Aichinger, Ilse

Aichinger's education was interrupted by World War II when, because she was half Jewish, she was refused entrance to medical school. Although she eventually did begin

Granma

Daily newspaper published in Havana, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. The paper takes its name from the yacht that carried Fidel Castro and others supporting his revolution from Mexico to Cuba in 1956. Granma was established in 1965 by the merger of what then were the two major, and rival, newspapers, Hoy (Spanish: �Today�), the organ of the

Scalia, Antonin

Scalia's father, a Sicilian immigrant, taught Romance languages at Brooklyn College, and his Italian American mother taught elementary school. Scalia received a Roman

Haavelmo, Trygve

After the outbreak of World War II, Haavelmo left Norway and delivered his doctoral dissertation, �The Probability Approach in Econometrics,� at Harvard University in 1941. Although he had two doctorates

Dual Alliance

Also called �Franco-russian Alliance, � a political and military pact that developed between France and Russia from friendly contacts in 1891 to a secret treaty in 1894; it became one of the basic European alignments of the pre-World War I era. Germany, assuming that ideological differences and lack of common interest would keep republican France and tsarist Russia apart, allowed its Reinsurance Treaty (q.v.) with

China, Fine arts

In the realm of the arts, the Ming period has long been esteemed for the variety and high quality of its state-sponsored craft goods - cloisonn� and, particularly, porcelain wares. The sober, delicate monochrome porcelains of the Sung dynasty were now superseded by rich, decorative polychrome wares. The best known of these are of blue-on-white decor, which gradually changed

Nicholas Ii

Russian in full �Nikolay Aleksandrovich� the last Russian emperor (1895 - 1917), who, with his wife, Alexandra, and their children, was killed by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution.