title: Empress Lü

text: In early 206 BC, after the fall of the Qin Dynasty, Xiang Yu divided the former Qin Empire into the Eighteen Kingdoms. Liu Bang was named "King of Han" and given the lands in the remote Bashu region (in present-day Sichuan) as his domain. However, Liu Bang's family, including Lü Zhi and her children, remained in Pei County, which was a territory of Xiang Yu's kingdom of Western Chu.


title: Empress Lü

text: Later that year, Liu Bang attacked and seized the Three Qins (three kingdoms covering the Guanzhong region) directly north of his own fief. Guanzhong was rightfully Liu Bang's, according to an earlier promise by Emperor Yi of Chu (previously known as King Huai II of Chu) to appoint whoever conquered Guanzhong first (during the rebellion against the Qin Dynasty) as king of that area. This marked the beginning of a four-year power struggle for supremacy over China between Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, from 206 BC to 202 BC, known as the Chu–Han Contention. Xiang Yu initially took no action against Liu Bang's family. In the eighth lunar month, Liu Bang sent his followers Wang Xi () and Xue Ou () to meet Wang Ling () in Nanyang and fetch his family. However Xiang Yu mobilised troops to Yangxia () and prevented the Han forces from advancing.


title: Empress Lü

text: In the summer of 205 BC, Liu Bang took advantage of the situation when Xiang Yu was occupied with suppressing rebellions in the Qi kingdom to attack and capture Western Chu's capital Pengcheng. Xiang Yu immediately withdrew from Qi and launched a counterattack, defeating Liu Bang's forces at Suishui (). Lü Zhi and Liu Bang's family were captured by Chu forces and held hostage. During this period of time, Lü Zhi started an illicit affair with Shen Yiji (), one of Liu Bang's followers who was also held captive together with her.


title: Empress Lü

text: In the autumn of 203 BC, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu came to a temporary reconciliation, known as the Treaty of Hong Canal, which divided China into west and east under their Han and Western Chu domains respectively. As part of their agreement, Xiang Yu released Lü Zhi and Liu Bang's family and returned them to Liu. Lü Zhi was given the title of "Queen Consort of Han" (). Liu Bang later renounced the truce and attacked Xiang Yu, eventually defeating the latter at the Battle of Gaixia in 202 BC and unifying China under his rule. Liu Bang proclaimed himself Emperor of China and established the Han Dynasty. He instated Lü Zhi as his empress and their son Liu Ying as crown prince.


title: Empress Lü

text: Even after Emperor Gaozu (Liu Bang)'s victory over Xiang Yu, there were still unstable areas in the empire, requiring the new government to launch military campaigns to pacify these regions thereafter. Gaozu placed Empress Lü Zhi and the crown prince Liu Ying (Lü Zhi's son) in charge of the capital Chang'an and making key decisions in court, assisted by the chancellor Xiao He and other ministers. During this time Lü Zhi proved herself to be a competent administrator in domestic affairs, and she quickly established strong working relationships with many of Gaozu's officials, who admired her for her capability and feared her for her ruthlessness, after the war ended and Emperor Gaozu returned, she remained in power and she was always influential in many of the country's affairs.


title: Empress Lü

text: Lü Zhi is known for her roles in the deaths of Han Xin and Peng Yue, two of Emperor Gaozu's subjects who contributed greatly to the founding of the Han Dynasty, of whose military capabilities both she and her husband had been apprehensive .


title: Empress Lü

text: In 196 BC, Gaozu left the capital Chang'an to suppress a revolt in Julu started by Chen Xi, the Marquis of Yangxia. A year before, Chen Xi met Han Xin before departing from Chang'an for Julu, and it was alleged that Han Xin was involved in the rebellion. Lü Zhi became wary of Han Xin, and after consulting the chancellor Xiao He, she had Xiao summon Han to meet her in Changle Palace. There, the empress had Han Xin taken by surprise, captured and subsequently executed in a torturous manner. Lü Zhi also ordered Han Xin's family and relatives to be put to death as well.


title: Empress Lü

text: When Gaozu was putting down Chen Xi's revolt, he requested reinforcements from Peng Yue but the latter claimed that he was ill and sent his subordinates to assist Gaozu instead. After Chen Xi's rebellion was quelled, Gaozu heard rumours that Peng Yue was plotting against him too, and he had Peng arrested and stripped off his titles. Peng was demoted to the status of a commoner and exiled to the remote Qingyi County (青衣縣; in present-day Ya'an, Sichuan). During his journey to Qingyi, Peng Yue encountered Lü Zhi, who wanted to have him killed. He pleaded with her to spare his life and let him return to his hometown in Changyi (昌邑; present-day Jinxiang County, Shandong), and the empress pretended to agree. Peng Yue was brought to Luoyang, where he was subsequently executed on false charges of treason. Lü Zhi ordered Peng Yue's body to be mutilated and had Peng's clan exterminated as well.


title: Empress Lü

text: In his late years, Emperor Gaozu started favouring one of his younger consorts, Concubine Qi, who bore him a son Liu Ruyi, who was instated as Prince of Zhao in 198 BC, displacing Lü Zhi's son-in-law Zhang Ao (Princess Yuan of Lu's husband). Gaozu had the intention of replacing Liu Ying with Liu Ruyi as crown prince, reasoning that the former was too "soft-hearted and weak" and that the latter resembled him more. Since Lü Zhi had strong rapport with many ministers, they generally opposed Gaozu's decision but the emperor seemed bent on deposing Liu Ying. Lü Zhi became worried and she approached Zhang Liang for help, and the latter analysed that Gaozu was changing the succession on grounds of favouritism. Zhang Liang invited the "Four Whiteheads of Mount Shang", a group of four reclusive wise men, to persuade Gaozu to change his decision. The four men promised to assist Liu Ying in future if he became emperor, and Gaozu was pleased to see that Liu Ying had their support. Gaozu told Concubine Qi, "I wanted to replace (the crown prince). Now I see that he has the support of those four men; he is fully fledged and difficult to unseat. Empress Lü is really in charge!" This marked the end of the dispute over the succession and affirmed Liu Ying's role as crown prince.


title: Empress Lü

text: In 195 BC Emperor Gaozu died and was succeeded by Liu Ying, who became historically known as Emperor Hui of Han. Lü Zhi was honoured by Emperor Hui as empress dowager. She exerted more influence during the reign of her son than she had when she was empress, and she became the powerful and effective lead figure in his administration.


title: Empress Lü

text: Lü Zhi did not harm most of Gaozu's other consorts and treated them according to rules and customs of the imperial family. For example, consorts who bore male children that were instated as princes were granted the title of "Princess Dowager" () in their respective sons' principalities. One exception was Concubine Qi, whom Lü Zhi greatly resented because of the dispute over the succession between Liu Ruyi (Qi's son) and Liu Ying. Liu Ruyi, the Prince of Zhao, was away in his principality, so Lü Zhi targeted Concubine Qi. She had Qi stripped of her position, treated like a convict (head shaved, in stocks, dressed in prison garb) and forced to do hard labour in the form of milling rice.


title: Empress Lü

text: Lü Zhi then summoned Liu Ruyi, who was around the age of 12 then, to Chang'an, intending to kill him together with his mother. However Zhou Chang (), the chancellor in Liu Ruyi's principality, whom Lü Zhi respected because of his stern opposition to Emperor Gaozu's proposal to make Liu Ruyi crown prince, temporarily protected Liu Ruyi from harm by responding to Lü Zhi's order that "The Prince of Zhao is ill and unfit for travelling over long distances." Lü Zhi then ordered Zhou Chang to come to the capital, had him detained, and then summoned Liu Ruyi again. Emperor Hui tried to save Liu Ruyi by intercepting his half brother before the latter entered Chang'an, and kept Liu Ruyi by his side most of the time. Lü Zhi refrained from carrying out her plans for several months because she feared that she might harm Emperor Hui as well.


title: Empress Lü

text: One morning in the winter of 194 BC, Emperor Hui went for a hunting trip and did not bring Liu Ruyi with him because the latter refused to get out of bed. Lü Zhi's chance arrived, so she sent an assassin to force poisoned wine down Liu Ruyi's throat. The young prince was dead by the time Emperor Hui returned. Lü Zhi then had Concubine Qi killed in an inhumane manner: she had Qi's limbs chopped off, eyes gouged out, ears sliced off, nose sliced off, tongue cut out, forced her to drink a potion that made her mute, and thrown into a latrine. She called Qi a "human swine" (). Several days later, Emperor Hui was taken to view the "human swine" and was shocked to learn that it was Concubine Qi. He cried loudly and became ill for a long time. He requested to see his mother and said, "This is something done not by a human. As the empress dowager's son, I'll never be able to rule the empire." From then onward Emperor Hui indulged himself in carnal pleasures and ignored state affairs, leaving all them to his mother, and this caused the power to fall completely into her hands.


title: Empress Lü

text: Around the winter of 194 BC, Liu Fei, the Prince of Qi, Emperor Gaozu's eldest son born to Lady Cao (), visited Chang'an and he and Emperor Hui attended a banquet hosted by the empress dowager. Emperor Hui honoured Liu Fei as an older half brother and treated the latter respectfully. Lü Zhi felt offended and secretly instructed her servants to pour a cup of poisoned wine for Liu Fei, and then toasted him. Just as Liu Fei was about to drink the wine, Emperor Hui realised his mother's intention and grabbed Liu Fei's cup as if he would drink from it. Lü Zhi immediately jumped up and knocked the cup out of Emperor Hui's hand. Liu Fei then offered to give up an entire commandery from his principality to Lü Zhi's daughter Princess Yuan of Lu, and Lü Zhi accepted and allowed him to leave.


title: Empress Lü

text: Lü Zhi also played a role in the death of another of Gaozu's sons, Liu You, the Prince of Zhao. Liu You married Lü Zhi's niece but was caught having an affair with another woman, so Lü Zhi's niece reported to her aunt that Liu You was plotting a rebellion. Lü Zhi summoned Liu You to Chang'an and had him imprisoned and deprived of food. Liu You was afraid of committing suicide and eventually starved to death, in 181 BC.


