Cornelius Vander Starr
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Cornelius Vander Starr
Cornelius Vander Starr (October 15, 1892 – December 20, 1968), sometimes known as Neil Starr, was an American businessman and founder of C.V. Starr & Co. (later known as Starr Companies) in Shanghai, China, which became insurance giant AIG and AIA Group. AIG grew from an initial market value of $300 million to $180 billion, becoming the largest insurance company in the world. Early life Starr was born to parents of Dutch ancestry. His father was a railroad engineer. Starr attended University of California, Berkeley from 1910 to 1911 before dropping out and returning to his hometown of Fort Bragg, California. There he began his first business venture, selling ice cream, at the age of nineteen. He joined the U.S. Army in 1918 but was never deployed overseas because World War I had ended. Unable to resist a strong urge to travel and understand the world, he joined the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as a clerk in Yokohama, Japan. Later that year, he traveled to Shanghai where h ...
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Fort Bragg, California
Fort Bragg is a city along the North Coast (California), North Coast of California in Mendocino County, California, Mendocino County. The city is west of Willits, California, Willits, at an elevation of . Its population was 6,983 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Fort Bragg is a tourist destination because of its views of the Pacific Ocean. Among its points of interest are Glass Beach (Fort Bragg, California), Glass Beach and the California Western Railroad (popularly known as the "Skunk Train"). A California Historical Landmark, Fort Bragg was founded in 1857 prior to the American Civil War as a military garrison rather than a fortification. It was named after army officer Braxton Bragg, who at the time had served the U.S. in the Mexican–American War (and would later serve in the Confederate States Army, Confederate Army during the Civil War). The city was incorporated in 1889. History The area known as Fort Bragg was home to Native Americans in the United ...
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William J
William is a masculine given name of Germanic origin. It became popular in England after the Norman conquest in 1066,All Things William"Meaning & Origin of the Name"/ref> and remained so throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era. It is sometimes abbreviated "Wm." Shortened familiar versions in English include Will or Wil, Wills, Willy, Willie, Bill, Billie, and Billy. A common Irish form is Liam. Scottish diminutives include Wull, Willie or Wullie (as in Oor Wullie). Female forms include Willa, Willemina, Wilma and Wilhelmina. Etymology William is related to the German given name ''Wilhelm''. Both ultimately descend from Proto-Germanic ''*Wiljahelmaz'', with a direct cognate also in the Old Norse name ''Vilhjalmr'' and a West Germanic borrowing into Medieval Latin ''Willelmus''. The Proto-Germanic name is a compound of *''wiljô'' "will, wish, desire" and *''helmaz'' "helm, helmet".Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxf ...
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Current Biography
''Current Biography'' is an American monthly magazine published by the H. W. Wilson Company of New York City, a publisher of reference books, that appears every month except December. ''Current Biography'' contains profiles of people in the news and includes politicians, athletes, businessmen, and entertainers. Published since 1940, the articles are annually collected into bound volumes called ''Current Biography Yearbook''. A December issue of the magazine is not published because the staff works on the final cumulative volume for the year. Articles in the bound volumes correct any mistakes that may have appeared in the magazine and may include additional relevant information about the subject that became available since publication of the original article. The work is a standard reference source in American libraries, and the publisher keeps in print the older volumes. Wilson also issues cumulative indexes to the set, and an online version is available as a subscription databas ...
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People's Liberation Army
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People's Republic of China (PRC). It consists of four Military branch, services—People's Liberation Army Ground Force, Ground Force, People's Liberation Army Navy, Navy, People's Liberation Army Air Force, Air Force, and People's Liberation Army Rocket Force, Rocket Force—and four arms—People's Liberation Army Aerospace Force, Aerospace Force, People's Liberation Army Cyberspace Force, Cyberspace Force, People's Liberation Army Information Support Force, Information Support Force, and People's Liberation Army Joint Logistics Support Force, Joint Logistics Support Force. It is led by the Central Military Commission (China), Central Military Commission (CMC) with its Chairman of the Central Military Commission (China), chairman as Supreme Military Command of the People's Republic of China, commander-in-chief. The PLA can trace its origins during the Republic of China (1912– ...
