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Alfred Hitchcock Biography Sir Alfred Hitchcock was an English/American film director who pioneered significant developments in the movie industry of the mid 20th century. He is most famous for producing several classic films, especially of the thriller genre. Hitchcock is considered one of the greatest and most influential film producers of the Twentieth Century. Some of his most famous films include 39 Steps (1935), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960). "In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God: he must create life." – Alfred Hitchcock – as quoted in Hitchcock (1984) Early life of Alfred Hitchcock alfred-hitchcockAlfred Hitchcock was born 13 August 1899 in Leytonstone, Essex, England where he studied at the Roman Catholic Salesian College and later St Ignatius College. His childhood was not particularly happy. He suffered from obesity, a result of a glandular condition, and his parents were strict and somewhat remote. When he was just five, his father sent him to a police station with a note that he should be locked up for 5 minutes, which left him with a life-long fear of authority and the police in particular. During his childhood, the young Alfred would often spend time by himself, inventing games and drawing maps. When he was 15, he left college to study at the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation; this qualified him to be a draftsman. He gained his first job with a telegraph company, but it was around this time he developed a burgeoning interest in the cinema, which was a recent innovation. In the evenings after work, he would watch films and study the cinema trade newspapers. Towards the end of the First World War, he attempted to join the army but was rejected because of his weight, although he did later manage to sign up for a brief time as a cadet in the Royal Engineers. First Steps in Film After the war, he began writing short stories, which were published in his company's in-house magazine. Hitchcock also developed an interest in photography and the new art of film production. He gained employment in 1920 as a title card designer for a company which would later be known as Paramount Pictures. With hard work, Hitchcock progressed through the company and within five years was producing silent films. In later years he said silent films were the 'purest form of cinema'. In the mid-1920s, he travelled to Germany where he picked up many of the emerging expressionist techniques used in modern filmmaking. After a few challenging early films, he gained his first commercial and critical success with The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). By 1929, he had produced ten films; his 10th film Blackmail was a significant moment for him because it was one of the first 'talkers' – films with an audio track. Success in the 1930s By the mid-1930s, Hitchcock was establishing his reputation as one of the leading film producers in Britain. Several films proved a great success, such as 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Hitchcock proved a master at creating tension and a fast-moving plot line; he didn't tie down the audience in detail but created scenes of dramatic tension. Hitchcock pioneered the use of famous backdrops, either famous landmarks in a city or the wilderness of the Scottish moors – 39 Steps (1935). Later in his career, he used many famous landmarks such as Mt Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959) and the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942). Move to America Hitchcock's critical success in England led him to be approached by David Selznick from Hollywood. In 1939, the Hitchcock family moved to California, where he began working on a new film. His first film Rebecca (1940) received an Academy Award for Best Picture. Hitchcock was not particularly enamoured of America, but he did enjoy the greater resources available to American studios – it was an improvement on the small budgets of the English film producers. Towards the end of the Second World War (1943), he returned to England, where he produced two films in French for the Free French forces. In 1945 he also served as film editor for a documentary about the concentration camps that were liberated by British troops (Bergen-Belsen). However, the images were so shocking; it was later shelved until being published in 1985 (Memory of the Camps); the film was also re-released in 2014. After the war, Hitchcock returned to America, where he resumed his long and successful American film career. In particular, he enjoyed developing his talents in creating psychologically intriguing films. "Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual." – Alfred Hitchcock. The Golden Era The 1950s was Hitchcock's golden era, producing classic films such as Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). Psycho was Hitchcock's best known and most profitable film. It broke box office records as viewers flocked to view this pioneering new horror genre film. Hitchcock, (like Walt Disney) was also early to embrace the new medium of TV. He hosted a TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents from 1955 to 1965; his prominent role in hosting the show helped him become one of the most recognisable film directors and media celebrities of the day. During the next two decades, his output was less prolific as old age and failing health limited his work rate, but he continued to produce feature films up until his death. Hitchcock died of renal failure on 29 April 1980, while at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles. He had just recently received a knighthood from the Queen. Features of Hitchcock's films Hitchcock's films often share similar elements. Responding to criticism of repeated ideas, he once retorted, "Self-plagiarism is style." Hitchcock often portrayed the guilty party as quite a charming man. Often an innocent man was accused of being guilty in the first instance by authority, before being able to prove his innocence. His leading ladies were often 'ice-cool blondes', such as Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. These women were often reserved and cold in his films, giving little emotion away. Hitchcock stated: "Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints." – Alfred Hitchcock, Interview on CBS TV (20 February 1977) Hitchcock also enjoyed a gallows humour which is not always obvious to spot. Finally, Hitchcock developed a tradition of making short cameos in his films. Hitchcock had a reputation for being unsympathetic to actors and a hard taskmaster. He was rumoured to have said that actors were 'like cattle', and this remark hung around Hitchcock (though he later said he had been misquoted). However, many actors gave memorable performances in his films and won Academy Awards for their performances. Hitchcock was nominated five times for an Academy Award for Best Director, but he never won. In 1956, he became a U.S. citizen, although he remained a British subject.
When asked about the fate of the U.S. economy…
Lyndon Johnson Biography Lyndon Johnson was the 36th President of the US from 1963 to 1969 – one of the most turbulent and influential periods in American politics. Lyndon Johnson helped to implement the 'Great Society' reforms – extending welfare support and implementing civil rights legislation. He also presided over the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War which proved increasingly controversial. Lyndon Johnson Johnson was born on August 27, 1908, in central Texas. Growing up in the Great Depression, he gained a first-hand perspective on poverty, and the Great Society reforms he later implemented were an attempt to make this kind of poverty a thing of the past. In 1937, aged only 29, Johson successfully won election to the House of Representatives. During the Second World War, he served in the Navy, winning the Silver Star for service in the Pacific. In 1948, he was elected to the Senate, and by 1953, had become the youngest ever Minority House Leader. He worked closely with Dwight D Eisenhower and helped to get some of his policies through the Senate. In 1960, he stood as Vice President to the youthful In the 1959 election, he stood as Vice President to the youthful John F Kennedy. The idea was that the Protestant, southern Johnson would make a dream ticket to accompany the northern Catholic liberal, John F. Kennedy. In 1959, one of the tightest ever elections, JFK-Johnson were elected, defeating Richard Nixon. The three years of the Kennedy presidency proved turbulent, with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War dominating foreign policy. America also started to become involved in aiding the South Vietnamese against their northern Communist enemies. In 1963, JFK was assassinated, while visiting Dallas, Texas – Johnson's home state. Shortly after, Johnson was sworn in as Vice President and addressed a shocked nation. "This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep, personal tragedy. I know the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best; that is all I can do. I ask for your help and God's." (22 November 1963) In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was re-elected in a landslide for the Democrats. In this period, America became more involved in the Vietnam war – switching from providing intelligence to bombing positions in the north and putting American troops on the ground. JFK's and Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defence, Robin McNamara, suggested that if JFK had lived, American involvement in Vietnam would have decreased. But, with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964, Johnson gained a free hand from Congress to take greater involvement in the Vietnam war. He said in 1965, "I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle." But the war was increasingly escalated, and the casualties mounted. The conflict also became increasingly unpopular and costly to the American people. By 1968, there were widespread protests and civil disobedience in protest at the war. On a domestic front, Johnson was able to pass more legislation through Congress as part of his Great Society reforms. This included extended welfare support for poorer Americans. For example, millions of elderly people benefited through the 1965 Medicare amendment to the Social Security Act. Johnson also enacted civil rights legislation to protect in law, equal rights independent of a person's ethnic group. In 1965, he introduced the Voting Rights Act. "Every American citizen must have the right to vote…Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes… No law that we now have on the books…can insure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it… There is no Constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights." (15th March 1965 However, the new legislation often didn't change the situation on the ground, and there were growing civil rights protests at continued racial discrimination. Martin Luther King led non-violent protests, though increasingly others, such as Malcolm X wanted more radical action. Lyndon Johnson shocked American by not standing for re-election in the 1968 election. He died of a heart attack in 1973.
