1942 Battle of Christmas Island

The Battle of Christmas Island was a small engagement which began on 31 March 1942, during World War II. Because of a mutiny by Indian soldiers against their British officers, Japanese troops were able to occupy Christmas Island without any resistance. The United States Navy submarine Seawolf caused severe damage to the Japanese cruiser Naka.

Background

At the time, Christmas Island was a British possession under administrative control of the Straits Settlement, situated 161 nmi (185 mi; 298 km) south of Java. It was important for two reasons: it was a perfect control post for the east Indian Ocean and it was an important source of phosphates, which were needed by Japanese industry. Since 1900, the island had been mined for its phosphate, and at the time of the battle there was a large labour force, consisting of 1,000 Chinese and Malays working under the supervision of a small group of British overseers. In addition, there were about 100 women and 200 children on the island.

After the occupation of Java, Japanese Imperial General Headquarters issued orders for "Operation X" (the invasion and occupation of Christmas Island) on 14 March 1942. Rear Admiral Shōji Nishimura was assigned to command the Second Southern Expeditionary Fleet's Occupation Force, with the light cruiser Naka as his flagship. The fleet also consisted of the light cruisers Nagara and Natori, and destroyers Minegumo, Natsugumo, Amatsukaze, Hatsukaze, Satsuki, Minazuki, Fumizuki and Nagatsuki, oiler Akebono Maru and transports Kimishima Maru and Kumagawa Maru, with 850 men of the 21st and 24th special base forces and the 102nd Construction Unit.

Opposing this invasion force was a 6 in (150 mm) gun that had been built in 1900 and had been mounted on Christmas Island in 1940. The British garrison—a detachment of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery—numbered 32 troops. They were led by a British officer, Captain L. W. T. Williams. Williams' force consisted of an Indian officer, Subadar Muzaffar Khan; 27 Punjabi Indian gunners and non-commissioned officers (NCOs); and four British NCOs.

A group of Punjabi troops, apparently believing Japanese propaganda concerning the liberation of India from British rule, and probably acting with the tacit support of some or all of the local Sikh police officers, mutinied. On 11 March, they shot and killed Williams and the four British NCOs and tossed their bodies into the sea. They then locked up the district officer and the few other European inhabitants of the island pending an execution that apparently was thwarted by the Japanese occupation.

Battle for Christmas Island

At dawn on 31 March 1942, a dozen Japanese bombers launched the attack, destroying the radio station. The mutineers signalled their intention to surrender, raising a white flag before the 850-man landing force had come ashore. The Japanese expeditionary corps was able to disembark at Flying Fish Cove without opposition.

At 09:49 the same morning, the US Navy submarine USS Seawolf fired four torpedoes at the Naka; all missed. Seawolf attacked again at 06:50 the following morning, firing three torpedoes at Natori, missing again. That evening, with her final two torpedoes, from 1,100 yd (1,000 m), Seawolf managed to hit Naka on her starboard side, near her No.1 boiler. The damage was severe enough that Naka had to be towed back to Singapore by Natori, and eventually was forced to return to Japan for a year of repairs. Following the hit, the other Japanese vessels depth charged the US submarine for over nine hours but it escaped.

Natori returned to Christmas Island and withdrew all elements of the occupation force, with the exception of a 20-man garrison detachment, to Banten Bay, Indonesia, on 3 April 1942. The Japanese gained phosphate rock which was loaded on the transport ships.

Aftermath

Following the occupation, the Japanese garrison attempted to put the Chinese and Malays to work, although many escaped further inland to live off the land. The mutineers also became labourers, being employed to clean storage bins. Production was only very limited after the occupation and after the 17 November 1942 sinking of the Nissei Maru by the submarine USS Searaven while unloading at the wharf, phosphate production was halted altogether. Over 60 percent of the island's population, including the European prisoners, were relocated to Java by December 1943. After the war, Christmas Island was reoccupied by the UK in mid-October 1945.

In the post war period, seven Punjabi mutineers were traced and court-martialled in Singapore. The first six to be identified and tried were convicted on 13 March 1947. Five were sentenced to death, and one was sentenced to two years' imprisonment and discharge with ignominy. King George VI confirmed the death sentences on 13 August 1947. British rule in India ended shortly afterward, with India gaining independence and Pakistan being created before the executions could be carried out, and thus diplomatic issues had to be taken into account. In October 1947, a seventh mutineer was identified. He was also court-martialled and sentenced to death. An eighth soldier was identified as a participant in the mutiny but was never caught. On 8 December 1947, the death sentences were commuted to penal servitude for life after the governments of India and Pakistan made representations. After further arguments between the UK and Pakistan over where the sentences should be served, with the British demanding they serve nine years, the six prisoners were transferred to Pakistan in June 1955, after which the British government ended its interest in the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Christmas_Island

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A Similar Situation in 1942

The Cocos Islands mutiny was a failed mutiny by Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) soldiers against British officers, on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean on 8 May 1942, during the Second World War.

The mutineers were to seize control of the islands and disable the British garrison. It was claimed that the mutineers also planned to transfer the islands to the Empire of Japan.^] However, the mutiny was defeated after the Ceylonese failed to seize control of the islands. Many mutineers were punished, and the three ringleaders were executed; they were the only British Commonwealth servicemen to be executed for mutiny during the Second World War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocos_Islands_mutiny

Reggie Brown -- Obama Impersonator

Reginald D. "Reggie" Brown (born September 28, 1980) is an American comedic impersonator and look-alike of former U.S. President Barack Obama.

Reggie Brown is best known for the controversy surrounding his performance at the 2011 Republican Leadership Conference, his occasional television appearances, and his activity on YouTube.

                                                         Reggie Brown, Impersonator

Early Life and Education

Brown is a native of Chicago, and was born Reginald Dennis Odell II in Maywood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Like President Obama, Brown was born to a white mother and black father. When Brown was five years old, his father left his mother to raise Reggie and his older brother Lawrence on her own. When Brown was 9, his mother married his step father, Lawrence Brown. A year later his step father was diagnosed with Leukemia and began a 3-year battle with the disease. At the age of 13, his step father died, leaving Brown and his siblings to be raised by a single mother.

Brown attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign before dropping out of college to pursue a career in modeling. He also had a snake in college. After joining Ford Model Management, he enrolled at The Acting Studios Chicago to take voice and acting classes.

Career as a Local Reporter

From 2006 to 2008, Brown worked as a blogger for WMAQ-TV's Street Team, where he covered local events. On September 9, 2008 Brown won an Emmy for 'Outstanding Achievement for Alternate Media/ New Media Interactivity' for his contributions to the coverage of Looptopia Live as part of the Street Team from the Chicago/Midwest Chapter of The National Academy of Television Arts And Sciences.

