the-french-artist/wikipedia_20220301.simple_sentence_split huggingface dataset:
Many art historians think this story is just a legend.
They think that Giotto's family was quite rich, and they moved to Florence where Giotto was sent to Cimabue's workshop as an apprentice.
Vasari tells several stories to show how clever Giotto was, and what a sense of humour he had.
Vasari writes that when Cimabue was away from the workshop, Giotto painted a fly on the face of the painting that his master was working on.
When Cimabue came back, he tried several times to brush the fly off.
Vasari also tells the story that the Pope wanted to see if Giotto would be a good artists to paint some important pictures.
The Pope sent a messenger asking Giotto to send him back a small picture.
Instead of doing a painting, which would take many days, Giotto drew, in red paint, a circle that was so perfect that it seemed as though it was drawn using a pair of compasses.
Giotto told the messenger to give that to the Pope.
Giotto's master, Cimabue, was one of the two most famous painters of Tuscany.
He worked in Florence, while the other famous painter, Duccio, worked mainly in Siena.
Around 1280, Giotto and Cimabue went to Rome, where there were several fresco painters.
The most famous painter in Rome was Pietro Cavallini.
The famous sculptor and architect from Florence, Arnolfo di Cambio, was also working in Rome.
Giotto would have seen the paintings and sculpture by these different artists.
Pietro Cavallini's paintings and Arnolfo's sculpture was far more realistic and three-dimensional than the paintings by Giotto's teacher Cimabue.
From Rome, Giotto's teacher Cimabue went to Assisi to paint several large frescoes at the "Upper Church" of the newly built Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.
Through the 19th century,and for much of the 20th century it was believed that Giotto had also painted a famous series of frescos in the "Upper Church".
These pictures show the "Life of St. Francis".
From 1912, some art historians who studied these frescos more closely, decided that they were the work of several different artists (probably four), probably from Rome, and that probably none of the pictures were by Giotto.
Nowadays, most art historians agree with this, but some books and some websites continue to say that these paintings are by Giotto.
All the papers that belonged to the monastery were destroyed by Napoleon's soldiers, so there is no record of which artist was paid to do the job.
Vasari wrote that Giotto's earliest works were for the Dominican Friars at the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.
These paintings include a fresco of the Annunciation and the enormous suspended Crucifix which is about 5 metres high painted in about 1290 In 1312, a rich Florentine gentleman called Ricuccio Pucci left money in his will so that a lamp could be kept burning before the crucifix "by the illustrious painter Giotto".
In 1287, when he was about 20, Giotto married Ricevuta di Lapo del Pela, known as "Ciuta".
The couple had many children, perhaps eight.
One of the sons, Francesco, became a painter.
Giotto's fame as a painter spread.
He was called to work in Rome, Padua, and Rimini, where his Crucifix can be seen in the Church of St Francis.(See right) Giotto became rich enough to buy land in the wealthy city of Florence.
This probably means that he was the master of a large workshop.
The Scrovegni Chapel
Giotto's most famous works are the fresco paintings in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.
These were painted sometime between 1303 and 1310.
The Scrovegni Chapel is often called the Arena Chapel because it is on the site of an Roman arena.
Giotto was "commissioned" (given the work) by a rich Paduan man called Enrico degli Scrovegni.
Enrico built the chapel and had it painted as a place to pray for the soul of his dead father.
It was next to a very old palace that Enrico was restoring to live in.
The palace has gone now, but the chapel is still standing.
The outside of the building is very plain, pinkish-red bricks.
The inside of the chapel is also very simple.
It is long, with a chancel at one end where a priest can say the mass, an arched roof and windows down one side.
The walls have been painted with three tiers (layers) of pictures.
The "theme" (the main idea) in the pictures is God's Salvation of people through Jesus Christ.
In the usual way for churches of that date, the wall above the main door has a large painting of the Last Judgement.
At the other end of the building, on either side of the chancel archway are paintings of the Annunciation.
One side shows the Virgin Mary and the other side show the Angel Gabriel who is bringing her the message that she will have a son, Jesus.
Around the walls, starting at the top layer, are scenes which tell the life of the Virgin Mary.
Under them, in two layers, are the stories of the life of Jesus.
There are 37 scenes altogether.
About the paintings
Giotto's master Cimabue painted in a Medieval style.
But Giotto's paintings look quite different.
The writer Giorgio Vasari says that Giotto brought about a complete change in painting, with a more natural style.
Giotto would have seen the paintings of Pietro Cavallini and some Ancient Roman sculpture, on his visit to Rome.
He also saw the sculpture of Arnolfo di Cambio who worked in Florence.
The style of these sculptured figures was solid and natural, not "elongated" (made longer) like most Medieval sculptured and painted figures.
The figures that Giotto painted are solid and three-dimensional.
They have anatomy, faces and actions that look very natural, because they have been drawn from looking at real people.
The clothes of the figures are not arranged to form a beautiful pattern, like the clothes in Cimabue's paintings.
They fit the figures and hang in a natural way like real clothes.
This more natural way of showing people was started by Pietro Cavallini, but Giotto took the new ideas much further.
