadership maintained close contacts with far-right groups.


title: HIAG

text: Lobbying by HIAG and other revisionists produced some early successes. In 1953, Chancellor Adenauer announced in a public speech in Hanover that members of the combat formations of the Waffen-SS had been "soldiers just like the rest" who had been "simply drafted". Large describes this declaration as "irresponsible and unhistorical", while the military historian Simon MacKenzie refers to it as "the least credible" of the several claims put forth by Waffen-SS apologists. He states that on the Eastern Front the Wehrmacht equaled the Waffen-SS in its brutality.


title: HIAG

text: In the following months, a number of war criminals from the ranks of the Waffen-SS were released. Many of them were made eligible for prisoner-of-war compensation from local governments. In 1956, the Federal Ministry of Defence announced that former members of the Waffen-SS, up to the grade of lieutenant colonel, would be accepted to the "Bundeswehr" at their old rank. Former Waffen-SS men who wished to join the "Bundeswehr" still faced heightened scrutiny, especially the officers. All Waffen-SS applicants went through the rigorous vetting process reserved for those with the higher ranks in the Wehrmacht. HIAG labeled the procedure "political inquisition" and complained bitterly about in its publications, but to no avail. As a result of this heightened review, by September 1956, only 33 of 1310 applications by ex-Waffen-SS officers had been accepted (making them 0.4% of the Bundeswehr's officer corps), as compared to 195 of 462 applications by enlisted men.


title: HIAG

text: At its height in the early 1960s, around 8% of the approximately 250,000 former Waffen-SS members living in West Germany were members of HIAG. This was the timeframe when HIAG achieved its last success in economic rehabilitation: in 1961, the West German government partially restored pension rights to Waffen-SS personnel under the 131 legislation. HIAG greeted this development as a partial victory, which they hoped would lead to a complete rehabilitation. This wider aim proved impossible to achieve: the government was cautious, as rehabilitating the Waffen-SS would have opened the door to claims by personnel of other SS and Nazi organisations, including SA, SD, Hitler Youth, and others—a prospect the federal government would rather not contemplate, because of possible domestic and international consequences. Some of its more outspoken members sounded like Nazis, harming the public image of HIAG.


title: HIAG

text: During the Nuremberg Trials, HIAG's personnel, such as Hausser in his testimony as a defence witness, contended that the Waffen-SS was a purely military organisation no different from the Wehrmacht. The prosecution at Nuremberg rejected this claim and successfully argued that the Waffen-SS was an integral part of the SS apparatus. The Tribunal found that "the units of the Waffen-SS were directly involved in the killings of prisoners of war and the atrocities in the occupied countries" and judged the entire SS to be a criminal organisation.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG aimed to reverse that judgement through significant propaganda efforts in the service of its historical negationism. According to Large, HIAG was a case study in the broader West German process of historical manipulation. HIAG's rewriting of history encompassed multi-prong publicity campaigns—including tendentious periodicals, books, and public speeches, as well as a publishing house dedicated to presenting the Waffen-SS in a positive light. The leadership viewed restoring the "tarnished shield" as a key component of the desired legal and economic rehabilitation, and thus no effort was spared.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG's first periodical was "Wiking-Ruf", which was launched in 1951. In 1955, HIAG launched its other publication "Der Freiwillige" ("The Volunteer"). A 1952 editorial by Kumm highlighted key themes that were used throughout HIAG's subsequent history:


title: HIAG

text: Even during the war, and especially after the war, infamous and lying propagandists have been able to make use of all the unfortunate events connected to the Third Reich and also with the SS to destroy and drag through the mud all of what was and is sacred to us. (...) Let us be clear about it: the [Allied] battle was directed not only against the authoritarian regime of the Third Reich, but, above all, against the resurgence of the strength of the German people.


title: HIAG

text: Erich Kern, a far-right Austrian journalist and a former Nazi war correspondent, became the organisation's key employee responsible for its publishing arm. He first became active within HIAG in 1955, and then joined as a full-time employee in 1959. According to the historian Jonathan Petropoulos, Kern remained an "unrepentant and unreconstructed Nazi" up to his death in 1991.


title: HIAG

text: The theme of foreign volunteers was featured prominently, with Steiner lending his voice in this area. In a 1958 editorial, he praised the foreign volunteers who, like German SS men, saw the "diabolical" threat of Bolshevism and "fought like lions" against it, as part of the Waffen-SS. The picture books echoed the same themes; one of them proclaimed: "From all European lands came volunteers as genuine comrades-in-arms. They fought for their Fatherland against Bolshevism."


title: HIAG

text: Glossy books, such as "Waffen-SS in Pictures" (1957), featured, as described by MacKenzie, "tales of valour and heroism" and "propaganda photographs of Aryan-ideal volunteers from all over the Continent". In 1972, HIAG produced a five-hundred page SS picture tome under the nostalgic title "When All Our Brothers Are Silent". Hausser spearheaded the project with Jochen Peiper, a controversial Waffen-SS figure, as a contributor. Other similar books included "Scattered are the Traces" (1979), "Cavalry Divisions of the Waffen-SS" (1982), "Panzer Grenadiers of the 'Viking' Division in Pictures" (1984), and many others. (One of the cavalry units in question, SS Cavalry Brigade, was responsible for the murder of an estimated 23,700 Jews and others in July–August 1941 alone, during the Pripyat Marshes massacres. Its regimental commander Lombard reported eliminating close to 11,000 "plunderers" in the first two weeks of the same operation.)


title: HIAG

text: HIAG leadership denied that there was any connection between the Waffen-SS and Nazi atrocities. In 1957, Paul Hausser wrote, in "Der Freiwillige", an open letter to West Germany's minister of defence, stating that the concentration camp guard units (SS-Totenkopfverbände) served on external detail only, "without the possibility of interfering with the internal procedure". He did not mention that the guards accompanied prisoners to labour sites and that the commanders of concentration camps generally came from the Waffen-SS. This apologist position also ignored the fact that the organisational structure of the SS tied the Waffen-SS to the Nazi annihilation machine through the transfer of personnel between various SS units and the shifting responsibilities of the units themselves, as they might perform frontline duties at one time, and then be reassigned to "bandit-fighting" operations – or "Bandenbekämpfung" — in the rear.


title: HIAG

text: Kurt Meyer embodied the voice of Waffen-SS apologists. In 1957, speaking at the HIAG convention in Karlsberg, Bavaria, he stated that "SS troops committed no crimes, except the massacre at Oradour, and that was the action of a single man". Meyer claimed that the Waffen-SS was the same as the German Army. On another occasion, Meyer publicly denounced the "regime" [West Germany] that could "honour traitors" but would vilify its soldiers. He condemned the notion of "collective guilt" and equated Jews and Jesuits to the Nazis and the Waffen-SS, as all being victims of history and prejudice. In the first instance, Meyer was most likely referring to Adolf Diekmann who was the senior officer present during the Oradour massacre. Meyer himself had served a lengthy prison term for his role in the Ardenne Abbey massacre. In the second instance, he was apparently referring to the members of the 20 July plot. At Jochen Peiper's memorial in 1976, Hubert Meyer referenced Peiper's open letter from Landsberg Prison, which had previously been quoted in Hausser's 1953 books. Hubert Meyer's speech later appeared in the November 1976 issue of "Der Freiwillige":


title: HIAG

text: For a broad public in Germany and even more throughout the rest of the world, [Peiper] has become the embodiment of that which all of us were clearly, intentionally and wrongly burdened in Nuremberg... We have not forgotten what Jochen Peiper wrote to us from Landsberg Prison in 1952: "Don't forget that the first Europeans killed in action were in the units of the Waffen-SS, that the ones beaten to death during the post war period mostly were men from our ranks. They had become fair game because of their belief in the indivisibility of Western Europe. Remember these martyrs."


title: HIAG

text: To buttress the reputation of the Waffen-SS, the memoirs of HIAG's leading members featured quotations by former Wehrmacht generals endorsing the fighting skills of the force. Steiner's, Meyer's, and Hausser's books have been characterised by historian Charles Sydnor as the "most important works of [Waffen-SS] apologist literature". They demanded rehabilitation of the combat branch of the Nazi Party and presented Waffen-SS members as "soldiers just like any other".


