Petro Shelest (1908–1997), the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was one of the strongest advocates of an armed invasion of Czechoslovakia among Soviet leaders in 1968. The Soviet leadership tasked him to maintain contacts with the so-called healthy forces in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; in the beginning of August, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Vasil Biľak (1917–2014) secretly handed over to him the notorious “letter of invitation” in public lavatories in Bratislava. The author asks a fundamental question whether it is possible to identify a specific Ukrainian factor which stepped into the Prague Spring process and contributed to its tragic end. He attempts to capture Shelest’s position in the decision-making process and describe information that Shelest was working with., To this end, he has made use of reports of the Committee for State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti – KGB) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on developments in Czechoslovakia and reactions thereto among Ukrainian citizens produced in the spring and summer of 1968, which were being sent to Shelest and other Ukrainian leaders. These documents have lately been made available in Ukrainian archives and partly published on the website of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Their analysis brings the author to a conclusion that they were offering a considerably distorted picture of the situation. Instead of relevant information and analyses, they only present various clichés, ideological rhetoric, inaccuracies, or downright nonsenses. Their source were often members of the Czechoslovak State Security who were often motivated by worries about their own careers and existence and were acting on their own., and The uncritical acceptance of the documents contributed to a situation in which in the leader of the Ukrainian Communists and other Soviet representatives were creating unrealistic pictures of the events taking place in Czechoslovakia, believing that anti-socialist forces were winning, anti-Soviet propaganda was prevailing, and Western intelligence agencies were strengthening their position in Czechoslovakia, and that there was a threat that the events that had taken place in Hungary in 1956 would repeat themselves again. As indicated by his published diary entries and other documents, Petro Shelest was using these allegations both in discussions inside his own party and during negotiations with Czechoslovak politicians. Just like in the case of the leaders of Polish and East German Communists, Władysław Gomułka and Walter Ulbricht, respectively, the principal reason why Shelest was promoting a solution of the Czechoslovak crisis by force was, in the author’s opinion, his fear of “contagion” of his own society by events taking place in Czechoslovakia which the Ukraine shared a border with.
The effect of three different concentrations of amitrole (AM), a bleaching herbicide affecting carotenogenesis, on chloroplast ultrastructure, photosynthetic pigment contents, and photochemical activity was studied in two maize genotypes differing in photosynthetic characteristics. The content of photosynthetic pigments in leaves of plants treated with low (20 μM) AM concentration was similar to control plants and no damaging effect of the herbicide on the ultrastructure of either mesophyll (MC) or bundle-sheath (BSC) cell chloroplasts was observed. Higher (60 and 120 μM) concentrations of AM caused a significant decrease in the content of carotenoids (especially xanthophylls), which was followed by photooxidative destruction of chlorophylls and some alterations of chloroplast ultrastructure. MC chloroplasts appeared more sensitive to the damaging effect of AM compared to BSC chloroplasts. A significant decrease in the amount of both granal and intergranal thylakoids in MC chloroplasts was observed with the increasing concentration of AM. As regards BSC chloroplasts, rapid decrease in the volume density of starch inclusions was found in plants treated with higher concentrations of AM. When 120 μM AM was used, both MC and BSC chloroplasts contained just a few thylakoid membranes that were strongly altered. The changes in the ultrastructure of MC chloroplasts were accompanied by the changes in their photochemical activity. The formation of chloroplast protrusions after treatment of plants with AM as well as in control plants was also observed. and R. Pechová ... [et al.].
The anterior jejunum from common vole naturally infected with Giardia microti (Kofoid et Christiansen, 1915) was examined by ТЕМ and compared with the anterior jejunum from control (metronidazole-treated, Giardia-free) common voles (Pallas, 1778). Giardia microti infection resulted in significant diffuse shortening of microvilli and significant greater microvillous diameters. In addition, deformations of the microvilli were observed at the margin of the ventral disc. The microvilli attached to the lateral crest of the ventral disc were vesiculated with a disorganised filamentous core and contained whorled structures resembling “myelin-like figures”. The findings are discussed in context of the Giardia-epithelial cell interaction.
