#but the other two have publicly worked and succeeded to thwart their plans

[ceaselessbasher]

"We do not have an institutional archangel falling problem," said the archangel falling institution

[seymour-butz-stuff]

President Donald Trump’s onslaught of falsehoods about the November election misled millions of Americans, undermined faith in the electoral system, sparked a deadly riot — and has now left taxpayers with a large, and growing, bill.

The total so far: $519 million.

The costs have mounted daily as government agencies at all levels have been forced to devote public funds to respond to actions taken by Trump and his supporters, according to a Washington Post review of local, state and federal spending records, as well as interviews with government officials. The expenditures include legal fees prompted by dozens of fruitless lawsuits, enhanced security in response to death threats against poll workers, and costly repairs needed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That attack triggered the expensive massing of thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington amid fears of additional extremist violence.

Although more than $480 million of the total is attributable to the military’s estimated expenses for the troop deployment through mid-March, the financial impact of the president’s refusal to concede the election is probably much higher than what has been documented thus far, and the true costs may never be known.

Many officials contacted by The Post said they were still trying to tally the cost of rapidly scaling up security to deal with the increased threat of violence from Trump supporters. Others have given up on trying to calculate their costs — perplexed over how to calculate the financial impact of a president’s injecting so much instability into the democratic system — opting instead to simply absorb them as the cost of doing business in the Trump era. 

Some officials have shifted their attention to making plans for additional security measures going forward in the threatening environment fostered by Trump’s conspiratorial brand of politics.

“I think anytime you see an event like we saw on January 6th, it changes your perspective going forward. You don’t take things for granted like we used to,” said Michael Rapich, superintendent of the Utah Highway Patrol, which spent $227,000 on Jan. 17 to deploy 300 troopers to the state’s Capitol after threats of an armed siege by Trump supporters ahead of the inauguration of President Biden. “It is an incredible amount of money to spend.”

Other states spent even more, and officials are beginning to draft new security budgets that suggest ongoing security costs will grow significantly in the future as a result of the Capitol breach.

The bill to the federal government continues to grow daily, as thousands of National Guard troops patrol Washington and lawmakers consider a supplemental spending proposal to bolster their security.

The 25,000 troops that were deployed to Washington traveled on military planes and stayed in local hotels — their presence aimed at restoring order in the nation’s capital after an attempted insurrection that overwhelmed Capitol police and ended in five deaths. The cost estimate of the troops, first reported by Bloomberg News, covers the troop presence at the Capitol through mid-March, according to Defense Department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal figures. With an unprecedented show of force that included checkpoints and militarized zones in Washington, the troops succeeded in thwarting efforts to disrupt Biden’s swearing-in, which took place on the same platform stormed by Trump-supporting rioters two weeks earlier.

It is not clear whether the House Democrats managing Trump’s impeachment trial plan to bring up the financial costs borne by taxpayers as a result of what critics have called his “big lie.” The trial begins Tuesday, and Democrats have focused heavily on Trump’s speech to supporters shortly before the Capitol riot.

A spokeswoman for Trump’s presidential office did not respond to a request for comment. Trump’s defense lawyers have argued that he was within his rights to publicly question the election’s integrity and should not be held responsible for the actions of people who attacked the Capitol after his speech.

Several states are working to calculate the taxpayer costs for additional security and related expenses in the aftermath of the November election and the Jan. 6 protests.

In California, state officials estimated they spent about $19 million, deploying 1,000 National Guard troops and hundreds of state troopers from Jan. 14 to Jan. 21 to protect the state Capitol and other locations.

“That’s a lot of money, even by California standards, for one week’s worth of work,” California Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said in an interview. “But it was necessary work to make sure that we didn’t see the damage that could have occurred, had we had a crowd that was bent on doing damage to the building.”

In Ohio, taxpayers spent $1.2 million to deploy National Guard troops to the closed Statehouse building in Columbus. The New Mexico legislature increased its appropriation for Capitol security during the 60-day session by almost 40 percent this month, handing taxpayers a bill of $1.5 million for personnel, equipment and other expenses, officials said.

Taxpayers paid to deploy helicopters to monitor potential demonstrations in Texas and North Carolina, temporary fencing around the capitols in Lansing, Mich., and Olympia, Wash., and extra security details for state lawmakers attending legislative sessions.

D.C. police dispatched 850 officers to help defend the Capitol, spending more than $8.8 million during the week of Jan. 6, acting police chief Robert J. Contee III said in his opening statement before a closed session of the House Appropriations Committee on Jan. 26. Contee said the final tab will probably be much higher, and police and prosecutors will be “engaged for years” investigating and trying the rioters.

“The costs for this insurrection — both human and monetary — will be steep,” he said. “The immediate fiscal impact is still being calculated.”

For many states, the post-Jan. 6 costs added to a tab that has been growing since shortly after polls closed on Nov. 3. Trump’s false assertion that night that he had won the election and that it was being stolen in ballot-processing centers led to credible threats against poll workers and facilities where they were working. Between added legal fees to fend off conspiracy-theory-laced lawsuits from Trump and enhanced security for election officials, states’ costs resulting from the president’s central fabrication about the Nov. 3 vote have escalated rapidly.

States spent untold millions of dollars on election recounts not required by law but demanded by Trump and legal and state legislative hearings.

Protesters, some armed, amassed at ballot-processing centers in places such as Maricopa County, Ariz.; Detroit; and Las Vegas in the days after Nov. 3, echoing Trump’s rhetoric about a rigged election.

The added bill comes as many states are resource-strapped as a result of a pandemic that has wracked the economy and decimated state budgets.

Chris Loftis, communications director for the Washington State Patrol, said the new “staggeringly high” costs for security and other expenses constituted “a wasteful distraction of essential and diminishing resources.”

Not included in the more than $4 million estimated security bill for Washington state taxpayers is the yet-to-be-determined cost of fixing a gate at the governor’s mansion broken by armed demonstrators on Jan. 6.

“Not only have our people, places and processes of democracy been attacked and damaged, but the continuing expense of this new security environment will take away from funds that could have been used for covid vaccines and treatment” and other critical expenses, Loftis said.

In Georgia, which faced a large share of Trump’s post-election fraud charges, officials conducted two recounts of the presidential vote. One was triggered by Biden’s narrow margin of victory over Trump, leading to a hand recount of all 5 million presidential ballots cast — the largest hand recount in U.S. history. The Trump campaign then requested another recount — this time, a machine rescan of those hand-recounted ballots. Both recounts reaffirmed Biden’s victory. They also added extra costs for staff time and the security of election administrators, who faced growing threats and, in some cases, required 24-hour police details.

In Fulton County, Georgia’s largest, taxpayers spent an estimated $500,000 on security alone for election officials, who faced harassment and threats fueled by conspiracy theories over the November election.

Other state and local officials spent funds to battle with Trump’s well-funded team of lawyers in court. Trump and his allies devoted more than $11 million to a failed legal effort that included dozens of lawsuits and repeated losses in court due to a lack of evidence. After the Nov. 3 election and through the end of December, Trump and the Republican Party paid at least 65 firms or lawyers on election-related legal challenges, according to federal campaign finance filings.

The state of Pennsylvania hired several private law firms to deal with the onslaught of election litigation, paying outside lawyers as much as $480 per hour to fight Trump’s claims of rigged voting.

How much taxpayers ultimately had to spend to beat back Trump’s efforts to delay certification or overturn the results remains unknown, because many state officials did not specifically track their legal expenses.

“Although difficult to quantify, many legal hours were invested by the secretary of state’s general counsel and attorneys with the New Mexico attorney general’s office in responding to the baseless lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign,” said Alex Curtas, a spokesman for the New Mexico secretary of state.

Many officials said that while they wished the cost incurred as a result of Trump’s baseless voter-fraud allegations could have gone to more productive purposes, they saw the expenses as necessary to defending democracy.

“Safety isn’t cheap. Preparedness isn’t cheap,” Loftis said. “But neither are the lives of the elected leaders and support staff that we have been protecting, the historic and symbolic buildings they work in or the processes of democracy they represent.”

Congress is also grappling with calculating the expected costs of cleaning up and shoring up the Capitol after rioters carrying Trump flags and wearing MAGA hats smashed windows, busted doors, destroyed light fixtures and sprayed graffiti. The hours-long clash between law enforcement and insurrectionists left the building with battle scars that could take months to assess and repair, officials said.