Obama Impersonator

Brown claims that he first learned of his resemblance to President Obama at the age of 21, when Obama was still an Illinois state legislator. Brown's career as a professional impersonator was launched by a series of appearances on Fox Business Network, starting with a mock debate against Representative Ron Paul on Stossel. Brown subsequently appeared on Stossel for similar mock debates with Governor Gary Johnson and Herman Cain.

2011 Republican Leadership Conference Controversy

Brown was the subject of a national controversy in June 2011 when, during a nationally televised performance by Brown at the Republican Leadership Conference, he was cut off mid-sentence by Conference Chairman Charlie Davis. Davis told CNN that he ended Brown's performance because the Conference has a "zero tolerance [policy] for racially insensitive jokes." At first, Brown disputed the factual basis of Davis' statement, claiming that the performance was ended because Brown "was over [his] time by a few minutes." Later, Brown responded to the allegations of racism by stating that he "didn't hear any boos on any of the racial jokes" and that he felt "very safe delivering content like that" because he and the President are of a similar mixed racial background. "I wouldn't touch anything that I don't think the President would feel comfortable with or hasn't done himself. He is someone I respect. I want to make him happy," said Brown.

In the aftermath of the 2011 Republican Leadership Conference incident, Brown was invited by comedian Bill Maher to finish his act on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

You Tube Activity

Brown appeared in a viral YouTube parody of Psy's hit song Gangnam Style, entitled Obama Gangnam Style! The video received over 100 million views all over the world including over 30 million views from Twitter users in China, who reportedly believed that the real President Obama was responsible for the video. He also impersonated Obama in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and in the 2016 U.S. presidential election he debuted a cross between Obama and Donald Trump, speaking popular Trump quotes, on CollegeHumor. He gave a similar performance in 2017 on Real Time with Bill Maher in a segment called "New Rule: What If Obama Said It?”

Personal Life

Brown currently resides in Los Angeles, California. When asked about his political affiliation by NewsOne, Brown refused to comment as to whether he is a Democrat or Republican, stating that he is simply an "entertainer.”

                     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggie_Brown_(impersonator)

Higher Capacity Lithium Batteries

”Hybrid” cathodes could provide more power for a given weight and volume.
David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

March 25, 2019 -- Researchers around the globe have been on a quest for batteries that pack a punch but are smaller and lighter than today’s versions, potentially enabling electric cars to travel further or portable electronics to run for longer without recharging. Now, researchers at MIT and in China say they’ve made a major advance in this area, with a new version of a key component for lithium batteries, the cathode.

The team describes their concept as a “hybrid” cathode, because it combines aspects of two different approaches that have been used before, one to increase the energy output per pound (gravimetric energy density), the other for the energy per liter (volumetric energy density). The synergistic combination, they say, produces a version that provides the benefits of both, and more.

The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Ju Li, an MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and of materials science and engineering; Weijiang Xue, an MIT postdoc; and 13 others.

Today’s lithium-ion batteries tend to use cathodes (one of the two electrodes in a battery) made of a transition metal oxide, but batteries with cathodes made of sulfur are considered a promising alternative to reduce weight. Today, the designers of lithium-sulfur batteries face a tradeoff.

The cathodes of such batteries are usually made in one of two ways, known as intercalation types or conversion types. Intercalation types, which use compounds such as lithium cobalt oxide, provide a high volumetric energy density — packing a lot of punch per volume because of their high densities. These cathodes can maintain their structure and dimensions while incorporating lithium atoms into their crystalline structure.

The other cathode approach, called the conversion type, uses sulfur that gets transformed structurally and is even temporarily dissolved in the electrolyte. “Theoretically, these [batteries] have very good gravimetric energy density,” Li says. “But the volumetric density is low,” partly because they tend to require a lot of extra materials, including an excess of electrolyte and carbon, used to provide conductivity.

In their new hybrid system, the researchers have managed to combine the two approaches into a new cathode that incorporates both a type of molybdenum sulfide called Chevrel-phase, and pure sulfur, which together appear to provide the best aspects of both. They used particles of the two materials and compressed them to make the solid cathode. “It is like the primer and TNT in an explosive, one fast-acting, and one with higher energy per weight,” Li says.

Among other advantages, the electrical conductivity of the combined material is relatively high, thus reducing the need for carbon and lowering the overall volume, Li says. Typical sulfur cathodes are made up of 20 to 30 percent carbon, he says, but the new version needs only 10 percent carbon.

The net effect of using the new material is substantial. Today’s commercial lithium-ion batteries can have energy densities of about 250 watt-hours per kilogram and 700 watt-hours per liter, whereas lithium-sulfur batteries top out at about 400 watt-hours per kilogram but only 400 watt-hours per liter. The new version, in its initial version that has not yet gone through an optimization process, can already reach more than 360 watt-hours per kilogram and 581 watt-hours per liter, Li says.  It can beat both lithium-ion and lithium-sulfur batteries in terms of the combination of these energy densities. 

With further work, he says, “we think we can get to 400 watt-hours per kilogram and 700 watt-hours per liter,” with that latter figure equaling that of lithium-ion. Already, the team has gone a step further than many laboratory experiments aimed at developing a large-scale battery prototype: Instead of testing small coin cells with capacities of only several milliamp-hours, they have produced a three-layer pouch cell (a standard subunit in batteries for products such as electric vehicles) with a capacity of more than 1,000 milliamp-hours. This is comparable to some commercial batteries, indicating that the new device does match its predicted characteristics.

So far, the new cell can’t quite live up to the longevity of lithium-ion batteries in terms of the number of charge-discharge cycles it can go through before losing too much power to be useful. But that limitation is “not the cathode’s problem”; it has to do with the overall cell design, and “we’re working on that,” Li says. Even in its present early form, he says, “this may be useful for some niche applications, like a drone with long range,” where both weight and volume matter more than longevity.

“I think this is a new arena for research,” Li says.

                   http://news.mit.edu/2019/hybrid-cathode-lithium-batteries-0325

Safer Autonomous Cars

Stanford Autonomous Car Learns
to Handle Unknown Conditions
In order to make autonomous cars navigate more safely in difficult conditions – like icy roads – researchers are developing new control systems that learn from real-world driving experiences while leveraging insights from physics.
By Taylor Kubota, Stanford News Service

March 27, 2019 -- Researchers at Stanford University have developed a new way of controlling autonomous cars that integrates prior driving experiences – a system that will help the cars perform more safely in extreme and unknown circumstances. Tested at the limits of friction on a racetrack using Niki, Stanford’s autonomous Volkswagen GTI, and Shelley, Stanford’s autonomous Audi TTS, the system performed about as well as an existing autonomous control system and an experienced racecar driver.

