Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Map of the Spanish Road. Brown arrows are the major routes passing through the Franche-Comté; blue arrows are the alternative routes alongside Rhine. Territories of Habsburg Spain are colored in orange; the territories of Habsburg-inherited Burgundy, including Franche-Comté and

Habsburg Netherlands, are colored in purple.

The Spanish Road was created by Philip II of Spain as a vital artery for the Spanish war effort during the Eighty Years' War against the Dutch Republic.

In 1560, Philip II organised a Holy League between the Spanish kingdoms and the

Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Papal States, the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta.

Philip's father arranged his marriage to 37-year-old Queen Mary I of England, Charles' maternal first cousin. His father ceded the crown of Naples, as well as his claim to

the Kingdom of Jerusalem, to him. Their marriage at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554 took place just two days after their first meeting. Philip's view of the affair was entirely political.

Mary I (18 February 1516 – 17 November 1558), also known as Mary Tudor, and

as "Bloody Mary" by her Protestant opponents, was Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death in 1558. She is best known for her vigorous attempt to reverse the English Reformation, which had begun during the reign of her father, Henry VIII. Her attempt to restore

to the Church the property confiscated in the previous two reigns was largely thwarted by Parliament, but during her five-year reign, Mary had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake in the Marian persecutions.

Much later the Fugger family lost a large portion of

their wealth following three Spanish state bankruptcies (1557, 1560, 1575) under the reign of Philip II of Spain.

The Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands was rechartered as the Muscovy Company by Mary I of England in 1555, and in the same year Chancellor left for

The Muscovy Company (also called the Russia Company or the Muscovy Trading Company Russian: Московская компания, romanized: Moskovskaya kompaniya) was an English trading company chartered in 1555. It was the first major chartered joint stock company, the precursor of the type of

business that would soon flourish in England and finance its exploration of the world. The Muscovy Company had a monopoly on trade between England and Muscovy until 1698 and it survived as a trading company until the Russian Revolution of 1917.

On 28 April 1920, the Bolsheviks

seized power in Baku after the Red Army invasion of Azerbaijan and Branobel's oil business in Azerbaijan was nationalized. In May 1920, the Nobel family sold almost half the Branobel's shares in its possession to Standard Oil of New Jersey. At the time it was considered uncertain

whether the Bolshevik regime would last and the negotiation led by Gustaf Nobel, on one side, and Walter C. Teagle, on the other, proved to be a profitable masterstroke for the Nobel family.

The devastation of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and the wars between the German

principalities and France caused some of the immigration of Germans to America from the Rhine area. Members of this group founded the borough of Germantown, in northwest Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, in 1683. They settled on land sold to them by William Penn.

The first

settlers described themselves as Deitsch, corresponding with the German language Deutsch (for "German") later corrupted to "Dutch". They spoke numerous south German dialects, including Palatine.

This group of Mennonites was organized by Francis Daniel Pastorius, an agent for a

land purchasing company based in Frankfurt am Main. None of the Frankfurt Company ever came to Pennsylvania except Pastorius himself, but 13 Krefeld German (South Guelderish-speaking) Mennonite families arrived on October 6, 1683, in Philadelphia. They were joined by eight more

Dutch-speaking families from Hamburg-Altona in 1700 and five German-speaking families from the Palatinate in 1707.

In 1683, a group of Mennonites, Pietists, and Quakers in Frankfurt, including Abraham op den Graeff a cousin of William Penn, approached Pastorius about acting as

their agent to purchase land in Pennsylvania for a settlement.

His descendants used a variety of spellings of the surname, including Opdegraf(f), Updegraf (f), Uptegraft, Updegrave, Updegrove, Updegraph, Uptegrove and Upthegrove. Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker

was the fourth great-grandson of Abraham.

The IG Farben Building was developed on land known as the Grüneburggelände. In 1837, the property belonged to the Rothschild family. It was part of the "Affensteiner Feld", an area in the north of today's Frankfurt Westend District. The

name Affenstein derives from an ancient Christian memorial that once stood here on the road outside Frankfurt. It was known as the "Avestein" as in Ave Maria but in the local Frankfurt dialect it was called the "Affe Stein". In 1864, the city's psychiatric hospital was erected

on the site. Here, Dr Heinrich Hoffman hired Alois Alzheimer to work in the hospital, where they both explored progressive methods of treating the mentally ill.

On May 10, 1947, permanent orders to military personnel prohibited further reference to the building as the "IG Farben

Building", and instead called for it to be referred to as "The Headquarters Building, European Command".[8] The United States High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG) and his staff occupied the building from 1949 to 1952.
After 1952, the building served as the European centre of

the American armed forces and the headquarters of the U.S. V Corps. It later became the headquarters for the Northern Area Command until 1994. The IG Farben Building was also the headquarters of the CIA in Germany, which led to its sobriquet 'the Pentagon of Europe'. On April 16,

1975, the US Army renamed the building the General Creighton W. Abrams Building.

Abrams was promoted to general in 1964 and appointed Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army he was appointed as deputy to his West Point classmate, General William Westmoreland, commander of

the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), in May 1967.

It has been asserted by authors such as Lewis Sorley that in contrast to Westmoreland, Abrams implemented counterinsurgency tactics that focused on winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese rural population. A

joint military-civilian organization named Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support under CIA official William Colby carried out the hearts and minds programs.

During World War II Colby served with the Office of Strategic Services. After the war he joined the newly

created Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Before and during the Vietnam War, Colby served as chief of station in Saigon, chief of the CIA's Far East Division, and head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development effort, as well as overseeing the Phoenix Program.