title: Empress Lü

text: Lü Zhi then transferred another of Gaozu's sons, Liu Hui, the Prince of Liang, to Zhao, and forced him to marry a daughter of Lü Chan. The Lü clan grabbed the authority of Zhao and oversaw Liu Hui, thus making Liu Hui feel restricted. Princess Lü had a favored concubine of Liu Hui poisoned to death. Liu Hui was distressed and committed suicide in fear in the same year.


title: Empress Lü

text: In 192 BC Lü Zhi received a marriage proposal from the Xiongnu "chanyu" Modu, who wrote as follows in a letter meant to intimidate and mock her:


title: Empress Lü

text: I'm a lonesome ruler born in marshes and raised in plains populated by livestock. I've visited your border numerous times and wanted to tour China. Your Majesty is now alone and living in solitude. Since both of us are not happy and have nothing to entertain ourselves, I'm willing to use what I possess to exchange for what you lack.


title: Empress Lü

text: Lü Zhi was infuriated at the rude proposition, and in a heated court session, her generals advised her to rally an army and exterminate the Xiongnu immediately. As she was about to declare war, an outspoken attendant named Ji Bu pointed out that the Xiongnu army was much more powerful than the Chinese. At Ji Bu's words, the court immediately fell into a fearful silence. Rethinking her plans, Lü Zhi rejected Modu's proposition humbly, as follows:


title: Empress Lü

text: Your Lordship does not forget our land and writes a letter to us, we fear. I retreat to preserve myself. I'm old and frail, I'm losing hair and teeth, and I struggle to maintain balance when I move. Your Lordship has heard wrongly, you shouldn't defile yourself. Our people did not offend you, and should be pardoned. We've two imperial carriages and eight fine steeds, which we graciously offer to Your Lordship.


title: Empress Lü

text: However she continued implementing the "heqin" policy of marrying Han princesses to Xiongnu chieftains and paying tribute to the Xiongnu in exchange for peace between both sides.


title: Empress Lü

text: In 191 BC, at Lü Zhi's insistence, Emperor Hui married his niece Zhang Yan (Princess Yuan of Lu's daughter) and made her empress. They did not have any children. It was alleged that Lü Zhi told Zhang Yan to adopt eight boys and have their mothers killed. There is uncertainty whether these children were Emperor Hui's; the traditional view is that they were not, while modern historians believe that they were born to his concubines.


title: Empress Lü

text: Emperor Hui died in 188 BC and was succeeded by Emperor Qianshao, one of the children Empress Zhang adopted. Empress Dowager Lü closely monitored and controlled the imperial court and kept the all army firmly in her hands, thus maintaining power more strongly than before. His death and the succession of an immature child left power completely and solely in the hands of Empress Dowager Lü, and as a regent legitimized her as the first female absolute ruler in Chinese history to do so exclusively. Lü Zhi's position as regent was first recorded in the official history of Ban Gu in the Book of Han: As grandmother of the infant emperor, Lü Zhi retained her title as Empress Dowager and never claimed the title as Grand Empress Dowager; As a result, she played the role of an emperor and de facto filled the empty throne. She addressed herself as "Zhen" (), a first-person pronoun reserved for use by the emperor after the Qin dynasty. Officials addressed her as "Bixia, Royal Majesty" (), an honorific used when addressing the emperor directly, not "Dianxia, Royal Highness" (), an honorific used when addressing the empress or empress dowager directly, the edicts (敕, chi) she issued was referred to as Sheng Zhe (聖制), which was the personal orders of the emperor. Conventional historians do not consider Emperor Qianshao a true sovereign, so he is usually omitted from the list of emperors of the Han Dynasty.


title: Empress Lü

text: Emperor Gaozu had previously decreed that no non-imperial clan members could become princes (not including the vassal kings), a rule that Lü Zhi herself had a hand in creating. In spite of this, Lü Zhi attempted to install some of her kinsmen as princes. The Right Chancellor Wang Ling () opposed her decision but the Left Chancellor Chen Ping and general Zhou Bo accepted this move. When Wang Ling rebuked Chen Ping and Zhou Bo in private for going against Emperor Gaozu's law, they rationalized that their compliance with the empress dowager's wishes was necessary to protect the empire and the Liu clan. Lü Zhi promoted Wang Ling to the position of Grand Tutor () but the latter claimed that he was ill and declined, so she ordered him to return to his marquisate (Wang Ling held the title of Marquis of Anguo). Lü Zhi then appointed Chen Ping as Right Chancellor and her illicit lover Shen Yiji () as Left Chancellor.


title: Empress Lü

text: Lü Zhi then proceeded to make her kin nobles. Her first step was to install her maternal grandson Zhang Yan (張偃; Princess Yuan of Lu's son, Empress Zhang Yan's brother) as the Prince of Lu. Over the next few years she instated several of her nephews and grandnephews as princes and marquises. In an unprecedented move, in 184 BC, Lü Zhi also granted her younger sister Lü Xu () the title of Marquise of Lingguang, in a separate fief from that of the latter's husband Fan Kuai.


title: Empress Lü

text: Around 184 BC Emperor Qianshao discovered that he was not Empress Dowager Zhang Yan's son, and his birth mother was executed by the empress dowager. He remarked that when he grew up he would make Empress Dowager Zhang pay for his mother's death. When Lü Zhi heard about this, she had the young emperor secretly confined in the palace and publicly announced that the emperor was seriously ill and unable to meet anyone. After some time she told the imperial court that Emperor Qianshao was still sick and suffered from psychosis, and was thus incapable of ruling. She then proposed that the emperor be replaced. The court complied with her wish, and Emperor Qianshao was deposed and put to death. He was succeeded by his brother Liu Yi (), who was renamed to Liu Hong (), and was also historically known as Emperor Houshao of Han. Like his predecessor Emperor Qianshao, Liu Hong is generally not regarded as a real monarch, so he is also not included in the list of emperors of the Han Dynasty.


title: Empress Lü

text: Lü Zhi died of illness at the age of 61 in 180 BC and was interred in Emperor Gaozu's tomb in Changling (). Near the end of Wang Mang's Xin Dynasty (AD 9 – AD 23), Lü Zhi's body was desecrated by Chimei rebels when they raided Gaozu's tomb. Emperor Guangwu, who restored the Han Dynasty in AD 25, posthumously replaced Lü Zhi as "Empress Gao" in Gaozu's temple with another of Gaozu's concubines, Consort Bo. Lü Zhi was enshrined in a separate temple instead.


title: Empress Lü

text: In the aftermath of Lü Zhi's death, her clan members were overthrown from their positions of power and massacred, in an event historically known as the Lü Clan Disturbance. The masterminds of this coup d'état include ministers who previously served Emperor Gaozu, including Chen Ping, Zhou Bo and Guan Ying. Liu Heng, a son of Gaozu and Consort Bo, was installed on the throne as Emperor Wen of Han.


title: Repsol

text: Repsol S.A. () is a Spanish multinational energy and petrochemical company based in Madrid. It is engaged in worldwide upstream and downstream activities. In the 2021 Forbes Global 2000, Repsol was ranked as the 683rd-largest public company in the world. As of 2021, it has more than 24,000 employees worldwide.


title: Repsol

text: It is vertically integrated and operates in all areas of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading. The business strategy also includes a renewable energy division.


title: Repsol

text: In 1927 CAMPSA (Compañía Arrendataria del Monopolio de Petróleos S.A.), headed by Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, was created with the objective of administering concessions in handing over the state monopoly of petroleum companies. Originally the company was arranged so that the state would have a minority stake. The Creation of CAMPSA intensified the progress of the Spanish refinery industry.


title: Repsol

text: In 1941 the Spanish government under Francisco Franco created the INI (National Industry Institute), in order to finance and promote Spanish industries. The INI supported CAMPSA in its exploration of Tudanca, Cantabria, a monumental moment in Spanish exploration on the Iberian Peninsula. The year 1947 marked the end of a 20-year contract between the Spanish state and CAMPSA, decentralizing services while at the same time giving specific rights to the state to intervene in the company's affairs, minus distribution and commercialization, which remained exclusive to CAMPSA.


title: Repsol

text: In 1948, REPESA (Refinería de Petróleos de Escombreras S.A.) was incorporated for the installation of a refinery in the Valley of Escombreras (Cartagena).


title: Repsol

text: REPESA became the symbol of the increasing industrial consolidation in the refining sector, as it took on the production and marketing of petrol, oils and lubricants under its own brand name.' From the beginning, REPSOL was REPESA's "star brand" of petroleum as a REPESA product brand.


title: Repsol

text: In 1999 Repsol bought 97.81% of the Argentine oil and gas company YPF S.A., which at the time was the largest oil-and-gas company in Ibero America. The acquisition better positioned Repsol as a multinational company. Repsol's acquisition of YPF also increased its capital to 288 million shares worldwide. Repsol's presence in Latin America was one of the keys to corporate growth. It was the first full year after the acquisition of YPF and the consolidation of Gas Natural SDG by global integration. The company's business structure was more balanced and international. Then in December 2001 Repsol completed an asset exchange agreement with Petrobras, making it the second largest consolidated oil company in Brazil. The same year Repsol announced new discoveries in Libya, Indonesia, Spain, Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia, prompting the development and marketing of its electricity business through Gas Natural SDG. In 2003 Repsol tripled its reserves and production of hydrocarbons in Trinidad and Tobago. North American expansion in 2008 saw Repsol open a massive regasification plant on the east coast of Canada with enough capacity to supply up to 20% of the gas demand for New York and New England.


title: Repsol

text: Following years of opposition from environmentalist groups, Spain finally gave permission in August 2014 for the company and its partners to explore prospects off the Canary Islands. Eventually, in January 2015, after two months of exploration about 50 kilometers off the coasts of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, the company said in a statement it only found small deposits that were not worth drilling thus scrapping the project.


