title: Marian reforms

text: However, loyalty of the legions shifted away from the Roman state and towards the generals who led the army, as soldiers now had a direct financial incentive to support their generals' ambitions. It became alarmingly common for a general to prolong his "imperium" by using the army to influence the Senate and consolidate his power. Some even went as far as to declare war on their political enemies leading to civil war. This led ultimately to the destruction of the Republic and its transformation into the Roman Empire, under the rule of an emperor.


title: Marian reforms

text: The cohort legions of the late Republic and early Empire are often called Marian legions. Following the Battle of Vercellae in 101 BC Marius granted all Italian soldiers Roman citizenship. He justified this action to the Senate by saying in the din of battle he could not distinguish Roman from ally. This effectively eliminated the notion of allied legions; henceforth all Italian legions would be regarded as Roman legions.


title: Marian reforms

text: The role of allied legions would eventually be taken up by contingents of allied/auxiliary troops, called "Auxilia". Each legion had a same size or near same size Auxilia (auxiliary), which contained specialist units, engineers and pioneers, artillerymen and siege craftsmen, service and support units plus units made up of non-citizens (who were granted Roman citizenship upon discharge) and undesirables. These were usually formed into complete units such as light cavalry, light infantry or "velites", and laborers. There was also a reconnaissance squad called "speculatores" who could also serve as messengers or even as an early form of military intelligence service. There were ten speculatores in each legion.


title: Marian reforms

text: During these reforms, the legions were also organized into permanent cohorts for the first time. Prior to this cohorts had been temporary administrative units or tactical task forces of several maniples, even more transitory than that of the legions of the early Republic themselves. Now the cohorts were six to ten permanent units, composed of five to eight centuries each led by a centurion assisted by an "optio", a soldier who could read and write. The "optio" also took control of the century if the centurion died or was injured. These came to form the basic tactical unit of the legions. The senior centurion of the legion was called the "primus pilus", a career soldier and adviser to the legate; he was generally 50 years of age or older. There were also additional officers assigned to each legion, an "aquilifer", "imaginifer" (Imperial Rome only), a "tesserarius", and a "cornicen". The "aquilifer" was in charge of the legion standard, so there was only one per legion. The legion standard created a sense of unit loyalty. The soldiers' loyalty to their unit also created rivalries between some units in the same army. The "imaginifer" carried an image of the emperor (whichever one was in power at the time). The "tesserarius" was in charge of the guard outposts for each century. The "cornicen" was crucial in the heat of battle, as he blew the formation, attack, withdrawal, and many other notes. This was the only way legionaries and their officers could hear or issue orders in the din of battle.


title: Marian reforms

text: Every legion had a baggage train of 500–550 mules, or about one mule for every ten legionaries. To keep these baggage trains from becoming too large, Marius had each man carry as much of his own equipment as he could, including his own armor, weapons and fifteen days' rations or about 50–60 pounds (22.5–27 kg) of load total. To make this easier, he issued each legionary a forked stick to carry his load on his shoulders. The soldiers were nicknamed Marius' mules ("muli mariani" in Latin) due to the amount of gear they had to carry themselves.


title: Marian reforms

text: A typical legion of this period had around 5,000–6,000 legionaries as well as a large number of camp followers, servants and slaves. Legions could contain as many as 6,000 fighting men divided among several cohorts. Numbers would also vary depending on casualties suffered during a campaign; Julius Caesar's legions during his campaign in Gaul often only had around 3,500 men and on one occasion during his civil war against Pompey he had to join two of his battle-reduced legions together to achieve the strength of one conventional legion.


title: Marian reforms

text: Hundreds of years later, under the Emperor Diocletian and his successors, new legions raised for the field armies, as opposed to those stationed along the frontiers, were recruited to only about 1,000 men and were, therefore, the size of military auxiliary cohorts. This was a response to the logistical needs of the late Empire: the smaller units were more easily dispatched as needed to trouble spots than were the older, larger units, and they were no longer made up exclusively of fully armored heavy infantry. Instead, they often consisted of light infantry or archers. Except with regard to Roman citizenship (and even then not always), they were in fact no longer sharply distinguished, if distinguished at all, from auxiliary units raised from barbarians within and without the Empire. These later legions ("comitatenses") should not be confused with the legions of heavy infantry of the earlier empire.


title: Governorates of Egypt

text: For administrative purposes, Egypt is divided into twenty-seven governorates ( '; ; genitive case: ' ; plural: ""). Egyptian governorates are the top tier of the country's jurisdiction hierarchy. A governorate is administered by a governor, who is appointed by the President of Egypt and serves at the president's discretion. Most governorates have a population density of less than one thousand people per km, while the three largest have a population density of less than three people per km.


title: Governorates of Egypt

text: Governorates are either fully "urban" or a mixture of "urban" and "rural." The official distinction between "urban" and "rural" is reflected in the lower tiers: that is, fully urban governorates have no regions ("markaz"), as the "markaz" is, natively, a conglomeration of villages. Moreover, governorates may comprise just one city, as in the case of Cairo Governorate or Alexandria Governorate. Hence, these one-city governorates are only divided into districts (urban neighborhoods). Cairo Governorate consists of 41 districts; Alexandria Governorate consists of 7.


title: Governorates of Egypt

text: Two new governorates were created in April 2008: Helwan and 6th of October. In April 2011, however, the 6th of October and Helwan governorates were again incorporated into the Giza and Cairo Governorates, respectively. Luxor was created in December 2009, to be the 29th governorate of Egypt, but with the abolition of the 6th of October and Helwan governorates, the number of governorates has decreased to 27.


title: Governorates of Egypt

text: Before the 1952 Egyptian revolution, state penetration of the rural areas was limited by the power of local notables. Under Nasser, land reform reduced those notables' socioeconomic dominance, and the peasants were incorporated into cooperatives which transferred mass dependence from landlords to the government. The extension of officials into the countryside permitted the regime to bring development and services to the village. The local branches of the ruling party, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), fostered a certain peasant political activism and coopted the local notables — in particular the village headmen — and checked their independence from the regime.


title: Governorates of Egypt

text: State penetration did not retreat under Sadat and Mubarak. The earlier effort to mobilize peasants and deliver services disappeared as the local party and cooperative withered, but administrative controls over the peasants remained intact. The local power of the old families and the headmen revived but more at the expense of peasants than of the state. The district police station balanced the notables, and the system of local government (the mayor and council) integrated them into the regime.


title: Governorates of Egypt

text: Until 1979, local government enjoyed limited power in Egypt's highly centralized state. Under the central government, there were twenty-six governorates, which were subdivided into regions (conglomeration of villages; named in ' "center", plural: '), each of which was further subdivided into towns or villages. At each level, there was a governing structure that combined representative councils and government-appointed executive organs headed by governors, district officers, and mayors, respectively. Governors were appointed by the president, and they, in turn, appointed subordinate executive officers. The coercive backbone of the state apparatus ran downward from the Ministry of Interior through the governors' executive organs to the district police station and the village headman.


title: Governorates of Egypt

text: Sadat took several measures to decentralize power to the provinces and towns. Governors acquired more authority under Law Number 43 of 1979, which reduced the administrative and budgetary controls of the central government over the provinces. The elected councils acquired, at least formally, the right to approve or disapprove the local budget. In an effort to reduce local demands on the central treasury, local government was given wider powers to raise local taxes. Local representative councils became vehicles of pressure for government spending, and the soaring deficits of local government bodies had to be covered by the central government. Local government was encouraged to enter into joint ventures with private investors, and these ventures stimulated an alliance between government officials and the local rich that paralleled the infitah alliance at the national level. Under Mubarak, decentralization and local autonomy became more of a reality, and local policies often reflected special local conditions. Thus, officials in Upper Egypt often bowed to the powerful Islamic movement there, while those in the port cities struck alliances with importers."


title: Governorates of Egypt

text: Data taken from CAPMAS:. Information for population is in thousands, pop density - persons/km and area is in km.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: A maritime patrol aircraft (MPA), also known as a patrol aircraft, maritime reconnaissance aircraft, or by the older American term patrol bomber, is a fixed-wing aircraft designed to operate for long durations over water in maritime patrol roles — in particular anti-submarine warfare (ASW), anti-ship warfare (AShW), and search and rescue (SAR).


