Peter Bird

World War II (often abbreviated to WWII or WW2.) The vast majority of the world's countries - including all the great powers - eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. WWII was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.

Norge under 2. verdenskrig. 9. april 1940 ble Norge og Danmark invadert av Tyskland; etter to måneders kamper med noe støtte av britiske, franske og polske styrker kapitulerte de norske styrkene.

Det okkuperte landet ble delvis styrt av Vidkun Quislings regjering under tysk kontroll og med omfattende tysk militær tilstedeværelse. Det norske fastlandet var ikke involvert i regulære krigshandlinger etter at norske styrker kapitulerte i juni 1940. Det var ett viktig unntak: Det østligste Finnmark var sterkt berørt av kampene ved Murmanskfronten fra 1941, og all bebyggelse i Finnmark og Nord-Troms ble brent og befolkningen tvangsevakuert da tyskerne høsten 1944 trakk seg tilbake etter nederlaget på Murmanskfronten. Deretter ble Øst-Finnmark frigjort av sovjetiske styrker i oktober 1944. Ved Tysklands kapitulasjon la de tyske styrkene i Norge ned våpnene uten kamp 8. mai 1945. Svalbard og Jan Mayen ble ikke okkupert.

Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author, who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge at the time of his death. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009.

Hawking achieved commercial success with works of popular science in which he discussed his own theories and cosmology in general. His book A Brief History of Time appeared on the British Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. He was a fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

In 1963, Hawking was diagnosed with an early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease that gradually paralysed him. He died on 14 March 2018 at the age of 76, after more than 50 years battling the disease.

Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943–1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.

The existence of the Colossus machines was kept secret until the mid-1970s, although some of its personnel and secret information undoubtedly fueled further development in the U.S. in the late 1940s; the machines and the plans for building them were destroyed in the 1960s as part of the effort to maintain the secrecy of the project. This deprived most of those involved with Colossus of the credit for pioneering electronic digital computing during their lifetimes.

Olav V var Norges konge fra 1957 til sin død i 1991. Han var medlem av Huset Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg og ble født i Storbritannia som sønn av prins Carl av Danmark og prinsesse Maud av Storbritannia.