title: Repsol

text: In 2008 Repsol began an intensive exploration campaign in which it focused its efforts on and invested in exploring in new areas, with results that enabled the company to change its profile. Using cutting edge technology, the company made over 30 hydrocarbon discoveries, many of which were considered to be among the largest in the world.


title: Repsol

text: This efforts was recognized by "Petroleum Economist" magazine as the "Best energy company of the year".


title: Repsol

text: In December 2014 Repsol announced that it would buy Canadian oil company Talisman Energy in a transaction worth about $15.1 billion Cdn ($13 billion US).


title: Repsol

text: In 1971 Repsol logo first appears, as REPESA (Refinería de Petróleos de Escombreras S.A.) brand product, in the Motorcycling World Championship of that year.


title: Repsol

text: Its name derives from the founding company REPESA for its visibility and easy pronunciation in different languages. In 1991, the Instituto Nacional de Hidrocarburos (INH), before the imminent demise of the state oil monopoly, set the goal to create a company of mixed public-private capital, which exploited state oil assets. When looking for a name a survey at street level was performed and the only two words that people recognized and associate with the world of oil were CAMPSA (badge of the former monopoly) and REPSOL; obviously, this last one was chosen to name the new company.


title: Repsol

text: "A short, round, sonorous and catchy name was searched. As many terms of the language sink their roots in Latin, here the first letters of a small company of lubricants (Repesa) were used, and the term is completed with the star that identifies Spain in the cultures of the north. Repsol is one of the few names of companies which does not obey an acronym or joins that obsession of putting together letters of horrific names. And that was the first hit".


title: Repsol

text: Exploration and production of oil and natural gas are in charge of Repsol Exploration SA and its many subsidiaries. It is present in several countries, such as Spain, United States, Canada, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Norway, United Kingdom, Algeria, Libya, Indonesia and others.


title: Repsol

text: The oil and gas exploration and production activity is Repsol's main growth driver. Repsol has become a world leader in exploration, with over 40 finds since 2008. To guarantee this activity in the long term, in 2013 Repsol incorporated 65 exploration blocks, mainly in the United States (44 blocks) and Norway (6 blocks), into its mining holdings.


title: Repsol

text: Production was doubled as a result of the acquisition of Talisman Energy in 2015. As of January 2022, Repsol produces an average of 572,000 barrels of oil per day, and it has proven reserves of 1.9 billion barrels.


title: Repsol

text: Industrial activity involves the supply and trading of crude and products, oil refining, petroleum product marketing, distribution and marketing of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), production and marketing of chemicals and the development of new energies.


title: Repsol

text: The Repsol Group owns and operates five refineries in Spain (Cartagena, A Coruña, Bilbao, Puertollano and Tarragona), and one in Peru. The combined refining capacity exceeds one million barrels per day.


title: Repsol

text: In addition to products derived from oil and gas, Repsol also produces aviation biofuel from waste and biomass.


title: Repsol

text: The brands Repsol, CAMPSA and Petronor market their products through an extensive network of over 6,900 outlets, of which over 6,500 are service stations, distributed in Europe and Latin America.


title: Repsol

text: Repsol is one of the leading retail distributions of LPG, bottled and bulk, worldwide and is the first in Spain and Latin America.


title: Repsol

text: The Chemicals division produces and markets a wide variety of products in over 90 countries and it is one of the leaders of the market on the Iberian Peninsula. Its activities range from basic petrochemicals to derivatives.


title: Repsol

text: Production is concentrated at three petrochemical complexes located in Spain (Puertollano and Tarragona) and Portugal (Sines), where there is a high level of integration between basic and derivatives, as well as with refining activities in the case of the Spanish facilities. Repsol also has a number of subsidiary and affiliate companies, through which the company produces polyolefin compounds, chemical specialties and synthetic rubber at special plants.


title: Repsol

text: The main function of Trading is to optimize the supply and deliver to market of the Group’s positions in international markets for crude oil and petroleum products (integrated supply chain). Its activity consists of:


title: Repsol

text: The Company’s activity in this area focuses on optimizing the margin from the marketing and sale of regasified LNG and natural gas. The optimization of the gas and LNG portfolio has been carried out through swap operations with third parties, along with logistic optimizations and trading in the gas system.


title: Repsol

text: It provides marketing and sales of oil and other products at service stations and directly (Direct Sales).


title: Repsol

text: Production and sale of lubricants, bases for lubricants, bitumen, jet fuel, extender oils, sulfur, paraffins and propellant gases.


title: Repsol

text: Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is a viable alternative for making immediate progress toward decarbonization objectives.


title: Repsol

text: In Spain and Portugal, Repsol distributes bottled LPG, bulk LPG and AutoGas. In Peru, it supplies AutoGas.


title: Repsol

text: Repsol provides electricity and gas in the retail sector (residential and businesses) with a base of more than 1.3 million customers throughout all of Spain.


title: Repsol

text: In 2021, Repsol secured the highest level of assurance —the A label— for the second straight year, for its environmentally friendly sourcing of electricity, according to the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia. Repsol is the only major retail marketer in Spain, in terms of customers supplied, that guarantees 100% renewable electricity.


title: Repsol

text: Repsol is a major player in the generation of electricity in Spain. As of 31 December 2021, the total installed capacity in operation of low-carbon and renowables reaches 3,738 MW. This includes 693 MW in hydroelectric and pumping plants, 1,625 MW in combined cycle plants, 600 MW in cogeneration plants, 430 MW in wind and 390 MW in solar photovoltaic.


title: Repsol

text: In May 2012, the Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, proposed the expropriation of 51% of Repsol's shares in YPF. The Republic of Argentina's Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Act that was passed that summer made officially possible the expropriation of Repsol's shares. Repsol went to various international bodies to pursue legal action directly after losing its shares of YPF. The expropriation was an attempt by the Argentine government to nationalize its oil and gas production. Results however show that the move to nationalize actually hurt oil production in Argentina. Compared to the oil production in 2011, YPF's oil production in 2012 fell by 8%, according to data from Argentina's Department of Energy.


title: Repsol

text: Repsol had the backing of the EU and the US, and both powers condemned Argentina's move as expropriation. President Fernández claimed that the state would seize 51% of YPF. In June 2013, Repsol rejected a $5 billion proposal from Argentina to compensate for the 2012 expropriation. The proposal also would have given Repsol drilling rights to 6.4% of the massive Vaca Muerta shale-gas field. The board of Repsol unanimously rejected this offer, as it would have caused them to drop a $10.5 billion lawsuit that was in progress against the Argentine government. Repsol at the time owned 6.4% of YPF. On 25 February 2014, the Repsol board announced it had accepted a settlement offer from the Argentine government of an issue of Argentine bonds valued at $5 billion. The deal concluded after three months of negotiations in Buenos Aires was subject to shareholder approval. The agreement ended two years of legal wrangling and the potential for a long drawn-out legal battle. Repsol Chairman Antonio Brufau described the "friendly" settlement as "extremely positive."


title: Repsol

text: In 2011 Repsol built the world's first service station certified by BREEAM, "the leading international method for evaluating and certifying building sustainability". The construction of the station was completed under green architecture parameters, utilizing multiple recycled materials. The publication Newsweek selected Repsol as the most environmentally respectful energy company of 2012. However, recent reports of Repsol drilling in the indigenous lands of the Peruvian Amazon display a disregard for the environment. According to an Environmental Impact Assessment, Repsol's exploration of the rainforest will involve drilling at least 21 wells. Although Repsol denies it, 20 of the 21 wells fall within the land of indigenous people, who are very vulnerable to any sort of contact with foreigners.


title: Repsol

text: In 2016, Repsol ranked as being among the 12th best of 92 oil, gas, and mining companies on indigenous rights in the Arctic. In 2021, Repsol was ranked no. 9 in the Arctic Environmental Responsibility Index (AERI) that covers 120 oil, gas, and mining companies involved in resource extraction north of the Arctic Circle.


title: Repsol

text: Repsol's La Pampilla refinery in Peru was involved in an estimated 6,000-barrel spill off the coast of Lima, on 15 January 2022. Over 18,000 square kilometres of coastline have been affected, including the Ancón Reserved Zone, home to hundreds of endemic marine species. The spill has been called by the Peruvian Foreign Ministry "the worst ecological disaster that has happened in Lima". The Peruvian Minister for the Environment has estimated that the penalties imposed on Repsol could go as high as USD 33.4 millions, aside from the reparations to the local population. Before the Government inspected the spill, Repsol falsely stated that the spill involved only "seven gallons". A Repsol spokeswoman stated to the Peruvian press that Repsol wasn't responsible for the spill: "we didn't cause the ecological disaster, we were unloading crude oil since the previous day. We called the Peruvian Navy, we asked them to confirm the alert on the coasts of Peru". The spokeswoman explained the mistake in informing the Government of the actual amount of spill stating that, since it happened during the night of the 15th, Repsol was unable to correctly estimate how much crude was spilled, and had to wait until the following morning to accurately analyse the situation. She also declined to say who would be responsible for the spill. The spill comes as the latest development in the botched response to the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai eruption and tsunami in Peru, where, due to the absence of any formal warnings by the Peruvian Navy's Hydrography and Navigation Directorate, two people died. Repsol has claimed that the Navy's refusal to inform the public of the incoming waves and tsunami allowed them to continue with the unloading of crude oil, which lead to the spill.


title: Repsol

text: On August 23, 2022, a judge in Peru admitted a lawsuit by Peru's Consumer Protection Agency, Indecopi, against Repsol, i.e. the case will be dealt with in court. The case would consist of a civil lawsuit seeking $3bn for environmental damage and $1.5bn for damages to locals, like fishermen.


title: Repsol

text: Repsol has been a longtime sponsor of motorsport. It partners with Honda Racing Corporation to compete in MotoGP under Repsol Honda Team since 1995, winning titles with legendary riders such as Mick Doohan, Àlex Crivillé, Valentino Rossi, Nicky Hayden, Casey Stoner, and Marc Márquez. Previously, it supported two-time world rally champion Carlos Sainz until 1997, Formula One teams Jordan Grand Prix in 1998, Arrows Grand Prix in 1999–2000 and Scuderia Toro Rosso from 2018, and the Mitsubishi Ralliart factory program at the Dakar Rally until 2009.


title: Flight of the Bumblebee

text: "Flight of the Bumblebee" () is an orchestral interlude written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) for his opera "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", composed in 1899–1900. Its composition is intended to musically evoke the seemingly chaotic and rapidly changing flying pattern of a bumblebee. Despite the piece's being a rather incidental part of the opera, it is today one of the more familiar classical works because of its frequent use in popular culture.


title: Flight of the Bumblebee

text: The piece closes Act III, Tableau 1, during which the magic Swan-Bird changes Prince Gvidon Saltanovich (the Tsar's son) into an insect so that he can fly away to visit his father (who does not know that he is alive). Although in the opera the Swan-Bird sings during the first part of the "Flight", her vocal line is melodically uninvolved and easily omitted; this feature, combined with the fact that the number decisively closes the scene, made easy extraction as an orchestral concerto piece possible.


title: Flight of the Bumblebee

text: Although the "Flight" does not have a title in the score of the opera, its common English title translates like the Russian one ("Полёт шмеля" = "Polyot shmelya"). Incidentally, this piece does not constitute one of the movements of the orchestral suite that Rimsky-Korsakov derived from the opera for concerts.


title: Flight of the Bumblebee

text: Those familiar with the opera "Tsar Saltan" may recognize two leitmotifs used in the "Flight," both of which are associated with Prince Gvidon from earlier in the opera. These are illustrated here in musical notation:


title: Flight of the Bumblebee

text: The music of this number recurs in modified form during the ensuing tableau (Act III, Tableau 2), at the points when the Bumblebee appears during the scene: it stings the two evil sisters on the brow, blinds Babarikha (the instigator of the plot to trick Saltan at the beginning into sending his wife away), and in general causes havoc at the end of the tableau. The readers of Alexander Pushkin's original poem, upon which this opera is based, will note that Gvidon is supposed to go on three separate trips to Saltan's kingdom, each of which requires a transformation into a different insect.


title: Flight of the Bumblebee

text: "Flight of the Bumblebee" is recognizable for its frantic pace when played up to tempo, with nearly uninterrupted runs of chromatic sixteenth notes. It is not so much the pitch or range of the notes that are played that challenges the musician, but simply the musician's ability to move to them quickly enough. Because of this and its complexity, it requires a great deal of skill to perform. Often in popular culture, it is thought of as being notoriously hard to play.


title: Flight of the Bumblebee

text: In the "Tsar Saltan" suite, the short version is commonly played, taking less than two minutes. In the Opera version, the three-minute fifty-five-second version is performed.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standardized and portable message-passing standard designed to function on parallel computing architectures. The MPI standard defines the syntax and semantics of library routines that are useful to a wide range of users writing portable message-passing programs in C, C++, and Fortran. There are several open-source MPI implementations, which fostered the development of a parallel software industry, and encouraged development of portable and scalable large-scale parallel applications.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The message passing interface effort began in the summer of 1991 when a small group of researchers started discussions at a mountain retreat in Austria. Out of that discussion came a Workshop on Standards for Message Passing in a Distributed Memory Environment, held on April 29–30, 1992 in Williamsburg, Virginia. Attendees at Williamsburg discussed the basic features essential to a standard message-passing interface and established a working group to continue the standardization process. Jack Dongarra, Tony Hey, and David W. Walker put forward a preliminary draft proposal, "MPI1", in November 1992. In November 1992 a meeting of the MPI working group took place in Minneapolis and decided to place the standardization process on a more formal footing. The MPI working group met every 6 weeks throughout the first 9 months of 1993. The draft MPI standard was presented at the Supercomputing '93 conference in November 1993. After a period of public comments, which resulted in some changes in MPI, version 1.0 of MPI was released in June 1994. These meetings and the email discussion together constituted the MPI Forum, membership of which has been open to all members of the high-performance-computing community.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The MPI effort involved about 80 people from 40 organizations, mainly in the United States and Europe. Most of the major vendors of concurrent computers were involved in the MPI effort, collaborating with researchers from universities, government laboratories, and industry.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI provides parallel hardware vendors with a clearly defined base set of routines that can be efficiently implemented. As a result, hardware vendors can build upon this collection of standard low-level routines to create higher-level routines for the distributed-memory communication environment supplied with their parallel machines. MPI provides a simple-to-use portable interface for the basic user, yet one powerful enough to allow programmers to use the high-performance message passing operations available on advanced machines.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: In an effort to create a universal standard for message passing, researchers did not base it off of a single system but it incorporated the most useful features of several systems, including those designed by IBM, Intel, nCUBE, PVM, Express, P4 and PARMACS. The message-passing paradigm is attractive because of wide portability and can be used in communication for distributed-memory and shared-memory multiprocessors, networks of workstations, and a combination of these elements. The paradigm can apply in multiple settings, independent of network speed or memory architecture.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Support for MPI meetings came in part from DARPA and from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant ASC-9310330, NSF Science and Technology Center Cooperative agreement number CCR-8809615, and from the European Commission through Esprit Project P6643. The University of Tennessee also made financial contributions to the MPI Forum.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI is a communication protocol for programming parallel computers. Both point-to-point and collective communication are supported. MPI "is a message-passing application programmer interface, together with protocol and semantic specifications for how its features must behave in any implementation." MPI's goals are high performance, scalability, and portability. MPI remains the dominant model used in high-performance computing today.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI is not sanctioned by any major standards body; nevertheless, it has become a "de facto" standard for communication among processes that model a parallel program running on a distributed memory system. Actual distributed memory supercomputers such as computer clusters often run such programs.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The principal MPI-1 model has no shared memory concept, and MPI-2 has only a limited distributed shared memory concept. Nonetheless, MPI programs are regularly run on shared memory computers, and both MPICH and Open MPI can use shared memory for message transfer if it is available. Designing programs around the MPI model (contrary to explicit shared memory models) has advantages when running on NUMA architectures since MPI encourages memory locality. Explicit shared memory programming was introduced in MPI-3.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Although MPI belongs in layers 5 and higher of the OSI Reference Model, implementations may cover most layers, with sockets and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used in the transport layer.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Most MPI implementations consist of a specific set of routines directly callable from C, C++, Fortran (i.e., an API) and any language able to interface with such libraries, including C#, Java or Python. The advantages of MPI over older message passing libraries are portability (because MPI has been implemented for almost every distributed memory architecture) and speed (because each implementation is in principle optimized for the hardware on which it runs).


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI uses Language Independent Specifications (LIS) for calls and language bindings. The first MPI standard specified ANSI C and Fortran-77 bindings together with the LIS. The draft was presented at Supercomputing 1994 (November 1994) and finalized soon thereafter. About 128 functions constitute the MPI-1.3 standard which was released as the final end of the MPI-1 series in 2008.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: At present, the standard has several versions: version 1.3 (commonly abbreviated "MPI-1"), which emphasizes message passing and has a static runtime environment, MPI-2.2 (MPI-2), which includes new features such as parallel I/O, dynamic process management and remote memory operations, and MPI-3.1 (MPI-3), which includes extensions to the collective operations with non-blocking versions and extensions to the one-sided operations.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI-2's LIS specifies over 500 functions and provides language bindings for ISO C, ISO C++, and Fortran 90. Object interoperability was also added to allow easier mixed-language message passing programming. A side-effect of standardizing MPI-2, completed in 1996, was clarifying the MPI-1 standard, creating the MPI-1.2.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: "MPI-2" is mostly a superset of MPI-1, although some functions have been deprecated. MPI-1.3 programs still work under MPI implementations compliant with the MPI-2 standard.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: "MPI-3" includes new Fortran 2008 bindings, while it removes deprecated C++ bindings as well as many deprecated routines and MPI objects.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI is often compared with Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM), which is a popular distributed environment and message passing system developed in 1989, and which was one of the systems that motivated the need for standard parallel message passing. Threaded shared memory programming models (such as Pthreads and OpenMP) and message passing programming (MPI/PVM) can be considered complementary and have been used together on occasion in, for example, servers with multiple large shared-memory nodes.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The MPI interface is meant to provide essential virtual topology, synchronization, and communication functionality between a set of processes (that have been mapped to nodes/servers/computer instances) in a language-independent way, with language-specific syntax (bindings), plus a few language-specific features. MPI programs always work with processes, but programmers commonly refer to the processes as processors. Typically, for maximum performance, each CPU (or core in a multi-core machine) will be assigned just a single process. This assignment happens at runtime through the agent that starts the MPI program, normally called mpirun or mpiexec.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI library functions include, but are not limited to, point-to-point rendezvous-type send/receive operations, choosing between a Cartesian or graph-like logical process topology, exchanging data between process pairs (send/receive operations), combining partial results of computations (gather and reduce operations), synchronizing nodes (barrier operation) as well as obtaining network-related information such as the number of processes in the computing session, current processor identity that a process is mapped to, neighboring processes accessible in a logical topology, and so on. Point-to-point operations come in synchronous, asynchronous, buffered, and "ready" forms, to allow both relatively stronger and weaker semantics for the synchronization aspects of a rendezvous-send. Many outstanding operations are possible in asynchronous mode, in most implementations.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI-1 and MPI-2 both enable implementations that overlap communication and computation, but practice and theory differ. MPI also specifies "thread safe" interfaces, which have cohesion and coupling strategies that help avoid hidden state within the interface. It is relatively easy to write multithreaded point-to-point MPI code, and some implementations support such code. Multithreaded collective communication is best accomplished with multiple copies of Communicators, as described below.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI provides several features. The following concepts provide context for all of those abilities and help the programmer to decide what functionality to use in their application programs. Four of MPI's eight basic concepts are unique to MPI-2.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Communicator objects connect groups of processes in the MPI session. Each communicator gives each contained process an independent identifier and arranges its contained processes in an ordered topology. MPI also has explicit groups, but these are mainly good for organizing and reorganizing groups of processes before another communicator is made. MPI understands single group intracommunicator operations, and bilateral intercommunicator communication. In MPI-1, single group operations are most prevalent. Bilateral operations mostly appear in MPI-2 where they include collective communication and dynamic in-process management.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Communicators can be partitioned using several MPI commands. These commands include codice_1, where each process joins one of several colored sub-communicators by declaring itself to have that color.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: A number of important MPI functions involve communication between two specific processes. A popular example is codice_2, which allows one specified process to send a message to a second specified process. Point-to-point operations, as these are called, are particularly useful in patterned or irregular communication, for example, a data-parallel architecture in which each processor routinely swaps regions of data with specific other processors between calculation steps, or a master-slave architecture in which the master sends new task data to a slave whenever the prior task is completed.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI-1 specifies mechanisms for both blocking and non-blocking point-to-point communication mechanisms, as well as the so-called 'ready-send' mechanism whereby a send request can be made only when the matching receive request has already been made.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Collective functions involve communication among all processes in a process group (which can mean the entire process pool or a program-defined subset). A typical function is the codice_3 call (short for "broadcast"). This function takes data from one node and sends it to all processes in the process group. A reverse operation is the codice_4 call, which takes data from all processes in a group, performs an operation (such as summing), and stores the results on one node. codice_4 is often useful at the start or end of a large distributed calculation, where each processor operates on a part of the data and then combines it into a result.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Other operations perform more sophisticated tasks, such as codice_6 which rearranges "n" items of data such that the "n"th node gets the "n"th item of data from each.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Many MPI functions require that you specify the type of data which is sent between processes. This is because MPI aims to support heterogeneous environments where types might be represented differently on the different nodes (for example they might be running different CPU architectures that have different endianness), in which case MPI implementations can perform "data conversion". Since the C language does not allow a type itself to be passed as a parameter, MPI predefines the constants codice_7, codice_8, codice_9 to correspond with codice_10, codice_11, codice_12, etc.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Here is an example in C that passes arrays of codice_10s from all processes to one. The one receiving process is called the "root" process, and it can be any designated process but normally it will be process 0. All the processes ask to send their arrays to the root with codice_14, which is equivalent to having each process (including the root itself) call codice_2 and the root make the corresponding number of ordered codice_16 calls to assemble all of these arrays into a larger one:


title: Message Passing Interface

text: However, you may instead wish to send data as one block as opposed to 100 codice_10s. To do this define a "contiguous block" derived data type:


title: Message Passing Interface

text: For passing a class or a data structure, codice_18 creates an MPI derived data type from codice_19 data types, as follows:


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The codice_22 (displacements) array is needed for data structure alignment, since the compiler may pad the variables in a class or data structure. The safest way to find the distance between different fields is by obtaining their addresses in memory. This is done with codice_29, which is normally the same as C's codice_30 operator but that might not be true when dealing with memory segmentation.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Passing a data structure as one block is significantly faster than passing one item at a time, especially if the operation is to be repeated. This is because fixed-size blocks do not require serialization during transfer.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI-2 defines three one-sided communications operations, codice_31, codice_32, and codice_33, being a write to remote memory, a read from remote memory, and a reduction operation on the same memory across a number of tasks, respectively. Also defined are three different methods to synchronize this communication (global, pairwise, and remote locks) as the specification does not guarantee that these operations have taken place until a synchronization point.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: These types of call can often be useful for algorithms in which synchronization would be inconvenient (e.g. distributed matrix multiplication), or where it is desirable for tasks to be able to balance their load while other processors are operating on data.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The key aspect is "the ability of an MPI process to participate in the creation of new MPI processes or to establish communication with MPI processes that have been started separately." The MPI-2 specification describes three main interfaces by which MPI processes can dynamically establish communications, codice_34, codice_35/codice_36 and codice_37. The codice_34 interface allows an MPI process to spawn a number of instances of the named MPI process. The newly spawned set of MPI processes form a new codice_39 intracommunicator but can communicate with the parent and the intercommunicator the function returns. codice_40 is an alternate interface that allows the different instances spawned to be different binaries with different arguments.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The parallel I/O feature is sometimes called MPI-IO, and refers to a set of functions designed to abstract I/O management on distributed systems to MPI, and allow files to be easily accessed in a patterned way using the existing derived datatype functionality.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The little research that has been done on this feature indicates that it may not be trivial to get high performance gains by using MPI-IO. For example, an implementation of sparse matrix-vector multiplications using the MPI I/O library shows a general behavior of minor performance gain, but these results are inconclusive. It was not


title: Message Passing Interface

text: until the idea of collective I/O implemented into MPI-IO that MPI-IO started to reach widespread adoption. Collective I/O substantially boosts applications' I/O bandwidth by having processes collectively transform the small and noncontiguous I/O operations into large and contiguous ones, thereby reducing the locking and disk seek overhead. Due to its vast performance benefits, MPI-IO also became the underlying I/O layer for many state-of-the-art I/O libraries, such as HDF5 and Parallel NetCDF. Its popularity also triggered research on collective I/O optimizations, such as layout-aware I/O and cross-file aggregation.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Many other efforts are derivatives of MPICH, LAM, and other works, including, but not limited to, commercial implementations from HP, Intel, Microsoft, and NEC.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: While the specifications mandate a C and Fortran interface, the language used to implement MPI is not constrained to match the language or languages it seeks to support at runtime. Most implementations combine C, C++ and assembly language, and target C, C++, and Fortran programmers. Bindings are available for many other languages, including Perl, Python, R, Ruby, Java, and CL (see #Language bindings).


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The ABI of MPI implementations are roughly split between MPICH and Open MPI derivatives, so that a library from one family works as a drop-in replacement of one from the same family, but direct replacement across families is impossible. The French CEA maintains a wrapper interface to facilitate such switches.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI hardware research focuses on implementing MPI directly in hardware, for example via processor-in-memory, building MPI operations into the microcircuitry of the RAM chips in each node. By implication, this approach is independent of language, operating system, and CPU, but cannot be readily updated or removed.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Another approach has been to add hardware acceleration to one or more parts of the operation, including hardware processing of MPI queues and using RDMA to directly transfer data between memory and the network interface controller without CPU or OS kernel intervention.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: mpicc (and similarly mpic++, mpif90, etc.) is a program that wraps over an existing compiler to set the necessary command-line flags when compiling code that uses MPI. Typically, it adds a few flags that enable the code to be the compiled and linked against the MPI library.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Bindings are libraries that extend MPI support to other languages by wrapping an existing MPI implementation such as MPICH or Open MPI.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The two managed Common Language Infrastructure .NET implementations are Pure Mpi.NET and MPI.NET, a research effort at Indiana University licensed under a BSD-style license. It is compatible with Mono, and can make full use of underlying low-latency MPI network fabrics.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Although Java does not have an official MPI binding, several groups attempt to bridge the two, with different degrees of success and compatibility. One of the first attempts was Bryan Carpenter's mpiJava, essentially a set of Java Native Interface (JNI) wrappers to a local C MPI library, resulting in a hybrid implementation with limited portability, which also has to be compiled against the specific MPI library being used.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: However, this original project also defined the mpiJava API (a de facto MPI API for Java that closely followed the equivalent C++ bindings) which other subsequent Java MPI projects adopted. One less-used API is MPJ API, which was designed to be more object-oriented and closer to Sun Microsystems' coding conventions. Beyond the API, Java MPI libraries can be either dependent on a local MPI library, or implement the message passing functions in Java, while some like P2P-MPI also provide peer-to-peer functionality and allow mixed-platform operation.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Some of the most challenging parts of Java/MPI arise from Java characteristics such as the lack of explicit pointers and the linear memory address space for its objects, which make transferring multidimensional arrays and complex objects inefficient. Workarounds usually involve transferring one line at a time and/or performing explicit de-serialization and casting at both the sending and receiving ends, simulating C or Fortran-like arrays by the use of a one-dimensional array, and pointers to primitive types by the use of single-element arrays, thus resulting in programming styles quite far from Java conventions.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Another Java message passing system is MPJ Express. Recent versions can be executed in cluster and multicore configurations. In the cluster configuration, it can execute parallel Java applications on clusters and clouds. Here Java sockets or specialized I/O interconnects like Myrinet can support messaging between MPJ Express processes. It can also utilize native C implementation of MPI using its native device. In the multicore configuration, a parallel Java application is executed on multicore processors. In this mode, MPJ Express processes are represented by Java threads.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: There are a few academic implementations of MPI using MATLAB. MATLAB has its own parallel extension library implemented using MPI and PVM.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: The OCamlMPI Module implements a large subset of MPI functions and is in active use in scientific computing. An 11,000-line OCaml program was "MPI-ified" using the module, with an additional 500 lines of code and slight restructuring and ran with excellent results on up to 170 nodes in a supercomputer.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: PARI/GP can be built to use MPI as its multi-thread engine, allowing to run parallel PARI and GP programs on MPI clusters unmodified.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI implementations in Python include: pyMPI, mpi4py, pypar, MYMPI, and the MPI submodule in ScientificPython. pyMPI is notable because it is a variant python interpreter, while pypar, MYMPI, and ScientificPython's module are import modules. They make it the coder's job to decide where the call to codice_41 belongs.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: In 2006 the Boost C++ Libraries acquired Boost:MPI which included the MPI Python Bindings. This is of particular help for mixing C++ and Python. Boost:MPI's Python bindings still have unfixed packaging bugs in CentOS.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: R bindings of MPI include Rmpi and pbdMPI, where Rmpi focuses on manager-workers parallelism while pbdMPI focuses on SPMD parallelism. Both implementations fully support Open MPI or MPICH2.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Here is a "Hello, World!" program in MPI written in C. In this example, we send a "hello" message to each processor, manipulate it trivially, return the results to the main process, and print the messages.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Here, codice_42 is a command used to execute the example program with 4 processes, each of which is an independent instance of the program at run time and assigned ranks (i.e. numeric IDs) 0, 1, 2, and 3. The name codice_42 is recommended by the MPI standard, although some implementations provide a similar command under the name codice_44. The codice_39 is the communicator that consists of all the processes.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: A single program, multiple data (SPMD) programming model is thereby facilitated, but not required; many MPI implementations allow multiple, different, executables to be started in the same MPI job. Each process has its own rank, the total number of processes in the world, and the ability to communicate between them either with point-to-point (send/receive) communication, or by collective communication among the group. It is enough for MPI to provide an SPMD-style program with codice_39, its own rank, and the size of the world to allow algorithms to decide what to do. In more realistic situations, I/O is more carefully managed than in this example. MPI does not stipulate how standard I/O (stdin, stdout, stderr) should work on a given system. It generally works as expected on the rank-0 process, and some implementations also capture and funnel the output from other processes.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: MPI uses the notion of process rather than processor. Program copies are "mapped" to processors by the MPI runtime. In that sense, the parallel machine can map to one physical processor, or to "N" processors, where "N" is the number of available processors, or even something in between. For maximum parallel speedup, more physical processors are used. This example adjusts its behavior to the size of the world "N", so it also seeks to scale to the runtime configuration without compilation for each size variation, although runtime decisions might vary depending on that absolute amount of concurrency available.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Adoption of MPI-1.2 has been universal, particularly in cluster computing, but acceptance of MPI-2.1 has been more limited. Issues include:


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Some aspects of the MPI's future appear solid; others less so. The MPI Forum reconvened in 2007 to clarify some MPI-2 issues and explore developments for a possible MPI-3, which resulted in versions MPI-3.0 (September 2012) and MPI-3.1 (June 2015).


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Architectures are changing, with greater internal concurrency (multi-core), better fine-grained concurrency control (threading, affinity), and more levels of memory hierarchy. Multithreaded programs can take advantage of these developments more easily than single-threaded applications. This has already yielded separate, complementary standards for symmetric multiprocessing, namely OpenMP. MPI-2 defines how standard-conforming implementations should deal with multithreaded issues, but does not require that implementations be multithreaded, or even thread-safe. MPI-3 adds the ability to use shared-memory parallelism within a node. Implementations of MPI such as Adaptive MPI, Hybrid MPI, Fine-Grained MPI, MPC and others offer extensions to the MPI standard that address different challenges in MPI.


title: Message Passing Interface

text: Astrophysicist Jonathan Dursi wrote an opinion piece calling MPI obsolescent, pointing to newer technologies like the Chapel language, Unified Parallel C, Hadoop, Spark and Flink. At the same time, nearly all of the projects in the Exascale Computing Project build explicitly on MPI; MPI has been shown to scale to the largest machines as of the early 2020s and is widely considered to stay relevant for a long time to come.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Alhambra (, , ; from "Alhambra") is a city located in the western San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles County, California, United States, approximately eight miles from the Downtown Los Angeles civic center. It was incorporated on July 11, 1903. As of the 2020 census, the population was 82,868. The city's ZIP Codes are 91801 and 91803 (plus 91802 for P.O. boxes).


title: Alhambra, California

text: The San Gabriel Mission was founded nearby on September 8, 1771, as part of the Spanish conquest and occupation of Alta California. The land that would later become Alhambra was part of a 300,000 acre land grant given to Manuel Nieto, a soldier from the Los Angeles Presidio. In 1820 Mexico won its independence from the Spanish crown and lands once ruled by them became part of the Mexican Republic. These lands then transferred into the hands of the United States following the defeat in the Mexican–American War. A wealthy developer, Benjamin Davis Wilson, married Ramona Yorba, daughter of Bernardo Yorba, who owned the land which would become Alhambra. With the persuasion of his daughter, Ruth, Yorba named the land after a book she was reading, Washington Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra", which he was inspired to write by his extended visit to the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. Alhambra was founded as a suburb of Los Angeles that remained an unincorporated area during the mid-19th century. The first school in Alhambra was Ramona Convent Secondary School, built on hillside property donated by the prominent James de Barth Shorb family. Thirteen years before the city was incorporated, several prominent San Gabriel Valley families interested in the Catholic education of their daughters established the school in 1890. The city's first public high school, Alhambra High School, was established in 1898, five years before the city's incorporation. On July 11, 1903, the City of Alhambra was incorporated. The Alhambra Fire Department was established in 1906.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Alhambra is promoted as a "city of homes", and many of its homes have historical significance. They include styles such as craftsman, bungalow, Spanish Mediterranean, Spanish colonial, Italian beaux-arts, and arts and crafts. Twenty-six single-family residential areas have been designated historic neighborhoods by the city, including the Bean Tract (formerly owned by early resident Jacob Bean), the Midwick Tract (site of the former Midwick Country Club), the Airport Tract (formerly the landing pad for Alhambra Airport), and the Emery Park area. There are also a large number of condominiums, rental apartments, and mixed-use residential/commercial buildings, especially in the downtown area.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Alhambra's main business district, at the intersection of Main and Garfield, has been a center of commerce since 1895. By the 1950s, it had taken on an upscale look and was "the" place to go in the San Gabriel Valley. While many of the classic historical buildings have been torn down over the years, the rebuilding of Main Street has led to numerous dining, retail, and entertainment establishments. Alhambra has experienced waves of new immigrants, beginning with Italians in the 1950s, Mexicans in the 1960s, and Chinese in the 1980s. As a result, a very active Chinese business district has developed on Valley Boulevard, including Chinese supermarkets, restaurants, shops, banks, realtors, and medical offices. The Valley Boulevard corridor has become a national hub for many Asian-owned bank headquarters, and there are other nationally recognised retailers in the city.


title: Alhambra, California

text: The historic Garfield Theatre, located at Valley Boulevard and Garfield Avenue from 1925 until 2001, was formerly a vaudeville venue and is rumored to have hosted the Gumm Sisters, featuring a very young Judy Garland. Faded from its original glory, for its last few years it was purchased and ran Chinese-language films, and in 2001 went out of business. Subsequently, developers have remodeled the dilapidated building, turning it into a vibrant commercial center with many Chinese stores and eateries.


title: Alhambra, California

text: In 2003, actress Lana Clarkson was shot to death in the Alhambra home of record producer Phil Spector. Spector lived in Alhambra's largest and most notable residence, the Pyrenees Castle, built in 1926. In 2009, Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in connection with Clarkson's death.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Alhambra is bordered by South Pasadena on the northwest, San Marino on the north, San Gabriel on the east, Monterey Park on the south, and the Los Angeles districts of Monterey Hills and El Sereno on the west.


title: Alhambra, California

text: As of 2020, Alhambra had a population of 82,868. Its population density was . Approximately 51% of residents were Asian, 23% were White (9% non-Hispanic White), 2.2% were African American, 0.5% Native American, 0.3% Pacific Islander, 3.0% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 36%. Alhambra is among the communities in L.A. County with the highest percentage of Asian residents. Chinese and Mexican are the most common ancestries in Alhambra.


title: Alhambra, California

text: During 2009–2013, Alhambra had a median household income of $54,148, with 13.9% of the population living below the federal poverty line. Approximately 40% of the city's housing units were owner-occupied as of 2015-2019.


title: Alhambra, California

text: The city is governed by a five-member city council; one member of the council is chosen as mayor. Council members are nominated by district and elected for four-year terms. Half of the council seats are up for election in each even-numbered year, which is held in a Tuesday after the first Monday in November during the California general election. The City Manager is appointed by the City Council and oversees the day-to-day operations of ten City departments, 400 employees and a $145M budget. The current City Manager, Jessica Binnquist was appointed in 2018.


title: Alhambra, California

text: The San Bernardino Freeway (I-10) runs through the city's southern portions, and the Long Beach Freeway (I-710) has its northern terminus at Valley Boulevard in the far southwestern portions of the city. Major thoroughfares within the city include Atlantic and Valley Boulevards, Mission Road, Fremont and Garfield Avenues, and Main Street.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Public transportation in Alhambra is provided by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) as well as the Alhambra Community Transit.


title: Alhambra, California

text: The California High-Speed Rail Authority is considering proposals to a build high-speed rail system through Alhambra along the San Bernardino Freeway (I-10) corridor from the east city limits to west city limits. In late July 2010, the authority told the city that the options under consideration included building tracks down the center of the freeway and parallel to the freeway along Ramona Road. As proposed, there would be a deck set on top of posts placed every . The proposal is part of the high-speed rail network currently planned for California. It is part of the line between Los Angeles's Union Station and San Diego, through the Inland Empire. Residents and city leaders voiced opposition to the plan to route the high-speed trains through the city in public meetings.


title: Alhambra, California

text: The local daily newspaper is the "San Gabriel Valley Tribune". The regional daily newspaper is the "Los Angeles Times".


title: Alhambra, California

text: The "Alhambra Post-Advocate" is the newspaper of general circulation adjudicated for the City of Alhambra and County of Los Angeles. It is currently published by the Wave Newspapers and is part of the Wave's East Edition.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Car dealerships are the largest contributor to the local economy. Many car brands can be found in Alhambra, such as Acura, BMW, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Ford, KIA, Volkswagen, Dodge, Jeep and Chrysler. Most of these dealerships are found on the Main St. auto row near Atlantic Boulevard.


title: Alhambra, California

text: In recent years there has been an effort to revitalize Main St. from Atlantic Blvd. to Garfield Ave. Many new restaurants have been opening on Main St. as well as development of mixed-use buildings that have provided opportunities for more businesses to open and provide jobs, such as the new Sprouts farmers market.