“Statues, murals, historic benches and original shutters all suffered varying degrees of damage — primarily from pepper spray accretions and residue from tear gas and fire extinguishers — that will require cleaning and conservation,” according to an initial assessment of the damage by the office of the architect of the Capitol, which is responsible for preserving and maintaining the Capitol complex.

An official estimate for repair and cleanup costs is still being compiled, said Laura Condeluci, a spokeswoman for the office.

Congressional officials are also trying to determine the costs for securing the Capitol going forward. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) requested a third-party review of security protocols for lawmakers and said she expected Congress to put forward a supplemental spending bill specifically for beefing up security for lawmakers. The $515 million annual budget of the Capitol Police is funded through congressional appropriations.

The agency, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment about how much the Jan. 6 riot cost, has placed many of its officers on 12-hour shifts and installed magnetometers and other additional security measures in recent weeks to deal with the increased threat of violence against lawmakers.

Acting Capitol Police chief Yogananda Pittman said in a Jan. 28 statement that “vast improvements” were needed for security in the future, including permanent fencing and backup forces in the vicinity of the Capitol complex.

The idea of creating a fence around the Capitol has received pushback from some congressional leaders and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), but it could ultimately be an expensive prospect if approved. The recent project to replace and upgrade the fencing around the White House complex, for example, cost about $64 million.

In the meantime, members of Congress are taking additional security measures on their own, ranging from bulletproof vests to private security details and surveillance cameras. Taxpayers are ultimately footing the bill, as lawmakers increasingly use their publicly funded Members’ Representational Allowances, known as “MRAs,” to protect themselves.

Pelosi has suggested that she wants the supplemental spending bill to cover much of those costs, so members can use the MRAs for their original purpose of serving constituents.

Pelosi has also encouraged lawmakers to attend post-traumatic counseling sessions organized in response to the riot. A spokesman for Pelosi did not respond to questions seeking the cost of the third-party security review, the counseling sessions or other ancillary expenses in the aftermath of Jan. 6.

Whatever their costs, those and other measures are expected to only grow over time as lawmakers deal with what the Department of Homeland Security recently described in a bulletin as a “heightened threat environment” in which domestic extremists may act on “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”

Robert McCrie, who teaches security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, compared the circumstances to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which led to a range of permanent security measures and expenses that have continued for almost 20 years.

“There’s no going back,” he said. “Our institutions have to be protected. They’re symbolic, but more than that, they are centers of government, of our sense of having a stable society. So those funds have to be spent.”

Federal investigators have also devoted considerable time and resources to identifying, finding and prosecuting rioters who breached the Capitol and threatened lawmakers; an officer also died after suffering injuries in the attack, and dozens of others were wounded.

U.S. authorities have opened case files on more than 400 potential suspects and obtained more than 500 grand jury subpoenas and search warrants in the sprawling investigation, acting U.S. attorney Michael R. Sherwin told reporters Jan. 26.

A nationwide manhunt has already resulted in 135 arrests and 150 federal criminally charged cases, according to Sherwin, the top prosecutor in D.C.

More charges could follow.

Law enforcement officials have estimated that roughly 800 people entered the Capitol without authorization, The Post reported last month.

The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment on the costs of the prosecutions and investigations, but some inside the bureau have described the Capitol riot case as their biggest since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Loftis, the Washington State Patrol spokesman, has said he has the full backing of his agency’s leadership to speak out.

“The selfish madness that caused this national self-inflicted wound must be addressed, as it has heaped tragedy on top of tragedy,” he said. “If those of us in law enforcement don’t speak up in defense of democracy and public safety, then our silence becomes a dreadfully powerful statement in its own right.”

[bountyofbeads]

Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html

Shoot Them in the Legs, Trump Suggested: Inside His Border War(Trump is nothing more than a thug and wannabe mobster. 🤢🤬🤬🤬)

By Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis | Published Oct. 1, 2019 Updated 7:19 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted October 1, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.

The advisers feared the president’s edict would trap American tourists in Mexico, strand children at schools on both sides of the border and create an economic meltdown in two countries. Yet they also knew how much the president’s zeal to stop immigration had sent him lurching for solutions, one more extreme than the next.

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him.

“The president was frustrated and I think he took that moment to hit the reset button,” said Thomas D. Homan, who had served as Mr. Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recalling that week in March. “The president wanted it to be fixed quickly.”

Mr. Trump’s order to close the border was a decision point that touched off a frenzied week of presidential rages, round-the-clock staff panic and far more White House turmoil than was known at the time. By the end of the week, the seat-of-the-pants president had backed off his threat but had retaliated with the beginning of a purge of the aides who had tried to contain him.

Today, as Mr. Trump is surrounded by advisers less willing to stand up to him, his threat to seal off the country from a flood of immigrants remains active. “I have absolute power to shut down the border,” he said in an interview this summer with The New York Times.

This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen White House and administration officials directly involved in the events of that week in March. They were granted anonymity to describe sensitive conversations with the president and top officials in the government.

In the Oval Office that March afternoon, a 30-minute meeting extended to more than two hours as Mr. Trump’s team tried desperately to placate him.

“You are making me look like an idiot!” Mr. Trump shouted, adding in a profanity, as multiple officials in the room described it. “I ran on this. It’s my issue.”

Among those in the room were Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary at the time; Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state; Kevin K. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief at the time; and Stephen Miller, the White House aide who, more than anyone, had orchestrated Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff was also there, along with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and other senior staff.

Ms. Nielsen, a former aide to George W. Bush brought into the department by John F. Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, was in a perilous position. She had always been viewed with suspicion by the president, who told aides she was “a Bushie,” and part of the “deep state” who once contributed to a group that supported Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump had routinely berated Ms. Nielsen as ineffective and, worse — at least in his mind — not tough-looking enough. “Lou Dobbs hates you, Ann Coulter hates you, you’re making me look bad,” Mr. Trump would tell her, referring to the Fox Business Network host and the conservative commentator.

The happiest he had been with Ms. Nielsen was a few months earlier, when American border agents had fired tear gas into Mexico to try to stop migrants from crossing into the United States. Human rights organizations condemned the move, but Mr. Trump loved it. More often, though, she drew the president’s scorn.

That March day, he was furious at Mr. Pompeo, too, for having cut a deal with Mexico to allow the United States to reject some asylum seekers — a plan Mr. Trump said was clearly failing.

A complete shutdown of the border, Mr. Trump said, was the only way.

Ms. Nielsen had tried reasoning with the president on many occasions. When she stood up to him during a cabinet meeting the previous spring, he excoriated her and she almost resigned.

Now, she tried again to reason with him.

We can close the border, she told the president, but it’s not going to fix anything. People will still be permitted to claim asylum.

But Mr. Trump was unmoved. Even Mr. Kushner, who had developed relationships with Mexican officials and now sided with Ms. Nielsen, could not get through to him.

“All you care about is your friends in Mexico,” the president snapped, according to people in the room. “I’ve had it. I want it done at noon tomorrow.”

The Start of an Overhaul

The president’s advisers left the meeting in a near panic.

Every year more than $200 billion worth of American exports flow across the Mexican border. Closing it would wreak havoc on American farmers and automakers, among many others. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said in an interview at the time that a border shutdown would have “a potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country.”

That night, White House advisers succeeded in convincing the president to give them a reprieve, but only for a week, until the following Friday. That gave them very little time to change the president’s mind.

They started by pressuring their Mexican counterparts to rapidly increase apprehensions of migrants. Mr. Kushner and others in the West Wing showered the president with emails proving that the Mexicans had already started apprehending more migrants before they could enter the United States.

White House advisers encouraged a stream of corporate executives, Republican lawmakers and officials from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to tell Mr. Trump how damaging a border closure would be.

Mr. Miller, meanwhile, saw an opportunity.

It was his view that the president needed to completely overhaul the Homeland Security Department and get rid of senior officials who he believed were thwarting efforts to block immigrants. Although many were the president’s handpicked aides, Mr. Miller told him they had become part of the problem by constantly citing legal hurdles.

Ms. Nielsen, who regularly found herself telling Mr. Trump why he couldn’t have what he wanted, was an obvious target. When the president demanded “flat black” paint on his border wall, she said it would cost an additional $1 million per mile. When he ordered wall construction sped up, she said they needed permission from property owners. Take the land, Mr. Trump would say, and let them sue us.

When Ms. Nielsen tried to get him to focus on something other than the border, the president grew impatient. During a briefing on the need for new legal authority to take down drones, Mr. Trump cut her off midsentence.

“Kirstjen, you didn’t hear me the first time, honey,” Mr. Trump said, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Shoot ’em down. Sweetheart, just shoot ’em out of the sky, O.K.?”

But the problem went deeper than Ms. Nielsen, Mr. Miller believed. L. Francis Cissna, the head of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services until earlier this year, regularly pushed back on Mr. Miller’s demand for a “culture change” at the agency, where Mr. Miller believed asylum officers were bleeding hearts, too quick to extend protections to immigrants.

They needed to start with the opposite point of view, Mr. Miller told him, and start turning people away.

John Mitnick, the homeland security general counsel who often raised legal concerns about Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, was also on Mr. Miller’s blacklist. Mr. Miller had also turned against Ronald D. Vitiello, a top official at Customs and Border Protection whom the president had nominated to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

By midweek, the campaign to change Mr. Trump’s mind about closing the border seemed to be working.

Maybe there’s another way to do this, the president told Ms. Nielsen. How about if I impose tariffs on the Mexicans, or threaten to impose tariffs? Tariffs are great.

But the staff worried that his retreat would only be temporary. The president never really let go of his obsessions.

They were right. On a trip to California late in the week, Mr. Trump turned to Mr. McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection chief, with a new idea: He wanted him to stop letting migrants cross the border at all, with no exceptions. If you get into any trouble for it, Mr. Trump told him, I’ll pardon you.

The Turning Point

Once on the ground, Mr. Trump met up with Ms. Nielsen and worked a room filled with Border Patrol agents. Start turning away migrants at the border, he told them. My message to you is, keep them all out, the president said. Every single one of them. The country is full.

After the president left the room, Mr. McAleenan told the agents to ignore the president. You absolutely do not have the authority to stop processing migrants altogether, he warned.

As she and her staff flew back to Washington that Friday evening, Ms. Nielsen called the president. She knew he was angry with her.

“Sir, I know you’re really frustrated,” she told him. The president invited her to meet with him on Sunday in the White House residence.

Ms. Nielsen knew that Miller wanted her out, so she spent the flight huddled with aides on a strategy for getting control of the border, a Hail Mary pass. She called it the “Six C’s” — Congress, Courts, Communications, Countries, Criminals, Cartels.

Unbeknown to her, Ms. Nielsen’s staff started work on her letter of resignation.

When Ms. Nielsen presented her plan to Mr. Trump at the White House, he dismissed it and told her what he really needed was a cement wall.

“Sir,” she said, “I literally don’t think that’s even possible.” They couldn’t build that now even if it would work, which it wouldn’t, Ms. Nielsen told him. The designs for steel barriers had long since been finalized, the contracts bid and signed.

The president responded that it was time for her to go, Mr. Trump recalled later. “Kirstjen, I want to make a change,” he said.

The president said he would wait a week to announce her resignation, to leave time for a transition. But before Ms. Nielsen had left the White House that day, the word was leaking out. By evening, Mr. Trump was tweeting about it.

“Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen will be leaving her position,” Trump wrote, “and I would like to thank her for her service.”

The dismissal was a turning point for Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, the start of the purge that ushered in a team that embraced Mr. Miller’s policies.

Mr. Trump quickly dismissed Claire M. Grady, the homeland security under secretary, and moved Mr. McAleenan to take Ms. Nielsen’s old job. Within two months, Mr. Cissna was out as well, replaced by Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former Virginia attorney general and an immigration hard-liner.

On Aug. 12, Mr. Cuccinelli announced that the government would deny green cards for immigrants deemed likely to become “public charges.” Nine days later, Mr. McAleenan announced regulations to allow immigrant families to be detained indefinitely.

In the months since the purge, the president has repeated his threat of placing tariffs on Mexico to spur aggressive enforcement at the border. Mr. McAleenan and Mr. Cuccinelli have embraced restrictive asylum rules. And the Pentagon approved shifting $3.6 billion to build the wall.

Mr. Trump has continued to face resistance in the courts and public outrage about his immigration agenda. But the people who tried to restrain him have largely been replaced.

In the interview with The Times this past summer, Mr. Trump said he had seriously considered sealing the border during March, but acknowledged that doing so would have been “very severe.”

“The problem you have with the laws the way they are, we can have 100,000 of our soldiers standing up there — they can’t do a thing,” Mr. Trump said ruefully.

This article is adapted from “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration,” to be published by Simon & Schuster on Oct. 8.

[clan-purcell-blog]

Clan Purcell Timeline

1000 BBY:

The Old Republic is dismantled and the Galactic Republic is created in its place.

522 BBY:

The Citadel is created to house rogue Jedi, in order to prevent an future uprisings like the Hundred Year Darkness.

49 BBY:

Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious are the latest Sith in Darth Bane's lineage following the rule of two.

48 BBY:

After learning everything he can from his Master, Darth Plagueis, Sidious kills him in his sleep.

47 BBY:

Darth Sidious is publicly known as Senator Sheev Palpatine of Naboo. His end goal is to manufacture a conflict big enough to throw the Republic into chaos and seize political power for himself.

45 BBY:

Sidious meets Mother Talzin and takes her son, Maul as his apprentice.

44 BBY:

Together Sidious and Maul travel to the Sith temple on Malachor where Maul learns the history of the Sith and is instilled with an intense hatred and desire for the destruction of the Jedi.

41 BBY:

Shmi Skywalker gives birth to a fatherless son she names "Anakin" who is conceived purely by the will of the Cosmic Force.

38 BBY:

When Anakin is three, he and his mother become the property of the junk dealer Watto  on the remote desert world, Tatooine.

37 BBY:

The Mandalorian people experience Civil War as the Duchess Satine Kryze tries to shift their culture from that of conqerors to pacifists. The terrorist group know as Death Watch wants to assassinate the Duchess, so Jedi Master Qui Gon Jinn and his Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi are tasked with her protection.

36 BBY:

They are on the run for a year and Obi-Wan and Satine develop feelings for each other, but when the war comes to an end, the Duchess returns to Mandalore to lead her now pacifist people, and Obi-Wan continues his Jedi Training.

35 BBY:

A Jedi Master named Syfo Dias has visions of an upcoming conflict and attempts to warn the Galactic Republic. He Is dismissed as a warmonger and is removed from the Jedi Council. He takes matters into his own hands by commissioning the Kaminoans to create a Clone Army for the Republic, which captures the attention of Sidious.

33 BBY:

Maul grows impatient of his Master's plans and secrecy and seeks to test his power against a Jedi Padawan known as Eldra Kaitis. He kills her, much to his masters delight.

32 BBY: Sidious begins the first phase of his Master plan by engineering a blockade of his home planet. Qui Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi are sent to end the dispute. They rescue the planet's ruler, Queen Padme Amidala and are forced to retreat to Tatooine where they meet Anakin Skywalker. Recognising his immense yet untrained potential in the force, Qui Gon arranges for Anakin's freedom and takes him back to Coruscant. The Galactic Republic's inability to settle the matter on Naboo reveals the ineffectiveness of the Senate and allows Palpatine to not only vote the Supreme Chancellor out of office, but also seize power for himself. Qui Gon, Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme return to Naboo to remove the blockade by force. Maul confronts then and cuts down Qui Gon before being dealt a mortal wound himself. Anakin is admitted to the Jedi Order as the Padawan of Obi-Wan. Despite the loss of Maul and the end of the blockade, Palpatine achieved his goal and sets his eyes on Anakin as his replacement, but in the meantime settles for a former jaded Jedi, Dooku.

30 BBY:

Sidious and Dooku arrange for the death of Sifo Dias and secretly take control of the clone army he commissioned.

29 BBY:

Anakin trains with Obi-Wan for three years proving to be incredibly powerful. He falls under the mentorship of the supreme Chancellor, who encourages the boys thought that the Jedi Order are not what he expected.

22 BBY:

Ten years after the blockade of Naboo, Dooku leads a number of star systems in succeeding to the Republic, beginning the conflict that was foreseen by Sifo Dias. The republic Senate is hesitant to create an army. Dooku orders the assassination of Padme Amidala who is a staunch opponent to militarization of the Republic. The assassination fails, Anakin is tasked with her protection and the two fall in love. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan hunts the would be assassins and discovers the Clone Army on Kamino. Fearing they have no other choice, the Senate grants the chancellor emergency powers, gives the Jedi Order command of the clones, and the Clone War begins. Anakin secretly marries Padme, rises to the rank of Jedi Knight and is assigned a Padawan named Ahsoka.

21 BBY:

The Republic discovers plans for a new super weapon in the hands of the Separatists. Palpatine manipulates a small group of scientists and engineers into creating the weapon for themselves, but the super laser proves to be a challenging breakthrough. Dooku takes an apprentice of his own, a Night Sister names Asajj Ventress. Sidious grows wary of ventresses strength and commands that she be killed as a test of Dooku's loyalty. She escapes the attempt on her life and becomes a bounty hunter. Anakin and Ahsoka grow close, but they both see the less noble side of the Jedi when Ahsoka is wrongly accused of murder and kicked out of the order. Anakin clears her name, and she is invited back, but feeling betrayed by those she respected most, she decides to leave.

20 BBY: Anakin's trust in the Jedi Order is weakened. The true murderer is arrested and announces her belief that the Jedi have lost their way by openly serving in the clone wars. A young Jedi named Caleb Doom begins training under his Master Depa Billaba after thwarting a terrorist attack on the Jedi temple together. The Jedi decide that the quickest way to end the clone wars would be the assassination of Count Dooku. In the midst of a battle, a Clone murders one of his Jedi Generals. An investigation reveals the presence of an inhibitor chip placed on the minds of all clone soldiers. Only two clones learn the whole truth. One is killed by his clone brothers, and the other and the other is captured and placed on stasis aboard a separatist cruiser that becomes lost in hyperspace. However, later on a number of clones learn the truth for themselves, prompting them to remove their inhibitor chips.

19 BBY:

Maul, after surviving his fatal injury on Naboo takes control of Mandalore and the Mandalorian Death Watch. He kills Duchess Satine in front of Obi-Wan as revenge. Maul's actions catch the attention of his former Master who sees him as a potential rival. He puts an end to him by chasing him throughout the galaxy and diminishing his power. And killing his mother Talzin. He takes his few followers back to Mandalore. There he is met in combat by a joint force of Mandalorians and Clones led by Ahsoka. He Is defeated and goes into hiding. As the siege of Mandalore begins, war comes to Coruscant for the first time in one thousand years. Anakin confronts and kills Count Dooku, again leaving Sidious without an apprentice. Padme becomes pregnant with Anakin's child and he begins to have visions of her death. Desperate to save her, he seeks advice from Palpatine who not only reveals he is a Sith Lord, but that he has the power to save Padme. Anakin joins Sidious and takes up the name Darth Vader for a chance to save his wife. He betrays the Jedi Order, kills Mace Windu, and leads an attack on the Jedi Temple. Simultaneously, Palpatine issues a command to all clones that triggers their chips, forcing them to kill the Jedi. Within moments, most of the Jedi Order is destroyed. Anakin is then sent to Mustafar to assassinate the remaining members of the Confederacy of Independant Systems. With their deaths, the Clone Wars come to an end. Having no one left to oppose him, Palpatine transitions the Republic into the first Galactic Empire and proclaims himself emperor of the galaxy. Caleb, Ahsoka, Yoda and Obi-Wan survive  the Great Jedi Purge and the initial attack on the Jedi Order. Yoda confronts Sidious while Obi-Wan confronts Anakin. Yoda is defeated and goes into exile on the planet Dagobah. Anakin is dismembered and badly burned, but left clinging to life by Obi-Wan. Padme dies giving birth to twins she names Luke and Leia. Leia is hidden with Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan. And Obi-Wan takes Luke to his Aunt and Uncle on Anakin's home planet Tatooine. Sidious informs Darth Vader that his wife and children are dead and he is forced to wear a bio-mechanical suit in order to survive, and he takes up his position as apprentice to Darth Sidious. He Is then placed in charge of the Empire's "Jedi Killers" known as the inquisitorious, which is made up of fallen Jedi. They are tasked with hunting and killing any Jedi that survived the Great Jedi Purge. The Super Weapon known as the Death Star continues its construction and the brilliant scientist known as Galen Erso is manipulated into designing the laser.

18 BBY:

Caleb is forced to abandon the ways of the Jedi in order to remain hidden. He changes his name to Kanan Jarrus. Ahsoka hides in the outer rim for a year until she discovers Bail Organa. They join forces to help systems that have fallen under the oppression of the Empire, and she takes up the codename Fulcrum.

17 BBY:

Galen Erso discovers he is creating a weapon of terrible power for the Empire and escapes to the outer rim with the aid of a rebel and Clone Wars veteran named Saw Gerrera.

14 BBY:

Darth Vader and his inquisitors continue their hunt for remaining Jedi for the next five years. Moff Tarkin - a merciless Imperial Leader is tasked with the protection of the Death Star after Galen's escape. Rebels come close to discovering the Death Star, but with the help of Darth Vader, Tarkin not only destroys them, but reveals an Imperial Traitor. His success prompts his promotion to Grand Moff, the first of the Empire.

13 BBY:

Galen Erso remains hidden for four years but is eventually tracked down by former colleague and head of Imperial Weapons Development and Research, Orson Krennic. His wife is killed, he is taken into Imperial custody and he is forced to continue working on the Death Star, leaving his daughter Jyn in the care of Saw Gerrera.

11 BBY:

After eight years in hiding, Kanan has become a drunk freighter pilot. He meets a rebel named Hera with whom he becomes infatuated. He sobers up and helps Hera protect a small planet in the outer rim which forces Kanan to reveal himself as a Jedi. He joins Hera on her ship, the Ghost. An alien and tactical genius named Thrawn is discovered on the edges of the unknown regions. He Is taken before the Emperor who is so impressed with the man he is admitted to the Imperial Navy.

9 BBY:

BASE YEAR. PLEASE IGNORE.

4 BBY:

On a small outer rim planet named Lothal, an orphan named Ezra Bridger inadvertently assists some rebels in stealing supplies from the Empire. Those rebels turn out to be Kanan and Hera. Ezra learns that he has abilities in the force and Kanan decides to train him. During that time they discover and visit a Jedi temple on Lothal.

3 BBY:

Leia Organa becomes a junior legislator of the Imperial Senate and learns that both her adoptive parents are members of an insurgency against the Empire. She begins helping them secretly support the Rebellion and even helps the Ghost Crew on Lothal. Kanan, Ezra and the rest of their crew cause enough problems for the Empire that Darth Vader himself is sent to hunt them down. Ahsoka also joins their crew when their small cell joins the larger growing Rebellion. The three travel to Malachor hoping to find a way to defeat the Sith. There they find Maul who had returned to the planet and he attempts to pull Ezra to the Dark Side before blinding Kanan and retreating. Darth Vader finds them at the Sith temple and confronts Ahsoka, who fights him long enough to allow Ezra and Kanan to escape with a Sith holocron.

2 BBY:

Senator Mon Mothma publicly denounces Emperor Palpatine and rallies the rebel cells into a unified movement. As their organization continues to grow, Thrawn who has risen to the rank of Grand Admiral is tasked with the destruction of Kanan and Hera's specific cell. Maul re-appears and uses the Sith holocron and Ezra to determine that Obi-Wan is still alive. Maul hunts down the old master but is killed by him for good. Thrawn discovers the location of the Rebel base and forces them to retreat to Yavin 4. The Grand Admiral also develops a new type of star fighter, the TIE Defender, Which begins construction on Lothal. The Ghost Crew go back to Lothal to destroy the factory and liberate the planet. They are successful in the destruction of the factory, but Kanan is killed in the process.

1 BBY: Ezra returns to the Jedi temple on Lothal to investigate Imperial activity there. He finds a portal to a mysterious place know as the world between worlds that exists outside of space and time. He Is able to see Ahsoka's duel with Darth Vader on Malachor, and save her from almost certain death, but each of them have to return to their own time. Ezra leads one final mission against the occupation on Lothal. Not only is he successful at liberating the planet but he also removes Grand Admiral Thrawn as a present danger by jumping to an unknown part of the Galaxy.

0 BBY:

As the Death Star nears completion, Galen Erso gets a message out to Saw and Jyn who unite on Jedha. He claims to have left a flaw in the Super Weapon's design. She then leads an attack on the Imperial planet Scarif where the Death Star Plans are held. The battle of Scarif is the first open war and conflict between the Empire and a unified Rebel Alliance. Krennic, Jyn and her team are all killed on Scarif, but the plans to the Death Star are successfully passed on to Princess Leia.