In the paintings around the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel, each scene looks like a shallow stage with actors on it.
There are always some buildings or landscape such as a rocky hill, so that the viewer can see where the action is happening.
The figures in each scene are carefully arranged so that the viewer can imagine that they are right there, taking part in the action.
The figures are not just shown with natural bodies, clothing and action.
Giotto is a brilliant story-teller, because he shows the emotions of the characters in each painting, in both their faces and their "gestures" (body movement).
One picture shows old Joachim returning to the hillsides, looking sad because he can have no children.
Two young shepherds look sideways at each other.
Another picture, shows the dreadful scene of the murder of the babies of Bethlehem.
There is a soldier who has his head hunched down, and a look of shame as he pulls a baby away from its screaming mother.
In the picture of Mary and Joseph on the way to Egypt, the people who are walking behind them are gossiping about them, as they go.
The most famous of the paintings, the "Lamentation over the Body of Christ", is shown the deep sadness of Jesus' mother and friends, as they get His body ready to be buried.
On Earth, the people crying and moaning, while in Heaven, the angels are roaring and shrieking and tearing their hair in grief.
Giotto had pupils who copied his style.
Many other artists were influence by him.
These painters include Guariento, Giusto de' Menabuoi, Jacopo Avanzi, and Altichiero.
In the next hundred years, there were many churches and chapels painted with scenes like the ones that Gitto painted.
The Scrovegni Chapel paintings were so famous that many other artists, such as Michelangelo, who lived 200 years later, made drawing or copies of them.
Mature works
From 1306 to 1311 Giotto was in Assisi, painting frescoes in the Lower Church.
The paintings are about The Life of Christ, the Teachings of the Franciscan Friars and The Lives of the Saints.
In 1311 Giotto returned to Florence.
In 1313 He went to Rome to design a mosaic for the façade (front) of the old St. Peter's Basilica.
This was destroyed when the building was demolished.
From 1314 until 1327 Giotto lived in Florence.
At this time he pianted the famous altarpiece for the Ognissanti Church (Church of All Saints).
This large tempera painting is called the Ognissanti Madonna.
It is now in the Uffizi where it is exhibited beside Cimabue's Santa Trinita Madonna and Duccio's Rucellai Madonna.
Giotto also painted a very large Crucifix to hang in Ognissanti Church.
The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti wrote that in 1318 Giotto began to paint four Chapels at the Church of Santa Croce.
The chapels were paid for by four different rich families and were given their names.
Giotto painted the Life of St. Francis in the Bardi Chapel.
He painted the Life of St. John the Baptist and the Life of St. John the Evangelist in the Peruzzi Chapel.
He painted Stories of the Virgin Mary in the Tosinghi Spinelli Chapel and Stories of the Apostles in the Giugni Chapel.
The Giugni Chapel has been destroyed.
The Peruzzi Chapel was very famous during Renaissance times.
More than 150 years later, Michelangelo came to studied Giotto's paintings.
In the 1320s Giotto painted two large altarpieces.
The first was the Stefaneschi Triptych, which is now in the Vatican Museum. (
A triptych is a painting on three panels.
Some triptychs are very small and can be folded up and carried around, but this triptych is a large altarpiece.)
The second altarpiece is called the Baroncelli Polyptych. (
A polyptych has lots of parts, big and small.
They are usually made as great big altarpieces for important churches, and have big, carved gold frames.)
Giotto travelled around and did paintings in Rome, Naples and Bologna.
He always took a group of students with him.
Nowadays, many of the frescos that he painted in these cities have been destroyed by damp, by earthquakes, by war and by people demolishing the church to build a new one.
Because Giotto was very famous, people always liked to believe that he painted the fresco in their church.
Many frescos are probably by Giotto's students.
In 1334 Giotto was in Florence where the magnificent new Florence Cathedral was being built.
Giotto was made the chief architect and was given the job of designing a huge tower to hold the cathedral bells.
It is called Giotto's Bell Tower and was designed and begun by him on July 18 1334, but it was not completed to his design.
As he grew old, Giotto became friends with two writers, Giovanni Boccaccio and Sacchetti, who both thought that he was such an entertaining and famous person that they wrote about him in their stories.
The most famous writer of that time, Dante, also wrote about him in his book The Divine Comedy.
Dante said that Giotto was the greatest painter in the world, even greater than his famous master, Cimabue.
Giotto's bones
Giotto died in January 1337.
Vasari wrote that Giotto was buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral of Florence, on the left of the entrance and with the spot marked by a white marble plaque.
In the 1970s, some bones were discovered underneath the paving near at a spot described by Vasari.
In 2000 the bones were examined by experts.
The bones were those of a very short man, just over four feet tall.
In a fresco in the Church of Santa Croce, there is a figure of a man who is a dwarf (a person who is very short).
People at that church have always said that the dwarf was Giotto himself.
The bones that were found at the cathedral support this story.
Also, the bones had lots of unusual chemicals in them, such as arsenic and lead, which were found in the artist's paints.
After the bones had been examined, they were buried with great honour, because many people believed that they were the remains of the great artist.
Not everybody believes this.