“Our work is motivated by safety, and we want autonomous vehicles to work in many scenarios, from normal driving on high-friction asphalt to fast, low-friction driving in ice and snow,” said Nathan Spielberg, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Stanford and lead author of the paper about this research, published March 27 in Science Robotics. “We want our algorithms to be as good as the best skilled drivers – and, hopefully, better.”

While current autonomous cars might rely on in-the-moment evaluations of their environment, the control system these researchers designed incorporates data from recent maneuvers and past driving experiences – including trips Niki took around an icy test track near the Arctic Circle. Its ability to learn from the past could prove particularly powerful, given the abundance of autonomous car data researchers are producing in the process of developing these vehicles.

Physics and learning

Control systems for autonomous cars need access to information about the available road-tire friction. This information dictates the limits of how hard the car can brake, accelerate and steer in order to stay on the road in critical emergency scenarios. If engineers want to safely push an autonomous car to its limits, such as having it plan an emergency maneuver on ice, they have to provide it with details, like the road-tire friction, in advance. This is difficult in the real world where friction is variable and often is difficult to predict.

To develop a more flexible, responsive control system, the researchers built a neural network – a type of artificially intelligent computing system – that integrates data from past driving experiences at Thunderhill Raceway in Willows, California, and a winter test facility with foundational knowledge provided by 200,000 physics-based trajectories.

“With the techniques available today, you often have to choose between data-driven methods and approaches grounded in fundamental physics,” said J. Christian Gerdes, professor of mechanical engineering and senior author of the paper. “We think the path forward is to blend these approaches in order to harness their individual strengths. Physics can provide insight into structuring and validating neural network models that, in turn, can leverage massive amounts of data.”

The group ran comparison tests for their new system at Thunderhill Raceway. First, Shelley sped around controlled by the physics-based autonomous system, pre-loaded with set information about the course and conditions. When compared on the same course during 10 consecutive trials, Shelley and a skilled amateur driver generated comparable lap times. Then, the researchers loaded Niki with their new neural network system. The car performed similarly running both the learned and physics-based systems, even though the neural network lacked explicit information about road friction.

In simulated tests, the neural network system outperformed the physics-based system in both high-friction and low-friction scenarios. It did particularly well in scenarios that mixed those two conditions.

An abundance of data

The results were encouraging, but the researchers stress that their neural network system does not perform well in conditions outside the ones it has experienced. They say as autonomous cars generate additional data to train their network, the cars should be able to handle a wider range of conditions.

“With so many self-driving cars on the roads and in development, there is an abundance of data being generated from all kinds of driving scenarios,” Spielberg said. “We wanted to build a neural network because there should be some way to make use of that data. If we can develop vehicles that have seen thousands of times more interactions than we have, we can hopefully make them safer.”

                                     https://news.stanford.edu/press/view/27012

Research on Whole-Body Regeneration

Study uncovers genes that control process of whole-body regeneration

Harvard Gazette, March 2019 -- When it comes to regeneration, some animals are capable of amazing feats. If you cut off a salamander’s leg, it will grow back. When threatened, some geckos drop their tails to distract their predator, only to regrow them later.

Other animals take the process even further. Planarian worms, jellyfish, and sea anemones can actually regenerate their bodies after being cut in half.

Led by Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Mansi Srivastava, a team of researchers is shedding new light on how animals pull off the feat, along the way uncovering a number of DNA switches that appear to control genes for whole-body regeneration. The study is described in a March 15 paper in Science.

Using three-banded panther worms to test the process, Srivastava and Andrew Gehrke, a postdoctoral fellow working in her lab, found that a section of noncoding DNA controls the activation of a “master control gene” called early growth response, or EGR. Once active, EGR controls a number of other processes by switching other genes on or off.

“What we found is that this one master gene comes on [and activates] genes that are turning on during regeneration,” Gehrke said. “Basically, what’s going on is the noncoding regions are telling the coding regions to turn on or off, so a good way to think of it is as though they are switches.”

For that process to work, Gehrke said, the DNA in the worms’ cells, which normally is tightly folded and compacted, has to change, making new areas available for activation.

“A lot of those very tightly packed portions of the genome actually physically become more open,” he said, “because there are regulatory switches in there that have to turn genes on or off. So one of the big findings in this paper is that the genome is very dynamic and really changes during regeneration as different parts are opening and closing.”

Before Gehrke and Srivastava could understand the dynamic nature of the worm’s genome, they had to assemble its sequence — no simple feat in itself.

“That’s a big part of this paper,” Srivastava said. “We’re releasing the genome of this species, which is important because it’s the first from this phylum. Until now there had been no full genome sequence available.”

It’s also noteworthy, she added, because the three-banded panther worm represents a new model system for studying regeneration.

“Previous work on other species helped us learn many things about regeneration,” she said. “But there are some reasons to work with these new worms.” For one thing, they’re in an important phylogenetic position. “So the way they’re related to other animals … allows us to make statements about evolution.” The other reason, she said, is, “They’re really great lab rats. I collected them in the field in Bermuda a number of years ago during my postdoc, and since we’ve brought them into the lab they’re amenable to a lot more tools than some other systems.”

While those tools can demonstrate the dynamic nature of the genome during regeneration — Gehrke was able to identify as many as 18,000 regions that change — what’s important, Srivastava said, is how much meaning he was able to derive from studying them. She said the results show that EGR acts like a power switch for regeneration — once it is turned on, other processes can take place, but without it, nothing happens.

“We were able to decrease the activity of this gene and we found that if you don’t have EGR, nothing happens,” Srivastava said. “The animals just can’t regenerate. All those downstream genes won’t turn on, so the other switches don’t work, and the whole house goes dark, basically.”

While the study reveals new information about how the process works in worms, it also may help explain why it doesn’t work in humans.

“It turns out that EGR, the master gene, and the other genes that are being turned on and off downstream are present in other species, including humans,” Gehrke said.

“The reason we called this gene in the worms EGR is because when you look at its sequence, it’s similar to a gene that’s already been studied in humans and other animals,” Srivastava said. “If you have human cells in a dish and stress them, whether it’s mechanically or you put toxins on them, they’ll express EGR right away.”

The question is, Srivastava said, “If humans can turn on EGR, and not only turn it on, but do it when our cells are injured, why can’t we regenerate? The answer may be that if EGR is the power switch, we think the wiring is different. What EGR is talking to in human cells may be different than what it is talking to in the three-banded panther worm, and what Andrew has done with this study is come up with a way to get at this wiring. So we want to figure out what those connections are, and then apply that to other animals, including vertebrates that can only do more limited regeneration.”