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: Among other maritime surveillance resources, such as satellites, ships, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and helicopters, the MPA is an important asset. To perform ASW operations, MPAs typically carry air-deployable sonar buoys as well as torpedoes and are usually capable of extended flight at low altitudes.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: The first aircraft that would now be identified as maritime patrol aircraft were flown by the Royal Naval Air Service and the French Aéronautique Maritime during the First World War, primarily on anti-submarine patrols. France, Italy and Austria-Hungary used large numbers of smaller patrol aircraft for the Mediterranean, Adriatic and other coastal areas while the Germans and British fought over the North Sea. At first, blimps and zeppelins were the only aircraft capable of staying aloft for the longer ten hour patrols whilst carrying a useful payload while shorter-range patrols were mounted with landplanes such as the Sopwith 1½ Strutter. A number of specialized patrol balloons were built, particularly by the British, including the SS class airship of which 158 were built including subtypes.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: As the conflict continued, numerous aircraft were developed specifically for the role, including small flying boats such as the FBA Type C, as well as large floatplanes such as the Short 184, or flying boats such as the Felixstowe F.3. Developments of the Felixstowe served with the Royal Air Force until the mid 20s, and with the US Navy as the Curtiss F5L and Naval Aircraft Factory PN whose developments saw service until 1938. During the war, Dornier did considerable pioneering work in all aluminium aircraft structures while working for Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and built four large patrol flying boats, the last of which, the Zeppelin-Lindau Rs.IV, influenced development elsewhere resulting in the replacement of wooden hulls with metal ones, such as on the Short Singapore. The success of long range patrol aircraft led to the development of fighters specifically designed to intercept them, such as the Hansa-Brandenburg W.29.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: Many of the Second World War patrol airplanes were converted from either bombers or airliners, such as the Lockheed Hudson which started out as the Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra, as well as older biplane designs such as the Supermarine Stranraer, which had begun to be replaced by monoplanes just before the outbreak of war. The British in particular used obsolete bombers to supplement purpose-built aircraft for maritime patrol, such as the Vickers Wellington and Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley, while the US relegated the Douglas B-18 Bolo to the same role until better aircraft became available. Blimps were widely used by the United States Navy, especially in the warmer and calmer latitudes of the Caribbean Sea, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Gulf of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and later the Azores.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: A number of special-purpose aircraft were also used in the conflict, including the American-made twin-engine Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boats, and the large, four-engine British Short Sunderland flying boats of the Allies. In the Pacific theatre, the Catalina was gradually superseded by the longer-ranged Martin PBM Mariner flying boat. For the Axis Powers, there were the long-range Japanese Kawanishi H6K and Kawanishi H8K flying boats, and the German Blohm & Voss BV 138 diesel-engined trimotor flying boat, as well as the converted Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor airliner landplane.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: To finally close the Mid-Atlantic gap, or "Black Gap", a space in which Axis submarines could prey of Allied shipping historically out of reach of MPAs, the British Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the US Army Air Forces introduced the American Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber, which had a very long range for the era. The B-24 was also used at the basis for the PB4Y-2 Privateer, a dedicated MPA variant adopted in large numbers by the US Navy, which saw service late on in the Pacific theatre.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: During the conflict, there were several developments in Air-to-Surface Vessel radar and sonobuoys, which enhanced the ability of aircraft to find and destroy submarines, especially at night and in poor weather. Another area of advancement was the adoption of increasingly effective camouflage schemes, which led to the widespread adoption of white paint schemes in the Atlantic to reduce the warning available to surfaced U-boats, while US Navy aircraft transitioned from an upper light blue-gray and lower white to an all-over dark blue due to the increasing threat of Japanese forces at night-time.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: In the decades following the Second World War, the MPA missions were partially taken over by aircraft derived from civilian airliners. These had range and performance factors better than most of the wartime bombers. The latest jet-powered bombers of the 1950s did not have the endurance needed for long, overwater patrolling, and they did not have the low loitering speeds necessary for antisubmarine operations. The main threat to NATO maritime supremacy throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s was Soviet Navy and Warsaw Pact submarines. These were countered by the NATO fleets, the NATO patrol planes mentioned above, and by sophisticated underwater listening systems. These span the so-called "GIUK Gap" of the North Atlantic that extends from Greenland to Iceland, to the Faroe Islands, to Scotland in the United Kingdom. Air bases for NATO patrol planes have also been located in these areas: U.S. Navy and Canadian aircraft based in Greenland, Iceland, and Newfoundland; British aircraft based in Scotland and Northern Ireland; and Norwegian, Dutch, and German aircraft based in their home countries.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: During the late 1940s, the RAF introduced the Avro Shackleton a specialised MPA derivative of the Avro Lancaster bomber in anticipation of a rapid expansion of the Soviet Navy's submarine force.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: An improved model of the Shackleton, the "MR 3", was introduced, featuring various structural improvements, along with homing torpedoes and Mk 101 Lulu nuclear depth bombs. During the late 1960s, a jet-powered replacement in the form of the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod, a derivation of the De Havilland Comet airliner, begun to be introduced. During the 2000s, an improved model, the BAE Systems Nimrod MRA4, was in development, but was cancelled and eventually substituted for by the Boeing P-8 Poseidon.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: The U.S. Navy flew a mixture of MPAs, including the land-based Lockheed P2V Neptune (P2V) and the carrier-based Grumman S-2 Tracker. During the 1970s, the P2V was entirely replaced by the Lockheed P-3 Orion, which remained in service into the early twenty-first century.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: The P-3, powered by four turboprop engines, is derived from the 1950s era Lockheed Electra airliner. In addition to their ASW and SAR capabilities, most P-3Cs have been modified to carry Harpoon and Maverick missiles for attacking surface ships. American P-3s were formerly armed with the Lulu nuclear depth charge for ASW, but those were removed from the arsenal and scrapped decades ago. Produced in United States, Japan and Canada, the P-3 has been operated by the air forces and navies of United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, and Taiwan. The Canadian version is called the CP-140 Aurora.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: During the 1960s, in response to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a new MPA, the Breguet 1150 Atlantic was developed by a French-led multinational consortium, "Société d'Étude et de Construction de Breguet Atlantic" (SECBAT). Operators of the type include the French Navy, the German Navy, the Italian Air Force, the Pakistan Navy, and the Royal Netherlands Navy. During the 1980s, an updated version, the "Atlantic Nouvelle Génération" or "Atlantique 2", with new equipment and avionics was introduced, which included a new radar, sonar processor, forward-looking infrared camera turret, and the ability to carry the Exocet anti-shipping missile. By 2005, French manufacturer Dassault Aviation had decided to terminate marketing efforts for the Atlantic, promoting a MPA variant of the Dassault Falcon 900 corporate jet instead.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: Japan has developed multiple purpose-designed MPAs during this period. The Shin Meiwa PS-1 flying boat was designed to meet a Japanese requirement for a new ASW platform. A modernised derivative of the PS-1, the ShinMaywa US-2 amphibian, was introduced during the early twenty-first century to succeed the PS-1. The land-based Kawasaki P-1 was introduced during the 2010s by the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) as a replacement for the aging P-3C Orion.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: Both the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Australian Navy met their early postwar MPA needs via a stretched-fuselage modification of the Avro Lincoln bomber. However, the type was soon supplemented and eventually replaced by new aircraft, such as the P2V and later the P-3C, which later became the sole ASW type operated by the service.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: The Soviet Union developed the Ilyushin Il-38 from a civilian airliner. Similarly, the Royal Canadian Air Force derived the Canadair CP-107 Argus from a British airliner, the Bristol Britannia. The Argus was superseded by the CP-140 Aurora, derived from the Lockheed Electra.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: Since the end of the Cold War, the threat of a large-scale submarine attack is a remote one, and many of the air forces and navies have been downsizing their fleets of patrol planes. Those still in service are still used for search-and-rescue, counter-smuggling, antipiracy, antipoaching of marine life, the enforcement of the exclusive economic zones, and enforcement of the laws of the seas.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: The earliest patrol aircraft carried bombs and machine guns. Between the wars the British experimented with equipping their patrol aircraft with the COW 37 mm gun. During World War II, depth charges that could be set to detonate at specific depths, and later when in proximity with large metal objects replaced "anti-submarine" bombs that detonated on contact. Patrol aircraft also carried defensive armament which was necessary when patrolling areas close to enemy territory such as Allied operations in the Bay of Biscay targeting U-boats starting out from their base.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: As a result of Allied successes with patrol aircraft against U-boats, the Germans introduced U-"flak" (submarines equipped with more antiaircraft weaponry) to escort U-boats out of base and encouraged commanders to remain on the surface and fire back at attacking craft rather than trying to escape by diving. However, U-flak was short-lived, as opposing pilots adapted their tactics. Equipping submarines with radar-warning devices and the snorkel made them harder to find.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: To counter the German long-range patrol aircraft that targeted merchant convoys, the Royal Navy introduced the "CAM ship", which was a merchant vessel equipped with a lone fighter plane which could be launched once to engage the enemy planes. Later, the small escort carriers of WW II became available to cover the deep oceans, and the land air bases in the Azores became available in mid-1943 from Portugal.


title: Maritime patrol aircraft

text: A modern military maritime patrol aircraft typically carries a dozen or so crew members, including relief flight crews, to effectively operate the equipment for 12 hours or more at a time.


title: Stefano Pessina

text: Stefano Pessina (born 4 June 1941) is an Italian-Monegasque billionaire businessman; he is the executive chairman and largest single shareholder of Walgreens Boots Alliance.


title: Stefano Pessina

text: He graduated from the Polytechnic University of Milan in nuclear engineering before starting his career in academia and later joining market research firm ACNielsen in Milan. He wanted to be a nuclear physicist, but was discouraged by the tumultuous political climate of 1970s.


title: Stefano Pessina

text: In 1977, Pessina took over his family's pharmaceutical wholesaler (possibly Petrone Group) in Naples, Italy, and turned it into Alliance Santé, a Franco-Italian pharmaceutical wholesale group. In 1997, it merged with Alliance UniChem. From 2001 to 2004, he served as its CEO. He served as deputy chairman, and later as chairman. The company merged with Boots Group PLC in 2006 and was taken private in July 2007. Pessina was chairman of Alliance Boots from 2007 to 2014 and currently serves as Executive Chairman of Walgreens Boots Alliance (here, "WBA"). Pessina is also a director of WBA. He is a director of the Consumer Goods Forum.


title: Stefano Pessina

text: In a 31 January 2015 interview for "The Sunday Telegraph", Pessina commented on the prospect of Britain's Labour Party winning the UK general election in May 2015, ""If they acted as they speak, it would be a catastrophe ... The problem is would they act that way or not? One thing is to threaten and to shout but it is completely different to be in charge and to manage the country day-to-day."" He described Labour's business policies as "not helpful for business, not helpful for the country and in the end it probably won’t be helpful for them". The "Sunday Telegraph" noted that Pessina ""declined to elaborate on which specific policies he disliked"".