G.Previtali, Giotto e la sua bottega (1993)
Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti (1568)
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans.
George Bull, Penguin Classics, (1965)
Sarel Eimerl, The World of Giotto, Time-Life Books, (1967),
Norman Land, Giotto as an Ugly Genius: A Study in Self-Portrayal, in Andrew Ladis, ed.,
Giotto as a Historical and Literary Figure: Miscellaneous Studies, 4 vols. (
1: Giotto and the World of Early Italian Art), Garland Publishing, New York, 1998: 183 – 196.
1267 births
Gaius or Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius or Caius Plinius Caecilius (61/63 in Como - ca.
113), better known as Pliny the Younger, was a lawyer, a remarkable writer, an author, and natural philosopher of Ancient Rome.
Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder, helped raise and educate him and they were both witnesses to the eruption of Vesuvius on August 24th, 79 AD.
Pliny's first Letter to Tacitus  Describes how his uncle sailed across the bay to save some people
Pliny's second letter to Tacitus  Tells how Pliny himself barely escaped.
First letter, latin original (Letters, Book 6, Letter 16), in  Wikisource
Second letter, Latin Original (Letters, Book 6, Letter 20), in Wikisource
61 births
People from Como
The Moura Photovoltaic Power Station is in the municipality of Moura, in the interior region of Alentejo, Portugal.
It has an installed capacity of 62 MWp.
The first stage of construction was finished in 2008 and the second and final stage was finished in 2010.
Together with the construction of the power station, a solar panel factory is currently being built and there are plans for a research lab dedicated to solar energy.
Originally conceptualized in 1999, Moura is a stepping stone in addressing the issue of carbon dioxide by way of solar energy.
Moura is currently operated by Acciona, which purchased the project in 2007.
Jérémie (Kréyòl: Jeremi) is a city in southwest Haiti.
It is the capital city of the Grand'Anse Département.
Jérémie is also called the City of Poets because of the many writers, poets, and historians that were born or live there, such as Etzer Vilaire and Émile Roumer.
The father of the French writer Alexandre Dumas, père, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born at Madère, near Jérémie.
The town was founded in 1756 when the country was the French colony of Saint-Domingue.
It was built where there was a small fishing town called Trou-Jérémie.
The city is on the north coast of the Southern Peninsula, on a small bay.
It is among low mountains (Bordes, Rochasse and Caracol) and almost isolated from the rest of the country, about 280 km south of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.
To the southeast of the city is the River Grande-Anse.
The arrondissement has five communes (a commune is like a municipality): Jérémie, Abricots, Bonbon, Chambellan and Moron.
There are several interesting places to visit and see in Jérémie and near the city.
Fort Télémaque or Fort Marfrac.
It was built after the Haitian independence to defend the area.
Église Saint-Louis (Saint Louis Church), built during the 19th century.
The Anse-d'Azur' beach.
There are other interesting beaches such as those of Gommier and Guinaudée.
L'Habitation Latibolière where the General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the French writer Alexandre Dumas, was born.
It was a farm where coffee was grown; its old name was Habitation Davy de La Pailleterie''.
Radio Grand-Anse FM
Radio Imagine FM (Corail)
Radio Lanbi FM (Rue Stenio Vincent)
Radio Orbite (Rue De la Paix)
Radio Tèt Ansanm (Rue Abbe Huet)
Radio Pipirite Nouvelle (Rue Alexandre Petion)
Radio Jérémie Nouvelle (Rue Dr Hypolytte)
Radio Echo Celeste (Calas)
Radio ABC FM (Caracolie)
Radio Xaragua FM (Rue Mgn Beauger)
Radio Power Mix (Gragramora)
Zantray (Dame Marie)
Radio Dame Marie FM (Dame Marie)
Radio pirite (Anse D´ainault)
Radio Mega FM (Beaumont)
Radio Rebel (Anse D´ainault)
Radio trompette Evangelique (Caracolie)
Radio Makandal FM (Caracolie)
The Three Mile Island accident occurred on March 28th, 1979 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania.
It was "the single most important event in the fifty-year history of nuclear power regulation in the United States".
Many people have seen the event as a turning point for the nuclear power industry in the United States.
The Three Mile Island power station is near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
The accident resulted in a partial core meltdown in Unit 2 of the nuclear power plant.
Unit 2's pressurized water reactor was of 900 MWe capacity.
The chain of events that led to the crisis at the TMI plant included several minor equipment failures that operator errors drastically compounded, resulting in a major accident.
The Three Mile Island accident is largely seen as a failure of crisis management.
According to one reviewer of the book:
Reactor operators were not trained to deal with accident conditions, and the NRC had not established effective communication with utilities.
Moreover, once the accident occurred, the lines of authority proved to be ill defined.
The public received conflicting reports that caused needless panic and evacuations.
It was these systemic weaknesses in the regulatory system that allowed gifted people to make the mistakes they did.
Large portions of the TMI-2 reactor core melted, though the fact that a partial meltdown had occurred did not become clear until 1985.
The greatest source of concern during the TMI crisis was a hydrogen bubble that formed in the top of the pressure vessel which held the core:
Although opinions differed, some reactor experts feared that over time the hydrogen bubble might become flammable or, less likely, explosive by combining with free oxygen in the vessel.