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Duncan Lee
Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee (1913–1988) was a confidential senior assistant to Maj. Gen. William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), World War II-era predecessor of the CIA, between 1942 and 1946. Lee has posthumously been identified by the Venona project as the NKVD mole inside the OSS with the code name "Koch", making Lee the most senior alleged spy the Soviet Union is ever known to have recruited inside the U.S. intelligence community. Career OSS As an OSS officer, Lee served as head of the China section of SI, the Secret Intelligence Branch. While an officer, according to Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley, Lee—reportedly a descendant of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee—covertly furnished her with information on "anti-Soviet work by OSS" and other topics of interest to Moscow, which was technically an ally (in Europe) following the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact. In November 1944, Anatoly Gorsky reported to Moscow t ...
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X-2 Counter Espionage Branch
The head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), William Donovan, created the X-2 Counter Espionage Branch in 1943 to provide liaison with and assist the British in its exploitation of the Ultra program's intelligence during World War II. A few months before, Donovan had established a Counterintelligence Division within the Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS but rescinded this order upon development of the X-2. The X-2 was led by James Murphy, whose branch would have the power to veto operations of the Special Operations and Secret Intelligence Branches without explanation. Donovan modeled the Counter Espionage Branch on British Counter Espionage. With the creation of the X-2 Branch, the British insisted that it follow British security procedures to maintain the secrecy of Ultra. The X-2 established separate lines of communication for itself as a self-contained unit. By the end of World War II, the X-2 had discovered around 3,000 Axis agents. Overview Background With the begi ...
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Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming Chancellor of Germany#Nazi Germany (1933–1945), the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of in 1934. His invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust: the genocide of Holocaust victims, about six million Jews and millions of other victims. Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary and moved to German Empire, Germany in 1913. He was decorated during his service in the German Army in the First World War, receiving the Iron Cross. In 1919 he joined the German Workers' Party (DAP), the precursor of the Nazi Party, and in 1921 was app ...
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Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of newspapers in the United States, sixth-largest newspaper in the U.S. and the largest in the Western United States with a print circulation of 118,760. It has 500,000 online subscribers, the fifth-largest among U.S. newspapers. Owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by California Times, the paper has won over 40 Pulitzer Prizes since its founding. In the 19th century, the paper developed a reputation for civic boosterism and opposition to Trade union, labor unions, the latter of which led to the Los Angeles Times bombing, bombing of its headquarters in 1910. The paper's profile grew substantially in the 1960s under publisher Otis Chandler, who adopted a more national focus. As with other regional newspapers in California and the United Sta ...
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Mark Fritz
Mark Fritz is a war correspondent and author. A native of Detroit and graduate of Wayne State University, he won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1995 for his stories concerning the Rwandan genocide. Journalism career As a staff writer for the Associated Press (AP), from 1984-1997, and again in 2003, Fritz reported on the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Chechnya, and Liberia, among others. As an AP editor on the Foreign Desk, he filed the first U.S. bulletin on the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. He subsequently was named East Berlin correspondent, then West Africa bureau chief. Fritz also served a stint on the agency's computer-assisted investigative reporting team and as roving foreign correspondent for the International Desk in New York. He subsequently worked as a New York-based national writer for the ''Los Angeles Times'' and the ''Boston Globe'', and as an investigat ...
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Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong pronounced ; traditionally Romanization of Chinese, romanised as Mao Tse-tung. (26December 18939September 1976) was a Chinese politician, revolutionary, and political theorist who founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and led the country from Proclamation of the People's Republic of China, its establishment until Death and state funeral of Mao Zedong, his death in 1976. Mao served as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1943 until his death, and as the party's ''de facto'' leader from 1935. His theories, which he advocated as a Chinese adaptation of Marxism–Leninism, are known as Maoism. Born to a peasant family in Shaoshan, Hunan, Mao studied in Changsha and was influenced by the 1911 Revolution and ideas of Chinese nationalism and anti-imperialism. He was introduced to Marxism while working as a librarian at Peking University, and later participated in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In 1921, Mao became a founding member of the ...
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