title: HIAG

text: Both Hausser and Steiner followed up their 1950s books with works published in the 1960s. Published in 1963, Steiner's book was called "The Army of Outlaws" (). Hausser's work appeared in 1966 under the title "Soldiers Like Any Other" (). According to MacKenzie, the books' titles were symbolic of the Waffen-SS image that HIAG's leaders wanted to portray, while Sydnor describes this later generation of books as "equally tendentious". In addition to HIAG's own publishing house Munin Verlag (below), similar books were also published by in Göttingen.


title: HIAG

text: In 1958, HIAG established its own publishing house—Munin Verlag. The name comes from Norse mythology popular with right-wing movements. Muninn is one of the two ravens that are the companions of the god Odin; "muninn" is Old Norse for "memory".


title: HIAG

text: The aim of the publishing house was to publish, in cooperation with HIAG, the works of former Waffen-SS members. Its authors were former Waffen-SS unit commanders or staff officers who were members of HIAG. The Munin Verlag titles did not go through the rigorous fact-checking processes common in peer-reviewed historical literature; they were revisionist accounts, unedited by professional historians, presenting the former Waffen-SS members' version of events. Until HIAG's dissolution in 1992, Munin-Verlag published 57 titles.


title: HIAG

text: Walter Harzer took on the role of the official historian of HIAG, in charge of coordinating the writing of the histories of Waffen-SS divisions. HIAG worked with historian Ernst Klink, of the Military History Research Office (MGFA) in Freiburg, to screen materials donated to the for any information that may have implicated units and personnel in questionable activity. To rehabilitate the image of the force, HIAG underwrote the publication of works by right-wing academics sympathetic to the Waffen-SS.


title: HIAG

text: The unit narratives were extensive (often in several volumes) and strived for an official-seeming representation of their history, backed by maps and operational orders. MacKenzie points out that "the older or the more famous the unit, the larger the work—to the point where no less than five volumes and well over 2,000 pages were devoted to the doings of the 2nd Panzer Division "Das Reich"", authored by one of its former officers, Otto Weidinger.


title: HIAG

text: The French author Jean-Paul Picaper, who studied the Oradour massacre perpetrated by the men of the "Das Reich", notes the tendentious nature of Weidinger's narrative: it provided a sanitised version of history without any references to massacres. He argues that the unit histories, like other HIAG publications, focused on the "positive", "heroic" side of National Socialism. The researcher Danny S. Parker notes similar efforts undertaken to rewrite the history of the "Leibstandarte" division. HIAG worked with Rudolf Lehmann, chief of staff of the 1st SS Panzer Corps, to produce what Parker calls an "exculpating multi-volume chronicle" of the division, which even whitewashed the Malmedy massacre. HIAG involved a legal consultant to make sure the account would be within the framework of the strict German laws prohibiting glorification of the Nazi past. The project also included the former chief of staff of the unit, Dietrich Ziemssen, who in 1952 produced a denialist version of the massacre in his pamphlet "Der Malmedy Prozess".


title: HIAG

text: In the mid-to-late 1970s, HIAG attempted to commission a favorable biography of Peiper, to stop "the bad rumors", according to a HIAG official. "We must steadfastly remain behind the wheel and direct this book ourselves, otherwise [Erich Kern] will do it", Harzer wrote to a fellow member in 1976. HIAG contemplated approaching (or approached) Herbert Reinecker, a prolific screenwriter who had served in a propaganda company ("Propagandakompanie") of the Waffen-SS, but nothing came out of it.


title: HIAG

text: By the mid-1950s, HIAG had been able to differentiate the Waffen-SS from other SS formations; the crimes that could not be denied were attributed to "Allgemeine-SS" (security and police), the "SS-Totenkopfverbände", and the "Einsatzgruppen". The Waffen-SS was thus successfully integrated into the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. The positive image of the Waffen-SS indeed found a receptive audience during the Cold War. Senior Waffen-SS personnel were "not shy about suggesting that "they" had once organised and led a NATO-like army (and an elite one at that)", notes MacKenzie. John M. Steiner, in his 1975 work, points out that SS apologists, especially strongly represented in HIAG, stressed that they were the first to fight for Europe and Western civilisation against "Asiatic Communist hordes".


title: HIAG

text: Quoting German political journalist Karl Otto Paetel, the historian George Stein writes, in his 1966 book, that the works produced by HIAG's circle were trying to show "the soldiers of the Waffen-SS were brave fighters, suffered big losses and, as far as they served in the front line, did not run exterminations camps". Stein notes that the apologists define the Waffen-SS narrowly and are silent on the matter of war crimes. He notes that only a minority of men were implicated in committing known atrocities and that the most historically significant role of the Waffen-SS was in the battles for "Hitler's Europe". But "to recognise this is not to agree with the apologists who picture the overwhelming majority of the men of the Waffen-SS as idealistic, clean-living, decent and honourable soldiers", Stein writes.


title: HIAG

text: Wilke argues that by the 1970s HIAG attained a monopoly on the historical representation of the Waffen-SS. Its recipe was simple and contained just four ingredients: the Waffen-SS was apolitical, elite, innocent of all war crimes or Nazi atrocities, and a European army par excellence, the Army of Europe. Historians dismiss this characterisation. Picaper labels it as a self-panegyric, while Large uses the words "extravagant fantasies about [the Waffen-SS's] past and future". MacKenzie refers to HIAG's body of work as a "chorus of self-justification", and Stein refers to them as apologetics. Historian James M. Diehl writes that, contrary to HIAG's claims, the Waffen-SS was not the fourth branch of the Wehrmacht and it was outrageous to describe it as a precursor to NATO.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG then began its drift into the far right, further retreating into its Nazi past. For a time, HIAG published a calendar that marked Nazi commemoration dates. Many of the organisation's founding members did not evolve with the times. For example, at least through the 1970s, Kumm remained "the ever unreformed Nazi enthusiast", according to Parker.


title: HIAG

text: In the 1970s and 1980s, as the West German public's awareness of the SS atrocities grew, the attitudes towards Waffen-SS veterans shifted dramatically. The federal organisation and local groups were ostracised, with their meetings and commemorations greeted with protests. At the same time, neo-Nazi and nationalist movements found in the Waffen-SS something on which to project their understanding of World War II.


title: HIAG

text: During the 1980s, HIAG's vociferous public events created almost insurmountable image problems, such as when a 1985 meeting turned into a public relations disaster. The press reported on the singing of forbidden Nazi songs, clashes with protesters, and even Waffen-SS reenactors. In an even more damaging development, "Stern" investigative reporter infiltrated the meeting, posing as a war buff. He later published a damning article called "Nazi Family Reunion" containing statements from a Waffen-SS veteran that ranged from virulent antisemitism to Holocaust denial and mentions of happy concentration camp inmates "singing like birds". The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution monitored HIAG as a far-right organisation during its later history, although HIAG was briefly taken off the list of neo-Nazi and extremist groups in 1984, causing another controversy.


title: HIAG

text: Increasingly ostracised, HIAG disbanded at the federal level in 1992. Regional HIAG chapters continued to exist through the 2000s, at least one into the 2010s. These groups worked to maintain momentum through the recruitment of younger generations and through outreach to foreign veterans of the Waffen-SS, aided by the continued publication of "Der Freiwillige". "[Its] acclaimed aim, today [2014], is to link older and younger generations in a common cause", notes the historians Steffen Werther and Madeleine Hurd. The publication's predominant theme continued to be "Europe against Bolshevism", with several editorials devoted to the idea that the Waffen-SS laid the foundation for the unification of Europe, expansion of NATO, and "freedom of Fatherlands", as stated in one of the magazine's issues.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG's informal successor was the international War Grave Memorial Foundation "When All Brothers Are Silent" (), formed with a stated goal of maintaining war graves. In the 1990s and 2000s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the foundation worked on arranging new commemorative sites for the Waffen-SS dead in the former Soviet Union, including one in Ukraine.