Colby served

as DCI under President Richard Nixon and President Gerald Ford until January 30, 1976; he was succeeded at the CIA by George H. W. Bush.

After WW2, Colby graduated from Columbia Law School and then briefly practiced law in William J. Donovan's New York firm, Donovan, Leisure,

Newton & Irvine.

Then an OSS friend offered him a job at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Colby accepted. Colby spent the next 12 years in the field, first in Stockholm, Sweden. There, he helped set up the stay-behind networks of Operation Gladio, a covert

paramilitary organization organized by the CIA to make any Soviet occupation more difficult, as he later described in his memoirs.

Shortly after arriving Colby succeeded Komer as head of the U.S./South Vietnamese rural pacification effort named CORDS. Part of the effort was the

controversial Phoenix Program, an initiative designed to identify and attack the "Viet Cong Infrastructure."

The CORDS model and its approach influenced U.S. strategy and thinking on counterinsurgency in the 2000s in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Ford, advised by Henry

Kissinger and others concerned by Colby's controversial openness to Congress and distance from the White House, replaced Colby late in 1975 with George H. W. Bush during the so-called Halloween Massacre in which Secretary of Defense Schlesinger was also replaced (by Donald

Rumsfeld). Colby was offered the position of United States Permanent Representative to NATO but turned it down.

On April 27, 1996, Colby set out from his weekend home in Rock Point, Maryland, on a solo canoe trip.

NTI also created the Connecting Organizations for Disease

Surveillance (CORDS), which in 2013 launched as an independent NGO that links international disease surveillance networks, supported by the World Health Organization, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

NTI has received international recognition for

work to improve biosecurity, primarily through creating disease surveillance networks.[citation needed] Whether a biological threat is natural or intentional, disease surveillance is a key step in rapid detection and response.

NTI advisor Warren Buffett provided $50 million to

jump-start the reserve, which will be owned and managed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and located in Kazakhstan.

NTI was founded in 2001 by former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn and philanthropist Ted Turner. It serves as the Secretariat for the "Nuclear Security Project", in

cooperation with the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Nunn (the "four horsemen of the nuclear apocalypse").

In 2001 Margaret Hamburg

became the founding Vice President for Biological Programs and later the Senior Scientist for the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Hamburg is married to Peter Fitzhugh Brown, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert. Brown is the chief executive officer of Renaissance

Technologies.

Cambridge Analytica is heavily funded by exCEO of Renaissance Technology Robert Mercer.

Emerdata's board of directors included Frontier Services Group officer Johnson Chun Shun Ko, a Hong Kong businessman linked to Erik Prince (founder of Blackwater), Cambridge

Analytica investor Rebekah Mercer, and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.

In 2019, FSG signed contracts to support China's One Belt and One Road initiative, including building a series of bases in China's Xinjiang, where the internment camps of ethnic Uyghurs attracted

widespread allegations of human rights abuse. Chinese Communist Party officials in Xinjiang reported that FSG's work would enhance the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. FSG's CEO, Dongyi Hua, was the key driver in investing the re-education camps.

Frontier

Services Group is partially owned by CITIC Group, a state-run investment fund owned and controlled by the People's Republic of China. CITIC is FSG's largest shareholder.

State-run Chinese conglomerate CITIC Group is conducting due diligence on CEFC China Energy's stake in

onshore oil fields in Abu Dhabi as CITIC prepares, under the Chinese government's direction, to possibly take over CEFC's energy business.

CEFC purchased the Abu Dhabi stake as part of a spree to expand its energy assets that also included an agreement to buy a 14.16 percent

stake in Russia's Rosneft.

On 7 December 2016, Rosneft signed a deal to sell 19.5% of the outstanding shares, or roughly US$11 billion, to the Anglo-Swiss multinational commodity trader Glencore and the Qatar Investment Authority.

On 26 September 2017, the Russian government

controversially approved the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder as chairman of Rosneft.
Glencore was founded in 1974 as Marc Rich & Co. AG by commodity traders Marc Rich and Pincus Green.

In April 2018, the company started to limit its exposure to Oleg Deripaska by

canceling the plan to swap an 8.75 percent stake in aluminum producer United Co. Rusal for shares in another one of Deripaska’s companies, London-listed En+ Group Plc.

In June 2020, it was reported that Tesla Motors partnered with Glencore for the future supply of cobalt in

their lithium-ion batteries.

On 6 March 2019, it was revealed by The Guardian Australia that Glencore, aided by consulting firm CT Group.

CT Corporation's registered-agent service in Delaware is at the Corporation Trust Center at 1209 North Orange Street which is famous for

being the home of thousands of companies due to Delaware's incorporation laws.

The Corporation Trust Center, is operated by CT Corporation, a subsidiary of Dutch information services firm Wolters Kluwer. The company provides "registered agent services".

In 2012, it was the

registered agent address of at least 285,000 separate American and foreign businesses who operate or trade in the United States.

Companies formed in Delaware are required to have an address in the state at which process may be served. Therefore, Delaware entities with no

physical office in the state must have a registered agent with a Delaware address. Notable companies represented by CT at this location include Google, American Airlines, Apple Inc., General Motors, The Coca-Cola Company, Walmart, Yum! Brands, Verizon, and about 430 of Deutsche

Bank's more than 2,000 subsidiary companies and special purpose companies. Both former President of the United States Donald Trump, and his main opponent in the 2016 United States presidential election, Hillary Clinton, have registered companies at the center.