Going forward, Srivastava and Gehrke said they hope to investigate whether the genetic switches activated during regeneration are the same as those used during development, and to continue working to better understand the dynamic nature of the genome.

“Now that we know what the switches are for regeneration, we are looking at the switches involved in development, and whether they are the same,” Srivastava said. “Do you just do development over again, or is a different process involved?”

The team is also working on understanding the precise ways that EGR and other genes activate the regeneration process, both for three-banded panther worms and for other species as well.

In the end, Srivastava and Gehrke said, the study highlights the value of understanding not only the genome, but all of the genome — the noncoding as well as the coding portions.

“Only about 2 percent of the genome makes things like proteins,” Gehrke said. “We wanted to know: What is the other 98 percent of the genome doing during whole-body regeneration? People have known for some time that many DNA changes that cause disease are in noncoding regions … but it has been underappreciated for a process like whole-body regeneration.

“I think we’ve only just scratched the surface,” he continued. “We’ve looked at some of these switches, but there’s a whole other aspect of how the genome is interacting on a larger scale, not just how pieces open and close. And all of that is important for turning genes on and off, so I think there are multiple layers of this regulatory nature.”

“It’s a very natural question to look at the natural world and think, if a gecko can do this, why can’t I?” Srivastava said. “There are many species that can regenerate, and others that can’t, but it turns out if you compare genomes across all animals, most of the genes that we have are also in the three-banded panther worm … so we think that some of these answers are probably not going to come from whether or not certain genes are present, but from how they are wired or networked together, and that answer can only come from the noncoding portion of the genome.”

This research was supported with funding from the Milton Fund of Harvard University, the Searle Scholars Program, the Smith Family Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, the Human Frontier Science Program, the National Institutes of Health, the Biomedical Big Training Program at UC Berkeley, the Marthella Foskett Brown Chair in Biological Sciences, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-study-unlocks-a-key-to-regeneration/

Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound

The Wall of Sound (also called the Spector Sound) is a music production formula developed by American record producer Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios in the 1960s, with assistance from engineer Larry Levine and the session musician conglomerate later known as "the Wrecking Crew". The intention was to exploit the possibilities of studio recording to create an unusually dense orchestral aesthetic that came across well through radios and jukeboxes of the era. Spector explained in 1964: "I was looking for a sound, a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record. It was a case of augmenting, augmenting. It all fitted together like a jigsaw."

Critical shorthand usually reduces the Wall of Sound inaccurately to a maximum of noise. Levine recalled how "other engineers" mistakenly thought that the process was "turning up all the faders to get full saturation, but all that achieved was distortion.” To attain the Wall of Sound, Spector's arrangements called for large ensembles (including some instruments not generally used for ensemble playing, such as electric and acoustic guitars), with multiple instruments doubling or tripling many of the parts to create a fuller, richer tone. For example, Spector would often duplicate a part played by an acoustic piano with an electric piano and a harpsichord. Mixed well enough, the three instruments would then be indistinguishable to the listener. Additionally, Spector incorporated an array of orchestral instruments (strings, woodwind, brass and percussion) not previously associated with youth-oriented pop music. Reverb from an echo chamber was also highlighted for additional texture. He characterized his methods as "a Wagnerian approach to rock & roll: little symphonies for the kids".

The intricacies of the technique were unprecedented in the field of sound production for popular music. According to Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, who used the formula extensively: "In the '40s and '50s, arrangements were considered 'OK here, listen to that French horn' or 'listen to this string section now.' It was all a definite sound. There weren't combinations of sound, and with the advent of Phil Spector, we find sound combinations, which—scientifically speaking—is a brilliant aspect of sound production." Session guitarist Barney Kessel noted how "terribly simple" it was, however, "the way [Spector] recorded and miked it, they’d diffuse it so that you couldn't pick out any one instrument. Techniques like distortion and echo were not new, but Phil came along and took these to make sounds that had not been used in the past. I thought it was ingenious.”

The Wall of Sound forms the foundation of Phil Spector's recordings, in general. However, certain records are considered to have epitomized its use. The Ronettes' version of "Sleigh Ride" used the effect heavily. Another prominent example of the Wall of Sound was "Da Doo Ron Ron" by The Crystals. Spector himself is quoted as believing his production of Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High" to be the summit of his Wall of Sound productions, and this sentiment has been echoed by George Harrison, who called it "a perfect record from start to finish". Spector later produced his album All Things Must Pass (1970).

Perhaps Phil Spector's most infamous use of his production techniques was on the Let It Be album. Spector was brought in to salvage the incomplete Let It Be, an album abandoned by The Beatles, performances from which had already appeared in several bootleg versions when the sessions were still referred to as Get Back. "The Long and Winding Road", "I Me Mine", and "Across the Universe" are often singled out by Paul McCartney, and others, as those tracks receiving the greatest amount of post-production work. The modified treatment (often misrepresented as a Wall of Sound, although neither Spector nor the Beatles used this phrase to refer to the production) and other overdubs proved controversial among fans and The Beatles themselves. Eventually, in 2003, Let It Be... Naked was released, an authorized version without Spector's additions.

                                          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound

Globally Dispersed Bacteria

Study could shed light on harmful bacteria that share antibiotic resistance genes

Rutgers Today -- March 24, 2019 -- Bacteria may travel thousands of miles through the air worldwide instead of hitching rides with people and animals, according to Rutgers and other scientists. Their “air bridge” hypothesis could shed light on how harmful bacteria share antibiotic resistance genes.

                                              Bacteria were collected from this hot spring
                                                  in the El Tatio region in northern Chile.

“Our research suggests that there must be a planet-wide mechanism that ensures the exchange of bacteria between faraway places,” said senior author Konstantin Severinov, a principal investigator at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology and professor of molecular biology and biochemistry in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

“Because the bacteria we study live in very hot water – about 160 degrees Fahrenheit – in remote places, it is not feasible to imagine that animals, birds or humans transport them,” Severinov said. “They must be transported by air and this movement must be very extensive so bacteria in isolated places share common characteristics.”

Severinov and other researchers studied the “molecular memories” of bacteria from their encounters with viruses, with the memories stored in bacterial DNA, according to a study in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Bacteriophages – viruses of bacteria – are the most abundant and ubiquitous forms of life on the planet, the study notes. The viruses have a profound influence on microbial populations, community structure and evolution.