title: HIAG

text: HIAG never grew to the size of other West German veterans' organisations, the most successful of which, VdH, had membership approaching 500,000. Diehl, who studied postwar veterans' movements in West Germany, writes that the overwhelming majority of Waffen-SS veterans, who were more interested in rebuilding their civilian lives or getting too old to consider returning to military service, ignored "Der Freiwillige"s "fire-eating editorials". HIAG's membership began to fall sharply in the 1960s, while the organisation itself was never a significant threat to democracy. "HIAG's main goal was pensions, not a restoration of the Third Reich", he notes. HIAG's performance as a lobbying organisation was mixed. Large sees a "combination of resentment, myopia and inflated self-importance" in HIAG's efforts and attitudes. He credits West Germany's government, major political parties, and military planners with keeping distance between HIAG and other veterans' organisations sufficient to limit HIAG's role in the new republic and its armed forces.


title: HIAG

text: As a "crucible of historical revisionism" (in Picaper's phrase), HIAG attempted to rewrite and manipulate history. HIAG was instrumental in creating the perception in popular culture of the Waffen-SS as being "comrades-in-arms engaged in a noble crusade", according to MacKenzie, who highlights the long-term effects of HIAG's revisionism: "As older generation of Waffen-SS scribes has died off, a new, post-war cadre of writers has done much to perpetuate the image of the force as a revolutionary European army. The degree of admiration and acceptance varies, but the overall tendency to accentuate the positive lives on, or has indeed grown stronger."


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: The 2021 WrestleMania Backlash was the 16th Backlash professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) and livestreaming event produced by WWE. It was held for wrestlers from the promotion's Raw and SmackDown brand divisions. The event took place on May 16, 2021, from the WWE ThunderDome, hosted at the Yuengling Center in Tampa, Florida—it was WWE's first PPV to present the ThunderDome from the Yuengling Center during the COVID-19 pandemic, following a four-month residency at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was also the first Backlash to air on the livestreaming service Peacock. From 1999 to 2009, the concept of the Backlash PPV was based around the backlash from WWE's flagship event, WrestleMania. The 2021 event returned Backlash to this original position as the post-WrestleMania PPV, and it was in turn renamed to "WrestleMania Backlash" as it was based around the backlash from WrestleMania 37.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: Seven matches were contested at the event, including one on the Kickoff pre-show. In the main event, Roman Reigns defeated Cesaro by technical submission to retain SmackDown's Universal Championship. In another prominent match, Bobby Lashley defeated Drew McIntyre and Braun Strowman in a triple threat match to retain Raw's WWE Championship. Also on the undercard, Bianca Belair defeated Bayley to retain the SmackDown Women's Championship and Rey Mysterio and Dominik Mysterio defeated Dolph Ziggler and Robert Roode to win the SmackDown Tag Team Championship, thus becoming the first-ever father and son team to hold a tag team championship in WWE.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: The event received positive reviews from critics and fans. The event included a promotional tie-in for the zombie film "Army of the Dead", which stars former WWE wrestler Batista. In addition to Batista doing a voiceover for the event's opening vignette, the Lumberjack match between Damian Priest and The Miz had the lumberjacks acting as zombies. This tie-in was heavily panned and covered in the media, with the "New York Post" calling it "one of WWE's saddest moments ever." Despite the negative criticism towards the tie-in, the rest of the event was well-received.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: Backlash is a pay-per-view (PPV) and WWE Network event that was established by WWE in 1999. It was held annually from 1999 to 2009. The original concept of the pay-per-view was based around the backlash from WWE's flagship event, WrestleMania. Backlash was discontinued after 2009 but reinstated in 2016 and was held every year since, except in 2019; however, these events did not continue Backlash's original post-WrestleMania theme. The 2021 Backlash was initially scheduled for June 20, however, during WrestleMania 37, it was revealed that Backlash would take place on May 16 and would be titled "WrestleMania Backlash," thus returning the event to its original concept and featuring the backlash from WrestleMania 37. It was the 16th event in the Backlash chronology and featured wrestlers from the Raw and SmackDown brands. It was also the first Backlash to air on Peacock after the American version of the WWE Network merged under Peacock in March.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic that began affecting the industry in mid-March 2020, WWE had to present the majority of its programming from a behind closed doors set. Initially, Raw and SmackDown's television shows and PPVs were done at the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, Florida. A limited number of Performance Center trainees and friends and family members of the wrestlers were later utilized to serve as the live audience. In late August, these programs were moved to a bio-secure bubble called the WWE ThunderDome. The select live audience was no longer utilized as the bubble allowed fans to attend the events virtually for free and be seen on the nearly 1,000 LED boards within the arena. Additionally, the ThunderDome utilized various special effects to further enhance wrestlers' entrances, and arena audio was mixed with that of the chants from the virtual fans. After being hosted at Orlando's Amway Center, the ThunderDome was relocated to Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida in December.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: Due to the start of the 2021 Tampa Bay Rays season, as Tropicana Field is the home venue of the Tampa Bay Rays, on March 24, 2021, WWE announced that they would relocate the ThunderDome to the Yuengling Center, located on the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa, which began with the April 12 episode of "Raw". Subsequently, WrestleMania Backlash was the first WWE pay-per-view produced from the ThunderDome at the Yuengling Center.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: The show comprised seven matches, including one on the pre-show. The matches resulted from scripted storylines, where wrestlers portrayed heroes, villains, or less distinguishable characters in scripted events that built tension and culminated in a wrestling match or series of matches. Results were predetermined by WWE's writers on the Raw and SmackDown brands, while storylines were produced on WWE's weekly television shows, "Monday Night Raw" and "Friday Night SmackDown".


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: At WrestleMania 37, Bobby Lashley defeated Drew McIntyre to retain the WWE Championship. On the following night's "Raw", Lashley's manager MVP declared that no one could defeat Lashley. McIntyre interrupted and wanted another opportunity at Lashley, claiming that he would have defeated him if MVP had not distracted him and prevented him from performing the Claymore Kick on Lashley. Braun Strowman and Randy Orton then interrupted and stated their respective cases to challenge for the title. WWE official Adam Pearce then scheduled a triple threat match between McIntyre, Strowman, and Orton with the winner facing Lashley for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania Backlash, which was won by McIntyre. On the April 26 episode, Strowman challenged McIntyre to a match with the added stipulation that if Strowman won, he would be added to the championship match at WrestleMania Backlash. Strowman defeated McIntyre thus the championship match became a triple threat match.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: At WrestleMania 37, Bianca Belair won the SmackDown Women's Championship. On the following episode of "SmackDown", The Street Profits (Angelo Dawkins and Montez Ford, the latter of whom is Belair's real-life husband) threw Belair a championship celebration. Later, Bayley challenged Belair for the title. The following week, the championship match was scheduled for WrestleMania Backlash.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: At WrestleMania 37, Rhea Ripley defeated Asuka to win the Raw Women's Championship. The two had a rematch the following night on "Raw", however, the match ended in a no-contest after interference from a returning Charlotte Flair, who attacked Asuka. Prior to the match, Flair, who had been off TV for the past month, returned that night after missing her first WrestleMania since WrestleMania 32 in 2016. The following week, Flair lost to Asuka thanks to a distraction from Ripley. Following the match, an irate Flair attacked the referee. Adam Pearce subsequently suspended Flair, however, fellow WWE official Sonya Deville, who primarily appeared on SmackDown, reinstated Flair the following week after Flair made a public apology on "Raw". On the May 3 episode, another rematch between Ripley and Asuka for the Raw Women's Championship was scheduled for WrestleMania Backlash. However, Deville allowed Flair a chance to present a proposal and after hearing Flair's case, Deville added Flair to the championship match to make it a triple threat match.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: On the April 16 episode of "SmackDown", Universal Champion Roman Reigns, along with Paul Heyman and Jey Uso, boasted about retaining his championship at WrestleMania 37. Reigns was then interrupted by Cesaro, but before he could speak, Reigns, Jey, and Heyman left the ring and departed backstage. Later, Cesaro confronted Adam Pearce and Sonya Deville about facing Reigns that night, even as a non-title match. However, instead of Reigns, Cesaro faced Jey in the main event, which ended by disqualification when Seth Rollins, who Cesaro had defeated at WrestleMania, interfered and attacked Cesaro, proclaiming that their rivalry was not over. On the special "Throwback SmackDown" on May 7, Cesaro was scheduled to face Rollins with the added stipulation that if Cesaro won, he would earn a Universal Championship match at WrestleMania Backlash. Cesaro defeated Rollins once again, securing the championship match. Also that episode, Jey's brother Jimmy returned from injury, last appearing at Hell in a Cell in October 2020, and although conflicted at first, particularly because of what Reigns did to them at Hell in a Cell, Jimmy also eventually aligned with Reigns, but soon turned on Reigns.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: During the WrestleMania Backlash Kickoff pre-show, United States Champion Sheamus faced Ricochet in a non-title match. In the end, Sheamus performed a Knee Strike on Ricochet to win the match.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: The actual pay-per-view opened with Rhea Ripley defending the Raw Women's Championship against Charlotte Flair and Asuka. In the closing moments, after an evenly competitive match between the three, Ripley performed the Riptide on Asuka to retain the title.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: Next, Dolph Ziggler and Robert Roode defended the SmackDown Tag Team Championship against Rey Mysterio and Dominik Mysterio. Earlier in the night, Dominik was attacked by Ziggler and Roode, and medical personnel ruled Dominik unable to compete. During the match, Ziggler and Roode dominated Rey. About mid-way though, Dominik eventually entered the match. In the end, Rey performed a 619 on Roode and tagged in Dominik, who then performed a Frogsplash Splash on Roode to win the title, thus becoming the first-ever father and son team to hold a tag team championship in WWE.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: After that, Damian Priest faced The Miz (accompanied by John Morrison) in a lumberjack match. The ring was surrounded by zombies as a promotional tie-in for the zombie film "Army of the Dead", which stars former WWE wrestler Batista. During the match, Priest and Miz teamed to fend off the zombies. In the end, Morrison was "devoured" by the zombies which distracted Miz. Priest performed Hit the Lights on Miz to win the match. Following the match, several zombies entered the ring and "devoured" Miz.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: In the next match, Bianca Belair defended the SmackDown Women's Championship against Bayley. Belair pinned Bayley using her braided hair to gain leverage to retain the title.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: In the penultimate match, Bobby Lashley (accompanied by MVP) defended the WWE Championship against Drew McIntyre and Braun Strowman. During the match, Lashley and McIntyre fought their way up the entrance ramp where McIntyre threw Lashley through an LED board. Back in the ring, McIntyre and Strowman continued the match. In the end, as McIntyre performed a Claymore Kick on Strowman, Lashley appeared, threw McIntyre out of the ring and performed a Spear on Strowman to retain the title.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: In the main event, Roman Reigns (accompanied by Paul Heyman) defended the Universal Championship against Cesaro. Throughout the match, Reigns targeted Cesaro's right arm, thus preventing Cesaro from doing his upper cuts and not being able to fully apply other maneuvers. In the climax, Reigns applied the Guillotine Choke submission on Cesaro, who passed out, thus Reigns retained the title via technical submission. After the match, Cesaro was attacked by Jey Uso. Seth Rollins then came out. After a stare down with Reigns, Rollins viciously attacked Cesaro and smashed his right arm in a steel chair.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: The event received mixed to positive reviews. While most of the pay-per-view was well received, the marketing tie-in with "Army of the Dead" during the Damian Priest vs. The Miz Lumberjack match was heavily panned. The film's star and former WWE wrestler Batista responded to fan criticism, stating that he did not book "a bunch of fucking zombies," and that fans should be calling out WWE Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Vince McMahon for the decision. A review from "Shacknews" said that WrestleMania Backlash exceeded "almost every expectation," except for the Lumberjack match. The review said that the match was already bad, but it was made worse by the inclusion of the zombies, with Priest and Miz having to act like they were actually scared of them. The negative criticism over the tie-in was covered by mainstream media outlet "New York Post", calling it "one of WWE's saddest moments ever." They were positive about the rest of the show. The match between Priest and Miz was voted as the Worst Match of the Year by readers of the "Wrestling Observer Newsletter". Despite the negative criticism towards the zombies, WWE made over US$1 million from Warner Bros. for the promotional tie-in.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: "WrestleMania Backlash" would become the name for the event series, as the 2022 event was confirmed to also be held under this name.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: The following night on "Raw", WWE Champion Bobby Lashley issued an open challenge. Drew McIntyre came out to accept as he was not pinned in the triple threat match, however, MVP stated that it was open to anyone except McIntyre and Braun Strowman—WrestleMania Backlash would in turn be Strowman's final appearance in WWE until he returned on the September 5, 2022 edition of "Raw", as he was released from his contract on June 2. In the main event of "Raw", it was revealed that the open challenge was just to face Lashley rather than a title match. The New Day's Kofi Kingston answered the challenge and defeated Lashley thanks to McIntyre's distraction. On the May 31 episode, McIntyre defeated Kingston to earn another title opportunity against Lashley at Hell in a Cell.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: Also on "Raw", Charlotte Flair confronted WWE officials Adam Pearce and Sonya Deville, demanding another opportunity at Rhea Ripley for the Raw Women's Championship as Flair did not take the pin in the triple threat match. Pearce and Deville stated that if Flair won her match against Asuka, they would consider it. However, Flair lost the match thanks to a distraction from Ripley. A rematch occurred the following week where Flair defeated Asuka, thus earning another title match against Ripley at Hell in a Cell.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: Also on "Raw", United States Champion Sheamus faced Ricochet in a non-title rematch. Sheamus again defeated Ricochet.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: On the following "SmackDown", WWE official Sonya Deville announced that WWE would be leaving the ThunderDome and returning to live touring, starting with the July 16 episode of "SmackDown". She also hosted a parade of champions to celebrate SmackDown's champions. New SmackDown Tag Team Champions Rey Mysterio and Dominik Mysterio, SmackDown Women's Champion Bianca Belair, Intercontinental Champion Apollo Crews (accompanied by Commander Azeez), and WWE Women's Tag Team Champions Natalya and Tamina were all on stage. Deville then introduced Universal Champion Roman Reigns, however, Paul Heyman instead came out, stating that everyone else were just title holders and that Reigns was the only real champion. Bayley then interrupted, claiming that Belair cheated at WrestleMania Backlash by using her hair. Belair and Bayley were scheduled for a rematch at Hell in a Cell.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: Also on the following "SmackDown", Cesaro, with his arm in a sling, confronted Universal Champion Roman Reigns and challenged him to another match at Hell in a Cell. However, Seth Rollins attacked Cesaro again, resulting in medical personnel taking Cesaro out on a stretcher. A match between Cesaro and Rollins was scheduled for Hell in a Cell.


title: WrestleMania Backlash (2021)

text: On the May 28 episode of "SmackDown", new SmackDown Tag Team Champions Rey Mysterio and Dominik Mysterio were scheduled to defend the title in a rematch against Dolph Ziggler and Robert Roode. Prior to their match, Rey was attacked backstage, similar to what happened at WrestleMania Backlash, leaving Dominik to face Ziggler and Roode alone. At the climax of the match, Rey made his way to the ring, which distracted Roode and allowed Dominik to pin him to retain the title. After defending the SmackDown Tag Team Championship against The Usos (Jey Uso and Jimmy Uso) the following week, which ended by interference from Roman Reigns, who brutally attacked Dominik, the Mysterios then entered into a feud with Reigns and The Usos, resulting in Rey challenging Reigns for the Universal Championship.


title: Fred Stoller

text: Fred Stoller (born March 19, 1958) is an American actor, stand-up comedian and author. He is best known for portraying Gerard on "Everybody Loves Raymond". He is also the voice of Stanley in the "Open Season" series, Fred the Squirrel in "The Penguins of Madagascar", Chuck the Evil Sandwich-Making Guy in "WordGirl", Jimbo in Disney Junior's "Mickey and the Roadster Racers" and Rusty the monkey wrench on Playhouse Disney's "Handy Manny".


title: Fred Stoller

text: Stoller was born in New York City and grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He has a sister, Cindy, six years his senior, and is Jewish. Stoller attended Kingsborough Community College before leaving to pursue comedy full time.


title: Fred Stoller

text: Stoller had worked as a stand-up comedian in nightclubs since the early 1980s at the time of his first television appearance, in 1987, when he appeared on "Stand-Up America" and later on "The Young Comedians Special" alongside six other comedians.


title: Fred Stoller

text: He gained recognition for his frequent appearances as Gerard on the CBS sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond", Mr. Lowe in "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide" and as Sheldon Singer, the son of Harold Gould's deli-owning character, on the short-lived sitcom "Singer & Sons". He has also made guest appearances on several other TV series. He wrote two episodes of "Seinfeld" ("The Soup" and the Kramer/chimpanzee subplot of "The Face Painter"). He also appeared as Fred in the episode "The Secret Code".


title: Fred Stoller

text: Stoller is also known as the voices of Stanley in the "Open Season" franchise, Rusty the Wrench on "Handy Manny", Fred the Squirrel in "The Penguins of Madagascar", and Steve Tree in "Oswald".


title: Fred Stoller

text: In 2012, Stoller published a successful e-book titled "My Seinfeld Year", in which he chronicled his experiences after being hired as a new staff writer. He has since released a book titled "Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star", and a second e-book, "Five Minutes to Kill: How the HBO Young Comedians Special Changed the Lives of 1989’s Funniest Comics", in 2017.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: The 2019–20 season was Manchester City's 118th season of competitive football, 91st season in the top flight of English football and 23rd season in the Premier League. In addition to the league, the club competed in the FA Cup, as holders of both competitions. They also entered the UEFA Champions League, hoping to win the team's first European trophy since 1970. At the start of the season, City defeated Liverpool to win their second consecutive and sixth overall Community Shield. The Citizens also successfully retained the EFL Cup, making it their third consecutive League Cup win and their fifth in seven seasons.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: The season covered the period from 1 July 2019 to 31 August 2020, having been extended from 30 June 2020 for an indefinite period following the suspension of all elite sport in the UK in March 2020 as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The domestic season resumed on 17 June, and concluded on 26 July, while the Champions League resumed on 7 August.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: This was the first season since 2007–08 without former captain Vincent Kompany, who departed to Anderlecht.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: Manchester City began the season as unprecedented holders of all four domestic competitions. Their first successful defence came on 4 August, as they defeated Liverpool on penalties at Wembley in the 2019 FA Community Shield, in the traditional curtain raiser to the season.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: Acknowledging that City would be judged by their Champions League performance after all, Pep Guardiola said that the new season's main objective would be to win the European title. The Cityzens progressed to the knock-out phase and faced old foes Real Madrid there. City won the away game 2–1, but the remainder of the tournament was indefinitely postponed due to the COVID–19 pandemic. Finally, UEFA announced that the tournament would be resumed in August 2020. After 8 domestic trophies were clinched with Guardiola, fans eagerly await the team's first European title since 1970. The home match against Madrid was scheduled for 7 August. Thanks to a brace from Raheem Sterling and Gabriel Jesus, the Citizens once again defeated Madrid 2–1, achieving a 4–2 victory on aggregate and advancing to the quarter-finals. However, Man City once again exited the competition at the next stage, losing 1–3 to Lyon on 15 August in a one-off game held at the neutral Estádio José Alvalade in Lisbon.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: In the Premier League however, City were unable to maintain their consistency from the previous 2 seasons. Key players Aymeric Laporte and Leroy Sané endured extended injury layoffs from the beginning of the season until early 2020. Laporte's absence in particular impacted on the teams' defensive capabilities and their effectiveness against opposition set up to quickly counterattack on the break. City already had dropped more league points by the end of December 2019 (19) than they had in their entire previous two seasons.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: For the second year in a row, City were the first top European team to reach 100 goals scored in all competitions when they beat Fulham 4–0 in an FA Cup fourth round match on 26 January 2020.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: On 14 February 2020, UEFA stated its intention to ban Manchester City from the all UEFA club competitions for the 2020–21 and 2021–22 seasons for alleged breaches of the UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations. UEFA noted the club's right to appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and the club submitted an appeal on 26 February 2020. As part of the appeal registration the Court of Arbitration for Sport stated a date for a final decision would be in the first half of July 2020. The appeal was heard on 8 June 2020. The appeal was upheld on 13 July 2020, and the ban was overturned.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: On 1 March 2020, City won their third EFL Cup in a row and their fourth in five seasons, defeating Aston Villa 2–1 at Wembley Stadium in the final.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: In March, the season became affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. On 10 March, the match between Manchester City and Arsenal, due to be played the next day, was postponed after a number of Arsenal players made close contact with Olympiacos owner Evangelos Marinakis, who had tested positive for infection with the coronavirus, when the two teams had met in the Europa League 13 days earlier. On 12 March, it was revealed that three Leicester City players were self-isolating. Manchester City also announced that their defender Benjamin Mendy was also self-isolating, after a family member displayed symptoms of the virus. Later in the evening, it was then confirmed that Arsenal head coach Mikel Arteta had tested positive for coronavirus. On 13 March, following an emergency meeting between the Premier League, The Football Association (FA), the English Football League and the FA Women's Super League, it was unanimously decided to suspend professional football in England until at least 4 April 2020. On 19 March, the suspension was extended to at least 30 April 2020. At the same time the FA agreed to extend the season indefinitely, past the scheduled end date of 1 June.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: In late May 2020 the UK Government began to ease the lockdown measures which had been taken to combat the COVID-19 contagion and it was duly announced on 28 May that the Premier League clubs had agreed to play the remaining 92 Premier League fixtures and FA Cup fixtures in empty stadiums and with modified rules to minimize contagion from 17 June 2020. City restarted the season with a postponed game in hand against Arsenal on 17 June, winning 3–0. On 25 June City lost 2–1 away to Chelsea and as a result, Liverpool were confirmed as 2019–20 Premier League champions with seven rounds of games to be played. A week later, on 2 July, City were able to assuage some of the disappointment of losing the Premier League title to their rivals when they beat Liverpool 4–0 in a home league match, also avenging November's controversial 1–3 loss.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: In beating Newcastle United 5–0 on 8 July, City achieved a pass completion rate of 93.7% - the highest accuracy on record in the Premier League since 2003–04 (since detailed passing statistics first were measured). Riyad Mahrez reaching 10 Premier League goals in the season in the same game also ensured City would be the first English top-flight side to have five different players score at least 10 league goals in a single season since Everton in 1984–85 (Sterling, De Bruyne, Agüero, Jesus, Mahrez). The 5–0 victory away against Brighton & Hove Albion on 11 July then confirmed that City would finish the season as runners-up to Liverpool in the league. City scored 102 league goals in 2019–20; it was the fifth time they reached a century of goals after 1936–37, 1957–58, 2013–14 and 2017–18, an English record.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: In the restarted FA Cup, City defeated Newcastle 2–0 away from home on 28 June, advancing to the semi-finals where they faced Arsenal at Wembley. However, inform Aubameyang scored a brace and lukewarm City were shut out, being denied an opportunity to defend their title in a showcase final. The Gunners went on to win a record 14th FA Cup title in the final, defeating Chelsea.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: The end of the 2019–20 season marked the end of David Silva's ten-year stint with the club. Silva's final appearance in the Champions League quarter-final defeat to Lyon was his 436th for City; in doing so he entered the top 10 all-time appearance makers for the club, as well as becoming the first modern era player to reach this level in 34 years. Silva also ended his career at City as the club's most decorated player at the time, with fourteen league and cup winner medals. Due to COVID-19 precautions, Silva's final appearances had to be played behind closed doors. City hoped there would be an opportunity in the following season for fans to return in order to give Silva a proper sendoff.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: Kevin De Bruyne was recognised in the end of season awards for his performances at City, being named the Premier League Player of the Season and PFA Players' Player of the Year, despite Liverpool winning the Premier League title that year. De Bruyne had already won the club's own Player of the Season Award for the third time in five years, and the Premier League's Playmaker of the Season award for providing a league-leading 20 assists, equalling the record of most assists in a Premier League season by Thierry Henry in 2002–03.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: Manchester City played a number of pre-season matches in 2019, including the 2019 Premier League Asia Trophy in China.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: Agüero's win in January 2020 was at the time his seventh overall, the most in the competition's history.


title: 2019–20 Manchester City F.C. season

text: De Bruyne's total of 20 assists for the season also equalled the Premier League record set by Thierry Henry in 2002–03.


title: Futaba Channel

text: , or Futaba for short, also sometimes called 2chan (not to be confused with 2channel), is an imageboard in Japan. A popular Japanese website, it deals with a wide variety of topics, from daily personal problems to sports, ramen, and otaku and underground culture.


title: Futaba Channel

text: Futaba Channel was set up on August 30, 2001, as a refuge for 2channel users when 2channel was in danger of shutting down. It started as a textboard but eventually added imageboards based on the GazouBBS software. The English-language imageboard 4chan website was based on Futaba.


title: Futaba Channel

text: Futaba Channel consists of about 60 imageboards (three of which are "" boards) and about 40 textboards, with topics ranging from daily personal problems to food, sports, ramen, and pornography. There is also a place to upload general non-image files. Futaba is powered by a custom script based on GazouBBS (, from , , meaning "image"). The Futaba script was open source (last updated in 2005) and its ancestors are used to run many Japanese and English imageboards.


title: Futaba Channel

text: Futaba has spawned a number of visual gags and characters; the OS-tans would be one such meme that has spread to western internet culture. Some of the characters that appear on Futaba Channel have entered the real world in the form of various real-life goods, such as figures, dolls or images printed on pillows. Such items are mainly produced by Japanese dōjin artists and groups.


title: Futaba Channel

text: Non-Japanese Internet users sometimes refer to Futaba Channel as "2chan," due to the address of the site. It is frequently unclear whether this is intended to mean Futaba Channel or 2channel, and sometimes it even refers to both, as if they were a single website. To eliminate confusion, the names "Futaba" and "2channel" are often used.


title: Futaba Channel

text: A function to report a post that violates the rules and to request deletion, which has been added to each board of Futaba ☆ channel since September 27, 2008. A hyperlink with the text "del" will be created in the upper right of the thread, and clicking on it will open the "Form for deletion request" page the contents are a bribe picture, a child pornographic image, personal information, slander, intimidation, double throw, harassment etc.


title: Futaba Channel

text: In addition, a function has been added since July 2013 when a specific IDless board has a deletion request exceeding the threshold, the ID will be displayed forcibly.


title: Futaba Channel

text: On some boards, when the del number of a thread accumulates more than a certain number, they disappear from the normal catalog and are "isolated". In order to view the isolated thread, you need to enter the address directly.


title: Futaba Channel

text: In the past, the thread was moved to a special board called "隔離" (Isolation) and could be viewed, but the board is now gone. Therefore, it can not be seen without knowing the URL of the isolated thread as described above.


title: Cotillion

text: The cotillion (also cotillon or French country dance) is a social dance, popular in 18th-century Europe and North America. Originally for four couples in square formation, it was a courtly version of an English country dance, the forerunner of the quadrille and, in the United States, the square dance.


title: Cotillion

text: It was for some fifty years regarded as an ideal finale to a ball but was eclipsed in the early 19th century by the "quadrille". It became so elaborate that it was sometimes presented as a concert dance performed by trained and rehearsed dancers. The later "German" cotillion included more couples as well as plays and games.


title: Cotillion

text: The English word "" is a variation of the French (which does not have "i" in the last syllable). In English, it is pronounced // or //; but in French, it is // (without the // sound, despite the spelling).


title: Cotillion

text: The French word originally meant "petticoat (underskirt)" and is derived from Old French (‘cotte’) and the diminutive suffix .


title: Cotillion

text: In 18th-century French, the dance was also known as , meaning "French country dance" or "French contradance".


title: Cotillion

text: The name "cotillion" appears to have been in use as a dance-name at the beginning of the 18th century but, though it was only ever identified as a sort of country dance, it is impossible to say of what it consisted at that early date.


title: Cotillion

text: As we first encounter it, it consists of a main "figure" that varied from dance to dance and was interspersed with "changes" – a number of different figures that broke out of the square formation, often decided spontaneously by the leading couple or by a caller or "conductor". Each of these was designed to fit a tune of eight or occasionally sixteen measures of 2/4 time. Participants exchanged partners within the formation network of the dance. "Changes" included the "Great Ring", a simple circle dance with which the dance often began, as well as smaller Ladies' and Gentlemen's rings, top and bottom and sides rings, and chains. Other changes included the , and . A complete dance composed of a prescribed order of these was called a "set".


title: Cotillion

text: The cotillion was introduced into England by 1766 and to the United States in about 1772. In England from that time onwards there are a large number of references stressing its universal popularity in the best and highest circles of society, and many teaching manuals were published to help recall the vast number of changes that were invented. There is a reference in Robert Burns's 1790 poem "Tam o' Shanter" to the "cotillion brent-new frae France" (brand new from France).


title: Cotillion

text: Dancing masters differed as to the exact way of doing these dances: some, recognising the affair as an English country dance, taught that the steps and jumps of these were appropriate, while others insisted upon French elegance, recommending the basic step of the gavotte or the minuet. In reality many participants simply walked through the figure and changes, seeing these as the dance and the exact steps as dispensable. On the other hand, some figures required high skill at social dancing and many performances took place at which the majority preferred to watch rather than dance.


title: Cotillion

text: The quadrille gained fame a few years later as a variety of cotillion that could be danced by only two couples. In London in 1786 Longman & Broderip's "6th book of Twenty Four New Cotillions" brings together for the first time the most characteristic dance-figures of the quadrille: (‘trousers’), (‘summer’), (‘the beautiful hen’) and . However, while the cotillion kept all the dancers in almost perpetual motion, the quadrille often allowed rest to half of the participants while the other half danced.


title: Cotillion

text: In the 1790s, the cotillion was falling from favour, but it re-emerged in a new style in the early years of the next century, with fewer and fewer changes, making it barely distinguishable from the newly-emerging "quadrille", which was introduced into English high society by Lady Jersey in 1816 and by 1820 had eclipsed the cotillion, though it was recognisably a very similar dance, particularly as it also began to be danced by four couples. References to the English cotillion dances persist here and there until the 1840s, but these were more games than fashionable dances, and were often danced to the waltz or the mazurka.


title: Cotillion

text: In the United States, however, the opposite was true: quadrilles were termed cotillions until the 1840s, when it was realised that all the distinctive figures of the earlier dance had been taken up into the newer. The German cotillion was introduced to New York society at a costume ball with a Louis XV theme given by William Colford Schermerhorn in the early winter of 1854. Here, too, waltzes, mazurkas, fun, games and boisterous behaviour at private parties took on a more important role, and only some figures of the earlier dances survived. Finally the term cotillion was used to refer to the ball itself and the cotillion and quadrille became the square dance.


title: Ant colony

text: An ant colony is a population of a single ant species capable to maintain its complete lifecycle. Ant colonies are eusocial, communal, and efficiently organized and are very much like those found in other social Hymenoptera, though the various groups of these developed sociality independently through convergent evolution. The typical colony consists of one or more egg-laying queens, numerous sterile females (workers, soldiers) and, seasonally, many winged sexual males and females. In order to establish new colonies, ants undertake flights that occur at species-characteristic times of the day. Swarms of the winged sexuals (known as alates) depart the nest in search of other nests. The males die shortly thereafter, along with most of the females. A small percentage of the females survive to initiate new nests.


title: Ant colony

text: The term "ant colony" refers to a population of workers, reproductive individuals, and brood that live together, cooperate, and treat one another non-aggressively. Often this comprises the genetically related progeny from a single queen, although this is not universal across ants. The name "ant farm" is commonly given to ant nests that are kept in formicaria, isolated from their natural habitat. These formicaria are formed so scientists can study by rearing or temporarily maintaining them. Another name is "formicary", which derives from the Medieval Latin word "formīcārium". The word also derives from "formica". "Ant nests" are the physical spaces in which the ants live. These can be underground, in trees, under rocks, or even inside a single acorn. The name "anthill" applies to aboveground nests where the workers pile sand or soil outside the entrance, forming a large mound.


title: Ant colony

text: Colony size (the number of individuals that make up the colony) is very important to ants: it can affect how they forage, how they defend their nests, how they mate, and even their physical appearances. Body size is often seen as the most important factor in shaping the natural history of non-colonial organisms; similarly, colony size is key in influencing how colonial organisms are collectively organized. However, colony sizes are very different in different ant species: some are just several ants living in a twig, while others are super colonies with many millions of workers. Even looking at a single ant colony, seasonal variation can be huge. For example, in the ant "Dolichoderus mariae", one colony can shift from around 300 workers in the summer to over 2,000 workers per queen in the winter. Genetics and environmental factors can cause the variation among colonies of a particular species to be even bigger. Zooming out further, within a related group of different ant species, the differences can be enormous: "Formica yessensis" has colony sizes that are reported to be 306 million workers while "Formica fusca" colonies sometimes comprise only 500 workers.


title: Ant colony

text: A supercolony occurs when many ant colonies over a large area unite. They still continue to recognize genetic differences in order to mate, but the different colonies within the super colony avoid aggression. Until 2000, the largest known ant supercolony was on the Ishikari coast of Hokkaidō, Japan. The colony was estimated to contain 306 million worker ants and one million queen ants living in 45,000 nests interconnected by underground passages over an area of . In 2000, an enormous supercolony of Argentine ants was found in Southern Europe (report published in 2002). Of 33 ant populations tested along the stretch along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in Southern Europe, 30 belonged to one supercolony with estimated millions of nests and billions of workers, interspersed with three populations of another supercolony. The researchers claim that this case of unicoloniality cannot be explained by loss of their genetic diversity due to the genetic bottleneck of the imported ants. In 2009, it was demonstrated that the largest Japanese, Californian and European Argentine ant supercolonies were in fact part of a single global "megacolony". This intercontinental megacolony represents the most populous recorded animal society on earth, other than humans.


title: Ant colony

text: The following terminology is commonly used among myrmecologists to describe the behaviors demonstrated by ants when founding and organizing colonies:


title: Ant colony

text: Ant colonies have a complex hierarchical social structure. Ants’ jobs are determined and can be changed by age. As ants grow older their jobs move them farther from the queen, or center of the colony. Younger ants work within the nest protecting the queen and young. Sometimes, a queen is not present and is replaced by egg-laying workers. These worker ants can only lay haploid eggs producing sterile offspring. Despite the title of queen, she doesn't delegate the tasks to the worker ants; however, the ants choose their tasks based on personal preference.


title: Ant colony

text: Ants as a colony also work as a collective "super mind". Ants can compare areas and solve complex problems by using information gained by each member of the colony to find the best nesting site or to find food. Some social-parasitic species of ants, known as the slave-making ant, raid and steal larvae from neighboring colonies.


title: Ant colony

text: Ant hill art is a growing collecting hobby. It involves pouring molten metal (typically non-toxic zinc or aluminum), plaster or cement down an ant colony mound acting as a mold and upon hardening, one excavates the resulting structure. In some cases, this involves a great deal of digging. The casts are often used for research and education purposes but many are simply given or sold to natural history museums or sold as folk art or as souvenirs. Usually, the hills are chosen after the ants have abandoned so as to not kill any ants; however in the Southeast United States, pouring into an active colony of invasive fire ants is a novel way to eliminate them.


title: Ant colony

text: An "ant-bed", in its simplest form, is a pile of soil, sand, pine needles, manure, urine, or clay or a composite of these and other materials that build up at the entrances of the subterranean dwellings of ant colonies as they are excavated. A colony is built and maintained by legions of worker ants, who carry tiny bits of dirt and pebbles in their mandibles and deposit them near the exit of the colony. They normally deposit the dirt or vegetation at the top of the hill to prevent it from sliding back into the colony, but in some species, they actively sculpt the materials into specific shapes and may create nest chambers within the mound.


title: The Riot Club

text: The Riot Club is a 2014 British thriller drama film directed by Lone Scherfig and written by Laura Wade, based on Wade's 2010 play "Posh". The film stars Sam Claflin, Max Irons and Douglas Booth. It is set among the Riot Club, a fictional all-male, exclusive dining club at the University of Oxford. When the play "Posh" premiered, the Riot Club was often described as a thinly veiled version of the real-life Bullingdon Club, although according to Wade it is entirely fictitious.


title: The Riot Club

text: Alistair and Miles, both with aristocratic connections, start their first year at Oxford University. Miles is friendly and level-headed, cordially offering to switch rooms when Alistair's assigned room does not meet with his parents' approval, and beginning a relationship with Lauren, who has a working-class, Northern background. Alistair is an insecure, arrogant and cold-hearted snob. The two are tutorial partners at Oxford, where Alistair is blatant in his contempt for Miles and his left-leaning politics.


title: The Riot Club

text: The Riot Club, a long-established exclusive drinking club priding itself on hedonism and the belief that money can buy anything, is on the hunt for new members to maintain its roster of ten men, all of whom must be educated at private schools. Alistair is invited by Harry, whom he has met during the start of their term. Miles, who was out drinking in the pub, is invited by Hugo, another Riot Club member. Hugo is openly gay, and he and Miles exchange charged looks throughout the film. Alistair finds a new friend in Harry, who introduces him to his Uncle Jeremy (Tom Hollander), a senior Conservative MP—which Alistair himself aspires to be one day. After undergoing an unpleasant initiation, both Miles and Alistair become members of the Riot Club.


title: The Riot Club

text: Having been barred from most establishments in Oxford, the club have their annual dinner at the function room in a country pub. Alistair and Miles are both surprised to see each other there, Alistair showing open disdain. The Club begin their dinner, and though the landlord is initially excited to have a wealthy, aristocratic party dining at his establishment, their raucous behaviour annoys the pub's other patrons, some of whom leave. Chris, the landlord, is put off by their behaviour and tells them that they are disrupting his business; the boys settle with an arrangement with them paying for his losses to let them continue to stay, which he reluctantly accepts. After the escort Harry hired refuses to perform group oral sex, Alistair takes Miles's phone and texts Lauren without Miles knowing. Lauren then shows up to the pub to the surprise of Miles, whom the boys promptly proposition to do what the escort would not. Hurt that Miles did nothing while they insulted her, Lauren then attempts to leave the pub, but is assaulted by one of the members. Miles struggles to rescue her as the other members hold him back. Hugo intervenes and orders the boys to let her leave, which she does.


title: The Riot Club

text: Miles, drunk and seemingly depressed after what happened to Lauren, stays quiet for the rest of the night, while Alistair works up the rest with his political ideals of the rich and the poor. Becoming progressively more drunk and ingesting drugs, they start to wreck the room. When Chris comes to confront them, Alistair insults Chris by giving him money which he does not accept, telling them they are no better than a bunch of kids breaking shop windows and that they are just spoiled brats. Alistair punches him followed by the others who viciously attack him until he becomes unconscious. While the members become frantic realizing what they just have done, Miles calls for an ambulance.


title: The Riot Club

text: The boys are all arrested but believing that the club is more important than the individual, they agree not to give statements. The club meet after the incident and agree that Miles, as the newest club member, should take the blame for the attack on Chris. Miles tries to apologise to Lauren, who tells him to never talk to her again. Later, Chris's skin is then found underneath Alistair's fingernails, meaning they can arrest and charge him. Alistair is sent down (expelled) from Oxford, being the only one arrested for the incident, whilst the others are allowed to continue their studies without any criminal charges. After a talk with the dean, Miles is approached by the new president of the Riot Club, Guy Bellingfield, to re-join next year, but after nearly having to leave university because of the scandal, he decides to leave the club, a decision which the new president mocks.


title: The Riot Club

text: Alistair is invited to a meeting with Jeremy in London, who asks for the Riot Club to be kept out of future court appearances, and assures Alistair that in spite of being kicked out of Oxford, the boy is still a Riot member. Though Alistair is at first aggressively dismissive of Jeremy's proposed assistance, Alistair is brought around when Jeremy offers the boy a position in his office and an assured future. The film concludes with Alistair leaving the meeting with Jeremy, a smug smile on his face as he walks down the street.


title: The Riot Club

text: On 5 February 2013 it was reported that HanWay and Blueprint Pictures would produce the adaptation of the play "Posh" written by Laura Wade. The producers would be Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin, with the BFI Film Fund and Film4 Productions. On 15 March 2013 Robert Pattinson, Sam Claflin, Max Irons and Douglas Booth were understood to be under consideration to play the lead. On 18 March Max Irons was confirmed as the lead. On 19 May 2013 Sam Claflin also joined the cast, as well as Douglas Booth. On 20 May 2013 Universal Pictures International acquired the UK and Irish rights to the film. On 11 July 2013, Natalie Dormer also joined the cast.


title: The Riot Club

text: The shooting of the film began on 30 June 2013 in Oxford, England. The crew were spotted during the filming of scenes at Magpie Lane. Filming also took place at Pinewood Studios and Winchester College.


title: Dive bomber

text: A dive bomber is a bomber aircraft that dives directly at its targets in order to provide greater accuracy for the bomb it drops. Diving towards the target simplifies the bomb's trajectory and allows the pilot to keep visual contact throughout the bomb run. This allows attacks on point targets and ships, which were difficult to attack with conventional level bombers, even "en masse".


title: Dive bomber

text: After World War II, the rise of precision-guided munitions and improved anti-aircraft defences—both fixed gunnery positions and fighter interception—led to a fundamental change in dive bombing. New weapons, such as rockets, allowed for better accuracy from smaller dive angles and from greater distances. They could be fitted to almost any aircraft, including fighters, improving their effectiveness without the inherent vulnerabilities of dive bombers, which needed air superiority to operate effectively.


title: Dive bomber

text: A dive bomber dives at a steep angle, normally between 45 and 60 degrees or even up to a near vertical dive of 80 degrees with the Junkers Ju 87, and thus requires an abrupt pull-up after dropping its bombs. This puts great strains on both the pilot and aircraft. It demands an aircraft of strong construction, with some means to slow its dive. This limited the class to light bomber designs with ordnance loads in the range of although there were larger examples. The most famous examples are the Junkers Ju 87 "Stuka", which was widely used during the opening stages of World War II, the Aichi D3A ""Val"" dive bomber, which sank more Allied warships during the war than any other Axis aircraft, and the Douglas SBD Dauntless, which sank more Japanese shipping than any other allied aircraft type. The SBD Dauntless helped win the Battle of Midway, was instrumental in the victory at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and fought in every US battle involving carrier aircraft.


title: Dive bomber

text: An alternative technique, glide-bombing, allowed the use of heavier aircraft, which faced far greater difficulties in recovering from near-vertical approaches, though it required greater use of sophisticated bombsights and aiming techniques, by a specialised member of aircrews, namely a bombardier/bomb aimer. The crews of multi-engined dive-bombers, such as variants of the Junkers Ju 88 and Petlyakov Pe-2, frequently used this technique. The heaviest aircraft to have dive-bombing included in its design and development, the four-engined Heinkel He 177, also utilised a glide-bombing approach; the requirement that the He 177 be able to dive/glide-bomb delayed its development and impaired its overall performance.


title: Dive bomber

text: Dive bombing was most widely used before and during World War II; its use declined during the war, when its vulnerability to enemy fighters became apparent. In the post-war era, this role was replaced with a combination of improved and automated bombsights, larger weapons and even nuclear warheads that greatly reduced the need for accuracy, and finally by precision guided weapons as they became available in the 1960s. Most tactical aircraft today allow bombing in shallow dives to keep the target visible, but true dive bombers have not been a part of military forces since the start of the jet age.


title: Dive bomber

text: When released from an aircraft, a bomb carries with it the aircraft's trajectory. In the case of a bomber flying horizontally, the bomb will initially only be travelling forward. This forward motion is opposed by the drag of the air, so the forward motion decreases over time. Additionally, gravity causes the bomb to accelerate after it is dropped. The combination of these two forces, drag and gravity, results in a complex pseudo-parabolic trajectory.


title: Dive bomber

text: The distance that the bomb moves forward while it falls is known as its range. If the range for a given set of conditions is calculated, simple trigonometry can be used to find the angle between the aircraft and the target. By setting the bombsight to this "range angle", the aircraft can time the drop of its bombs at the instant when the target is lined up in the sight. This was only effective for "area bombing", however, since the path of the bomb is only roughly estimated. Large formations could drop bombs on an area hoping to hit a specific target, but there was no guarantee of success, and huge areas around the target would also be hit. The advantage to this approach, however, was that it is easy to build such an aircraft and fly it at high altitude, keeping it out of range of ground-based defences.


title: Dive bomber

text: The horizontal bomber was thus ill-suited for tactical bombing, particularly in close support. Attempts at using high-altitude bombing in near-proximity to troops often ended in tragedy, with bombs both hitting their targets and friendly troops indiscriminately. In attacking shipping, the problems of inaccuracy were amplified by the fact that the target could be moving, and could change its direction between the time that the bombs were released and the time that they arrived. Successful strikes on marine vessels by horizontal bombers were extremely rare. An example of this problem can be seen in the attempts to attack the Japanese carriers using B-17s at altitude in the Battle of Midway, with no hits scored. The German battleship "Tirpitz" was subjected to countless attacks, many while in dock and immobile, but was not sunk until the British brought in enormous Tallboy bombs to ensure that even a near miss would be effective.


title: Dive bomber

text: An aircraft diving vertically minimises its horizontal velocity component. When the bomb is dropped, the force of gravity simply increases its speed along its nearly vertical trajectory. The bomb travels a virtually straight line between release and impact, eliminating the need for complex calculations. The aircraft simply aims at the target and releases its bombs. The primary source of error is the effect of wind on the bomb's flight path after release. As bombs are streamlined and heavy, wind has only a slight effect on them and the bomb is likely to fall within its lethal radius of the target.


title: Dive bomber

text: Bomb sighting becomes trivial, requiring only a straight line of sight to the target. This was simplified as the aircraft was pointed directly at the target, making sighting over the nose much easier. Differences in the path of different bombs due to differing ballistics can be corrected by selecting a standardised bombing altitude and then adjusting the dive angle slightly for each case. As the bomber dives, the aim could be continually adjusted. In contrast, when a horizontal bomber veers offline while approaching the bomb release point, turning to the angle that would correct this also changes the speed of the aircraft over the ground (when there is a wind) and thereby changes the range as well.


title: Dive bomber

text: In the 1930s and early 1940s, dive bombing was the best method for attacking high-value compact targets, like bridges and ships, with accuracy. The forces generated when the aircraft levels out at the bottom of the dive are considerable. The drawback of modifying and strengthening an aircraft for near-vertical dives was the loss of performance. Aside from the greater strength requirements, during normal horizontal flight, aircraft are normally designed to return to fly straight and level, but when put into a dive the changes in forces affecting the aircraft now cause the aircraft to track across the target unless the pilot applies considerable force to keep the nose down, with a corresponding decrease in accuracy. To compensate, many dive bombers were designed to be trimmed out, either through the use of special dive flaps (such as Fairey Youngman flaps) or through changes in tailplane trim that must be readjusted when the dive is completed.


title: Dive bomber

text: The Vultee Vengeance, mostly used by the RAF and RAAF in Burma, was designed to be trimmed for diving, with no lift to distort the dive. The drawback was that it flew nose up in level flight, increasing drag. Failure to re-adjust trim made the aircraft difficult or impossible to pull out of a dive.