If the bubble burned or exploded, it could rupture the pressure vessel and force the damaged reactor core into the containment building.
The loss of the vessel would not make a breach of containment inevitable, but it would increase the risk of a disastrous release of radiation.
In the end, the Three Mile Island accident, though it "caused a grave crisis, did not produce a public health disaster".
In the face of a core meltdown, the pressure vessel held and there was no breach of the  plant's containment structure.
Only "tiny amounts of the most dangerous forms of volatile radiation escaped to the atmosphere".
The TMI-2 cleanup took 11 years and cost about US$1 billion.
J. Samuel Walker suggests that the TMI accident incited widespread criticism of nuclear power technology, the nuclear industry, and the NRC.
Critics faulted the industry and the NRC for their poor performance both before and after the accident.
The international attention garnered by the crisis redoubled the determination of, and enhanced the credibility of, the anti-nuclear movement.
Arguably, the United States nuclear industry has never recovered.
1979 in the United States
20th century in Pennsylvania
The Windscale fire was a fire in Britain's first nuclear reactor at Windscale (now Sellafield) on 10 October 1957.
The fire spread radioactive fallout over hundreds of miles.
Some of the most dangerous contamination was kept secret, and its effects only came to light years later.
At the back of the reactor, ruptured fuel cartridges containing uranium are still jammed in the fire damaged core, awaiting safe removal.
Official estimates are that about a hundred people died from the contamination.
The cleanup cost over a hundred million pounds.
The Windscale fire was the first fire in any nuclear facility.
1950s in the United Kingdom
20th century in England
Alan (name), the given name
Alan (crater), a crater on the Moon
People named just "Alan"
Alan I, Duke of Brittany, the Great
Alan II, Duke of Brittany
Alan III, Duke of Brittany
Alan IV, Duke of Brittany, aka Alan Fergant ("the Younger" in Breton language)
Alan, abbot of Tewkesbury
Alan of Lynn, a 15th-century monk
People with the given name
Alan Greenspan, American economist
Alan Gregov, Croatian basketball player
Alan Hansen, former Liverpool F.C defender and Match of the Day pundit.
Alan Hunter, Actor and writer
Alan Iverson, Australian filmmaker
Alan Jones (Formula 1) - Formula One world champion
Alan Parsons, British musician
Alan Rickman, award-winning British stage and film actor.
Alan Shearer, Newcastle United's all-time top scorer
Alan Stivell, French harpist and singer.
Alan Sugar, Founder of Amstrad, and star of the UK version of The Apprentice
Alan Tam, famous Canto-pop singer from Hong Kong.
Alan Dawazhouma, Tibetan-Chinese folk pop singer.
Alan Kuo, male singer who combinese elements of rock, pop, rap and techno
Alan Douglas Borges de Carvalho, footballer
The Tokaimura nuclear accident was a serious nuclear radiation accident in Japan.
It took place at a uranium-reprocessing facility in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, Japan, on 30 September 1999.
The accident occurred in a very small fuel preparation plant operated by JCO.
The direct cause of the accident was workers putting uranyl nitrate solution containing about 16.6 kg of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass, into a precipitation tank.
The tank was not designed to dissolve this type of solution and was not designed to prevent such accidents to happen.
As a result, three workers were exposed to neutron radiation doses in excess of allowable limits.
Two of these workers later died.
The three workers who worked at the uranium-reprocessing facility were Hisashi Ouchi, Masato Shinohara, and Yutaka Yokokawa.
Two of them died of radiation poisoning.
Hisashi Ouchi, aged 35, died 12 weeks after the accident.
He had lost most of his skin, and was kept alive for 83 days, according to his parents and wife will.
Ouchi was closest to the tank when the accident occurred.
He ended up as the first victim of this nuclear accident.
Seven months after the accident, Masato Shinohara died, aged 40.
1990s in Japan
The fast breeder Monju Nuclear Power Plant sodium leak in December 1995 (the reactor is still shut-down), the Tokai reprocessing waste explosion in March 1997, the criticality accident at the Tokai fuel fabrication facility in September 1999 and a widespread falsification scandal starting in August 2002 that lead to shut down all of Tokyo Electric Power Company's 17 nuclear reactors.
Also, on 9 August 2004, five workers were killed after a steam leak at the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant-3 station.
The subsequent investigation revealed a serious lack in systematic inspection in Japanese nuclear plants, which led to a massive inspection program.
On 16 July 2007, a severe earthquake (measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale) hit the region where Tokyo Electric's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant is located.
The plant with seven units is the largest single nuclear power station in the world.
All of the reactors were shut down and are expected to remain closed for damage verification and repairs for at least one year.
Following an earthquake, tsunami, and failure of cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, a nuclear emergency was declared.
This was the first time a nuclear emergency had been declared in Japan, and 140,000 residents within 20km of the plant were moved out.
Explosions and a fire resulted in dangerous levels of radiation, resulting in a stock market collapse and panic-buying in supermarkets.