title: Stefano Pessina

text: On Sunday 1 February, Labour's shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna, responded in "The Independent", "The British people and British businesses will draw their own conclusions when those who don’t live here, don’t pay tax in this country and lead firms that reportedly avoid making a fair contribution in what they pay purport to know what is in Britain’s best interest." On 2 February, in a live Q&A session with Sky News, the Labour Party leader Ed Miliband said, ""The chairman of Boots lives in Monaco and doesn't pay British taxes ... I don't think people should take kindly to being told how to vote by someone who avoids paying his taxes.""


title: Stefano Pessina

text: On 2 February, Walgreens Boots Alliance stated, "The comments made by Stefano Pessina were a small part of a much larger conversation and have been taken out of context ... Stefano Pessina was expressing his personal views only and is not campaigning against Ed Miliband or the Labour Party." On 6 February, Allister Heath, deputy editor of "The Telegraph", described the "attacks" by Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians on Pessina, ""one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs"", as being ""as nonsensical as they were indefensible"".


title: Stefano Pessina

text: In July 2020, it was announced that Pessina would step down as CEO of WBA to take a "less hands on role" and replace Jim Skinner as executive chairman.


title: Stefano Pessina

text: Pessina is married to Ornella Barra; she is chief operating officer, international of Walgreens Boots Alliance.


title: Stefano Pessina

text: According to "Bloomberg Billionaires Index", Pessina's net worth was estimated at US$10.3 Billion as of August 2021.


title: Mega Man 11

text: Mega Man 11 is an action-platform game developed and published by Capcom. The game is an entry in the original "Mega Man" series, and was released worldwide for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in October 2018. The game was ported to Amazon Luna on September 9, 2021. The game brings back several features such as voice acting and a 2.5D graphic style from previous games throughout the "Mega Man" franchise.


title: Mega Man 11

text: "Mega Man 11" retains the gameplay style of the classic "Mega Man" series of games, and features a 2.5D graphics style with 3D polygonal characters and 2D environments. Players control Mega Man in an attempt to stop Dr. Wily from using the Double Gear system that he invented many years before when he was at Robot University. Players travel through eight linear stages, which can be chosen in any way the player sees fit, and have to face Doctor Wily's newest Robot Masters, including Block Man, Fuse Man, Blast Man, Acid Man, Tundra Man, Torch Man, Impact Man (known as Pile Man in Japan), and Bounce Man (known as Rubber Man in Japan).


title: Mega Man 11

text: Mega Man can perform classic moves such as the chargeable Mega Buster and slide, as well as obtain new weapons by defeating Robot Master bosses at the end of each level. Unique to this game is the Double Gear system, which grants Mega Man two additional abilities: the Speed Gear and Power Gear. The Speed Gear lets Mega Man slow down time, allowing him to dodge attacks, while the Power Gear increases the attack power of Mega Man's weaponry, allowing him to fire two charged shots at the same time or a single, very powerful charged shot; however, there is a limit, showcased by a bar above Mega Man's head, so if Mega Man uses them too much, he will overheat, making him unable to reuse them again for a few seconds. When Mega Man's health is critically low, he can activate both gears at the same time, slowing time and performing a powerful charge shot. This can only be used once and leaves Mega Man weakened after the limit expires: he cannot charge his shots, can only fire a single solar bullet at a time and he will only have one unit of life energy, making the next hit he takes fatal for him, and even the cooldown period where he cannot use the gears is longer because of the severe strains.


title: Mega Man 11

text: The game has additional features including Time Trials, Missions, Global Leaderboards, a character gallery and more. The game also features difficulty settings, last seen in "Mega Man 10", expanding upon them for a total of four: Newcomer, Casual, Normal, and Superhero. The Nintendo Switch version has Amiibo support, which can be used to unlock in-game items.


title: Mega Man 11

text: The story begins with a flashback of Dr. Light and Dr. Wily when they were students at Robot University at the exact moment they had their falling out. The committee is debating over choosing either Light's research of robots with independent thoughts or Wily's Double Gear system to continue work on. Despite Wily's objections to Light's ideologies, Light's research was chosen over Wily's. Enraged by his rejection, Wily swears revenge on Light.


title: Mega Man 11

text: After the flashback ends with Wily waking up disturbed, he suddenly remembers the Double Gear System and begins plotting.


title: Mega Man 11

text: Meanwhile, at his lab, Light, Roll, and Auto are checking up on eight of the latest generation models of Robot Masters for maintenance. Just as they finish with one, Wily barges into the lab and tells Light that he has perfected the Double Gear system before using its Speed Gear to capture the Robot Masters. Mega Man demands Wily release them, but he instead leaves with the robots. Light explains to Mega Man about the Double Gear System and its capabilities, warning him that if Wily really has perfected it, he will not stand a chance. Seeing Mega Man's determination, Light reveals that he kept and repaired the prototype Double Gear System that Wily used to own. After briefly warning Mega Man of its risks, Light installs the Double Gear into Mega Man after several days to help him combat Wily's forces.


title: Mega Man 11

text: After defeating four Robot Masters, Light explains to Mega Man that the Double Gear system was partly responsible for him and Wily falling out. Light believed that if robots were given the power to think for themselves, they could be true partners with humans. Wily, however, stated that even robots who think independently would be mere tools to humans, but by giving them power and speed boosts, then humans would finally respect robots for what they are and any robot could be a hero with the Double Gear System installed. However, when the committee chose Light over Wily, the latter stormed off never forgiving his old friend for not even giving him a chance.


title: Mega Man 11

text: Back in the present, Light muses if he had shown him there was a way to work together instead of telling him that he was wrong, they might have remained friends. Light then gives Mega Man the Rush Jet modification for Rush (Mega Man's robotic pet dog) with Mega Man then setting off to defeat the remaining Robot Masters.


title: Mega Man 11

text: After defeating all eight Robot Masters, Auto attempts to locate Wily, who angrily beckons Mega Man to come to his Gear Fortress so he can deal with him. In response, Mega Man heads to Wily's fortress, defeats his armies, defences and the Robot Masters, and confronts Wily in his new Wily Machine. Upon losing to Mega Man, Wily tries to beg for mercy in slow motion, but Mega Man does not fall for it, much to Wily's ire. Light arrives and tries to coax Wily to make amends, citing Mega Man as an example of their ideas working together, but Wily refuses and escapes, leaving Light dismayed. As the fortress begins to collapse, Auto arrives, telling Light he had finished doing what he asked of him. With that, the three of them escape the collapsing fortress.


title: Mega Man 11

text: Back at the lab, Light reveals he and Auto went to the Gear Fortress to find the parts in order to rebuild the Robot Masters. Auto uses Mega Man's Double Gear System to carry the Robot Masters to the repair room, so they can be sent back to their owners (during which he overheats and faints).


title: Mega Man 11

text: The game was announced in December 2017 as part of the celebration of the series' 30th anniversary, along with the announcements of re-releases of earlier "Mega Man" games. "Mega Man 11" features 3D polygonal characters and hand-drawn environments, departing from the pixel art-based approach from previous games, and is displayed in 2.5D. It was directed by Koji Oda and produced by Kazuhiro Tsuchiya, with character designs by Yuji Ishihara, and music by Marika Suzuki. According to Tsuchiya and Oda, the departure of "Mega Man" producer Keiji Inafune was mainly the reason for the long hiatus of a new game, as there was a huge hesitation for anyone to step up and become "the new Mega Man guy" until Oda himself did so.


title: Mega Man 11

text: "Mega Man 11" was released worldwide for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One on October 2, 2018, except in Japan where it was released two days later. An alternate soundtrack in the form of a DLC add-on for the game was made freely available to those who pre-ordered the game. A Mega Man Amiibo was released alongside the game for the Switch version. A demo featuring Block Man's stage was released on the Nintendo Switch on September 6, 2018, and on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 the following day. A version for Amazon Luna was made available on September 9, 2021.


title: Mega Man 11

text: Marika Suzuki was the composer, although she was not responsible for the arranged versions. The music in this game was not as well received as that of previous iterations.


title: Mega Man 11

text: "Mega Man 11" was met with generally favorable reviews by critics. IGN gave it a 7.5/10 rating saying "It's not revolutionary, but Mega Man 11 feels almost like a classic Mega Man game, and is a good foundation for the next 10 games" while "GameSpot" gave it a 7/10 rating praising the game for its "great sub-bosses and intense robot master fights[,] some new stage gimmicks [being] a lot of fun and endearing personality of the series com[ing] through in the visual and character design", while criticizing the stages for being "far too long and hav[ing] some questionable elements[,] the difficulty spikes throughout levels lead[ing] to frustrating setbacks [and] the Double Gear System never seem[ing] quite as useful as you want it to be". "Nintendo Life" gave it a 9/10 rating, writing that "Mega Man 11 is an excellent resurgence for the Blue Bomber, imbuing the tried-and-true classic gameplay with modern touches and new ideas that expand on existing concepts in interesting ways."


title: Mega Man 11

text: During its first week on sale in Japan, the physical Nintendo Switch version of Mega Man 11 sold 14,650 copies, while the physical PlayStation 4 version sold 12,052 copies. As of February 2019, the game sold 870,000 copies worldwide, As of September 2019, the game sold 1.3 million copies worldwide. As of June 2021, the game sold 1.4 million copies worldwide. As of March 31, the game sold 1.5 million copies worldwide. Capcom confirmed in September 30, 2022 that it had sold over 1.6 million copies becoming the best highest selling game in the Mega Man franchise.