title: Alhambra, California

text: The Hat, a local icon, was opened in Alhambra in 1951. It was the original, family-owned outdoor restaurant, and is now a well-known small Southern California chain. Shakey's Pizza also has its headquarters in Alhambra.


title: Alhambra, California

text: On the western edge of town, the Ratkovich Company, which owns The Alhambra office complex (formerly the site of CF Braun headquarters), and as of 2021 they are planning to build condominium units on , as well as a parking structure, after completing the LA Fitness gym, valued at $190 million. Due to strong public opposition, the council voted unanimously to oppose the project. At primary issue was the toxic contamination of the land, a federally designated EPA Superfund site, due to the former foundry on the site.


title: Alhambra, California

text: According to the City of Alhambra 2020 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the year ended June 2020, the city's top employers were:


title: Alhambra, California

text: Each year on Valley Boulevard, the cities of Alhambra and San Gabriel used to co-host the San Gabriel Valley Lunar New Year Parade and Festival, which ran from Del Mar to Garfield Avenues. The event was of such significance to the majority Asian American demographic in Alhambra that it was broadcast live on Chinese radio, KWRM AM 1370, locally on KSCI-18, and later on worldwide cable and satellite TV. Now Alhambra alone runs the event within city limits without the parade.


title: Alhambra, California

text: From 2001 to 2008, Alhambra was the host of the Summer Jubilee, a street carnival and music concert held every Saturday, until its postponement due to loss of funds caused by the late 2000s recession.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Alhambra is home to the Los Angeles campus of Platt College and the Los Angeles Campus of Alliant International University. The University of Southern California has a Health Sciences Alhambra campus, which hosts the university's Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research (IPR), and its master's degree program in public health.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Almost all of the city is within the Alhambra Unified School District. The district's public elementary and middle schools (K–8) located in Alhambra are Martha Baldwin, Emery Park, Fremont, Garfield, Granada, Marguerita, William Northrup, Park, and Ramona. Additionally a small part of the city is assigned to Monterey Highlands K-8 in Monterey Park. The public high schools in Alhambra are: Alhambra High School, founded in 1898; Century High School; Independence High School; Mark Keppel High School; and San Gabriel High School (which, despite its name, is located within Alhambra). Alhambra Unified School District used to run Garfield Community Adult School until the early 2010s.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Historic Ramona Convent Secondary School is a Catholic all-girls college preparatory school for grades 7–12 in Alhambra. Its first building was dedicated at Ramona Acres on January 29, 1890.


title: Alhambra, California

text: Other sectarian schools in the city include St. Therese (Catholic, grades K–8), St. Thomas More Elementary (Catholic, K–8), All Souls World Language Catholic School (Catholic, K–8), and Emmaus Lutheran (Lutheran, PK–8). Nonsectarian private schools include Oneonta Montessori School (grades PK–6), Sherman School (10–12), Bell Tower School (PS-5) and Leeway School (3–12).


title: Gulu Lalvani

text: Gulu Lalvani was born to a Sindhi Sikh family in March 1939, in Karachi, Sind, British India (now in Pakistan). His family moved to Bombay after the partition of India, where he was raised and educated. He was one of nine brothers and sisters. His brothers Kartar Lalvani and Pratap Singh Lalvani are also businessmen who founded Binatone with him. Kartar is also the founder of the nutraceutical company Vitabiotics, which is currently run by his son Tej Lalvani. Gulu's youngest sister is the socialite Bina Ramani (), after whom Binatone was named. The family subsequently migrated to London during the 1960s.


title: Gulu Lalvani

text: In 1958, Lalvani founded Binatone, once one of the world's largest manufacturers of digital cordless phones. He founded the company with his brother Partap, and they named it after their sister, Bina.


title: Gulu Lalvani

text: In 2008, his net worth was estimated at £435 million. Lalvani has substantial interests in Phuket, Thailand, including a villa in Amanpuri.


title: Gulu Lalvani

text: Lalvani's first marriage was with Vimla Lalvani, their son Dino Lalvani currently runs Binatone. He later married Turkish actress Semiramis Pekkan (sister of singer Ajda Pekkan) in 1987, with whom he has a son, it also ended in a divorce in 1996. Lalvani currently lives in Phuket, Thailand. In 2006, his daughter Divia married Joel Cadbury, son of the businessman Peter Cadbury.


title: Amitash Pradhan

text: Amitash (born 12 October 1990) is an Indian actor who primarily works in Tamil films. He has starred in films such as "Velaiilla Pattadhari" (2014), "Bruce Lee - The Fighter" (2015), "Heartbeats" (2017), and "Vaanam Kottatum" (2020).


title: Amitash Pradhan

text: Amitash was born in Dharwad, Karnataka and brought up in Chennai. He did his schooling in Bala Vidya Mandir, and master's degree in electronic media from Anna University. He did his Diploma in acting from Anupam Kher's institute in Bombay called "An Actor Prepares". Amitash was enrolled in Little Theatre, a popular theatre group in Chennai at the age of 8, and came on stage in his first play with them. He went on to pursue his acting talent in many of their plays as well as school plays. His association with several experienced and eminent theatre directors and theatre groups like Madras Players shaped his perspectives on acting. He founded Theatron, a theatre club in Anna University, the first of its kind in that institution and introduced many students to stage plays. Under that banner, he directed several plays. He has also directed many other plays.


title: Amitash Pradhan

text: Amitash is also a singer. He has to his credit a Cover "Sing For The Moment", which is a tribute to "Laal Ishq". During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, he has sung and performed in independent Tamil music videos called "Corona Kannala" and "Arakkiye".


title: Amitash Pradhan

text: "Vaaranam Aayiram" was his introduction to films, albeit a tiny role, just as he completed his schooling. His professional acting breakthrough came in 2014 with the Tamil film "Velaiyilla Pattadhari", in which he plays the role of the main antagonist against Dhanush. The film went on to make waves as the highest grossing Tamil film of 2014 and Amitash got recognition. Telugu film director Srinu Vaitla cast him in his Telugu film "Bruce Lee - The Fighter", marking his Telugu debut. He made his Hollywood debut in the year 2015 with playing male lead in the movie "Heartbeats" directed by Duane Adler of the Step Up series was a significant phase for Amitash. He plays the role of Aseem Kapoor, an Indian choreographer with whom Krystal Ellsworth, an American dancer falls in love and the film celebrates their love and the tough path they had to tread. He played a supporting role alongside Aishwarya Rajesh and Shanthanu Bhagyaraj in "Vaanam Kottattum" (2020). Amitash is a part of an anthology called "Kutty Story" by four eminent directors of South and he features in A. L. Vijay's episode along with Megha Akash. His next film "Thalli Pogathey", a remake of the Telugu film "Ninnu Kori" sees Amitash as one of the two male leads alongside Atharvaa and Anupama Parameswaran.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: Meredith Corporation was an American media conglomerate based in Des Moines, Iowa, that owned magazines, television stations, websites, and radio stations. Its publications had a readership of more than 120 million and paid circulation of more than 40 million, and its websites had nearly 135 million monthly unique visitors. Its broadcast television stations reached 11% of U.S. households.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: Edwin Thomas Meredith founded the company in 1902 when he began publishing "Successful Farming" magazine.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: In 1922, Meredith began publishing "Fruit, Garden and Home" magazine, a home and family service publication. In 1924, the magazine was retitled "Better Homes and Gardens", and the first issue cost a dime on the newsstand. In 1930, the company published the first edition of "The Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book". In 1946, the company became a public company. In 1987, Meredith Corporation made a deal that they would purchase MMT Sales for $40 million, and would represent national advertising spot time on 60 stations across the entire US country.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: In 1994, Meredith and CBS struck an agreement to renew its Kansas City station and affiliate two of the Bay City and Phoenix stations with the network.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: In March 2012, Meredith acquired allrecipes.com from Reader's Digest Association for $175 million. In February 2013, Meredith and Time Warner held discussions on a possible purchase of Time Inc.; Time Warner at the time elected to spin it out as a separate company instead.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: In October 2014, Meredith announced a 10-year licensing agreement with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia to acquire the rights to Martha Stewart Living, Martha Stewart Weddings and marthastewart.com.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: In November 2014, Meredith acquired mywedding.com. In January 2015, the company acquired Selectable Media. Also in January 2015, Meredith acquired "Shape", "Natural Health" and "Fit Pregnancy" from American Media Inc. Fitness magazine was folded into Shape, while retaining its website.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: On September 8, 2015, Media General announced its intent to acquire Meredith in a cash and stock deal valued at $2.4 billion. Pending regulatory and shareholder approval, the deal was expected to be consummated in June 2016. The combined company would have operated under the name Meredith Media General, and be the third-largest owner of television stations in the United States—serving an estimated 30% of households. To comply with FCC ownership limits, the company would have divested and/or swapped stations in six markets. Media General shareholders would have controlled 65% of the company, with Meredith shareholders holding 35%. However, the offer was countered by Nexstar Broadcasting Group, who made a successful, $4.6 billion bid to acquire Media General instead.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: In February 2017, it was reported that Meredith and a group of investors led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. were considering another possible purchase of Time Inc. On November 26, 2017, it was announced that Meredith Corporation would acquire Time Inc. in a $2.8 billion deal. $640 million in backing was provided by Koch Equity Development, but the Koch family would not have a board seat or otherwise influence the company's operations.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: On January 9, 2018, it was announced that Meredith would launch a "Hungry Girl" magazine on January 16, expanding from the online brand.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: On January 31, 2018, the company completed the acquisition of Time Inc. In March 2018, only six weeks after the closure of the deal, Meredith announced that it would lay off 200 employees, up to 1,000 more over the next 10 months, and explore the sale of "Fortune", "Money", "Sports Illustrated", and "Time". Meredith felt that, despite their "strong consumer reach," these brands did not align with its core lifestyle properties. Howard Milstein had announced on February 7, 2018, that he would acquire "Golf Magazine" from Meredith, and Time Inc. UK was sold to the British private equity group Epiris (later rebranded to TI Media) in late February. In September 2018, Meredith announced the sale of "Time" to Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne for $190 million. In November 2018, Meredith announced the sale of "Fortune" to Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon, whose family owns Charoen Pokphand, for $150 million. After failing to find a buyer for "Money", Meredith in April 2019 announced that it would cease the magazine's print publication as of July 2019, but would invest in the brand's digital component Money.com. In May 2019, Meredith announced the sale of "Sports Illustrated" to Authentic Brands Group, for $110 million.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: Time Inc. Productions was renamed Four M Studios in May 2018. The studio is under Bruce Gersh, Meredith's president of "People", Entertainment Weekly and "People en Español" and head of Four M Studios.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: In October 2019, Meredith Corporation sold the "Money" brand and website to Ad Practitioners LLC, a media and advertising company based in Puerto Rico. Terms were not disclosed, but sources said the brand went for just over $20 million, that was more than the $10 million Meredith was seeking in early 2019.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: In November 2019 the company unloaded one more asset acquired in the Time Inc. acquisition, its 60% equity ownership of digital advertising company Viant Technology Holding Inc. that, among other assets, owns social networking site Myspace. Also in November 2019, the company announced the launch of a new quarterly magazine, called "Reveal," in January 2020 in collaboration with Drew and Jonathan Scott from HGTV's "Property Brothers".