FROM HERE THE EVENTS OF " A NEW HOPE" "THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK" AND "RETURN OF THE JEDI" TAKE PLACE.

Thanks to Star Wars Explained's "Star Wars: The Complete Canon Timeline (2018)" for base timeline.

[programsbos]

The life story of Alexander the Great Part II

The life story of Alexander the Great Part II

In 336 BC, Philip went to Aegean to attend the wedding of his daughter Cleopatra to Alexander I of Evros, the brother of his wife Olympias, who was assassinated by his bodyguard commander, Pausanias of Orestiade. He then ran towards the city gate trying to escape, but stumbled with a vine rope. Two of Alexander's companions, Perdicas and Leoniatus, caught him immediately. After the death of Philip Baya, the nobility of Alexander, king of the throne of Macedonia and commander-in-chief of his army, was only 20 years old. Consolidate his power Alexander began his reign by exterminating his opponents, who would likely emerge from the throne of the kingdom.He ordered the execution of his cousin Aminitas IV, the most prominent rival and claimant to the throne of Macedonia, and two other Macedonian princes from the territory of Linjestus, but he pardoned a third, Alexander Lingisti. Olympias also ordered the execution of Cleopatra Euridis, the last wife of Philip, and her daughter Europa, whom she had given birth to, and burned two lives. It appears that Alexander was not willing or willing to execute the woman and her innocent daughter, as the sources state that he was furious when he was known for their death. Other people also affected by Alexander's sword include: Attalus, who was commander of the Frontier Corps of the Army stationed in Asia Minor, and Cleopatra Eurydis, as he communicated with Athenian leader Demostheni about the possibility of defecting from the Macedonian army and joining the Athens army. Alexander was still spiteful of Attalus after he publicly insulted him at the wedding of his niece Ali Philip, and after the death of the two and proved his contact with the Athenians, Alexander executed him and got rid of his evils. Alexander pardoned his half-brother Felipe Arredaeus for a mental disability, probably because of the poison that Olympias had hidden for him. After the death of Philip spread, several cities under Macedonian revolt rose up against their rulers, including: Thebes, Athens, and Thessaly, as well as the Thracian tribes living in the north of the kingdom. As soon as the news of the revolution reached the ears of Alexander, he prepared and equipped an army of 3,000 horsemen, although his advisers advised him to adopt diplomatic solutions, and walked south towards Thessaly, and as soon as he reached the crossing between Mount Olymp and Mount Usa, he was surprised by the Thessalonians who had occupied and stationed their forces there. He ordered his men to climb Mount Osa and to turn around the Thessalonians and surprise them. The Thessalonians were shocked when they woke up the next morning to find the Macedonians behind the rear of their army, surrendered immediately, and their knights voluntarily joined the army of Alexander, who completed the march south to the Mora Peninsula. Alexander continued his journey until he reached the corridor of the incendiary gates, and continued south until Corinth arrived, and then the Athenians asked him for safety, and promised him to submit to Macedonia, pardoned them and secured them for their lives and property. During his stay in Corinth, Alexander met with the famous ascetic philosopher Diogenes the Dog, and he was a big fan of him. He asked him if he had a request that he could fulfill. It appears that this response delighted Alexander, where some historians say: «I really tell you, if I was not Alexander I would have been Diogenes». Alexander was disqualified as the supreme leader of the Hellenistic League during his stay in Corinth.He was succeeded by his father to lead the armies of all of Greece in the next war with the Persian Empire, and received reports that the Thracians revolted against his rule. Alexander wanted to secure the borders of his northern kingdom, before crossing the Dardanelles to Asia, and in the spring of 335 BC he embarked on a campaign to purge his country of the revolutions and uprisings. Alexander set out from Amphipolis eastward to the country of the "Independent Thracians", and on the slopes of the Balkans defeated their forces in disbelief. The army then headed to the main branch of the river, where the Gitians tied on the opposite bank, and Alexander ordered his men to cross at night under cover of darkness. Afterwards, he reached out to Cleitus of Aleria, and Plockias of the Tolentians to disobey him. During Alexander's Northern Campaign, when the latter knew about it, he headed south at full speed to extinguish the fire of the revolution before it was extended. As in previous revolutions, all the Greek cities hesitated to fight Alexander when he learned of his arrival, except Thebes, who decided to confront. The resistance of the Tayyibis was absolutely useless. Alexander and his army swept them like a storm, leveling their city by land, dividing its territory among the rest of the city. The end of Thebes had a terrible effect in the hearts of the Athenians, and they submitted to Macedonia for fear that they would suffer the same fate. Alexander devoted himself fully to his Asian campaign, gathering troops and equipment and going east, leaving one of the military commanders, Antipater, as regent. In 334 BC, Alexander crossed the Dardanelles with an army of 48,100 infantry soldiers, 6,100 cavalry, and a fleet of 120 ships with a crew of 38,000, brought from Macedonia and various Greek cities. The army also included a number of mercenaries and feudal warriors from Thrace, Paionia, and Aleria. Alexander showed his intention to conquer all the territory of the Persian Empire when he first inserted a spear into the Asian mainland, saying that he accepted Asia as a gift to the goddess. This incident also showed another important thing: Alexander's yearning for fighting the Persians, and his inclination towards military solutions, unlike his father, who always favored diplomatic solutions. The Macedonians clashed with the Persians in the first battle on the banks of the Granikos River, now known as the Peva River, northwest Asia Minor, near the site of the city of Troy, where the Persians were defeated and handed over the keys of the city of Sard, the capital of that province, to Alexander, who entered it by victory. He seized its coffers and then continued its advance along the Ionian coast. Alexander laid siege to the city of Halicarnassus, in the province of Karia, making it the first city to besiege it.The siege was so successful that the city's mercenary commander, Memnon Rhodesi, and the governor of the Persian province of Arandbad, had to withdraw by sea. Alexander handed the rule of Karia to Ada Kariya, a former governor of the region, who declared her allegiance to Macedonia and adopted Alexander officially until the rule of the province legitimately after her death. Alexander and his army advanced from Halicarnassus to the mountainous region of Lycia in southern Anatolia and the Pamphylia plain, conquering all the coastal cities one by one, depriving the Persians of many important seaports. Alexander marched into Anatolia after the conquest of Gamphelia, as the rest of the coastline contained no prominent seaports or bases. To the wrath of Zeus upon him and his lack of success in his campaign. After Thermos, Gordium was the next stop for Alexander and his army, in which he dissolved the previously unresolved Gordian knot, which only the true king of Asia was said to solve. Historians report that Alexander cut the knot with his sword, saying it was not necessary to know the correct way to solve it. After Alexander and his army spent the whole winter invading and conquering fortified cities and castles in Asia Minor, they continued their march south and crossed the gates of Cilicia in 333 BC, and met the Persians again at Asus, led by Shah Dara III himself. His wife, two daughters, and his mother «Cisigambis» were captured in captivity. The Shah offered to conclude a peace treaty with Alexander under which the latter would retain the territory he had opened, and to release his family for 10,000 tons. Alexander responded to this proposal that only he had the right to divide the territory of Asia, since it was impossible for its master, neither Dara nor anyone could determine for him what he kept and what he left. Alexander immortalized his victory, which opened the doors of the Levant wide, by establishing a city in the north of the country on the borders of Anatolia, is «Iskenderun». Alexander had now to choose one of two plans: either to pursue the Persians to their own country, or to crawl south to open the Phoenician cities and Egypt before pouncing on Persia. Alexander chose the second plan to safeguard his transportation lines and to thwart every attempt by the Persian fleet to move Greece to revolt against it. The Phoenician cities were under the yoke of heavy Persian colonialism, opening their doors to Alexander and receiving him as a savior. Alexander wanted to offer the sacrifices to the god of images «Malqart», so the Syrians refuse to do so, as they considered this work as a right of their king only. Alexander regarded this rejection as a personal insult to him, and determined to discipline the stubborn city. Images were then divided into two parts: wild images and island images. Alexander saw that he would first open the wild city, and then build a dam that would connect it to the island and cross the sea, and besiege the island and fall into his hands. Thus, he seized the wilderness with great ease, and then ordered his men to demolish their buildings, throw their debris into the sea, and cut down trees from nearby forests to use them in massive landfills. But the Syrians resisted the conqueror with astonishing courage, until despair almost leaked to his heart. Finally, Alexander was able to gather a huge naval force besieged the island fell in his hand, in the month of July 332 BC, after a seven-month siege. Alexander retaliated from Tire, killing six thousand of its people, and crucified two thousand, and enchant thirty thousand. Then he entered the temple of Melqart and offered sacrifices to the god of Tire, and set up a gaming party to rejoice in his victory. After the destruction of Tire, most of the Shami cities and towns were subjected to Alexander without a fight, as he passed to Egypt, except for Gaza.The city's Persian ruler refused to open its doors to the Macedonian leader, and declared his intention to resist it. Gaza was one of the most fortified cities in Syria, and its position on a hill imposed on any army hit the siege on it to be able to open it. The Macedonians