As of April 2011, water is still being poured into the damaged reactors to cool melting fuel rods.
John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation, has said that it "might be 100 years before melting fuel rods can be safely removed from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant".
Nuclear energy policy is a national and international policy concerning some or all aspects of nuclear energy, such as mining for nuclear fuel, extraction and processing of nuclear fuel from the ore, electricity generation by nuclear power, enriching and storing spent nuclear fuel and nuclear fuel reprocessing.
Since nuclear energy and nuclear weapons technologies are closely related, military aspirations can act as a factor in energy policy decisions.
The fear of nuclear proliferation influences some international nuclear energy policies.
The use of nuclear energy is limited to a relatively small number of countries in the world.
As of 2007, only 31 countries, or 16% of the 191 United Nations Member States, operated nuclear power plants.
Countries that rely most on nuclear energy were France (with 75% of its electricity generated by nuclear power stations), Lithuania,  Belgium, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Sweden, Ukraine and South Korea.
The largest producer of nuclear capacity was the USA with 28% of worldwide capacity, followed by France (18%) and Japan (12%).
In 2000, there were 438 commercial nuclear generating units throughout the world, with a total capacity of about 351 gigawatts.
Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany has permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors.
Italy voted to keep their country non-nuclear.
Switzerland and Spain have banned the construction of new reactors.
As of 2013, countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Norway remain opposed to nuclear power.
Germany and Switzerland are phasing-out nuclear power.
Globally, more nuclear power reactors have closed than opened in recent years.
Nuclear energy policy by country
After the 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, China, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Malaysia, Thailand, United Kingdom, and the Philippines are reviewing their nuclear power programs.
Countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, North Korea, and Norway remain opposed to nuclear power.
Australia produces no nuclear power.
Plans to review whether the country should develop nuclear power were abandoned after Kevin Rudd, who opposed the move, was elected prime minister in 2007.
As of 2006, Finland's nuclear power program has four nuclear reactors.
The first of these came into operation in 1977.
They now provide 27% of Finland's electricity.
The third Olkiluoto reactor will be the new European Pressurized Reactor.
Scheduled to go on line in 2011, it will have a power output of 1600 MWe.
Construction of Olkiluoto 3 started in August 2005.
Two and a half years later the project is "over two years behind schedule and at least 50% over budget, the loss for the provider being estimated at €1.5 billion".
After the oil crisis of the early 1970s, the French government decided in 1974 to move towards self-sufficiency in electricity production, primarily through the construction of nuclear power stations.
France today produces around 78.1% of its electricity through nuclear power.
Because France produces an overall electricity surplus, it exports nuclear-produced energy.
Some of this goes to countries which are ostensibly against the use of nuclear energy, such as Germany.
The Board of Electricité de France (Électricité de France or EDF) has approved construction of a 1630 MWe European Pressurized Reactor or EPR at Flamanville, Normandy.
Construction is expected to begin in late 2007, with completion in 2012.
In the 1970s, an anti-nuclear movement in France, consisting of citizens' groups and political action committees, emerged.
There were many large anti-nuclear protests and demonstrations.
More recently, targeted campaigns have been conducted, mainly by Greenpeace, and Sortir du nucléaire (France) has called for an official safety inspection of the Areva facilities.
In 2000, the German government, consisting of a coalition including the Green party Alliance '90/The Greens officially announced its intention to phase out nuclear power in Germany.
Jürgen Trittin, the Minister of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, reached an agreement with energy companies on the gradual shut down of the country's nineteen nuclear power plants and a cessation of civil usage of nuclear power by 2020.
Legislation was enacted in the Nuclear Exit Law.
The power plants in Stade and Obrigheim were turned off on November 14, 2003, and May 11, 2005, respectively.
Dismantling of the plants is scheduled to begin in 2007.
But the Nuclear Exit Law did not ban enrichment stations - one in Gronau has received permission to extend operations.
There have been concerns over the safety of the phase-out, particularly in terms of the transport of nuclear waste.
In 2005 Angela Merkel won the German federal election in 2005 with the CDU party.
She has subsequently announced to re-negotiate with energy companies the time limit for a shut down of nuclear power stations.
But as part of her pact with the SPD, with whom the CDU form a coalition, the phase-out policy has for now been retained.
In November 2008, a shipment of radioactive waste from German nuclear plants arrived at a storage site near Gorleben after being delayed by large protests from nuclear activists.
More than 15,000 people took part in the protests which involved blocking trucks with sit-down demonstrations and blocking the route with tractors.
The demonstrations were partly a response to conservative calls for a rethink of the planned phaseout of nuclear power stations.
Japan has 55 reactors of total capacity 47,577 MWe (49,580 MWe gross) on line, with 2 reactors (2,285 MWe) under construction and 12 reactors (16,045 MWe) planned.
Nuclear energy accounts for about 30% of Japan's total electricity production, from 47.5 GWe of capacity (net).
There are plans to increase this to 37% in 2009 and 41% in 2014.
On 16 July 2007 a severe earthquake hit the region where Tokyo Electric's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant is located.
During the Fukushima nuclear disaster there was a failure of cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, and a nuclear emergency was declared.