title: Mega Man 11

text: The game was nominated for "Best Action Game" at The Game Awards 2018, for "Original Light Mix Score, Franchise" at the National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards, and for the G.A.N.G. / MAGFEST People's Choice Award at the 2019 G.A.N.G. Awards.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Reactions to the September 11 attacks included condemnation from world leaders, other political and religious representatives and the international media, as well as numerous memorials and services all over the world. The attacks were widely condemned by the governments of the world, including those traditionally considered hostile to the United States, such as Cuba, Iran, Libya, and North Korea. However, in a few cases celebrations of the attacks were also reported, and some groups and individuals accused the United States in effect of bringing the attacks on itself. These reports have largely been uncorroborated and many have been linked to unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Many countries introduced anti-terrorism legislation and froze the bank accounts of businesses and individuals they suspected of having connections with al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, the accused perpetrators of the attacks.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration declared a war on terrorism, with the stated goals of bringing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justice and preventing the emergence of other terrorist networks. These goals were to be accomplished by means including economic and military sanctions against states perceived as harboring terrorists and increasing global surveillance and intelligence sharing. Within hours after the September 11 attacks, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld speculated on possible involvement by Saddam Hussein and ordered his aides to make plans for striking Iraq; although unfounded, the association contributed to public acceptance for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The second-biggest operation of the US Global War on Terrorism outside of the United States, and the largest directly connected to terrorism, was the overthrow of the Taliban rule from Afghanistan, by a US-led coalition.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: In a Joint Statement by the American Muslim Alliance, American Muslim Council, Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers, Association of Muslim Social Scientists, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Medical Association of North America, Islamic Circle of North America, Islamic Society of North America, Ministry of Imam W. Deen Mohammed, Muslim American Society and Muslim Public Affairs Council, stated:


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: American Muslims utterly condemn the vicious and cowardly acts of terrorism against innocent civilians. We join with all Americans in calling for the swift apprehension and punishment of the perpetrators. No political cause could ever be assisted by such immoral acts.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: President George W. Bush, a devout Christian, quoted Psalm 23 in his Address to the Nation immediately following the attacks:


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism. Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me."


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Bush also called for solidarity with Muslims and Islam following attacks on Arab-Americans and Muslims, stating "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Reverend Billy Graham gave a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral for a memorial service to the victims of the terrorist attacks, declaring the need for spiritual renewal, and imploring Americans to bond together through struggle and strengthen their faith, and not to fragment and disintegrate as a people and nation.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Two days following the attacks, on the Christian television program "The 700 Club", television evangelist Jerry Falwell called the event a punishment from God and laid the blame on "paganists", "abortionists", "feminists" and "gays and lesbians", claiming that they "helped this happen". Host Pat Robertson concurred with the statements. Both evangelists came under attack from President George W. Bush for their statements and Falwell subsequently apologized.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Five days following the attacks, Reverend Jeremiah Wright gave a sermon at the United Trinity Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois, claiming that the attacks were recompense for various injustices that the United States and Americans had perpetrated, before stating that now was a time for self-examination.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: According to left-wing intellectuals Michael Walzer, Leo Casey, Michael Kazin, James B. Rule, and Ann Snitow, writing in "Dissent", one of the responses by the American left to the September 11 attacks was to blame American actions, including the Gulf War, Sanctions against Iraq, support for Saudi Arabia, and support for Israel, for provoking the September 11 attack. Walzer later described the left's response to 9/11 as a "radical failure."


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: After the attacks many governments and organizations in the western world and several pro-U.S. allies expressed shock and sympathy, and were supportive of burgeoning efforts to combat terrorism. Among them are:


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Almost all Muslim political and religious leaders condemned the attacks. The leaders vehemently denouncing the attacks included the leaders of Egypt (Hosni Mubarak), the Palestinian Authority (Yasser Arafat), Libya (Muammar Gaddafi), Syria (Bashar al-Assad), Iran (Mohamed Khatami) and Pakistan (Pervez Musharraf). The sole exception was Iraq, when the then-president Saddam Hussein, said of the attacks that "the American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity". Saddam would later offer sympathy to the Americans killed in the attacks.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: In 2008, John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed published the findings of a six-year effort to poll and interview tens of thousands of Muslims in more than 35 countries with Muslim majorities or substantial minorities about reactions to the September 11 attacks: 23.1 percent of respondents said the attacks were in some way justified, and 7 percent viewed them as "completely justified." According to Pew Research, the majority of Muslims do not believe the official 9/11 story.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: A group of Palestinians were filmed celebrating in the street after hearing the local news reports of attacks on the World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of Americans. Fox News reported that in Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp, revelers fired weapons in the air, with similar celebratory gunfire also heard at the Rashidiyeh camp near the southern city of Tyre. Yasser Arafat and nearly all the leaders of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) condemned the attacks. They attempted to censure and discredit broadcasts and other Palestinian news reports justifying the attacks in America, with many newspapers, magazines, websites and wire services running photographs of Palestinian public celebrations. The PNA claimed such celebrations were not representative of the sentiments of the Palestinians, and the Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said the PNA would not allow "a few kids" to "smear the real face of the Palestinians". In an attempt to quell further reporting, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat's Cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority could not "guarantee the life" of an Associated Press (AP) cameraman if footage he filmed of post-9/11 celebrations in Nablus was broadcast. Rahman's statement prompted a formal protest from the AP bureau chief, Dan Perry.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Arafat said of the attacks: "It's unbelievable. We completely condemn this very dangerous attack, and I convey my condolences to the American people, to the American president and to the American administration, not only in my name but on behalf of the Palestinians." He gave blood for victims of the attack in a Gaza hospital.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: James Bennet reported in "The New York Times" that while "most" towns in the West Bank were quiet, some drivers in East Jerusalem were honking horns in celebration; he also wrote that he saw one man passing out celebratory candy. Big crowds of Palestinians celebrated in Nablus, chanting "Beloved bin Laden, strike Tel Aviv!" while Palestinian Authority personnel prevented photographers from taking pictures. Annette Krüger Spitta of the German public broadcaster ARD's TV magazine "Panorama" states that unaired footage shows the street surrounding the celebration in Jerusalem was quiet. Furthermore, she states that a man in a white T-shirt incited the children and gathered people together for the shot. The "Panorama" report, dated September 20, 2001, quotes Communications Professor Martin Löffelholz explaining that in the images one sees jubilant Palestinian children and several adults, but there is no indication that their pleasure is related to the attack. The woman seen cheering stated afterwards that she was offered cake if she celebrated on camera, and was frightened when she saw the pictures on television afterward.


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: There was also a rumour that the footage of some Palestinians celebrating the attacks was stock footage of Palestinian reactions to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This rumour was proven false shortly afterwards, and CNN issued a statement to that effect. However, a poll of Palestinians conducted by the Fafo Foundation in 2005 found that 65% of respondents supported "Al Qaeda bombings in the USA and Europe".


title: Reactions to the September 11 attacks

text: Polls taken several years later by Saudi-owned Al Arabiya and Gallup suggest some support for the September 11 attacks within the Islamic world, with 38% believing the attacks to be not justified, while 36% believing them to be justified when Saudis were polled in 2011. Another 2008 study, produced by Gallup, found that 7% of the sample of Muslims polled believing the 9/11 attacks were "completely" justified.


title: FarmVille

text: FarmVille is a series of agriculture-simulation social network game developed and published by Zynga in 2009. It is similar to "Happy Farm" and "Farm Town". Its gameplay involves various aspects of farmland management, such as plowing land, planting, growing, and harvesting crops, harvesting trees and raising livestock. The sequels "FarmVille 2" and "FarmVille 3" were released in September 2012 and November 2021.


title: FarmVille

text: The game was available as an Adobe Flash application via the social networking website Facebook and Microsoft's MSN Games. It was previously available as a mobile app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad for a brief period in 2010. The game was free-to-play; however, to progress quickly within the game, players are encouraged to spend "Farm Cash" (in "FarmVille") or "Farm Bucks" (in "FarmVille 2"), which are purchasable with real-world currency. "FarmVille" was thus one of the first major freemium games.


title: FarmVille

text: After launching on Facebook in 2009, "FarmVille" became the most popular game on the site, and held that position for over two years. At its peak, in March 2010, the game had 83.76 million monthly active users. Daily active users peaked at 34.5 million. After 2011, the game began experiencing a considerable decline in popularity. By May 2012, the game was ranked as the seventh most popular Facebook game. As of April 30, 2016, its rank had fallen to the 110th most popular Facebook game as measured by daily active users, while "FarmVille 2" had climbed to 42.


title: FarmVille

text: On September 27, 2020, Zynga announced that it would discontinue the first "FarmVille" on Facebook on December 31, 2020, as Facebook was to stop supporting games running on Flash Player—required by "FarmVille"—on that day. Following the existing "FarmVille 2", "FarmVille 3" focuses on mobile devices.


title: FarmVille

text: Once players began a farm, they would first create a customizable avatar, which could be changed at any point.


title: FarmVille

text: The player began with an empty farm and a fixed starting number of Farm Coins, the primary currency in the game. Players earned XP (experience points) for performing certain actions in the game such as plowing land or buying items. At certain XP benchmarks, the player's level would rise. As the player obtained more items and progressed through levels, crops and animals would become available to them via the "market" where items could be purchased using either Farm Coins or Farm Cash. Farm Cash was earned by leveling up or completing offers, or purchased for real money.


