The Japanese Alps is a series of mountain ranges in Japan which bisect the main island of Honshu. The name was coined by William Gowland, the "Father of Japanese Archaeology", and later popularized
by Reverend Walter Weston (1861–1940), an English missionary for whom a memorial plaque is located at Kamikochi, a
tourist destination known for its alpine climate.
When Gowland coined the phrase, however,
he was only referring to the Hida Mountains. Today, the Japanese Alps encompass the Hida Mountains,
the Kiso Mountains and the Akaishi Mountains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Alps
The Southern Alps is a mountain range extending along much of the length of New Zealand's South Island, reaching its greatest elevations near
the island's western side. The term
"Southern Alps" generally refers to the entire range, although
separate names are given to many of the smaller ranges that form part of
it. The
Southern Alps run 450 km north to south. The tallest peak is Aoraki / Mount Cook,
the highest point in New Zealand at 3,754 metres (12,316 ft) and there are
sixteen other points in the range that exceed 3,000 metres (9,800 ft) in
height. The mountains are cut through
with glacial valleys and lakes. According to an inventory conducted in the late
1970s, the Southern Alps contained over 3000 glaciers larger
than a hectare, the longest of
which – the Tasman Glacier – is 29 kilometres in length down
towards Lake Pukaki.
The Southern Alps were named by Captain Cook on
March 23, 1770, who described their "prodigious height". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Alps
The Alps are one of the great mountain range systems of Europe stretching
approximately 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) across eight Alpine countries from Austria and Slovenia in
the east, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, and France to
the west, and Italy and Monaco to
the south. The mountains were formed
over tens of millions of years as the African and Eurasian tectonic plates collided.
Extreme shortening caused by the event resulted in marine sedimentary rocks rising by thrusting and folding into
high mountain peaks such as Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. Mont Blanc spans the French–Italian border,
and at 4,810 m (15,781 ft) is the highest mountain in the Alps. The Alpine region area contains about a
hundred peaks higher than 4,000 m (13,123 ft), known as the "four-thousanders". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alps
Link to
information on the major mountains of
the world at http://www.euratlas.net/geography/world/mountains/
Harald Jäger
has spent the last quarter century denying that he was the man who toppled the
Berlin Wall. “It wasn’t me who opened
the wall, it was the East German people gathered there that evening,” says
Jäger. Despite the border guard’s
modesty, it was his snap decision, late on the evening of November 9th, 1989,
to throw caution to the wind that ensured the Berlin Wall fell peacefully,
joyfully. Jäger was at work at 6pm at
the border crossing at Berlin’s Bornholmer Strasse, eating a bread roll in the
canteen and watching one of the most famous press conferences in history. Eight
kilometres to the south impatient journalists were firing questions at Günter
Schabowski, an official with the ruling SED, about the Politburo’s new travel
regulations. Increasingly confused by
regulation changes he didn’t understand fully himself, Schabowski, fatefully,
said that East Germans would be allowed cross the border “immediately, without
delay”. At
least 251 people had died trying to get across the border, many shot by East
German border guards. Jäger spent hours
on the telephone in a desperate attempt to find out what Schabowski’s
announcement meant for him and his 14 men on the Berlin Wall’s front line. Most of the East Berlin apparatchiks
had gone into hiding and the only superior he could reach told him: “I have no order from above and no orders for
you.” By 11pm, the initial trickle of
curious East Germans had turned into a flood. With every new arrival, the balance of power
shifted away from the border guards’ towards the crowd. As they shouted “Let us out!”, the guards’
decades-long authority dwindled away for all to see. Hoping to reduce the building pressure, Jäger
was told to let across the loudest agitators. But it had the opposite effect, and made the
rest even more determined to get across, too. “That’s the moment when I said to myself,
‘It’s up to you to act’,” said Mr Jäger. Around 11.30pm he told his perplexed
subordinates: “Open the barrier!” With no border left to guard, he lost his job
and struggled to make ends meet as a security guard and then with a newspaper
kiosk before retiring to a small apartment north of Berlin. Derek Scally
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/border-guard-s-snap-decision-ensured-joyful-end-to-wall-1.1992745
On November 6, 2014 SilverSky by Toledo author Paul Many broke into the top 20 titles on
the Amazon Kindle Scout Hot and Trending site.
November 8, 2014 In
December 2009, politically powerful U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut
inserted a $100 million “hospital construction grant” into the Affordable Care
Act bill, which a Senate committee he headed was helping to write. Days later, the University of Connecticut was
publicly thanking Dodd, as it was one of a handful of hospitals in the nation
that qualified to apply for the grant. It was generally understood that Dodd, who was
facing a tough re-election campaign that he would withdraw from days later, had
inserted the grant for UConn, which was trying to finance the replacement of
its hospital. But another hospital also
qualified: Ohio State University’s
Wexner Medical Center. It met the
criteria of a facility that provides research and inpatient care or outpatient
clinical services, and that was affiliated with an academic health center at a
public research university “that contains a state’s sole public academic
medical and dental school.” Ohio Sen.
Sherrod Brown, who also was on the committee drafting the health-care
legislation, phoned OSU officials, hoping that maybe the university could pry
$15 million or so out of the grant that seemed so obviously headed to UConn. Dodd “wrote it in a way that the University
of Connecticut would have the best chance to get it,” Brown said yesterday in
an interview at the dedication of OSU’s new Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital. A year later, in late December 2010, Brown
said, he got a call while riding his exercise bike in his home near Cleveland. It was federal Secretary of Health and Human
Services Kathleen Sebelius. “Did we get
some part, $10 or $15 million?” Brown asked her. “No,” Sebelius said. “Then what are you calling for?” Brown asked. “Because you’re getting the whole $100
million,” Sebelius said. Bill Bush http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/11/08/ohio-states-new-cancer-hospital-won-surprising-u-s--aid.html
Prime Minister David Cameron planted a ceramic poppy at the Tower of London
display November 8, 2014 as it was announced the popular artwork will remain in
the capital until the end of the month. His poignant visit comes as it
was announced the sea of red ceramic flowers, titled Blood Swept Lands and Seas
of Red by artist Paul Cummins, will remain at the Tower of London until the end
of November to allow more people to pay their respects to Britain's war
dead. To date 888,246 poppies have been planted in the Tower's moat to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of WWI. Despite a public campaign to
make the entire display permanent, a team of 8,000 volunteers will begin
dismantling and cleaning the flowers on November 12. They will leave two
sections, The Wave and The Weeping Window, in place until the end of the month.
It will then be displayed across the
country in different museums, before being permanently installed at the
Imperial War Museum in 2018. Jennifer Smith See pictures at
November 10, 2014 The
polar vortex is not moving over the United States this week, regardless of
what you may have heard or read. The
polar vortex is real and the meteorological community has known about it and
used the term for decades. It is an
almost always present upper-level circulation that hangs out over the poles. It is not at the surface and is not related to
every push of cold air. The polar jet
stream is like a fence keeping the air influenced by the polar vortex in place. During the first week of January 2014, the
polar jet stream was kinked enough to build a large ridge in the West and allow
a lobe of the polar vortex to slip into Canada, greatly influencing the air
that set records in the northern plains and Great Lakes. This has happened before, and for longer
periods of time, such as in the late 1970s, but the term polar vortex did not
get picked up back then by the general population. Since January 2014, the term polar vortex has
been used -- and abused. If we called
every push of cold air the polar vortex it would lose its meaning and not be
accurate. http://www.wtma.com/common/more.php?m=58&ts=1415623802&article=1669D7E168D811E4B51EFEFDADE6840A&mode=2
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1215
November 10, 2014
On this
date in 1766, the last colonial governor
of New Jersey, William
Franklin, signed the charter of Queen's College (later renamed Rutgers University). On this date in 1775, the United States Marine Corps was founded at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia by Samuel
Nicholas.
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