The ultrastructure and histochemistry of the tegument and penetration glands of adult Amphilina foliacea from the body cavity and the tissues of the internal organs of Acipenser ruthenus and A. stellatus were studied. New data on the localization in the tissue, development and in encapsulation of the adult A. foliacea mostly in the liver of A. ruthenus were obtained. The well developed penetration glands are necessary for penetration into the tissue and for migration of A. foliacea into the body cavity of the hosts. The tegument of the adult A. foliacea is a syncytium with cytons deeply embedded into the parenchyma. The secretory activity of the tegument of worms has a protective function against the immune system of the host. Our results give further information about the phylogeny of Amphilinidea and confirm the view of the close phylogenetic relationship of Amphilinidea and Cestoidea.
This article builds on the emerging tradition of transnationalism in migration research, which considers both migrants’ ‘making a home’ in their host societies and their continued attachments to their places of origin as parallel processes. It examines the factors that influence migrants’ simultaneous negotiation of ‘belonging’ in the home and host societies. This question is particularly significant in the ‘liquid’ context of free intra-EU mobility. The analysis is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted in 2014–2016 with 41 Czech migrants who had moved to the United Kingdom in 1990–2015. Building on existing research of Central and Eastern European migration, the article shows that despite their diverse trajectories, most interviewees strive for ‘grounded’ lives with a family and a predictable future. Their sense of ‘belonging’ is affected by their reasons for coming to and staying in the UK, but especially by the presence or absence of agency; whether the migrant’s decision to stay was voluntary or dependent. Aspects of the individual’s migration situation and personal characteristics are also shown to structure migrant belonging. The concept of a ‘leap of faith’ is introduced to capture the role of a conscious commitment to settling in the host country, both physically and mentally, and thus re-gaining ‘control’ over one’s migration trajectory in cases when the decision to stay was not made independently.
Ontology is widely used in the computer domain to structure concepts that represent a view of world nowadays, which could formally specify semantic relationship among the terms. In this paper, we present coordination between agent crawlers based on ontology in Topic Specific Search Engines, and we try to measure understanding among them, relying on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) instead of comparing the terms only. In literature, most papers on concept similarity in FCA are based on two different concepts in the same concept lattice, and whereas there is very little research related to different concept lattices or even different agents. We propose a novel method on concept similarity for computing the Concept-Concept similarity, the Concept-Ontology similarity and the Ontology-Ontology similarity, and at last we can deduce understanding among agent crawlers. Finally, we can guide the crawlers effectively in our Search Engine.
Given an integral scheme X over a non-archimedean valued field k , we construct a universal closed embedding of X into a k -scheme equipped with a model over the field with one element F1 (a generalization of a toric variety). An embedding into such an ambient space determines a tropicalization of X by previous work of the authors, and we show that the set-theoretic tropicalization of X with respect to this universal embedding is the Berkovich analytification Xan . Moreover, using the scheme-theoretic tropicalization we previously introduced, we obtain a tropical scheme \mathpzcTropuniv(X) whose T -points give the analytification and that canonically maps to all other scheme-theoretic tropicalizations of X . This makes precise the idea that the Berkovich analytification is the universal tropicalization. When X=SpecA is affine, we show that \mathpzcTropuniv(X) is the limit of the tropicalizations of X with respect to all embeddings in affine space, thus giving a scheme-theoretic enrichment of a well-known result of Payne. Finally, we show that \mathpzcTropuniv(X) represents the moduli functor of semivaluations on X , and when X=SpecA is affine there is a universal semivaluation on A taking values in the idempotent semiring of regular functions on the universal tropicalization.
To what extent do anglophone Malaysian literatures retain their capacity for representation, when they are written, marketed, and sold outside Malaysian borders? How do we ascertain their authenticity as Malaysian text? This paper demonstrates how the conceptualization of the “Global Malaysian Novel” is a shift that responds to and problematizes traditional postmodern and postcolonial modes of reading that have not yet transcended the nation as a frame of reference. While a critique of their complicity in global literary markets centered in the UK and US is often reduced to an ad hominem attack, there remains much to be said about the effects of their increasingly transnational material production upon their more formally understood aesthetic and literary qualities. As such, I explore the discursive effects of the “Global Malaysian Novel” through the debates on national literature and literary tradition. In doing so, I chart how literary scholars have approached contemporary Asian literatures and attempted to situate them critically within realms of the national, within postcolonial Southeast Asia, and within World Literature frameworks. In particular, I bring the critical work of Malaysian scholars like Lloyd Fernando and Wong Phui Nam into productive dialogue with the broader field.