title: FarmVille

text: The main way a player earned Farm Coins, the less important of the two in-game currencies, was through harvesting crops or visiting their neighbors. The player would do this by paying coins for plowing a unit of land. This readied the land for planting seeds, which would eventually be harvested after a set amount of time. The amount of time it took for a crop to mature, and how much money a crop would yield when harvested, was dependent on the crop planted and was noted on its entry in the "market" dialog. They would wither, or they would be of no use when a crop-specific amount of time had elapsed, the amount of time being equal to 2.5 times the amount of time taken to grow the crop (for example, crops which took 8 hours to grow would wither after 2.5×8=20 hours). However, a player could use Farm Cash (purchasable with real-world cash) to purchase an "unwither" to rejuvenate the crops, or use a biplane with "instant grow" to cause crops to be immediately available for harvest. Although the biplane could be purchased with coins, this special feature was only available for Farm Cash. As a player leveled up more, crops with a higher payoff and economy would become available. Sometimes a crop would need a permit that costs Farm Cash in order to be planted.


title: FarmVille

text: A player could buy or receive from friends livestock and trees or bushels, such as cherry trees or chickens, which did not wither but instead became ready for harvest for preset amounts of money a set amount of time from their last harvest. Trees and livestock could not die.


title: FarmVille

text: The two main in-game currencies, Farm Coins and Farm Cash (in "FarmVille") or Farm Bucks (in "FarmVille 2"), were available for purchase from Zynga with real-world money. Coins could also be "earned" within the game by completing tasks or selling crops, and could be spent on basic in-game items such as seeds. Farm Cash and Farm Bucks were more difficult to acquire within the game, and could not be earned within the farm's economic system, only by special actions like leveling up or completing tasks. Farm Cash and Farm Bucks provided a route to acquire further in-game items, such as additional animals for the farm, or to acquire in-game resources like animal feed, water, fuel and power, which were otherwise slow and/or laborious for players to acquire.


title: FarmVille

text: Like most Zynga games, "FarmVille" incorporated the social networking aspect of Facebook into many areas of gameplay. Contacting other players allowed the player to improve their farm more quickly, by using their help as farmhands or by gaining rewards from helping them. Often the aid of other players was a substitute for Farm Cash, the game's purchasable in-game currency, giving players an effective choice between spamming their friends with "FarmVille" messages and requests, or paying real-world cash. "FarmVille" had allowed players to add neighbors that are not Facebook friends, thus allowing the player to have many neighbors at hand. Players invited friends or other players that were not Facebook friends to be their neighbors, allowing them to perform five actions on each other's farms per day by "visiting" it. Neighbors could also send gifts and supplies to each other, complete specialized tasks together for rewards, and join "co-ops" - joint efforts to grow a certain amount of certain crops. Gifts were sent as mystery gifts with expensive, but random items, special deliveries with building supplies, or by choosing a particular item to send. They cost the sending user nothing. For "FarmVille"s 2nd birthday, a series of different mystery gifts were added to the Gifts Page.


title: FarmVille

text: "FarmVille" occasionally ran in-game partnerships where users can visit another company's virtual farm and buy or receive items with their brand logo. For example, as of June 9, 2011, users could get free McDonald's hot air balloons, McCafe products and the ability to visit McDonald's' virtual farm. Other brand partnerships include Minion, Frito Lay, Dish Network Hopper, Capital One, American Express, Lady Gaga, Rio (the motion picture), Haiti Relief Fund, Discover Card, Cascadian Farms, Megamind, Farmers Insurance, Microsoft Bing, and 7-Eleven. "FarmVille" also offered engagement advertising where users could interact with a brand in exchange for free Farm Cash through an ad platform called SVnetwork.


title: FarmVille

text: "FarmVille" has added numerous expansions over the game's lifetime, where players farm in new locales that include England, Hawaii, Japan, Atlantis, Winter holiday locations, Australia and more. As of 2014, "FarmVille" releases a new farm approximately every six weeks.


title: FarmVille

text: In 2012, Zynga, in conjunction with Hasbro, released several kids' "Animal Games" based on "FarmVille" under the "Hasbro Gaming" imprint. These include versions of "Memory" (in a "Disco Dancing Sheep" pouch), "Go Fish" (in a "Groovy Chicken" pouch), "Old Maid" (in a "Rockstar Cow" pouch), and "Hungry Hungry Herd" (a redux of "Hungry Hungry Hippos" with the characters Gobbling Horse, Munching Pig, Snacking Sheep and Chomping Cow replacing the Hippos in the original game).


title: FarmVille

text: This is one of several games in the Zynga game library to be released as physical board game versions. Others include "Draw Something", "Words with Friends" and a "CityVille" edition of "Monopoly".


title: FarmVille

text: Despite the initial success of the game, it has received a negative reaction from critics, video game designers, and personalities. "Time" magazine called the game one of the "50 Worst Inventions" in recent decades due to it being "the most addictive of Facebook games" and a "series of mindless chores on a digital farm".


title: FarmVille

text: In a December 2010 interview with "Gamasutra", game designer and programmer Jonathan Blow criticized "FarmVille" for being designed to create an atmosphere of negativity, requiring an unprecedented commitment to the game, and encouraging users to exploit their friends.


title: FarmVille

text: The video game researcher Ian Bogost designed "Cow Clicker" as a satire of "FarmVille" and similar Zynga games to deconstruct the repetitiveness and perceived absurdity of such games.


title: FarmVille

text: "FarmVille" won an award at the Game Developers Conference for the "Best New Social/Online Game" in 2010. The crowd booed a Zynga executive as he accepted the award.


title: FarmVille

text: On June 26, 2012, "FarmVille 2" was unveiled, and was subsequently released in September 2012. It differs from the original "FarmVille" in a number of ways.


title: FarmVille

text: "FarmVille 2: Country Escape" for mobile devices (iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows operating systems) was released on April 10, 2014, and received a positive review from "The New York Times". Unlike other games in the "FarmVille" series, "FarmVille 2: Country Escape" can be played offline.


title: Anisette

text: Anisette, or Anis, is an anise-flavored liqueur that is consumed in most Mediterranean countries. It is colorless, and because it contains sugar, is sweeter than dry anise flavoured spirits (e.g. absinthe). The most traditional style of anisette is that produced by means of distilling aniseed, and is differentiated from those produced by simple maceration by the inclusion of the word "distilled" on the label. And while Pastis is a similar-tasting liqueur that is prepared in similar fashion and sometimes confused with anisette, it employs a combination of both aniseed and licorice root extracts. Sambuca is essentially an anisette of Italian origin that requires a high minimum (350g/L) sugar content.


title: Anisette

text: Anise liqueur was also introduced to the Philippines by the Spanish, which developed into the local "anisado", an anise-flavored liqueur usually made from distilled sugarcane wine. A notable variant of Filipino "anisado" with sugar is known as "anisado Mallorca", or simply "Mallorca". They are commonly used as ingredients in Filipino cuisine.


title: LORA (missile)

text: In 2018, it has been offered for sale to the Israel Defense Forces, but a decision on purchasing it has not yet been made. Also in 2018 it was confirmed that the Azerbaijani Land Forces had purchased the system.


title: LORA (missile)

text: LORA was used in the final days of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, being used to target a vital bridge in the Lachin corridor linking Armenia to the Nagorno-Karabakh region. It was initially thought to have destroyed the bridge, but later evidence suggested it had only inflicted limited damage.


title: North American cougar

text: The North American cougar ("Puma concolor couguar") is a cougar subspecies in North America. It was once common in eastern North America, and is still prevalent in the western half of the continent. This subspecies includes populations in western Canada, the western United States, Florida, Mexico and Central America, and possibly South America northwest of the Andes Mountains. It is the biggest cat in North America, with North American jaguars being fairly small. It thus includes the extirpated Eastern cougar and extant Florida panther populations.


title: North American cougar

text: As of 2017, "P. c. cougar" was recognised as being valid by the Cat Classification Taskforce of the Cat Specialist Group. "P. c. costaricensis" had been regarded as a subspecies in Central America.


title: North American cougar

text: The North American cougar has a solid tan-colored coat without spots and weighs . Females average , about the same as a jaguar in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve on the Mexican Pacific coast.


title: North American cougar

text: The North American cougar lives in various places and habitats. Several populations still exist and are thriving in the Western United States, Southern Florida, and Western Canada, but the North American cougar was once commonly found in eastern portions of the United States. It was believed to be extirpated there in the early 1900s. In Michigan, it was thought to have been killed off and extinct in the early 1900s. Today there is evidence to support that cougars could be on the rise in Mexico and could have a substantial population in years to come. Some mainstream scientists believe that small relict populations may exist (around 50 individuals), especially in the Appalachian Mountains and eastern Canada. Recent scientific findings in hair traps in Fundy National Park in New Brunswick have confirmed the existence of at least three cougars in New Brunswick. The Ontario Puma Foundation estimates that there are currently 850 cougars in Ontario.


title: North American cougar

text: The Quebec wildlife services also considers cougars to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in lynx mating sites. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the critically endangered Florida panther. There have been unconfirmed sightings in Elliotsville Plantation, Maine (north of Monson) and as early as 1997 in New Hampshire.


title: North American cougar

text: Reported sightings of cougars in the eastern United States continue today, despite their status as extirpated.


title: North American cougar

text: While the origins of these animals are unknown, some cougar experts believe some are captive animals that have been released or escaped.


title: North American cougar

text: The North American cougar usually hunts at night and sometimes travels long distances in search of food. Its average litter size is three cubs. It is fast, and can maneuver quite easily and skillfully. Depending on the abundance of prey such as deer, it shares the same prey as the jaguar in Central or North America.


title: North American cougar

text: Other sympatric predators include the grizzly bear and American black bears. Cougars are known to prey on bear cubs. Cougars in the Great Basin have been recorded to prey on feral horses.


title: North American cougar

text: Rivalry between the cougar and grizzly was a popular topic in North America. Fights between them were staged, and those in the wilderness were recorded by people, including Natives.


title: North American cougar

text: Even though conservation efforts of the cougar have decreased against the "more appealing" jaguar, it is hunted less frequently because it has no spots, and is thus less desirable to hunters.


title: North American cougar

text: In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and has an estimated population of 4,000 to 6,000. With the increase of human development and infrastructure growth in California, the cougar populations in the state are becoming more isolated from one another.


title: North American cougar

text: A 2012 study using 18 motion-sensitive cameras in Río Los Cipreses National Reserve counted a population of two males and two females (one of them with at least two cubs) in an area of 600 km (0.63 cougars per 100 km). The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities. A study on wildlife ecologists showed that urban cougar populations exist around the Los Angeles metropolitan area, with individuals of these populations having the smallest home ranges recorded for any cougars studied, and being primarily nocturnal and not crepuscular (most likely adaptations to avoid humans in high-density areas).