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned "other surprises" are on the horizon.
Karl Marx (German: [maʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, representing his greatest intellectual achievement. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic, and political history. Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, German Confederation, Marx studied at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the latter in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as The German Ideology (written 1846) and the Grundrisse (written 1857–1858). While in Paris in 1844, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and met Engels, a lifelong friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's ideas and ends with a call for revolution: "Working men of all countries, unite!" Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital. In 1864, Marx helped found the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he sought to fight the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote on revolution, the transition to communism, and the state. He died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Marx's critical theories about society, economics, and politics hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In the capitalist mode of production, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labour-power in return for wages.[5] Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that capitalism produced internal tensions like previous socioeconomic systems and that these tensions would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as the socialist mode of production. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism—owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature—would eventuate the working class's development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society constituted by a free association of producers.[6] Marx actively pressed for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised proletarian revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation.[7] Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised.[8] Marxism has exerted major influence on socialist thought and political movements, and during the 20th century revolutionary governments identifying as Marxist took power in many countries and established socialist states including the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. A number of theoretical variants, such as Leninism, Marxism–Leninism, Trotskyism, and Maoism, have been developed. Marx's work in economics has a strong influence on modern heterodox theories of labour and its relation to capital,[9][10][11] and he is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.[12][13]
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Click here and watch what happens in the first 10– seconds of this video. Ivan Sulyma (Polish: Iwan Sulima, Ukrainian: Іван Михайлович Сулима – Ivan Mykhailovych Sulyma) was a Senior of Registered Cossacks in 1628–29 and a Kosh Otaman in 1630–1635. Life and death Son of Mykhailo Sulyma, Ivan came from a petty noble (szlachta) family. He was born in Rohoshchi (next to Chernihiv). He served as an estate overseer for Stanisław Żółkiewski and later the family of Daniłowicze who inherited his lands; for that service in 1620 he was awarded three villages: Sulimówka, Kuczakiw and Lebedyn. All the villages today belong to the Boryspil Raion, Kyiv Oblast. His sons included Stepan (died 1659), a captain of Boryspil company, and Fedir (died 1691), a colonel of Pereiaslav regiment. He became popular among the unregistered Cossacks, leading them on campaigns to plunder Crimea and other Ottoman vassal territories. For organizing a revolt on an Ottoman slave galley and freeing Christian slaves[1] he received a medal from Pope Paul V himself. Eventually, Sulyma reached the rank of the hetman, which he held from 1628 to 1629 and 1630 to 1635. In 1635, after returning from an expedition to Black Sea against the Ottomans, he decided to rebel against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which at that time controlled most of the Cossack territories, and whose nobility was trying to turn militant Cossacks into serfs.[citation needed] Ivan Sulyma took part in numerous campaigns of Sagaidachny against Tatars and Turks. In particular, it was the famous capture of Kafa (modern Theodosia), the main center of the slave trade on the Black Sea, Trapezont, Izmail, and also two attacks on Tsaregrad. On the night of 3 to 4 August 1635 he took the newly constructed Kodak fortress by surprise, burning it and executing its crew of about 200 people under Jean Marion. Soon afterwards however his forces were defeated by the army of hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski and Sulima was turned over to the Commonwealth by Cossack elders or starshina. Together with several other leaders of his rebellion, Hetman Sulyma was executed in Warsaw on 12 December 1635. At first, the Polish King Władysław IV Waza, known for his friendly attitude towards the Cossacks, was hesitant to execute Sulyma, especially since he was a person upon whom the Pope himself bestowed his medal. However, pressured by the nobility who wanted to show that no rebellions against the 'established order' would be tolerated, the order for an execution was given; after being tortured, Sulyma was cut to pieces and his body parts were hung on the city walls of Warsaw.[2]