This was the first time a nuclear emergency had been declared in Japan, and 140,000 residents within 20 km of the plant were moved out.
Shippingport power plant was the first commercial nuclear power plant built in the United States in 1958.
After the growth of nuclear power in the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission anticipated that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by 2000.
But by the end of the 1970s, it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly so dramatically, and more than 120 reactor orders were ultimately cancelled.
As of 2007 in the United States, there are 104 (69 pressurized water reactors and 35 boiling water reactors) commercial nuclear generating units licensed to operate, producing a total of 97,400 megawatts (electric), which is approximately 20% of the nation's total electric energy consumption.
The United States is the world's largest supplier of commercial nuclear power.
The Three Mile Island accident has been the most serious accident experienced by the U.S. nuclear industry.
Other accidents include those at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant, which has been the source of two of the top five most dangerous nuclear incidents in the United States since 1979, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Several US nuclear power plants closed well before their design lifetimes, including Rancho Seco in 1989 in California, San Onofre Unit 1 in 1992 in California (units 2 and 3 are still operating), Zion Nuclear Power Station in 1998 in Illinois and Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in 1992 in Oregon.
Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant in California closed in 1976, 13 years after geologists discovered it was built on a fault (the Little Salmon Fault).
Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant never operated commercially as an authorized Emergency Evacuation Plan could not be agreed on due to the political climate after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.
The most serious nuclear accident has been the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
Other serious nuclear accidents include Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, Three Mile Island accident, the Windscale fire, Mayak accident, and the SL-1 accident.
In the period to 2007, 63 major nuclear accidents have occurred at nuclear power plants.
Twenty-nine of these have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster, and 71 percent of all nuclear accidents (45 out of 63) occurred in the United States.
Fukushima, Onagawa  and Tōkai
On 11 March 2011, the Magnitude 9.0 devastating Sendai earthquake and tsunami took place in Japan.
As a result, Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant, Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant and Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant stations consisting of eleven (11) reactors were automatically shut down following the earthquake.
At Fukushima Daiichi and Daini tsunami waves went over seawalls and destroyed diesel backup power systems.
This loss of power caused severe problems including two large explosions at Fukushima Daiichi and leakage of radiation.
Over 200,000 people have been evacuated.
Seismic recordings at six assessed nuclear power plant facilities indicated the plants had been exposed to peak ground accelerations of 0.037–0.383 g and peak ground velocities of 6.18–52.62 cm/sec.
One year after the accident, the official death toll related to the Fukushima accident has been five: one caused by the earthquake, another one had a heart attack, two people drowned, and a last person died in October for unreported causes.
None of the deaths have been caused by radiation.
The Chernobyl disaster was a major accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986, with an explosion at the plant and later radioactive contamination of the surrounding area.
It is so far the worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear power.
A plume of radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland and eastern North America.
Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly damaged, forcing the people in charge to have to evacuate and resettle more than 336,000 people.
About 60% of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus, according to official post-Soviet data.
The accident made many people worried about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry.
As a result, plans for more nuclear plants were put on hold and the Soviet government, who were not very open with its data, had to make public more of its data.
The now-independent countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have had to spend a lot of money and time on decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident.
Nobody knows how many people died because of this accident.
This is because the Soviets covered up information, did not fully complete lists, and did not let doctors list "radiation" as the reason why some people died.
Most of the expected long-term deaths, such as that from cancer, have not yet happened and it is hard to say that Chernobyl was the full reason for their deaths.
The accident unfolded over the course of five tense days, as a number of agencies at local, state and federal level tried to diagnose the problem and decide whether or not the on-going accident required a full emergency evacuation of the population.
The full details of the accident were not discovered until much later.
In the end, the reactor was brought under control.
Although approximately 25,000 people lived within five miles of the island at the time of the accident, no identifiable injuries due to radiation occurred, and a government report concluded that "the projected number of excess fatal cancers due to the accident... is approximately one".
But the accident had serious economic and public relations consequences, and the cleanup process was slow and costly.
It also furthered a major decline in the public popularity of nuclear power, exemplifying for many the worst fears about nuclear technology and, until the Chernobyl disaster seven years later, it was considered the world's worst civilian nuclear accident.
Davis-Besse
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station is a nuclear power plant with a single reactor located on the southwest shore of Lake Erie near Oak Harbor, Ohio.
According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Davis-Besse has been the source of two of the top five most dangerous nuclear incidents in the United States since 1979.
SL-1 accident
The SL-1, or Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, was a United States Army experimental nuclear power reactor which underwent a steam explosion and meltdown in January 1961, killing its three operators.
The direct cause was the improper withdrawal by a maintenance team of a single reactor control rod.
The event is the only reported fatal reactor accident in the United States.
On October 10, 1957, the graphite core of a British nuclear reactor at Windscale, Cumbria, caught fire, releasing substantial amounts of radioactive contamination into the surrounding area.
The event, known as the Windscale fire, was considered the world's worst nuclear accident until the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.
The fire itself released an estimated 20,000 curies (700 |terabecquerels) of radioactive material into the nearby countryside.
