Vauxhall is a car manufacturer. The company was founded in London in 1903 and was named after the area of the city where it was created. The company is based in Luton, Bedfordshire. They have 2 factories, 1 in Luton for production of the Vivaro van and 1 in Ellsmere Port for production of the Astra family car. In March 2017, Vauxhall and parent brand Opel were brought by PSA, the company who owns Peugeot and Citroen.
Battle of Dunkirk
The Battle of Dunkirk (French: Bataille de Dunkerque) (Also known as Operation Dynamo) was a major battle during World War II. It lasted from the 26 May until 4 June 1940. The Allied forces were split in two by a German armoured advance to the Channel coast at Calais. The British and French commanders had been taken by surprise at the speed of the advance. The northern part of the army was surrounded In Dunkirk, France, a port on the English Channel. There they made a perimeter and waited for an evacuation.
1971 Bangladesh atrocities
The 1971 Bangladesh atrocities refer to the murder of many people in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) by the Pakistan National Army (PNA) during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. It began on March 26, 1971 with Operation Searchlight.
In 1947, the United Kingdom split British India into two countries: India and Pakistan. The idea was that Hindus would live in India and Muslims would live in Pakistan. But it was not so simple. Because Hindus and Muslims lived in so many different places, East Pakistan and West Pakistan were about 1000 miles apart, with all of India in between them. Also, not all Muslims are the same. The East Pakistanis and West Pakistanis did not speak the same language and did not always like each other.
There were fewer West Pakistanis than East Pakistanis, but West Pakistanis controlled most of the government. After the Bhola Cyclone damaged East Pakistan, West Pakistan did not send enough help. Because of these things, East Pakistanis started to want to be a separate country from East Pakistan. The government in East Pakistan started Operation Searchlight to stop this separatist movement.
East Pakistan would later become Bangladesh. The people who lived there called themselves Bengalis. Some of the Bengalis were not Muslims but Hindus.
In 1970, Pakistan held its first general election. Before this, the military had limited voters' rights. The West Pakistanis voted for many different political parties, but most of the East Pakistanis voted for the same political party, called the Awami League. This meant the East Pakistani candidates would have a majority in Pakistan's assembly. This East Pakistani political party was led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
General Yahya Khan, a West Pakistani and leader, did not want the East Pakistani candidates to run the country, so he declared martial law, meaning the army was in charge of the country. The East Pakistanis were angry. They did protests and riots in 1970 and 1971.
Khan and Mujibur met with each other to talk to try to solve the problems and stop the riots. It looked like they had made an agreement. But on March 25, 1971, Mujibur was arrested. Then, thousands of West Pakistani soldiers, 60,000 to 80,000 of them, began killing East Pakistanis. Bangladesh declared itself an independent country the next day.
West Pakistani soldiers killed Hindus, Bengali Muslims, smart people, students and politicians in order to kill them all. They went to schools and killed everybody there. The soldiers killed college professors at Dhaka University and other intellectual leaders because they thought they were the ones encouraging other East Pakistanis to want to be a separate country. They especially killed Hindu leaders. Then they killed young Hindu men because they thought young Hindu men would want to fight against them. A "TIME" magazine article said ""The Hindus are three-fourths of the refugees and most of the dead, have most disliked by the Muslim soldiers.""
More than 200,000 women were raped. Some of the women were raped in front of husbands or male relatives. Other women were captured to be slaves for the West Bengali soldiers.
Two Muslims called Al-Shams and Al-Badr were told by the Pakistanis to kill Bengali Hindus and traitory Bengali Muslims also. There are many graves with a lot of people in Bangladesh, and new graves with a lot of people are always being discovered.
A bad set of killings took place during Operation Searchlight, a series of killings which began on March 25, 1971 and ended on December 16, 1971 and led to death of 3 million Bengalis in East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh), and other things like rape and looting. Originally, the Pakistanis wanted to take over the big cities in Bangladesh and control everybody in one month. They did not expect that the Bengalis would fight back, which they did. Pakistanis got very angry and started to kill all the Bengalis.
Eventually, the Bengali freedom fighters under the Mukti Bahini would seek help from India to win against the Pakistanis. India sent its army in and fought the Pakistanis with the Bengalis until Pakistan was totally defeated and went away from Bangladesh on December 16, 1971.
People disagree about how many people died. According to the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center, it could have been as few as 500,000 or as many as 3 million. This was during the Cold War, so different groups said more or fewer people died depending on what their own political ideas and goals were. The Soviets said it was 3 million. The United States CIA said it was 200,000. Pakistan was an ally of the United States at the time, and the West Pakistani soldiers used weapons that the United States had given them. India and Bangladesh also say that nearly 3 million were killed.
In 1997 R. J. Rummel wrote a book called "Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900", In Chapter 8 called "Statistics Of Pakistan's Democide - Estimates, Calculations, And Sources" he says:
Rummel says this was an act of killing specific groups of people. He writes that "Consolidating both ranges, I give a final estimate of Pakistan's democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000."
Not everyone agrees that the atrocities were a genocide. Nationalist Bangladeshis call this a genocide. Islamic Fundamentalists Pakistan call that "Bengali Lies." Bangladeshi authorities and some independent organizations say that between 1-3 million people were killed. Another 10 million ran away from the country to be safe in Indias West Bengal province.
None of the people involved in the genocide were put on trial until 2011. Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunals convicted 26 people for genocide and crimes against humanity. Some were executed. International organizations said that the accused were not treated fairly.
Iwao Takamoto
Iwao Takamoto (29 April 1925 - 8 January 2007) was a Japanese-American animator, television producer, and film director. He was a production designer for Hanna-Barbera Productions and the artist/character designer of Scooby-Doo.
Iwao Takamoto's father moved from Hiroshima to the United States for his health. He only went back to Japan once, and that was to marry his wife. Iwao Takamoto was born on April 19 1925 in Los Angeles, California. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Iwao Takamoto's family, like many Japanese-Americans, had to move to an internment camp. They spent the rest of World War II in the Manzanar internment camp. While he was there, Iwao Takamoto received basic illustration training from other people in the camp.
Iwao Takamoto first started doing cartoons professionally after the end of the war. He was hired as an assistant animator by Walt Disney Studios in 1947. Iwao Takamoto eventually became an assistant animator for the legendary Milt Kahl. He worked as an animator on such titles as "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty", "One Hundred and One Dalmatians", and "Lady and the Tramp".