tried to storm the city three times in a row, they did not succeed, and the fourth time they succeeded after using siege tools they brought specially from Tire, but Alexander paid the price of the siege dearly, he was seriously injured in his shoulder. As he did in Tire, Alexander took revenge on the people of the city for the evil of revenge. His wounds. The city of Jerusalem had opened its doors to Alexander, and he entered it without resistance. Great will invade the territory of the Persian Empire and that the Shah of Persia, the great centuries will not be able to stand in his path: Taper between his eyes. And he came to the ram of the two horns, which I saw standing by the river, and ran upon him with his might. And I saw him have arrived along with the ram, Va_i_at it and hit the ram and break the horns, did not ram the strength to stand up in front of him, and put on the ground and stepped on, and did not ram the savior of his hand. [Daniel 8] shows that Alexander mirth when he heard a prophecy concerning him, Vokrm Jerusalemites He stayed for a while in the city during which he visited the Temple of Herod, and then left and continued his way south. Alexander arrived at the Farma, the gate of East Egypt, in the autumn of 332 BC, and found no resistance from the Egyptians or the Persian garrison at the border and opened it easily, then across the Nile and arrived in the capital of Memphis, was welcomed by its people as a victorious editor, and then held a cultural entertainment festival Greek-style celebration of this great victory. After that, he walked his forces with the canal branch of the Nile, heading for the Mediterranean coast, landed near Lake Mariout, and took care of the importance of the place between the lake and the Mediterranean, especially since the place is close to the Nile River, which supplies it with fresh water. He found a small island near the beach called «Pharos», and then commissioned one of his aides called «Dinocrates» to oversee the construction of a city in this and arrived the beach on the island by a stone and sand, with the new city to bear the name of the Macedonian leader, namely, Alexandria Which was destined to become the capital of Egypt later during the reign of the Ptolemies. Historians recount that when Alexander the Great chose Alexandria to be the capital of his empire, he was guided by the guidance of his spiritual teacher Homer, the epic of the Iliad and the Odyssey, who appeared to Alexander in the dream, and was sung by his famous verses from the Odyssey of the Odyssey when the hero of the saga and his companions turned to the island of Pharos. Alexander immediately deceived him, and went to Pharos, which was still a small island to the southwest for the Canopic estuary. As the engineers embarked on the design, Alexander decided to make a spiritual journey to the temple of the god Amun, opposite Zeus to the Greeks, in the oasis of Siwa in the Western Desert of Egypt. The Temple of Amun in Siwa Oasis was famous as one of the important temples of prediction and spiritual mediation in the Mediterranean at the time. When Alexander the Great arrived at the temple and entered it, he was welcomed by the priests of Amun, who set him a pharaoh over Egypt and declared him the son of Amun, the great Egyptian goddess, and wore him his crown and shape as the head of a ram with two horns. Since then, Alexander claimed that Zeus-Amun was his real father, and his head was later engraved on the minted coins decorated with ram horns, the sign of immortality. Alexander then returned to Memphis, and before leaving Egypt he was careful to organize the country carefully. He was keen to preserve the old Egyptian regimes, diversify the rule between the Egyptians and the Greeks, who put military and financial power in their hands, kept the Egyptians administrative authority, and distributed the authorities evenly, and did not appoint a Macedonian governor-general, thus ensuring the satisfaction of the Egyptians and the failure of national revolutions. Egypt thus became a Greek state, and Alexander kept Memphis as its capital, and he was keen to open the doors of Egypt to the Greek immigrants, especially the Macedonians, because Egypt as imagined by the Macedonian leader was a Greek state, Macedonian rule, thought and culture, and this was a turning point in the history of Egypt, as it entered a new phase Of its diverse civilization phases. Before Alexander left Egypt, he reviewed his troops for farewell and held a sports and cultural festival for the Egyptian and Greek people as a symbol of cooperation between the two ancient civilizations.He also recommended his staff to make some repairs to the temples and renovate the Temple of Karnak.Then, he made the journey and moved his army eastward again. Alexander marched his army to Dar al-Pers, intending to eradicate their military power.He reached Mesopotamia, where Shah Dara III had mobilized a large army of 200,000 to 250,000 troops, while contemporary sources state that the number It was probably between 50,000 and 100,000 soldiers, while the Macedonian army numbered only 47,000. The Shah chose the location of the decisive battle carefully. He wanted to throw his entire military weight against the Macedonians, ensuring victory. The commanders of Alexander's army proposed to surprise the Persians on the eve of the battle and to attack them under cover of darkness and took them by surprise, because confronting this large army face to face is very difficult, if not impossible. But Alexander rejected this idea, saying that he would not steal this victory, but would win it well, so how could he be the king of Asia if not really earned it. In any case, such an attack would have been likely to fail, as Dara anticipated and predicted, ordering his men to stay awake all night and put them on standby to counter any possible attack. The following morning, the Macedonian army headed to the battlefield to find the Persians lined up and waiting for them. There were plenty of war wheels and fifteen war elephants brought in from India. Alexander showed his military genius at the beginning of the battle. They broke through the ranks of his army, and he fled on the run with some of his commanders, leaving his army under the weight of the blows of Alexander and his army. Alexander followed the remnants of the Persian army with the desire to capture the Shah, and he followed him to Arbala in the north, but was unable to catch him, because he crossed the Zagros Mountains and took refuge in Hamadan. Alexander then entered Babylon, the Persian capital, crowned with fingernail, and was welcomed by its people, and gave safety to the people and prevent his soldiers from entering the homes without the permission of the owners or to take away something. After the conquest of Babylon, Alexander set off for the city of Sousse, one of the important Achaemenid capitals. He then marched with most of his army to Persepolis, the religious capital of Persia, across the royal road.He is said to have personally selected the soldiers, each in his name, to do the job.When the Macedonians arrived at the Gates of Persia, they found a small army waiting for them, led by the governor of the territory “They defeated him and scattered him, then they rushed to the city before her garrison robbed her treasury and fled. Alexander allowed his men to loot Persepolis for several days after he entered it, and he stayed there for five months. During his stay, a massive fire broke out in the eastern palace of Khashayarsha, spreading to the rest of the city, possibly caused by a drunken man who did not know what he was doing, or that one of them deliberately set fire to an important Persian landmark, in response to the Persians' burning of Acropolis of Athens during Second Persian War. Alexander pursued the chase of Shah Dara III with all his determination, pursued him to Medea first, then followed him to Parthia.Dara was in an unenviable state.After losing all his battles with Alexander, and losing most of the land to his favor, he lost the respect and trust of his few officers who accompanied him. And among them «Ardashir» known as Psus, the governor of Bakhtria and his cousin, has disobeyed the latter, not only that, but he handcuffed and carried him with him captive to Central Asia. When Alexander and his army were approaching, he ordered his men to stab a deadly stab at Dara, then declared himself a successor, under the name of Ardashir V, and proceeded to Central Asia to prepare a series of military campaigns against the Macedonian leader. The front of the Macedonian army found a thrown in his chariot in the event of a conflict, and when Alexander arrived Dara had surrendered the soul, and it appears that Alexander was saddened to see his old adversary as such, who was once a great king, ended up in this way; He covered him with his mantle, and his body was taken to Persepolis, where he was buried alongside his ancestors of kings, after a solemn funeral. Some novels, including Alexander himself, suggest that when he arrived, Dara was still alive, and named Alexander a successor to the throne of Persia. Historians consider the end of the Achaemenid Empire to have come with the death of Dara III. Alexander Psus was considered an aggressor usurper, and he proceeded in his trail. The campaign aimed at arresting Bsous turned into a large-scale tour in Central Asia. Alexander opened the city after city and town after town, and founded several cities, all of which he called «Alexandria», and some still exist to the present, but the name changed, Afghanistan, and Alexandria maximum in Tajikistan. Alexander included several provinces in his empire during this tour, such as Medea, Gart, Ariana (Western Afghanistan), Zrenka, Rukh (Central and Southern Afghanistan), Bakhteriya (Northern and Central Afghanistan), and Sithia. Alexander was able to Psus after he was betrayed by the governor of Sogdia, called "Spentamensch", and handed over to Ptolemy in 329 BC, the latter carried him to Alexander, who ordered his execution immediately, his nose was cut and his ears were cut, and some sources state that he was crucified at the same site where he was killed Dara and others state that he was tortured and beheaded in Hamadan, and Plutarch says his body was cut into pieces in Bakhteria. Shortly after this incident, the Spentamanche declared disobedience to Alexander and encouraged the sons of Sogdia to revolt, taking advantage of the absence of the Macedonian army to respond to a raid by the Sithon nomads on the banks of the Sihon River. Alexander was able to defeat the Sethites, and then turned his eyes to Sogdia.He met the Spentamines army, defeated him and forced him to flee.Then his soldiers soon killed him in their hands, and sent Alexander to ask for forgiveness and peace and declare their allegiance to him.