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The rating system of the Royal Navy and its predecessors was used by the Royal Navy between the beginning of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th century to categorise sailing warships, initially classing them according to their assigned complement of men, and later according to the number of their carriage-mounted guns. The rating system of the Royal Navy formally came to an end in the late 19th century by declaration of the Admiralty. The main cause behind this declaration focused on new types of gun, the introduction of steam propulsion and the use of iron and steel armour which made rating ships by the number of guns obsolete.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The first movement towards a rating system may be seen in the 15th century and the first half of the 16th century, when the largest carracks in the Navy (such as the "Mary Rose", the "Peter Pomegranate" and the "Henri Grâce à Dieu") were denoted "great ships". This was only on the basis of their roughly-estimated size and not on their weight, crew or number of guns. When these carracks were superseded by the new-style galleons later in the 16th century, the term "great ship" was used to formally delineate the Navy's largest ships from all the rest.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The earliest categorisation of Royal Navy ships dates to the reign of King Henry VIII. Henry's Navy consisted of 58 ships, and in 1546 the Anthony Roll divided them into four groups: 'ships, galliasses, pinnaces, and row barges.'"


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The formal system of dividing up the Navy's combatant warships into a number or groups or "rates", however, only originated in the very early part of the Stuart era, with the first lists of such categorisation appearing around 1604. At this time the combatant ships of the "Navy Royal" were divided up according to the number of men required to man them at sea (i.e. the size of the crew) into four groups:


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: A 1612 list referred to four groups: royal, middling, small and pinnaces; but defined them by tonnage instead of by guns, starting from 800 to 1200 tons for the ships royal, down to below 250 tons for the pinnaces.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: By the early years of King Charles I's reign, these four groups had been renamed to a numerical sequence. The royal ships were now graded as "first rank", the great ships as "second rank", the middling ships as "third rank", and the small ships as "fourth rank". Soon afterwards, the structure was again modified, with the term "rank" now being replaced by "rate", and the former small ships now being sub-divided into fourth, fifth and sixth rates.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The earliest rating was based not on the number of guns, but on the established complement (number of men). In 1626, a table drawn up by Charles I used the term "rates" for the first time in a classification scheme connected with the Navy. The table specified the amount of monthly wages a seaman or officer would earn, in an ordered scheme of six rates, from "first-rate" to "sixth-rate", with each rate divided into two classes, with differing numbers of men assigned to each class. No specific connection with the size of the ship or number of armaments aboard was given in this 1626 table, and as far as is known, this was related exclusively to seaman pay grades.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: This classification scheme was substantially altered in late 1653 as the complements of individual ships were raised. From about 1660 the classification moved from one based on the number of men to one based on the number of carriage guns a ship carried.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: Samuel Pepys, then Secretary to the Admiralty, revised the structure in 1677 and laid it down as a "solemn, universal and unalterable" classification. The rating of a ship was of administrative and military use. The number and weight of guns determined the size of crew needed, and hence the amount of pay and rations needed. It also indicated whether a ship was powerful enough to stand in the line of battle. Pepys's original classification was updated by further definitions in 1714, 1721, 1760, 1782, 1801 and 1817 (the last being the most severe, as it provided for including in the count of guns the carronades that had previously been excluded). On the whole the trend was for each rate to have a greater number of guns. For instance, Pepys allowed a first rate 90–100 guns, but on the 1801 scheme a first rate had 100–120. A sixth rate's range went from 4–18 to 20–28 (after 1714 any ship with fewer than 20 guns was unrated).


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: A first-, second- or third-rate ship was regarded as a "ship-of-the-line". The first and second rates were three-deckers; that is, they had three continuous decks of guns (on the lower deck, middle deck and upper deck), usually as well as smaller weapons on the quarterdeck, forecastle and poop.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The largest third rates, those of 80 guns, were likewise three-deckers from the 1690s until the early 1750s, but both before this period and subsequent to it, 80-gun ships were built as two-deckers. All the other third rates, with 74 guns or less, were likewise two-deckers, with just two continuous decks of guns (on the lower deck and upper deck), as well as smaller weapons on the quarterdeck, forecastle and (if they had one) poop. A series of major changes to the rating system took effect from the start of January 1817, when the carronades carried by each ship were included in the count of guns (previously these had usually been omitted); the first rate from that date included all of the three-deckers (the adding in of their carronades had meant that all three-deckers now had over 100 guns), the new second rate included all two-deckers of 80 guns or more, with the third rate reduced to two-deckers of fewer than 80 guns.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The smaller fourth rates, of about 50 or 60 guns on two decks, were ships-of-the-line until 1756, when it was felt that such 50-gun ships were now too small for pitched battles. The larger fourth rates of 60 guns continued to be counted as ships-of-the-line, but few new ships of this rate were added, the 60-gun fourth rate being superseded over the next few decades by the 64-gun third rate. The Navy did retain some fourth rates for convoy escort, or as flagships on far-flung stations; it also converted some East Indiamen to that role.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The smaller two deckers originally blurred the distinction between a fourth rate and a fifth rate. At the low end of the fourth rate one might find the two-decker 50-gun ships from about 1756. The high end of the fifth rate would include two-deckers of 40- or 44-guns (from 1690) or even the demi-batterie 32-gun and 36-gun ships of the 1690–1730 period. The fifth rates at the start of the 18th century were generally "demi-batterie" ships, carrying a few heavy guns on their lower deck (which often used the rest of the lower deck for row ports) and a full battery of lesser guns on the upper deck. However, these were gradually phased out, as the low freeboard (i.e., the height of the lower deck gunport sills above the waterline) meant that in rough weather it was often impossible to open the lower deck gunports.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: Fifth and sixth rates were never included among ships-of-the-line. The middle of the 18th century saw the introduction of a new fifth-rate type—the classic frigate, with no ports on the lower deck, and the main battery disposed solely on the upper deck, where it could be fought in all weathers.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: Sixth-rate ships were generally useful as convoy escorts, for blockade duties and the carrying of dispatches; their small size made them less suited for the general cruising tasks the fifth-rate frigates did so well. Essentially there were two groups of sixth rates. The larger category comprised the sixth-rate frigates of 28 guns, carrying a main battery of twenty-four 9-pounder guns, as well as four smaller guns on their superstructures. The second comprised the "post ships" of between 20 and 24 guns. These were too small to be formally counted as frigates (although colloquially often grouped with them), but still required a post-captain (i.e. an officer holding the substantive rank of captain) as their commander.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The rating system did not handle vessels smaller than the sixth rate. The remainder were simply "unrated". The larger of the unrated vessels were generally all called sloops, but that nomenclature is quite confusing for unrated vessels, especially when dealing with the finer points of "ship-sloop", "brig-sloop", "sloop-of-war" (which really just meant the same in naval parlance as "sloop") or even "corvette" (the last a French term that the British Navy did not use until the 1840s). Technically the category of "sloop-of-war" included any unrated combatant vessel—in theory, the term even extended to bomb vessels and fire ships. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy increased the number of sloops in service by some 400% as it found that it needed vast numbers of these small vessels for escorting convoys (as in any war, the introduction of convoys created a huge need for escort vessels), combating privateers, and themselves taking prizes.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The rated number of guns often differed from the number a vessel actually carried. The guns that determined a ship's rating were the carriage-mounted cannon, long-barreled, muzzle-loading guns that moved on 'trucks'—wooden wheels. The count did not include smaller (and basically anti-personnel) weapons such as swivel-mounted guns ("swivels"), which fired half-pound projectiles, or small arms. For instance, HMS "Cynthia" was rated for 18 guns but during construction her rating was reduced to 16 guns (6-pounders), and she also carried 14 half-pound swivels.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: Vessels might also carry other guns that did not contribute to the rating. Examples of such weapons would include mortars, howitzers or boat guns, the boat guns being small guns intended for mounting on the bow of a vessel's boats to provide fire support during landings, cutting out expeditions, and the like. From 1778, however, the most important exception was the carronade.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: Introduced in the late 1770s, the carronade was a short-barreled and relatively short-range gun, half the weight of equivalent long guns, and was generally mounted on a slide rather than on trucks. The new carronades were generally housed on a vessel's upperworks—quarterdeck and forecastle—some as additions to its existing ordnance and some as replacements. When the carronades replaced or were in lieu of carriage-mounted cannon they generally counted in arriving at the rating, but not all were, and so may or may not have been included in the count of guns, though rated vessels might carry up to twelve 18-, 24- or 32-pounder carronades. For instance, HMS "Armada" was rated as a third rate of 74 guns. She carried twenty-eight 32-pounder guns on her gundeck, twenty-eight 18-pounder guns on her upperdeck, four 12-pounder guns and ten 32-pounder carronades on her quarterdeck, two 12-pounder guns and two 32-pounder carronades on her forecastle, and six 18-pounder carronades on her poop deck. In all, this 74-gun vessel carried 80 cannon: 62 guns and 18 carronades.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: When carronades became part (or in some cases all) of a ship's main armament, they had to be included in the count of guns. For instance, "Bonne Citoyenne" was a 20-gun corvette of the French Navy that the British captured and recommissioned in the Royal navy as the 20-gun sloop and post ship HMS "Bonne Citoyenne". She carried two 9-pounder cannon and eighteen 32-pounder carronades.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: By the Napoleonic Wars there was no exact correlation between formal gun rating and the actual number of cannons any individual vessel might carry. One therefore needs to distinguish between the "established" armament of a vessel (which rarely altered) and the "actual" guns carried, which might happen quite frequently for a variety of reasons; guns might be lost overboard during a storm, or "burst" in service and thus useless, or jettisoned to speed the ship during a chase, or indeed removed down into the hold in order to use the ship (temporarily) as a troop transport, or for a small vessel, such as the schooner , to lower the centre of gravity and thus improve stability in bad weather. Also some of the guns were removed from a ship during peacetime service, to reduce the stress on the ship's structure, which is why there was actually a distinction between the "wartime" complement of guns (and men) and the lower "peacetime" complement—the figure normally quoted for any vessel is the highest (wartime) establishment.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The smaller fourth-rates, primarily the 50-gun ships, were, from 1756 on, no longer classified as ships of the line. Since not big enough to stand in the line of battle, were often called frigates, though not classed as frigates by the Royal Navy. They were generally classified, like all smaller warships used primarily in the role of escort and patrol, as "cruisers", a term that covered everything from the smaller two-deckers down to the small gun-brigs and cutters.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The larger fifth-rates were generally two-decked ships of 40 or 44 guns, and thus "not" "frigates", although the 40-gun frigates built during the Napoleonic War also fell into this category.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The smaller sixth-rates were often popularly called frigates, though "not" classed as "frigates" by the Admiralty officially. Only the larger sixth-rates (those mounting 28 carriage guns or more) were technically frigates.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The ton in this instance is the burthen tonnage (bm). From c.1650 the burthen of a vessel was calculated using the formula formula_1, where formula_2 was the length, in feet, from the stem to the sternpost, and formula_3 the maximum breadth of the vessel. It was a rough measurement of cargo-carrying capacity by volume, not displacement. Therefore, one should not change a measurement in "tons burthen" into a displacement in "tons" or "tonnes".