title: Meredith Corporation

text: On May 3, 2021, Meredith announced an agreement with Gray Television for the latter to acquire Meredith's television division. The transaction will be structured as a spin-off of a new (short-lived) Meredith Corporation, containing the magazines division, to existing shareholders, to be immediately followed by the old Meredith (by then consisting solely of its TV stations group) being acquired by Gray for $2.7 billion in cash.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: Later that year, on October 6, Meredith announced an agreement whereby the company's remaining magazine and other non-broadcast assets would be acquired by IAC's Dotdash for $2.7 billion, forming a new entity called Dotdash Meredith.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: On November 15, Meredith announced it has received regulatory approvals for both the Gray and IAC transactions. Both deals were completed on December 1. On February 9, 2022, it was revealed that six former Meredith Corporation magazines (Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, EatingWell, Health, Parents and People en Espanol) will cease having print circulation and switch to a digital-only format.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: The broadcasting division owned 15 television stations. Most of the company's stations were affiliated with CBS, Fox, or MyNetworkTV. Meredith's broadcasting division also produced "Better" from 2007 until 2015, which was originally conceived as a brand extension of "BH&G". Since its inception in 2007 the show has placed an increasing emphasis on celebrity interviews and music performances. There were also cooking demonstrations and regular features on health, beauty, fitness and fashion. Local versions of the concept continue to air on Meredith stations.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: On December 23, 2013, Meredith announced plans to buy St. Louis CBS affiliate KMOV and Phoenix independent station KTVK for $407.5 million in cash from Gannett Company and Sander Media, LLC to satisfy a federal mandate that Gannett sell KMOV. The purchase of KMOV was completed on February 28, 2014, while the KTVK sale was completed on June 19.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: Meredith has also struck deals to acquire ABC affiliate WGGB in Springfield, Massachusetts from Gormally Broadcasting for $53.8 million and Fox affiliate WALA in Mobile, Alabama from LIN Media for $86 million.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: Four M Studios (Four M), formerly Time Inc. Productions, is Meredith's in-house production company and is under the oversight of Bruce Gersh, Meredith's president of People, Entertainment Weekly and People en Español.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: After attempting a few TV shows in 2014 and 2015, the company formed Time Inc. Productions in 2016 as its in-house production company. It launched its free, ad-supported online video service PeopleTV in 2016, which got a pay TV deal by May 2018 with FuboTV. In November 2017, it launched its first over-the-top subscription service, Sports Illustrated TV, available via Amazon Channels. On October 30, 2017, it announced that Paramount Network was partnering with it on two TV pilots.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: Time Inc. Productions was renamed Four M Studios in May 2018. Four M would expand from the Time titles to all Meredith titles and to freestanding lifestyle shows and scripted shows. Four M also announced at that time a deal with Freeform TV channel to develop Meredith magazine stories, including "People"'s "Heroes Among Us" franchise, into telefilms.


title: Meredith Corporation

text: Four M Studios partnered with Imagine Entertainment's Imagine Kids & Family division. Its first project from the partnership is "LIFE for Kids", a children's TV show using LIFE Magazine's photo archive.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Katherine Beers (born December 30, 1982) is an American woman who was kidnapped when she was 9 years old in Bay Shore, New York by John Esposito, a friend of the family, and held in an underground bunker from December 28, 1992, to January 13, 1993.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Katie Beers lived with her mother Marilyn Beers and older half-brother John Beers in Long Island, New York. Her biological father has never been identified as her conception was the result of a one-night stand. From a young age, Katie also lived with her godmother Linda Inghilleri and Inghilleri's husband, Salvatore. Marilyn frequently neglected Katie and John, leaving them in the care of the Inghilleris, from whom they would endure abuse including frequent sexual assaults by Sal.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: John Esposito was a friend of Beers' family who would frequently give attention and gifts to Katie and John Beers, but would also sexually abuse John. Esposito had previously been arrested in 1977 for the attempted abduction of a twelve-year-old boy.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Beers was lured into Esposito's house at Bay Shore, New York on December 28, 1992, two days before her 10th birthday, by the promise of birthday presents. After Beers played a video game in Esposito's bedroom, he forced her into an underground concrete bunker.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: The 6-foot-by-7-foot bunker hill was located under Esposito's garden and accessed via a six-foot long tunnel. The entrance tunnel was concealed by a 200-pound concrete trap door and hidden behind a removable bookcase in Esposito's office. The bunker contained a commode toilet and closed-circuit television system. Within the bunker was a coffin-size soundproofed room containing a bed and television where Beers was chained. Esposito would later tell police he had built the bunker specifically for Beers. Beers herself later recalled playing in the dirt displaced by the bunker as Esposito dug it a few years before the kidnapping.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Immediately after forcing Beers into the bunker, Esposito made her record a message where she claimed a man with a knife had taken her. Esposito played the message at a pay phone outside the Spaceplex amusement arcade at Nesconset, New York and told the arcade's staff that he had lost Beers within the building. Police were called when she couldn't be located.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: During her captivity, Esposito would frequently visit Beers to sexually abuse her while also providing food, blankets and toys. He allowed Beers into the larger part of the bunker when he visited her but would force her back into the smaller room when she was alone, although Beers was able to unchain herself and escape to the larger room in Esposito's absence after hiding a key under her pillow, but was unable to escape the bunker itself. Esposito told Beers he intended to keep her in the bunker for the remainder of her life, and planned to take a photo of her asleep and send it to police so they would believe she was dead, although the photo was never taken.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Esposito was a suspect from an early stage in the police investigation, following accusations of previous sexual abuse towards John Beers and witnesses at Spaceplex stating that he entered the arcade alone on the day of Beers' disappearance. Police also determined that Beers' phone message about a man with a knife was from a previously made recording based on a lack of background noise.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: On January 13, 1993, 17 days after the kidnapping, Esposito confessed to holding Beers captive and took police to the bunker where they rescued her.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Esposito pleaded guilty to kidnapping on June 16, 1994 and was sentenced on July 27, 1994 to 15 years to life, a sentence he served at Sing Sing prison in Westchester County, New York. During Esposito's trial, Beers said he had raped her during her captivity. Although he was not charged with this, the judge sentencing him agreed with her. Esposito was found dead in his cell of apparently natural causes on September 4, 2013, shortly after his fourth parole hearing in 20 years.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Sal Inghilleri was convicted of two counts of sexual abuse and served 12 years for molesting Beers. During the investigation into the kidnapping, authorities discovered that Inghilleri had sexually abused the girl before she was abducted. He was prosecuted additionally for those crimes. He died in prison in 2009.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Shortly after her rescue, Beers was sent to live with foster parents in East Hampton, New York due to the neglect and abuse they both had experienced before the kidnapping. Beers was provided with anonymity and raised by her foster parents until adulthood. In January 2013, Beers spoke publicly for the first time about her ordeal and revealed that she was now married with two children and working in insurance. During the same month, she published a memoir about her ordeal.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: In the months following the kidnapping, two books covering the case were published: "My Name Is Katherine: The True Story of Little Katie Beers" written by Maria Eftimiades and Joe Treen, and "17 Days: The Katie Beers Story" by Arthur Herzog.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Beers' memoir, "Buried Memories" (known as "Help Me" in the United Kingdom) was co-written by reporter Carolyn Gusoff, who had covered Beers' case as it was happening, and was published on January 13, 2013, on the 20th anniversary of her rescue.


title: Katie Beers kidnapping

text: Investigation Discovery recounted the case on an episode of its 2020 documentary miniseries "Killer Carnies". It included accounts from Beers, the lead police detective, and others.


title: Brahmapur, Odisha

text: Brahmapur (; also known as Berhampur) is a city on the eastern coastline of Ganjam district of the Indian state of Odisha. Bramhapur is most famous for its street food, silk sarees or pato sarees, temples and many historical places. Bramhapur also dubbed as Food Capital of Odisha, and Silk City of India.


title: Brahmapur, Odisha

text: The name of the city is said to have been derived from the name of Lord Brahmeswara, worshipped in a temple at Lathi, 4 km from the main town.


title: Brahmapur, Odisha

text: Jaugada, present 35 km away from Brahmapur on the banks of the Rushikulya, was an ancient fort and city existing from 3rd century BC to 7th century AD. Its existence before and after this time period cannot be ruled out. Also called "Samapa", it was a provincial headquarter of Maurya Dynasty along with "Dhauli" as evident from the edicts found at both places. Specific history about the place and civilisation doesn't exist after the Maurya Dynasty and the fort is now buried.