We complete the rest of Alexander the Great's life story at the following link

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[bountyofbeads]

Netanyahu Fails to Form Government, Leaving Israel as Divided as Ever

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/world/middleeast/netanyahu-gantz-israel.html

I guess Trump's endorsement of Netanyahu was the kiss of death after all!!! #VoteBlue2020

Also below, "The troop withdrawal ends American operations against the terrorist group conducted jointly with a Kurdish-led militia."

Netanyahu Fails to Form a Government, Leaving Israel as Divided as Ever

Israel’s president will offer the chance to form a government to Mr. Netanyahu’s chief rival, Benny Gantz, a former army chief.

By David M. Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner | Published October 21, 2019 Updated 6:23 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 21, 2019 |

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel abandoned his latest attempt to form a government on Monday, clearing the way for his chief rival to take a shot but leaving a divided country no closer to knowing who its next leader would be.

It remained to be seen whether the move was the beginning of the end for Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, or just another twist in a political standoff that has paralyzed the government for six months.

President Reuven Rivlin said he would give Benny Gantz, the former army chief whose party won one more parliamentary seat than Mr. Netanyahu’s in last month’s election, the mandate to try to become the country’s next leader.

But Mr. Gantz, a political newcomer who has capitalized on pending corruption cases against Mr. Netanyahu, has no clear path to assembling the required 61-seat majority in Israel’s Parliament.

He has 28 days to try. If he fails, Israel could be forced into an unprecedented third election, a prospect few Israelis would relish.

Two days before his 28-day deadline was up, Mr. Netanyahu, 70, who has been prime minister since 2009, told Mr. Rivlin that he had been unable to put together a parliamentary majority.

Mr. Rivlin said he would give the mandate to Mr. Gantz, 60, “as soon as possible.”

“The time of spin is over, and it is now time for action,” Mr. Gantz’s Blue and White party said in a statement. “Blue and White is determined to form the liberal unity government, led by Benny Gantz, that the people of Israel voted for a month ago.”

Mr. Gantz had resisted entreaties from Mr. Netanyahu to join him in a unity government, saying that he would not serve under a prime minister facing indictment. That left open the possibility that Mr. Netanyahu might prevail upon a few centrist lawmakers to give him a majority.

They did not, and Mr. Gantz’s gamble has paid off, so far.

Now, he will get his chance to try to assemble a majority. Arguing that 80 percent of Israelis agree on 80 percent of the issues, he has promised to seek a broad government with conservative partners by working “from the center out.”

But achieving what Mr. Netanyahu could not would be quite a feat. Mr. Gantz would need to recruit defectors from the political right, perhaps from within Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, or persuade Avigdor Liberman, leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, to do what so far appears unthinkable: collaborate with Arab politicians.

Mr. Netanyahu, who remains prime minister until a new government is formed, is counting on Mr. Gantz to fail, forcing a new election.

In a video posted to his Twitter account on Monday, shortly after the end of the Sukkot holiday in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu said he had “worked relentlessly, in the open but also in secret, in an effort to form a broad national unity government” with Mr. Gantz.

“This is what the people want,” Mr. Netanyahu wrote. “This is also what Israel needs in the face of security challenges that are growing by the day, by the hour.”

He said he had made “every effort” to negotiate a unity government with Mr. Gantz, but “to my regret, time and time again, he simply refused.”

For Mr. Netanyahu, who in July surpassed Israel’s founding leader, David Ben-Gurion, to become its longest-serving prime minister, his failure to assemble a majority was a humbling and potentially career-ending blow.

The last time an Israeli politician beside him had the chance to form a government was in 2009, when Tzipi Livni, then the foreign minister, narrowly edged Mr. Netanyahu in an election. But she failed to muster a majority and Mr. Netanyahu succeeded, completing a comeback after having served a previous term as prime minister in the late 1990s.

Mr. Gantz, a career soldier making his first run for office, tied with Mr. Netanyahu in their first contest in April, but Mr. Netanyahu had more supporters in Parliament and was given the chance to form a government. He appeared well on his way to a fourth consecutive term only to be thwarted by a surprise defection by Mr. Liberman.

Rather than let Mr. Gantz be given a chance, Mr. Netanyahu orchestrated a second election, held on Sept. 17.

Mr. Gantz narrowly edged Mr. Netanyahu in that election, but Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing and ultrareligious parties again came away with a larger bloc in Parliament than Mr. Gantz’s alliance of center-left parties. Once more, Mr. Netanyahu was handed the first attempt at forming a government.

Mr. Netanyahu may still have another path back to the premiership: If Mr. Gantz cannot form a government within his allotted time, the president can hand the task to Parliament, giving lawmakers an additional 21 days to come up with a candidate who can command a majority. Mr. Netanyahu may be hoping, at that point, that the public and political pressure to avoid a third election will persuade the half-dozen additional lawmakers whose support he needs to come to his side.

Analysts have also speculated that Mr. Netanyahu may prefer a third election, perhaps believing that the attorney general would ultimately drop the bribery indictment, the heaviest of three charges he is facing. Under such an outcome, Mr. Netanyahu could claim a degree of vindication and campaign while facing lesser charges of fraud and breach of trust, and insisting that they, too, would come to naught in court.

The gamesmanship between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gantz since the election last month has resembled a chess match in which Mr. Netanyahu’s position was weaker than after the April election but the conclusion was hardly foregone.

With neither man finding a politically palatable way of achieving a 61-seat majority, a unity government of one sort or another appeared unavoidable, and Mr. Rivlin urged both men to agree on one.

One major stumbling block, if they agreed to rotate the premiership, was the question of who would serve first and at what point Mr. Netanyahu would step aside if charged.

Mr. Netanyahu accepted a proposal suggested by Mr. Rivlin under which Mr. Netanyahu would serve as prime minister first, but if charged, would declare himself incapacitated while he sorted out his legal troubles. Mr. Gantz would then serve as acting prime minister with full powers.

Such an arrangement left many questions, including at what point Mr. Netanyahu would step aside, and would have required legal changes that could be challenged in court.

Moreover, Mr. Netanyahu has insisted that any unity government include his longstanding allies in the right-wing and religious parties. Mr. Gantz has demanded that Likud negotiate a unity government without its allied parties.

Mr. Netanyahu repeatedly and publicly chastised Mr. Gantz for refusing to negotiate with him on terms for building a grand coalition including both their parties. Mr. Gantz said the terms proposed by Mr. Netanyahu were impossible to accept.

Most recently, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that Mr. Gantz’s plan all along was to thwart any efforts to form a unity government and instead set up a minority government with the backing of Arab parties — an unlikely move that would be deeply unpopular with many Blue and White voters, as well as with many of the party’s lawmakers.

The rise of such a minority government would only be possible with the tacit cooperation of Avigdor Liberman, which Mr. Liberman has all but ruled out.

Critics said Mr. Netanyahu had been showing signs of panic. He pressed his right-wing and religious allies to sign multiple loyalty oaths. And he proposed a Likud party primary, but then abruptly canceled the idea after a popular younger rival, Gideon Saar, declared himself ready to challenge Mr. Netanyahu for the party leadership.