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: In February 1817 the rating system changed. The recommendation from the Board of Admiralty to the Prince Regent was dated 25 November 1816, but the Order in Council establishing the new ratings was issued in February 1817. From February 1817 all carronades were included in the established number of guns. Until that date, carronades only "counted" if they were in place of long guns; when the carronades replaced "long" guns (e.g. on the upper deck of a sloop or post ship, thus providing its main battery), such carronades were counted.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: There was a further major change in the rating system in 1856. From that date, the first rate comprised all ships carrying 110 guns and upwards, or the complement of which consisted of 1,000 men or more; the second rate included one of HM's royal yachts, and otherwise comprised all ships carrying under 110 guns but more than 80 guns, or the complements of which were under 1,000 but not less than 800 men; the third rate included all the rest of HM's royal yachts and "all such vessels as may bear the flag of pendant of any Admiral Superintendent or Captain Superintendent of one of HM's Dockyards", and otherwise comprised all ships carrying at most 80 guns but not less than 60 guns, or the complements of which were under 800 but not less than 600 men; the fourth rate comprised all frigate-built ships of which the complement was not more than 600 and not less than 410 men; the fifth rate comprised all ships of which the complement was not more than 400 and not less than 300 men; the sixth rate consisted of all other ships bearing a captain. Of unrated vessels, the category of sloops comprised all vessels commanded by commanders; next followed all other ships commanded by lieutenants, and having complements of not less than 60 men; finally were "smaller vessels, not classed as above, with such smaller complements as the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty may from time to time direct".


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: Rating was not the only system of classification used. Through the early modern period, the term "ship" referred to a vessel that carried square sails on three masts. Sailing vessels with only two masts or a single mast were technically not "ships", and were not described as such at the time. Vessels with fewer than three masts were unrated sloops, generally two-masted vessels rigged as snows or ketches (in the first half of the 18th century), or brigs in succeeding eras. However some sloops were three-masted or "ship-rigged", and these were known as "ship sloops".


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: Vessels were sometimes classified according to the substantive rank of her commanding officer. For instance, when the commanding officer of a gun-brig or even a cutter was a lieutenant with the status of master-and-commander, the custom was to recategorise the vessel as a sloop. For instance, when Pitt Burnaby Greene, the commanding officer of "Bonne Citoyenne" in 1811, received his promotion to post-captain, the Navy reclassed the sloop as a post ship.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: Although the rating system described was only used by the Royal Navy, other major navies used similar means of grading their warships. For example, the French Navy used a system of five rates ("rangs") which had a similar purpose. British authors might still use "first rate" when referring to the largest ships of other nations or "third rate" to speak of a French seventy-four. By the end of the 18th century, the rating system had mostly fallen out of common use (although technically it remained in existence for nearly another century), ships of the line usually being characterized directly by their nominal number of guns, the numbers even being used as the name of the type, as in "a squadron of three seventy-fours".


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: As of 1905, ships of the United States Navy were by law divided into classes called rates. Vessels of the first rate had a displacement tonnage in excess of 8000 tons; second rate, from 4000 to 8000 tons; third rate, from 1000 to 4000 tons; and fourth rate, of less than 1000 tons. Converted merchant vessels that were armed and equipped as cruisers were of the second rate if over 6000 tons, and of the third rate if over 1000 and less than 6000 tons. Auxiliary vessels such as colliers, supply vessels, repair ships, etc., if over 4000 tons, were of the third rate. Auxiliary vessels of less than 4000 tons—except tugs, sailing ships, and receiving ships which were not rated—were of the fourth rate. Torpedo-boat destroyers, torpedo boats, and similar vessels were not rated. Captains commanded ships of the first rate; captains or commanders commanded ships of the second rate; commanders or lieutenant-commanders commanded ships of the third rate; lieutenant-commanders or lieutenants commanded ships of the fourth rate. Lieutenant-commanders, lieutenants, ensigns, or warrant officers might command unrated vessels, depending on the size of the vessel.


title: Rating system of the Royal Navy

text: The term "first-rate" has passed into general usage, as an adjective used to mean something of the best or highest quality available. "Second-rate" and "third-rate" are also used as adjectives to mean that something is of inferior quality.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Chamaenerion angustifolium is a perennial herbaceous flowering plant in the willowherb family Onagraceae. It is known in North America as fireweed, in some parts of Canada as great willowherb, in Britain and Ireland as rosebay willowherb. In the United Kingdom it is also known as bombweed, as a result of its rapid appearance on city bomb sites during the Blitz of World War II; the plant is also traditionally known as Saint Anthony's laurel. It is also known by the synonyms Chamerion angustifolium and Epilobium angustifolium. It is native throughout the temperate Northern Hemisphere, including large parts of the boreal forests.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: The reddish stems of this herbaceous perennial are usually simple, erect, smooth, high with scattered alternate leaves. The leaves are spirally arranged, entire, narrowly lanceolate, and pinnately veined, the secondary leaf veins anastomosing, joining together to form a continuous marginal vein just inside the leaf margins.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: The inflorescence is a symmetrical terminal raceme that blooms progressively from bottom to top, producing a gracefully tapered shape. The flowers are in diameter, slightly asymmetrical, with four magenta to pink petals and four narrower pink sepals behind. The protruding style has four stigmas. The floral formula is ✶/↓ K4 C4 A4+4 or 4+0 Ğ(4).