Of particular concern was the radioactive isotope iodine-131, which has a half-life of only 8 days but is taken up by the human body and stored in the thyroid.
As a result, consumption of iodine-131 often leads to cancer of the thyroid.
No one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but there was concern that milk might be dangerously contaminated.
Milk from about 500 km² of nearby countryside was destroyed (diluted a thousandfold and dumped in the Irish Sea) for about a month.
Mayak accident
Mayak is the name of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plants 150 km northwest of Chelyabinsk in Russia.
Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents, with a serious accident occurring in 1957.
The 1957 Kyshtym disaster occurred when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a non-nuclear explosion having a force estimated at about 75 tons of TNT (310 gigajoules), which released some 20 MCi (740 petabecquerels) of radiation.
Subsequently, at least 200 people died of radiation sickness, 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation.
Attacks on nuclear plants
Between 18 December 1977 and 13 June 1979: attacks on Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant in Spain while it was still under construction.
In September 1980: Iran bombed the Al Tuwaitha nuclear complex in Iraq, in Operation Scorch Sword.
In June 1981: an Israeli air strike completely destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear research facility.
On 8 January 1982: Umkhonto we Sizwe attacked Koeberg Nuclear Power Station in South Africa while it was still under construction.
Between 1984 and 1987: Iraq bombed Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant six times.
In Iraq in 1991: The U.S. bombed three nuclear reactors and an enrichment pilot facility.
In 1991: Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel’s Dimona nuclear power plant.
In September 2003: Israel bombed a Syrian reactor under construction.
17 fatalities – Instituto Oncologico Nacional of Panama, August 2000 -March 2001.
patients receiving treatment for prostate cancer and cancer of the cervix receive lethal doses of radiation.
13 fatalities – Radiotherapy accident in Costa Rica, 1996.
114 patients received an overdose of radiation from a Cobalt-60 source that was being used for radiotherapy.
11 fatalities – Radiotherapy accident in Zaragoza, Spain, December 1990.
Cancer patients receiving radiotherapy; 27 patients were injured.
10 fatalities – Columbus radiotherapy accident, 1974–1976, 88 injuries from Cobalt-60 source.
8 fatalities – Radiation accident in Morocco, March 1984.
7 fatalities – Houston radiotherapy accident, 1980.
5 fatalities – Lost radiation source, Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR, October 5, 1982.
13 injuries.
4 fatalities – Goiânia accident, September 13, 1987.
249 people received serious radiation contamination from lost radiography source.
4 fatalities – Radiation accident in Mexico City, 1962.
3 fatalities – Three deaths and ten injuries resulted in Samut Prakarn, Thailand when a radiation-therapy unit was dismantled, February 2000.
1 fatality – Mayapuri radiological accident, India, April 2010.
1 fatality – Malfunction INES level 4 at RA2 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, operator Osvaldo Rogulich dies days later.
The parallel port (also known as a printer port or Centronics port) is a type of interface found on computers for connecting various peripherals.
A parallel port is a type of interface found on computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals.
In computing, a parallel port is a parallel communication physical interface.
It was a de facto industry standard for many years, and was finally standardized as IEEE 1284 in the late 1990s, which defined a bi-directional version of the port.
The parallel port interface was originally known as the Parallel Printer Adapter on IBM PC-compatible computers.
It was primarily designed to operate a line printer that used IBM's 8-bit extended ASCII character set to print text, but could also be used to adapt other peripherals.
Graphical printers, along with a host of other devices, have been designed to communicate with the system.
Plastic surgery is a surgery that is done to change the way a person's body looks or works.
Some plastic surgeries can change both.
Work can be done on someone's bones, cartilage, muscles, fat, and skin.
The two most common forms of plastic surgery are reconstruction (fixing body parts that have been damaged) and cosmetic (changing size shape or color of body parts to make them look better).
An example of reconstructive plastic surgery is fixing a part of the body that has been burned.
An example of cosmetic plastic surgery is a surgery called a "face-lift": pulling the skin of the face tight so that the client looks younger.
Originally, the track featured four track configurations: the  long Gesamtstrecke ("Whole Course"), which included the 22.810 km Nordschleife ("Northern Loop"), and the 7.747 km Südschleife ("Southern Loop").
There also was a 2.281 km warm-up loop called Zielschleife ("Finish Loop") or better known as Betonschleife, around the pit area.
Between 1982 and 1983 the start-finish area was demolished to create a new GP-Strecke, and this is currently used for all major and international racing events.
Official website: German | English
Ben Lovejoy's Nurburgring website
Nurburgring Explorer website
One full Nordschleife lap with an on-board camera
One lap GP track with on-board camera
Formula One circuits
Suu Kyi was not able to be president.
Instead, she became the State Counsellor of Myanmar.
She is the leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma and a famous prisoner.
She has been under house arrest several times.
Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize in 1990, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
In 1992, she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru peace prize.
She is sometimes called Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
Daw is not part of her name, but a title for older women.
This name shows respect for her.
On 1 February 2021, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and removed from power by the military during a coup d'état.
The military declared the November 2020 Myanmar general election results fraudulent.
On February 3, she was charged with violating Myanmar's import laws  On February 16, Myanmar police filed a second criminal charge against her, this time for violating the country's Natural Disaster Law.
Aung San Suu Kyi was the third child in her family.
Her name "Aung San" comes from her father, who is also named Aung San; "Kyi" comes from her mother; and "Suu" comes from her grandmother.
Her father helped to make Burma independent from the United Kingdom in 1947.
She grew up with her mother, Khin Kyi, and two brothers, Aung San Lin and Aung San Oo in Yangon.
One of her brothers, Aung San Lin, drowned when Suu Kyi was eight.
Her other brother, Aung San Oo currently lives in San Diego, California and is an American citizen.
Suu Kyi went to Catholic schools for much of her childhood in Burma.
She learned English in school.
Khin Kyi, Suu Kyi's mother, became famous as a politician.
She became the Burmese ambassador to India in 1960.
Aung San Suu Kyi went to college in India at the Lady Shri Ram College for Women in New Delhi.
Suu Kyi continued her education at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and learned about philosophy, politics, and economics.
She also went to the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London in the 1980s.
She moved to New York and worked at the United Nations.
In 1972, Aung San Suu Kyi married Michael Aris (1946-1999), a professor of Tibetan culture who lived in Bhutan.
She had met Aris when they were both students at Oxford.
In 1973, she gave birth to her first son, Alexander, in London; and in 1977 she had her second son, Kim.
Political beginnings
Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma in 1988 to take care of her sick mother.
That year, the long-time leader of the socialist ruling party, General Nay Win, stopped being a politician.
She admired Mohandas Gandhi's use of nonviolence.
She was also inspired by Buddhism.
Aung San Suu Kyi worked for democracy and helped make the National League for Democracy on September 27th 1988.
House arrrest and release
She was arrested in 1989 and placed in prison in 1990.
This was after an election which her party, the National League for Democracy, won, but they were not allowed to be in charge of the country.
Between 1990 and 2010, she was almost always in her home, which is called house arrest.
Burma released her in November 2010.
Suu Kyi was going to be released in 2009, but when a man was found entering her home, she was kept on house arrest for another year because she had broken the rules of the house arrest.
Time as a politician
After she was released from house arrest, she was elected to be State Counsellor.
When she was State Counsellor, Burma had serious problems with the genocide of the Rohingya.
Political belief
When she was asked what democratic models Myanmar could look to, she said: "We have many, many lessons to learn from various places, not just the Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia and Indonesia."
She also cited "the eastern European countries, which made the transition from communist autocracy to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Latin American countries, which made the transition from military governments. "
And we cannot of course forget South Africa, because although it wasn't a military regime, it was certainly an authoritarian regime."
She added: "We wish to learn from everybody who has achieved a transition to democracy, and also ... our great strong point is that, because we are so far behind everybody else, we can also learn which mistakes we should avoid."
Letters from Burma (1998) with Fergal Keane
The Voice of Hope (1998) with Alan Clements,
Freedom from Fear and Other Writings (1995) with Václav Havel, Desmond M. Tutu, and Michael Aris,
Der Weg zur Freiheit (1999) with U Kyi Maung, U Tin Oo,
Letter to Daniel: Despatches from the Heart (1996) by Fergal Keane, foreword by Aung San Suu Kyi, edited by Tony Grant
Burma's Revolution of the Spirit: The Struggle for Democratic Freedom and Dignity (1994) with Alan Clements, Leslie Kean, The Dalai Lama, Sein Win
Aung San of Burma: A Biographical Portrait by His Daughter (1991) , 2nd edition 1995
Aung San (Leaders of Asia Series) (1990)
Burma and India: Some aspects of intellectual life under colonialism (1990)
Bhutan (Let's Visit Series) (1986)
Nepal (Let's Visit Series) (1985)
Burma (Let's Visit Series) (1985)
Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson.
Edited by Michael Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi. (
Vikas Publishing house, New Delhi.
Mentioned in
Aung San Suu Kyi (Modern Peacemakers) (2007) by Judy L. Hasday,
The Lady: Aung San Suu Kyi: Nobel Laureate and Burma's Prisoner (2002) by Barbara Victor, , or 1998 hardcover:
Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi (2007) by Justin Wintle,
Tyrants: The World's 20 Worst Living Dictators (2006) by David Wallechinsky,
Aung San Suu Kyi (Trailblazers of the Modern World) (2004) by William Thomas,
No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (2002) by Naomi Klein
Mental culture in Burmese crisis politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (ILCAA Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa Monograph Series) (1999) by Gustaaf Houtman,
Aung San Suu Kyi: Standing Up for Democracy in Burma (Women Changing the World) (1998) by Bettina Ling
Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma (Newsmakers Biographies Series) (1997) by Whitney Stewart,
Prisoner for Peace: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma's Struggle for Democracy (Champions of Freedom Series) (1994) by John Parenteau,
Des femmes prix Nobel de Marie Curie à Aung San Suu Kyi, 1903-1991 (1992) by Charlotte Kerner, Nicole Casanova, Gidske Anderson,
Aung San Suu Kyi, towards a new freedom (1998) by Chin Geok Ang