Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Tereshkova, Valentina Vladimirovna, 1937–, Soviet cosmonaut. She was the first woman to orbit the earth, in Vostok 6 on June 16–19, 1963. She left the Soviet space program soon after and married c...

(Encyclopedia) Russian language, also called Great Russian, member of the East Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages). The principal language of administ...

(Encyclopedia) Unión, La, town (1990 pop. 15,144), Murcia prov., SE Spain. It is a center for the rich lead, silver, iron, manganese, and zinc mines of the vicinity, which have been worked since Carthaginian times....

(Encyclopedia) agrarian reform, redistribution of the agricultural resources of a country. Traditionally, agrarian, or land, reform is confined to the redistribution of land; in a broader sense it includes related c...

(Encyclopedia) International Telecommunication Union (ITU), specialized agency of the United Nations, with headquarters at Geneva. It was created in 1934 as a result of the merging of the International Telegraph Uni...

(Encyclopedia) Universal Postal Union (UPU), specialized agency of the United Nations since 1948, with headquarters at Bern, Switzerland. Established in 1875 following adoption of the Universal Postal Convention, it...

(Encyclopedia) Shushkevich, Stanislav Stanislavovich, Belarusian Stanislau Stanislavavich Shushkevich, 1934–, Belarusian political leader and scientist, first head of state of independent Belarus after the dissolu...

(Encyclopedia) Benelux Economic Union bĕnˈəlŭksˌ [key], economic treaty among Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. It arose out of a customs convention signed in 1944, but was not fully established until 1...

(Encyclopedia) Council of the European Union, institution of the European Union (EU) that has the final vote on legislation proposed by the European Commission and approved by the European Parliament; in some cases ...

(Encyclopedia) Reed, John, 1887–1920, American journalist and radical leader, b. Portland, Oreg. After graduating from Harvard in 1910, he wrote articles for various publications and from 1913 was attached to the ...