Mr. Gantz, meanwhile, has been calmly seeking to strengthen his leadership credentials, issuing prime ministerial-like statements in response to local and world events. He hosted the German ambassador to Israel, Dr. Susanne Wasum-Rainer, in his sukkah, the temporary hut or tabernacle that Jews construct for the Sukkot holiday, and said they discussed anti-Semitism and Germany’s decision to cease weapons sales to Turkey, for which he expressed gratitude.

Last week, Mr. Gantz requested, and was granted, a meeting with the military chief of staff to update himself on security developments in the region. That meeting was held with the approval of Mr. Netanyahu.

Still, Mr. Netanyahu has far from given up.

On Monday night he posted a photo of himself and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, thanked Mr. Putin for telephoning him with birthday greetings and said they had discussed the situation in Syria, among other things.

“It is still not too late,” he declared in his video. It would still be possible to form a unity government, he said, “if Gantz comes to his senses.”

“This has always been the solution, and this remains the solution,” he said.

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ISIS Reaps Gains of U.S. Pullout From Syria

The troop withdrawal ends American operations against the terrorist group conducted jointly with a Kurdish-led militia.

By David D. Kirkpatrick and Eric Schmitt | Published October 21, 2019 Updated 7:22 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 21, 2019 |

American forces and their Kurdish-led partners in Syria had been conducting as many as a dozen counterterrorism missions a day against Islamic State militants, officials said. That has stopped.

Those same partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces, had also been quietly releasing some Islamic State prisoners and incorporating them into their ranks, in part as a way to keep them under watch. That, too, is now in jeopardy.

And across Syria’s porous border with Iraq, Islamic State fighters are conducting a campaign of assassination against local village headmen, in part to intimidate government informants.

When President Trump announced this month that he would pull American troops out of northern Syria and make way for a Turkish attack on the Kurds, Washington’s onetime allies, many warned that he was removing the spearhead of the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Now, analysts say that Mr. Trump’s pullout has handed the Islamic State its biggest win in more than four years and greatly improved its prospects. With American forces rushing for the exits, in fact, American officials said last week that they were already losing their ability to collect critical intelligence about the group’s operations on the ground.

“There is no question that ISIS is one of the big winners in what is happening in Syria,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a research center in London.

Cutting support for the Syrian Democratic Forces has crippled the ability of the United States and its former partners to hunt down the group’s remnants.

News of the American withdrawal set off jubilation among Islamic State supporters on social media and encrypted chat networks. It has lifted the morale of fighters in affiliates as far away as Libya and Nigeria.

And, by removing a critical counterforce, the pullout has eased the re-emergence of the Islamic State’s core as a terrorist network or a more conventional, and potentially long-lasting, insurgency based in Syria and Iraq.

Although Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared victory over the Islamic State — even boasting to congressional leaders last week that he had personally “captured ISIS” — it remains a threat. After the loss in March of the last patch of the territory it once held across Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State dispersed its supporters and fighters to blend in with the larger population or to hide out in remote deserts and mountains.

The group retains as many as 18,000 “members” in Iraq and Syria, including up to 3,000 foreigners, according to estimates cited in a recent Pentagon report. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, is still at large.

“Our battle today is one of attrition and stretching the enemy,” Mr. al-Baghdadi declared in a video message released in April. Looking comfortable and well fed, he sat on the floor of a bare room, surrounded by fighters, with an assault rifle by his side.

“Jihad is ongoing until the day of judgment,” he told his supporters, according to a transcript provided by SITE Intelligence Group.

Against the benchmark of the Islamic State’s former grip on a broad swath of geography, any possibility of a comeback to that extent remains highly remote.

Changes in the political context in Syria and Iraq have diminished the Islamic State’s ability to whip up sectarian animosity out of the frustrations of Sunni Muslims over the Shiite or Shiite-linked authorities in Syria and Iraq — the militants’ trademark.

The government in Baghdad has broadened its support among Sunni Iraqis. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, by crushing the revolt against him, has left Sunni militants less space to mobilize. And many Syrians and Iraqis who lived under the harsh dominion of the Islamic State strongly oppose its return.

But as an underground insurgency, the Islamic State appears to be on the upswing.

Militants have been carrying out “assassinations, suicide attacks, abductions, and arson of crops in both Iraq and Syria,” according to a report this summer by the Pentagon inspector general for operations against the Islamic State. It is establishing “resurgent cells” in Syria, the report said, and “seeking to expand its command and control nodes in Iraq.”

The militants have been burning crops and emptying out whole villages. They have been raising money by carrying out kidnappings for ransom and extorting “taxes” from local officials, often skimming a cut of rebuilding contracts.

Their attacks on village headmen — at least 30 were killed in Iraq in 2018, according to the Pentagon report — are an apparent attempt to scare others out of cooperating with Baghdad.

“The high operational tempo with multiple attacks taking place over a wide area” may be intended to create the appearance that the Islamic State can strike anywhere with “impunity,” the report said.

Mr. Trump first said last December that he intended to withdraw the last 2,000 American troops from Syria; the Pentagon scaled that back, pulling out about half of those troops.

Military officials, though, say that helping the Syrian Democratic Forces hunt down underground cells and fugitive fighters required more training and intelligence support than an open battle for territory. Even the partial drawdown, the Pentagon inspector general’s report found, could be “detrimental” to the American mission in Iraq and Syria.

Last month, as if to prove its continued vitality, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for a minibus bombing that killed a dozen people near the entrance to a Shiite pilgrimage site in the Iraqi city of Karbala. It was its deadliest attack since the loss of its last territory.

And within hours of Mr. Trump’s announcement almost two weeks ago that American forces were moving away from the Syrian border with Turkey, two ISIS suicide bombers attacked a base of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the Syrian city of Raqqa.

“The crusaders have given up,” Islamic State supporters crowed, according to Laith Alkhouri of the business risk consulting company Flashpoint Global Partners, who monitors the group’s online messages.

Other messages “urged ISIS ‘soldiers’ everywhere to double their efforts,” Mr. Alkhouri said.

The missions against the Islamic State conducted by the Syrian Democratic Forces — sometimes as many as two dozen a day — had included both counterterrorism patrols and raids on militant cells. Some were carried out jointly with American soldiers, others alone, according to United States officials.

But the Kurds, an ethnic minority sometimes disparaged by Arab Syrians, faced resentment among the Arab residents of northeastern Syria.

In part to try to win support from those communities, the Kurdish-led forces pardoned and released hundreds of detained ISIS fighters or supporters in so-called reconciliation deals, relying on informal relationships with community leaders to handle their reintegration.

The Kurdish-led militia even incorporated some of the released Islamic State detainees into its own forces, said Dareen Khalifa, a researcher with the International Crisis Group who has traveled to the region extensively and documented the “reconciliation” pardons in a report last summer.

The Kurdish militia leaders said: “What do you want us to do, kill them all? Imprison them all? The best way forward is to keep a close eye on them by keeping them within the S.D.F.,” Ms. Khalifa said in an interview. She said that those enlisted had not been Islamic State leaders and that so far there had been no recidivism.

But now the American withdrawal and the Turkish incursion are threatening the informal supervision of those former prisoners, Ms. Khalifa said, creating a risk that some might gravitate back to fighting for the Islamic State.

Turkey, which has battled Kurdish separatist militants at home for decades, launched the invasion primarily to push back the Kurdish-led forces in Syria. Without American protection, the Kurdish leaders are now switching sides to ally with Mr. al-Assad.

In Iraq, too, some say opportunities may be emerging for the Islamic State to revive its appeals to Sunni resentments in the areas it once controlled. Promises of postwar reconstruction have gone unfilled. And Shiite militias that rose up to defeat the Islamic State remain in place, sometimes seeking to profit off the local populations.

“People in the liberated areas say: ‘Why are all these armed groups still around? Why do they still call us all ISIS, and why are they taxing us or extorting us and taking all of our money?’,” said Renad Mansour, the director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House.

The campaign against the Islamic State, he said, “was a military solution to what is a social and political problem.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, has insisted repeatedly that Turkey should take over the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. “It’s going to be your responsibility,” Mr. Trump said he told the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But current and former United States officials say the Turkish military has a bleak track record at counterterrorism and little hope of filling the void left by the Americans and the Syrian Democratic Forces.

“That is wishful thinking as far as I can tell,” said Dana Stroul, co-chairwoman of the congressionally sponsored Syria Study Group and a former Pentagon official.

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