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Nazi Germany,[h] officially known as the German Reich[i] until 1943, later the Greater German Reich,[j] was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany quickly became a totalitarian state where many aspects of life were controlled by the government. The Third Reich,[k] meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", referred to the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and German Empire (1871–1918). The Third Reich, which the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich,[l] ended in May 1945, after only 12 years, when the Allies defeated Germany and entered the capital, Berlin, ending World War II in Europe. The Nazi Party became the largest in parliament following the July 1932 German federal election, but it did not hold a majority. Hitler refused to participate in a coalition government unless he was its leader. By the constitution of the Weimar Republic, in those circumstances the chancellor of Germany (the head of government) could be appointed by the president, Paul von Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler on 30 January 1933, at the behest of right-wing politicians and industrialists. The Reichstag fire was used to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, leading to the suppression of civil liberties and mass arrests of political opponents. The Enabling Act of 1933 gave Hitler's government the power to make and enforce laws without the Reichstag (parliament) or president. The Nazis began to eliminate political opposition and consolidate power. Hindenburg died in August 1934, and Hitler became dictator by merging the powers of the chancellery and presidency. A 1934 German referendum confirmed Hitler as sole Führer (leader). Power was centralised in Hitler's person, his word became the highest law. The government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitler's favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment, using heavy military spending. Financed by deficit spending, the regime undertook extensive public works projects, including the Autobahnen (motorways) and a massive secret rearmament program, forming the Wehrmacht (armed forces). The return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity. Racism, Nazi eugenics, anti-Slavism, and especially antisemitism were central ideological features of the regime. The Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the "master race", the purest branch of the Aryan race. Discrimination and persecution of Jews and Romani people accelerated. The first concentration camps were established in March 1933. Jews, liberals, socialists, communists, other political opponents and undesirables were imprisoned, exiled, or murdered. Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed and leaders imprisoned. Education focused on racial biology, population policy, and fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. The 1936 Summer Olympics showcased Germany on the international stage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, and Hitler's hypnotic oratory to influence public opinion. The government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. From the latter half of the 1930s, Nazi Germany made increasingly aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if these were not met. The Saarland voted to rejoin Germany in 1935, and in 1936 Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarised after World War I. Germany seized Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, and demanded and received the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in that same year. In March 1939, the Slovak state was proclaimed and became a client state and the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was established on the remainder of occupied Czech lands. Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, launching World War II in Europe. By late 1942, Germany and its European allies in the Axis powers controlled much of Europe and North Africa. Germany exploited the raw materials and labour of its occupied territories and allies. Genocide, mass murder, and large-scale forced labour became hallmarks of the regime. Generalplan Ost was implemented to exterminate the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe and advance the Lebensraum settler-colonial programme. Hundreds of thousands with mental or physical disabilities were murdered in hospitals and asylums. Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death squads accompanied the armed forces inside the occupied territories and conducted genocide of millions of Jews and other Holocaust victims. Millions were imprisoned, worked to death, or murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps. This genocide is known as the Holocaust. While the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was initially successful, the Soviet resurgence and entry of the US into the war meant Germany lost the initiative in 1943, and by late 1944 had been pushed back to the 1939 border. Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated and the Axis powers were driven back in Eastern and Southern Europe. After the Allied invasion of France, Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union from the east and the other Allies from the west, and capitulated on 8 May 1945. Hitler's refusal to admit defeat led to massive destruction of German infrastructure and additional war-related deaths in the closing months of the war. The Allies initiated a policy of denazification and put many of the surviving Nazi leadership on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
Lauren Wingfield
Managing Editor,
The Opportunistic Trader 
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