The scientists collected heat-loving Thermus thermophilus bacteria in hot gravel on Mount Vesuvius and hot springs on Mount Etna in Italy; hot springs in the El Tatio region in northern Chile and southern Chile’s Termas del Flaco region; and hot springs in the Uzon caldera in Kamchatka, Russia.

In bacterial cells infected by viruses, molecular memories are stored in special regions of bacterial DNA called CRISPR arrays. Cells that survive infections pass the memories – small pieces of viral DNA – to their offspring. The order of these memories allows scientists to follow the history of bacterial interaction with viruses over time.

Initially, the scientists thought that bacteria of the same species living in hot springs thousands of miles apart – and therefore isolated from each other – would have very different memories of their encounters with viruses. That’s because the bacteria all should have independent histories of viral infections. The scientists also thought that bacteria should be evolving very rapidly and become different, much like the famous finches Charles Darwin observed on the Galapagos Islands.

“What we found, however, is that there were plenty of shared memories – identical pieces of viral DNA stored in the same order in the DNA of bacteria from distant hot springs,” Severinov said. “Our analysis may inform ecological and epidemiological studies of harmful bacteria that globally share antibiotic resistance genes and may also get dispersed by air instead of human travelers.”

The scientists want to test their air bridge hypothesis by sampling air at different altitudes and locations around the world and by identifying the bacteria there, he said. They would need access to planes, drones or research balloons.

The study included scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences; Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia; Pasteur Institute in France; University of Santiago de Chile; and Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

https://news.rutgers.edu/bacteria-may-travel-thousands-miles-through-air-globally/20190324#.XJqvk-Tsa1v

New Smart Energy Monitor

Energy Monitor Can Find Electrical
Failures Before They Happen
Sensor can monitor wiring in a building or ship, and signal when repairs are needed.
By David L. Chandler, M.I.T. News

March 21, 2019 -- A new system devised by researchers at MIT can monitor the behavior of all electric devices within a building, ship, or factory, determining which ones are in use at any given time and whether any are showing signs of an imminent failure. When tested on a Coast Guard cutter, the system pinpointed a motor with burnt-out wiring that could have led to a serious onboard fire.

The new sensor, whose readings can be monitored on an easy-to-use graphic display called a NILM (non-intrusive load monitoring) dashboard, is described in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, in a paper by MIT professor of electrical engineering Steven Leeb, recent graduate Andre Aboulian MS ’18, and seven others at MIT, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Naval Academy. A second paper will appear in the April issue of Marine Technology, the publication of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.

The system uses a sensor that simply is attached to the outside of an electrical wire at a single point, without requiring any cutting or splicing of wires. From that single point, it can sense the flow of current in the adjacent wire, and detect the distinctive “signatures” of each motor, pump, or piece of equipment in the circuit by analyzing tiny, unique fluctuations in the voltage and current whenever a device switches on or off. The system can also be used to monitor energy usage, to identify possible efficiency improvements and determine when and where devices are in use or sitting idle.

The technology is especially well-suited for relatively small, contained electrical systems such as those serving a small ship, building, or factory with a limited number of devices to monitor. In a series of tests on a Coast Guard cutter based in Boston, the system provided a dramatic demonstration last year.

About 20 different motors and devices were being tracked by a single dashboard, connected to two different sensors, on the cutter USCGC Spencer. The sensors, which in this case had a hard-wired connection, showed that an anomalous amount of power was being drawn by a component of the ship’s main diesel engines called a jacket water heater. At that point, Leeb says, crewmembers were skeptical about the reading but went to check it anyway. The heaters are hidden under protective metal covers, but as soon as the cover was removed from the suspect device, smoke came pouring out, and severe corrosion and broken insulation were clearly revealed.

“The ship is complicated,” Leeb says. “It’s magnificently run and maintained, but nobody is going to be able to spot everything.”

Lt. Col. Nicholas Galanti, engineer officer on the cutter, says “the advance warning from NILM enabled Spencer to procure and replace these heaters during our in-port maintenance period, and deploy with a fully mission-capable jacket water system. Furthermore, NILM detected a serious shock hazard and may have prevented a class Charlie [electrical] fire in our engine room.”

The system is designed to be easy to use with little training. The computer dashboard features dials for each device being monitored, with needles that will stay in the green zone when things are normal, but swing into the yellow or red zone when a problem is spotted.

Detecting anomalies before they become serious hazards is the dashboard’s primary task, but Leeb points out that it can also perform other useful functions. By constantly monitoring which devices are being used at what times, it could enable energy audits to find devices that were turned on unnecessarily when nobody was using them, or spot less-efficient motors that are drawing more current than their similar counterparts. It could also help ensure that proper maintenance and inspection procedures are being followed, by showing whether or not a device has been activated as scheduled for a given test.

“It’s a three-legged stool,” Leeb says. The system allows for “energy scorekeeping, activity tracking, and condition-based monitoring.” But it’s that last capability that could be crucial, “especially for people with mission-critical systems,” he says. In addition to the Coast Guard and the Navy, he says, that includes companies such as oil producers or chemical manufacturers, who need to monitor factories and field sites that include flammable and hazardous materials and thus require wide safety margins in their operation.

One important characteristic of the system that is attractive for both military and industrial applications, Leeb says, is that all of its computation and analysis can be done locally, within the system itself, and does not require an internet connection at all, so the system can be physically and electronically isolated and thus highly resistant to any outside tampering or data theft.

Although for testing purposes the team has installed both hard-wired and noncontact versions of the monitoring system — both types were installed in different parts of the Coast Guard cutter — the tests have shown that the noncontact version could likely produce sufficient information, making the installation process much simpler. While the anomaly they found on that cutter came from the wired version, Leeb says, “if the noncontact version was installed” in that part of the ship, “we would see almost the same thing.”

The research team also included graduate students Daisy Green, Jennifer Switzer, Thomas Kane, and Peer Lindahl at MIT; Gregory Bredariol of the U.S. Coast Guard; and John Donnal of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The research was funded by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research NEPTUNE project, through the MIT Energy Initiative.

                http://news.mit.edu/2019/energy-monitor-find-electrical-failures-0322

Project E (Cold War)

Project E was a joint project between the United States and the United Kingdom during the Cold War to provide nuclear weapons to the Royal Air Force (RAF) until sufficient British nuclear weapons became available. It was subsequently expanded to provide similar arrangements for the British Army of the Rhine. A maritime version of Project E known as Project N provided nuclear depth bombs used by the RAF Coastal Command.

