Brigadier general is a senior rank in the armed forces. It is the lowest ranking general officer in some countries, usually sitting between the ranks of colonel and major general. When appointed to a field command, a brigadier general is typically in command of a brigade consisting of around 4,000 troops (four battalions). In some countries a brigadier general is informally designated as a one-star general.

In some countries, this rank is given the name of brigadier, which is often considered to not be a general-officer rank, but is usually equivalent to brigadier general in the armies of nations that use the rank.

The rank can be traced back to the militaries of Europe where a brigadier general, or simply a brigadier, would command a brigade in the field. An alternative rank of "brigade general" was first used in the French revolutionary armies.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, British and Commonwealth armies used the rank of brigadier general as a temporary appointment, or as an honorary appointment on retirement; in the 1920s this practice changed to the use of brigadier, which is not classed as a general officer.

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Darrell Edward Issa (/ˈaɪsə/; Arabic: عيسى‎; born November 1, 1953) is the U.S. Representative for California's 49th congressional district, serving since 2001. He is a member of the Republican Party. He was formerly a CEO of Directed Electronics, the Vista, California-based manufacturer of automobile security and convenience products. His district consists of portions of southern Riverside County and northern San Diego County. The district was numbered as the 48th District during his first term and was renumbered the 49th after the 2000 Census. Since January 2011, he has served as Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Issa is a self-made millionaire with a net worth estimated between $220 and $448 million, making him one of the wealthiest members of Congress. He was a major contributor to the 2003 recall election of Governor Gray Davis.

Issa was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the second of six children. His mother was a Mormon and his father Eastern Orthodox. Issa is the grandson of Lebanese immigrants.

Steven Scott Ritchie (born February 13, 1950) is an acclaimed pinball and video game designer. He has been called "The Master of Flow" by pinball aficionados due to the emphasis in his designs on ball speed, loops, and the like.

Ritchie recently left Incredible Technologies for Raw Thrills, a video game production house headed by former WMS employee Eugene Jarvis. He currently suffers from tinnitus and predicts that he will be deaf by 2013. Steve is the older brother of fellow pinball designer Mark Ritchie.

After serving a stint in Vietnam and Alaska in the United States Coast Guard from 1968-1972, Ritchie joined Atari in 1976 and first worked on the assembly line as an electro-mechanical technician. Two years later, he was promoted to work at their fledgling pinball division, where he worked on his first game, Airborne Avenger. Ritchie earned the license to make a Superman-pinball based on the Superman comic book, but in the final stages of production of the table, he received an offer from Williams Electronics, a major pinball company, that Ritchie could not refuse.

Roger Clinton Locher (born September 13, 1946) is a former F-4D Phantom weapons officer and pilot who during the Vietnam War and Operation Linebacker was shot down only 64 km (40 mi) from Hanoi, North Vietnam. The 23 days Locher spent behind enemy lines evading capture was a record for downed airmen during the war.USAF General Vogt "shut down the war" and sent 119 aircraft to recover him. His rescue was the deepest inside North Vietnam during the entire War.

When his aircraft was shot down by a Shenyang J-6 on May 10, 1972, he was on his third combat tour and had over 407 combat missions. He was one of the leading MIG killers in Vietnam with three kills. No one saw him eject or his parachute open, and it was unknown whether he had died or been captured. Over the next two weeks, U.S. air crews in the area tried to raise him on the radio without success. The North Vietnamese did not add his name to the roster of captured airmen, which gave the Americans some hope. Traveling only at dusk and dawn, over three weeks Locher traveled about 12 miles (19 km), evading farmers and living off the land.