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: The upright, reddish-brown linear seed capsule splits from the apex and curls open. It bears many minute brown seeds, about 300 to 400 per capsule and 80,000 per plant. The seeds have silky hairs to aid wind dispersal and are very easily spread by the wind, often becoming a weed and a dominant species on disturbed ground. Once established, the plants also spread extensively by underground roots, an individual plant eventually forming a large patch.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: This species has been placed in the genus "Chamaenerion" (sometimes given as "Chamerion") rather than "Epilobium" based on several morphological distinctions: spiral (rather than opposite or whorled) leaf arrangement; absence (rather than presence) of a hypanthium; subequal stamens (rather than stamens in two unequal whorls); zygomorphic (rather than actinomorphic) stamens and stigma. Under this taxonomic arrangement, "Chamaenerion" and "Epilobium" are monophyletic sister genera.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: The generic name "Chamaenerion" means 'dwarf-oleander' and the Latin specific epithet "angustifolium" translates as 'narrow-leaved'. It shares this epithet with many other species of plants, including "Vaccinium angustifolium". The common British name "rosebay", from the passing resemblance of the flowers to (wild) roses and the leaves to those of bay, goes back in print to Gerard's "Herball" of 1597. The common American name "fireweed" derives from the species' abundance as a colonizer on burnt sites after forest fires and other disturbances.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Fireweed is often abundant in wet calcareous to slightly acidic soils in open fields, pastures, and particularly burned-over lands. It is a pioneer species that quickly colonizes open areas with little competition, such as the sites of forest fires and forest clearings. Plants grow and flower as long as there is open space and plenty of light. Fireweed reaches its average peak colonization after five years and then begins to be replaced as trees and brush grow larger. Seeds remain viable in the soil seed bank for many years. When a new fire or other disturbance occurs that opens up the ground to light again, the seeds germinate. Some areas with heavy seed counts in the soil can, after burning, be covered with pure dense stands of this species and when in flower the landscape is turned into fields of color.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Fireweed is an effective colonizer; it may not be present until after a fire has moved through a landscape. Because of its very high dispersal capacity, "propagule pressure" from its regional presence will let it quickly colonize a disturbed area. Once seedlings are established, the plant quickly reproduces and covers the disturbed area via seeds and rhizomes. It is somewhat adapted to fire as well and so can prevent the reintroduction of fire to the landscape. Fireweed is well adapted to seed in severely burned areas as well, because the mineral soil that is exposed due to the removal of organic soil layers provides a good seedbed.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: In Britain the plant was considered a rare species in the 18th century, and one confined to a few locations with damp, gravelly soils. It was misidentified as great hairy willowherb in contemporary floras. The plant's rise from local rarity to widespread abundance seems to have occurred at the same time as the expansion of the railway network and the associated soil disturbance. The plant became locally known as "bombweed" due to its rapid colonization of bomb craters in the Second World War.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: The flowers are visited by a wide variety of insects (the generalised pollination syndrome). Some species in the insect order Lepidoptera frequently use the willowherb as their primary larval host-plant, examples including the elephant hawk moth ("Deilephila elpenor"), bedstraw hawk moth ("Hyles gallii"), and the white-lined sphinx moth ("Hyles lineata").


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: The plant is not considered palatable, but is easy to find. The very young shoots and leaves can be cooked and eaten. The young flowers are also edible, and the stems of older plants can be split to extract the edible raw pith. Additionally, the leaves can be used for tea.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Traditionally the young shoots are collected in the spring by Native American and Siberian people and mixed with other greens. As the plant matures, the leaves become tough and somewhat bitter. Native Americans in the American southeast collect the stems in this stage. They are peeled and eaten raw. When properly prepared soon after picking they are a good source of vitamin C and provitamin A. The Denaʼina add fireweed to their dogs' food. Fireweed is also a medicine of the Upper Inlet Dena'ina, who treat pus-filled boils or cuts by placing a piece of the raw stem on the afflicted area. This is said to draw the pus out of the cut or boil and prevents a cut with pus in it from healing over too quickly.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: The root can be roasted after scraping off the outside, but often tastes bitter. To mitigate this, the root is collected before the plant flowers and the brown thread in the middle removed. The stem centers can also be prepared by splitting the outer stalk, and eaten raw.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: In Russia, fireweed ("C. angustifolium") is made into a tea known as Ivan Chai or Koporsky tea (from the town of Koporye, where it has been produced since the 13th century). They use it as highly prized medicinal herb too. The popularity of fireweed tea perhaps stems from the similarity of its production to that of common black tea ("Camellia sinensis"), leading to a richly flavoured and deeply coloured herbal tea, with no caffeine, it is commercially sold in a blend with mint or thyme.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: The honey produced from fireweed is highly valued for its quality. Most fireweed honey is produced in locations in cool climates, such as the Pacific Northwest in the United States and Scandinavian countries in Europe.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Fireweed's natural variation in ploidy has prompted its use in scientific studies of polyploidy's possible effects on adaptive potential and species diversification.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Because fireweed can colonize disturbed sites, even following an old oil spill, it is often used to reestablish vegetation.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: It is also grown as an ornamental plant. A white form, "C. angustifolium" 'Album', is listed by the Royal Horticultural Society.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Because of its rapid establishment on disturbed land, fireweed can be used for land management purposes. Events such as logging, fires and mass wasting can leave the land barren and without vegetation. This causes the land to be more susceptible to erosion because of the lack of root structure in the soil. Fireweed is a useful tool that can be utilized after prescribed fires and logging events because of its fire resistance and ability to recycle the nutrients left in the soil after a fire. It is also able to quickly establish a root system for reproduction and through this can prevent mass wasting and erosion events from occurring on burned or logged hillsides. Reestablishment of vegetation is crucial in the recovery time of disturbed lands. In many cases, fireweed establishes itself on these disturbed lands, but implementing the introduction of fireweed to a disturbed area as a management practice could prove useful in speeding up the recovery of disturbed lands. Disturbed and burned over lands are generally unpleasant to look at and pose a risk to habitats and nearby communities because of their susceptibility to mass wasting events. Fireweed can quickly establish itself across the landscape and prevent further damage, while providing a blanket of vegetation for recovering fauna to create new habitats in and for pollinators to foster the re-establishment of a diverse set of flora.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Because of fireweed's poetic nature, it has found use in poetry and prose since at least the 19th century. Rudyard Kipling wrote, "The fire-weed glows in the centre of the drive ways". In "The Fellowship of the Ring", J. R. R. Tolkien lists fireweed as one of the flowering plants returning to the site of a bonfire inside the Old Forest.


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: As the first plant to colonise waste ground, fireweed is often mentioned in postwar British literature. The children's novel "Fireweed" is set during the Blitz and features two runaway teenagers who meet on bomb sites where fireweed is growing profusely. Another children's novel, "A Reflection of Rachel" features a protagonist attempting to restore an old garden that used "Rose Pink Willow Herb" as an ornamental plant and mentions its notoriety for growing on abandoned bomb sites. Cicely Mary Barker's 1948 book "Flower Fairies of the Wayside" included an illustration of 'The Rose-Bay Willow-Herb Fairy', with the accompanying verse "On the breeze my fluff is blown; So my airy seeds are sown. Where the earth is burnt and sad, I will come to make it glad. All forlorn and ruined places, All neglected empty spaces, I can cover—only think!— With a mass of rosy pink."


title: Chamaenerion angustifolium

text: Rosebay Willowherb was subsequently voted the county flower of London in 2002 following a poll by the wild plant conservation charity Plantlife.


title: NXT TakeOver

text: NXT TakeOver was a series of periodic professional wrestling events produced by WWE, a professional wrestling promotion based in Connecticut. The events were produced exclusively for the promotion's NXT brand division and aired live on pay-per-view (PPV) and the livestreaming services Peacock and the WWE Network. The first TakeOver event was simply titled TakeOver and was held on May 29, 2014. TakeOver events were then held several times a year. The events were originally streamed exclusively on the WWE Network until TakeOver 31 in October 2020, when the events also became available on traditional PPV before also becoming available on Peacock in early 2021. The TakeOver series came to an end following TakeOver 36 in August 2021, as in September, NXT was restructured as NXT 2.0 with the brand's succeeding events no longer carrying the TakeOver name, including some former TakeOver events.


title: NXT TakeOver

text: With the establishment of NXT UK in 2018—a sister brand of NXT based in the United Kingdom—the brand adopted the TakeOver name for their live events as well.


title: NXT TakeOver

text: In 2012, WWE restructured their NXT brand from being a reality-based competition television show to a developmental territory for their main roster. In February 2014, the brand held its first live special that was uniquely titled Arrival, which was also the very first event to air live on WWE's online streaming service, the WWE Network, which launched earlier that same month. However, after NXT held an event titled TakeOver in May that year, the "TakeOver" name became the branding for all NXT live specials. All NXT live specials were initially held at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida, as with the main "NXT" series. They were also originally exclusive to the WWE Network until TakeOver 31 in October 2020 when they also became available on traditional pay-per-view (PPV), before also becoming available on Peacock after the American version of the WWE Network merged under Peacock in March 2021.


title: NXT TakeOver

text: Beginning with in 2015, the events were held at various U.S. and international locations, with most TakeOvers being named after their host city or U.S. state, which also began with that Brooklyn event. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, all NXT events returned to Full Sail University in mid-March 2020 until TakeOver 31 that October, when events were moved to the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, Florida, presented as a virtual fan viewing experience with a small live crowd called the "Capitol Wrestling Center", an homage to the Capitol Wrestling Corporation, the predecessor to WWE. The Capitol Wrestling Center was similar to the WWE ThunderDome, which was a bio-secure bubble that the company utilized for Raw and SmackDown's programs. Most COVID restrictions were lifted in mid-2021 with the events no longer including a virtual audience and resumed having a live audience. Although the Raw and SmackDown brands resumed live touring in July 2021, NXT remained at the Capitol Wrestling Center. As TakeOvers were only held in Florida since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, they were named either by their installment number (e.g., TakeOver 31) or revived old WWE pay-per-view names (e.g., ), with the exception of that year.


title: NXT TakeOver

text: Since TakeOver: Brooklyn in 2015, several TakeOver events were scheduled as a support event for each of WWE's "Big Four" pay-per-view events at the time (Royal Rumble, WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and Survivor Series), and occasionally, their other monthly pay-per-views, such as Backlash and Money in the Bank. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, TakeOvers also shared the same venue as those PPVs, except when those PPVs were held in a stadium; in these cases, TakeOver was held at an arena in the same city instead. There were also recurring subseries of TakeOver events; TakeOver: Brooklyn was also the first to have its own subseries of TakeOvers. Other subseries of TakeOvers included Toronto, Chicago, In Your House, and the most prominent, WarGames, which had been held on the night preceding Survivor Series from 2017 to 2019; in 2020, it was held two weeks after Survivor Series. The event featured the namesake WarGames match as its main event. in April 2021 was the only TakeOver held across two nights.