                                                         Four Mark 28 Nuclear Bombs
The British nuclear weapons project, High Explosive Research, successfully tested a nuclear weapon in Operation Hurricane in October 1952, but production was slow and Britain had only ten atomic bombs on hand in 1955 and fourteen in 1956. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, approached the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, with a request that the US supply nuclear weapons for the strategic bombers of the V-bomber fleet until sufficient British weapons became available. This became known as Project E. Under an agreement reached in 1957, US personnel had custody of the weapons, and performed all tasks related to their storage, maintenance and readiness. The bombs were held in secure storage areas (SSAs) on the same bases as the bombers.

The first bombers equipped with Project E weapons were English Electric Canberras based in Germany and the UK that were assigned to NATO. These were replaced by Vickers Valiants in 1960 and 1961 as the long-range Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor assumed the strategic nuclear weapon delivery role. Project E weapons equipped V-bombers at three bases in the UK from 1958. Due to operational restrictions imposed by Project E, and the consequential loss of independence of half of the British nuclear deterrent, they were phased out in 1962 when sufficient British megaton weapons became available, but remained in use with the Valiants in the UK and RAF Germany until 1965.

Project E nuclear warheads were used on the sixty Thor Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles operated by the RAF from 1959 to 1963 under Project Emily. The British Army acquired Project E warheads for its Corporal missiles in 1958. The US subsequently offered the Honest John missile as a replacement. They remained in service until 1977 when Honest John was in turn superseded by the Lance missile. Eight-inch and 155 mm nuclear artillery rounds were also acquired under Project E. The last Project E weapons were withdrawn from service in 1992.

Background

During the early part of the Second World War, Britain had a nuclear weapons project codenamed Tube Alloys. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, and the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the Quebec Agreement, which merged Tube Alloys with the American Manhattan Project to create a combined British, American and Canadian project. The September 1944 Hyde Park Aide-Mémoire extended commercial and military cooperation into the post-war period. Many of Britain's top scientists participated in the Manhattan Project. The Quebec Agreement specified that nuclear weapons would not be used against another country without mutual consent. On 4 July 1945, Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson agreed on Britain's behalf to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan.

The British government considered nuclear technology to be a joint discovery, and trusted that America would continue to share it. On 16 November 1945, President Harry S. Truman and Prime Minister Clement Attlee signed a new agreement that replaced the Quebec Agreement's requirement for "mutual consent" before using nuclear weapons with one for "prior consultation", and there was to be "full and effective cooperation in the field of atomic energy", but this was only "in the field of basic scientific research". The United States Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) ended technical cooperation. Its control of "restricted data" prevented US allies from receiving any information. Fearing a resurgence of American isolationism, and Britain losing its great power status, the UK government restarted its own development effort, now codenamed High Explosive Research.

In 1949, the Americans offered to make atomic bombs in the US available for Britain to use if the British agreed to curtail their atomic bomb programme. This would have given Britain nuclear weapons much sooner than its own target date of late 1952. Only those bomb components required by war plans would be stored in the UK; the rest would be kept in the US and Canada. The offer was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff on the grounds that it was not "compatible with our status as a first class power to depend on others for weapons of this supreme importance". As a counter-offer, they proposed limiting the British nuclear weapons programme in return for American bombs. The opposition of key American officials, including the United States Atomic Energy Commission's Lewis Strauss, and Senators Bourke B. Hickenlooper and Arthur Vandenberg, coupled with security concerns aroused by the 2 February 1950 arrest of the British physicist Klaus Fuchs as an atomic spy, resulted in the proposal being dropped.

Implementation of the Subsequent Agreement

The U.S. manufactured atomic weapons were used in these arenas:

• Tactical Bombers
• Strategic Bombers
• British Army of the Rhine
• Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles
• Project N (deployment aboard Royal Navy ships)

End of Project E

When the Cold War ended in 1991, there were more than 500 US nuclear weapons in the UK. Of these, about 400 were bombs, 48 were Ground Launched Cruise Missiles, and approximately 100 were B57 nuclear depth bombs. The BAOR still had about 85 Lance missiles, and more than 70 W33 eight-inch and W48 155 mm nuclear artillery shells. The cruise missiles were withdrawn in 1991 under the terms of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The United States then decided to withdraw its short-range nuclear weapons. The last US warheads, including the Mark 57 nuclear depth bombs and those used by the BAOR, were withdrawn in July 1992. The only American nuclear weapons then remaining in the UK were 110 or so B61 nuclear bombs stored at RAF Lakenheath for USAF F-15E Strike Eagles, which were withdrawn by 2008. The British WE.177 nuclear bombs used by the RAF and Royal Navy were withdrawn from service in August 1998, at which point the only remaining British nuclear weapons were the warheads on the Trident missiles of the Vanguard-class submarines.

                                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_E

Complete Defeat of ISIL in Syria

The Battle of Baghuz Fawqani was an offensive by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), assisted by American-led coalition airstrikes, artillery, and special forces personnel, that began on 9 February 2019 as part of the Deir ez-Zor campaign of the Syrian Civil War. The battle, composed of a series of ground assaults, took place in and around the Syrian town of Al-Baghuz Fawqani in the Middle Euphrates River Valley, near the Iraq–Syria border, and was regarded as the territorial last stand of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in eastern Syria.

After encircling the Islamic State into a densely populated cluster of hamlets and a tent city along the riverside within the first week, the SDF acknowledged that a greater than anticipated number of civilians, mostly relatives of the mostly foreign ISIL fighters, was still in the enclave. With Coalition oversight, the SDF took an incremental approach to the battle, launching fierce assaults then pausing to allow surrendering fighters, hostages, and families to evacuate in order to minimize civilian casualties. The "trickle-out" strategy, coupled with stiff, fanatical resistance by veteran ISIL jihadists within a small but dense area, prolonged the battle into a protracted siege. The SDF officially declared final victory over the Islamic State in Baghuz Fawqani on 23 March.

Aftermath of the Battle

Both before and throughout the battle, immense focus was put on the surrounding humanitarian situation in the ISIL enclave. The SDF helped transfer tens of thousands of civilians to internally displaced persons camps in northeast Syria while also holding over 1,000 captured ISIL suspects and their family members as a result of their conquests. Both the SDF and the U.S. began urging international countries to repatriate the captured jihadists during the later stages of the battle.

On 21 February, an Iraqi official stated that the SDF had transferred 150 ISIL militants to Iraqi authorities under a deal involving a total of 502, making it the single largest repatriation of ISIL members thus far. On 24 February, the Iraqi Government stated that they received 13 more ISIL suspects from the SDF. Some Iraqi officials stated that all 13 were of French origin.

