Constance Collier (1878–1955) was an English stage and film actress and acting coach.   Born Laura Constance Hardie in Windsor, Berkshire to Auguste Cheetham Hardie and Eliza Georgina Collier, Constance Collier made her stage debut at the age of three, when she played Fairy Peasblossom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  In 1893, at the age of 15, she joined the Gaiety Girls, the famous dance troupe based at the Gaiety Theatre in London.  Collier's writing career is notable for her collaboration with Deems Taylor on the libretto of the opera Peter Ibbetson, which was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in February 1931 and which received mixed reviews.  In 1935, upon her arrival in Hollywood, Luise Rainer hired Collier to improve Rainer's theatre acting and English, and to learn the basics of film acting.  Collier was presented with the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre Award for distinguished service in training and guiding actors in Shakespearean roles.  Collier was a drama coach for many famous actors, including Audrey Hepburn, Vivien Leigh and Marilyn Monroe.  She also coached Katharine Hepburn during Hepburn's world tour performing Shakespeare in the '50s.  Upon Collier's death in 1955, Hepburn "inherited" Collier's secretary Phyllis Wilbourn, who remained with Hepburn as her secretary for 40 years.  Collier has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Collier 

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) was an American theoretical physicist.  He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II.  Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr in explaining the basic principles behind nuclear fission.  Together with Gregory Breit, Wheeler developed the concept of the Breit–Wheeler process.  He is best known for using the term "black hole" for objects with gravitational collapse already predicted during the early 20th century, for inventing the terms "quantum foam", "neutron moderator", "wormhole" and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing the "one-electron universe".  Wheeler earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Karl Herzfeld, and studied under Breit and Bohr on a National Research Council fellowship.  During 1939 he collaborated with Bohr to write a series of papers using the liquid drop model to explain the mechanism of fission.  During World War II, he worked with the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, where he helped design nuclear reactors, and then at the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington, where he helped DuPont build them.  He returned to Princeton after the war ended, but returned to government service to help design and build the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s.  For most of his career, Wheeler was a professor of physics at Princeton University, which he joined in 1938, remaining until his retirement in 1976.  At Princeton he supervised 46 PhD students, more than any other professor in the Princeton physics department.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler 

Charlie Wilson's War was a publishing sensation and a New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times bestseller.  In the early 1980s, a Houston socialite turned the attention of maverick Texas congressman Charlie Wilson to the ragged band of Afghan "freedom fighters" who continued, despite overwhelming odds, to fight the Soviet invaders.  Wilson, who sat on the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, managed to procure hundreds of millions of dollars to support the mujahideen.  The arms were secretly procured and distributed with the help of an out-of-favor CIA operative, Gust Avrokotos, whose working-class Greek-American background made him an anomaly among the Ivy League world of American spies.  Avrakotos handpicked a staff of CIA outcasts to run his operation and, with their help, continually stretched the Agency's rules to the breaking point.  Moving from the back rooms of the Capitol, to secret chambers at Langley, to arms-dealers' conventions, to the Khyber Pass, this book presents an astonishing chapter of our recent past, and the key to understanding what helped trigger the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and ultimately led to the emergence of a brand-new foe in the form of radical Islam.  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29358.Charlie_Wilson_s_War  Charlie Wilson’s War was a 2007 American film. 

The Soviet–Afghan War was a conflict wherein insurgent groups (known collectively as the Afghan mujahideen), as well as smaller Maoist groups, fought a nine-year guerrilla war against the Soviet Army and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government ending on February 15, 1989.  The international community imposed numerous sanctions and embargoes against the Soviet Union, and the U.S. led a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow.  The boycott and sanctions exacerbated Cold War tensions and enraged the Soviet government, which later led a revenge boycott of the 1984 Olympics held in Los Angeles.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War 

The war in Afghanistan--launched on October 7, 2001 in the wake of the September 11 attacks--is the longest ever waged by the United States.  https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210706-the-war-in-afghanistan-by-the-numbers

The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war.  Congress has declared war on 11 occasions, including its first declaration of war with Great Britain in 1812.  Congress approved its last formal declaration of war during World War II.  Since that time it has agreed to resolutions authorizing the use of military force and continues to shape U.S. military policy through appropriations and oversight.  See a list of declared wars from 1812 to 1942 at https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/declarations-of-war.htm 

Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry has revealed a tower for the Luma Arles arts centre in southern France.  Named The Tower, the stainless steel-clad cultural building is the centrepiece of the Luma Arles arts campus in the town of Arles.  According to Gehry, the design references Arles' Roman architecture, nearby mountains and Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night painting, which was painted nearby.  The 56-metre-high arts tower contains the exhibition galleries, archives, a library, offices, seminar rooms and a cafe for Luma Arles.  Clad with 11,000 irregularly arranged stainless steel panels, the distinctive tower was designed to be a landmark structure for the arts centre, which was established in 2013 by Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann.  The Tower stands within the 27-acre former railyard that was left vacant in 1986, which has been turned into Luma Arles, funded by a €150 million donation from Hoffmann.  Along with the Gehry-designed centrepiece, a series of industrial buildings on the site have been renovated by New York-based Selldorf Architects.  Tom Ravenscroft  See pictures at https://www.dezeen.com/2021/06/25/luma-arles-the-tower-frank-gehry/ 

On August 10, 2021, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced that he would resign effective August 24.  Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) will serve out the remainder of Cuomo's term, which ends on January 1, 2023.  Between December 2020 and August 2021, a series of events unfolded involving Cuomo that resulted in calls for his impeachment or resignation from office.  He said on August 10, "Given the circumstances, the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing."  Cuomo is the ninth governor of New York to resign from office and the 218th governor in the nation's history to do so.  Click here for more information.  https://ballotpedia.org/Resignation_of_Andrew_Cuomo,_2021

claque (plural claques)  noun  (collective) A group of people hired to attend a performance and to either applaud or boo. quotations ▼  (by extension)  A group of fawning admirers.  A group of people who pre-arrange among themselves to express strong support for an idea, so as to give the false impression of a wider consensus.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/claque#English 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2402  August 11, 2021