By 1 March, the population of the Al-Hawl refugee camp soared past 50,000, due to the massive civilian evacuations from the Baghuz Fawqani region. Aid organizations feared that dysentery and other diseases could break out from the overflowing camp. The United Nations stated that 84 people, mostly children, died on the way to Al-Hawl, since December 2018. This number was raised to 100 by the end of the battle, and the refugee camp had swelled to at least 74,000 people.

On 7 March, in regards to the evacuations, CENTCOM commander Gen. Joseph Votel stated that he believed that surrendered ISIL fighters were largely "unrepentant, unbroken and radicalized," and were waiting "for the right time to resurge". "We will need to maintain a vigilant offensive against this now widely dispersed and disaggregated organization that includes leaders, fighters, facilitators, resources and toxic ideology," he added. This was supported by subsequent interviews with surrendered ISIL militants and some of their family members. By 9 March, one month into the protracted battle/stand-off, many evacuating ISIL militants and their families reportedly remained unrepentant and devoted to the "caliphate" and hoped for future "conquests.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghuz_Fawqani

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Future Guerilla Attacks by ISIL

The New York Times reports that ISIL is still capable of guerilla attacks in Syria and Iraq.  See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/23/world/middleeast/isis-syria-defeated.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

 

 

Lincoln Logs (Children's Toy)

Lincoln Logs is a U.S. children's toy consisting of notched miniature logs, used to build small forts and buildings. They were invented by John Lloyd Wright, second son of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Lincoln Logs were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1999. As of 2014 Lincoln Logs are manufactured by K'NEX Industries Inc. In late 2017, K'NEX, having filed for bankruptcy, was bought out by Basic Fun, Inc. of Florida.

Pride Manufacturing, of Burnham, Maine, manufactures Lincoln Logs for Basic Fun.

                                                            Lincoln Logs Patent Drawing

Design

The logs measure three quarters of an inch (roughly two centimetres) in diameter. Analogous to real logs used in a log cabin, Lincoln Logs are notched so that logs may be laid at right angles to each other to form rectangles resembling buildings. Additional parts of the toy set include roofs, chimneys, windows and doors, which bring a realistic appearance to the final creation. Later sets included animals and human figures the same scale as the buildings.

The toy sets were originally made of redwood, with varying colors of roof pieces. In the 1970s the company unsuccessfully introduced sets made entirely of plastic, but soon reverted to real wood.

History

Lincoln Logs were invented sometime around 1916–1917 when John Lloyd Wright was working in Japan with his father. The mold for the toy was based on the architecture of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, designed by the inventor's father. The foundation of the hotel was designed with interlocking log beams, which made the structure "earthquake-proof".

When he returned to the U.S., John organized The Red Square Toy Company (named after his father's famous symbol), and marketed the toy in 1918. Wright was issued U.S. patent 1,351,086 on August 31, 1920, for a "Toy-Cabin Construction". Soon after, he changed the name to J. L. Wright Manufacturing. The original Lincoln Log set came with instructions on how to build Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as Abraham Lincoln's cabin. Subsequent sets were larger and more elaborate. The toy was a hit, following as it did Meccano, Tinker Toys and Erector Set introduced a few years before.

K'Nex, the toy's current distributor, states the product was named after Abraham Lincoln—famously born in a log cabin—due to patriotism during World War I. Others attribute the name to Frank Lloyd Wright's original name, Frank Lincoln Wright, or the alteration of the name, 'linkin' logs.

In 1999 Lincoln Logs and John Lloyd Wright were entered into the National Toy Hall of Fame. In September 2014 the manufacturer announced the return of production from China to the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Logs

Warning Afterword by the Blog Author

Do not under any circumstances buy Lincoln Logs for your very young children.  Observe that your children always pick up their toys and clean up the room before even remotely considering the purchase of this toy.  The reason is that the small logs are scattered throughout the floor.  Stepping on one of these wooden logs in bare feet or stocking feet results in immediate, intense pain, accompanied by cursing and sometimes by falling down onto the floor.  Such an incident cannot be described as “Basic Fun.”  The immediate, inevitable temptation will be to locate every single log in the room and throw them all out, never to be repurchased.

Incidentally, Tokyo was hit by a severe nearby earthquake in 1923 that created massive destruction in the city.  The Imperial Hotel was damaged but withstood the quake due to the clever design of its foundation by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Matter Outnumbers Anti-Matter

Syracuse's Sheldon Stone helps discover matter-antimatter asymmetry in charmed quarks
By Rob Enslin

Physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) have confirmed that matter and antimatter decay differently for elementary particles containing charmed quarks.

Distinguished Professor Sheldon Stone says the findings are a first, although matter-antimatter asymmetry has been observed before in particles with strange quarks or beauty quarks.

Quarks are elementary particles that are the building blocks of matter.

Stone and members of the College’s High-Energy Physics (HEP) research group have measured, for the first time and with 99.999-percent certainty, a difference in the way D⁰ mesons and anti-D⁰ mesons transform into more stable byproducts. 

Mesons are subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark, bound together by strong interactions. 

"There have been many attempts to measure matter-antimatter asymmetry, but, until now, no one has succeeded,” says Stone, who collaborates on the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. “It’s a milestone in antimatter research.”

The findings may also indicate new physics beyond the Standard Model, which describes how fundamental particles interact with one another. "Till then, we need to await theoretical attempts to explain the observation in less esoteric means," he adds. 

Every particle of matter has a corresponding antiparticle, identical in every way, but with an opposite charge. Precision studies of hydrogen and anti-hydrogen atoms, for example, reveal similarities to beyond the billionth decimal place.

When matter and antimatter particles come into contact, they annihilate each other in a burst of energy—similar to what happened in the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago. “That’s why there is so little naturally occurring antimatter in the Universe around us,” says Stone, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, which has awarded him this year's W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. 

The question on Stone's mind involves the equal-but-opposite nature of matter and antimatter. “If the same amount of matter and antimatter exploded into existence at the birth of the Universe, there should have been nothing left behind but pure energy. Obviously, that didn’t happen,” he says in a whiff of understatement.

Thus, Stone and his LHCb colleagues have been searching for subtle differences in matter and antimatter to understand why matter is so prevalent.

The answer may lie at CERN, where scientists create antimatter by smashing protons together in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest, most powerful particular accelerator. The more energy the LHC produces, the more massive are the particles—and antiparticles—formed during collision.

It is in the debris of these collisions that scientists such as Ivan Polyakov, a postdoc in Syracuse’s HEP group, hunt for particle ingredients.

“We don’t see antimatter in our world, so we have to artificially produce it," he says. "The data from these collisions enables us to map the decay and transformation of unstable particles into more stable byproducts." 

HEP is renowned for its pioneering research into quarks, of which there are six types, or flavors. Scientists usually talk about them in pairs: up/down, charmed/strange and top/bottom. Each pair has a corresponding mass and fractional electronic charge.

In addition to the beauty quark (the "b" in "LHCb"), HEP is interested in the charmed quark. Despite its relatively high mass, a charmed quark lives a fleeting existence before decaying into something more stable. 

Recently, HEP studied two versions of the same particle. One version contained a charmed quark and an antimatter version of an up quark, called the anti-up quark. The other version had an anti-charm quark and an up quark.

Using LHC data, they identified both versions of the particle, well into the tens of millions, and counted the number of times each particle decayed into new byproducts. 

 

“The ratio of the two possible outcomes should have been identical for both sets of particles, but we found that the ratios differed by about a tenth of a percent," Stone says. "This proves that charmed matter and antimatter particles are not totally interchangeable.”

Adds Polyakov, “Particles might look the same on the outside, but they behave differently on the inside. That is the puzzle of antimatter.”

The idea that matter and antimatter behaves differently is not new. Previous studies of particles with strange quarks and bottom quarks have confirmed as such.

What makes this study unique, Stone concludes, is that it is the first time anyone has witnessed particles with charmed quarks being asymmetrical: "It's one for the history books."

HEP's work is supported by the National Science Foundation. 

http://thecollege.syr.edu/news/2019/matter-antimatter-syracuse.html

Socialist Strongman Sukarno

Sukarno (6 June 1901 – 21 June 1970) was the first President of Indonesia, serving from 1945 to 1967.

Sukarno was the leader of his country's struggle for Independence from the Netherlands. He was a prominent leader of Indonesia's nationalist movement during the Dutch colonial period, and spent over a decade under Dutch detention until released by the invading Japanese forces. Sukarno and his fellow nationalists collaborated to garner support for the Japanese war effort from the population, in exchange for Japanese aid in spreading nationalist ideas. Upon Japanese surrender, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945, and Sukarno was appointed as first president. He led Indonesians in resisting Dutch re-colonization efforts via diplomatic and military means until the Dutch acknowledgement of Indonesian independence in 1949. Author Pramoedya Ananta Toer once wrote "Sukarno was the only Asian leader of the modern era able to unify people of such differing ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds without shedding a drop of blood."

                                                                 Sukarno in 1949

After a chaotic period of parliamentary democracy, Sukarno established an autocratic system called "Guided Democracy" in 1957 that successfully ended the instability and rebellions which were threatening the survival of the diverse and fractious country. The early 1960s saw Sukarno veering Indonesia to the left by providing support and protection to the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) to the irritation of the military and Islamists. He also embarked on a series of aggressive foreign policies under the rubric of anti-imperialism, with aid from the Soviet Union and China. The failure of the 30 September Movement (1965) led to the destruction of the PKI and his replacement in 1967 by one of his generals, Suharto, and he remained under house arrest until his death.

“Guided Democracy” and Increasing Autocracy.

The impressive military victories over the PRRI-Permesta rebels and the popular nationalisation of Dutch companies left Sukarno in a very strong position. On 5 July 1959, Sukarno reinstated the 1945 constitution by presidential decree. It established a presidential system which he believed would make it easier to implement the principles of guided democracy. He called the system Manifesto Politik or Manipol—but it was actually government by decree. Sukarno envisioned an Indonesian-style socialist society, adherent to the principle of USDEK:

1. Undang-Undang Dasar '45 (Constitution of 1945)
2. Sosialisme Indonesia (Indonesian socialism)
3. Demokrasi Terpimpin (Guided Democracy)
4. Ekonomi Terpimpin (Commanded Economy).
5. Kepribadian Indonesia (Indonesia's Identity)

In March 1960, Sukarno disbanded parliament and replaced it with a new parliament where half the members were appointed by the president (Dewan Perwakilan Rakjat – Gotong Rojong / DPR-GR). In September 1960, he established a Provisional People's Consultative Assembly (Madjelis Permusjawaratan Rakjat Sementara/MPRS) as the highest legislative authority according to the 1945 constitution. MPRS members consisted of members of DPR-GR and members of "functional groups" appointed by the president.

With the backing of the military, Sukarno disbanded the Islamic party Masyumi and Sutan Sjahrir's party PSI, accusing them of involvement with PRRI-Permesta affair. The military arrested and imprisoned many of Sukarno's political opponents, from socialist Sjahrir to Islamic politicians Mohammad Natsir and Hamka. Using martial law powers, the government closed-down newspapers who were critical of Sukarno's policies.

During this period, there were several assassination attempts on Sukarno's life. On 9 March 1960, Daniel Maukar, an Indonesian airforce lieutenant who sympathised with the Permesta rebellion, strafed the Merdeka Palace and Bogor Palace with his MiG-17 fighter jet, attempting to kill the president; he was not injured. In May 1962, Darul Islam agents shot at the president during Eid al-Adha prayers on the grounds of the palace. Sukarno again escaped injury.

On the security front, the military started a series of effective campaigns which ended the long-festering Darul Islam rebellion in West Java (1962), Aceh (1962), and South Sulawesi (1965). Kartosuwirjo, the leader of Darul Islam, was captured and executed in September 1962.

To counterbalance the power of the military, Sukarno started to rely on the support of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). In 1960, he declared his government to be based on Nasakom, a union of the three ideological strands present in Indonesian society: nasionalisme (nationalism), agama (religions), and komunisme (communism). Accordingly, Sukarno started admitting more communists into his government, while developing a strong relationship with the PKI chairman Dipa Nusantara Aidit.

In order to increase Indonesia's prestige, Sukarno supported and won the bid for the 1962 Asian Games held in Jakarta. Many sporting facilities such as the Senayan sports complex (including the 100,000-seat Bung Karno Stadium) were built to accommodate the games. There was political tension when the Indonesians refused the entry of delegations from Israel and Taiwan. After the International Olympic Committee imposed sanctions on Indonesia due to this exclusion policy, Sukarno retaliated by organising a "non-imperialist" competitor event to the Olympic Games, called the Games of New Emerging Forces (GANEFO). GANEFO was successfully held in Jakarta in November 1963, and was attended by 2,700 athletes from 51 countries.

As part of his prestige-building program, Sukarno ordered the construction of large monumental buildings such as National Monument (Monumen Nasional), Istiqlal Mosque, Jakarta, CONEFO Building (now the Parliament Building), Hotel Indonesia, and the Sarinah shopping centre to transform Jakarta from a former colonial backwater to a modern city. The modern Jakarta boulevards of Jalan Thamrin, Jalan Sudirman, and Jalan Gatot Subroto was planned and constructed under Sukarno.

                                         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukarno